Quite apart from Updike, there was plenty to dismay Roth about the reception of Shylock. Though Harold Bloom had compared him with Aristophanes in The New York Review of Books, and the novel would go on to win Roth the first of his three PEN/Faulkner Awards, sales were fairly dismal in spite of the hype and Simon & Schuster abruptly stopped advertising. Worse still was the apathy of his key constituency: Jews, American and Israeli, outraged or delighted. “Will Roth be impaled on incensed Jewishness once more?” D. M. Thomas wondered in his front-page review for the Sunday Times. Given Roth’s “merciless probing” of Israeli brutality, Thomas wrote, Roth “would be smart to have a double undertake his promotional tour.” Indeed, Roth’s own great expectations for his book had included a Rushdie-style scandal—at least in the Middle East—but no. Reviewing Shylock for the Jerusalem Post, S. T. Meravi noted, benignly enough, that the novel had been largely ignored: “The man hasn’t lost any of his estimable skill; he’s just lost an estimable readership. Which may be the ultimate comment on the Israel-Diaspora question.” Now that was depressing.

  ROTH’S MARRIAGE also had a morale-lowering effect, though things had gone surprisingly well at first. “My ordinary, everyday life with Claire, especially in the country, fills me with a satisfaction I’ve never known before,” he wrote DeLillo on January 16, 1991. “It unnerves me a little that I can be made happy by the life I used to be impatient with. In the old days everything outside of writing bored the shit out of me. Now it’s the writing that bores the shit out of me, and the walks, the eating, the sleeping, the comradery [sic] that thrills me.” The couple had made a point of keeping their marriage certificate magnetized to the fridge in New York, and would entertain friends with spontaneous improvisations of bantering cockneys or whooping Indians; meanwhile Roth insisted on pouring her cereal (or whatever) while announcing in a “Jew voice” (Avishai), “You don’t lift a finger! You’re a Roth now.”

  “He’s very uxorious and tremendously involved with Claire’s career,” David Rieff had told Vanity Fair, and so he was. Back in the early eighties, when Bloom’s acting jobs had dried up again, Roth pushed her to do one-woman shows featuring the great speeches of Shakespeare’s heroines. She was, after all, one of the preeminent Shakespearean actresses of her time, having played Cordelia to Gielgud’s Lear, Lady Anne to Olivier’s Richard III, and Ophelia to Paul Scofield’s Hamlet. After grueling rehearsal sessions in Roth’s studio, they tried out the show at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where Roth conferred with the playwright William Gibson (The Miracle Worker) about proper stage lighting, microphone levels, and so on. Leon Botstein conducted music for one such performance, and likened Roth’s engagement to that of a “stage parent” (“You felt you would be subject to his ire if something went wrong”). Later Bloom expanded her repertoire to include characters such as Mrs. Dalloway and Jane Eyre, and Roth always took it upon himself to come up with pithy titles—e.g., “The Triumph of the Bereft Woman: Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE.” (“Why? Why?” he wondered in a 2013 email. “I must have been nuts. / The ex-idiot, PR.”)

  Roth was especially doting to Bloom qua actress, and especially in the presence of their friends. “I have to go backstage now and see my little tchotchkala,” he’d sweetly announce after one of her performances. Indeed, the more insightful of their friends detected a quality of playacting to the whole relationship (“everything was perfect, but could shatter if someone made a false move”). Because of the couple’s well-choreographed rapport, some were shocked by the rupture that lay ahead, while others had always viewed the match as essentially artificial (whether or not they knew of its more dire shortcomings)—that is, as a meeting of great artists in the abstract, modeled on Chekhov and Olga Knipper, a paradigm Roth cherished. But a 1991 note in his slanted lefty handwriting indicates a man struggling to grasp the person he’s married: “[Claire] has many wonderful, endearing and admirable qualities,” he began, then considered the various men in her life: “Sadists and bullies. Burton, Steiger, Elkins. Finally only a criminal [Elkins] could protect her (Fear led her to seek protection from sadists or bullies who seemed ‘strong.’ . . .) At bottom is fear . . . Fear of Anna. . . .”

  The last was most germane to the health of their marriage. “The [Felicity] event was the coup de grâce, of course,” said Anna Steiger of the sexual advance Roth had made toward her friend in 1988. “After that it was only avoid avoid avoid.” She’d tried begging off on the wedding, claiming another engagement, but relented after a series of tearful phone calls. Neither on that occasion nor any other, however, did she bother to dissemble a baleful contempt for her latest stepfather—though of course, to their mutual chagrin, they could hardly help crossing paths. While in New York, Steiger stayed at the Cosmopolitan Club on East Sixty-sixth, but “camped out” (as Roth put it) during the day at her mother’s apartment, making phone calls from Roth’s study while he worked at his studio and sometimes, as he’d find on his return, lying between the sheets of his bed. Nor had Bloom become any more independent—as Roth had fondly hoped—now that an ocean divided her from her daughter; on the contrary she’d taken to phoning Anna in Europe sometimes three or four times a day. As for Steiger’s visits to Connecticut, they were infrequent but unbearable to all concerned. She was bored by the country, and her mother “would work feverishly” (Roth) to keep her diverted and out of her husband’s way. Given the terrible tension, Roth was “flabbergasted” when a real estate agent phoned one day, in the women’s absence, to report on a nearby house the two were thinking about buying. For Anna.

  Inga bore the brunt of Roth’s rage and desperation, as he was forever phoning her at the office to vent. “The way I see it is: you are powerless over the Claire-Anna relationship,” she wrote him. “For Claire, Anna is her addiction. Since addiction is an illness it cannot be resolved with reasoning.” Citing the AA slogan “Take what you like and leave the rest,” she advised him to identify what was definitely unacceptable and come to some kind of workable arrangement. Thus Roth’s letter to Bloom dated January 18, 1993, which she characterized in Doll’s House (without quoting it) as “a totally unwarranted attack on [her] daughter.” “We have a very precious marriage,” the attack began.

  I love you dearly and I love dearly our life together. I know that what I am writing is going to cause you pain and I don’t want to cause you pain. But in the interest of preserving what’s most precious to me—your life with me and mine with you—I have to tell you candidly about something that distresses and pains me with a stress that won’t seem to go away.

  Roth proposed a few “guidelines” for Anna’s visits, asking that she not use his study anymore (“I think my room and my desk should be respected as mine”), and suggesting he stay in Connecticut whenever she was in New York. As for Steiger’s occasional trips to the country, Roth hoped they could be limited henceforth to a single week per year: “What begins as a pleasant time ends as a difficult, edgy, and, for me, hollowly isolating time.” He concluded:

  Claire, it’s no accident that we got married in America, where we were able at long last to live alone and intimately as two. For us, living alone and intimately as two middle-aged adults had been long, long overdue. . . . I refuse to have my life corroded with resentments spawned by my sense of being encroached on by or entailed with, even temporarily, a relationship that is not of my making . . . a relationship to which I am superfluous anyway and always have been because, in my judgment, it does not really admit of another human presence. . . .

  Love, love, and love, / Philip

  In Doll’s House, Bloom conceded it had been “many years” since she’d received one of Roth’s “written injunctions,” but at the time she reacted as if it were a matter of menacing routine: “No more letters!” she screeched, throwing the envelope to the floor. Roth departed for his studio and tried vainly to work, then phoned Joanna Clark (“one of my wisest friends”) and asked if he could come meet her for lunch in Princeton. At Lahiere’s, Clark recalled, Roth broke down and wept: “What can I do, Joanna? What can I do?” Bloom was also crying when he came home that night. She’d taken his letter to her analyst, who categorically agreed with Roth. “Good,” Roth thought with sublime relief, lying on the floor because of his aching back. “Good.” Then Bloom said: “But can’t she come one last time?” Roth felt chest pains and gasped, “Call Chuck” (Smithen, his cardiologist), who advised him to lie still for ten minutes and try to calm down. Meanwhile Bloom decided, as she wrote in Doll’s House, that “the only way to deal with his petty belligerence was to humor him and take no notice.”

  Pain was the final factor in Roth’s breakdown. While on his Patrimony tour that winter and spring of 1993, he’d worn a back brace at the lectern and afterward, backstage, would gulp a couple of shots of vodka to get himself through the rest of the evening (he refused to take painkillers or sedatives because of the Halcion episode). Finally, on May 22, he drove two hours to western Massachusetts to receive an honorary degree from Amherst College; after sitting through an almost three-hour ceremony he thought he would faint with pain, and while driving home he pulled over and phoned Inga, begging her to go to his house and wait for him there, as she did. For the past few weeks Bloom had been in London with her daughter.

  Home at last—with no further reading dates and only a vague idea of what (if anything) he wanted to write next—Roth planned a summer of rest and recuperation: swimming, hiking, reading, sleeping. “Then Claire came,” he remembered, “and she just began to cry. And she said, ‘I can’t stand it here. I hate it here. . . . I miss my daughter.’ ” This went on for three days or so, during which Roth “tanked”—overcome again by a constant, uncontrollable terror of being alone. Almost every morning the spectral, trembling man would descend the stairs, and his wife would take one look at him and burst into tears. “Just put your arms around me,” he remembered telling her. “And tell me, ‘I’m here, sweetheart, and everything’s going to be okay.’ And she’d do it, after I told her, like an actress.” Roth particularly remembered a day in July when he pretty much threw in the towel. Bloom had asked him to help her rehearse some passages from Cymbeline† that she was considering for her one-woman show, and (“nearly out of my wits with pain”) Roth followed her into his studio and listened, uncomprehending, for however long it went on. “Very good,” he intoned when it was over, whereupon she informed him that Anna would be coming to New York for six weeks‡ in the fall to study with a brilliant new teacher, Ruth Falcon, a great opportunity.

  Roth sat pondering the six weeks of ghastly pain and panic he’d have to endure alone (mostly) in the country, and a phrase occurred to him that would become like a mantra in the days ahead: “My life is a problem I cannot solve.”

  In Doll’s House, Bloom mentioned a journal she began keeping that summer, the better to fathom her husband’s “emotional swings”; on July 18, she accurately recorded that he seemed “afraid of being alone with [her].” Desperate for friends who wouldn’t automatically fidget or weep in his presence, Roth had asked Ross Miller and the Maneas to keep him company for a while. Norman arrived with his wife, Cella, and remembered finding his friend “weak as a child of twelve years old”: “Norman, I am lost,” Roth whispered. “I am totally lost.” As for Bloom, she seemed even more “unsettled, ravaged” (said Manea) than her husband, until her hysteria erupted in a curious way. “We three, and Ross, were sitting outside talking,” Roth wrote in a 2010 diary entry, “when Claire, prompted by nothing that could be seen, began to run crazily around the fields, her arms raised in the air and wailing uncontrollably.” (“Claire began to run around screaming, yes,” Manea confirmed.) Roth and the Maneas sat watching in silence, while Miller went off after her, trying to catch her and calm her down.

  None of this would have surprised Philip’s brother. According to his third wife, Dorene Marcus, Sandy liked to remark of any actress who struck him as unstable (Judy Davis, say), “She’s like Claire.” When he arrived in Connecticut that July, he quickly sized up the situation and decided he needed to get his brother out of there.

  The two had become close again once their first wives had died. After the kindhearted Trudy—who, again, despised Maggie and considered her brother-in-law “selfish”—succumbed to ovarian cancer in 1970, Philip went to stay awhile with Sandy in West Englewood, New Jersey. The widowed Sandy struck his brother as “lonely and lost,” so Philip and Barbara Sproul made a point of inviting him and his boys for gemütlich weekends (touch football, etc.) in the country. In 1976, Sandy moved to Chicago to become a creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, and within a decade he’d remarried, divorced, and, at age fifty-six, retired from advertising. Philip remembered a day in the mideighties when Sandy visited him at the Wyndham and announced (“look[ing] a little like the cat who ate the canary”) that he was taking acting lessons and intended to become an actor. Instead, he became a full-time painter—more or less for the fun of it, as he was always careful to stress: “I’m a journeyman who paints pretty well,” he told a journalist, “but no better than pretty well.” Philip was always a little bemused that his brother—who obsessively filled hundreds of nine-by-twelve sketch pads with skillful drawings over the course of his lifetime, whiling away afternoons at a mall or museum just to sketch people—chose, for his painting, big abstract acrylic canvases rather in the style of de Kooning. These however were good enough to rate a one-man show at SoHo’s Jack Gallery in 1988: “It’s Sandy’s paintings, not my books, that are autobiographical,” Philip told Time on that occasion, “—and embarrassing to all of us.”

  “He only took pride in him, and that was lovely,” Sproul observed of Sandy’s attitude toward his little brother’s “big, big talent” versus his own “middling ability,” as he put it. Usually the two kept loosely in touch, chatting on the phone every few weeks, but Sandy never failed his brother in a crisis. In the past, when Philip needed help while he was alone in Connecticut, Sandy had dropped everything to care for him, and he did so again in July 1993 after a disturbing phone call. That first night in the country Sandy was awoken by the sound of his brother sobbing in the next room (at Philip’s request, Bloom was sleeping in “a far guest room”); Sandy lay beside him and Philip asked to be held. In her journal Bloom wrote that she felt like “an unwanted appendage,” and when Sandy asked her how she was coping with things, she admitted that she felt “helpless” and sometimes “almost hate[d]” Philip, who suddenly appeared in the doorway. Years later, reading of how Bloom had suspected he’d “engineered” the scene, Roth wrote: “Even when I am disabled both physically and emotionally and might seem to most observers unlikely to be able to engineer anything, I remain capable, in her estimation, of wielding my power over her and of ‘manipulat[ing]’ and ‘frighten[ing]’ her.”

  After less than a week, Sandy had seen enough: “You can’t stay here,” he told Philip, “she wants to be the sick one. You’re coming to Chicago with me.” The next day, as Sandy was about to lead his fragile brother away, Bloom called them “two of the cruelest people in the world”—or, as Philip remembered it (giving the words to Eve Frame in I Married a Communist), “You are the worst people I have ever known!” Afterward she repented of her harshness to a visitor (Inga), who replied, “Not one of your best moments.”

  SANDY LIVED IN A residential tower on Lake Shore Drive, and Philip immediately felt better there. That first night they went to dinner with Sandy’s companion, Dorene (the couple wouldn’t marry until 2001), who, unlike Sandy’s second wife, knew Philip’s work and found him delightful. Philip became lively and talkative, and even ate with decent appetite for the first time in weeks—but he slept poorly, and was depressed again when he woke up. Dick Stern paid a visit, and while they strolled around the downstairs gardens, Roth clung to his friend and said, “Are you sure you love me? Am I all right?”

  Ross Miller happened to be in Chicago, and one day while they walked to lunch Roth decided it was time to kill himself. He stopped on the sidewalk and told Miller to go ahead without him. Surmising the worst—that Roth planned to jump from the top of his brother’s building—Miller said (in effect) that if Roth was planning to do what Miller suspected, he’d have to do it in front of him. “It was a stunning confrontation and it frightened me,” said Roth, who was persuaded instead to phone a psychiatrist he’d occasionally consulted over the years, Bill Frosch. A few minutes later Frosch called back: he’d found a place for Roth at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where a friend of his named Bloch§ was medical director. The next day, August 3, Sandy flew back east with his brother, then drove him an hour north to Silver Hill, and hugged him goodbye outside Bloch’s office.

  “How did I get from Chancellor Avenue School to here?” Roth wondered that first night in the Intensive Care Room; what had become of that brash lad who’d skipped two terms and dazzled the mothers of Weequahic as a caped Columbus? Anxious to escape, Roth complained about his room to Bloch, who walked him over to a separate, all-women’s residence and offered him a big white room under the eaves. This, Roth thought, was more like it: “a haven.” Avishai, an early visitor, remembered the contented smile that came over Roth’s face (“as if he were the happiest little boy in the world”) every time the nurse knocked on his door—“Mr. Roth?”—and made sure he was all right.