Ted Solotaroff, however, dismissed the character as little more than “a sitting duck for Sabbath’s caricaturing disgust,” a pitfall Roth had meant to skirt with evidence of Roseanna’s poignant inner life in the form of diary entries and letters from her incestuous father. The latter (including a suicide note) were reproduced almost verbatim from letters written by Inga’s own father. She’d given Roth permission to cull these materials as he saw fit, but in bitter retrospect decided “he was ruthlessly using [her] vulnerability.” She might have found it galling, too, that Sabbath mocks his wife’s sorrow just as readily as he mocks her more comic foibles. After reading her mournful diary, for instance, Sabbath composes a satirical reply in the voice of her dead father (without attempting to disguise his own handwriting): “Dear little Roseanna! / Of course you are in a mental hospital. I warned you again and again about separating yourself from me. . . . But why don’t you judge me for a change by my pain, by my holy feelings? How you cling to your grievance! As though in a world of persecution you alone have a grievance.”

  Roth himself, of course, was hardly a slouch when it came to clinging to a grievance—the one against Francine du Plessix Gray, for instance, which would fester until the end. As far as Gray herself knew, everything had been fine between them until his breach with Bloom. When he first entered Silver Hill, Gray had written him a loving note wishing him a “speedy and serene” recovery, and even pleaded with Bloom (at Inga’s and Thurman’s urging) to agree to Roth’s request for a six-month separation lest he end up killing himself. All this despite blatant signals from Roth that he found her, Gray, distasteful. When she was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1992, she’d complained to him about the simultaneous election of a notable (but inferior in Gray’s eyes) short story writer. Irritated that one of his least favorite writers (Gray) had gotten into the Academy, and moreover was already complaining (“she hadn’t had time to take a crap”) about a fellow inductee, Roth phoned the Academy’s director and mentioned that he’d be attending that year’s ceremonial luncheon, as Douglas Hobbie’s chaperone, and wanted to be seated next to the story writer who’d offended Gray. His wish was granted.

  The first sign that Gray returned his animus, and then some, came that Yom Kippur day when he departed Silver Hill for good. Before heading to New York, Roth had stopped for lunch at Inga’s house—an occasion interrupted by a phone call from Gray: “We’re organizing a support group for Claire,” she said, inviting Inga to her pool that afternoon. That such a group, or at least its leader, was apt to have an anti-Roth agenda soon became manifest. Writing on October 19 to decline Bloom’s invitation to her one-woman show in Litchfield, Roth explained that he wished to avoid the Grays: “They have been outspokenly malicious in slandering me since the first day I came out of the hospital, and I don’t believe that I could control my contempt for them in their presence.” By then he had a hunch about the identity of the “friend” who’d let slip to gossip columnist Charlotte Hays of the New York Daily News—for an October 15 item in “Charlotte’s Web” (“For Roth, it’s goodbye, Claire”)—that he’d recently left his wife homeless.

  These were minor matters next to a scurrilous, anonymous note Roth received around Thanksgiving 1993; on a single sheet of paper, the author had printed in red ballpoint pen: “EVERYBODY KNOWS / YOU’RE SEEING / JUDITH THURMAN.” The European 7s on the envelope put him immediately in mind of Gray; he imagined she’d written and mailed the note in a fury, à la The Human Stain’s Delphine Roux, who rashly accuses Coleman Silk as follows: “Everyone knows you’re / sexually exploiting an / abused, illiterate / woman half your / age.” In both cases the charge was essentially false: Roth and Thurman had had no sexual contact for many years; indeed she was then engaged to another man, whom she married a few months later. Roth asked Inga to send him samples of Gray’s handwriting from her files—Gray had been a patient—and Inga obliged. “Some ten days ago,” Roth’s old friend Marty Garbus wrote Gray on December 1, “you sent an anonymous letter to Mr. Roth that is not only offensive, harassing and denigrating to Mr. Roth, but also deeply embarrassing to Ms. Thurman.” Garbus threatened a lawsuit, and Gray lost no time enlisting a lawyer friend of her own, James Goodale, to deny the accusation and threaten a countersuit.

  Roth let four and a half years pass, until he won the 1998 Pulitzer for American Pastoral and received a congratulatory note from an old high school classmate, Nona Fried, who happened to be a professional handwriting analyst. Roth promptly sent her samples of Gray’s handwriting and, in his cover note, insisted she charge her usual fee: “Dear Porfiry Petrovich”—the magistrate who pursues Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment—“Do your stuff.” Three days later Fried mailed her report: “Based on the documents submitted, it is my professional opinion that the hand that penned all the known standards as Francine du Plessix Gray is one and the same hand that penned the questioned anonymous note and envelope.”

  ROTH CLAIMED THAT Bloom had asked him whether she could “at least” have his studio on West Seventy-ninth, but he refused; already he was thinking about selling his main apartment and moving to Connecticut more or less full-time, keeping his studio (which had doubled in value) as a pied-à-terre. Bloom complained to their mutual friend Aaron Asher, who phoned Roth and implored him not to be so “selfish”; Roth angrily replied that Bloom had a perfectly nice place in London, where she preferred to live anyway, and besides it was none of Asher’s business. The two didn’t speak again for almost six years.

  The prenuptial agreement, said Bloom’s lawyer, was “unconscionable”—or so she quoted him in Doll’s House, though her lawyer in 1990 had suggested only minor changes, which Roth had readily approved; still, Bloom claimed penury to friends and demanded a settlement outside the terms of the prenup. Roth, furious, wanted to take her to court, but his lawyer advised against it. Two of the three New York judges, he said, were “feminists”; if Roth got one of the latter, they’d charge him ten thousand bucks a week in support and endlessly delay his case, while the tabloids had a field day. The lawyer therefore suggested they offer Bloom a settlement of $100,000 plus legal fees ($17,000); Roth subsequently consulted his regular lawyer, Helene Kaplan, who assured him he was getting off easy.

  Bloom accepted the sum “against [her] lawyer’s strong advice,” though it was hardly enough to cover a “dank little apartment” (as their friend Dick Stern described it) on East Ninety-fourth and Third Avenue. Eager to get on with her life, and still hoping she and Roth could be friends (or even a couple again, once he came to his senses), she told him she was ready to set up her new apartment and wondered when she might expect the belongings—“furniture, china, and linens”—she’d left behind on West Seventy-seventh and exhaustively listed. Roth responded by faxing her a list of his own, demanding she return the Bulgari snake ring, the $28,500 per annum provided by his twelve-year Clifford Trust, other lavish cash gifts, plus $150 per hour for the “five or six hundred hours” he’d spent rehearsing with her. On it went. Finally Roth proposed to fine her sixty-two billion dollars—a billion for every year of her life—for failing to honor their prenup. At first the mockery of the exercise was “entirely lost” on Bloom and her daughter, but after the ninth or tenth page they saw the joke and commenced laughing.

  “She’s behaved abominably about money and I’ve had to pay her off to get rid of her,” Roth wrote his old friend Charlotte Maurer. “She’s hysterical, irrational, deceitful, and, above and beyond everything else, A BLAMELESS VICTIM RESPONSIBLE FOR NOTHING. The last finally got me down.” Roth wrote this on March 20, 1994, three days after shelling out the “distributive award” of $100,000 plus legal fees, on the condition that Bloom sign a new separation agreement relinquishing all further claims “from the beginning of the world to the date of this Agreement.” In May, Roth composed the following directive: “To my executors and those planning my burial: It is my strong wish that Claire Bloom be barred from my funeral and from any memorial services arranged for me. All possible measures should be taken to enforce this.”

  EARLIER THAT YEAR Roth had begun dating a thirty-one-year-old psychiatrist, Julia Golier, who taught at Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side and treated Vietnam veterans for PTSD at the VA hospital in the Bronx. Golier was tall and pretty, and moreover Roth was attracted to her “calm, rational” manner (“in that way very like Barbara and Ann, very unlike Claire and Maggie”). She also had a penchant for drollery, and over the years would send Roth clippings that fell under the rubric “As Joke Goes Awry”—like the one about the man who swallowed his friend’s tropical fish and choked to death. That March of 1994, Francine du Plessix Gray published Rage and Fire, a biography of Louise Colet that advanced the novel thesis that Colet was a genius and Flaubert a chauvinist pig who crushed her spirit.‡ In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani found the book shrill and ludicrous, whereas Golier made a copy of the “EVERYBODY KNOWS” letter and crossed out all but the first two words, emending it to read “EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU WROTE ‘RAGE AND FIRE’ ”—which she then mailed to Gray from the Bronx.

  As was his wont with much younger girlfriends, Roth couldn’t resist playing Pygmalion—a benevolent role, for the most part. In the early days of their courtship he took Golier to see Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy at Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side, and for the rest of his life he and Golier referred to each other as Apu. He was also a little appalled by her sketchy apartment on First Avenue, which he would later give to the all-but-destitute Amy Bellette in Exit Ghost; when Golier decided to move, a year or so after they met, he successfully urged her to pick a place on Ninety-first and Park, then accompanied her on a furniture shopping expedition.

  Roth’s own living arrangements were in flux. He’d decided “there were too many traces of Claire” in his otherwise beloved house in Connecticut, and hired a local architect to design a smaller one-story that he planned to build on a ten-acre parcel of his property (which included his swimming pool, the one thing he couldn’t bear parting with) just south of his old house. Roth had already planted several dozen white pines and built a split-rail fence for privacy, and the excavator was due to cut a new road through the woods, when Golier spent her first weekend in the country as Roth’s guest. “But why are you doing this?” she sensibly inquired. “Your house is so beautiful.” He saw her point. In the end the new house never materialized except in miniature, as an architect’s model, which Roth kept as a kind of centerpiece in his attic (where he also stored the vast foreign editions of his work).

  By then his long affair with Inga had spectacularly imploded. As their mutual friend Thurman pointed out, the couple had thrived on transgression and subterfuge, but in a more conventional arrangement their basic incompatibilities came to the fore—or, as Roth put it, “She’s a great adulteress, but not a great mate.” The same was arguably true of Roth. “No more women,” he promised a friend, post-Bloom. “Been at it for 45 years. Enough’s enough. . . . Solitude is best.” By this he meant, of course, that he’d never again permit any one woman to lay claim to him, which was somewhat at odds with Inga’s own program. “I became a needy and helpless child pathologically bound to you,” she wrote him after their final rupture. “That woman full of vigor and joy of life and fearless[ness] that you loved just evaporated.”

  Things blew up at Inga’s breakfast table on New Year’s Day, 1995. For a long time the couple had been planning a summer trip to Norway (coinciding with the publication of Sabbath’s Theater, so Roth could avoid the reviews), where she looked forward to showing him her childhood haunts. Meanwhile, though, she’d become increasingly uncomfortable with Roth’s insistence that they keep their affair a secret; she wanted to inform her children, at least, as to whom she was traveling with. Rattled by the prospect of more gossip, Roth told her he wouldn’t go if she told her children, whereupon she became “wild with rage,” as he recalled: “ ‘I want to tell my children! I want them to know where I am! I want them to know who I’m with!’ ” Roth sat there for “ten or fifteen minutes,” he said, then excused himself and left, while she followed him outside screaming. Inga told it differently. According to her, Roth was in an irritable mood that morning; while eating in fraught silence he suddenly announced, “Inga, why don’t you put the caps on the toothpaste?!” After a few more crabby remarks in that vein, he did his exercises in her bedroom and finally stomped off with a farewell threat to cancel their plans for Norway.

  “Inga, we should cool it,” Roth said, when she phoned him ten days later to find out where they stood. It was then—her marriage and love affair both in ruins—that Inga suffered a breakdown, and on January 13 a psychiatrist diagnosed her as suicidal and referred her to the Institute of Living in Hartford. Only allowed to receive incoming calls, she asked her AA sponsor to get in touch with Judith Thurman, to inform Roth of her hospitalization and ask him to call her. For five days she remained “glued to the pay phone” waiting for his twice-daily calls, morning and night, until the eve of her departure, when two therapists explained that her attachment to Roth was dangerously self-destructive. “I hardly had time to say hello,” Roth said of his final phone call to Hartford the next day, “before she was furiously and not entirely coherently berating me for having destroyed her life and telling me that I should never try to be in touch with her again or she would tell the world about me.”

  On January 22, Roth sent his cleaning woman, Kathy Meetz—who worked for both of them—over to Inga’s condo with her belongings, neatly packed (each individual lipstick in bubble wrap), with a polite note to “Mrs. Larsen” explaining that she’d left them behind in his “attic,” when in fact they’d mostly come from his New York apartment. Three days later, he received an angry fax: “Mr. Misogynist! / May you rot in hell! It gives me pleasure to know that one day indeed you will . . . when your depression returns. . . . You are the most ruthless man on this planet.” She considered the matter further, then faxed him two days later on January 27:

  In my desperate attempt to rescue you I have deeply hurt my family and myself, a wound I may never be able to heal.

  You are pathetic in you [sic] rapid aging and decline, full of chronic pain and physically revolting with a double chin and pot belly and almost impotent.

  STAY AWAY FROM ME!!!!!! I MIGHT TALK WHEN YOUR BOOK IS PUBLISHED!!!!

  Roth waited a month for the considerable smoke to clear, then wrote Inga that he hoped they could eventually be friends again. She replied on March 11, from Madrid, that she agreed and “harbor[ed] no ill-will,” albeit admitting she sometimes wondered whether he’d wanted her to die like Drenka in the book: “This letter is for you, my once lover and American boy friend,” she concluded. “Not the novelist Philip Roth! I hope you respect that. Be well maybe we can meet in the summer.” It was still spring, though, when she paid him a final visit. As Roth remembered, she appeared at his studio “wearing over her seductive form the tightest jeans and lowest-cut blouse she owned . . . and when her attempts at seduction were, perhaps for the first time in her life, rebuffed, that most certainly was the end of everything.” But nothing in the letter she wrote him afterward (dated April 9) suggested a thwarted seduction; rather she wistfully acknowledged the end of their affair, and chided Roth (“I feel so bored”) for having boasted about “other women” in his life: “Do you need to flatter your ego in front of me? . . . you might surely find another woman in your life again but none like me.”

  ROTH’S LONG AND HAPPY friendship with Mia Farrow went back to a near encounter at a party chez Styron, in Roxbury, during the summer of 1992, around the time the Woody Allen scandal broke. When Farrow arrived, Roth remembered, all the women in the room rushed to console her “like they were sucked down a tube.” Bloom, who’d met Farrow briefly on the set of Crimes and Misdemeanors (Bloom had played Martin Landau’s wife), insisted they have her over for dinner sometime, and Roth agreed. He was all the more sympathetic given that he’d despised Woody Allen even before the man was accused of sexual assault; in Operation Shylock, Pipik describes the director as a “little dork asshole”—an insult that a libel lawyer, vetting the novel, found gratuitous: “Has the author an axe to grind concerning Woody Allen? On what does he premise this language?” At the time it was mostly an aesthetic grievance. Updike had written Roth a polite note about the movie (because Bloom was in it), especially commending a scene, near the end, where a blind rabbi poignantly dances with his daughter at her wedding. Roth replied:

  You have to be Jewish to hate Crimes and Misdemeanors openly, I guess. It is really the bottom of Jewish kitsch and the desecration of the memory of Primo Levi has sent me into a fury that won’t quite subside.§ When the rabbi came out dancing at the end, I shouted aloud in the theater, “Blind isn’t enough!” . . . Claire learned to loathe Allen during the making of the film, not because she had nothing to do, but because he bore so little resemblance to a human being. The man, if that is the word, is a fake from top to bottom. Can you imagine, John?—he has even ruined shiksas for me.