FOR FIVE OR SIX MONTHS, Roth never ventured far from his Connecticut home, nor did he accept phone calls from New York. Golier found him “pretty distraught” and did her best to cheer him. The better to underline the point that Bloom’s book was but a passing blip in an otherwise happy and accomplished life, she pasted three or four sheets of paper together and devised an elaborate timeline, past and future, on which the all but invisible pinprick of Doll’s House was followed by honors and prizes galore (“I was not wrong,” she said). The “worst moment” that fall—for Golier—was returning to Grand Central after an especially arduous weekend of bucking Roth up (“Nobody cares! It’s going to be gone in ten seconds!”), and running smack into rows and rows of New York magazine with Roth and Bloom on the cover: “A Hell of a Marriage.”

  Above all, perhaps, Roth was hurt by what seemed an almost universal willingness to accept Bloom’s account at face value. His friend Jack Miles noticed this too, and protested Patricia Bosworth’s review of Bloom’s book in the Sunday Times with a letter reminding its readers that “there are two sides to any divorce story. . . . In sum, what badly needs saying about this season’s succès de scandal is that no one knows how much of it is true. I can only regret that your reviewer didn’t say just that much and that little.” Certainly Roth would have liked to rebut the charge that he caddishly discarded “one woman after another”; among the women who’d discarded him, rather than vice versa, and remained friends all the same, was Barbara Sproul, who’d bumped into Bloom at a party shortly before Bloom’s divorce from Roth. “She went on about him being ‘unreasonable,’ ” Sproul remembered, “and I said I found him to be eminently reasonable.” Later Bloom’s complaint seemed all the richer in light of her “disgusting” book (“the day you get carted off to the bin doesn’t seem to be anyone’s fucking business except the most intimate of friends”), and Sproul lost no time writing Roth a letter:

  I wanted you to hear it from somewhere other than your own inner voice: it ain’t so, and I am glad to say it. You are good and kind and generous and true and if you have any flaw, surface cynicism notwithstanding, it is that you are hopeful and faithful enough to think others are as well. If you have failed here it is only in the sense that your love—of Maggie first, and then of Claire—wasn’t enough to make them find what was truly worthwhile in themselves. . . .

  I would gladly write a public piece about you, but it seems to me quite irrelevant what “other people” think. . . . I’d also be delighted to write Claire personally with an “how could you” letter—just so she’d know there were limits some people at least still respected. . . .

  I am so sorry someone wants to hurt you; you deserve so much better.

  As the months passed, Roth wrestled with the question of Bloom’s motive for such a terrible attack; given a human tendency to underestimate his own failings, he focused mostly on her “continuing desire to win Anna’s favor.” That her efforts in that direction were unavailing was made uncomfortably public on Mothering Sunday, March 9, 1997, when the BBC presented Stars and Mas—an anodyne tribute whose TV listing betrayed at least one anomalous bit: “Spice Girl Emma Bunton and boxer Lennox Lewis talk about their close relationships with their mothers. Bob Marley’s mother Cedella Booker speaks of her devotion to her son, while actress Claire Bloom reveals a more complex relationship with her daughter.” The complexity is evident from the get-go, as Anna describes her mother (seated beside her) as “very childish for her age,” then tells about the time she had to force Bloom into telling the truth about her imminent divorce from Anna’s father: “I thought then that she was a weaker character than me already, at about five.” Soon they get onto the subject of Roth’s shocking demand that Anna move out:

  BLOOM: I don’t believe in holding on to the past. Because it’s too painful. I believe in trying to let it go. [Anna scowls at her fingertips.] You believe in holding on to it.

  STEIGER: No, I don’t. I just don’t believe in ignoring it, that’s all. Because I don’t believe it really has been aired as an issue, or confronted or faced. Or really discussed properly.

  BLOOM: . . . Anna did come back; we lived together in the house for another I don’t know how many years. So it wasn’t a final break of any kind. I didn’t say ‘Go away and never come back.’ And she was eighteen; she was not a baby. She would have gone on with her life. I couldn’t face losing my relationship with Philip, that was so precious to me. [Bloom keeps nervously glancing at Anna to see how she’s taking things.]

  STEIGER: I just feel there’s a lot of whitewash going on here. And bullshit frankly.

  BLOOM: I’m the one who brought it up in the public field, so how can it be whitewash?

  STEIGER: I don’t know. All I know is what I hear I don’t like. Somehow it makes me angry and I don’t see it in the same way or have the same perspective on it at all.

  Finally Bloom is alone on camera, weeping over the loss of “her treacherous Machiavelli” (as Roth put it): “I remember the good times with gratitude and love,” she admits. For I Married a Communist, Roth worked directly from this videotape while writing the scene in which the washed-up Eve Frame appears with her daughter, Sylphid, on a TV show called The Apple and the Tree: “Sylphid doesn’t display a split second’s worth of affection for this pathetic woman struggling to hang on,” Murray Ringold observes. “Not a speck of generosity, let alone understanding.”

  About six years later, quite by chance, Roth and Bloom crossed paths for the last time. One night he was strolling along Columbus Avenue with a girlfriend, Susan Rogers;# they’d paused to look in the window of a ladies shoe shop, and when they turned around to head south toward Roth’s apartment, there was Bloom and a friend, the flutist Eugenia Zukerman, about fifty yards away. “I decided to give Claire the kind of look you give somebody to whom you loaned your car, thirty years earlier, when you were in college, and who had banged it up and who now you were seeing for the first time since then,” Roth remembered. He did his best to muster that look, but he and Rogers burst into laughter as soon as Bloom passed. Later a mutual friend told Roth that Bloom had described him as “shaking with rage.” She “reported that I was ‘trembling so’ that she believed ‘they would have to call an ambulance and have [me] hospitalized.’ ”

  * The alternative title is unclear in the correspondence I read.

  † A note with similar wording is received by one of Zuckerman’s reviewers in Exit Ghost, whereas Zuckerman himself receives a couple of opprobrious postcards (both featuring Pope John Paul II) addressed to “Jew Bastard”—also similar to postcards Roth himself had received around this time.

  ‡ “When her adulterous lover of forty or fifty years back, Richard Burton, died,” said Roth, “she astonished me by her performance. She went around in long dark skirts acting, quite ethereally, like the widow herself, especially at mealtime, when she was quite beyond my reach. I tolerated it for about two days and then pointed out to her that she wasn’t the widow.”

  § When a radio interviewer mentioned that Merkin and others had objected to her “victim consciousness,” Bloom allowed herself to be waspish: “Daphne Merkin had already written a most appalling piece, that I had remembered, which was an essay in her fantasy sexual life, and it was to be spanked. I ask you. I think she knows a little more about being a victim than I do.”

  ¶ Or even some form of the actual word “misogynist”—unless I missed it in my two or three readings—though it was the invariable characterization that occurred to journalists in describing the tenor of her perception of Roth.

  # Daughter of his old Chicago friends Tom and Jacquie Rogers.

  CHAPTER

  Forty

  STOMPING ALONG THE HOUSATONIC, ROTH FOUND HIMSELF “swamped with anger” and knew he had to “write [his] way out of it” lest his head explode. “I kept thinking, ‘What is this like? What is happening to me is not innately interesting to anybody else. But what would be of interest? . . . That postwar Communist scare with the accusation: Communist, Communist. And now it’s misogynist, misogynist. You can’t elude it. If you’re stamped with it, you’re stamped with it.’ ” Roth had no desire to write about an innocent, and so conceived his hero, Ira Ringold, as a furtive Communist “full of flaws,” just as Roth himself was guilty of conducting a florid sex life behind Bloom’s back; but Eve Frame isn’t content with the mere truth, and her book accuses Ringold of being a Soviet spy besides, whereas Bloom rendered Roth as a “Machiavellian strategist” and all-around head case. “I wanted to get the valences correct,” said Roth.

  The main model for Ira’s brother, Murray, was Roth’s freshman homeroom teacher, Dr. Robert (“Doc”) Lowenstein. During a 1955 House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in Newark, Lowenstein—then serving as executive vice president of the Newark Teachers Union—invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than discuss his former membership in the Communist party. “How can you be paid by the taxpayers’ money when you are obligated by your damnable Communist oath to teach the Soviet line?” Representative Clyde Doyle berated him. Lowenstein lost his job for six years, until he was vindicated and reinstated after two appeals to the New Jersey Supreme Court; when he was first fired, though, the Newark Evening News printed angry letters from readers demanding the resignation of four Board of Education members who’d dared to defend Lowenstein. Philip Roth, a year out of Bucknell, answered with a letter of his own, pointing out that “in Russia dissenters are asked to resign, and now in Newark dissenters are being asked to resign.”

  Bob Lowenstein was an eighty-nine-year-old retiree living in West Orange when Roth sent a driver to pick him up and take him out to Connecticut so Roth could canvass his views on the way Newark was portrayed, before and after the riots, in a late draft of American Pastoral. The two cemented their friendship a year later, when Roth paid several visits to West Orange to discuss Lowenstein’s experiences as an ostracized teacher in the McCarthy era. Roth also had long talks with another old mentor, Irv Cohen, Cousin Florence’s husband—“a loudmouth Jew” who was tall and lanky like Abe Lincoln, the man Ira Ringold (as “Iron Rinn”) becomes famous for portraying. When Sandy read his brother’s novel, he immediately recognized the model for Eve Frame’s doomed, angry husband: “I could hear Irv’s voice loud and clear.”

  ROTH WAS ALSO CONSIDERING a nonfictional corrective to Bloom’s book—namely a biography of himself, written by his best friend at the time, Ross Miller. Indeed, the men had bonded over their mutual marital woes: Miller had witnessed firsthand such curious episodes as Bloom’s wailing sprint around the fields chez Roth, while Roth had given his friend shelter in his studio when Miller was “emboldened” by Roth’s example to leave his own wife. On April 2, 1995, Miller wrote Roth thanking him for his generosity and remarking on how he’d been inspired by Roth’s “toughness”; Roth, in turn, never forgot the way Miller had stopped him from leaping off a tall building in Chicago. “Ross became a friend,” Conarroe summed it up, “at a time when Philip needed a friend.”*

  It was true Roth didn’t think much of Miller as a writer—his prose, said Roth, was “no jeweled and nuanced thing”—especially after helping to edit Miller’s two published books, American Apocalypse (1990) and Here’s the Deal (1996). The first, about the Great Chicago Fire, was respectfully reviewed in The New York Times by Thomas Hine, who found it on the loose and “repetitious” side, but “overall a very thoughtful work that is particularly valuable in these times.” Wylie had agreed (via Roth) to represent Miller’s second book, which he managed to sell to a major trade publisher, Knopf, though the book’s most exhaustive reviewer, Cheryl Kent in the Chicago Tribune, doubted it would attract any interest outside her city—this despite a promising subject, with all sorts of universal implications: Block 37, an urban renewal project that had proposed the construction of a $350 million office-retail complex along the dilapidated block between Marshall Field’s on State Street and the Richard J. Daley Center on Dearborn, only to be canceled in 1990 for lack of funding. “Miller has given us an undisciplined book that, sadly, tells us little about Block 37 or the way cities are shaped,” wrote Kent, an architecture and urban planning critic, lamenting Miller’s failure to “broaden the story by referring to other cities, other blocks, other building projects.”

  “I won’t tell him,” said Roth, smiling, when Douglas Hobbie opined that their mutual friend was a “shitty writer.” The fact was, Roth was relatively isolated at the time and didn’t know where else to turn; nor did he want to wait too long to counteract the damage done by Doll’s House. “I thought: ‘Someone’s gotta correct this story, or this is gonna be the story.’ And if I had dropped dead that year, that would have been the story.” Another worry was that a less sympathetic biographer would come along and, without Roth’s blessing, rely on Bloom’s “serious and libelous distortions of reality and her numerous significant omissions as a starting point.” By anointing Miller as his only authorized biographer, Roth hoped to discourage the less pure-hearted until a more or less accurate account could be published.

  Miller himself was, at first, taken aback by the idea: Didn’t their friendship present a conflict of interest? This qualm—massive in its obviousness—would not deter Roth until later; at the time he was simply a little surprised by how “uncertain and overwhelmed” his friend suddenly seemed, so unlike the glib, confident fellow Roth had come to know. At any rate, a month before Doll’s House was published,† Roth pressed on Miller a list of interviewees to whom he ought to give priority because of their old age: “With all of these people,” Roth noted, “I would arrange the introduction, and make it clear that you are the authorized biographer, and that it’s my wish that they speak to no one else, if even approached.” The list included Kleinschmidt, the Schneiders (“Claire couldn’t stand the Schneiders . . . because they were bourgeois Jews”), his cousin Florence, and a couple of other elderly cousins living in Florida, Milton Roth and Gladys Kaplan. He coached Miller, too, on the line of questioning he should (“ ‘should’ is in quotation marks,” said Roth) adopt with people who’d known him when: How was it that Roth (“with his background from Leslie Street in Newark”) became a writer of all things? “Same thing with anybody in my family,” Roth urged his friend to inquire—“ ‘How did this guy become a writer?’ ”—as though Roth himself was burning to know the answer.

  Meanwhile the two friends conducted a number of taped interviews between themselves, and Roth spoke freely about the kind of book he wanted Miller to write. Maxine Groffsky was “key” to understanding his early years as a writer and a man, said Roth, assuring Miller she had “no hostility” and would readily consent to an interview. Such interviews, he stressed—inside knowledge—would likely determine how much money Miller got for the book proposal Wylie would submit to publishers. Of course the Bloom issue was paramount, and it was crucial, Roth thought, that Miller persuade her to sit for an interview before I Married a Communist was published: “Her anti-Semitism you can leave out,” Roth advised. “I’m going to get her in the other book.” Indeed, he hoped Miller’s biography would finally address the whole nonsalacious, Chekhov-and-Knipper side of things: “What really went on between this actress and this writer? He’s a serious artist and she’s a serious artist.” But whenever Roth began exploring the more high-minded possibilities, he’d remember the main thesis of Bloom’s own book, and become furious all over again. “I mean, the book of hers is cuckoo,” he said during their November 13 session. “It’s so fucking cuckoo, Ross!” Eleven days later he elaborated:

  I’ve always had women lawyers. This whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit! And Shirley [Fingerhood] was my companion through this. . . . Helene’s [Kaplan] been my lawyer for twenty years. My advisers have been women. Who brought me to The New Yorker? Veronica [Geng]. The whole thing is crazy, Ross. . . . No one has more professional contacts with women, no writer, than I do. My first agent was Candida Donadio. . . . So all those key relations: lawyer, agent, editor—my first editor in New York was Rachel MacKenzie. . . . And of course I had a lifelong friendship with Mildred Martin. Of all the teachers I had at Bucknell, the lifelong friendship I had was with a [shouting] WOMAN!”

  As for the ticklish subject of his sex life: Roth suggested (another word belonging in quotes) that Miller steer clear of the whole Inga Larsen can of worms, and concentrate instead on “philosophical” aspects—indeed, he insisted Miller needed to write a discrete essay, prior to the biography, about the “meaning” of sex in Roth’s life, devoid of any concrete “instances,” which could wait until the biography per se:

  It wasn’t just “Fucked this one fucked that one fucked this one” [he told Miller] . . . if you’re writing the biography of Henry Miller, or Norman Mailer, or any man who hasn’t kept his sex hidden—or D. H. Lawrence, for God’s sake. Or Colette! Why shouldn’t I be treated as seriously as Colette on this? She gave a blow job to this guy in the railway station. Who gives a fuck about that? [Roth ticked off other examples of Colette’s sexual vagaries] . . . That’s just titillation. . . . That doesn’t tell me anything. What did hand jobs mean to her? Why did she like that? It has a meaning!

  The proposal that Miller finally gave Roth and Wylie, however, stinted on “meaning” if not on the sex itself—“as though he were writing my biography for serialization in Hustler magazine,” said Roth, who described the proposal’s main thrust as “The Story of My Penis.” Though Miller hadn’t managed to interview Groffsky (and never would), he’d included lurid details about her dalliance with the young Roth, as well as a colorful recounting of, say, his and Mudge’s trip to England in the summer of 1968: “He was ‘living by his dick’ again, picking up ‘Hong Kong’ prostitutes on Curzon Street, doing just what he wanted—and upon his return to New York in August was ready again to ‘take his life between his teeth’ and move on.”