“You told me that would never happen because of politics,” said Jack Wheatcroft, his old Bucknell friend, when Roth was announced as the winner on April 14, 1998. That afternoon Roth had been “cruising the aisles of Litchfield’s Stop & Shop” and came home to find some twenty-five messages on his machine.¶ Jeffrey Posternak called from Wylie’s office to offer their prompt congratulations and let Roth know that CNN, CBS, and the Associated Press were “all eager for interviews.” “I’m a reporter for the Mountain Lakes Pulpit,” said Conarroe, “which is a weekly paper, and we’d like to do an interview with you at your convenience about growing up in New Jersey and in Quahog—Queequeg?—whatever that is.” Michael Herr: “What a thrill it must be to share the dais with Michiko Kakutani” (who’d won for criticism). “Everyone thought Anita Brookner was gonna get it.” Other well-wishers included DeLillo (“Put some brandy in your Jell-O tonight”), Bellow (“I thought I would lay my bouquet”), Styron (“Richly deserved, as I said about fifteen years ago when you got euchred out of it”), Lowenstein (“Mazel tov!”), and an emotional Sylvia Tumin (“Big hugs, big kisses . . . love you”), whose husband, Mel, had died four years before and been movingly eulogized by Roth. But none was as emotional as Sandy, who burst into tears the moment his brother called him back.

  * Miller did not respond to my repeated requests for an interview.

  † And two days before Dinitia Smith’s Times piece of September 17, 1996—which suggests, again, that Roth already had a pretty good idea of what to expect from Bloom’s book.

  ‡ The “inert form” being the Kid himself, of course, whose heroic catch sends the Dodgers to the World Series but leaves him “writhing in agony.”

  § Masin soon developed Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2006. Two years later, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Weequahic High School, he was inducted into the inaugural class of the Weequahic Alumni Hall of Fame, along with Roth and Lowenstein.

  ¶ Roth preserved his answering-machine tape from that day, which he included among materials he gave to his biographer.

  CHAPTER

  Forty-One

  BY THE MIDNINETIES, ROTH’S FRIEND AND FAVORITE editor, Veronica Geng, had fallen on hard times. For years she’d worked at The New Yorker on a per-diem basis, but when Tina Brown took over as editor, in 1992, Geng decided she wanted the security of a salaried position; Brown (who considered Geng “too high-maintenance and flighty,” according to Hendrik Hertzberg) would agree only to raise her per-diem, and Geng quit in a huff. Since then she’d published her occasional casuals in The New York Review of Books instead of The New Yorker, and made ends meet by editing writers such as Roth on a freelance basis. She was living alone in a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side, in 1996, when she blacked out and collapsed; afterward, at New York Hospital, she was found to have a malignant, grapefruit-sized brain tumor on her right temporal lobe. She was fifty-five and had no health insurance.

  Roth put up five thousand dollars for her medical expenses, and promptly arranged for her friends Barbara Epstein, Saul Steinberg, Roy Blount Jr., and James Hamilton to do likewise. Following her brain surgery, Geng stayed with a friend in Great Barrington, and, during Roth’s visits, wore a “dress” improvised from her hospital gown—one detail of many (her lurid surgical scar was another) that Roth would give to the similarly afflicted Amy Bellette in Exit Ghost. When Geng’s relations with her friend in the Berkshires became strained, Roth let her stay in his writing studio on West Seventy-ninth Street; with the help of nurses (hired by Roth) she lived there awhile, contentedly enough, until she had a seizure one night and was taken by ambulance to Sloan-Kettering. By then she was too weak to walk, and Roth would wheel her outside the hospital so she could smoke. On December 22, 1997, he noted in his diary that Geng had had trouble breathing during his visit, and two days later she died. On the cold, drizzly day she was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn (“Veronica Geng / Beautiful Soulful / Hilarious / Jan. 10, 1941–Dec. 24, 1997”), Roth brought things to an abrupt end when he turned on his heel and walked away; he and other mourners repaired to Patrissy’s Restaurant in Little Italy, and Roth picked up the tab ($540.05).

  During this era he also performed good works in behalf of Emmanuel Dongala, a Congolese chemist and novelist Roth had befriended through the Huvelles, who’d served as Dongala’s foster parents when he’d come to the States, almost thirty years before, to attend Oberlin College. In 1994, when Roth was awarded the Karel Čapek Prize, he’d asked Dongala, a PEN delegate, to read his English acceptance speech (Klíma read the Czech version) in Prague. Three years later Dongala was dean of Marien Ngouabi University, in Brazzaville, when civil war broke out; as he wrote the Huvelles on August 10, 1997, the city center and university had been looted and almost entirely destroyed: “You see 15-year-old kids with Kalashnikovs roaming around and stopping you in the many roadblocks and these kids have the right of life or death on you. . . . It is very surrealistic, me reading American Pastoral while mortars are pounding away, the family frightened and hiding in the house. My best to Philip when you talk to him next.”

  The Huvelles gave Roth the details and asked for his help getting Dongala and his family out of the country. Since a prerequisite for a visa was some promise of employment, Roth phoned his friend Leon Botstein, who promptly arranged an appointment for Dongala as a chemistry professor at Bard’s affiliate in Great Barrington, Simon’s Rock. Roth and the Huvelles were waiting at JFK when Dongala (“with a touch of malaria”) arrived in March 1998; meanwhile his twenty-year-old brother-in-law had been randomly murdered by a militia squad, and his wife, Pauline, was still hiding in the bush with their three teenage daughters. With the help of an aide in Senator Kennedy’s office, Roth managed to get visas a week later for Pauline and two of the daughters, but the United States consulate refused a visa for the oldest daughter, Assita—this by way of assurance, it seemed, that the other Dongalas wouldn’t seek permanent asylum. On April 4, 1998, Roth summarized the family’s predicament in a letter to President Clinton: “After experiencing some nine months of warfare, terror, and near-starvation,” he wrote of Assita, “a traumatized eighteen-year-old girl has been separated from her immediate family for reasons that are unfathomable to me.”

  He still hadn’t received a reply on April 20, when Styron took him to lunch at the West Street Grill in Litchfield to celebrate his Pulitzer. Toward the end of their meal, Styron mentioned he was leaving for Washington, D.C., in a few hours for a White House dinner in honor of National Poetry Month. “Wait right here,” Roth said, and drove twenty minutes back to his house in Warren, retrieved a copy of his letter to the president, and drove back to the restaurant. “Put this in Bill Clinton’s hands,” he told Styron, “and tell him to read it.” Three days later Roth received a fax from Susan Beveridge at the White House (“This office handles the President’s casework and would be happy to assist”), and a month later Assita Dongala was reunited with her family in Great Barrington. As a housewarming gift, Roth gave the Dongalas one of his extra TV sets, and (as he had with Norman Manea) took the girls to a huge supermarket where they could marvel at “the ample displays of food in row after row. Tubs of frozen turkeys, mountains of oranges, etc.”—the bounty of America. Roth paid their tuition at an intensive English institute, and, within a year, the two younger daughters were on the honor roll at the local high school.

  A few years earlier, Roth had tried using his leverage with the MacArthur Foundation to get a lucrative “genius” grant for Alfred Kazin, who’d retired in 1985 after a nearly fifty-year career at CUNY and was now trying to subsist on his credentials as one of the country’s preeminent literary critics. Just as Bellow’s fifth wife, Janis, had boosted Roth as a worthy friend to her husband, so Kazin’s fourth wife, Judith Dunford, had made it possible for Roth and Kazin to coexist more or less peaceably. In 1983, the Kazins bought a house in nearby Roxbury, and two or three times a year the couple would dine with Roth and Bloom, or else the two men would meet à deux at the Hopkins Inn. As Roth remembered, “Alfred began an evening by asking how you were and three minutes later, having barely been able to endure your reply, he began his lecture on the French Revolution or the poetry of Hart Crane or Lincoln’s prose style.” For the MacArthur Foundation, Roth described Kazin as “one of the treasures of American culture” and was furious when Kazin was passed over. “He is an old man, ill, without financial resources,” Roth wrote the foundation. “I was stupified [sic] by the people you chose over him last year. Please do not turn to me again for assistance.”

  In early 1998, Kazin learned that his prostate cancer had spread to his bones, and Roth recommended the same hospice nurses he’d hired to take care of Geng in his apartment. The nurses were excellent but expensive: thirty-five dollars an hour, day and night. As Dunford observed, “It was one of those terrible American situations where you think maybe I should hope that he dies a little faster.” Happily or not, it didn’t last long—Kazin died on his eighty-third birthday, June 5—and meanwhile Dunford received a thousand dollars from Roth (“Please accept this as tuition for all I’ve learned from Alfred”), who also tried, again, to muster support from Barbara Epstein and other friends. After her husband’s death, Dunford asked Roth to help her find an editor for an anthology of Kazin’s work, and took his advice (“wisely,” said Roth, “because he did a brilliant job”) to approach Solotaroff; Roth also persuaded Wylie to handle Kazin’s literary estate, even though, as Dunford put it, “if they made back their postage cost, I’d be surprised.” Indeed, the posthumous anthology, Alfred Kazin’s America (a title Roth suggested), was largely ignored—a sad commentary on the thankless labors of American belletrists; Roth pressed all but one or two of his twelve copies on friends and visitors.

  In 2011, Kazin’s journals were published by Yale University Press, and Roth learned how deeply one of his idols had loathed him. “Philip Roth, the male shrew” was a favorite epithet, referring (a little ironically, Roth thought) to the younger man’s tendency to monopolize conversations in a noisy, pompous way, so that Kazin was “always glad to see him depart in all his prosperity and self-satisfaction.” Roth brooded about things for a couple of years, and finally wrote the widow: “I fail to understand Alfred’s profound distaste for me in his journals. I don’t really care”—though plainly he did—“but I do find it peculiar. What did I ever do to him? That generation of Jewish intellectuals and their touchy fucking grievances.”

  “HEMINGWAY SAID, ‘Life is a cheap thing beside a man’s work,’ ” Roth had written Riki Wagman in 1972. “It may be the smartest thing Hemingway ever said.” By the late nineties, Roth’s life had shrunk (or expanded, as he would have it) almost entirely around his writing. Less and less did he see the point of visiting New York, except for a couple of days a month “to get a haircut and eat some good Chinese food”—but work was all that really mattered, and he always worked better in the country. “When you’re in New York, in the apartment, and you’re stuck, what can you do? Put your shoes on, go downstairs, walk to Zabar’s and back? Walk in Central Park? This is better than Central Park; I own my own Central Park.”

  The apartment on West Seventy-seventh had always been cursed, as far as Roth was concerned, and he couldn’t wait to get rid of it. The tenants above him (writer Nancy Friday and her husband, Time editor Norman Pearlstine) had a greenhouse on their terrace, and a decade of daily watering had rendered Roth’s apartment all but uninhabitable. First the pictures on his walls—the Roth caricatures by David Levine, the Guston cartoon of a Roth-like writer stabbing a Howe-like critic, etc.—became stained and cockled from leaks, and he had to pay Cella Manea to restore them; toward the end, all the furniture and rugs had to be removed, and the apartment was vacant except for buckets to catch water. On March 9, 1998, Roth finally managed to sell the place—for $600,000, exactly what he’d paid for it a decade before—whereupon he notified Wylie via fax: “AS FAR AS ANYONE IS CONCERNED, I NO LONGER HAVE ANY CONNECTION TO NYC”—that is to say, his pied-à-terre on Seventy-ninth was not for public consumption.

  Wherever he happened to be, Roth didn’t want to be bothered. He demanded the removal of his entry from International Who’s Who when they repeated the mistake of publishing his home address (albeit with a crucial typo that rendered it pretty much untraceable), and he posted two little signs near his desk: “Stay Put” and “No Optional Striving.” Occasionally he’d complain of loneliness, but, almost in the same breath, remind himself (and perhaps his cleaning person or caretaker, if they happened to be around) that he’d only get in trouble with women if he ventured out. Sometimes, to be sure, on bleak winter days when he was snowed in, Roth would pull on his boots in the morning and feel about “three minutes” of melancholy; then he’d remember Bloom and think, “But there’s no friction.” And he’d smile. “My schedule is absolutely my own,” he explained to David Remnick of The New Yorker. “Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back and I work for two or three more hours.” Around this time Roth heard that a developer wanted to buy ninety-three acres across the road and build a subdivision; foreseeing the ruin of his rural utopia (“a school bus, the whole works”), Roth immediately phoned his local lawyer and told him to find out a price for the land—two million, it turned out—and pay it. “Don’t hondel [bargain],” said Roth. “Just give him the money.”

  “Beware the utopia of isolation,” Murray Ringold warns Zuckerman toward the end of I Married a Communist. “Beware the utopia of the shack in the woods, the oasis defense against rage and grief. An impregnable solitude.” For a while, Roth sought to assuage his own solitude by getting back in touch with the friends of his youth. Back in 1985, Marty Weich had arranged a reunion at his Manhattan apartment for Roth and the rest of the boys: Bob Heyman, Stu Lehman, and Bernie Swerdlow. Later, when Roth had returned to the States for good, he and Weich made a point of meeting twice a year at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side (“redolent of the smoked fish delis of our childhood”), and Roth was gratified to find his former best friend little changed. Every morning, after dropping his son at school, Weich would drive all the way out to New Jersey to visit his senile mother (“Stand up straight!” she’d greet him), then race back to Manhattan so he could start meeting patients around eleven. In his spare time he was writing a musical.

  The others had led conventionally successful lives, for the most part. Heyman was an endodontist whose thriving Fifth Avenue practice attracted patients such as Lauren Bacall and Willie Mays, while Stu Lehman (still married to his college sweetheart) was an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Howie Silver, another dentist, hadn’t been part of the tight circle who used to gather for parties in Heyman’s basement, but he’d also graduated with the class of 1950 and was an enthusiastic, good-natured addition to these later meetings. A more exotic creature (still) was Bernie Swerdlow, whose boyhood colitis and satyriasis Roth had given to Melvin Weiner and Smolka, respectively, in Portnoy. At Weich’s apartment in 1985, Swerdlow had mentioned a memoir he was writing and asked Roth if he wanted to be his coauthor. “Everybody wants to write a book about themselves,” said Roth.

  Actually he might have made something interesting of Swerdlow’s later adventures. A psychiatrist like Weich, Swerdlow had wangled his way into the University of Amsterdam medical school, whither he’d dragged his first wife (one of the few shiksas at Weequahic) until the marriage broke up amid their grinding poverty abroad (“the boys took up a collection,” Heyman recalled, “and gave money to Bernie to see him through”). Swerdlow returned to the States, single, and set up a lively practice on the Jersey Shore—but invariably sex and drugs got him into trouble, until he’d flee the wreckage and hang his shingle in some other part of the country: California at one point, and finally Winter Park, Florida, where he (the author of Whiplash and Related Headaches) started his own headache clinic. At a high school reunion, as Lowenstein reported to Roth, Swerdlow had shown up, late, “with a girl twice his height and half the age of his daughter. . . . He claims he is flat broke, cleaned out by wife #5—I may be off there, but not by much.”

  Whatever his raffishness, Swerdlow was a sentimental soul who treasured his old friendships—he kept a memorabilia-filled “Weequahic Room” at his home in Winter Park—serving as the “spark plug” for what became periodic gatherings with Roth et al. He also tended to guide the discussions in predictable ways, until Howie Silver hosted a reunion at his house in Deal, New Jersey, and insisted they take things to a higher plane—that is, by drawing little slips of paper with heavy prompts (“What level of happiness are you experiencing?”) out of a brandy snifter. “Screw that,” said Heyman. “Let’s talk about jerking off. Or almost getting laid in the old days.” That would have suited Roth, who also hosted a meeting in Connecticut on October 27, 1996, less than two weeks after the publication of Leaving a Doll’s House. “Don’t mention Claire’s name!” Sandy hissed into their guests’ ears, intercepting each man on arrival.

  It was Swerdlow who insisted—with Roth’s tacit blessing—that wives be barred from the proceedings. “I have a lifestyle and a philosophy that, literally, have diverged from my friends,” Swerdlow wrote Lowenstein in 1988, complaining that one of “the boys” was “married to a hypochondriac, hysterical, paranoid woman,” and who the hell needed such people cramping his style? Then, too, by the late nineties, wives might have reminded Swerdlow that he himself was fated to die alone. “To sleep at night,” he wrote Roth in 1998, “I hug my pillow and fantasize a loving woman. Of all the things I accomplished and did not accomplish in my life I regret not having had a long lasting relationship.” Diabetes killed him a few months later, whereupon the reunions came to end—not least, for Roth, because the others wanted to bring wives now that Bernie wasn’t around to object.