Roth decided his wariness was well founded when Atlas published a selection of journal entries about Bellow in the June 26, 1995, issue of The New Yorker. Titled “The Shadow in the Garden”—a phrase Bellow had used to describe Atlas, after the shadow cast by a gravestone—the entries revealed Atlas’s growing disaffection with his subject, not to say envy (“why him and not me?”) over the relative glamor of Bellow’s life and achievement. “My greatest fear is that we’ll have a falling out someday,” Atlas wrote. “The person with whom I used to experience a huge paternal transference doesn’t exist as powerfully for me anymore; I feel independent of him, but also sad. There is no Dad. Certainly not this difficult, prickly character.”

  After Atlas’s New Yorker piece, Roth assumed a chill civility in his rare communications with his former friend. On June 21, 1997, he wrote Atlas a request to see, as agreed, any direct quotations from their earlier interview that Atlas planned to use in the finished book; Atlas replied that he was still in the process of cutting, and wouldn’t know what he was definitely using until the fall. When Roth hadn’t heard further by the following March, he wrote a brief reminder to Atlas, who replied as follows: “Relax. My book isn’t done yet; it’s been delayed. . . . Do you think I’m going to ‘cheat’ and smuggle in quotes from you without your approval? That’s not how I do things. When I’m ready to seek your permission, I’ll seek it. I want to do this book right.” That tore it. Roth wrote Wylie (their mutual agent) that he found the note “egregiously rude,” and now wanted to deny Atlas “use of any and all material” from their interview. In the end Roth relented on his threat,¶ but was unmoved by Atlas’s apology a few months later (“I’m sorry I snapped at you”) and duly skeptical when Atlas ventured a diffident hope that Roth would find the published book “generous, fair, and interesting.”

  Roth found the book a “belittling distortion” of his literary and personal hero, blinded to its merits by what he described as “the banality of all that righteous, boring pseudo-p[s]ychiatric moralizing.” Atlas himself would come to regret the scolding tone he sometimes took toward his subject, who once quipped that he’d married his second wife, Sondra, to “get into her pants”: “It was a remarkably adolescent way of looking at the challenge of seduction for a man of almost forty,” Atlas wrote; “if he was joking—a generous interpretation—the crudeness of his language was significant. Sondra was (to put it less bluntly than Bellow did) a sexual object; as such, she didn’t require fidelity.” Perhaps, but hardly the sort of thing that was apt to sit well with Roth, who was at least as fond of ribaldry as his beloved Bellow; nor did Roth agree with Atlas’s judgment that the writer Vivian Gornick was “justifiably” offended by the way Bellow (and Roth) “depicted women in his novels.” For his part, Atlas would remain rightly proud of his book’s “scope and structure and literary insights,” but he was aware, too, that something had misfired. He admitted to growing “impatient,” over the years, with Bellow’s evasions, vacillations, and general crabbiness (“I want to get on with my story, live my life,” Atlas wrote in The New Yorker), and such irritation found its way into his book and at least one letter to Roth, whose vehement displeasure was conveyed to Atlas by a mutual friend.

  And yet Atlas could scarcely have known the half of it. “You sounded in good spirits on the phone today,” Roth wrote Bellow on September 14, 2000, about a month before publication of Bellow: A Biography. “You’re taking this Atlas shit like a champ.” By then Roth had spent more than two years working on a plan to neutralize the damage of Atlas’s book (a book he’d taken no little part in encouraging): viz., a corrective interview with Bellow, covering his magisterial oeuvre from Augie March to the present day, that would be “four times longer” than any of the other interviews in Roth’s forthcoming collection, Shop Talk—“the last, best word on this great man,” as Roth would have it. After rereading each novel he proposed to send a list of questions for Bellow to answer at his leisure, and meanwhile Roth convened a reading group of three “smart Yeshiva bochers” to help enrich his insights: Miller, Manea, and Ed Rothstein, the Times cultural reporter whose stellar review of Zuckerman Unbound (“The Revenge of the Vrai”) Roth hadn’t forgotten.# Manea soon dropped out for linguistic reasons, but the others met once a month at Roth’s New York studio for “wonderful semi-fierce discussions” about a given Bellow novel, followed by a good Chinese meal. “Book talk, smart guys, chattering over dinner, going home,” said Roth. “No friction.”

  But the fading Bellow was distracted by work on his final novel, Ravelstein, and it might have been clear to anyone but Roth that his Shop Talk interview was a lot more important to him than to Bellow, who took months to compose a single answer, when he bothered at all. “Yours, not Atlas’s, should be the last word on what you’ve done,” Roth hectored him on June 6, 1999, almost a year after proposing the project, and finally Roth decided to take matters even more firmly in hand. For a few days in early December, he informed Bellow, Roth would stay at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, and spend “four or five hours a day”—two sessions a day, morning and afternoon—interviewing Bellow at his home in Brookline; afterward they’d prepare a transcript and Bellow could formulate his final answers based on that. Time was of the essence, Roth insisted, since David Remnick was eager to publish their interview in The New Yorker to coincide with (and, Roth hoped, to undermine) Atlas’s biography.

  Each morning Roth would join Bellow in his upstairs study at ten o’clock, and by noon Bellow “had had it”; the two men and Janis would adjourn to a nearby Thai restaurant, then Roth would work at his hotel in the afternoon and return chez Bellow for an early dinner and nightcap. As for the interviews themselves, Roth did most of the talking while Bellow listened and laughed and occasionally put up a kind of droll, token resistance to being led around by the nose, as though he were trying to fend off an overzealous encyclopedia salesman.

  ROTH: Whenever you go to Chicago in your books it’s exuberant, whenever you come to New York you’re depressed.

  BELLOW: I never realized that.

  ROTH: . . . You can’t even imagine being lost in Chicago until The Dean’s December.

  BELLOW: I can’t really see that I am so utterly place-dependent. . . .

  ROTH [after an exhaustive explanation]: . . . You know?

  BELLOW: With certain reservations, I do know.

  “You’re gonna finally understand yourself when this is over,” Roth quipped at one point, while Bellow (perhaps in an effort to detach himself further from the ordeal) began referring to Roth in the third person: “Roth likes Henderson, and I am grateful to him for that. . . . Again Roth puts it better than I could have done.” “I want you to understand that I’m not James Atlas,” Roth reminded his weary elder, who replied, “I know that.”

  “Saul failing badly,” Conarroe observed in his diary on July 12, 2000, but Roth persevered. With Atlas’s book imminent, he was all the more determined to finish the job, going over their sketchy interview transcript and marking in red, for Bellow’s benefit, whatever seemed most pertinent to a given set of questions. On July 15, he tried putting his foot down:

  If you give me two hours a day, a morning hour and an afternoon hour, you should be able to do a question a week, which means that by the end of August the job will be done. If it is, we can then get it to Remnick for publication in The New Yorker in October. It would be the perfect response from you, and the only one necessary. This is your job: DO IT.

  Otherwise, please:

  1. Don’t look at the Atlas book. . . .

  2. Change your phone number NOW, and give the new number only to intimates. . . .

  4. Say nothing about the book to anyone outside the very inner circle. NOT A WORD. NOTHING. DON’T SHOW THE WOUND TO A SOUL. THIS IS THE DISCIPLINE REQUIRED.

  But it was no use, and finally Roth poured the collective insights of the last couple of years into a long essay, “Re-Reading Saul Bellow,” which appeared in the October 9, 2000, issue of The New Yorker. “Remnick must know that he struck it rich, this time,” a grateful Bellow wrote Roth, “—no Eng. Lit. Prof. would be capable of doing what you’ve done with my books.”** Fair enough: with adulatory élan Roth explicated the better qualities of Bellow’s mature novels, singling out Herzog as his “grandest creation” because it best exemplified “the nearly impossible undertaking that marks Bellow’s work as strongly as it does the novels of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann: the struggle not only to infuse fiction with mind but to make mentalness itself central to the hero’s dilemma—to think . . . about the problem of thinking.” Finally, when Bellow died in April 2005, Roth saw to it that The New Yorker published Bellow’s entire written response to Roth’s interview question about the origin of Augie March—“without any editorial correction or alteration,” oddly enough, since Bellow’s incipient dementia was awkwardly highlighted by the way he circled back three times to the same basic (if charming) story, to wit: while spending a Guggenheim year in Paris, Bellow had been mired in writing a lugubrious philosophical novel set in a hospital, until one day he happened to think of a childhood friend who used to shout “I got a scheme!”—after which Bellow jettisoned the hospital novel and wrote an exuberant “speculative biography” of his lost chum, The Adventures of Augie March. And so a great writer was fledged.

  “THIS IS HOW I whiled away the last fifteen months,” Roth wrote the Bellows on December 10, 1997, enclosing the penultimate draft of I Married a Communist. Bellow read the long book in three weeks, and was as stylish in aspersion as Roth (vis-à-vis Bellow) was in praise. Lamenting the “absence of distance” between Roth and his characters—a sin Bellow confessed to having committed in Herzog (where, however, he “hoped the comic effects might protect [him]”)—he wondered how Roth could bear such a “cast-iron klutz” as Ira Ringold, and what about the other principals in his cast? “Eve is simply a pitiful woman and Sylphid is a pampered, wicked fat girl with a bison hump.” Bellow ended his critique with the hope that Roth wouldn’t “cast [him] off forever,” and Roth replied with a vigorous defense of his novel followed by the usual gracious valediction: “You’ve been in my bloodstream since I read Augie March. It’s going to take more than mere candor for me to cast you out for half an hour, let alone ‘forever.’ ”

  Truth be known, Roth was rather proud of the distance he’d achieved between his fictional world of midcentury Communist hysteria and his own latter-day personal woes, though he realized others might disagree on a legal (versus aesthetic) basis. For Milbank Tweed’s consideration, he composed “a detailed anatomy of the relationship between major characters in the book and the real-life counterparts who, to a greater or lesser degree, serve as inspiration.” Eve Frame, of course, was “modeled on the personality of Claire Bloom,” though Roth had “substantially altered” the facts. It was true that Frame’s second husband, Miles “Jumbo” Freedman, was a lot like Bloom’s second husband, Hillard “Hilly” Elkins. Both, said Roth, were theatrical producers who might be described as “short and unattractive” and had perpetuated their wives’ careers while stealing their money; in this case lawyers persuaded Roth to change Freedman into Frame’s third husband, now a real estate speculator (but still a “sex clown”). Carlton Pennington therefore became Frame’s second husband, based on the man who’d written a suavely bitchy blurb for Doll’s House: “she even makes—inadvertently—her last husband, Philip Roth, into something he himself has failed to do—not for want of trying—interesting at last.” Thus Roth was spurred, he confessed, to the task of making Gore Vidal “interesting” as the secretly gay, anti-Semitic Pennington, a silent-movie actor who manages to sire Sylphid and becomes more and more grotesque after his career tanks: “Drunk every night, on the prowl, a bitter ex-somebody ranting and raving about the Jews who run Hollywood who ruined his career.” Roth figured this character was sufficiently camouflaged as written.††

  Sylphid was “modeled closely” on Anna Steiger, Roth informed his lawyers, though privately he considered the fictional version “much more appealing” than the real thing. For instance, at one of her mother’s soirées, the wittily cynical Sylphid goes out of her way to put the young Zuckerman at ease by “helping [him] gradually to understand that there wasn’t as much at stake as all the pomp suggested”: “What’s most laughable about that lunatic is her grandiosity,” she remarks of one guest, the writer Katrina Van Tassel Grant, confiding to Nathan that her mother had secretly nicknamed the woman Loony. For Milbank Tweed, Roth explained the resemblance between Grant and Francine Gray as follows: “Both women are depicted as tall, thin, and blond-haired. Each has two private school-educated sons, each is a bad writer, and each is a calculating, incessant liar. There are no significant similarities beyond these.”

  Roth expected his novel to stir up a lot of gossip, the ubiquity of which was, after all, one of its major themes: “Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism is the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience.” Nowhere was the tendency more pronounced, Roth thought, than in so-called cultural journalism—“maniacally dedicated, as all gossip is, to knowing who is doing dirty to whom.” As if to gratify his worst expectations, the Times ran a piece titled “Writers as Plunderers,” by none other than Dinitia Smith, who decried the recent spate of “tell-all books” by such as Mia Farrow, Lillian Ross, and Roth, the last of whom “has made a career of taking elements from his life for his fiction,” and whose new novel was regarded by some as “simply payback” (Smith also noted that The Ghost Writer had been “about” Malamud). As for the Times review of I Married a Communist—by Michiko Kakutani, Roth’s fellow Pulitzer winner that year—it, too, disparaged the novel as “hogtied to a narrow, personal agenda,” the targets of which “are not transformed . . . into plausible or compelling fiction.”

  Among the more favorable reviews was one by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Observer; Roth was especially pleased by the caption beneath a photo of himself, which he quoted in a letter to his editor, Wendy Strothman: “ ‘PR, who understands how politics may serve as mask and outlet for extra-political resentments and obsessions.’ . . . PR understands how book reviews may serve as mask and outlet for resentments and obsessions too.” He was, at any rate, further consoled by a long, appreciative notice in the New York Review by Robert Stone, who applauded Communist as “a bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and a place in our common past.”

  As a preemptive strike against old lefty friends who were apt to find Ira Ringold an unflattering reflection of their own susceptibilities, Roth incorporated the same verbatim sentiment into various letters: “if gullibility (that is, unforgivable naiveté about the horrors of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian thuggery) wasn’t the major idiocy of the American left, I don’t know what was.” Besides, he believed that Ira’s own gullibility was particularized/extenuated by his hardscrabble childhood, richly evoked, which left him “an easy mark for the utopian vision,” as Zuckerman reflects. Roth was especially proud of the canary funeral, a virtuosic set piece that “was most thrilling to write,” he said, and that he’d “stake [his] longevity on.” As with Swede’s tour of the glove factory, the funeral was based on meticulous research (an actual event in Newark history), but what pleased Roth, as ever, was its potency as fiction: while the elaborate obsequies for an Italian cobbler’s canary, Jimmy, leave most of the crowd in stitches, little Ira isn’t “in on the joke” and weeps inconsolably, thereafter dubbed “Boo-hoo Ringold. The Jewboy who cried at the canary funeral.” Thus the nature of Ira’s alienation is picturesquely defined. He will forever identify with the weak and helpless thing—a tendency shared by his creator (“Don’t step on the underdog”)—hence his attraction to the likes of Eve Frame and the Communist party. Nor will the memory of his childhood humiliations ever go away, and beneath the polished façade of Iron Rinn, the Lincoln-impersonating radio celebrity, remains an unstable lout who once beat a man to death with a shovel.

  Roth understood “how politics may serve as mask and outlet for extra-political resentments” regardless of ideology. As Murray Ringold explains to Zuckerman, the HUAC committee member most responsible for getting him fired from his teaching job was Bryden Grant—Katrina’s odious husband—the same person who nominally cowrote (“as told to”) the book that destroyed the career of Murray’s brother, I Married a Communist. Murray traces the Grants’ undying spite to a seemingly trivial episode at a party on West Eleventh Street, when Ira referred to the right-wing Bryden as “a pal of Wernher von Braun’s”: “The whole squabble took three minutes,” says Murray, “but according to Ira, three minutes that sealed his fate and mine.” Similarly, Roth would forever believe that a Katrina Grant–like figure was at least the partial ghostwriter of Doll’s House, since he couldn’t imagine Bloom coming up with certain characterizations any more than Eve Frame would be apt to call her gullible husband “a Machiavellian Communist, a vicious man of enormous cunning”—though she was certainly apt to pander to her daughter in whatever terms: “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything so heroic in my life as my young daughter, who loved nothing so much as to sit quietly all day playing her harp, arguing strenuously in defense of American democracy against this Communist madman and his Stalinist, totalitarian lies.” Politics may also provide a mask for failings one can’t otherwise bear to acknowledge. As Murray explains Eve’s self-exculpatory reasoning, “I didn’t lose my husband because of the horrible trap I’m in with my daughter. I didn’t lose my husband because of all those kneeling ‘I implore you’s.’ . . . It has to be grander than that—and I must be blameless. . . . I lost my husband to Communism.”