Conarroe had trod safely for almost four decades—until suddenly, in 2003, his foot slipped on the tightrope between Roth and Roth’s various bêtes noires. One of these was the poet Amiri Baraka, who’d been inducted into the Academy the same year Roth had received his Gold Medal (2001). A year later, Baraka was involved in a controversy over his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which suggested Israel had known in advance about the 9/11 attacks:

  . . . Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

  To stay home that day

  Why did Sharon stay away?

  Who? Who? Who? . . .

  Apoplectic, Roth fired off a note to the Academy secretary: “ ‘Who made the credit cards’ is still my favorite line,” he wrote her. “Which is yours?

  Who murdered the English language

  Who the worst poet in America

  Who, who, who

  And who the idiot who nominated this jerk. Please let me know.

  As Roth was shortly informed, Baraka had been proposed for membership by Francine du Plessix Gray (“She gets everything right”).

  It so happened the theme of “Somebody Blew Up America” was a well-worn aspect of Baraka’s work. As an Anti-Defamation League report pointed out, his 1967 poem “Black People!” had suggested that merchandise in Jewish-owned stores such as Klein’s and Hahne’s could be had with the magic words, “Up against the wall, mother fucker, this is a stick up!” Lest one think this is so much abstract satire, Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones, whose play Dutchman Roth had savaged in a 1964 issue of the New York Review) had been arrested during the 1967 Newark riots for carrying an illegal weapon and inciting to riot.§ “A whole business is going down the drain because of that son of a bitch LeRoi Jones,” says the Swede’s obstreperous father in American Pastoral, “that Peek-A-Boo-Boopy-Do, whatever the hell he calls himself in that goddamn hat.” Later Baraka was careful to make a distinction between Judaism and Zionism (“It is Zionists who control Israel and have the most influence now in the Jewish bourgeoisie”), though, to be sure, he wasn’t advocating the robbery of Zionists per se in “Black People!”

  Baraka was appointed Poet Laureate of New Jersey in 2002, a position the legislature proposed to abolish a few months later, in light of the outrage over “Somebody Blew Up America.” Conarroe, as president of PEN America, had co-signed a protest letter written largely at the behest of K. Anthony Appiah, chairman of the PEN Freedom to Write Committee, advising the legislature that they stood to violate the First Amendment: “We are troubled by any controversy that focuses on a few short passages extracted from a much longer piece of literature and fails to acknowledge fully the context of the passages within the work or the context of the work within the traditions and conventions of the art.” When other PEN members proposed to publish the same letter in The New York Review of Books, Conarroe balked; after talking things over with Roth, he explained his misgivings to PEN: “I’m bothered by the phrase ‘a few short passages,’ as if there’s very little here, after all, to object to, and also by the idea of calling the diatribe a piece of ‘literature,’ which it’s not, and to referring to the tradition and conventions of ‘the art,’ as if this unspeakable outburst had anything to do with art. Is ‘Protocols of Zion’ a work of art?” The next day Conarroe conclusively refused to sign a public letter in the New York Review.

  Within a week, Roth somehow got word that his friend’s signature had, in fact, been on the original letter to the legislature supporting “a ranting, demagogic, anti-Semitic liar,” as Roth considered Baraka, “and a ridiculously untalented poet to boot”; furious that Conarroe had failed to mention his previous defense “of this cocksucker,” he left a ranting message on Conarroe’s answering machine, followed by a FedEx letter accusing him of deception: “My friends don’t lie to me on serious issues nor do they deliberately withhold information that is vital to understanding their predicament when they ask for my assistance.” “You seem to be angry about a lot of things (and people) these days,” replied Conarroe, whose sweetness did, after all, have a limit. “Did I lie and say I hadn’t signed? Bullshit. I called on an old friend for advice because . . . I thought the letter to be published in NYRB was to be a different letter, one that would newly state PEN’s position, and not the one sent to NJ, and that I would be able to make changes that would reflect my own second thoughts.” Such was Roth’s lingering pique, however, that he had Wylie (or rather an employee in Wylie’s office) return Conarroe’s letter unopened.

  When Conarroe made no further effort to explain, the better angel of Roth’s nature finally asserted itself. Two months later he wrote Conarroe that he was to receive an honorary degree from Penn in May: “I’d like you to be there. It doesn’t make any sense if you’re not. Can we excise the month of March—or was it February?—from our long history as friends?” Conarroe replied that he certainly wouldn’t miss “the canonization of [his] old Penn pal,” and the following year he put up $50,000 of his own money to sponsor volume 1 of the Library of America Philip Roth edition.

  ANDREW WYLIE MADE a point of hiring Harvard graduates, and one of these, Lisa Halliday, caught Roth’s eye when he visited the Midtown office in the spring of 2002. Soon enough the two found themselves in an elevator together (Halliday later told him she’d timed her departure to coincide with his), and Roth asked her to lunch at the Bagel Baron on West Fifty-seventh Street, where the young woman, an aspiring writer, produced “not just perfect sentences,” he recalled, but “perfect paragraph after perfect paragraph” in the course of answering his questions about her (surprisingly working-class) origins. “Are you game?” Roth inquired as they were leaving, and she gave him a playful nod. Lori Monson, his physical therapist, was in the same building as Wylie, and subsequently Roth asked Halliday to pick up some paperwork for him there and bring it to his apartment on the Upper West Side. “Very smooth,” Halliday remembered.

  As it happened, Halliday lived just two blocks away from Roth—on West Eightieth, between Amsterdam and Broadway—and during the larky affair that followed, Roth’s apartment became a kind of second home to her (he tended to see Susan Rogers more in the country); either she or Roth would pick up dinner at Zabar’s, eat it chez Roth, go to bed, then watch baseball (Halliday, from the Boston suburbs, was a big Red Sox fan). Roth remembered with special pleasure (“charming, charming, charming”) the time Halliday breezily pantomimed, atop his bed, a famous scene from Chaplin’s Modern Times. During one of their rare excursions outside Roth’s apartment—for a concert at Carnegie Hall—they were accosted by a street photographer: “No,” Roth replied to the man’s overture, “we’ll pay you not to have it taken.”

  Around this time Roth also made the acquaintance of the actress Nicole Kidman, who’d been cast as Faunia Farley in The Human Stain. She and Roth had a divorce lawyer in common, Bill Beslow, who mentioned to Roth that she wanted to chat about Faunia over the phone. Roth advised her to go to a battered women’s shelter and talk to the most intelligent woman there, then suggested they discuss things further over dinner in New York. Roth’s “one and only hangout” in the city then was Russian Samovar, on West Fifty-second Street, where he was always ebulliently greeted by the owner, Roman Kaplan. “Hello, beautiful,Ý said Kaplan, when Kidman arrived on Roth’s arm, and the waitresses skittered across the street to buy disposable cameras at Rexall’s.¶ The night was a success: Roth and Kidman “hit it off,” he remembered, and on the sidewalk afterward pedestrians erupted, “Nicole! . . . Nicole!”

  The Human Stain was shot mostly in Montreal, but in May the production moved to Williams College in the Berkshires, within easy driving distance of Warren, and over Memorial Day weekend Roth paid a visit to the set. “I hate to say this in front of Nicole,” he said, after watching a concert scene with Kidman and Anthony Hopkins (as Coleman Silk); Kidman bit her nails while Roth “paused for effect” (according to a Times reporter who wrote about Roth’s visit). Finally he went on: “But what she did was terrific. You could see what was happening inside her head when all she did was go to touch this guy and then decide against it.”

  Until he’d met Kidman, Roth had shown little interest in the production. “You’ll have only one problem with me,” he told producer Tom Rosenberg of Lakeshore Entertainment, when they first met for lunch at the West Street Grill. “If the check doesn’t clear.” For his part Rosenberg was nervous about doing justice to what he considered “the great American novel”; the day he received the screenplay he could hardly bring himself to open the envelope, but was soon reassured that Nicholas Meyer (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution) had pulled it off. As for Roth, he considered the script “horrendously bad” and could barely force himself to sit through a rough-cut screening for his sole benefit. “Oh no!” he’d cry out in the projection room, or “Good god!” Afterward he had lunch with Rosenberg and the director, Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer). “What were you guys thinking about?” he said to the stunned pair, who tried to explain that important stuff from his novel had to be jettisoned for the sake of filmic economy. Roth insisted they put in “the most important scene” in the book—when Coleman tells Faunia he’s black—which, Roth tartly remarked, may mean cutting a few seconds from one of their jogging scenes (meant to indicate “male bonding” between Silk and Zuckerman). When they agreed to shoot the extra scene, Roth phoned Kidman and coached her on how to say the key line (“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know?”): “Just throw it away! His life’s secret!” Roth never saw the final movie, but Kidman informed him they’d cut her line and rendered the scene nonsensical.#

  Roth claimed his friendship with Kidman had petered out after a few phone calls, but a reliable source said there was at least one more abortive date. Roth, who’d excitedly hired a limo for the evening, arrived at Kidman’s hotel and was taken aback when she came down to the lobby with a puzzled look, dressed in jeans. Apologetically she explained that she thought their date was for the next night, and offered to join him in the hotel bar for a glass of wine or something. Roth, however, was furious and left in a huff. Later a friend of his met Kidman and mentioned Roth. “Tell him to grow up,” the actress replied.

  * Precisely described in The Humbling as “a tan close-fitting waist-length leather jacket with a shearling lining.”

  † Stern might have also wanted to deflect the Bellows from encountering such observations as this, on page 487 of Atlas: “it took [Bellow] years to forgive Richard Stern for his quip that Bellow had two hobbies: ‘philosophy and fucking.’ ”

  ‡ Roth was certainly capable of the “tootsie” slur, but it wasn’t a fair characterization of his attitude. As Stern himself admitted, when Roth first met the nineteen-year-old Rollings, in 1969, he’d been “totally open, welcoming, affectionate, approving” of her relationship with Stern. Roth and Rollings remained good friends, even after Stern’s death in 2013.

  § He was ultimately acquitted, as I mention on page 589.

  ¶ A photo from that night—Kaplan, Kidman, Roth—is easily found online.

  # In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott pretty much nailed it when he described The Human Stain as “an honorable B+ term paper of a movie: sober, scrupulous and earnestly respectful of its literary source.” He particularly questioned the casting of Wentworth Miller as the young Coleman, since the actor resembled neither his older self (Hopkins) nor the other Silks, putting Scott in mind of Steve Martin as the adopted son of black sharecroppers in The Jerk.

  CHAPTER

  Forty-Four

  THE BENEFIT OF ROTH’S PREVIOUS BACK SURGERY, IN March 2002, began to wear off a year or so later, and soon he was in terrible pain again. Making matters worse, as always, was his inability to get another novel started after he’d finished The Plot Against America in early 2004. His “physical predicament,” he said, “was not conducive to the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and emotion recollected in tranquility”—or, as he told Ross Miller during a taped interview that summer, “I’m in a fucking rut in my life. Everything.”

  These days Roth often spoke in a slurred mumble because he was taking four to six Vicodin a day, along with Klonopin to steady his nerves and Ambien to help him sleep; the last had the unfortunate effect of causing random words and images to scroll along the inside of his eyelids. Looking back, Susan Rogers wondered “how much of his self-involvement, his unawareness, a lot of what he’d say or do that was mean, was part of his medical situation.” To be sure, she’d sometimes encourage Roth to take a Vicodin to lift his spirits, since the alternative was a melancholy man in agonizing pain. But there were drawbacks as well to the playful, euphoric Roth, who sustained himself with drugs during a jolly trip to the Jersey Shore with Rogers: “How did you get here?” he kept asking her over dinner one night. “I guess someone had to be here. It might as well be you.” The point of the shtick, hardly lost on Rogers, was that theirs was a more or less random connection, versus a romantic one vis-à-vis Margot and her ilk. “He thought he was being funny,” said Rogers; “it just made me feel like crap.”

  Getting off such high doses of opioids was problematic, even for so iron-willed a person as Roth. Once, he tried quitting his medications cold turkey; since he couldn’t bear being alone during such an ordeal, he persuaded Rogers to stay in Connecticut and keep him company for a weekend. “Nothing was okay,” she recalled, “nothing was right: He felt abandoned, despairing.” She’d start to put her arms around the trembling man but he didn’t want to be touched, nor spoken to when she tried verbal reassurance. Rogers wanted to phone for an ambulance, but he’d insisted everything had to remain a secret. When she could leave, at last, she drove to a friend’s house and collapsed sobbing.

  One night, with Ross Miller, the couple attended a swank party on the Upper East Side, but Roth was taken ill and went home early. Miller walked with the barefoot (because of her heels) Rogers back to her room at the Athletic Club, and while they wended their way around the park she vented her frustrations as a caretaker. Miller, after all, was the only person she could talk to; none of her friends knew anything about the affair, and surely Miller of all people (so she figured) could relate to her predicament. Afterward Rogers received a note from Roth: “Ross tells me you’re not ‘cut out’ for this,” it began, proposing they take a long and perhaps permanent break from each other.

  According to Rogers’s journal, Roth got back in touch two months later—on May 8, 2004—and could hardly have been more charming. He invited her to come to Warren for dinner in a couple of weeks, when he’d give her back the clothing she’d left at his house. (“So on the one hand he’s being flirtatious,” she mused, “and on the other he’s sending me back my clothes. A strange call.”) She felt very nervous on arrival—she remembered her legs shaking—even before she spotted the weary apparition hobbling toward her from his studio. Roth wrapped his arms around her and began to sob: “Every time I came out to the house,” he said, in effect, “I would walk around and say ‘Susie’s dead. Susie’s not here, she must be dead.’ ”

  For a few unsettling months they were a couple again, though Rogers was looking forward to spending six weeks in Antarctica, beginning in December, on a quirky, prestigious National Science Foundation grant for writers and artists (Roth and Leon Botstein had put her up for it). Since Roth didn’t do email, they agreed Miller would be the conduit for both her personal, Roth-specific letters as well as her “Dear Family and Friends” bulletins. Roth received a few of the latter—via Conarroe—but nothing otherwise, and came to suspect Rogers was distracted by another affair, especially after Conarroe sent him an article from a gay magazine “suggesting that Antarctica was the lesbian capital of the world,” as Roth put it, “kind of a continental Provincetown with penguins.”

  When Rogers returned, at the end of January 2005, Roth was in the grip of a monthlong flu and decidedly poor company, at least where Rogers was concerned. He didn’t wait up for her late-night arrival in the city, and the next morning (after she’d slept in the adjacent apartment, which Roth had recently bought to combine with his one-bedroom unit) she reported to her host’s sickbed and made desultory, one-sided conversation for less than an hour before catching a train back to Bard (“I was awful,” she admitted, laughing). A few days later he called her: “What’s the hardest part about being back?” he asked, and she replied, “The fact that it’s impossible to talk to you.” “Yeah,” he said, and hung up.

  After a month of silence, Rogers wrote him a semicontrite letter. She was “stunned” and “deeply sad” that things were ending this way, though she had to admit she’d never quite been able to believe Roth loved her: “Too often I felt that your need for me came before the love and with that need came a searing hatred—not necessarily of me, but of relying on anyone—as well as a deep gratefulness. I felt both and this clouded my understanding. . . . If there is anger on your part I hope it subsides with time and that some day we’ll be able to move toward a friendship.” There was, in fact, plenty of anger. Roth wondered how she could have doubted his love after he’d dedicated his book to her and “kissed [her] in plain view of everyone” at the National Book Awards because he wanted the world to know about them.