He also might have thought he could take a strong hand in writing his own biography, especially with his best friend at least nominally at the helm. When approached in 2000 (via Conarroe) by another would-be biographer, Roth had replied that he wouldn’t want one “even if it was Boswell”; Ross Miller, however, was another matter. As Roth would later sheepishly explain, he thought Miller had “mature[d] a good deal” in the seven years since he’d written that ribald book proposal Roth had so vehemently rejected. As ever, too, Roth worried he might die at any time, in which case Bloom’s version of his character would stand forever. Miller, of all people, knew the other side of the story.

  On May 4, 2004, Roth’s publisher issued a press release alerting the world to Houghton’s acquisition of two books by Ross Miller: a “full-scale biography of Philip Roth” and Free at Last: Why the Jews Discovered America, about “the historical circumstances of the Jewish immigration to the U. S.” Miller’s book proposal for the biography, this time, had been in the more sober form of his Du chronology (that is to say, Roth’s Du chronology). Lisa Halliday was still at the Wylie Agency when the deal was struck for a biography, and while preparing some of its paperwork she felt a distinct sense of foreboding: “I just thought, ‘There’s only so much you can control.’ ” That summer Miller gave an extended interview to the St. Petersburg Times, likening his book about Roth to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, with two key differences: (1) “Boswell had to wait till Johnson died,” and (2) “I’m not in this biography. I will not appear in this book.” The second point seemed plausible given that Miller’s friendship with his subject was strictly “intellectual,” or so he claimed (“We don’t go bowling together. . . . [I]t’s all business”)—that, indeed, he was more of an “editor” to the novelist: “You have a great heavyweight fighter and they need a trainer, or a great pianist and they need a coach. That’s really the sort of relationship. This is a fragile thing we have. We’re on a tightrope.”

  Finally, on the fraught topic of Roth and the Nobel Prize, Miller had this to say: “He’s been on the short list of two or three at least a few times. It’s inevitable. . . . His feeling is, let’s get it over with.” Roth’s “furious” response to Miller, as he recalled, went something like this: “Why did you say that? It isn’t so! . . . If I had the minutest chance you can be sure you killed whatever minute chance I had of getting it. Luckily I don’t give a shit. But why do you say things that aren’t true?” “No mas,” Miller replied.

  WHEN ROTH RECEIVED an honorary degree from Harvard in 2003, he, Miller, and Rogers took the Bellows out to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton; Saul seemed frail and depressed that night, so Roth and Miller sat on either side of him, trying to cheer him up. Bellow’s final novel, Ravelstein (2000)—a roman à clef about his friendship with fellow Committee member Allan Bloom—had seemed weak to Roth, but he forbore to write a frank critique and simply said he was “out of sympathy” with the hero and therefore an unfit reader. Four years later, the only novel Bellow wanted to read was The Plot Against America—“Where’s the book?” he’d call to Janis, who knew which one he meant—opening at any page and reading as if for the first time. “I’ve been thinking about Lindbergh,” he said to Roth very near the end. “He always moves away from my unclean presence.” Roth cherished these rare glimpses of lucidity. Janis always knew when Roth was on the phone, because she’d hear her husband laughing in his old way—throwing his head back—after Roth had treated him to some “delicious” joke. And Roth kept calling even after Bellow was too confused to know who he was; once Bellow responded with a voice “so old, so dead,” that Roth burst into tears. “Do you want to speak to your sister?” Bellow said (meaning Janis) the last time Roth called.

  When Bellow died on April 5, 2005, Roth was in the midst of a grinding siege of back pain (he’d scheduled another surgery for the following month). Still, he managed the flight to Boston, with Wylie, then a three-hour drive from Bellow’s house in Brookline to his burial site in Brattleboro, Vermont. Bellow had wanted to be buried with traditional Jewish rites, so the service was in Hebrew, with no eulogies, and later the mourners took turns shoveling dirt into the grave. By then Roth was almost crazed with pain, and had to walk back and forth to a bench some fifty feet from the grave site—“like a kind of brooding Hamlet,” Bellow’s son Greg observed in his memoir, Saul Bellow’s Heart, “[Roth] wandered the edges of the funeral in deep thought.” Greg also mentioned that his own final graveside words were quoted in Roth’s Everyman—“ ‘Sleep easy, Pop’ ”—but declined to include what followed: “any note of tenderness, grief, love, or loss was terrifyingly absent from his voice.”

  Shortly after the funeral, Roth reported to Solotaroff that Bellow’s middle son, Adam, “was the most visibly wracked, perhaps because his feelings about Saul are the most twisted”; within a few months, however, he decided that both older sons (he liked the youngest, Daniel) were “shallow shits.” Adam had lost his good opinion by writing a New York Times op-ed about his neglectful father (“Missing: My Father”) for what would have been Saul’s ninetieth birthday: “We had no family occasions,” Adam wrote. “He just sat up there like Wotan on his mountain, in Vermont, or in his aerie overlooking Lake Michigan, and I made pilgrimages by bus or car or plane.” “I wonder if this is the first of a series to be published in your paper by the neglected children of divorce,” Roth wrote in a rebuttal he never sent.

  If this is the case, you will have millions of submissions from aggrieved adults like Mr. Bellow to choose from, and I assume that after you have finished with the children of dead Nobel Prize winners you will lend space on your Op Ed page to the similarly neglected fifty-and sixty-year-old children of dead taxi drivers, dead plumbers, dead prize fighters, dead neurosurgeons, dead military personnel, etc.

  They too have a right for their lamentations to be gullibly taken at face value once the imperfect parent is unable to challenge the justness of possible simplifications, fabrications, and self-serving distortions of the truth.

  This was mild next to what Roth thought about Greg’s book, Saul Bellow’s Heart, published in 2013: “The unworldliness, the lack of imagination, the terrible prose, the monomania, the vindictive spirit seasoned with self-congratulatory expressions of forgiveness and love,” he wrote a friend, “—none of this makes this book easy reading. I think the book is an example of what is beautifully called ‘pissing on the grave.’ ” Roth had always referred to Greg as Schmucko, and in the margins of Greg’s memoir he scribbled a running commentary of “Oy” and suchlike glosses, until he wrote “I quit” on page 35; but he didn’t quit: “He was being ironic, schmuck,” Roth riposted on page 211, next to where Greg interprets his father’s invariable “Hunky dory”—when asked about his health during that last year of life—to mean he “was too far gone to realize how frail he was.” “You wicked bastards!” Everyman rails against his disaffected sons, Randy and Lonny. “You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits!”

  Preoccupied with filial resentment and thoughts of the grave, Roth began a new novel the day after Bellow’s funeral. The Life and Death of a Male Body¶ was to be “a story about a man’s mortality from the perch of the operating room, that is, the history of his diseases”—a man who shared his creator’s aversion to the metaphysical. A few months before, when Max Rudin’s second child was born sixteen weeks premature, Roth had phoned every few days to ask how the boy was doing. At one point Rudin hesitated to share some piece of good news, because he didn’t want “to jinx anything,” and Roth shot back, “Nothing you say will make any difference.” Rudin always remembered the moment as a nice instance of the staunch “Jewish rationalism” that informed Roth’s everyday thinking and thus Everyman.

  The sprawling, intricately layered Plot had exhausted something in Roth; he no longer had the “mental stamina” for big novels, and, like Bellow toward the end of his career, would henceforth content himself with the taut architecture of novellas. The fewer the motifs, or “props,” of a narrative, the more potently they resonate for readers, and in Everyman Roth was particularly inspired by the jewelry shop owned by the hero’s father (who calls it Everyman’s so that gentile customers won’t be put off by his Jewish name). One day, by way of research, Roth walked along Broadway until he came to a shop with a Dominican owner who was happy to break out his jewelry loupe and show Roth the intricacies of clocks and watches, carats—accoutrements that dovetail beautifully in the final passage of Everyman (“I felt very happy that day,” said Roth), where the dying man remembers bodysurfing as a boy:

  Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler’s loupe engraved with his father’s initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself—at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth! . . . Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.

  * An affinity is suggested, in the novel, when Foster presides over Bengelsdorf’s wedding.

  † Roth didn’t know that Mrs. Wishnow was going to die until he approached the end of the book. To deepen the impact, he subsequently added an earlier scene in which she patiently talks little Philip through the ordeal of having locked himself in the Wishnows’ bathroom, and comforts the sobbing child afterward.

  ‡ With occasional exceptions: Little Philip, a stamp collector, notes that Booker T. Washington is the first Negro to appear on an American stamp, and wonders whether a Jew will ever enjoy such a distinction. “In fact, another twenty-six years had to pass,” the narrator remarks, “and it took Einstein to do it.”

  § Roth occasionally visited the LOA’s offices. “Don’t I recognize you from one of our book jackets?” asked one of the more puckish editors, bumping into Roth in the men’s room. “Yes,” Roth replied, “I’m Louisa May Alcott.”

  ¶ Or, as he called it privately, his “geezer book.”

  CHAPTER

  Forty-Five

  AFTER HIS FINAL BREAK WITH SUSAN ROGERS IN EARLY 2005—a time when he was feeling especially enfeebled and gloomy—Roth suspected he was “too old to seriously consider attracting the women who attracted him.” One woman friend, who was “only” (as Roth would have it) about twenty years younger than he, never forgot the dispirited way he suggested she come live with him in Connecticut. “It will be nice to have some companionship,” he said. “One could go her own way when one needed to, and there might be little visits to my bed every now and then.” The woman found it a chilly proposition, and politely declined.

  David Plante was then infatuated with one of his more gifted Columbia students—a young man who’d begun to publish in prestigious magazines and would soon finish an acclaimed novel. Plante thought he’d put the fellow “in his place” by inviting him to dinner with Philip Roth, who in turn might be able to shed light on whether or not the young man was gay. As it happened their guest arrived with a former girlfriend, Brigit,* who struck Roth as quite pretty, albeit in a nebulous “virginal mode” that particular night. Roth, of course, was in pain—it was March 23, 2005, less than two months before his second major back surgery—but receptive enough, with the help of Vicodin, to retain a basic dossier on the woman: a twenty-nine-year-old graduate of an Ivy League college, she’d grown up in privileged circumstances on the Upper West Side; her Jewish father worked on Wall Street, and her gentile mother had been a gifted artist before dying of cancer a few years back. The young woman was still starkly burdened with grief. “This would be a good place to commit suicide,” she said to Roth, standing beside a grimy, alley-view window in Plante’s apartment. “Let’s do it,” he replied.

  Six months later Roth was pain-free; remembering the young woman, he asked Plante to arrange a dinner for the three of them at Russian Samovar. When Plante arrived, he spotted Roth and Brigit in a back booth, leaning toward each other, and walked around the block a few times. “Leave after dessert,” Roth murmured to him at some point, and afterward Roth and Brigit sat talking for another two or three hours. “I can’t let you go,” he said on the sidewalk, and joined her in a taxi back to her Village apartment. “In the taxi,” Roth remembered, “she grew a little shy of me and she began to talk self-consciously about all the things there were to learn and I said, ‘Don’t worry—I’ll teach you.’ ” When the taxi pulled up to the curb, Roth stayed put (“Don’t fuck it up,” he thought; “don’t go for her”), and promised to call her soon.

  OCTOBER WAS the happiest month for Roth. His dinner with Brigit at Russian Samovar was on October 4, and, less than three weeks later, Philip Roth Day was celebrated in Newark: a historical plaque was unveiled at 81 Summit Avenue (“This was the first childhood home of Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest writers of the 20th and 21st centuries”†), and the corner of Summit and Keer was named Philip Roth Plaza. The next morning, around seven thirty (“I had no finesse whatever”), Roth rang up Brigit and gave her “a full and gleeful report of the goings-on.” He was in love. A month later he hired a limo and took her along for a shopping spree in SoHo. “Imagine a scene that Mann never wrote where Aschenbach buys clothes for Tadzio,” he said, still delighting in the memory years later. At Assets he bought her a leather jacket and skirt, then at Barbara Bui he picked out a little black dress and asked her to try it on: “She was just delicious,” he said, and she agreed it was nice but worried about the stupendous price tag. Roth handed her his credit card and went outside to wait in the car. “You know what the salesgirl said to me?” Brigit said afterward. “ ‘You got the black dress too?’ ”‡ On December 7, the couple attended the annual New Yorker holiday party at Pastis—their first public outing. “Philip Roth made an appearance with a twenty-something young lady,” Gawker reported. “Mr. Roth and his lady were the subject of much conversation.”

  The only cloud was her imminent departure—on January 1, 2006—for a five-month theater fellowship in Colorado. She and Roth spent their last weekends together in Connecticut, dancing on Saturday nights to the big-band music of Roth’s youth, and one night, Faunia-like, Brigit performed a charming striptease in Roth’s bedroom. “Who needs any more than this?” she exulted one snowy, twilit evening. The most memorable night of all was New Year’s Eve: in front of a fire they drank Champagne and consumed a pot of caviar, then Roth sat opposite her in his Eames chair and asked her to tell him the story of her adult life, from college graduation to the present day. For the next three hours—midnight came and went; nobody noticed—she held forth, vividly, hardly pausing except to collect herself when she came to the terrible saga of her mother’s illness and death. Her departure the next day was wrenching.

  Except for Brigit’s visits, the place in Connecticut had become too cold and lonely during winter months, and Roth was in the process of turning his New York apartment into a more permanent haven. Rather than soundproof the walls with cork à la Proust, Roth bought up the surrounding apartments: The first, below him, had been owned by a burly doting father who crashed around playing with his children every night; next Roth bought the apartments on either side of him, 12D and 12F, renting out the first to a temperate lodger, and renovating the second as an extension to his studio—an elaborate project that would take the full five months of Brigit’s absence, during which he stayed at Plante’s apartment on Claremont Avenue, near Columbia, while Plante was away in Europe on sabbatical.

  The day after her arrival in Colorado, Brigit sent Roth some paint samples she’d picked out for the spare bedroom—that is, her room—in Roth’s soon to be renovated New York apartment, as well as samples for the downstairs parlor in Warren, which was to be her office. The two spoke on the phone at least once a day, never briefly, and arranged to meet three times during Brigit’s fellowship. For three days in early April, Roth booked a suite at the Peninsula in Chicago, showing Brigit around Hyde Park haunts from another halcyon period of his life. A rather grim memento mori, however, was the decrepitude of his brother, Sandy: in the eight or so months since Philip had seen him last, osteoporosis had bent Sandy almost double, and never mind the heart disease that would kill him in three more years. Meanwhile his wife, Dorene, was a little bemused by her seventy-three-year-old brother-in-law’s romance, and not simply for the obvious reasons. “He saw none of her spoiled-brat qualities,” she remembered. “She seemed like somebody who was poised to have a very man-filled life.” Another tactical blunder on Roth’s part, arguably, was arranging a dinner with Janis Bellow when the couple stayed at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, or so Ross Miller opined during a taped interview with Dick Stern: “How crazy are you to put up Janis as a model?”—that is, of a devoted caretaker for a much much older man who, in her case, had recently died after a long decline into dementia. Roth, incensed when he heard Miller’s comment on tape, insisted that Janis was just his “dear lovely friend” and he was hardly “selling” her to Brigit. Even so loyal a person as Judith Thurman, though, saw parallels in the Bellow union that might have appealed to Roth: “But [Brigit] didn’t have that temperament,” she added. “She was very ambitious. She didn’t want to be a handmaiden.”

  For the time being, anyway, Brigit hardly had to worry about the caretaking side of things. Ribaldry inspired the otherwise proper young woman: she rhapsodized about their sex games in her letters, and for Roth’s seventy-third birthday she composed a breathtakingly filthy parody of “Mr. Sandman”—“Mr. Hard-on,” whom the singer begs to bring her something more tangible than a dream. Little wonder Roth kissed Plante on the lips when the two met again at Broadway and 116th, while students streamed around them through the campus gate. The whole thing was reminiscent of a favorite Roth joke: an old man goes into a confession booth in Ireland and says, “I’m eighty-three and I’m sleeping with a twenty-eight-year-old!” “Do I detect a Jewish accent?” the priest replies. “Why are you telling me this?” “I’m telling everybody!”