Roth was looking forward to the happy task of marshaling witnesses and documentation, but his friends were unanimously opposed to publication. Jack Miles and Nicole Krauss both wondered, and expected others to wonder, why Roth had stayed in such a relationship so long—a question Roth himself repeatedly posed in the book, finding no satisfactory answer. Both Hermione Lee and Jonathan Brent used the same phrase—“relentless self-justification”—to describe Roth’s tone, and privately Brent deplored the way Roth had been “washing these little gemstones of memory, over and over and over again, so they come out as set pieces.” Barbara Sproul, who loved him, was “saddened by the obsessiveness of it . . . that perpetual desire to be understood and to be justified”—still, still—and insisted on talking him out of it in person. As Roth recalled their conversation, she said, “ ‘You’re gonna do yourself more damage with this book than she did with hers.’ I said, ‘It’s the truth!’ And she said, ‘You’re gonna look like a bully.’ . . . I said, ‘I didn’t start it!’ And she just said, ‘Don’t do it.’ ” After she left, it occurred to Roth that the only person who might have encouraged him was Ross Miller. “Let’s just forget it,” he told Wylie over the phone, deciding to use the manuscript in the sense implied by its title.

  * A pseudonym.

  † Hermione Lee had tentatively agreed to oblige, but first had to honor her commitments as president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and also finish her work in progress, a biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. She figured she could begin earnest work on a Roth book by 2014; meanwhile she wrote her old friend, “I will completely understand if, because of that [delay], you decide to approach someone else who can get going more quickly.”

  ‡ In 2012, Debenedetti created a fake Twitter account under Roth’s name.

  CHAPTER

  Forty-Nine

  ROTH’S HEART CONDITION STEADILY WORSENED. ONE night he had chest pains, and asked Lisa Halliday to accompany him to the hospital; after the usual wait, he was given a private room where a nurse helped fill out his paperwork. “Religion?” she asked, and Roth replied “Atheist.” When she departed, Halliday wondered why they need to know a patient’s religion. “Well,” said Roth, “if you say you’re Jewish and suddenly it’s looking like it’s getting close to the end, they’ll send a rabbi around. And if you say you’re Catholic, they’ll send a priest around.” “And if you say you’re an atheist?” “They send Christopher Hitchens around.”

  His first leisurely summer in a long time, 2010, was marred by an extreme soreness of the tongue and gums that made it painful to eat; he’d lost nine pounds before a doctor told him he had “burning mouth disease,” and suggested he dissolve a Klonopin on his tongue for three minutes, three times a day, then spit out the residue. Two days later—Labor Day—he and Ben Taylor were having lunch at the West Street Grill, and during the first course Taylor asked him to name the baseball player who’d been the model for Roy Hobbs in Malamud’s The Natural.* Roth held a forefinger aloft—then collapsed. Taylor remembered the last sentence of Death in Venice (“And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease”) and called an ambulance. At the hospital Roth was stabilized with an IV and oxygen; his fainting spell was attributed to a combination of Klonopin and low blood pressure. Meanwhile an echocardiogram showed that his coronary artery disease—diagnosed almost thirty years ago—had now progressed to “mild congestive heart failure,” following the same course as Sandy’s illness.

  Soon Roth had a charming person to cook healthy meals for him. The reference had come from Kaysie, who’d hired a private chef, Catherine von Klitzing, to help her feed the enormous man (six foot seven, 280 pounds) she’d married shortly after breaking up with Roth; unfortunately the cook’s first day on the job coincided with the final departure of Kaysie’s husband. Roth came to dinner instead, and lavishly praised the meal; Kaysie replied that it had been prepared by a cook she no longer needed but whom Roth would do well to hire.

  Roth would always have a weakness for vulnerable young women, and with Catherine he hit the jackpot. A recovering alcoholic prone to bouts of depression (a condition she’d inherited, she said, from a “bastard” of a father), she would sometimes become tearful for no discernible reason, and Roth was nothing but patient and concerned. He’d suggest she lie down for a while in the spare bedroom, or just go home “and take care of [her]self.” That summer she stayed four days out of each week in Connecticut, where she lodged in Roth’s studio; from nine to noon the pool was all hers, and Roth was careful never to intrude on her time. He still made his own breakfast, and took to greeting her through the kitchen screen door as she walked down to the pool each morning: “Slim!” he called her. “Why don’t you come in and have some breakfast?” So, gradually, they became comfortable with each other.

  AFTER LEARNING OF his congestive heart failure, Roth made a point of getting back in touch with dear people from his distant past. Dorothy Brand, his old friend from the Chancellor Avenue School, hadn’t heard from Roth since 1957, when she moved to Chicago; at the time Roth had told her he was painting his Hyde Park apartment, and would get back to her as soon as he was done—then disappeared down the rabbit hole of ceaseless literary endeavor for the next fifty-odd years. “Are you the coauthor of Let Freedom Ring?” he abruptly inquired, phoning her in 2012. “I’m destroyed,” he went on, when she seemed flummoxed. “That’s the beginning of my writing career, and you don’t remember . . .!” Suddenly it all came back to her—Prejudice and Tolerance; “The House I Live In”†—and the two “just picked up where [they] left off,” chatting for half an hour or more. Roth followed with a letter, and they became pen pals.

  Jane Brown Maas, his old costar (she’d played the title role) in the Bucknell production of The Madwoman of Chaillot, wrote Roth a fan letter about The Plot Against America, then went into the hospital for colon cancer surgery. Roth visited almost daily, and afterward made a point of meeting Maas for dinner once a month. (One night he brought two copies of Madwoman to Maas’s apartment: “We read the play and couldn’t make head nor tail of what it was all about,” he recalled.) In late 2010, Maas was among those interviewed for a European documentary about Roth, and, while giving what she thought were candid-enough answers, was abruptly interrupted by her Italian interviewer: “He is not St. Philip, Jane! Does he have a dark side?” Maas soberly replied that he does have a dark side, and sometimes it comes out when he’s in pain; however, while she was in the hospital with cancer, and told him over and over he didn’t have to visit so often, he kept right on coming anyway.

  As Roth kept telling their mutual friend Barbara Jakobson, one of the people he missed most was his sweet-natured companion from the sixties, Ann Mudge, who’d steadfastly refused to see him after her second marriage in 1983. “For a variety of reasons,” she’d written Roth after an “awfully prickly” encounter chez Styron in 1974, “I seem to feel I must defend myself against you.” Her prickliness was hardly unwarranted, given that she’d just read My Life as a Man with its portrayal of “Susan”—Tarnopol’s feckless gentile girlfriend who can’t have an orgasm and tries to kill herself with sleeping pills after he dumps her. Susan’s real-life model, at any rate, managed to pull herself together quite nicely. Around the age of forty she completed her law degree, and, after a short-lived marriage, bought a house in Litchfield County. One night in 1981, she was dining with John Jakobson at the Hopkins Inn; returning from the men’s room, he reported that Roth was there, too, with his father (it was the summer after Bess’s death). Mudge went over to say hi, and Roth not only received her ebulliently but phoned the next day to invite her to dinner. “I stupidly said ‘Yes,’ ” Mudge remembered, “and ended up going back to his house and that was the last one-night stand. Claire was due back from London the next day, and there was all this frantic ‘We have to get the sheets washed!’ . . . And he called me up a couple days later in New York, and I said, ‘Philip, I can’t see you.’ ”

  “I’m delighted for you,” Roth wrote her two years later, when she married the advertising mogul Bill Backer, whose coups included the Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad (“I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”) in 1971. “You never love an ex-wife more (and, as it turns out, you are that to me) than when she remarries.” By the time Mudge finally relented and paid Roth a visit, in the spring of 2012, she was barely able to walk after various surgeries (“full of bolts and screws”), and he ditto. “She was a little old white-haired lady I wouldn’t recognize in the street,” said Roth, “until she sat down and began to speak, and then I began to see her face.” Soon Roth was phoning her at least twice a week, usually after her even more decrepit husband had gone to sleep. “What are you wearing?” he’d greet her. “Where’s your cane? I’ll tell you where my cane is if you’ll tell me where your cane is.” Roth found his tender old friend “enchanting,” and resumed his paternalistic advice-giving, nowadays about exercising in the pool and so on. “Annie dearest,” he wrote her on April 25, 2013, “I was right about going back to college . . . and I am right about this” (proper water temperature). “The only thing I did wrong was failing to marry you and have a family, and that I couldn’t do because by the time Mad Maggie and the State of New York were through with me I could as easily have married an aardvark as a woman, even one as lovely and loving as you.”

  “I can’t save you, Philip,” Lucy Warner had told him after their final tryst in the turbulent summer of 1962, when Roth had tried and failed to leave his first wife. “I’m only twenty-two years old.” Four years later he called her, out of the blue, and offered to recommend her for an editorial-assistant opening at The New York Review of Books; as it happened she needed the job but had no relevant experience and wondered if she were suited. “I always had a higher opinion of you than you had of yourself,” said Roth, who persuaded Barbara Epstein to hire her anyway. During the forty-six years that followed, before she and Roth got back in touch, Knopf published Warner’s story collection, Mirrors (1969), which coincided with a bad patch in her life that led to her giving up as a writer; eventually she got married and became a reading teacher in public schools and homeless shelters. Neither to her husband, her therapist, nor any of her friends did she ever breathe a word of her bygone affair with Philip Roth—whom she’d seen (but not vice versa) only once, in 2006, while observing alternate-side-parking rules near her apartment on 116th and Riverside: There he was, walking along the opposite sidewalk with a much younger woman (Brigit). “Oh Philip,” she thought, “I hope that’s your niece.”

  In 2012, she was “shocked” to be contacted by Roth’s biographer, having assumed Roth had forgotten her long ago. “For many of these intervening 50 years,” she wrote him afterward, “I have been haunted by my abrupt and frightened leave-taking of you. . . . I remember you with enormous tenderness.” Roth felt the same way, and promptly reassured her that she’d been quite right in Iowa City, and again in Connecticut, to leave the desperate, bewildered young man who’d begged her to run away with him: “I promise I won’t ask you to run away with me again,” he concluded in 2012. “In point of fact, I can’t run. But I can walk to the corner and will for you if you give the word.”

  Their reunion was touching to both. Roth noticed that Lucy wore a cross around her neck these days, as she mostly consorted with the Episcopal nuns and monks she’d befriended during monastery retreats, whereas Lucy was struck by Roth’s frailty, physical and otherwise. He was still recovering from his latest back surgery and taking powerful pain meds, and seemed a little “spacey” prior to embracing her on the sidewalk and saying “Of course, sweetheart,” when she asked whether she could call him again. Their subsequent meetings took place mostly at Roth’s apartment, where he would tell her (often while holding her hand) what had befallen him over the years—Maggie and Claire, his depressions, surgeries, drugs, and so on. Lucy became one of the helpers who took him to the hospital when needed, and he in turn reread her short stories and declared them “masterful,” goading her to write at least “twenty sentences a day” instead of the sporadic few she’d managed since taking up fiction again a few years back. He also gave her a gift of ten thousand dollars for the upkeep of her childhood home in Maine, whither they still joked about running away: Roth would become “the first Jewish lobster man”—for five years or so, she said, until he ran off with someone else.

  Not everyone was thrilled to hear from him again. Maxine Groffsky had returned from Paris in the midseventies, when she and Roth met for dinner—their first meeting in fifteen years or more. As he remembered it:

  She had lost none of her beauty and was very poised, but I remember having the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that she didn’t approve of me and didn’t like me. . . . I was surprised then, when afterward we were waiting outside for a taxi, that she suddenly turned her head and offered her mouth to be kissed. I didn’t oblige her and mumbled something like “No, no.” I remember this as making her angry and when I put her into a cab to take her home she barely said goodnight. Those are the bare bones that I can recall.

  To others, Groffsky would occasionally vouchsafe—a little ruefully (at best)—that she was the model for Brenda Patimkin. In 1983, she married the chairman of Harper & Row, Winthrop Knowlton, and with Knowlton she bumped into Roth again, in 2008, while attending a concert at Carnegie Hall; she was perhaps startled when Roth (“somewhat swept away by the recollection of all she’d meant to me and the thought of the two of us now being in our seventies”) gave her a big hug and whispered “You’re still my girl” into her ear. “I’d love to see you and talk to you and listen to you before I die,” he emailed her roughly four years later—an invitation she curtly declined with a one-line reply.

  But he was most persistent with Brigit, the young woman who’d prompted “the last great outburst of everything” (as Roth wrote of Everyman’s longing for the comely jogger who changes her route to avoid him). “We couldn’t walk for five consecutive minutes along the shore of the Housatonic River without stopping in our tracks to excitedly talk,” Roth reminded Brigit on December 17, 2010, more than four years after their final parting.

  Excitedly. Excitedly. Excitedly. You sang to me one night during one of our playful hour-long phone calls between [Colorado] and Connecticut, you said, “Do you want to hear a lullaby?” And I said yes, and so you breathily sang a lullaby and I was wowed, as though you’d just sung from Tosca. I remember rolling onto my back on the bed and asking you (as though I didn’t know), “Are you really as wonderful as this?”

  “NO REPLY” he wrote with a Flair pen at the bottom of his file copy. On May 16, 2012, he tried again: “I insist on seeing you. Life offers few pleasures more thrilling and poignant than seeing someone you deeply loved years later, and not just fleetingly on the street. . . . I want to listen to you speak as I did all night long one New Year’s Eve in Connecticut.” “NO REPLY,” he noted again, and a few months later he sent his “Old Flame” a Peninsula Hotel matchbox to remind her of their time in Chicago. “NO REPLY.”

  MEMORIES OF BRIGIT (et al.) were part of a larger wistfulness, now that he was old, retired, and dependent on friends not only to stave off loneliness but to take him to the hospital and back. Remembering his pregnancy scare with Betty Powell, his long-dead Bucknell girlfriend, Roth said, “I would have married her. And just think. There would be a man or a woman on this earth, a person fifty-nine-years-old, who would be my son or daughter.”

  A degree of compensation—even the “love of his life,” as some saw it—had come his way in November 2003, when Julia Golier gave birth to twins, Amelia and William. About ten days later, on December 9, Roth went to Julia’s childhood home in Montvale, New Jersey, where “the loveliest picture” ever taken of him—according to Julia’s mother—captured Roth gazing benevolently at the little girl’s head cupped in his hand: “All you have to do is put a halo on him and you could call him St. Joseph.” Roth spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the floor beside the twins’ blanket, and later, when the family moved back to Manhattan, he made a point of visiting once or twice a month, sometimes when only the Indian nanny was around.

  He was their de facto grandfather—all the more once their actual grandfathers died. During play days at his pool, Roth would hold contests for craziest dive and the like, and afterward show the kids his favorite old musicals. “Amelia, go to sleep, sweetheart,” he told the nine-year-old (“hanging on not just to the evening, but to life itself by a fine thread”) while watching My Fair Lady after a “sun-blasted” day in the pool. “No, no, no, I can’t,” she moaned. “Why not?” “I have to see if he marries her.” Talking with her mother, Amelia wondered whether it was proper to say “I love you” to Philip, and when it slipped out one day, she was mortified and he was elated. “Julia tells me that you and William have lots of spelling words to learn,” he wrote her, after she’d made him a Valentine’s heart. “Let me teach you one right now. B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L. That’s what you are.”

  Roth and Amelia occasionally collaborated on stories, via email, under the pen name Phamelia. One of their early efforts, when the girl was eight, had to do with a family of monkeys who visit the Museum of Natural History while wearing human masks (“Their adventures there make the Marx Brothers look like Dostoyevsky,” said Roth), and a year later Amelia proposed a story about an optimistic snail (Oppy) who goes for a walk (as it were) and encounters another snail named “Cry a baby CAB for short.” Roth gamely took up the story from there: “Oppy said to Cry Baby, ‘Don’t cry, you silly snail. Life is beautiful. . . . You have suction on your belly so you can hold on to anything. You have a beautiful house that you carry around with you on your back so you can always be inside whenever it starts raining.’ ” Roth waited a few days for Amelia’s installment (doubtless hoping she’d emulate the snailish quiddity of his descriptions), and finally wrote “Oppy? Where are you?” “I have writers block,” Amelia replied, and that was that. Roth indulged his didactic bent, again, when the girl began a piece about wishing on a star for wealth and fame (“The white lights of Hollywood!”). “Wishing on a star has nothing to do with what brings you fame, money, and the admiration of others,” Roth admonished. “GAINING FAME IS ALL ABOUT HARD WORK AND PERFECTING YOUR TALENT”—and he went on about how “boring” it is to be famous (“strangers come up to you while you are eating”). But this, apparently, was not what the girl had in mind, and again she fell silent.