ROTH’S OCCASIONAL NONFICTION had tended to arise “mainly from a provocation,” and so with Wikipedia’s assertion that The Human Stain had been “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” Jolted by this reminder of all the gossipy “babble” surrounding the publication of that novel—never mind the one preceding it, and never mind a certain scurrilous memoir preceding that—Roth demanded the offending misstatement be deleted and was advised by the “English Wikipedia Administrator” that he, Roth, was not in a position to make the call: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their [sic] own work,” this administrator replied, “but we require secondary sources.”

  Such a source, then, was Roth’s “Open Letter to Wikipedia,” published September 6, 2012, on the New Yorker website. “Dear Wikipedia,” it began—as if Roth’s correspondent were a single, monolithic entity—“I am Philip Roth.” After explaining the reason for what Remnick described as a “hilarious screed” (circa 2,655 words), Roth proceeded to give a rambling synopsis of The Human Stain vis-à-vis Mel Tumin’s real-life “Spooks” episode, followed by a not very accurate account of Roth’s vague acquaintance with Broyard, whom he’d met on the beach at Amagansett, in 1959, and only haphazardly encountered thereafter—most notably, he claimed, at the clothier Paul Stuart, sometime in the eighties: “Since Broyard was by this time the Times’s most intellectually stylish book reviewer, I told him that I would like to have him sit down in the chair beside me and allow me to buy him a pair of shoes, hoping thereby, I forthrightly admitted, to deepen his appreciation for my next book. It was a playful, amusing encounter, it lasted ten minutes at most, and was the only such encounter we ever had.”

  In 1989, however, while gravely ill with prostate cancer, Broyard had suggested a deeper kind of spiritual/aesthetic kinship with Roth: “He was my cynical big brother and my crazy little brother, too. . . . Like so many American readers, I felt that I had got gloriously drunk with Philip Roth, we had gone skinny-dipping together, and had suffered with the same kind of women.” That last item was more than notional; back in the sixties, when Broyard was a writing teacher at the New School, he’d communicated with Roth (so to speak) by sending some of his comelier students to his colleague’s nearby walkup on East Tenth, where, unbidden, but certainly welcome, they would announce via the intercom that “Mr. Broyard” had sent them, and were promptly buzzed upstairs. One of the women wrote Roth afterward:

  If I were you I would find it very hard to resist telling about a visit like mine. Thats [sic] okay—it’s like your share of the profits almost. What I wanted to ask was would you not get Broyard’s name in it. I guess it could hurt him.

  You were very nice to me and I feel I got off easily. Thank you.

  “I should never have written that letter to Wikipedia,” Roth admitted, a week after it appeared. “Stupidly I didn’t realize it was going to let all of the cockroaches out of the woodwork.” Most of his critics were merely amused (a few found the piece a little daft), but Broyard’s daughter, Bliss, made it known via Facebook (and subsequently Salon) that her father’s acquaintance with Roth “was more substantial” than Roth had described. Though perhaps unaware of their antics during the sixties, she mentioned an encounter at James Atlas’s Thanksgiving Eve party, in 1988, that contradicted at least one point in Roth’s Wikipedia piece—“I’ve never known, spoken to, or, to my knowledge, been in the company of a single member of Broyard’s family”—and also suggested an abiding awareness on Roth’s part re her father’s main secret, to wit: after Broyard introduced his daughter to Roth, chez Atlas, Roth looked her over and said, “So lithe and pale. Like a ghost.” “It was a brief encounter,” Bliss reported twenty-four years later, “—one I’m not surprised that he might have forgotten—but I am sure you all can understand why I haven’t.”

  Despite his rue over the reception of that first Wikipedia letter, Roth proceeded to pore over every other Roth-related entry and compose three more letters for inclusion in his tenth LOA volume (Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013). His second letter countered the observation that “Jewish sons” such as Portnoy and Zuckerman “rebel by denouncing Judaism”: “Far from denouncing Jews,” Roth rejoined, “in The Ghost Writer, as a neophyte writer, Zuckerman is denounced by Jews,” etc. “To begin with,” Roth asserted in his third letter—citing a reference (“Wikipedia writes”) to his “nervous breakdown” on the evidence of Operation Shylock—“there is no way to conclude anything with certainty about the flesh-and-blood author from something that is said about a character in a novel.” And the last letter addressed another old and bothersome canard: “I knew nothing about [Swede Masin] when I was writing American Pastoral other than that he had been an outstanding all-around athlete.” Two months later, when Roth’s retirement from writing fiction became widely known, Tablet magazine remembered that first Wikipedia letter as “just another piece of support for the tired wisdom that there are few things more dangerous (or tedious) than a retiree with a typewriter.”

  AND YET WORD of his retirement was a worldwide sensation. One woman wrote The New York Times that the news had reminded her of “a ten-block conversation” she’d once had with the indefatigable novelist. “By the end, he knew how old I was, my greatest failure, and how much I made an hour. He closed in on information that might be useful. He was working.” Roth himself—who used to say he’d die if unable to write—mentioned on NPR what a relief it was not to feel compelled anymore to take notes after any vaguely significant conversation: “Now I just listen, and it’s quite nice. I go home and go to sleep.”

  Some three years after writing his last page of fiction, Roth’s admission that he’d quit had more or less slipped out during an interview for the October 9, 2012, issue of Les Inrocks—“Philip Roth arrête d’écrire,” read a boxed banner on the cover—and a whole month passed before (as Roth wrote Hoagland) “some down-at-the-heels stringer somewhere must have gone to the barbershop in Paris to get a haircut and found the magazine.” Actually it was Salon editor David Daley who noticed the item and hastily used Google to translate Roth’s most pertinent remarks into awkward, as it were Gallic-inflected, English: “And after that”—

  i.e., Roth’s rereading of his own books—“I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more. I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

  Both the Associated Press and the Times pounced on Daley’s item that same day—November 9—the latter reproducing the Salon/Google translation word for word, whereupon Roth gleefully paraphrased E. E. Cummings on the subject of President Warren Harding: “ ‘The only man, woman, or child who could make six [“seven” in Cummings’s poem] grammatical errors in a single declarative sentence.’ Thus the paper of record.” Four days later, The Paris Review website published a correct translation of the Les Inrocks interview, which established that Roth had stopped reading and writing fiction only (“I don’t want to read any more of it, write any more of it” [italics added to indicate phrases omitted from the Google translation]), versus reading and writing altogether. Meanwhile Roth’s admirers wondered whether it was really true, or whether, as Adam Gopnik would have it, Roth would succumb to the temptation of writing “one last Möbius strip of fictional-confessional construction, in which Zuckerman may be found creating a novelist, call him Isaac Kaplan, who, at the age of eighty, has decided to stop writing, only to find that this has increased, rather than limited, his fame.” If so, it would be hard to improve on reality, as Roth’s decision to retire was given front-page treatment by the Times: “Goodbye, Frustration: Pen Put Aside, Roth Talks.” During a three-hour interview, Charles McGrath found Roth “cheerful, relaxed and at peace with himself”—all the more so, said Roth, since this was to be his final interview: “Free at last.”

  What followed was perhaps unique in American literary history. New York magazine canvassed thirty-three personages—twenty-eight men and five women, including Salman Rushdie, James Franco, Kathryn Schulz, and Neil LaBute—on various Roth-related issues. An impressive 77 percent voted him the greatest living American novelist; 24 percent named Sabbath’s Theater his best book, 13 percent The Counterlife, and 10 percent each named American Pastoral, The Ghost Writer, Goodbye, Columbus, or Portnoy’s Complaint. As for the still-burning question “Is Roth a misogynist?”: 17 percent said yes, 30 percent no, and 52 percent “Well . . .” “I don’t like the way he writes about women,” said Nell Freudenberger, “and I don’t like the way I sound complaining about it.” Amid the vast coverage, too, was a survey of glowing tributes (via Flavorwire) from no fewer than three dozen prominent writers—or rather thirty-five who spoke more or less glowingly, whereas the poet and novelist Eileen Myles had this to say: “I’m happy he’s still alive, and we won’t have to keep hearing about his boring books. It’s very generous of him to stop.”

  Give or take the odd barb, Roth seemed to enjoy the spectacle, likening himself to Tom Sawyer “listening to his own funeral proceedings.” A similar parallel occurred to Daphne Merkin, who over the years had taken a somewhat acid interest in Roth’s career: “Has there ever been a cannier promoter of his own work than Philip Roth, announcing his retirement?” she remarked in The Daily Beast. “Not Bellow, not Updike, certainly no female writer I can think of. It takes a certain kind of moxie—and egomania—both of which Roth has always had in spades.” “Ah, Daphne sees right through me,” Roth commented to a friend.

  Some six months ago, in the privacy of my apartment, telling a French journalist from an obscure French magazine . . . that I wasn’t working on anything, hadn’t been for several years, and didn’t think I’d write fiction again—what a cagey (and, if I might add what Daphne is too shy to say, vulgar) act of self-promotion! Who other than Roth could have thought up a publicity gimmick like that? Not even Mailer! Not even Capote! Not even Tom Wolfe or Mike Tyson! . . . When it comes to naked self-promotion, I don’t fuck around.

  To be sure, Roth was more amenable to publicity now that he had time on his hands. Back in September 2009—as he was haplessly casting about for a new novel idea in the wake of Nemesis—an Italian journalist who’d become a friend, Livia Manera, met Roth for dinner to ask his advice about a proposed TV project on American writers who’d supported Obama. “When are you asking me?” said Roth, whose nonparticipation Manera had taken for granted. With Roth’s eager approval, however, she promptly dropped the Obama project and decided to do a documentary exclusively on Roth (albeit one with no questions about Claire Bloom and the like). Directed by a Frenchman, William Karel, a fifty-two-minute version was filmed in the fall of 2010 and aired the following year on the French-German channel Arté as Philip Roth, sans complexe and Philip Roth, ohne Beschwerden (“without complaints”). Meanwhile Manera pitched it to Susan Lacy of PBS’s American Masters—a platform Roth had quietly coveted going back to his BBC documentary in 1993—and Lacy was in favor, suggesting they expand it to ninety minutes by adding interviews with other writers: Pierpont, Krauss, Englander, and Franzen. Roth pointed out some errors in the first version and suggested bits of re-editing, declaring the final PBS version “much, much better”; he was even willing to appear via satellite at the Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena, where he “stole the show” (Los Angeles Times) while promoting a program in which he himself proved to be “marvelous company,” as the critic A. O. Scott wrote, “—expansive, funny, generous and candid.”

  Philip Roth: Unmasked was given a free weeklong screening at Film Forum, in SoHo, where a packed crowd sang “Happy Birthday” that first night (March 12, 2013, a week early) to Roth, who attended with an entourage including Manera and Conarroe, the latter in a thrift-store Weequahic High jacket (“because I’m a goy, Philip says it’s a fake”). Roth had a wonderful time, shouting at himself onscreen and phoning Manera the next day: “We should have met twenty-five years ago,” he said, after solemnly applauding her work. “It would have changed our lives.”

  “I SAW AND HEARD something remarkable just a few hours ago,” David Remnick wrote for the New Yorker website on March 20, 2013,

  something I’m not likely to forget until the mechanisms of remembering are shot and I’m tucked away for good. Philip Roth celebrated his eightieth birthday in the Billy Johnson Auditorium of the Newark Museum last night with the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed. On his birthday night, and having sworn never again to give himself over to the “stringent exigencies of literature,” he put on a farewell performance, a great burst of writing and sly self-display—a triumphal lope around the bases, like Ted Williams on his last day in a Red Sox uniform.

  This triumph had been the brainchild of Professor Aimee Pozorski, the eager young president of the Philip Roth Society. During the summer of 2011, when Roth was renovating his house in Warren, Pozorski had volunteered to spend a weekend reshelving his vast library according to his careful system of alphabetized genres and relative priority. “How would you feel about a conference and a party in honor of your eightieth birthday?” she asked, once the job was completed to his satisfaction. Roth consented, and soon the project was enthusiastically adopted by Liz Del Tufo, president of the Newark Landmarks and Historic Preservation Committee, who was so persistent about touching base with Roth during the months of preparation that he took to answering her calls with the question, “Am I eighty yet?” The festivities would include a photographic exhibition of Roth’s life, at the Newark Public Library, and the two curators, James Lewis and Rosemary Steinbaum, reported to Roth’s apartment with some trepidation (“I had heard he was very private and could be prickly,” said Lewis); but Roth was always happy to see them, and seemed to have a funny anecdote for almost every photo in his many boxes and albums. The curators took notes and finally emailed their rough captions to Roth, who “carefully rewrote them for his own voice,” according to Steinbaum.

  The Philip Roth Society’s “Roth@80” conference was held at the Robert Treat Hotel, jammed with scholars from more than a dozen countries, including Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Romania, and India (whence came Gurumurthy Neelakantan, who gave a seminar on how Roth challenges “notions of purity” inherent in the Brahmin caste system).‡ “That this scholarly organization is not necessarily an adoration society,” Steven Kellman wrote in Tablet, “was apparent in several presentations that emphasized Roth’s obsession with controlling every detail of his reputation, from cover to dust-jacket, from advertising to translation.” Indeed, Roth took pains to ensure that his own select group of luminaries would be on hand to pay homage—the great Edna O’Brien, for instance, whom he insisted on personally reimbursing ($6,735) for her plane ticket and a week’s stay at the Lotos Club on the Upper East Side. Joining O’Brien onstage at the Billy Johnson Auditorium—while the likes of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, David Remnick, and Siri Hustvedt sat in the audience—was Jonathan Lethem, who “accepted the honor of batting lead-off in this highbrow’s lineup.”§ Roth’s favorite intellectuals, Alain Finkielkraut and Hermione Lee, discussed Nemesis and Shakespearean themes in Roth’s work, respectively, while Claudia Roth Pierpont put the kibosh on accusations of misogyny (“There are no generalizations to be made about Roth’s women, any more than about his men”). But O’Brien’s tender, unsparing speech was perhaps the most memorable, as much for its content as for the bardic relish of its delivery. A little reluctantly she admitted that Roth and she had never been lovers, as naturally rumored, and imparted a few revealing (versus purely flattering) anecdotes. “So, friends,” she concluded, “this is the tip of the iceberg, I can only give you a glimmer of the complexity of the man that is Philip Roth, feared and revered, plagiarized, envied, hermit and jester, lover and hater, by his own admission foolish and yet fiercely formidable, too adorable for words, a true friend and undoubtedly one of Yeats’s Olympians.”

  Dressed in a black suit and shirt, Roth prompted a renewed burst of applause as he walked slowly onstage at the end of O’Brien’s tribute, standing long enough to wave at friends and soak it in, then sitting at a table and opening a black binder. “Tempting as it is,” he began, “I will not bury you tonight beneath a ton of stories about my happy childhood in the Weequahic section of this city or about my emotional affinity to nearly every commonplace, unpoetic thing that was the Newark of my day.” Whereupon he launched into a loving litany of commonplace things, like the foil he used to pick from empty cigarette packs during the war, the books he’d carry home from Osborne Terrace Library in his bicycle basket (“Nobody needs to hear more about my bicycle basket”), the prizefights at Laurel Garden, the ball games at Ruppert Stadium (where “drunks slept the afternoon away, whimpering and snoring in the summer sun”). “I’ve described my last javelin throw and my last stamp album and my last glove factory and my last jewelry store and my last breast and my last butcher shop.” Roth’s recitation of things he wouldn’t linger over now, or evoke in print ever again, led at last to a seven-page passage toward the end of Sabbath’s Theater that, he said, “I like as well as any pages I’ve ever written”—Sabbath’s welter of childhood memories while he looks for his family’s graves at a Jersey Shore cemetery, until he places pebbles on the stones of his mother, his father, and his brother Morty: “Here I am.” Roth allowed a beat of silence, closed the binder, and walked offstage amid a standing ovation. “It was a colossal dream for me,” he thanked Del Tufo two days later, “a colossal, vibrant, mirth-filled, deeply touching dream. Because the meaning of life is that it stops, missing were my parents and my brother. But as I was waiting in the wings to come out to speak—while Edna lovingly roasted me—I invoked them and it didn’t require too much encouragement for them to appear, full-blown.”