Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (138 page)

You know, even the best biographies are only two-thirds correct.
Philip Roth in conversation with Mark Lawson

Authors can be terrible liars and never more so than when they are in the autobiographical vein. Like salesmen, they are at their most dangerous when most sincere. Philip Roth has made a profession out of mischievous transgressions of fact and fiction. One of his titles,
Deception
(1990), could embellish the covers of all of his fiction as the name of the Rothian game. Roth’s tell-it-all memoir, cheekily entitled
The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography
(1988) – the title alludes to
Dragnet
hero Jack Webb’s ‘the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts’ – carries a subversive afterword, in the form of a letter from one of the platoon of Rothian alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman. ‘You are far better off writing about me than “accurately” reporting your own life,’ the figment sagely advises. But where’s the dividing line? Disentangling Roth from his fictional characters is like trying to scrape the tomato sauce off spaghetti. He specialises in ‘counterlives’ – teasing reflections of himself, with heroes perversely named ‘Philip Roth’, but not Philip Roth. The funniest thing he has written by way of explication of his fiction is that ‘the personal element is there’ – an understatement that ranks with ‘I may be gone for some time.’

When it was published, Roth’s publishers trumpeted
The Facts
as just what its title said – ‘Roth and his battles, defictionalised and unadorned’. It was suspicious since Roth’s previous writings had played ducks and drakes with factuality and fictionality, and disentanglement is complicated by the fact that he manifestly does drop great authentic chunks of personal history into his fiction. He has used his childhood in Weequahic so often that even though I have never been to Newark, New Jersey, I feel I know its pre-war streets as well as I know the Bull at Ambridge. His 2010 novel, the last of the ‘Nemesis’ trilogy, opens:

The first case of polio that summer [1944] came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived. Over in the city’s southwestern corner, in the Jewish Weequahic section, we heard nothing about it, nor did we hear anything about the next dozen cases scattered singly throughout Newark in nearly every neighborhood but ours.

The seventy-five-year-old novelist – the ‘dying animal’, in his own phrase – writing this lives in a fine eighteenth-century farmhouse in isolated Connecticut (visitors are extremely unwelcome, but a pen-picture is given in
Exit Ghost
). The ten-year-old Philip Roth is somewhere on the sidewalk in New Jersey, 1944 – and will always be trapped there, unable to escape, like some sad ghost in an M. R. James tale.

Roth’s titles routinely tease the reader with proffers of frank confession: e.g.
Reading Myself and Others
(1976),
The Ghost Writer
(1979), or the 1994 TV special, entitled, outrageously,
My True Story
. But ‘confession’ is false coinage with this writer. He doesn’t hold with it. He has stated that a writer cannot
know
his past, he can only
recount
it. What then does it mean to ‘come clean’, or ‘let go’? –
Letting Go
(1962), one recalls, is another of Roth’s teasing titles. Probably
Portnoy’s Complaint
(1969) offers his most persuasive answer. You come closest to telling the truth when you kvetch – when you whine – and when you are privately closeted with your analyst (hopefully the listener behind the sofa will not be as absurd as Dr Spielvogel, author of the treatise ‘The Puzzled Penis’).

The Facts
is no kvetch, however. If anything, it’s a surprisingly mellow evocation of the author’s upbringing. Especially in the early sections, it recalls Woody Allen’s over-tenderised
Radio Days
. Philip’s was, we are to understand, a happy childhood. Nor is
The Facts
a transcript of what goes on between Roth and his therapist: it is the least offensively outspoken of any book he has written. No organisation of rabbis, league of Jewish mothers, or Southern Baptist preacher could have protested this publication. Anyone wanting to know if Roth himself actually did that awful thing described in the ‘Salad Days’ section of
My Life as a Man
(1974) to a young lady under the ping-pong table, yelping ‘good shot’ and ‘nice return’ to allay her parents next door, will be disappointed.
The Facts
contains not a single lavatorial or sex scene; no family liver is profaned; no anal sub-tabular tennis is played.

Roth, being Roth, will never keep the facts he does tell entirely straight. Framing the autobiography is an exchange with Nathan Zuckerman – the hero and sometimes the narrator of the 1980s tetralogy. Roth’s letter requesting his alter ego’s imprimatur forms a preface to
The Facts
and there he explains how he came to write it. Its quest for ‘original pre-fictionalised factuality’ grew out of certain ‘necessities’ and these were in turn the consequence of a ‘crack-up’ which the author suffered in the spring of 1987. Tantalisingly, Roth won’t elaborate (‘there’s no need to delve into particulars here’ – why not?). As part of a general nausea, he emerged sick of ‘fictionalising’ Roth. If this manuscript ‘conveys anything, it’s my exhaustion with masks, disguises, distortions and lies’. One knows what he is referring to. His immediately preceding novel,
The Counterlife
(1986), finished in a riot of fictional artifice with characters arbitrarily dying and coming to different (‘counter’) life and finally defecting from the novel in disgust at what their awful author was doing to them. ‘I’m leaving you and I’m leaving the book,’ the heroine tells the narrator in a farewell note. After
The Counterlife
’s excess of artifice, the author was evidently surfeited. ‘Did literature do this to me?’ David Kepesh asks when he wakes to find himself a gigantic breast. It did – and it has done awesome things to Roth.

As a postscript to his preface in
The Facts
, Roth touches on another ‘necessity’ – a settling of accounts with his mother’s death in 1981 and his father’s great age (eighty-six) and cancer-ridden fragility. The autobiography opens not with the hero’s birth but with a vivid recollection of Herman Roth’s near-fatal attack of peritonitis in late October 1944 when Philip was ten. He was saved by sulfa powder, newly developed during the early years of the war to treat battle-front wounds. But it was a very close thing and the revealed mortality of his father during the height of his Oedipal conflict affected Roth deeply. The narrative skips forty years to Herman at death’s door – but this time there is no wonder drug to come to his rescue:

now, when he is no longer the biggest man I have to contend with – and when I am not all that far from being an old man myself – I am able to laugh at his jokes and hold his hand and concern myself with his well-being, I’m able to love him the way I wanted to when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen but when, what with dealing with him and feeling at odds with him, it was simply an impossibility.

Using a bleak and economical English, Roth goes back past those adolescent years to describe a Newark childhood in which the real enemies were not Germans or Japs but ‘the Americans who opposed or resisted us – or condescended to us or rigorously excluded us – because we were Jews’. The theme is expanded in his ‘alternative universe novel’,
The Plot Against America
(2004), a sub-SF fantasy about 1930s anti-Semitism in a USA in which the national (but incorrigibly prejudiced) hero Charles Lindbergh comes to power, defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s fantasy on one level; on another, actual fears which the Roth family and Philip (all of whom are so-named characters in the novel) entertained in the 1930s. With the rise of the Bush dynasty in the 2000s he feared it again.

The tone of
The Facts
is dutiful and piously filial. Portraits are correspondingly respectful. For the record, his father – the insurance salesman – was never the constipated
nudnik
of
Portnoy.
Neither did his father disown Philip’s writing and die in rage at its masturbatory offences to patriarchal Judaism. Herman Roth was the loyalest and proudest father an author could have. Further tribute was paid in
Patrimony
(1991). No father – as he went to his final rest – could want better tribute from a son. Although she figures only on the edge of
The Facts
, Roth’s mother was, as he describes her, a quiet, intelligent woman – ‘vigilant’ perhaps, but nothing like the vampiric and castrating Sophie Portnoy: the kind of mother who would drive young Jewish boys to hang themselves in the cellar in a spirit of sheer filial dutifulness (leaving a note that the day’s shopping would be found in the fridge). Roth’s brother Sandy was and is nothing like Henry Zuckerman. And so on.

The narrative of
The Facts
touches briefly on Roth’s beloved baseball – beloved
because it was, in the 1940s, ‘a great nationalistic church from which nobody had ever seemed to suggest that Jews should ever be excluded’. This great nationalistic sport, with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as its heroes, inspired his one formal attempt at the great American novel (cheekily so entitled) and – paradoxically – his most innocently comic piece of writing (‘Call me Smitty,’ it begins). According to
The Facts
, the only true fellowship with his fellow Americans Roth has known in his life was playing ball at school. Put another way, baseball was his purest experience of being American, not Jewish-American. His ‘baseball years’, as he elsewhere calls them, extended until eighteen, when a new era opened with the reading of Conrad’s
Lord Jim
. The bulk of
The Facts
is taken up with his formative college years, 1950–58, at Rutgers, Bucknell and Chicago (where he was taught by Saul Bellow). Among other revelations is a recollection – which future biographers will seize on – of his early storytelling activities at 95 per cent gentile Bucknell College. As an undergraduate, Roth would regale his goy friends with robust imitations and salty routines from his native Jewish Newark community, delivered in stand-up comedian manner. Meanwhile he was
writing
fey sub-Salingerian literary exercises in which ‘the Jew was nowhere to be seen’.

The Facts
skates over the educational aspects of his ‘Joe College’ years and ignores altogether his time in the Army – from which he was invalided out in 1955 after sustaining an injury during basic training. Those few months supplied the acrid short story, ‘Defender of the Faith’ with its whiff of self-despising Judaism. It was gathered into his first collection,
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959), the book which, with its 1959 NBA award, propelled him into fame, still in his twenties. The facts Roth principally engages with in
The Facts
are his three affairs with non-Jewish girls. The first was in 1954, when Roth fell in love with ‘Polly Bates’ (a pseudonym). Following various couplings in his lodgings, made acutely uncomfortable by the prying of his landlady – an episode recalled in the early sections of
When She Was Good
(1967) – Polly found herself pregnant, as she thought. Roth faced the prospect of buckling down to marriage and giving up the writing nonsense. To his relief (though perhaps not – desire for children that never came runs through
The Facts
as a pathetic refrain), Polly turned out not to be in the club, after all.

It was the end of the affair and Philip caddishly, as he later thought, left her to go off to Chicago, postgraduate study and his literary destiny. In that city in 1956 he met a divorcée with two children, ‘Josie Jensen’ (another pseudonym, taken to be Margaret Martinson). She was working as a waitress. Like Polly, Josie put the frighteners on Roth with an unplanned pregnancy and the child was aborted (semi-legally). By this time, however, he had seen ‘the obvious strains’ of marriage and children among his contemporary writer friends and resolved to avoid such
enemies of promise. He messily separated from, and then allowed himself to be again entrapped by, his shiksa-witch Josie. Again she played the pregnancy card – this time dishonestly. Roth, if we believe him, was taken for a sucker. He married Martinson, although he claims he didn’t have to. The marriage was short-lived. In ‘My True Story’, it is also rendered as hideously violent, with battery taking over from sex as the most gratifying form of marital intercourse.
The Facts
corrects the fictional version: the marriage certainly went badly wrong, but homicide was not on the cards. And there seems to have been a silver lining. Roth credits his wife’s provocations with helping him make his all-important break from Henry James, noting, enigmatically, ‘It took time and it took blood.’ Hers.

After the inevitable divorce in 1963, Roth was skewered on ever-mounting alimony payments ($125 a week in 1967) and taunted (as recounted in
The Facts
) by Josie’s promise never to remarry and release him. He killed her – as Lucy – in
When She Was Good
. Martinson went on to kill herself in a car accident in 1968. Roth felt less liberated than guilty. This personal crack-up coincided, ironically, with the publication of
Portnoy’s Complaint
(1969), and bestsellerdom. The American public was ready for its jolly portrait of the artist as a young onanist. The last of Roth’s great loves recalled in
The Facts
was ‘May Aldridge’. He dwells on her money and good breeding, as if to make the point that the son of the insurance salesman from Newark has done well for himself. May was/is ‘a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie’, possessed of ‘the civic distinction and social prominence that once came automatically to American clans of British stock’. Their affair lasted five years.
The Facts
ends – prematurely – in September 1968 with Roth vowing never to tie himself down to a woman again: ‘I was determined to be an absolutely independent, self-sufficient man.’ Roth Unbound.