Book Review: Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, by Benjamin Taylor (2020)

 

Cover of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, by Benjamin Taylor, 2020. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor, with my Roth books in the background.)

Philip Roth had acclaim and renown as a brilliant writer from the moment his first book Goodbye, Columbus appeared in 1959. Despite decades of literary fame and winning just about every literary prize imaginable (except for the Nobel Prize) Roth never became a public figure the same way that authors like Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal did. You weren’t going to find Roth on Johnny Carson, kibitzing about his latest novel. There remained an aura of mystery around Philip Roth.

 

Roth’s official biographer, Blake Bailey, will publish his tome about Roth in April 2021. Until then, for a look at the man behind the novels, we have Benjamin Taylor’s memoir Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth. Published in May 2020, Here We Are gives us some sense of what Philip Roth was like as a person.

 

Taylor and Roth first met in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2001 that they really became friends. They remained close until Roth’s death in 2018. One of the more vivid parts of the book is Taylor recounting how many people came to see Roth in the hospital during his final days. Ex-lovers of Roth’s showed up at his deathbed! That’s like a scene, well, out of a Philip Roth novel:

 

“Lying on the hospital bed, Zuckerman inhaled sharply. There stood Jennifer. Sweet, proud Jennifer. He didn’t know it at the time they met, but she would be his last lover. It was at one of his readings. An upscale bookstore on the Upper West Side, filled with millennials noshing on overpriced bagels. He looked up from a paragraph, and suddenly, she was there. In the fourth row, her auburn hair falling loosely around her shoulders, her dress revealing a hint of décolletage. They chatted after the reading as she got her book signed. She told him how much she had liked his book about his friend Swede Levov. She seemed slightly shy; she told him she was a writer herself. ‘I’d be interested to read your work,’ he told her. It wasn’t a lie. He asked for her email address, and she rummaged around her too-large purse, searching for a pen. He laughed ‘There’s pens right here, on the table.’ ‘Of course, how silly of me!’ She mimed smacking herself on the forehead. He told her she should wait around for him; he’d like to talk to her more. After he finished signing for the long line of people, they went out for a drink. They became lovers that night.

 

“To see her here now, in the hospital, seemed to him like a great cosmic joke. She seemed so vital, the very picture of healthful youth. His eyes, dark and still expressive, darted around the hospital room before they drew her in. Even now, he still strained to get a look at her calf muscles.”

 

What Here We Are is missing are the mundane, quotidian details that would paint a more vivid picture of the friendship between Roth and Taylor. With a two-decade age gap, the relationship inevitably tilts towards mentor and protégé. Taylor is a writer as well, a fact that he barely brings up in the book. You need to be brutally honest when you’re writing a memoir, and yet Taylor holds too much about himself back. We learn little about Taylor throughout the book. Presumably, Taylor doesn’t have a husband, or a long-time partner, as he’s able to spend so much of his time hanging out with Philip. He seems to be practically at Roth’s beck and call.

 

Here We Are humanizes Roth, which means that we see his bad side as well—the pettiness, continually seeking revenge on those who have seemingly wronged him. Why is it that so many writers seem intent on holding onto grudges? Taylor informs us that even after Roth announced he had stopped writing fiction in 2012, he was still writing non-fiction aimed at settling scores. Roth gave Taylor two manuscripts, “Notes for My Biographer” and “Notes on a Scandal Monger” that were takedowns of Roth’s first official biographer, Ross Miller, who Roth decided was not up to the task, and Roth’s ex-wife, the actress Claire Bloom, who had published Leaving a Doll’s House, a memoir of her life with Roth that put him in a most unflattering light. (Sidenote: Claire Bloom was married to Rod Steiger and Philip Roth. Interesting pairing.) After Roth’s death, Taylor deposited the manuscripts at the Princeton University Library, so perhaps future scholars can page through them and see if there’s anything interesting.

 

Taylor reveals more about Roth’s health problems than I was previously aware of. Taylor tells us that Roth had three spinal fusion surgeries in the last 15 years of his life. (p.163) Yikes. In 1982, when Roth was 49, doctors told him that he had “a fraction of normal cardiac function.” (p.164) Roth spent the next few years dreading that his heart might suddenly stop. Finally, in 1989, Roth had a quintuple bypass. (Why this wasn’t done in 1982, I don’t understand.) Taylor posits that this bypass gave Roth a new lease on life and was to some degree responsible for the late-career blossoming of his talent. I think Taylor is onto something. Presumably freed from some of the dread about his health, Roth let his imagination run wild again, and set off on his most triumphant run of novels.

 

Taylor also lets us know that Roth slept with the actress Ava Gardner in London. Taylor writes in an aside, “I tell you this, reader, in strict confidence.” (p.75) Which is a ridiculous thing to write, since he’s writing it in a book! Anyway, this solves a minor mystery for me, as it now becomes clear that Ava Gardner was the model for Caesara O’Shea, the fading movie star Nathan Zuckerman has a one-night stand with in Zuckerman Unbound.

 

For fans of Roth, I’d also recommend James Atlas’ audiobook Remembering Roth, published through Audible. It’s another story of a younger writer’s friendship with Roth, and how it eventually soured.