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.

Philip Roth, 1933-2018

Philip Roth, 1933-2018. Pictured in 2012, he's reading Ike's Bluff, by Evan Thomas.

Philip Roth died on Tuesday at the age of 85. It’s been a bad ten days for my favorite writers. Like Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth was someone I had read about for many years before I actually started reading his work. I read the novella “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1999, just after graduating from high school. It was in the textbook for a class called “Short Novels,” although we didn’t actually read “Goodbye, Columbus” in the class. I liked “Goodbye, Columbus” when I first read it, but for whatever reason I didn’t read any more of Roth’s work until I read his 2010 novel Nemesis, which would prove to be his last book. (I reviewed Nemesis here.) The book struck a nerve with me, and I found it fascinating. I then went on something of a Roth binge, as I re-read Goodbye, Columbus, which I reviewed here, and then read several of his other books, like The Great American Novel, American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, Zuckerman Unbound, and his 1988 memoir, The Facts. In a long piece that I’m especially proud of, I wrote about the various connections between Portnoy’s Complaint, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Facts. 

Roth wrote about himself, of course, but he was also astute and perceptive about the United States. His novels tell us much about American life during the late 20^th century. Roth was funny, biting, moving, and always interesting. His career had a fascinating trajectory. He was anointed as an important writer from the very beginning. Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the National Book Award in 1960. He was quickly known as a “writer to watch.” However, his follow up novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good, did not light up the best-seller lists. 

Things changed for Roth in 1969 when the uproariously ribald Portnoy’s Complaint was published. It was a huge hit, and also condemned by many as utter filth. Roth didn’t produce another hit like Portnoy during the 1970’s, and even into the 1980’s it seemed that he might be remembered as someone who peaked early and produced decent, in unspectacular, work regularly after that. And then, something funny happened. In the 1990’s, as he moved into his 60’s, he started turning out one acclaimed book after another. In 1995 he won another National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater. In 1998 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for American Pastoral. Suddenly, Roth was being acclaimed as the Great American Novelist of his time. There have been few other American writers, if any, who could match Roth’s late blooming productivity and critical acclaim. In the 20 year period from 1990 to 2010, Roth published 15 books. That’s a huge number for a serious literary author. 

One interesting difference between Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe is how Roth was embraced by the literary establishment in a way that Wolfe never was. Wolfe never won the Pulitzer Prize, or any other of the major awards that Roth seemed to collect as easily as baseball cards. I would assume that some of that is due to the fact that Wolfe started his career as a journalist, and only moved to writing fiction when he was in his 50’s. I think some people always thought of Wolfe as a journalist, a category that they consider below fiction. And it may not have helped Wolfe’s case that he basically told fiction writers that they were missing the boat during the 1960’s and 1970’s—that most of the really great writing done about America during that era was done by authors who could be grouped together under the banner of New Journalism. 

What Roth and Wolfe had in common was their iconoclasm. They were never afraid to shake things up, and question the status quo. Both suffered the slings and arrows of outraged critics. Roth had to fend off attacks from Jewish critics that he was a self-hating Jew. He has long been criticized by feminist authors and critics as being a misogynist. Wolfe had to fend off attacks from writers like Norman Mailer and John Updike, who both essentially said that his 1998 novel A Man in Full wasn’t literature. 

I found the 2013 American Masters documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked, to be a fascinating look at the author. In it, Roth comes across as quite funny and down to earth. Thanks to the documentary, I also learned that Philip Roth was left-handed, which was another reason for me to like him.

Book Review: Philip Roth-“Portnoy’s Complaint,” (1969) “Zuckerman Unbound,” (1981) and “The Facts” (1988)

The iconic cover of "Portnoy's Complaint," by Philip Roth, 1969.

"Zuckerman Unbound," by Philip Roth, 1981.

"The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography," by Philip Roth, 1988.

Philip Roth, 1969.

Philip Roth’s best-selling 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” was a breakthrough for Roth as an author. The book shocked readers for its crude language and its unvarnished depiction of sexual behavior. It became a huge best-seller and thrust Roth onto the national spotlight. Roth fictionalized some of the craziness surrounding “Portnoy’s” success in his 1981 novel “Zuckerman Unbound,” featuring his alter-ego author Nathan Zuckerman. Roth later wrote about the time period that inspired the creation of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in his 1988 non-fiction book “The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography.” This essay will examine some of the themes in all three books, such as the blurring between fact and fiction that Roth constantly engages in. 

“Portnoy’s Complaint” takes the form of a very long comedic psychoanalytic monologue between patient Alexander Portnoy, and his analyst, Doctor Spielvogel, who is unheard from until the last line of the book. It’s a marvelously funny book, as Roth channels the beleaguered Portnoy and tracks his sexual obsessions. The book is all about voice and tone. Roth knew that by using the psychoanalytic monologue as a framing device for Portnoy to tell his story it would free Roth to be as uninhibited on the page as he wanted to be.

Portnoy is a well-behaved Jewish boy growing up in Newark in the 1940’s and 50’s. Portnoy obeys his parents, even though he feels overly stifled by them, even as an adult. Portnoy says in exasperation, “Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!” (P. 110) Portnoy is a gifted student, and he eventually becomes a lawyer. As Portnoy becomes an adolescent, he discovers the pleasures of masturbation, and quickly becomes addicted to it. Much of the book deals with his feelings toward his parents and his feelings about sex.

Portnoy can’t reconcile being a nice person with also having a sex life. He’s constantly wracked with guilt, and he constantly imagines what awful things will happen if someone, anyone, finds out about his sexual cravings. An ongoing joke in the book is Portnoy’s continual imagining of the headlines of his impending doom.  

Soon after “Portnoy’s Complaint” became a best-seller, people quickly jumped to the conclusion that Philip Roth and Alexander Portnoy were one and the same, and that Roth’s breakthrough novel was nothing more than a long, explicit confessional. As Roth said in a 1977 interview:

“I hadn’t just written a book, it seemed, but had become somebody who stood for something. What I realized was that in the popular imagination, and in the media, Roth and Portnoy were about to be fused into the same person.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 102)

Roth’s fictional alter-ego, the author Nathan Zuckerman, has to contend with the same problems in Roth’s novel “Zuckerman Unbound,” after the publication of Zuckerman’s successful, sexually explicit novel “Carnovsky.” 

As Zuckerman wonders at the beginning of the book, “All this, this luck-what did it mean? Coming so suddenly, and on such a scale, it was as baffling as a misfortune.” (P.4) 

Zuckerman is constantly accosted by people in the street who recognize him and either think he is great or depraved, depending on what they thought of his book. “They had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to a character who lived in a book.” (P.10) 

Even in writing to him, Zuckerman’s readers cannot separate him from his character. “Eleven letters tonight…Of these, six were addressed to Nathan Zuckerman, three to Gilbert Carnovsky; one, sent in the care of the publishing house, was addressed simply to ‘The Enemy of the Jews’ and had been forwarded to him unopened.” (P.58) 

Just before “Carnovsky” was published, Zuckerman ended his third marriage. He is confronted by a neighbor and friend of his wife’s, who says to him:

 “But that you could do what you have done to Laura…”

“What is that?”

“The things you wrote about her in that book.”

“About Laura? You don’t mean Carnovsky’s girlfriend, do you?” (P.167)

They get into an argument. “Their conversation grew louder and more shameful and went on for another ten minutes. His world was getting stupider by the hour, and so was he.” (P.170) 

In the course of “Zuckerman Unbound,” Zuckerman deals with an obsessive fan who is a former quiz-show winner, Alvin Pepler, loosely based on real-life quiz-show winner Herbie Stempel, and has a one-night stand with a fading movie star, Caesara O’Shea. Zuckerman also begins to get phone calls from someone threatening to kidnap his mother. Zuckerman is literally coming unbound and unglued, as his life gets crazier and crazier.

 Zuckerman’s father dies at the end of the book, and Zuckerman thinks that his father’s last word was “bastard,” directed at him. Zuckerman has a conversation with his brother about this, and his brother says to him:

“You killed him, Nathan. Nobody will tell you-they’re too frightened of you to say it. They think you’re too famous to criticize-that you’re far beyond the reach now of ordinary human beings. But you killed him, Nathan. With that book. Of course he said ‘Bastard.’ He’d seen it! He’d seen what you had done to him and Mother in that book!” (P.217) 

In a 1984 interview, Roth commented on the success of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and “Zuckerman Unbound”:

“It was too big, on a larger and much crazier scale than I could begin to deal with, so I took off. A few weeks after publication, I boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal for Saratoga Springs, and holed up at Yaddo, the writer’s colony, for three months. Precisely what Zuckerman should have done after ‘Carnovsky’-but he hung around, the fool, and look what happened to him. He would have enjoyed Yaddo more than he enjoyed Alvin Pepler. But it made ‘Zuckerman Unbound’ funnier keeping him in Manhattan, and it made my own life easier, not being there.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 176)

Does Roth’s book “The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography,” shed any more light on the writing and publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint”? “The Facts” begins in an odd way, as the first few pages are a letter from Philip Roth to Nathan Zuckerman, asking him for his opinion of the manuscript. What’s odd about this, of course, is that Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character, a creation sprung from the fecund mind of Philip Roth himself. “The Facts” takes the reader through Roth’s childhood growing up in a Jewish enclave of Newark, New Jersey, to his college experiences at Bucknell University, through his disastrous first marriage, and up to the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” 

Roth said of “The Facts” in a 1988 interview, “There were other parts to the book that aren’t there now. It went farther along in time. But that wasn’t as interesting, I suppose, because a calm and orderly life is not as interesting as pressure and crisis.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 222)

In the chapter “Girl of My Dreams,” Roth recounts how he met “Josie Jensen” in 1956, when he was an instructor at the University of Chicago. Roth had seen her before, but picked her up on the street, and convinced her to have a cup of coffee with him. Roth began a relationship with Josie, but it proved to be a very tumultuous one. Roth writes that two years into their relationship “…we no longer had anything resembling a love affair, only a running feud focused on my character flaws and from which I was finding it impossible to escape no matter how far I fled.” (P.95) Roth describes what a miserable relationship they had, yet he proves unable to shake Josie as she follows him to New York City. He allows her to move in with him when she is broke. Josie is clearly a mess, as she is an unstable woman with a martyr complex who is dearly in need of counseling, and the reader is hoping that Roth can extricate himself from the clutches of this woman when he ends the chapter with the bombshell: “Reader, I married her.” (P.112)

“Josie Jensen” is a pseudonym for Margaret Martinson Williams, Roth’s first wife. They married in 1959, and were separated by 1962, but Williams was unwilling to divorce Roth. In May 1968, while Roth was in the middle of writing “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Williams was killed in a car crash in Central Park, thus suddenly freeing Roth of both his marriage and his continued alimony payments. Roth arranged the funeral, at Frank Campbell’s on Madison and 81^st Street, the same funeral chapel that Zuckerman lives across the street from in “Zuckerman Unbound.” 

Roth has this to say about the different events that aided him in the creation of “Portnoy’s Complaint”: 

“What I found then, in New York…were the ingredients that inspired ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ whose publication in 1969 determined every important choice I made during the next decade. There was this audience of sympathetic Jewish friends who responded with euphoric recognition to my dinner-table narratives; there was my intense psychoanalysis, which, undertaken to stitch back together the confidence shredded to bits in my marriage, itself became a model for reckless narrative disclosure of a kind I hadn’t learned from Henry James…” (P.137) 

Roth stresses the point that “Portnoy” was not in any way a self-portrait:

“Unhampered by fealty to real events and people, it was more entertaining, more graphic, and more shapely than my own analysis, if not quite to the point of my personal difficulties. It was a book that had rather less to do with ‘freeing’ me from my Jewishness or from my family (the purpose divined by many, who were convinced by the evidence of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ that the author had to be on bad terms with both) than with liberating me from an apprentice’s literary models…” (P.156-7)

The last chapter of “The Facts” is Zuckerman’s response to Roth’s manuscript. It’s a little unorthodox to have a fictional character critique the work of the author who created him, but Philip Roth has never been afraid to take chances in his work. 

Zuckerman is quite astute as he writes about Roth’s work:

“You see your writing as evolving out of three things. First, there’s your journey from Weequahic Jewishness into the bigger American society…Second, there was the terrific upheaval of the involvement with Josie and the self-consciousness this ignited about your inner weaknesses as a man. Third, as far as I can make out, there’s your response to the larger world…The whole book seems to be leading to the point where these three forces in your life intersect, producing ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’’’ (P.164-5) 

I agree with Zuckerman, that “Portnoy” was a breakthrough for Roth, and it’s the moment where it all comes together for him. Roth is at last free of his marriage, and he is creating fiction using a unique voice that is his own creation. He’s no longer trying to write like Henry James-as though there’s any way Henry James could ever have written anything as shocking or as funny as “Portnoy”! 

Zuckerman calls out Roth on a lot of things in his response to Roth’s manuscript. For example, he criticizes Roth’s use of a pseudonym for his wife, rather than her real name. Zuckerman also accuses Roth of being less than totally honest in the manuscript. Why does Roth have Zuckerman criticize him so much? As a way to take ammunition away from his critics? Why didn’t he change the narrative of the book if he felt the way Zuckerman does? Or is Zuckerman pursuing his own agenda? If Roth keeps writing non-fiction, then Zuckerman will have no reason to exist. Is Zuckerman criticizing Roth in order to sway Roth back to writing fiction? When an interviewer asked Roth about this in 1988, shortly after the book was published, he said “Zuckerman is wrong. I think the book is pretty candid. I’ve come as close to the truth as I can. Zuckerman can say whatever he wants. That’s his business.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P.241)

What is the line between fact and fiction in the work of Philip Roth? It’s a thin line at times, as shown by the exchange of letters between real author Roth and fictional author Zuckerman. Ultimately, the line between fact and fiction might not really matter and might distract from appreciating Roth’s work. But it’s one that critics have been asking about Philip Roth for decades. Is Philip Roth really Nathan Zuckerman or Alexander Portnoy? Did he really do everything they did in the novels? Of course he didn’t. He’s an author; he makes up stories for a living. I think that we tend to assume that events actually happened to authors the exact same way they happened in a book, that writing fiction is not so much an act of imagination as one of transcription, that all they have to do is merely write it down. 

 As Nathan Zuckerman says, “That writing is an act of the imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.” (“The Anatomy Lesson”)

Roth said in a 1985 interview: “You’re confusing me with all those astute book reviewers who are sure that I am the only novelist in the history of literature who has never made anything up.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 196) Roth also said in the same interview: “If all these subtle readers can see in my work is my biography, then they are simply numb to fiction-numb to impersonation, to ventriloquism, to irony, numb to the thousand observations of human life on which a book is built, numb to all the delicate devices by which novels create the illusion of a reality more like the real than our own. End of lecture.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P.192)

Roth also said in a 1988 interview: “I’m not going to pretend that I’m Portnoy. Why should I? Writing is a performance. I imbue the characters with aspects of my personality. I’m the writer. I’m not the actor.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P.241)

However, it’s easy to see why book reviewers and critics would wonder how much of Roth is in his books. When an author gives a character as many surface similarities to himself as Roth gives Alexander Portnoy, of course people are going to assume that the author is that character. Yes, it’s lazy to assume that the author is his character, but it’s natural for people to think that way. I’m doing a certain amount of it in this essay. As an author, you invite a certain amount of that kind of critical attention if your characters have that many similarities to your own background. 

Some of the similarities between Portnoy and Roth: 

Portnoy and Roth were both born in Newark in 1933. Their fathers were both insurance salesmen. Their mothers were both homemakers. Portnoy and Roth both graduated from Weequahic High in 1950. (Nathan Zuckerman was in the class of 1949 at Weequahic.) Roth and Portnoy both skipped two grades in school. 

Are these similarities meaningful? Not terribly, all it means is that Roth has chosen to write about someone coming from a similar background as his. Most critics don’t pay attention to the differences between Portnoy and Roth:

Portnoy has an older sister, Roth has an older brother. Portnoy has difficult relationships with both his parents, while Roth got along well with his parents, despite occasional disagreements with his father. Roth attended Bucknell University, Portnoy did not. Portnoy went on to become a lawyer, while Roth is a writer-although Roth has admitted that it crossed his mind when he was young to become a lawyer. Roth was in the Army for one year, Portnoy was not. Portnoy has never married, while Roth married in 1959. 

Of course, one could say that these differences are not meaningful either. I would counter that by saying that we will ultimately never know whether or not Philip Roth really experienced all of the things that Alexander Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman experienced in the novels. What’s important is the work; that these books are well-written, and they clearly are. Roth’s novels are convincing enough to make people wonder how much of the events depicted actually happened to him, which is in a way the highest praise there is. 

“Portnoy’s Complaint” ushered in a new era in Philip Roth’s career, one in which every move he made would be carefully watched by readers around the world. So it’s fitting to leave the last word to Dr. Spielvogel, whose only line is the closing line of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” “So {said the doctor}. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” (P.274) Once “Portnoy’s Complaint” was published in 1969 now Philip Roth may perhaps to begin-a new chapter in both his life and career.