‘I’M LOVED, WHAT
Novelist Philip Roth’s journey from scrappy
Philip Roth left Newark, but it never left him.
As soon as he could, Roth fled the brash, blue-collar city. First came college, grad school, and teaching, mainly in the Midwest. Then, a young writer’s life in New York. Finally, international travel and a Connecticut estate.
But every time he sat down to write, that brash Jersey attitude came roaring back.
Blake Bailey’s new book is called “Philip Roth: The Biography” and it’s earned the “The.” Done with Roth’s participation, but without his interference, the 898-page book is definitive. It’s also often funny, sometimes appalling, and always fascinating — like its subject.
Roth was born on March 19, 1933, and grew up in a solidly middle-class Newark neighborhood. His mother was a homemaker; his father worked for Metropolitan Life.
Like his friends, Roth dreamed of girls, rooted for the Dodgers, and went to mostly-Jewish Weequahic High. Years later, in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth would gleefully quote the unofficial school cheer: “Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam/We’re the boys who eat no ham/ We play football, we play soccer/We keep matzohs in our locker.”
After graduation, Roth started college at Rutgers-Newark. Then, on Thanksgiving break, he bumped into a friend attending Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. The pal pulled out a picture of his new girlfriend. “This?” Roth said, staring at the cute co-ed. “You’re going out with this?”
The following year, Roth entered Bucknell as a sophomore. He started working on the campus humor magazine. He chased women (“I was highly susceptible to slight, pretty blonds with brains,” he confessed.) And he decided on a career: Teaching literature.
There were interruptions: A romance with a rich Maplewood girl, later turned into the Short Hills beauty Brenda Patimkin, in “Goodbye, Columbus.” A hitch in the Army, where he permanently injured his back, lugging potatoes. Even a few awfully sensitive short stories. “I make Capote look like a longshoreman,” he bragged.
Then, there was the disaster that nearly ruined his life and inspired some of his greatest books.
Her name was Maggie
Martinson, and she was a secretary at the University of Chicago, where Roth was getting his master’s degree. She was his type — a pretty blond with brains. She was also the model for what would become his weakness — a damaged single mother with daddy issues and a taste for high drama.
It was a stormy relationship. She drank. They fought. After Roth earned his degree, they moved to New York and alternated between breakups and makeups. Then, in 1959, she told him she was pregnant.
He told her to get tested. When Roth checked with the drugstore later, the pharmacist confirmed the results: positive. Roth got the name of an abortionist and scrounged up $300. Martinson took it and told him to wait at home. She returned hours later, shaken. It was done.
A guilt-ridden Roth proposed.
They married the next day.
But it was all built on a stupendous lie, one Martinson threw back in Roth’s face years later. She had not been pregnant. Espying an expectant mother in the park, Martinson paid for a urine sample she passed off as her own. Instead of an abortionist, she went to the Turkish baths.
Horrified as he was, Roth still had to marvel at the fiction.
They split in 1963; the divorce was prolonged and painful. Roth had started selling novels, and Martinson was well aware of his potential earning power. Lawyers were kept busy. Then, in 1968, a twist too pat for one of Roth’s books: Martinson was killed in a car crash.
It was horribly, undeniably liberating. Roth whistled all the way to the funeral home. “When I saw the casket, I said to her, ‘You’re
dead and I didn’t have to do it,’” he wrote later.
But she would haunt his fiction in books like “My Life as a Man.” Haunt his life, too. Roth would marry again, in 1990, to the actress Claire Bloom. Like Maggie, she was smart and sexy. Like her too, she was a single mother with daddy issues. And like that first marriage, it also would end with rage and sharp-toothed lawyers.
And she would haunt his fiction, too, in books like “I Married a Communist.”
In the end, though, the books were what mattered to Roth. The sensational “Portnoy’s Complaint,” with its dirty joke sex scenes, was a spectacular success in 1969. It made its author a millionaire, and for a while, a hip humorous novelist, with “Our Gang,” “The Breast,” and “The Great American Novel.”
But Roth wouldn’t be pigeonholed. Fiction like “The Ghost Writer,” “The Counterlife, and “Sabbath’s Theater” experimented with persona and narrative. Later, “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist, and “The Plot Against America” rewrote history. He sold millions and won raves.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” Roth joked to a friend. “I’m loved. What did I do wrong?”
He would eventually win almost every literary prize available, except the Nobel. When the committee passed over Roth again in 2016, giving it to Bob Dylan instead, some saw it as a deliberate insult. “It’s OK,” Roth said. “Next year I hope Peter, Paul, and Mary get it.”
But it wasn’t just the Nobel committee that had problems with Roth.
First, there was the charge of “self-loathing Jew,” a constant since the start of his career. “I just received a letter this morning from a ‘New Yorker’ reader accusing me of being an anti-Semite,” Roth wrote a friend early on. “I’m arranging a party to go up to the Bronx, where he lives, and burn a cross on his lawn, so he can see the real thing.”
In fact, Roth was proud of his heritage, and his family was proud of him. But some read his books and saw only bitterness. Then there was the charge of misogyny. A sexual adventurer and serial adulterer, Roth felt almost obligated to seduce every woman he met; once, to Bloom’s horror, he even made a pass at one of her adult daughter’s friends. Yet he was also romantic and ridiculously generous, keeping in touch with ex-lovers and covering friends’ bills. Long before the #MeToo era, Roth saw times were changing, and his happy pursuit of starstruck young admirers was gone. “You used to be able to sleep with the girls in the old days,” he complained to Saul Bellow. “And now of course it’s impossible. You go to feminist prison; you serve 20 years to life.”
Literature was changing, too. New voices were being heard. When a teacher wrote to say her students were excitedly discussing “intertextuality, gender and ambivalence” in “American Pastoral,” Roth wrote back to say those words “make my flesh crawl.” Although he would live until 2018, Roth knew he already belonged to another time.
Yet, the medals and honorary degrees kept rolling in. Although the best award, sweeter than any Nobel, came on Oct. 23, 2003, back in sooty, sweaty Newark, when Philip Roth Day was proclaimed, and his family’s old apartment marked with a small sign.
“Today, Newark is my Stockholm, and that plaque is my prize,” he announced. “I couldn’t be any more thrilled by any recognition accorded to me anywhere on Earth.”
The hometown hero had come home.
Except he never really left.