The literary giant who boasted that sex with attractive students was one of his job perks
Philip Roth was wary of biographers. ‘ Biography,’ he said, towards the end of his life, ‘ adds a new dimension to the terror of dying.’ He certainly had more to fear than most. By then, he had become America’s most feted novelist, his life, after retirement, a succession of lifetime award ceremonies, presidential medals, honorary degrees, birthday celebrations and highminded l i terary symposia. But he had built his reputation largely on penning free-wheeling versions of his career as a deceitful, adulterous, cantankerous, predatory novelist.
Along the way, he acquired a fair number of enemies, among them his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom. She had been upset by many aspects of their life together, not least his portrait of their marriage in the novel Deception, in which the remarkably dreary, middle-aged wife, an actress who, at least in the first draft, just happened to be called Claire, is forever making a scene about her husband Philip’s affairs with younger women. Roth wrote Deception in 1989, while they were still married, but kept putting off letting her read the manuscript.
Having completed it, he confided to a friend that he was ‘very worried about Claire’s reaction’. He planned to tell her that it was mostly invented.
‘Even if it is invented,’ said his friend, ‘won’t Claire be humiliated by everyone’s assuming it’s the truth?’
‘She knows what it is to live with a writer,’ replied Roth.
Roth’s life was divided between writing and sex, though he would often combine the two, and write about sex. Brought up in a doting Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, he began pursuing school cheerleaders in his early teens, and never looked back.
In most literary biographies, sex is incidental. They are usually solemn accounts of books written and awards received. Even if the author in question is unusually libidinous, biographers are constricted by available information, so there are few details. But Roth is different. Not only did he present versions of his sex life throughout his 30- odd novels, but he also liked talking to his male friends about sex, and to his appointed biographer, too. Moreover, he left behind a never- ending trail of young women, satisfied or aggrieved, many of whom chipped i n with t heir own accounts.
‘Philip Roth was a sex fiend,’ wrote one of them, a former Playboy Playmate called Alice – ‘Miss July 1956’, no less. ‘He moved from tits to – aaah! – so fast I was breathless… once he got there, he hung in long and steamy. Tepid men never move me. Philip was on fire,’ she recalled.
Rarely has a literary biography read more like a roster of sexual conquests. There’s Ann, who he has in the local cemetery in his junior year of high school, and then there’s Arizona, his only black girl, and Pat, who was once molested by a priest, and likes to dance for Roth in her underwear, and Maxine, with whom he enjoys ‘strenuous sex games’, and then crazy Maggie, who turns out to be a lot less fun.
Roth readily accepts Maggie’s suggestion of a threesome with her lesbian friend Diane, but ends up feeling ‘terribly left out’. He then has an affair with a ‘quiet, easygoing, plainish girl’ in Cape Cod, followed by Susan, the daughter of an orthopaedic surgeon, whom he remembers as a ‘pain in the ass’ because she wouldn’t go the whole way.
Still with Maggie, he picks up a prostitute in Soho Square on a trip to London, before setting off for France where he enjoys ‘a wonderful interlude’ with Swedish Monica, followed by another affair on the boat back to the USA.
Maggie fakes pregnancy, and traps him into marriage by threatening suicide if he leaves. In Italy, she tries to drive them both over the edge of a cliff, but he manages to wrest the wheel from her.
One night Roth and Maggie row about the correct pronunciation of the word ‘orange’, and she ends up whacking him with her shoe. He finally manages to leave her in spring 1963, and embarks on an affair with Susan, who ‘ liked to splash around in his bathtub’, and t hen another Susan, who worked at the New Yorker magazine, and then ‘a voluptuous Yugoslav Italian (who was also dating the actor Marcello Mastroianni)’.
By now, Roth is determined to get a divorce, but Maggie is equally determined not to let him. Inviting herself round to his flat, she refuses to leave. ‘Finally, he tried dragging her to the door, but she clung to the legs of the chair and began screaming “Let me go! Let me go!” ’ writes his biographer. ‘He dropped her near the fireplace and grabbed a poker: “I’m going to bring this f****** thing down on your head,” he said – or so he told it in one version.’ Roth by name, Wrath by nature. Later, in a novel, he has his hero beat her with the poker, causing her to foul herself. In life, he tended to take things too far, but in his novels he took them even further.
In any relationship, however awful, it is the writer who has the last word. Roth recycled Maggie in numerous novels as, in his words, ‘a castrating, self-pitying monster… relentless, half- insane, impossible to like’. She died in a car crash in 1968. Roth was so happy that he would no longer have to pay alimony that he began whistling in a taxi, so merrily that the cabbie said: ‘Got the good news early, huh?’ Looking at Maggie dead in her casket, he said to her: ‘You’re dead and I didn’t have to do it.’ Waste not, want not: he later put it all in his autobiography.
At the University of Pennsylvania, he embarks on a series of affairs with attractive students, hand-picked for his course by the head of his department who likened himself, not inaccurately, to a pimp. By now Roth was 40; one of his lovers was 19. ‘Perfect. As God
meant it to be,’ he said. He later recalled that sex with students was one of the most desirable aspects of teaching ‘back in the days when you weren’t hauled off in chains to feminist prison if you struck up a tender friendship with the smartest, most beautiful girl in your class’.
Small wonder that Roth became a bête noire to many feminists. He always bristled at charges of misogyny, claiming that lazy readers were forever mixing up the author with his characters. Though his respectful biographer does his dutiful best to toe this line, the facts keep getting in the way. For instance, in her damning – and, to me, pretty believable – account of their marriage, Claire Bloom writes of the two occasions on which he made advances towards a schoolmate of her daughter, attempting to French- kiss her. Roth called the story preposterous, offering as evidence, as only he would, ‘I have never found the “French kiss” pleasurable. To go searching around the cavern of a woman’s mouth with a jutting, insinuating tongue was never my idea of fun’. His biographer springs to his defence, saying ‘a number of Roth’s old lovers were happy to corroborate the point’. But later in the book, he embarks on a fling with Mia, who merrily reports: ‘He seemed fine as soon as he got his tongue out of my throat.’
During his long relationship with Bloom, he had affairs galore, all closely chronicled by his biographer, including one with his neighbour, a Norwegian therapist, which lasted for 18 years. Bailey usefully informs us that the two of them would indulge their ‘ mutual addiction to sex’ in the woods between their two houses. Furthermore, when Claire was away in London, Roth would pick out one of her dresses, and ‘a motif of his letters that summer concerned his tendency to ravish the garment in her absence’.
Of course, this biography also deals with Roth’s numerous novels. Having recounted the real events that gave rise to each of them, Bailey faithfully summarises their plots, critical receptions, and sales figures. Unlike many biographers, he does not shy away from mentioning money: I was fascinated to know that Roth’s income for 1968, after the almighty success of Portnoy’s Complaint, was $827,000, or t he equivalent of $6,115,000 today.
But something is absent from this long, long biography, and that is the art. Roth lived a messy, scabrous l i f e, but transformed it t hrough his exact and furious prose into something thrillingly bold and energetic and, perhaps above all, funny. He had a writing motto – ‘Let in the repellent’. By giving his anti- heroes all of his most shameful impulses, he created works that will continue to have something to say about 20th Century man after the more wholesome fictions of his contemporaries have been long forgotten.
Philip Roth: The Biography is diligently researched, clearly written, panoramic, sympathetic and lively. But is there really any need for it? Perhaps writing the biography of a creative artist is like pulling down a great building in the hope of discovering the secret of its creation; or like shooting a bird to discover how it flies.
‘His 1968 income after the success of Portnoy’s Complaint was equivalent to $6.1 million today’