In Memory of Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018 in Manhattan at age 85. In The New York Review of Books, Nathaniel Rich wrote, “several generations from now Roth will be considered the central American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century” (“Philip Roth [1933–2018],” June 28, 2018). In 2006, The New York Times asked 200 writers, critics, and editors to name the single best book of American fiction in the last 25 years. Of the 22 volumes, six of them were written by Philip Roth. A. O. Scott wrote of Roth: “if we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, he would have won” (“In Search of the Best,” New York Times, March 21, 2006).

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Novelist Zadie Smith says that his “legacy to literature” will be his “spirit” that is “so full of people and stories and laughter and history.” For “Roth was an unusually patriotic writer” who “always wanted to know America… in its beauty and its utter brutality” (“Philip Roth, A Writer All the Way Down,” New Yorker, May 23, 2018). Historian David Greenberg considers Philip Roth to be “one of the most perceptive political observers of our times” (“The Forgotten Political Genius of Philip Roth,” Politico, June 1, 2018),

From Our Gang (1971) satirizing Nixon and cohorts to The Plot Against America (2004) where Roth imagined pro-Hitler Charles Lindbergh winning the election of 1940, Roth’s fiction has often taken on historical issues. How Roth’s life and career were engaged with politics, history, and psychoanalysis is the main focus of this paper.

Philip Roth was born as the second son to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey in 1933. After high school and a year at a local college, he went to Bucknell, and then to graduate work at the University of Chicago. His first book, Goodbye Columbus (1959), won the National Book Award in 1960.

Psychoanalysis figures prominently in Roth’s early novels. His bestseller, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), consisted entirely of a confession by Alexander Portnoy to his analyst, Dr. Spielvogel. This psychiatrist reappears in My Life as a Man (1974). Spielvogel was based on Roth’s actual analyst, Hans Kleinschmidt, who in 1967 published an article clearly based on Roth. Later, Roth became critical of Freud’s genius, seeing psychoanalysis as stamping “everyone with the same story.” Freud “didn’t pay enough attention to individual difference, to the details” (Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 2013, 80). 

While his enthusiasm for psychanalysis waned, soon after Goodbye Columbus he started writing on social issues. In 1961, Roth wrote about “our distressing cultural and political predicament.” The actuality of “American reality,” he writes, may stupefy, sicken, and infuriate the creative writer, but it continually outdoes “our talents” of invention. For who could have created such figures as Charles Van Doren, Roy Cohn, or Richard Nixon? The last he sees perhaps “as a satiric literary creation” who was “so fantastic, so weird, and astonishing” that he wishes he “had invented” him (Reading Myself, 1985 [1961], 190, 176-177).

Less than a decade later Nixon was President of the United

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States. He and others became the subject of Roth’s satirical and extremely funny novel, Our Gang. In the book we have a President named Trick E. Dixon, who veers off into paranoid fantasies. At the time, the CBS Evening News employed veteran journalist Eric Sevareid to give nightly commentary. In Roth’s book, he is given the name Erect Severehead, and he pontificates endlessly. Roth found the absurdity and farce in the pre-Watergate Nixon era and turned it into high and/or low comedy.

From the mid-70s to the mid-90s, many of Roth’s fictional creations focused on the personal escapades of fictional characters who resembled Philip Roth. His life and his art often overlapped. The stormy relationship with his first wife was featured in a number of his novels. In the mid-70s Roth began a long-term relationship with British actress Claire Bloom. They co-habited half the year in London, and spent the other half in the home Roth had purchased in 1972 on a long narrow country road in Warren, Connecticut. Claire and Philip married in 1990 and divorced in 1995. She too would turn up in his fiction.

The 1990s were a turning point for Roth. In 1992, he had painful back problems. By the summer of 1993 he started experiencing what he recalled later as “the most unimaginable form of dread I had ever known” (Pierpont, 187). It turned into deep depression with suicidal thoughts. Roth checked himself into Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in affluent New Canaan, Connecticut. Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and others among the rich and famous went there to recover. At the same time, he no longer wished to be married to Ms. Bloom, and soon after leaving Silver Hill he initiated divorce proceedings.

In 1996, Claire Bloom published a memoir, including her marriage to Roth. She not only was highly critical of what she saw as the dastardly ways he treated her, but made public his stay in a psychiatric hospital. Her book deeply upset him. At some point, he went to his lawyer to talk about his ex-wife. An employee of that firm told me that Roth requested that the lawyer put in his will that Ms. Bloom would not be allowed to attend his funeral. The attorney thought for a minute then replied that the will is not usually read until after the funeral. That seemed to satisfy Roth, at least for the moment.

Soon after these personal and public torments, Roth’s writings took a remarkably different direction. His attention turned to-

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ward combining the personal with the historical. Between 1997 and 2000 he published three novels, which have been collected as The American Trilogy 1997-2000 (2011).

The first of these is American Pastoral (originally published in 1997), which traces how the post-World War II American consensus was shattered personally and politically by the radicalism of American youth. The main character, Swede Levov, had been a star high school athlete in Newark, took over the family business, and made it more successful. He was leading a fulfilling life with a wife and child amidst the glories of the American dream. As his daughter became a teenager in the mid-60s, she became a radical opponent of the Vietnam War and detonated an explosive device at the local post office, which inadvertently killed a physician. She immediately went underground, did more bombings, converted to be a Jain, and later deeply regretted her murderous actions.

What she did overthrew Swede’s assumptions about life. He had seen his task as to be a crusader “against disorder, against the abiding problem of human error and insufficiency” (American Pastoral, 421). He hoped to “protect a family” and found that “you cannot even protect yourself” (421). For “disorder” dominated life more than “order.” “He had made his fantasy” and his daughter “had unmade it for him” (418). Swede admitted that “what was not supposed to happen had happened and what was supposed to happen had not happened” (422). The concluding section of this novel is entitled Paradise Lost, a familiar theme in Western literature. Roth poignantly portrays how things fell apart in America and the center did not hold.

The second book in the trilogy, I Married A Communist (1998), is about the McCarthy period. The central character, the radical Ira Ringold, becomes a prominent radio star and marries the actress Eve Frame. After a messy divorce, Eve Frame publishes a bestseller outing her now ex-husband as a Communist. The parallels between the Roth-Bloom marriage and her memoir escaped hardly anyone. Though this novel is clearly an act of revenge, it still captures the Red Scare’s sensationalism.

A character in the book says, “McCarthy was never in the Communist business…. McCarthy understood better than any American politician before him that people whose job was to legislate could do far better for themselves by performing, McCarthy understood the entertainment value of disgrace and how to feed the

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pleasures of paranoia” (I Married A Communist, 284). Sound familiar?

The last of the trilogy, The Human Stain, begins in 1998 when Bill Clinton was President. The narrator writes that in America, “terrorism… had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security.” But then as a threat terrorism “was succeeded by cocksucking” as “a virile middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year old employee” indulged in sexual escapades in the Oval Office. The publicity surrounding the Lewinsky affair aroused the old American “communal passion… the ecstasy of sanctimony.” The narrator cites Nathaniel Hawthorne discussion of “the persecutory spirit” which in the Clinton era led to enacting “the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch” (The Human Stain, 2000, 2).

The main protagonist of the book is Coleman Silk, who had been a professor and dean at the fictional New England Athena College. Silk had retired after he was criticized for making a reference to two students who had never attended class as spooks. It turns out these students were African-Americans. Silk then was accused of being racist. He avoided fighting the accusations for a personal reason. Silk was a light-skinned black who successfully passed himself off as white. To Roth, the political correctness that targeted Silk is akin to McCarthyism and the sanctimonious spirit that seeks a pious purity. One of the characters is critical of the piety that seeks purification says there is the “human stain…. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen – there’s no other way to be here…. It’s in everyone. Indwelling, Inherent, Defining…. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke…. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity” (The Human Stain, 242). These recurring self-righteous political movements to Roth do not recognize how they contain within themselves the very things which they are trying to excise.

Roth was not finished exploring America’s past. The Plot Against America (2004) imagines an alternative history. In Roth’s novel, Republicans nominated pilot Charles Lindbergh in 1940 as their presidential candidate. Instead of a conventional campaign, Lindbergh would fly his plane to a spot, disembark, and immediately speak to the assembled multitude. His main theme was to keep America from entering the war. His isolationism masked that Lindbergh was sympathetic to Hitler and an anti-Semite. He ran as a celebrity; he was short on substance and long on charisma. FDR

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was no match for the dashing pilot-hero. While keeping America out of the European conflict, President Lindbergh invited Hitler’s foreign minister to the White House and initiated programs designed to alienate Jewish youth from their families and religion.

In the novel, Philip Roth’s father says “every day I ask myself” how “can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination” (The Plot Against America, 2004, 196). Later the novelist has columnist Walter Winchell declare, “how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?” (230). Not surprisingly, Roth’s novel has been hailed as a harbinger of the Age of Trump. In this historical fantasy, Roth has Lindbergh strangely disappearing and after some unusual events Franklin Roosevelt is restored to the presidency. America avoids the destruction of our constitutional republic.

In these four late novels, a disruption stemming from political-historical phenomenon dramatically alters personal fortunes. In American Pastoral the social disrupter is that youthful radicalism produces generational conflict. The daughter is the disrupter who leads her protagonist father to new understandings of how the world works, amidst much suffering and catastrophe. In I Married A Communist, the disrupter is post World War II anti-communism. The protagonist is the flawed radical Ira Ringold. His ex-wife helps derail his life in a time of national hysteria. In The Human Stain, the disrupters are ideological correctness, whether it be sanctimonious piety or political correctness. The Plot Against America’s disrupter is an anti-Semitic pro-Nazi president. All these novels have as a central theme: the particular ways disruptive historical forces can transform the being of unique individuals who are trying to make sense of what is happening to them and their country.

In 2010, Roth announced he was retiring from writing. He moved for most of the year to Manhattan, summered in Connecticut, and lived the rest of his life this way. His contributions to literature, history, and humor are widely recognized. Here are two anecdotes. Roth was often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Year after year he was passed over. In 2016, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was given this prestigious award. When asked how he felt about Dylan winning, Roth replied “It’s

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O.K., but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it” (David Remnick, “Philip Roth’s Propulsive Force,” The New Yorker, June 4 & June 11, 2018, 44). The New York Times interviewed Roth to update his obituary. Roth reflected that the obituary the Times prints will also include unfavorable assessments of some of his books. “Even in death,” he said, “you get a bad review!” (Pierpont, 329).

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