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How Philip Roth invented a myth called ‘Philip Roth’
Steven J. Zipperstein set to work on his own biography of Philip Roth before anyone knew that Roth’s authorized biography would be pulled from shelves after accusations of sexual misconduct by its author, Blake Bailey. Zipperstein and I first spoke when he was wrapping up his draft. He was pondering Roth’s legacy. He wanted to discuss a Roth-like character I had put in my novel, How I Won a Nobel Prize, in part because he was surprised to discover a younger writer riffing on Roth so openly.
Zipperstein’s book, Philip Roth: Stung By Life, which is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, distinguishes itself with an approach that focuses more on Roth’s intellectual and artistic development than on a comprehensive reconstruction of his sexual history. Though Roth was devoutly anti-religious, Jewishness is a major theme that provides a surprisingly sturdy handle with which to grasp the family ties and cultural traditions that remained Roth’s persistent obsessions on the page, even as he resisted them in life.
Zipperstein, who is a professor of Jewish history and culture at Stanford, delivers an admiring, thorough, and swift account of an immensely single-minded writer’s unabating struggles with ambition, romance and the politics of his time. The book also has some fascinating scoops‚ major interviews and materials to which Zipperstein alone had access. We had a lot to talk about, and this interview has been compressed for length and clarity.
Julius Taranto: Start with the obvious: Why did you devote so much time and thought to a Philip Roth biography when there were rival biographical efforts that you could not have known would go up in flames?
Steven Zipperstein: Roth first reached out to me after I published my book, Rosenfeld’s Lives, and we were in touch intermittently for years. I was persuaded that there was really a book to be written, that I could actually do something new, when I discovered the Yeshiva University tape and came to realize the vast discrepancy between what Roth actually experienced and what he believed he experienced and then recorded on the page.
The Yeshiva University tape is one of one of several remarkable bits of journalism on your part, unraveling a remarkable bit of self-mythologizing on Roth’s part.
As part of its 75th anniversary celebration in 1962, Yeshiva University sponsored a panel about the ethnic responsibilities of a writer. Roth, who had at this point published only Goodbye, Columbus, was a featured speaker alongside Ralph Ellison. What Roth remembers — he devotes an entire chapter to this incident in his memoir — is that it was an inquisition, the audience hated him. As a result he decided he wasn’t going to write about Jews anymore and devoted three excruciating years to his next novel in which there are no Jews, and it’s a defining moment in his life.
I learned that the event was taped. Roth had threatened the university with a lawsuit if it was published or aired, but he agreed to give me access. By the time I acquired it, Roth was already dying in the hospital, so the last conversation I had with him was about this tape. It contradicts his memory in every conceivable way. The audience loved him and laughed at his jokes. Those who disliked him rushed to the stage once the program ended. And their criticism was all that he recalled.
I now see Roth’s purported rejection by the Jewish mainstream as a tale he invented (and earnestly believed) in order to justify his preexisting sense of rage and alienation.
Rage was a crucial factor in Roth’s fiction from the beginning. One of the people who contacted me, partly because of the implosion of Blake Bailey’s biography, and because of the apparent difference between my life and Blake’s, was Maxine Groffsky, who hadn’t spoken to anyone before about her relationship with Roth. They’d dated for years, and she was in many ways the model for Brenda Patimkin, the girlfriend in Goodbye, Columbus. But, at least as I was able to reconstruct it, Maxine was little like Brenda Patimkin.
She wasn’t rich or high status, and Roth was never especially subservient to her, the way Neil Klugman is to Brenda.
Still, in fiction Roth gives us Brenda Patimkin. That’s a projection of his rage and ambition.
Where do you think that came from?
I wrestled in the book not to be reductionist. I try to suggest that to understand Roth, you really need to understand the interplay between Roth and mother. Her fastidiousness was through the roof. Roth and his brother Sandy wouldn’t even use the bathrooms in friends’ houses because none were as clean as theirs. That’s a category of a very special kind. It’s a feature of Roth’s life from the outset to figure out what it means for him to really want to satisfy her and at the same time to be aware of what Benjamin Taylor calls his “inner anarchy.”
Mickey Sabbath – a rageful, overweight, unkempt, disgraced, perverted puppeteer – seems like the character through which Roth expressed his “inner anarchy” in its least-filtered form.
This man who engages in daily exercise, who’s trim, who’s incredibly disciplined in his work habits: Mickey Sabbath is what he imagines he is on the inside. In Sabbath’s Theater, he’s undressing himself. He’s allowing the reader to come closer to all that he fears he could be, the person who he knows exists and that he keeps hidden. It’s a book very much in conversation with Maletta Pfeiffer.
They had an on-and-off affair for more than twenty years, and she’s the model for Drenka in Sabbath’s Theater.
I think Maletta more than anyone else becomes privy to Roth’s secrets because he’s convinced that he’s met someone who has an all but identical attitude toward life, towards sensuality and sexuality, and who for the longest time he greatly admires.
But he’s wrong, isn’t he? You spent time with Maletta, and she showed you her diaries and her unsent emails to Roth — documents she never showed to any other biographer or journalist. I’m going to quote from your book, because I think this has real importance for how we interpret the portrait of mutual sexual ecstasy in Sabbath’s Theater. In one of her draft emails in 1995, Maletta wrote: “All the things you did to me. You made me go and talk to whores. . . . That never excited me. I just did it to please you. . . . I never liked it. All the things I did with you. I cannot even write about them. What you put in the book.” It’s quite dark to reconsider Sabbath’s Theater with the understanding that the model for Drenka was often not as enthusiastic as Roth believed her to be.
In contrast to the accusations against Blake Bailey, there’s no evidence of any coercive behavior on Roth’s part in his sexual life – but it’s clear that his sense of Maletta was, I think, not altogether accurate.
She’s romanticized, both in fiction and in Roth’s mind. This relates to a theme that I picked up on in your description of the arc of his career. Alongside his ambivalent relationship to Jewishness and family life, there is a parallel ambivalence between sentimentality and irony. Early in his career, he is so critical of Jewish sentimentalists like Leon Uris and Herman Wouk. But he has his own version of sentimentality emerge later in his career, particularly in American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. He becomes nostalgic for his parents’ world, for FDR, for the sense of moral security that he imagines they had.
He wrestled with nostalgia. He hated nostalgia, and he hated the strengths of family life. He is seeking his whole life to be extraordinary. But he also fantasizes, overtly in Portnoy’s Complaint, about the joy of not needing to strive, the joy of being mediocre. Roth deeply admires his father and wishes on some level that he was like him but also knows in every orb of his body that he wouldn’t actually want to be like him, committed and monogamous and dutiful. He writes from that ambivalence time and time again. And I think, as I suggest in the book, that’s why Zuckerman is the stand-in that stays with Roth, in a contrast to Kepesh, who is more one-sided and selfish and disposable.
I sensed your special affection for The Ghost Writer. Its portrait of writing within domesticity is extraordinarily well-rounded. Perhaps in response to criticism from Irving Howe, Roth maintains a balance in The Ghost Writer that he wasn’t trying to maintain in other works. And you argue, persuasively, that Lonoff is not really a portrait of Bernard Malamud, as is commonly thought, but is much more profoundly Roth’s projection of his own future.
Roth worked assiduously against balance and proportion in many of his other books. Zuckerman inhabits Roth’s ambivalence, and Lonoff represents a future that Roth doesn’t want. Roth fears obscurity. He doesn’t want a body like Lonoff’s, but he fears down deep that this actually might end up being his body. That Hope might end up being his wife. He’s able to face his own terror, in this book and others, in ways that I find extraordinary, especially since beyond his writing desk he doesn’t manage that nearly as successfully.
You surface Roth’s notion that politics is the great generalizer, and literature the great particularizer, and that at a fundamental level, they really cannot abide one another. “How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance?” Did Roth have political commitments?
He’s a political liberal in the Clintonesque sense, without using it as a curse word. But as is true for many aspects of his life, he’s willing to challenge his presuppositions. That’s something he certainly does in American Pastoral, which probably satisfied readers like Norman Podhoretz rather too much. He does something not dissimilar in The Counterlife with regard to Israel. His own inclinations are dovish. That book was all the more powerful for me for its capacity to portray with a degree of sympathy extreme Israeli figures that Roth politically deplored. One of the characteristics of Roth that I ended up admiring the most was the way in which he so often excoriated his own commitments, challenged them, and exposed them for their own weaknesses.
He tells Benjamin Taylor that he cares intensely about his “moral reputation.” That not something that one expects from the author of Portnoy’s Complaint or Sabbath’s Theater. How would you describe the values that Roth wanted to be associated with? It can’t be mainstream civility.
What he values above all is freedom as he understands it. And what he’s hoping a biographer will do is to portray him as someone who spends his life exploring the wages of freedom and the underbelly of unfreedom – hence his political commitment to liberalism, and hence his deploring ideologues who disparage freedom. He’s immensely preoccupied with his reputation, but he also takes incredible risks with it. He is insistent that those risks are unavoidable for a writer and that to avoid them means inevitable mediocrity.
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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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Everyone was a fan of Clive Davis — even if they didn’t know it
Last September I spent about 30 seconds with Clive Davis in a crowded elevator.
I was in the Sony Building, having just seen a press screening of Richard Linklatter’s Blue Moon. The elevator was full of mostly young people — probably Sony employees — and some press. The doors pinged open and in stepped a man with two handlers and an adorable spaniel. I turned to a fellow journalist and whispered “That’s Clive Davis.”
Someone who knew Clive — enough to call him “Clive” — told him we’d just seen a movie about the creative breakup between lyricist Lorenz Hart and musical composer Richard Rodgers.
“Didn’t you play Janis Joplin for Richard Rodgers,” he asked Davis.
Davis replied with perfect comic timing: “Yes. He hated it.”
That anecdote tells us just how much Davis, the legendary music executive and producer who died Monday June 22 at the age of 94, changed the musical landscape.
Davis had been in the music business long enough to serve as a bridge figure between the Great American Songbook and the popular music of the latter half of the 20th Century. The artists he signed at CBS, and later Arista (he was ousted from the CBS/Columbia for allegedly using company money to finance his son’s bar mitzvah), are enduring icons even, in the case of Ms. Joplin, decades after their deaths.
But what hit me in the elevator was the feeling that not everyone there knew who he was. They did, of course, know the music: Pink Floyd, P!nk, Whitney Houston, Sly and the Family Stone, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Aerosmith, the very authors of “Love in an Elevator.”
It’s not overstating it to say that Davis’ influence across genres and his golden ear provided the soundtrack to American life. His own life was productive until the end.
He was in the Sony building because he was Chief Creative Officer at the company. A week before his death, the streets were thumping with a New York anthem from one of his late career discoveries: Alicia Keys.
Davis’ rise could be taught in Jewish Studies courses. Born in working-class Crown Heights, he — like Barba Streisand — was a graduate of Erasmus Hall High. He made good at NYU and got his law degree at Harvard.
He rose from the legal department at Columbia to become the company’s top tastemaker. Somewhere along the way he discovered Joplin — of a polar opposite disposition and background — and went from strength to strength.
Davis’ true triumph might have been just how adept he was at navigating everything the U.S. had to offer. The musicians he promoted had little in common save for his imprimatur.
In that elevator, which delivered us without much fuss to the lobby, there may have been people whose musical tastes gravitated to rock, R&B, jam bands, easy listening, guitar instrumentals and jazz.
Whether they knew it or not, Davis shepherded something they liked into existence. His genius was in recognizing genius.
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