He was the writer who gave Jewish wit and angst their true identity, but Philip Roth, who has died aged 85, confessed he was unsure whether his work was fiction or autobiography.
In the end he decided to leave the verdict to the readers. Self revelation – often of the adolescent, sexual kind, as in his confessional novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) – shocked many for its masturbatory detail. He wrote with the exuberance, terror and graphic detail of a teenage boy, but like a literary Woody Allen character, he grew this thread of self-abnegation into works of black comedy, until in the 1960s he became ranked with Saul Bellow and Bernard Melamud in a literary trio which somehow gave Jewish insights an intensity that may have eluded an earlier readership.
In Roth’s case that insight erupted like a tornado. It was an awakening which followed the end of the Second World War, detonating sudden literary change. In the 1960s Roth’s Jewish disclosures broke free of social pressures and with daring and honesty uttered the truth that dared not speak its name. “A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant,” he wrote in Portnoy’s Complaint. Philip Roth’s writing had something of the character of Salvador Dali. Like a darkly comedic ringmaster, he offered many versions of himself with a cynic’s trompe l’oeil.
But he worked with monastic dedication, standing at his desk for hours and pouring out the words before disappearing into the woods outside his Connecticut farmhouse. The author of some 30 books, including the plaintive American Pastoral , he placed himself between John Updike and Bellow, suggesting that the former –“hold their flashlights out into the world – I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”
He sold more than 12,000 copies of his first book, Goodbye Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, but as a foretaste of things to come, it was denounced by influential rabbis. In the popular film starring Ali MacGraw and Richard Bejamin, it memorably featured an overblown wedding feast intended to suggest aspirational Jewish excess. Among his considerable literary output it was Portnoy’s Complaint which made him a best-selling author, selling 420,000 copies in the first ten weeks after publication.
The directness of his Jewish writing excited his American readership, but British Jews may have been less happy with his revelations, partly because they were so secular in nature, offering no sense of religious perception. In 2006 he told a radio interviewer that he had “no taste for delusion,” nor any need for spiritual consolation. Many readers saw him as having turned his sharp tongue against his religious background. And yet he never denied his Jewish roots. His protestations about being “brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood – without ever seeing a skullcap, a beard, a sidelock”– may not have convinced everybody, and it was a conflict Roth would never resolve. In 1959 his short story Defender of the Faith was published to a torrent of rabbinic fury. He was accused of Jewish self-hatred, but remained unabashed by a hostile reception at Yeshiva University in 1962, which he delightedly described in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey to Bessie née Finkel and Herman Roth, an insurance agent, both children of eastern European immigrants. He described the intensely Jewish world in which he grew up – listening to the voices of Hitler and Franklin D Roosevelt. He wrote of his family with great affection in several novels and his disputed autobiographies, The Facts, (1988) and Patrimony (1991) introduced his quizzical alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. He loved baseball, attending minor league games at Rupert Stadium in New York, later linking baseball myths with the realities of communism in his Great American Novel (1973.)
A popular student at Weequahic high school, where his friends noticed his emerging intelligence and his gift for mimicry, he went on to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, joined a Jewish fraternity, took part in a student production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and launched a literary magazine. He graduated with distinction in 1954 and held academic positions at American universities, where he found being a writer on campus “erotic and intellectual,” aspects which shaped his early fiction.
Roth took a master’s degree at Chicago University which exposed him to James Joyce and Franz Kafka.Drafted into the army, he suffered a back injury during basic training which resulted in a medical discharge. He returned to the university’s PhD programme, andwrote his successful short stories, which formed the collection for Goodbye Columbus and were critically acclaimed for their ferocious exactitude and ironic record of American Jewish life.
His marriages, to Maggie Michaelson in 1959, and Claire Bloom in 1990, both failed. The two novels he wrote during his first marriage, Letting Go (1962) and When she was Good (1967) were considered literary explorations of the failed relationship.
Roth did not just see himself as the emancipator of contemporary Jewish writing. Part of his mission was to redeem American literature from serious respectability. Crude, aggressive, even obscene writing was all part of this literary challenge. His early Kaskaesque influences became evident in the 1970s and erotic fantasy was never far away.
Philip Roth won high literary honours - two national book awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulker Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. But the pinnacle of all – the Nobel –eluded him.
In his 60s he wrote a string of historical novels reflecting a late return to his American themes. From Everyman (2006) onwards he produced a book a year, proving the writer’s gifts of fierce observation remained undimmed. Their themes dealt with approaching mortality. But Jewish identity and Antisemitism continued to haunt him. Returning frequently to the Newark of his youth – his “vanished Eden”– the irony of the location did not escape him. It was a place, he wrote, which had “the power to intimidate that emanated from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America” yet where “being Jewish and being American were practically indistinguishable.”
GLORIA TESSLER
Philip Roth: born March 19, 1933. Died May 22, 2018
