Tackling a biography of Philip Roth, one of the most influential American writers of the past century, takes courage, determination, and as keen a mind as the writer’s own.
With the October publication of “Philip Roth: Stung by Life,” part of the Yale Jewish Lives series, Stanford University scholar Steven J. Zipperstein has given the literary world an insightful, full-throttled portrait of a man who alienated as many readers and critics as he enthralled.
Roth, the product of a midcentury, middle-class Jewish upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, who, like many of his generation, rejected the tropes of his class and his people even as he remained tightly ensnared by them, was as disciplined, even ascetic, in his work habits as he was exuberantly excessive in his love life.
He charmed and annoyed his way through two marriages and countless affairs, clutching new friends and lovers to his bosom before carelessly discarding them — and in the process writing 31 books and numerous short stories, and winning just about every major literary award except the elusive Nobel Prize, whose absence he keenly felt.
Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford, is the author or editor of 10 books himself. He spent six years on the Roth project, mining extensive archives, including some never-before revealed letters and diaries, and conducting more than 100 interviews, including with Roth, who died in 2018. He sat down recently with J. editor emerita Sue Fishkoff to share his thoughts on the man and the writer.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Philip Roth was famously obsessed with the need to control his legacy, hiring and then firing potential biographers when they displeased him. You did this project on your own (though Roth eventually gave his approval), but you must have known you were stepping into a minefield, right?
I knew I was, and I figured if I could pull it off, I’d be pulling off a lot because here’s somebody who spent 31 books writing about himself. So how do you write about him?
Well, you did pull it off; the reviews have been uniformly excellent. Why did you decide to take on this project?
His voice was so resonant for me for so long, and I’ve been interested in biography for so long. And so I took the plunge. And it was a difficult plunge. While working on it, I forgot to renew my driver’s license, I forgot to renew our health insurance, I forgot my oldest son’s birthday. I’m so glad it’s over, and I miss it, because you live inside of this sort of thing so deeply.
It speaks to so much that’s relevant today about the importance of words, the importance of clarity of words, and the difficulty of identifying what’s Jewish. Who are we? To some extent, he probed these questions more assiduously than anyone that I know.
You write about a dichotomy in Roth. He could be incredibly honest about himself, and yet he often misremembered, intentionally or not, so much about himself and the people he was close to.
He misremembered, and he also saw people whom he felt antagonistic toward, like his ex-wife Claire Bloom, in black-and-white terms, the kind of terms that he would never, or rarely ever, actually employ on the page.
There was an enormous commitment on his part to writing with the greatest degree of clarity and honesty. He implicates himself in his fiction. Take that controversial story of his, “Defender of the Faith,” about a Jewish soldier shirking his military duty. I learned from friends of his who were in the army that he was a shirker, that he actually claimed that he couldn’t do duty on Friday nights because he had to attend Friday night services. He never attended Friday night services! So he was writing about himself in many ways, and about his own failings. He was really attuned to the interplay between the dishonest things that we tell ourselves, that we prefer not to face, and the reality just beneath the surface.
One of the people I interviewed was Marty Garbus, who he met in the army and became friends with. Marty described to me these two sides of Philip as evidenced in their barracks, that he told the filthiest jokes and he had the neatest bed.
You also address the discrepancy between his self-discipline as a writer — he called himself an “unchaste monk,” as you write — and his almost desperate need for sexual excess.
He’s deeply, incredibly sexual. He and his brother, Sandy, both, were intensely sexual men who really attracted women, and they enjoyed that.
I think one of the best examples is how he loathed the wife of the director at the summer camp he worked at when he was in college, so he orchestrated a spoof where he told all the campers that she had lost her chastity belt, and they searched for that chastity belt in front of their parents. Yet when his co-counselor returned to that camp several years later, the first thing the wife asks is, where’s Roth? She was drawn to him.
The sexual attraction, the sensuality of females overwhelmed him. And love for him, as he said in “Sabbath’s Theater,” was slavery. Almost invariably, whenever the relationship lasts for more than two years or so, he leaves it. But he leaves his friendships with men in an almost identical way.
Much of the attention given to Roth focuses on his sexual behavior. But you centered your biography on the importance of books to his life, at one point calling books his “true loves.”
When you write a biography, you want to identify what was most important to the person. And there’s no question in my mind that what he cares about the most are books, arguably to the detriment of many of the people in his life, male as well as female. But look at what he produces. I think that’s really where Blake Bailey got it wrong in his 2021 biography. Roth is obviously intensely preoccupied with sexuality. But what he’s truly most preoccupied with are books.
You write that Roth said one of the conditions of a good biographer is having deep empathy for their subject. Clearly, you do. But how do you think his vision of himself matches up with your vision of him?
He died before I finished my book, which was sort of a benefit. But it’s a good question, and a very hard question to answer. What I would hope is that in the wake of all of the terrible press that he received once the news surfaced about Blake’s past [there were serious accusations against him of sexual assault] and the way in which Roth ended up being conflated with Blake’s sexual activity, the impact it had on Roth’s reputation, I would hope that he would see my book as as taking him very, very seriously and trying to put him back where he belongs in the American canon and the American Jewish canon.
But it’s hard to know.