ROTH'S REVENGER'S TRAGEDY

Rafael Garcia-Navarro on why the American novelist does not need a lesson from Margaret Cook

MOST SEASONED readers know what to look for in Philip Roth. Uncompromising, often brutal honesty. Comic genius dark, dazzling, mordant, outrageous, argu- mentative, provocative, inventive, some- times more than a little cruel. There is pinpoint-precise observation, boldness, penetrating intelligence, trenchancy, ele- gance, generosity, a tendency, particularly in recent years, toward the self-regarding virtuoso diatribe. Add expecting the unex- pected. Add blistering sexual banter. Add what no other American writer has such ready access to (or communicates so elo- quently): a consuming hatred.

`When a writer is born into a family,' said the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, 'the family is finished.' That favourite quote of Roth's has provided his answer to ques- tions about the use of material from life as fictional fodder when it involves others, particularly their feelings. Being a brother, son, husband, friend, he has said, imposes on a man obligations and compromises which are ultimately constraints. The writ- er must be free to be a writer. 'When I'm writing,' he declared on Arena some years ago, 'I'm someone else.'

Having been an unreserved admirer of Roth the novelist and a less-than-approba- tory acquaintance of Roth the man, I was still taken aback when I read his new novel, 1 Married a Communist. To start with, a character based on me makes a cameo appearance on page 136. By this point I had understood that it was to be a work of fiction second to its primary objec- tive as an act of revenge.

The book's theme and ancillary motive are rebuttals to Claire Bloom's 1996 mem- oir, Leaving a Doll's House, which outlined the break-up of her marriage to Roth. That book also revealed Roth's mental breakdown preceding the divorce, the dis- closed details of which were taken by the notoriously private author as an unforgiv- able betrayal.

I am what you might call a bit player. I met Philip Roth in London in the autumn of 1976, at the beginning of his 18-year relationship with Bloom, during which by mutual agreement he'd spend half the year living in her London town house and they would spend the other half at his colonial farmhouse in Connecticut. I had stopped by to visit Claire's daughter, Anna Steiger. Roth stared probingly, spoke softly, and notwithstanding a mien of gentleness and sensitivity I found him quietly unnerving.

During the years Claire and Philip were together I saw them quite often. Many of their difficulties were made public in her memoir. I never witnessed 'that feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative, but strangely childlike face' that appeared `sometimes without warning, frequently without provocation, always out of propor- tion to the events that had given rise to it'. What was clear to me was that his needs came first.

He could be thoughtful. On the only occasion I was ever hospitalised, one of my first calls came, long-distance, from Philip. As you'd expect from someone for whom information is meat and drink, conversa- tion was never idle. Aside from his auto- cratic ways in the home — the price of living with a writer, he would argue — he stood for the right things, espoused the right causes, spoke convincingly. And he could be funny as few people can be.

Philip had always been withering, in his fictions and in private, on the institution of marriage. But after a nasty little book enti- tled Deception, he offered a gold ring to Claire as a peace offering, and later, in 1990, they were married. I attended their April wedding in New York, and thought that both looked extremely happy, sur- rounded by their friends from the literary world. The sanction of marriage was to be the death-knell of their long relationship.

In 1993, life turned upside down for them in a sequence of events bizarre even by Roth's fictional standards. His Opera- tion Shylock was published, bearing a dedi- cation to Claire. Soon after its lukewarm critical reception he suffered a breakdown during which he managed to manipulate le tout New York — women mostly — from a psychiatric hospital, Silver Hill, into get- ting his wife to move out of their West Side apartment while he 'recovered'. Immediately afterwards came promises of rapprochement, then legal papers, first for separation, next a request to renew his health insurance policy under her umbrella, and finally for divorce, citing her 'cruel and inhuman treatment'.

That year I fell in love with Rachael Hallawell, Anna's friend and fellow singer from the Guildhall School of Music, and we were married the following year, after Philip's divorce from Claire had been finalised. At our wedding, Anna sang and Claire read poems by Herbert and Marlowe.

Devastated by the divorce, Claire asked for assistance in putting together Leaving a Doll's House. The book was to be written to compensate her for the terms of Philip's meagre settlement, but also as a catharsis. I was happy to oblige on those counts, feel- ing much less easy about the details sur- rounding Philip's sexual advances to Rachael while she stayed in Chelsea, first as a student, then later in 1988, both of which were to be included as explosive rev- elations with Rachael's eventual consent. The truth regarding those episodes — and what Philip was attempting to gain through them, 'to kill three birds with one stone' is to be found in Claire's memoir.

Not unpredictably, Roth was smart by imposing a gagging order on himself and taking what admirers of his books Sab- bath's Theater and American Pastoral, win- ners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, would rightly call the high road. (Except that his public silence was leavened by his hiring solicitors in the United States and Britain to fire letters threatening legal action to the tune of $10 million should Claire Bloom continue granting interviews to promote her book.) There were, however, two fictional exploitations in Sabbath's Theater. He struck out at Claire by putting his spin on her mother's death, admitting how revulsed he was by her need to sit for days by her mother's remains (an episode he had stored for over ten years until it was time to wound). He also reproduced a suicide note written by the father of the woman he left her for (named Erda in the memoir for reasons of privacy). By this point he was done with her, too, illustrated by his unlov- ing portrait of Drenka Balich, over whose grave Mickey Sabbath masturbates.

Roth is not prepared to accept any infringement upon a writer's freedom in order to protect people's feelings, however vampirically he has usurped their stories and spat them out. He has said that way down his list of priorities in writing a novel is provoking people — but he has also admitted, 'I have low motives, too.'

I Married a Communist gets some real- life aspects dead right, others wrong, but the objective in each case is unmistakable. When it comes to getting even, knowing someone 18 years helps: how better to bury the stiletto into a mother's abdomen than to wage a frontal attack on her daughter's physical appearance? With a name like Syl- phid, does it take much imagination to guess at the daughter's waistline?

Sylphid, the villain of the story and the harpy of Roth's imagination, plays the harp. She's not the successful opera singer Anna Steiger is. No malicious detail is spared. Not since Dickens has anyone had more flair for suggestive or portmanteau names (Jinx Possesski, nicknamed Phalli- ka, in Operation Shylock; the Countess du Plissitas in Sabbath's Theater; and in I Mar- ried a Communist, the left-winger Ira Ringold, the actress Eve Frame and the corpulent harpist Sylphid Juliet).

Philip's attempted seduction of Rachael is presented in a way familiar readers would anticipate. There were two incidents eight years apart, so Roth concocts two characters. In the cameo introducing Ros- alind Halladay she appears with me. With the polarised Cuba of the Fifties as a back- drop, I'm Ramon Noguera, son of rich tobacco growers, and she's the politically vacuous, gold-digging fiancke.

My small role in his revenge is to appear out of the blue with my fiancée in tow, looking 'glamorous', happy, with a future to look forward to, thus marginalising the frightful Sylphid, whose portrait insinuates a dearth of those things. I take no pleasure in being used to undermine a friend.

The other, slightly older character based on Rachael is a composite, a flute player (shades of Claire's friend Eugenia Zuker- man) named Pamela. In Roth's version of events, his character is seduced by her and submits to a passionate love affair. The aim is to confuse Claire as to what actually hap- pened with Rachael and have her feel betrayed; he also wants Anna to feel that she was passed over as a friend; and because he writes that she did have an affair with him, Rachael is painted as a two- faced opportunist. Three birds, one stone.

In a prototypical scheme, Sylphid's father becomes a homosexual narcissistic actor named Carlton Pennington — three hits, two of them intentional. There is nothing malicious in using Michael Pen- nington's surname and profession as a springboard; in fact, Philip told me how he had admired Pennington's Raskolnikov in Yuri Lyubimov's production of Crime and Punishment during the Eighties. But the details of the character's sexuality, his overblown girth and decadent life in the south of France — waking up to last night's waiter dressed in a towelling robe and eating fresh figs in the morning — are a caricature of Claire's longtime friend Gore Vidal and his frolics in Italy. Roth has never obscured his abhorrence of Vidal, who provided a corrosive blurb to Bloom's book: 'She even makes — inad- vertently — her last husband, Philip Roth, into something he himself has failed to do — not for want of trying — interesting at last. '

There is a Lewinskian memory for unflattering detail, and a bitchiness that makes Truman Capote grazing at La Cote Basque look mealy-mouthed. What he gets even half right is nonetheless scorchingly written. Some friendly eye from these parts must have sent him Claire and Anna's 1997 BBC television appearance on Mother's Day. He describes the show as a mother-and-daughter version of King Lear with `Sylphid as Goneril and Regan'. By portraying Sylphid as such an unyield- ing gargoyle and Eve Frame as her victim, he twists the knife without mercy: the love for which she has forfeited her own mar- riage was built on sand.

Roth's friend Janet Malcolm has written perceptively comparing journalists to con men. The evidence of such betrayals is timely and voluminous: Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul, Rosemary Mahoney and Lil- lian Hellman, Lillian Ross and William Shawn, John Bayley and Iris Murdoch, Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger. It's a betrayal bonanza. And yet the memoirist or biographer, however excoriating, is con- strained somewhat by laws protecting his subject. The novelist working behind his veil can throw any number of stones, hide his hand, and call it fiction. Roth offers us something higher than exposé and yet, despite undeniable strengths and insights, his mastery of the dialectical novel does not conceal a stained hatchet.

The last word belongs to Philip Roth, who has provided his own apotheosis as writer and man, not in his novel of revenge but in Sabbath's Theater. 'How could he go? How could he leave? Everything he hated was already here.'