In 2003, Philip Roth turned 70, a strange age for an enfant terrible. To his early admirers, Roth meant chutzpah, rude energy, sly comic mischief. Slowly, improbably, that changed. Roth’s work deepened. Awards piled up. Respectability—the fate of all successful rebels—followed. By 2003, Roth had come full circle: The rebel was revered; the iconoclast, an icon.
And so, celebrations were planned, tributes drafted. Generally, Roth shunned interviews—he preferred silence, exile, and cunning—but this time, he welcomed a BBC camera crew to his spare, wood-paneled studio (“where I really wish I lived,” he once said). As winter light streamed in, he serenely answered questions from a friendly inquisitor: The New Yorker’s David Remnick.
Theirs was a subtle yet strong rapport. Beneath Remnick’s customary poise, his deliberate, thoughtful air, was an intense, fervent devotion. Growing up, he worshipped Roth. He had read Portnoy’s Complaint around twenty times (a novel about compulsion, devoured compulsively). He seldom traveled without packing one of Roth’s novels in his luggage.
When Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey, was accused of sexual assault, Remnick worried about Roth. Would his prestige decline? “What a shame that would be,” he told Cynthia Ozick. Some years earlier, Remnick favored his “favorite living writer” with an open invitation to the New Yorker. “You’re mine (favorite, that is),” he told Roth.
In publishing, such flattery is hardly unusual. Editors cultivate writers. It’s an art form practiced shamelessly and vigorously. Roth, for his part, thrived on praise, and tended carefully to his career. To some degree, Remnick’s flattery speaks to the transactional nature of journalism.
Still, their long partnership might surprise people, even veteran Rothologists, who pour over Roth’s marginalia and plunder his archives for hidden treasures. Over a decade, as I toured Rothworld—visiting archives, quizzing scholars,pondering Roth’s friendships—I kept brooding over Roth and Remnick. There was an obvious story about literary power—who wields it, and how. A story about fandom—its pleasures and risks. Soon enough, a third story, with less obvious contours, began to emerge—in some ways, a cautionary tale.
Theirs was a fruitful if complex alliance. In 2000, Remnick attempted to profile Roth. “Truth is, I probably should have written about something else, anything else,” Remnick later said. Having courted Roth, he wrote cautiously—“maybe that made the whole thing untrue,” he fretted. Soon, though, such worries vanished. Remnick and Roth continued working together, eventually producing enough pages to fill three-quarters of a New Yorker.
At times, their partnership took unusual forms. When a critical biography of Saul Bellow appeared, threatening Bellow’s reputation, Roth was furious. (“Bullshit,” he wrote in his galley. “PURE IDIOCY.” “No! No! No!”) To undermine the book—to counter its portrayal of a selfish, womanizing dandy—Roth turned to Remnick, who cleared space in the New Yorker for an interview with Bellow.
Indeed, when Roth needed a platform—to honor Bellow; to dispute a Wikipedia entry—he turned to Remnick. “Just know,” the editor told him, “these pages are as open as can be to you.” And so they were, and would remain, until Roth’s death.
In a way, it seems ordained. Two smart, bookish Jewish boys, sons of New Jersey, who found their vocation early. When, in 2003, Remnick trekked to rural Connecticut, he was following a Rothian plot. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman meets his hero, L. I. Lonoff, a famous literary recluse. In real life, Remnick approached Roth with nervous teenage excitement. “One of my great heroes, I got to meet,” he said of their first encounter in the 1990s. “It was like meeting Lou Gehrig.”
Though different in temperament, their backgrounds rhymed. Remnick, a dentist’s son, and Roth, whose father sold life insurance, both came from secure, close-knit Jewish homes. Both absorbed Yiddishkeit, the atmosphere of Jewish home life. (For both, Chazerai—trashy food—was strictly forbidden. Roth’s mother spat the word with disgust, while Remnick learned it from his great aunt—“the half-baked Dietician of Coney Island.”)
Roth’s Jewishness was secular but deeply felt; he was obsessed with Jewish wounds, Jewish history, and, not least, Jewish responses to his writing. Remnick, also secular, wore his Jewishness lightly without ever denying it (“a Malawi tribesman could take one look at me and say, ‘This man is a Jew’”). His Jewish passions focused on literature and Israel. In time, he came to despise Israel’s illiberal right-wing tendencies.
Both men contained multitudes. “I lead a tidy life,” Roth once wrote, “but have a strong taste for disorder and its excitements.” Likewise Remnick, who enjoyed boxing and politics, and whose pulse quickened to deadlines and scoops. Both were liberals with a conservative streak. Roth deplored crude American philistinism, while the younger Remnick mocked his generation’s vulgarity and hollow ambition.
Each crafted a public image—Roth especially. But Remnick also had “my bullshit”—charming, polished stories about his life and career. “It’s all true—or true-ish,” he once said. This wasn’t lying, he thought, merely “what we do in life.” Some of his favorite writers, from Roth to Walt Whitman, had this quality of performance. Yet he was earnest—indeed, pious—about literature and language. He and Roth were idealists.
There, perhaps, the similarities ended. Roth was an individualist; Remnick adapted easily to institutions. Roth wrote slowly, with great precision; Remnick wrote easily, with phenomenal speed. (As a foreign correspondent, he sometimes filed several stories a day.) When Roth let loose, his comedy reached zany, demented heights. Not so Remnick. He had the calm self-possession of a man who long ago tamed his spikier impulses.
Long before they met, Remnick knew Roth like the rest of us: as a reader. “I was a Jewish New Jersey kid reading [Portnoy’s Complaint] and discovering this thing,” he said. It happened in, of all places, a church basement book sale. (“Fifty cents, I spent on it,” he said.) That was it, the gateway drug, leading to Goodbye, Columbus and the rest. “Philip Roth was like finding home,” he recalled. At the same time, Roth was “utterly exotic” to a callow high schooler.
Over the years, Remnick’s admiration deepened. He loved Roth’s wacky baseball satire, The Great American Novel. He considered The Counterlife “a modern classic on the theme of Jewish rootlessness.” He dreamed of meeting “the master,” and when an opportunity arose, he was agog. “I hope and pray he will call,” Remnick told a friend, vowing “not to hock him about signing my thrice read Counterlife.” But providence didn’t intervene. (“Alas, no sign of Roth,” he sighed.)
Indeed, he had to wait several more years, but after that, Remnick sometimes resembled Roth’s Zelig. He attended Roth’s 60th birthday party. He interviewed Roth before his 70th. He cheered for Roth at the Philip Roth Society’s “Roth@80” celebration. He was among the mourners at Roth’s burial, a private ceremony for friends and family.
As Remnick’s early devotion increased, Roth’s ties to the New Yorker gradually frayed. He published little in the 60s, though he remained a loyal reader throughout William Shawn’s editorship. When Shawn’s replacement, Robert Gottlieb, was fired, Roth was disgusted. “But Shawn is certainly dead and so is the New Yorker,” he told friends. He couldn’t believe Tina Brown, of Vanity Fair, was taking over. “This woman sees the world through the lens of CELEBRITY, and that’s the death of everything.”
Roth and the New Yorker went back decades. The young Roth drew confidence when his provocative story “Defender of the Faith” was published. But the magazine proved fickle. “We love this first section of Philip Roth’s novel,” an editor told Roth’s agent in 1961 before rejecting the story. Chapters of Portnoy’s Complaint were declined; they wound up in Esquire, New American Review, and an unusually popular Partisan Review issue. The editors “didn’t care for my stuff,” Roth assumed. He wasn’t wrong. In simple terms, Roth’s intense, seething novels didn’t suit the genteel, decorous New Yorker.
Luckily for Roth, new editors, long-time admirers, arrived. “Welcome back,” the editor Veronica Geng wrote Roth, accepting The Ghost Writer, his near-perfect novella. As the story goes, Geng strode into William Shawn’s office flourishing the manuscript (“We should publish the whole thing”). That did the trick. To Roth’s delight, The Ghost Writer ran in its entirety, with Shawn’s enthusiastic blessing.
Around that time, several states away, a precocious Remnick bounded into journalism, eager and ambitious. “The thing I always dreaded in life,” he once said, “was waking up in the morning and not knowing why I was doing what I was doing.” At the Washington Post, he covered everything from crime to boxing to book publishing; he was a vapor trail with a notebook. “You will go as far as you want to go in this business,” the Post’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, told him.
Beneath his calm, steady demeanor, Remnick was intense, with sharp instincts and a keen alertness. Reporting from Russia, he worked tirelessly, filing stories by phone and Telex. He sometimes clashed with his editors (“his precocity sometimes masks an understandable immaturity,” one editor noted), but his talent was obvious. Remnick wanted a Pulitzer, and expected one. “I suppose it’s dark Jewish neurosis, but I somehow feel like I lost something,” he sighed when his Pulitzer went to a rival (at the New York Times, no less).
Pulitzer aside, Remnick was highly regarded. (“He, although on the young side, is considered the hottest, etc.,” the publisher Roger Strauss noted.) Some reporters are brilliant fact-finders; others write stylishly, with literary flair. Remnick had both talents, and could adapt himself to any situation. After joining Tina Brown’s “hot” New Yorker, he profiled Howard Stern and Dennis Rodman. When, in 1998, Brown jumped ship, Remnick took over. “I had never edited anything,” he later said. “I was an absolute novice.”
Truth be told, he was already an editor. (“He edited pieces. He edited some of my pieces,” Hendrik Hertzberg recalled.) He was also a consummate office diplomat. Under Brown, he pulled off “an amazingly skillful political high wire act,” a colleague said. Somehow, he pleased Brown, served her vision, and impressed her detractors. He possessed an easy humor, a practiced modesty, and a confidence befitting his stature.
Vaulting from Brown’s inner circle into the editor’s job, Remnick projected humility. He was merely “impersonating the editor of the New Yorker,” he told Roth. Meanwhile, he made the magazine his obsession, working frantically, voting yea or nay on every article, short story, and cartoon. That part was “agony,” he told Epstein: “one begins to feel like a decision-making machine.”
One decision, however, was simple: publishing Roth. After 1979, Roth again vanished from the New Yorker. That was understandable—he seldom published short stories anymore. Yet his absence was striking. One of the country’s finest authors wasn’t writing for its most storied magazine.
Remnick sought to rectify that. By chance, Roth’s latest novel, I Married A Communist, was in galleys. It was a fine book, hardly Roth’s best, but Remnick found it “absolutely, bottomlessly fascinating.” That week, he spiked the short story his editors had selected and published Roth instead. “Even if this madness ends in a week,” he told Roth, “I’ll have published something—someone—supreme.”
Remnick was amazed. The editor’s powers were vast. There were no meddling owners or advertisers. “This is really cool!” Remnick thought, instructing his fiction editor, Bill Buford, to work closely with Roth. (He agreed, writing Roth “in some haste” about an excerpt.) In matters of taste, Remnick was utterly confident, and he slowly recast the magazine. More politics. More arts criticism. Fewer glitzy profiles. His control was “really quite breathtaking,” he said. He welcomed back Woody Allen, a personal favorite.
Even as he reshaped the magazine, Remnick avoided any perception of favoritism. “It would be insane for the editor of the New Yorker to name favorite writers,” he told a reporter. That same autumn, he reached out again to Roth. “I suspect an editor of the New Yorker… is not supposed to have a favorite living writer,” he wrote, imagining people’s objections. “Too bad,” he wrote. They were free to find it “indecent, indiscreet, unfair, vulgar.”
Of course, Remnick wasn’t only wooing Roth. Joan Didion loved Remnick’s “fantastic extravagant gift”—a large shipment of caviar. Saul Bellow had to settle for flattery. “The truth is I’ve always thought it was wrong, criminal really, that the New Yorker published so little of you,” Remnick told Bellow. As an editor, Remnick had a remarkable gift for channeling writers, matching their moods, fostering kinship. “What can I tell you?” he wrote Roth, sharing boyhood memories of shabbos lights and spitzel. “I was raised on a rhetoric not unfamiliar to you.” He complained about “the misbegotten Netanyahus”—an opinion he thought Roth would share.
That September, at long last, a private meeting was scheduled. Although Remnick had acquired an aura of power and celebrity, he felt like an eager schoolboy. That day in New York, an “awestruck” Remnick greeted Roth at the New Yorker’s offices. For fifty minutes, they did what writers do when they meet: chat amiably, while quietly sizing each other up.
At first, Remnick was rattled—“you knew that there was not one goddamn thing lost on him.” Indeed, Roth was a fierce listener; he could bore into you with his attention. That day, Roth discussed Clinton/ Lewinsky. (“His dark, expressive eyes were deadly serious.”) In lighter moments, the room filled with laughter and convivial complaint. “Why don’t you get a bunch of novelists to write about this?” Roth suggested. Journalists were hacks, he said. Novelists were adults. They understood betrayal and human desire.
In fact, Remnick already agreed. Earlier that month, he bashfully sent Roth a proposal: might he “review” the Kenneth Starr report? It seemed possible, given Roth’s interest in Clinton, and, more generally, adultery, that he would bite. “Oh, hell, please don’t blame me for asking,” Remnick added. That didn’t entice Roth, but Remnick persisted. “Rumor has it you have finished something called The American Stain,” he wrote Roth in 1999, hoping to score an excerpt. “My book is called The Human Stain,” Roth replied, and warmly agreed to share a copy. By that point, Remnick was signing his letters “Yours always.”
As Remnick hoped, their letters grew warmer and looser. Having won Roth’s trust—no small accomplishment—Remnick proposed a bolder idea: a full-length profile of Roth. Since the 1960s, there had been few, notably Life magazine’s article, “A Comedian of Guilt,” written at the height of Portnoy-mania. But its author, Albert Goldman, was a personal friend and confidante.
At first, Roth had misgivings. He disliked—really, scorned—literary journalism. He resisted attempts to wrest control of his story. (Which was, after all, his material, grist for his novels.) Long into adulthood, Roth was bedeviled by the competing needs of adolescence: to be left alone, and to be understood. A part of him favored seclusion. Another part sought attention, the better to explain himself and his writing.
For his part, Remnick was a seasoned profiler. He veered toward figures of pathos—aging athletes, defeated politicians—and shape-shifters like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Like all good profilers, he leaned on classic plots, familiar stories. (“Mostly, they are the same stories over and over.”) He was a sharp and pitiless observer. He captured Al Gore’s flickering smile (“Gore smiled. Then he un-smiled”). He noted Tony Blair’s “Halloween rictus…a practiced yet futile attempt to mask embarrassment or anger.”
But even a shrewd, confident profiler would find Roth difficult. For one thing, Roth had secrets: his health, his depressions, his romantic life. There’s no harder subject than a fiercely private person, except, perhaps, a private person prone to mischief. As Roth teased readers, he toyed with journalists, feeding them half-truths and coy evasions. In one interview, Roth claimed to be a Mossad agent, while the reporter—who happened to be Remnick’s wife, Esther Fein—slowly came around to the impish conceit.
In the event, Roth soon relaxed around Remnick. Before long, he was lightening the mood with impressions of Harold Pinter and Mike and the Mad Dog, the sports-radio kibitzers beloved of New York commuters. Remnick was aware that “Philip Roth doing shtick in a car” was a performance—for him, yes, but also his readers. Roth was a savvy subject “who didn’t just fall off the publicity turnip truck.” Meanwhile, Remnick employed “all the strategies involved” to keep his subject talking (“acting dumb, not quite going away…”). It was all part of “this very strange transaction” between reporter and subject.
The result, published in May 2000, was a remarkable snapshot, shrewd, revealing, yet somewhat mythopoetic. It nimbly avoided Roth’s divorces, his troubled friendships, but didn’t skirt Roth’s depressions and physical breakdowns.
Above all, it captured a moment:
Roth is no longer the wunderkind; he is sixty-seven, and the books reflect it.His voice isstill charged,anendlesslypliable instrument of comedy and impersonation, but that voice has also darkened, its comedy is deeper, the story it tells is more tragic and painful.
It also captured something more elusive: Roth’s powerful charm, a curious blend of humor and sternness, aloofness and intensity. Throughout his life, people adored and forgave Roth—the special grace we grant those who relieve us of life’s boredom. In Remnick’s profile, Roth’s electric current, his ability to charge the air around him, was captured brilliantly.
If the profile was a success, it was also something less. At one point, Remnick describes a simple, spartan life, utterly sealed off. (“Nothing gets in,” Remnick writes of Roth’s studio.) Like the legend of an isolated Thoreau, this was an exaggeration. Outside his studio, Roth saw friends, had affairs, and, that spring, was interviewed by CBS Sunday Morning and the New York Times Book Review. And he traveled. As Remnick notes, Roth took the Concord to France for a multi-day festival, “The Roth Explosion,” where he mingled with thousands of fans in lovely Aix-en-Provence.
Equally dubious were the well-polished stories from Roth’s vault. 1959: A furious rabbi demands, “What is being done to silence this man?” 1969: Jacqueline Susann tells Johnny Carson that she admires Roth, “but wouldn’t want to shake his hand.” 1962: Roth, speaking at Yeshiva University, is harassed, and practically ambushed, by angry students. “That night at Yeshiva was a slaughter,” Remnick wrote.
Wonderful stories, all. Yet few would survive later scrutiny. Take the Yeshiva incident. “Roth was thus less victim than star of the evening,” claims Steven J. Zipperstein, a Roth biographer. As for that rabbinical fatwa—“What is being done to silence this man?”—it, too, is suspect. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t; in the end, we just don’t know. Unfortunately, we have only one source: a 1963 essay by Roth. Beyond that? Nothing.
At various times, Remnick’s profile has an air of credulity common to journalists who have gotten too close to their subjects. Even the famous Jacqueline Susann story is slightly off. It was comedian Flip Wilson who interviewed Susann. Johnny Carson had the evening off.
How common were Remnick’s mistakes? Extremely common. A profile is, in a sense, a first draft, subject to later revision by scholars. (“I’m a journalist—I’m not Robert Caro,” Remnick once said.) Indeed, Roth’s Yeshiva fable was widely repeated in journals, magazines, even his New York Times obituary.
The obvious lesson is for greater skepticism. The first rule of literary journalism might be: never trust a novelist about his personal life. That went double for Roth. “I say one thing to David, and I say one thing to you,” Roth told Robert Siegel, the NPR reporter, who interviewed them both. When Siegel shared that story with Remnick, both men laughed.
There was an irony to these mistakes. Error, misjudgment—this was Roth’s subject. “The fact remains,” he wrote in 1997, “that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s […] getting them wrong and wrong and wrong.” It was a belief Remnick shared. “Writing is about getting it wrong,” he said in 1998, “over and over and over again.” Remnick, working quickly, often made mistakes, relying on fact-checkers as a safety net. “I don’t know about you,” he once said, “but I make a lot of mistakes.” It was something he harped on. “It’s stunning how many mistakes you make.”
Whatever its flaws, the profile shows how Roth’s public image was shaped. Roth had vented his woes: bad health, bad marriage, bad reviews. That fed the conceit Remnick supplied: an embattled writer’s triumph. Roth had managed “to pull himself out of [crisis] and onto a plane of mastery.” He had resumed writing “with greater concentration than ever before.” Crisis and renewal. Suffering and redemption. In Remnick’s hands, Roth’s story acquired mythic overtones.
One wonders, though, what other stories were possible. Life supplies myriad plot lines; in journalism, a few are chosen, woven together, and the rest are discarded. What “facts” pass through the reporter’s sieve are invariably the ones that serve a chosen narrative. Roth knew this, which is what made him such a powerful narrator of his own life. But such stories are necessarily incomplete, and, at worst, misleading.
As it happens, Remnick was well aware of this. In a sense, he had delivered what Roth wanted: a smart and admiring portrait free of moral judgement. Roth read it; his friends read it; everyone liked it. Everyone, that is, except Remnick.
“Truth is, I probably should have written about something else, anything else,” he confided to Barbara Epstein. Normally, Remnick relished publication, but now he felt uneasy. He didn’t really know Roth. He had ignored Claire Bloom, whose memoir alleged mistreatment and deceit.
Ignoring her was his choice—“but maybe that made the whole thing untrue,” he now worried; “I don’t know.”
It’s hard to read this without wincing. Truth, after all, is everything, a writer’s north star. “I think […] you have your ambivalences about him,” he told Epstein, suggesting he might, too, if he knew Roth better. As things stood, he was glad not to. He had avoided “the marriage minefield.”
Remnick’s letter is a curious document. It suggests a process of reasoning hidden to readers, and perhaps to Remnick himself. Why hadn’t he quoted Bloom? Or reported rigorously? Obviously, there was much at stake: Roth’s trust, his affection, his future with the New Yorker. Remnick had worked hard to cultivate Roth; now that was in jeopardy. Plainly, he had less avoided a minefield than stumbled into one.
It was a minefield familiar to literary journalists. When profiling authors, one often learns secrets, things you wish you didn’t know. What then? In theory, it’s all fair game. In practice, such inconvenient facts are often discarded, and the problem goes away. This happens often with information that’s puzzling or offensive, and which, if published, would upset the subject and his admirers. Such quandaries test one’s integrity—a test most journalists flunk at one time or another.
Remnick’s profile has an easy, confident air, a steady voice, and great authority. His letter shows how that effect was achieved: by limiting its scope and avoiding “minefields.” In the end, Remnick chose caution—a partial portrait. And his decision paid off.
“So good on Philip R.,” Epstein cheered. “He has to like it.” Indeed he did, and the partnership flourished. For the next 18 years, Roth published in only one magazine: Remnick’s New Yorker.
As a rule, Remnick didn’t befriend his subjects. “It’s kind of not kosher for me,” he once said. Philip Roth was “a happy exception”—happy for Roth, too. As they bonded over jokes and literature, they slipped easily into something resembling a friendship.
Soon it was Roth who proposed a New Yorker piece. Back in 1998, James Atlas was finishing his long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow. “The book is lively, intelligent, and as readable as it is thorough,” one reviewer wrote. Bellow’s admirers disagreed. Roth, who had acquired a galley, saw malice and rancor in Atlas’ portrait. He particularly hated “all that righteous, boring pseudo-p[s]ychiatric moralizing.”
And he worried about Bellow, whom he admired greatly. “Don’t look at the Atlas book,” he urged. As publication neared, Roth overflowed with protective advice. Be stoical. The best response was no response. “DON’T SHOW THE WOUND TO A SOUL,” he implored. “THIS IS THE DISCIPLINE REQUIRED.”
Biography has been called a small person’s revenge against a greater person; and that was Roth’s considered view. Disgusted, he threw considerable energy into sinking Atlas’s book. His plan was simple: he would interview Bellow, collect his answers, and have Remnick publish them—a preemptive strike. “Yours, not Atlas’s, should be the last word on what you’ve done,” he told Bellow. He would avenge Bellow in advance of the attack.
Remnick, who may have gleaned Roth’s motives, was eager to proceed. He certainly admired Bellow, whom he had wooed as a reporter. (“I’ve just consumed with relish your latest book,” he told Bellow; “the essays are just a delight in every way.”) On top of that, he disliked Atlas, whom he had fired from the New Yorker. (Remnick had been encouraging—“You work here, you belong here”—until the moment the guillotine fell.)
It was a reasonable plan, and, through no one’s fault, it didn’t succeed. Roth prodded Bellow to write, write. But Bellow, frail and scattered, couldn’t, or wouldn’t. “Saul tells me he’s working on my questions,” Roth wrote Remnick in fall 1999. “We’ll see.” Months passed; the calendar turned. Roth exhorted Bellow to finish. “If it is, we can then get it to Remnick for publication in the New Yorker in October.”
But the task proved futile. The interview never materialized. In a pinch, Roth drafted a long, appreciative essay about Bellow, which the New Yorker ran instead. “Remnick must know that he struck it rich,” Bellow told Roth, and indeed, the result pleased everyone. The piece appeared in October 2000, just before Atlas’ biography.
Having returned to the New Yorker, Roth again vanished. Neither The Human Stain (2000) nor The Dying Animal (2001) appeared in the magazine. Remnick still looked forward to Roth’s “periodic raids on Babylon,” when Roth might be available for dinner (conveniently, they lived around ten minutes apart), yet the men saw little of each other. For his part, Roth was tending to health problems and struggling with The Plot Against America. (“It wasn’t a book I wanted to write,” he told a friend, “and twice I abandoned it for a month and longer.”)
In winter 2003, Remnick trekked to rural Connecticut for their BBC interview. Since 1969, when a fame-bedeviled Roth fled New York, few journalists had visited his refuge or even seen photographs. Inside his writing studio were his stand-up desk, a large fireplace, and a long leather couch; outside were apple trees, manicured meadows, and his large clapboard farmhouse facing the woods.
With the cameras rolling, Remnick had a wonderful ability to elicit candor. When he asked why Roth devoted himself single-mindedly to writing, Roth seemed perplexed. Softly, he said, “I don’t know what else to do.” His eyes twinkled a bit sadly. “If it were taken away from me, I think I would die.” For a brief moment, Roth appeared uncertain and undefended. The interview aired the night of Roth’s 70th birthday.
By that point, Roth was entering a season of losses. Both his parents were gone, and his literary generation was thinning. In 2005, Saul Bellow died, and the New Yorker published Roth’s old interview (such as it was). Meanwhile, the pesky Atlas returned, now as Bellow’s public eulogist. “To read Atlas in three different venues, one dumber than the next, was at least something [Bellow] could miss,” Remnick wrote Roth.
For five years, theirs had been a fruitful partnership. Roth had been Remnick’s favorite writer, a New Yorker contributor, and a profile subject. Inevitably, the roles blurred, and two of them—literary hero and journalistic subject—were in obvious tension. That nobody cared, or even seemed to notice, was a mark of Remnick’s discretion up until then, and his reputation for decency and integrity.
Any conflicts of interest were soon resolved—somewhat. In 2010, Roth retired. From fiction, at least. In truth, he continued writing: long memos to his biographer; an angry rebuttal to Claire Bloom’s memoir; and a “hilarious screed” (in Remnick’s words) about Wikipedia for newyorker.com. Around that time, he foreswore readings. He was finished—finished!—with public events. He preferred “sequestered Salingerism” to “exhibitionistic Mailerism.”
Remnick’s admiration was still boundless. “He’s as good as it gets,” he told Charlie Rose. In 2006, Remnick read Everyman, Roth’s sober meditation on mortality, and was bewitched. (“If that had been available to us…we would have published it straight through.”) In an interview, Remnick was asked for his dessert island author: Roth, Bellow, or Updike. Easy. He loved Bellow, “but I grew up on Roth,” whose books “meant and mean everything to me.”
In 2013, Remnick attended Roth’s 80th birthday celebration at the Newark Museum. The following day, he recalled “the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed.” After tributes by Edna O’Brien and Jonathan Lethem, the elderly Roth read confidently from Sabbath’s Theater. Remnick was transfixed. (“These were not his last words—please, not that!”) It was, for Remnick, an iconic moment—“a triumphal lope around the bases, like Ted Williams did on his last day in a Red Sox uniform.”
After the evening ended with birthday cake and champagne toast, Remnick rushed home to write. Appearing on newyorker.com the next day, his article had the zest and lyricism of deadline writing mixed with teenage wonder. “I saw and heard something remarkable just a few hours ago, something I’m not likely to forget until all the mechanisms of remembering are shot and I’m tucked away for good.”
Five years later, Roth was tucked away for good, felled by heart disease. He had prolonged his life through swimming, an abstemious diet, and numerous cardiac stents, but the end came swiftly. In Sabbath’s Theater, the rowdy hero considers burial in the quiet country. “But whom would he talk to up there? He had never found a goy yet who could talk fast enough for him.” A serious problem, given how long eternity could last. Eventually, Roth chose Bard College’s cemetery, where he had Hannah Arendt for company, and chose to be buried next to the eventual grave-site of his very-much-alive friend, the Romanian writer Norman Manea, so that he and Norman could “continue their conversations.”
At Roth’s funeral, a close circle of friends, including Remnick, watched his coffin lowered into the ground. Remnick was struck by the austere, secular service (“no Kaddish, no God, no speeches”). Later that week, Roth received a hero’s farewell in the New Yorker. In The Counterlife, Roth mocked pious, fulsome eulogies. “Where was the rawness and the mess? Where was the embarrassment and the shame?” A few places, actually, but not newyorker.com, where nearly a dozen grateful tributes appeared.
Remnick added his own eulogy. The Roth he remembered was indomitable (“Roth’s vitality never dwindled, particularly on the page”). He was a survivor who, after illness and divorce, “redoubled his sense of discipline and set himself free.” In Remnick’s eulogy, Roth acquired a purity, a saintliness. Here again was Roth as literary ascetic, “living alone in the woods,” shunning modern blandishments. In the literary pantheon, he ranked with Hemingway, Bellow, and Melville—“but he was funnier, more spontaneous, than any of them.”
Roth’s life had ended, but his afterlife was just beginning. According to Remnick, “Roth long resisted the idea of a biography,” then finally “relented.” In fact, Roth courted biographers, seeking a loyal, sympathetic Boswell, but every candidate, including Judith Thurman, had demurred. (“I didn’t think the friendship would survive,” Thurman said. “And I didn’t think I would survive.”) Later, Roth enlisted Ross Miller, his closest friend, but after two failed attempts, Roth gave up.
Around 2010, with time scarce, Roth made his final, fateful selection. To many, Blake Bailey seemed a strange choice: a midwest Gentile with a slick, to-the-manor-born mien. Could he understand Jewishness? Or working class Newark? Roth didn’t much care. “He doesn’t judge his protagonist,” Roth said after reading Bailey’s biography of John Cheever. “That is the kind of moral latitude I need in a biography.” It was that approach, and his just-us-guys bonhomie, that won Roth’s favor.
Biography has several tasks. In chronicling a life, it locates patterns, teases out meanings, and reveals someone’s layers, their human flaws. In so doing, it often complicates our feelings toward our heroes. Such was the fate awaiting Roth’s readers when Philip Roth: The Biography arrived.
How would Roth’s admirers react? Bailey, to his credit, didn’t ignore Roth’s darker side. He gives us Roth’s lechery (“I was forty and she was nineteen. Perfect”) and general selfishness with women. (“A mature woman wouldn’t take your shit,” Roth’s therapist says.) To balance the moral scales, Bailey emphasized Roth’s generosity and loyalty. In short, we get all of it: Roth’s anger, selfishness, and compulsive womanizing, but also his warmth, generosity, and menschlicheit.
Remnick’s review, which ran that April, and read like a mini-biography, struck a similar balance. It didn’t attempt to untangle Roth’s contradictions, but instead sketched a brilliant but confounding figure who can’t seem to separate from his problems, particularly those that fueled his writing. Though suspicious by nature, he seems unable to sever bonds of trust and dependence, even after profound betrayals.
Though written gracefully, with characteristic ease, the review has its awkward notes. In Remnick’s words, the young Roth was “determined to live unfettered.” Translation: he shunned marriage and monogamy. As a middle-aged professor, Roth “availed himself of what he viewed as the perquisites.” In simple English, Roth slept with his students. At times, a protective note creeps in. We’re reminded of Roth’s “remarkable service” to writers and his “many close and enduring friendships with women.” As for Roth’s biographer, “Bailey is industrious, rigorous, and uncowed.”
Not everyone found Bailey “uncowed.” The critic Laura Marsh called him an “adoring wingman” and a misogynist. The New York Times noted Bailey’s “complicity” and found his book “a sprawling apologia for Roth’s treatment of women.” In the book, Roth’s first wife is branded “a bitter, impoverished, sexually undesirable divorcée.”
Before long, Remnick’s endorsement would seem like one of the great critical misjudgments of the year. “I don’t know what David was thinking,” an acquaintance of his (and Roth’s) told me. In short order, Bailey was disgraced, his book withdrawn, following sexual assault charges. “Mein gott,” Remnick wrote Cynthia Ozick. He seemed shocked by Bailey’s undoing. But he also feared Roth’s. His chief concern, “in the unreal and unfortunate world of ‘one thing equals any other thing,’” was that Roth’s reputation might suffer.
He was right to worry. Roth’s reputation was declining. But it wasn’t the defamation-by-association that Remnick feared. By 2021, a variety of factors, from #metoo to a broad reappraisal of the “great male narcissists” (as David Foster Wallace branded them), had tarnished Roth. In college courses, Roth went unassigned. (At Yale University, Roth, Bellow, and Malamud had practically vanished from the syllabus.)
And yet, Roth wasn’t cancelled—far from it. As of 2023, nearly all his novels remained in print. The academic journal Philip Roth Studies kept chugging along. Roth’s good name was still good enough for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which hosted “Philip Roth Unbound,” a three-day festival of panels and performances.
Indeed, Roth’s place in literary history was fixed, as it had been since the 1970s. Why, then, had he needed the New Yorker? Despite his fame, Roth’s sales were generally modest; of his 32 books, very few were bestsellers. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had both prestige and a readership above a million. Indeed, it’s likely that more readers encountered Roth’s writing through the New Yorker than through his books.
But there was something Roth needed more than readers and prizes. “He values complicity very highly,” his friend Judith Thurman once said. As time passed, Roth felt increasingly embattled—betrayed by friends, besieged by critics, brought low by illness. More and more, he sought allies, supporters, defenders. He was, said Thurman, “the greatest seeker of complicity as a friend.”
Indeed, that’s what his literary allies provided: sympathy, at the deepest level; good company; unconditional loyalty. To accuse them of mere opportunism would be cynical. Their admiration was sincere. Yet many operated shrewdly. They sought favors and jacket blurbs. They exploited Roth’s connections, and eventually published memoirs quoting private letters and conversations. For decades, Roth suffered the curse of fame: everyone wanted something from him, if only proximity, a chance to bask in his celebrity.
Then there were the journalists. In their strange pas de deus, journalists seduce subjects, who seduce them back. Both sides win—and lose—to varying degrees. With Roth and Remnick, there were only winners. Remnick offered praise and the huge readership of the New Yorker. In return, he received access—the reporter’s holy grail—and Roth’s writing, a greater bounty of words than any other magazine. All the while, Remnick promoted “a literary genius” who managed to “portray Jews in all their human variety.”
That sounds flattering, but in a curious way, it diminishes Roth. After all, Roth didn’t merely “portray” Jewish Americans. Nor did he render anything so vague as their “humanity.” We likely wouldn’t care about such a writer. In book after book, Roth probed, provoked, and pushed Jewish-America’s pressure points. He was a dangerous writer, his fiction fed by strong, dark emotions, chiefly anger—his lifelong muse and tormentor.
Even as Remnick flattered and lionized Roth, some part of him surely knew better. Back in 1995, he faulted Ben Bradlee, his former boss at the Washington Post, for a lapse in judgement. “He had lost, if only for a moment, his instinct for skepticism, his bullshit meter.” Many years later, Remnick criticized Bradlee’s closeness to presidents and politicians.
“I learned something from that,” Remnick said, referring to journalists who befriend their famous subjects: “Ultimately, they come and bite you in the ass. They can compromise you. They can dull your judgement. I’m very wary of it,” he added.