How I found the real Philip Roth

Roth’s reputation, always under fire, has been particularly scorched over his attitudes towards women. He has stood accused of exploitation and misogyny, and while some of this stems from the misapprehension he is interchangeable with his protagonists, he is hardly a blameless innocent.

Perhaps most damaging was his former wife Claire Bloom’s withering portrait in her 1996 memoir, Leaving A Doll’s House, “whose accuracy”, writes Zipperstein, “tended to be taken for granted”. Roth had certainly been unkind enough to the women in his life on the page – but these depictions were, still, intended as fiction. Bloom’s was not.

The personal voice is profoundly contemporary, and he managed to employ his voice, his distinctive voice, essentially from the outset

Zipperstein has not made it his mission to unpick the “real” Roth from his self-mythologising counterparts. Rather he presents vivid and insightful portraits of both, and their entanglement with one another. “I didn’t try to square the circle with Roth. I allowed the contradictions to remain.” Indeed, his book shows that there as many “real” Roths as fictional ones.

He observes that Roth managed the rare combination of being at once highly self-referential and endlessly slippery. “Because literary biography focuses on one ostensibly notable, perhaps even great, writer, there’s a tendency to spotlight [them as] if someone is walking through life on his or her own. And of course, that’s not true.

“I tried to use as wide a range of voices as possible in order to understand him, to situate him in rather more crowded rooms, to weigh how he was seen by a variety of people.”

He has acquired illuminating fresh material from a multitude of sources, in particular what one might call “Roth’s women”, many of them – including the theology scholar Barbara Sproul, and the literary critic Judith Thurman – canny and self-aware individuals who recall Roth with what reads more like a wry, knowing fondness than a shudder. During Roth’s final illness, so many of them, ranging in age from their twenties to his own, came to attend him that it was necessary to arrange a schedule. Women, says Zipperstein, “who he had treated by any standard rather badly – because he’d also treated the same women rather well”. Although the second part held true more off the page than on it.

Separating the life from the writing has always been particularly tricky with Roth, not least because Roth made it so. From the start his books deployed narrative avatars. Nathan Zuckerman is the most prominent.

Then there are David Kepesh, and Peter Tarnopol, named for a town in Galicia, the region where Roth’s paternal grandfather was born, and, in a case of starting as Roth meant to go on, described by his fictive therapist as “the top of narcissists in the arts”. And with trademark mischief, “Philip Roth”, who appears in Operation Shylock both as author-protagonist and as an imposter, agitator and would-be lothario trading on Roth’s name and celebrity in Israel. A loudmouthed priapic pretender among Jews, calling himself Philip Roth? Beneath the many layers of his fiction – in this instance, an unflinching effort to grapple with the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Jewish diaspora’s connection to Zionism – Roth enjoyed nothing so much as a good joke at his own expense.

Particularly revealing is Zipperstein’s account of a formative trauma from Roth’s early career: a 1963 forum at New York’s Yeshiva University that Roth considered “a Kafkaesque trial or even excommunication”. Roth’s simultaneous preoccupation and struggle with his Jewish identity was encapsulated in his memory of that event, at which he believed he was denounced and jeered by the chiefly Jewish audience as a traitor to his people. “I realised,” he later wrote in his autobiography, The Facts, “that I was not just opposed but hated.”

A recording exists, from which Zipperstein learnt that “[Roth’s], I think, sincere recollection of the event was profoundly flawed” – the audience applauds, laughs with Roth, disdains his critics. That Roth long tried to stop that recording being made public seems an all too Rothian symbolic act of psychological repression.

Kafka would become a major figure in Roth’s literary mythos, aligning with Roth’s visits to then Czechoslavakia, and the writing they inspired, in which he came to understand what Zipperstein calls “the wages of history and politics”: that “Jews are to history what Eskimos are to snow.” I ask Zipperstein if this insight lies in the contrast between the fate of Jews in Europe and the confident sense of belonging afforded to Jews of Roth’s cohort in and around New York after the Second World War.

It is, he suggests, less a matter of belonging, more that “in the Fifties, Sixties, even into the Seventies”, Jews were “seen as exemplifying the human condition in the role that in so much contemporary culture women of colour now occupy … [There was] the emergence suddenly of this enormous group of talented writers able to write about Jewish life. I’ve come to be convinced that one definition of an American Jewish writer is someone who insists that they’re not an American Jewish writer. And all them did that. But it was absurd. It was a way of saying, I’m not a small writer. I’m not a tribal writer. I don’t write about just, you know, a bunch of people eating borscht at a table.”

Of all these writers, and indeed of almost all his contemporaries, it is Roth whose work best endures, most matters still. This is in part, thinks Zipperstein, because “the way in which he builds himself into his work feels far more contemporary than that of his peers.

“We have a daughter in Brooklyn, and nearly every young person we’ve met in a cafe in Brooklyn is writing a book of personal essays. The personal voice is profoundly contemporary, and he managed to employ his voice, his distinctive voice, essentially from the outset.”

When I remark to Zipperstein that my own favourite Roth books – the late- flowering, so-called American Trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married A Communist and The Human Stain – not only belie earlier accusations of solipsism but carry great moral force, he is quick to point out that Roth was “a moral writer from the outset, as is Dostoevsky, whose life is not there to be emulated, or Tolstoy. [Yet] we tend to forgive them in ways that we refuse to forgive Roth.”

But here Roth still is, defying his detractors. Unforgiven, maybe – but still read, still talked about, his best work transmitting all the relevance and power he could have dreamed for it when, as Zipperstein puts it, “he decides in his mid-twenties that he’s going to become a greater writer than [Herman] Melville, and devotes his life to that goal”.

He adds, “I didn’t need to write the life of a saint. That’s not why one engages in literary biography.” He pauses, then delivers a line the pith and timing of which would not have disgraced the subject of his book. “Virtuous people rarely write fiction.”

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Philip Roth: Stung by Life is published by Yale University Press on January 27