Culture Vultures: Philip Roth at 15
Steyn, Mark
"Culture Vultures: Philip Roth at 15" by Mark Steyn Philip Roth at 15 Henny Youngman puts it best: "Take my wife. Please." There it is in four words, one of the most indestructible artistic traditions: the need of...
...John Kasich • Sen...
...Meanwhile, the press did not show any distress, or even much interest, when Dole charged it with bias...
...it's just that, for historic reasons, most artists have been men and, therefore, most of their fall-guys have been gals...
...Claire Bloom could put them straight...
...Does it sound familiar...
...Even the scene where Angela Bassett dumps her husband's clothes in the street and torches them lacks the precision of the baronet's wife in England a year or two back: she took the best bottles from her philandering husband's wine cellar and left them as presents on the doorsteps of the neighboring villagers, and then went through his wardrobe and carefully cut out the crotch from every pair of trousers in every one of his expensive Savile Row suits...
...Don't watch television...
...For example, I've always been fond of Woody's hommage to his Bogart obsession, Play It Again, Sam, but, in light of his recent travails, there are now all kinds Can—should—the artist have a wife...
...It is the final transformation of their relationship, from life to art...
...Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon...
...They meet in a restaurant...
...That's really the heart of the book: artists make art from what they know, which means they cannibalize what, to anybody else, would be the most intense, private experiences...
...Helene's face was calm and motionless...
...He has no soul...
...William Roth • Sen...
...Would it work for anybody else...
...Far from being possessed of especial sensitivity and compassion, the distinguishing feature of the great thinker's approach to the opposite sex is selfpreoccupation and immaturity...
...and, in the seventies, he musicalized Lolita — older , worldly man takes in hand...
...This was an emancipation of sorts, and for once Dole seemed to be enjoying himself...
...By contrast, with Philip Roth, in his novel Deception, the line is: "I wouldn't say my wife's a tedious, whingeing, middle-aged drag...but she is...
...For years, Joan's husband was a staple of her stand-up routine...
...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Philip Roth at 15 Henny Youngman puts it best: "Take my wife...
...54 December 1996 The American Spectator z 2 of unnerving associations in lines like "Here's looking at you, kid...
...Hotel: The Sheraton Washington Hotel is convenientmuseums,reservations...
...I pressed my thumbs into the hollow at the top of her breastbone and then, still pressing, slowly moved them both, one to the left, the other to the right, up towards her ears where the flesh was hard," he wrote...
...I have always been very private," she assures every interviewer, and yet she's come up with the most public evisceration of a famous author since...well, most profile writers cited Nora Ephron's Heartburn, but that's an unsatisfying comparison: For one thing, Carl Bernstein was too busy with President Nixon to get around to trashing Nora in print...
...At the time, Roth had a studio in London and was married to an actress called Claire...
...Given her experience with actors, authors, and producers, you can only hope she'll draw the reasonable conclusion and take up with a logger or truckdriver...
...But, according to my own unscientific survey MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...But you can learn how to fight back — and win...
...Roth would have understood...
...The Washington Post reported that when Senator John McCain was told of Dole's remarks he "rolled his eyes," and said it was "not productive to beat up on the press...
...as a ladies' man...
...The American Spectator • December 1996 55 But Roth's have died, and he's still a 15-yearold boy: for all the talk about his depression and inner demons and unwillingness to have his creativity constrained by domesticity, in the end he left Miss Bloom for another woman—a younger woman and a friend of hers, too...
...In 1994, George Steiner wrote, as one great thinker on another, "The thinker inhabits fictions of purity, of reasoned propositions as sharp as white light...
...But it's an austere, distant beauty...
...A third-rate British novelist (that narrows it down to a few thousand) once told me of an affair he was having with the wife of an insolvency lawyer: "We belong together...
...Claire Bloom isn't really a celebrity...
...I'm not being entirely metaphorical here...
...Miss Rivers' account of her husband's suicide in Still Talking was exhaustive and confessional, but strangely unmoving...
...At a stroke, Miss Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House (Little, Brown, $23.95) has revived Roth's decayed notoriety in what People calls "the most buzzed-about celebrity memoir of the season...
...As Roth is virtually unknown in London, never mind Eastern Europe, I think it safe to attribute these passages to authorial invention or, anyway, wishful thinking...
...Professionally, too, she has come full circle —from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen, very different funnymen but with a shared preference for child-women...
...So she left the lawyer, moved in with the soulful artist, and, after six months of mental and physical cruelty, fled gratefully back to the non-soulful attorney...
...As writers go, Claire Bloom could have done worse than Roth, and, if it's any consolation, she was lucky to escape with purely mental torture...
...My old friend Alan Jay Lemer had eight wives (the only Broadway record Andrew Lloyd Webber hasn't beaten), which seems ridiculous until you look at his work: My Fair Lady—older, worldly man takes in hand young unsophisticated girl he thinks he can mold...
...In Deception, Roth creates a writer called "Philip" who has a studio in London and is married to a dreary actress called "Claire...
...Elkins' entire being was centered on sexual gratification," she writes...
...Trent Lott • Sen, John McCoin • Rep...
...her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling...
...Rob POIRRORf Serf...
...It's powered this fall's biggest movie—The First Wives Club—as well as last winter's—Waiting to Exhale...
...Don Nickles • Gov...
...But, as revenge dramas go, they're pretty tame stuff—and, in most cases, just strategies for getting their men back, or getting other men who are mostly the same as their predecessors...
...The coffee, the silence, the banter, the teasing smile...
...Then he launches into IF YOU'RE FED UP WITH BIG GOVERNMENT, YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO MISS...
...In both cases, theaters have been packed with women cheering on their sisters...
...You may remember her from Chaplin's Limelight or as Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited or even from a stint on As the World Turns, but her various achievements have never coalesced into an integrated public personality...
...She is one of the most beautiful women of our time, with exquisite bone structure and big, deep eyes...
...As the days dwindled down and his time grew short, he said that "the country does not belong to the liberal media...
...JohnEngler • Rep...
...The two male friends she turns to for enthusiastic endorsements are Vidal and John Gielgud, neither of whom has any reputation —how shall we put this...
...Artistic" is a word loaded with associations: neophyte writer John-Boy Walton was "artistic," which, in TV shorthand, means uniquely compassionate, uniquely sensitive, uniquely blessed with insight and feeling...
...Gingrich • James Glossop* n • Chief Reuben Greenberg Judd Gregg • Rep...
...You make up your JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...TERM LIMITS CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: Michael Aronstein • J. Kenneth Blackwell • t James Dale Davidson • Steve Forbes • m Rogers* Hon...
...Whatever you think of these women, they've changed irrevocably the public perception of their ex-husbands—or, in Mia's case, ex-co-adopfive-caregiver-living-acrossCentral-Park...
...It said that neither his "15 percent tax cut nor his wild charge that newspapers have pulled their punches on Whitewater Dole was right to kvetch, not that he deserved sympathy...
...04 PRESS WATCH by John Corry None Dare Call It Bias 0 bviously it had to happen sometime: Bob Dole would criticize the press...
...we've seen it in a thousand movies, including a few with Miss Bloom...
...They order coffee...
...all°nalTaxPgY55C°fifereu . Coll (202) 328-2900 for ntationce $109 s. FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO REGISTER, CALL 1-800-TAX HALT 56 December 1996 • The American Spectator twenty minutes of impersonal, superficial banter...
...Paul Simon • John Stossel • Gov...
...The painter Claude Monet, to his own shame, looking at his adored young wife on her deathbed, could not help recording the changing color of her skin and the dissolution of her once-beautiful face...
...David M. • INVITED SPEAKERS: Rep...
...then she marries Rod Steiger, followed by Hillard Elkins (producer of Oh, Calcutta...
...Yet you could easily make the case —with supporting statistics and graphs, too— that the practitioners of these crafts and many more have more understanding of "a woman's needs...
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...In death, as in life, he's still only the straight man...
...As an accountant...
...Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise...
...But he went on to use this image in his work...
...Is he much thought about here these days...
...A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy," wrote Roth in Portnoy's Complaint, "and will remain a 15year-old boy till they die...
...Not long ago, an accusation like that would have led to many cries of denial and perhaps a town hall meeting on "Nightline...
...I could be his Muse, if only he'd let me," sighs a typical Roth female character in the epigraph to his My Life as a Man...
...This insensitivity to intimacy isn't especially the property of the male artist...
...While dreary executives fret about not wanting to take their work home with them, the creative soul faces the opposite problem: the eternal temptation to take his home to work...
...Perhaps Louis Althusser was enacting a necessary axiom or logicalproof when, on the morning of November 16,198o, he throttled his wife...
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...Evan Bayh • David Brinkley • Goy George W. Bush • Sen...
...He gets a great novel out of it, but at what cost: to judge from Bloom's account, the home life of such a self-plundering writer eventually leads to complete loss of real feeling, its gradual extinction by artifice and effect...
...followed by Roth...
...Inside, her personal odyssey has a kind of tragic neatness: she loses her virginity to Richard Burton...
...So much for the novelist's powers of imagination—which, in this case, seem largely confined to the scenes where various exotic beauties from Eastern Europe descend on said studio and engage in increasingly convoluted bouts of sex with him...
...His fantasies were alternately voyeuristic and sadistic...
...With Youngman, at least there's a punchline...
...But he was ignoring the irony that Dole had spent most of his disastrous campaign in thrall to the liberal media he now was attacking...
...A smile teases his lips: "Oh, perversion...
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...There is a long silence...
...Dick Army • Gov...
...Don't let them make up your mind for you...
...After that, it surprises me that the so-called "women's audience" goes along with such lame affirmations of sisterly solidarity as The First Wives Club—or, come to that, that their leading ladies do...
...Be s to e t° museums rn°flu...
...he roared, and contemptuously dismissed his rival...
...In particular he was annoyed with the New York Times — "They don't put any anti-Clinton stories in the New York Times, only anti-Dole stories in the New York Times" — and the day after he said that, he cast an even wider net...
...But, as an example of how women can become just as dehumanized, look no further than Joan Rivers...
...Tommy Thompson • Hon...
...PaulTscavos • Rep J. C. •Itobert Woodson The forces of government are still too big and too intrusive...
...She drew on these "adventures" when she played Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, though not without reservation...
...For, over the years, the powder room at Actors' Equity has surely crackled with far more robust tales...
...How else to explain, say, his late, and almost imperceptible, embrace of the California Civil Rights Initiative, the disappearance of partial-birth abortion as an appropriate subject for discussion, or the reluctance to raise the so-called, and improperly labeled, character issue...
...of American youth, while most have heard of the phrase "Portnoy's complaint," they've no very clear idea what it involves or who Portnoy is...
...To be sure, there are no shortage of takers for the part...
...Alas for Alan, that was one reprise too many of "Thank Heaven For Little Girls...
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...What's revealing about the joke, though, is that it's not really about him or his suicide, but about her and her shopping habits...
...This time, though, it barely made the Sunday morning talk shows, and the Times dismissed it with a lofty inference in its presidential-endorsement editorial for Clinton...
...We've got to stop the liberal bias in this country," he told a Texas audience...
...Imagine a First Wives Club with, say, Claire Bloom and Mia Farrow...
...Eventually, she interrupts: "Philip, why do you want to be friends with me...
...In fact, for all the fuss about her portrait of Roth, the crux of her argument comes in the chapter on her second husband...
...Paul (g if • Gov...
...Another writer (there's no shortage of them) likes to try it on with chicks with the line, "As a writer, I'm sensitive to the needs of women...
...As a realtor...
...nt meats end Memel...
...Though Miss Bloom was an unintended beneficiary of the split with Mia (in Mighty Aphrodite, she landed the role of Woody's mother-in-law which, in his recent work, had tended to go to Maureen O'Sullivan, Mia's real-life mom), she seems remarkably similar to Allen's characterization of Miss Farrow in Husbands and Wives: "passive-aggressive...
...David hidmosh• Sen...
...Female revenge is big at the moment...
...In the closing pages of Leaving a Doll's House, the great man, having devastated his ex-wife and reduced her to a one-room rental in New York, sends her a note: "Dear Claire, can we be friends...
...George Putrid • Rep...
...There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs...
...Gigi— older, worldly man takes in hand young unsophisticated girl he thinks he can mold...
...Joan Rivers, there was a huge gulf—and eventually, one lonely day in Philadelphia, Edgar Rosenberg jumped into a bottle of pills...
...It is both shameful and courageous," she says, "to take a record from life and use it as a means to an end...
...We've read the scene in a hundred novels, including a few by Roth...
...By comparison with his banal roman a Claire, her account has the sharper crises—as when Roth demands Bloom's teenage daughter be banished permanently from the house and dispatched toa youth hostel—and the more telling details: in the divorce settlement, he graciously returns her china, cosmetics, fax machine and all the various mementoes of their love, including the plastic figure from atop their wedding cake...
...They knew what the political guidelines were, and they had followed them, all the way to oblivion...
...It wasn't about the suicide, it was about coping with the suicide — and, in the end, all it was really about was changing the act: "My husband left in his will that I should cremate him and then scatter his ashes in Neiman Marcus...
...Inexperienced and sometimes apprehensive, I was a willing partner to his games stretching the boundaries of physical experience...
...By contrast, the Bloom/Roth marriage has now been written up from both sides, and what's striking is how much more persuasive the solid working actress's showbiz memoir is than the great novelist's work of fiction...
...Newt...
...For "Muse," read "source material...
...Althusser is the noted French philosopher, though these days he's not noted at all for his philosophy but only for his resolution of the conflict between his calling and his domestic arrangements in that hotbed of French intellectualism, the Ecole Normale...
...The American Spectator December 1996 57...
...Plato or a Mme...
...Philip has become "Philip" and Claire "Claire": he's not capable of being her ex-husband, only of playing him—auditioning the moment for some great work as yet unwritten...
...Yes, that Claire—the dreary, middle-aged actress married to the writer named Philip...
...As a plumber, I'm sensitive to the needs of women...
...The enjoinder not to read that stuff and not to watch television might have come from a pixie...
...She insists her book isn't an act of revenge, but on the jacket blurb she's happy to license a sneer from her chum Gore Vidal: "...A terse tell-all style of such candor that she even makes— inadvertently— her last husband, Philip Roth, into something he himself has failed to do—not for want of trying—interesting at last...
...There it is in four words, one of the most indestructible artistic traditions: the need of the creative soul—whether novelist or stand-up comic—to co-opt his spouse into the act and to saw her in two or more pieces...
...Amazingly, this line is so effective that, as he occasionally complains, it's dramatically cut into the time he has available to write...
...In some ways, the jacket tells its tale as much as anything inside...
...Marriage is ultimately only the research experiment for the art, and, if inthe process of dissection, the poor laboratory mice die, well, it's in service to a greater cause...
...That way he knew he would see me five times a week...
...But between "Edgar" the stage prop and Edgar the real Mr...
...For my own part, I'm always happy, if I'm in a motel room at two in the morning and can't sleep, and I've missed the rerun of "Leave It to Beaver" dubbed into Spanish, to stumble across another showing of Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin in Goodbye, Columbus...
...all during the campaign, Dole and his advisers had been reading the Times and watching television...
...mind...
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...Don't read that stuff...
...But of course...
...And don't look for mature reflections on the fairer sex from Chaplin or Allen or any other artist afflicted with the Pygmalion complex...
...Less a series of relationships than of disastrous star turns: the Womanizer, the Father Figure, the Sexual Sadist, the Mental Sadist...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
