Commentary |

on Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin Taylor isn’t shy about revealing that his long and close friendship with Philip Roth was the defining experience of his life. His longings for Roth are palpable, even now, two years after Roth’s death.  Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth doesn’t even attempt to be objective — while repeatedly claiming to be.  It reads more like a lopsided love story in which Taylor is often blinded by the light.

In his own earlier memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House (2017, Penguin), Taylor describes himself as growing up as an extremely sensitive gay asthmatic teenager who basked in the glow of his flamboyant best friend who would entertain the neighbors with elaborate puppet shows while Taylor looked on.  He knew even then that he “was a flop who decided like many flops before me, that reflected glory would be better than none at all.”  The pattern repeats with the commanding and sometimes controversial Roth.

Taylor claims that he and Roth spoke about everything — “novels, politics, families, sex, baseball, food, ex-friends, ex-lovers” and much else over thousands of hours of conversation, usually over dinner.  He loved when Roth would perform ventriloquisms for him, particularly of his imaginary relative Paprika Roth, a retired stripper living in Florida.  When sensing that Taylor was holding back, Roth would encourage him to be more candid.

But like many of Roth’s acquaintances, he was intimidated and hesitant to cross him. Taylor recounts the vigil and final hours at Roth’s hospital bed when he was surrounded by close friends and ex-lovers. In a moment alone with Roth, he told him that their friendship made his life worth living, and Roth replied that the same was true for him. But despite these mutual declarations, Taylor’s disappointments and resentments simmer. He doesn’t say so directly, but a lingering sadness in the margins casts doubt on his positive assertions. One wonders about Roth’s capability for friendship – though others have already written about his primary preoccupation with himself, mirrored in the aggressive narcissism of many of his fictional alter-egos. Even Taylor concedes that Roth was “a beguiling citadel: august, many towered, lavishly defended,” adding that the few who got a little closer to him found “someone quite different from the persona devised for public purposes.” But how close is close?

Taylor packs a lot of information into the first few pages of his memoir, then slows down. He tells us about Roth’s infatuation with his hometown Newark which his fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman described in “American Pastoral” as “not a neighborhood steeped in darkness.  The place was bright with industriousness. There was a big belief in life and we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success: a better existence was going to be ours. ” Roth would often describe his childhood as a happy, but something in his temperament suggests otherwise to Taylor.  He addresses Roth’s simmering angers and resentments and inability to reconsider his two failed marriages as anything other than his memory of them.  Taylor recalls how Roth would often end their phone conversations abruptly without remembering to say good-bye, and how irritated he would get if Taylor used a word at dinner he found distasteful or overused.

But exposing Roth’s shortcomings isn’t Taylor’s mission. He never wades deeply into controversies that surrounded Roth — his behavior with women, his irreverence toward Jewish authorities. Taylor would much rather tell us that after his brother died in a freak accident in 2006, Roth called him daily for months. He wistfully recalls listening to Roth speak about his early infatuations with Flaubert, Henry James, and Sherwood Anderson.  Or hearing his thoughts about mankind that now seem prophetic.  Roth always insisted that even the most solid of men are “taken to pieces when the blindsiding force of history comes to call.” He admired Roth’s certainty. When Claire Bloom, his second wife of 15 years, published Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, savaging him as controlling, demanding, and abusive, he refused to rethink any version of their marriage, claiming “his own angle of vision was complete and unfailing.  Other accounts were distortions.”

But when Taylor gets too close to uncomfortable truths, he retreats.  He claims, “There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be.  We spent thousands of hours in each other’s company.  He was fully half my life.  I cannot hope for another such friend.”  But we don’t really believe him.  There is an undertow of regret and hurt bubbling up between his words.  It is this tension that drives the narrative.

Others besides Taylor have attempted to capture the essence of Philip Roth. Lisa Halliday wrote an autobiographical novel, Assymetry, portraying her love affair with Roth when she was a young woman in publishing, and he was 40 years her senior.  She describes a man whose controlling and intimidating nature overwhelmed her, yet left her smitten by his loving tenderness and concern for her aspirations as a writer.  Jennifer Senior suggested that that Roth’s novels were often driven by a vindictive fury narrated by self-pitying alter-egos incapable of looking beyond their rage. Hermione Lee has emphasized his tireless work over his drafts. Michael Kimmage makes note of his preoccupation with letting go and the reluctance to do so. Hillel Italie believes that Roth, the son of an insurance salesman and a stay-at-home mother, shared their wish to become, “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness.”

But none of these interpretations mean much to Taylor who sees Roth through a lens of adoration and ongoing infatuation.  There is an achingly tender beauty to his recollections of their time together; and his ongoing longing for his friend.  Ironically, it is Taylor’s fearlessness instead of Roth’s that impresses me here; he puts his heart on the page and shows us what it feels like to love someone almost recklessly and to want more from them. Always more.

 

[Published by Penguin Books on May 19, 2020, 192 pages, $26.00 hardcover]

Contributor
Elaine Margolin

Elaine Margolin’s is a book critic for The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Jerusalem Post, Denver Post, Truthdig, Times Literary Supplement, and several literary journals. With an emphasis on nonfiction, she has been reviewing books for over 20 years “with a sense of continual wonder and joy.”

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