A Domesticated Philip Roth? Vogue Profiles the Late Writer with Claire Bloom in 1983
In 1983, Vogue interviewed the late Philip Roth, who was living in a “pastoral idyll” in Connecticut with the British actress Claire Bloom—whom he would go on to marry for four tumultuous years. Bloom would write unsparingly about her marriage to Roth in her 1996 memoir Leaving the Doll’s House and you can just detect a hint of domestic unease in Cathleen Medwick’s acutely observed profile. (When Roth and Bloom sit outside together, it is not for companionship; they read and, Roth says, “I say shh a lot.”) Roth is ever the alpha: He lays ground rules before Medwick’s interview and answers some of her questions with obfuscating sarcasm. Bloom, meanwhile, is gamely transparent about her acting career—and demurs once or twice to her boyfriend. (“I mean,” she laughs, “[that’s] what I tried to say, but not as well.”) It’s a fascinating portrait of a celebrity relationship and of a writer in mid-career (Roth's new novel that year was The Anatomy Lesson) whose fealty to his work was absolute. And yet, the portrait is not all writerly ego: Roth talks revealingly about one of his best novels, the slender, unforgettable The Ghost Writer and the television adaptation starring Bloom. There are surprises too—Roth admitting that an empty stage scares him to death. And his thoughts about love? “I don’t need anyone else,” he says. “That’s probably why I chose to do what I do.”
Here, in its entirety, is Cathleen Medwick’s October, 1983, profile.
It is a soft, breezy day in northwestern Connecticut. There is an old farmhouse, fronted by a sea of tall grass; beyond that, deep woods. Philip Roth walks quietly in his meadow . . .
Philip Roth? In his meadow? The writer who gave us Portnoy and Zuckerman, those anguished urbanites—Roth, the kid from Newark, strolling now alongside stone fences, his sneakers wet with dew? Roth, whom critics insist on confounding with his characters—narcissistic men with embarrassing “complaints”—this same Philip Roth, it turns out, has been living a pastoral idyll for eleven years. True, he spends some time in London; but this eighteenth-century dairy farm is home. While Nathan Zuckerman was bruising his soul in Chicago (in The Anatomy Lesson, the final volume in Roth's just-completed trilogy), Roth was curling up before the fireplace in his grey shingled house. “In the winter,” he says fondly, “the smoke curling from the chimney looks like a child drew it.”
A simple life, but not a solitary one. Roth lives here with British actress Claire Bloom, a friend for many years—another worldly, displaced spirit, although, unlike Roth’s, her fame has never verged on infamy. If anything, she has had to battle the world’s vision of her as “the English rose”—a dark, delicate beauty who seemed born to play Ophelia, or Juliet, but has bared her thorns in roles ranging from Blanche DuBois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, to Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited. In January, Bloom appears as a New England woman married to a famous and temperamental author in a BBC/PBS co-production of Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer—a role she felt supremely competent to play.
“I was so rich, you know. I knew so much... It was, in a way, our house—not our happiness, but our quiet life, recreated out there in Vermont. Very strange. But I’d lived it. I knew what to do in the kitchen, and I knew the attitude of a writer when he doesn’t want to be disturbed by the telephone... And then, I’d had the advantage of talking to Philip about it....”
Claire Bloom is sitting on the long wicker sofa in a room of the house that was converted from a woodshed and is now a sort of sun porch. She looks decorously exotic here: the way she is dressed—in a flowing cotton skirt striped with burgundy, blue, and black; and her jewelry—amber beads from Marrakesh (a gift from Philip), silver bracelets and rings. She is always quietly moving and twisting her hands in her lap as she speaks. Her legs are perfectly still.
She is one of those women who can imperceptibly enter or leave a room: part discipline, part grace. She is never obvious. When she brings the coffee and tea, you never hear the cups clink, and you can’t remember how she got past you and sat down.
Philip Roth, on the other hand, is rather sudden—he can move fast. No hurry; he just seems to like getting from one point to another, like any good administrator. He shows the house, pointing out this added-on window, that original roof; that cartoon on the wall of his study (he also writes in a log cabin on the grounds), a friend's drawing of a writer knifing a rotund and prostrate critic; the custom-made writing board that the author uses on plane trips. Not pointed out (no need): the poster of Kafka; the photos of Claire—as the Queen in Richard II, and with Chaplin; the large picture of Tolstoy; the alphabetized books; the paperback edition of Portnoy et Son Complexe.
Roth seems to take pleasure in his house and grounds, which he describes as “manageable.” He is not playing the gentleman farmer: no puttering in the garden, no tilling of the soil. He is here to write. When Philip and Claire sit outside, in a screen-enclosed dome, it is not to commune with nature—or with each other. They both bring books and, explains Roth, “I say ssh a lot.”
Right now, he is making his way past the yellow daisies, past the chorus of crickets in the meadow, toward the old house. He is laying some ground rules for the interview—everything’s under control. He is also making jokes, for his own amusement: he is a man who likes to laugh. You would also guess that he likes to brood. He especially enjoys punting questions (Interviewer: “How did you and Claire meet?” Roth: “At the senior prom. Claire was there with another guy, but I had the car.”) He has an uncommonly distinctive profile—you would know him immediately in silhouette—suggesting some bird of prey, an eagle. He is probably amused by his looks.
The television version of The Ghost Writer is Roth’s first attempt at translating his fiction into film. He wrote the script. He also suggested Claire Bloom for the role of Hope. Beyond that, Roth says, he had little influence. “Once the writing was finished, I was sent off to pasture. People were very courteous to me. I was treated like a nice old gent. ‘Put Mr. Roth into a taxicab. Be sure he doesn't fall.’” Expendable—and that was, perhaps, a new experience for Philip Roth.
“The point about being a novelist is that you're absolutely in charge. You're the director, and you're the casting director, and you're the cast. I think I prefer that.”
The Ghost Writer, the first novel in Roth’s trilogy, is the story of Nathan Zuckerman, a rising young writer who has come on a sort of pilgrimage to the isolated rural home of E.I. Lonoff, an aging literary giant who has removed himself from his admiring public in order to write. As Zuckerman learns, Lonoff’s noble vocation is a torture to his wife, Hope, a white-haired Boston aristocrat, and an inspiration to one Amy Bellette, an enchanting girl-woman who helps Lonoff organize his work with a passion that distresses Hope still more. But who is Amy, where is she from? She has an accent (“from the country of Fetching,” as Lonoff cavalierly remarks). For Nathan, she becomes a fantasy: She is Anne Frank, miraculously alive and in her late twenties, hiding herself from the world in order to keep her legend intact.
When this scenario evolved in Philip Roth’s brain, it made one kind of sense. Onstage—that was another matter. Roth: “When you write a book, no matter how much you ‘see’ it, you don’t see it—the force of actuality is not present.” For example, the character of Hope—she turned out to be rather stronger in person than she did on the page. Stronger than Roth knew.
“When Philip wrote about her,” says Bloom, “one saw her as a rather passive, beaten-down woman, interesting because of her relationship to her husband. I didn't realize that she was interesting in herself. But when you, as an actress, start to bring her to life, she’s not at all passive. Things happen in your acting, you don't plan it.”
Did Bloom bring a lot of herself to the role of Hope?
“I don’t know how you play anything that you don’t bring a lot of yourself into, frankly. I know there are supposed to be great character actors who play roles totally away from their personalities—and in that case, I’m not one. That’s all. When I read a script, my immediate reaction is yes or no—but immediate. And nearly always right. Not that I haven’t made mistakes, obviously. But the first feeling is that something connects with what I’ve experienced, or might have experienced, or could experience. Hope is quite a familiar face.
“She is a very interesting woman, independent and strong. Independent in a dependent environment, really.”
And Roth (dare we ask the question of any novelist?) does he bring much of himself to the characters he creates?
Well, yes—and no.
“The difference between a writer and someone who doesn’t write is that the writer has something beyond self, which is imagination. I find that when certain people read books of mine, they say, ‘Well, did that happen to you?’ And I say, ‘No.’ Then they’ll say, ‘Well, we don’t believe you,’ and I’ll say to them, ‘Don’t you see that what separates me from you is I can make things up? That’s how I earn my living.’ Tolstoy said you can see a street fight and write War and Peace—you know, you don’t have to see a great battle to understand what combat is. You need something, some juice to get you going. If you had only the self, you wouldn’t be a writer, you’d be something else. But you have this other thing that, for lack of a better word, is called imagination.
“Let’s take the case of Lonoff, who is fifty-seven years old. I’m not fifty-seven years old now, and I was even younger when I wrote this book, but I certainly can project myself into that situation, and that’s an act of imagination. I don’t have to have lived it. If I had to live everything I wrote about, I’d be stuck.”
Not to mention, exhausted. ...
Roth: “Well, you do what your temperament requires. Hemingway had to go to Africa and shoot lions; and Chekhov didn't go anywhere, really, except finally to that prison camp in Siberia, and he never wrote fiction about it. When he finally did go off in search of experience, as it were, he couldn’t make fiction out of it. He could make fiction only out of what flowed through his own life. What you’re doing in those little rooms where you sit by yourself as a writer is not reconstructing your life—you’re taking those germs and letting them sprout, aren’t you?”
Bloom agrees—that is what she was saying. “I mean,” she laughs, “what I tried to say, but not as well.”
She goes on: “I suppose, in a way, an actor is more caged than a writer because as an actor you’re limited by your body ... but, even so, what dictates the range of your work is what you are capable of imagining yourself doing. You don’t have to murder a Duncan to play Lady Macbeth. But you do have to think that you are capable of doing such a thing.”
Can Philip Roth see himself as an actor?
“Not since I was in school. I just wanted to stand on the stage. In the light. No, no, I couldn’t begin to do it. I remember picking Claire up at night after she’d been in a play in London. She’d be dressing, and I’d walk out onstage and stand there, just—terrified.” (To Claire): “Do you ever feel that way?”
Bloom: “God, yes.”
Roth: “I’d stand there on the stage and think, how does she dare do this? No one was there, and my heart was pounding.”
About two years ago, Roth adapted a translation of Chekhov for a television production of The Cherry Orchard in which Bloom appeared. That was when he first had occasion to watch actors at work, in rehearsal, making the most awful mistakes and correcting them— much the way writers did, in fact.
“The experience of writing is mostly saying, ‘This is wrong. This word is wrong, this sentence is wrong, this page is wrong.’ Actors have to do all that in front of people, be wrong all the time—that’s mostly in rehearsal....”
(Bloom, quietly): “Not only in rehearsal.”
Roth: “Well, but in rehearsal you get the first draft. That's where it's really happening.
“I think being a director is like being a writer. I do it quietly to my page, to myself. You keep saying, ‘This isn’t right, no, no, no, no, the other way. You talk to yourself, I think, the way a good director probably talks to actors. And that is sometimes very sweetly and gently, and sometimes saying, ‘Look, take a walk, this stinks.’ ”
In her autobiography Limelight and After, Claire Bloom talks about actors’ failings—how they signal that they are in trouble with a role: “It’s a professional affliction that almost no one escapes...I have a little gesture that’s an obvious sign of tension—the arm is straight down and I raise my wrist so my hand is parallel to the ground...It’s like something you might do out of nervousness at a cocktail party. You put on some kind of face or voice, some act that...you hope will get you by until you can get the hell out of there and on to something else.”
Where did she get the nerve to expose a secret like that?
“Ah, well, I thought I’d give a lot of people an ax to hit me over the head with. ... I found that a very difficult part of the book to write, because I knew I would be giving things away. I tried to be specific about how one acts. And it’s a very mysterious and peculiar process altogether; but it’s interesting to try to pin it down.”
An urge to pin down the mystery is apparently what enables Claire Bloom to speak frankly about her abilities and limitations—the difficulty she had in being both a good mother and a good actress; the reasons for her failure to become a grand-scale Hollywood star (“In films, I fear I was a lady, and that is just fatal to anybody”). She is a woman who appears to have sacrificed certain illusions for the sake of emotional clarity.
The frustrations of being an actress: “I have to rely on other people, on things and ideas that are not mine. And it’s too late now; that’s what I chose to do, and that’s the world that I live in. I hesitate to say it, but I think my world is much more difficult than any other. It’s chancy; and for the kind of person I am, that’s not a particularly good way to live. I’m someone who likes to be in control, but I can’t.”
For Roth, of course, it is otherwise: “I don’t need anyone else. That’s probably why I chose to do what I do. And she needs a whole world.”
But he is also—surprisingly—philosophical about an artist’s limitations: “As you go on in a career in the arts, what do you learn? You learn what you can’t do. And that’s exactly what happens over ten, twenty, thirty years. You know what you can’t do. Others may accept it as your style or your trademark, your appeal. It may be the very thing that’s most appealing, which is what others may call your ‘vision.’ You yourself may feel it as your limitation, your boundary.”
In a sense, much of Roth’s fiction is about the artist and his limitations. Lonoff is a case in point—his great limitation being that he is so thoroughly an artist. And then there is Nathan Zuckerman who, in the course of three novels, discovers what he is not.
“I wanted to take this writer through three stages of his career, the beginning, the middle—and the middle. And so the first book is about the enthusiasm, and the conflict, and the obsession. Then the next book [Zuckerman Unbound] is about his strange success. The last book is about Zuckerman’s exhaustion in his forties, his exhaustion and his growing distaste for his own vocation—if not hatred of it—and his attempt to leave it.
“In The Anatomy Lesson, there are other consequences which appear to be physical— the ruin of his body, the toll that’s been taken by his career. He decides to leave Manhattan and his life there, and become a doctor. There's nothing more different from being a writer than being a doctor. People actually need doctors—they don't need writers. But there’s more to it than that. Zuckerman winds up in the hospital as a patient rather than as a doctor. In short, for him, there's no way out.”
There is a scene in The Ghost Writer in which Hope, frustrated by Lonoff’s relentless nobility, his faithful marriage to his profession, screams at him, “I cannot take any more moral fiber in the face of life’s disappointments.”
That sounds like a line either Philip Roth or Claire Bloom might have said.
Roth laughs. “I don't know what it means. I go completely blank when I hear it.” (To Bloom): “Do you know?”
“I think it means she’s had it up to here.”
“She’s talking about Lonoff,” explains Roth, “Not giving in to his yearning for Amy, and not giving in to the monotony and boredom. . . .”
“... and being,” continues Bloom, “such an endlessly honorable man. Whereupon, Hope says, ‘I’ll go to Boston, I’ll go to the end of the world. I’ll go anywhere. Just let me out of this.’ ”
“ ‘Let me out of the prison of your decency’ ”—Roth is getting into the spirit now. “But it’s complicated because the prison of his decency may well keep her together. Who knows? Lonoff is, as Claire says, a bottomlessly honorable man who has this fiendish dignity that she feels as a prison. ... I did write it. I didn’t say it.”
Bloom laughs now. “And I said it. I didn’t write it.”
[This profile was originally published in the October 1983 issue of Vogue.]
