ellauri106.html on line 126: A committed atheist, Philip Roth feared only one form of posthumous punishment: being trapped for all eternity in a hostile biography. In 2007, Roth, echoing a similar quip from Oscar Wilde, said, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Roth’s had already been the subject of a harsh and unforgiving portrait in Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), the memoirs of his former wife, the actor Claire Bloom. As John Updike noted in The New York Review of Books, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” This crisp summary ended Roth’s friendship with Updike, even after Updike made clear he was recapping Bloom’s book and not affirming its accuracy.
ellauri106.html on line 179: Today the lengthy obituaries are all laudatory. Tomorrow or the next day I can safely predict that the backlash will begin with harshly critical essays. Leading the way will be Feminists critics who will denounce the whole cabal of elite white men as the custodians of the literary cannon. More pointedly they will charge Roth with toxic masculinity and misogyny and will come loaded for bear with plenty of quotes from his work. They will also have the example and testimony of his two ex-wives, both of whom showed up thinly disguised in his novels—a Margaret Martinson in When She Was Good and actress Clare Bloom in I Married a Communist. Bloom penned her own bitter exposé of their 14-year-long relationship and four year marriage in he memoir Leaving the Doll’s House.
ellauri106.html on line 386: A committed atheist, Philip Roth feared only one form of posthumous punishment: being trapped for all eternity in a hostile biography. In 2007, Roth, echoing a similar quip from Oscar Wilde, said, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Roth’s had already been the subject of a harsh and unforgiving portrait in Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), the memoirs of his former wife, the actor Claire Bloom. As John Updike noted in The New York Review of Books, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” This crisp summary ended Roth’s friendship with Updike, even after Updike made clear he was recapping Bloom’s book and not affirming its accuracy.
ellauri106.html on line 624: Roth’s ex-wife, Claire Bloom, wrote about their relationship in her memoir, Leaving A Doll’s House, 25 years ago. You could also read Roth’s not-exactly-contrite reaction to Bloom’s complaints, his 1998 novel, I Married A Communist, in which the protagonist’s vicious wife was clearly based on Bloom.
ellauri109.html on line 567: Roth and Bloom divorced, miserably, in 1995. A year later, Bloom published a memoir, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” in which Roth was depicted as brilliant and initially attentive to the demands of her career, but also as unpredictable, unfaithful, remote, and, at times, horribly unkind, not least about Bloom’s devotion to her grown daughter. The book quoted incensed faxes that Roth sent Bloom at the end of their union, demanding that she pay sixty-two billion dollars for failing to honor their prenuptial agreement, and another bill for the “five or six hundred hours” that he had spent going over her lines with her.
ellauri109.html on line 569: Roth was flattened by “Leaving a Doll’s House” and the bad publicity that came with it. He never got over it. “You know what Chekhov said when someone said to him ‘This too shall pass?’ ” Roth told Bailey. “ ‘Nothing passes.’ Put that in the fucking book.”
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