‘He is a great artist’

WARREN, Conn. (AP) — “Hello!” “Hello!” “Hello!”

Philip Roth calls out to the visitors he awaits in his garden on this warm, beautifully dry afternoon. He is wearing slacks and a blueish-green work shirt, reclining under the screened confines of a spacious and tentlike contraption known as a bug house.

What a picture this is. He could be a head of state at his summer retreat. Roth invites his guests inside the tent and offers lemonade. His smile is bright and playful, as if to say, “So, did you imagine you’d see Roth sitting under something like this? Will you write about me or will you write about the bug house?”

Bug houses are fascinating, no doubt, but let us write about Roth.

The author of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “American Pastoral” and many other novels has lived more than 30 years in the Connecticut countryside, in an 18th-century farmhouse.

Over the past half century, he has been accused of anti-Semitism and obscenity; found himself relentlessly, and unfavorably, compared to the characters in his books; survived heart surgery and a nervous breakdown; endured two contentious marriages, the latter to actress Claire Bloom.

But his mood is light today and the news of late has been welcome: Roth is the youngest living author to be given solo billing in the Library of America, which issues hardcover collections of the country’s most acclaimed writers. The first two volumes, covering his work through the early 1970s, are out this fall.

“He is a great artist,” says critic Harold Bloom. “He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and Henry James. There’s the endless variety of modes he works in. His style, his stance, his point of view.”

In the best sense, the Library of America project is like witnessing one’s own memorial. The library’s books are traditionally dedicated to dead writers or to those no longer active, such as Eudora Welty and Roth’s close friend, Saul Bellow, who died last spring.

Now, with Roth a lively 72, tall and straight-backed with dark, daring eyes, his work has been slipped inside shiny black jackets, stacked on shelves along with the works of Bellow, Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

“It’s an admission of the books into perpetuity,” Roth says.

His legacy officially secured, he could easily spend his remaining days at rest in his garden. But much of the time he is engaged at a pine cottage on the opposite end of the main house — his writing quarters, where he maintains a pace that has resulted in a finished book roughly every two years.

Solitude is so important that Roth jokes that even a cat would distract him. He writes standing up, typing on an old Dell computer in a corner near the window, printing his work and making changes in longhand on a lectern across the room. “The imagining is the hardest part,” he explains, “the imagining and the writing, which are intertwined; to imagine even the next page, to grasp all the details in the mind, to determine what’s interesting, what’s banal.”

The Library of America series reminds him of the past, but doesn’t inspire him to relive it. He says he has not reread his early books and can hardly remember them. When asked about a specific passage, he offers no explanation and jokes, “I’m probably the last guy you should talk to.”

Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, N.J., a time and place he has remembered lovingly in “The Facts,” “American Pastoral” and other works. The son of an insurance salesman, to whom he paid tribute in the memoir “Patrimony,” Roth has described his childhood as “intensely secure and protected.” He was, he later wrote, a “good, responsible boy,” but also “strong-minded and independent.”

He was always a reader, and by his junior year at Bucknell University, he had decided to become a writer. The key books, inspiration for many of his generation, were Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” and “Of Time and the River.”

“They were the Bible of aspiring young writers. They were fierce and romantic and displayed such an enormous appetite for life,” Roth says.

His debut book, published in 1959, was “Goodbye, Columbus,” a novella and five short stories. It brought the writer a National Book Award and some extra-literary criticism.

The title piece was a love (and lust) story about a working-class Jew and the wealthy girl he romances. The aunt of the main character, Neil Klugman, is a meddling worrywart, and the affluent relatives of Neil’s girlfriend are satirized as shallow materialists. Some Jews saw Roth as a traitor, subjecting his brethren to ridicule before the gentile world.

“It seemed pretty reckless and vicious,” Roth says, adding that the book was also praised by such Jewish authors and critics as Bellow, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin. “I was just trying to depict the way it was, the way it sounded, what they talked about. This was just what I observed or imagined.”

Roth calls his early books “apprentice” works and likens the process to a shoemaker learning his craft. The terse, but humorous “Goodbye, Columbus” was followed by “Letting Go,” a long novel about marriage and academic life. Five years later, in 1967, he released the most uncharacteristic work of his career, “When She Was Good,” an earnest story set in the Midwest, with a main character marked by two un-Rothian traits: She was a woman, and she was Christian.

“I got stuck,” he recalls. “I couldn’t figure out what to do. I had false starts. I would write a decent amount of pages and then put them aside. It was heartbreaking.

“I thought ‘When She Was Good’ was a good idea, as unlike ‘Letting Go’ as a book could be, as unlike ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ as a book could be, at least by me. I thought, ‘Well, try it and see if you can do it. See if you can write about … this angry young girl and … this part of the country you didn’t come from.’ “

To explain what happened with the next book, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth cites a scene from “Crime and Punishment” in which the lecherous Svidrigailov traps the lovely Dunya in his apartment, only to discover she has a gun.

“This,” says Svidrigailov, “changes everything.”

As did “Portnoy’s Complaint” for Roth.

“And I pulled the pistol,” he sighs.

To read “Portnoy’s Complaint” after “When She Was Good” is like watching a well-behaved dinner guest suddenly pound the table, leap from his chair and scream that he can’t take it any more. Published in 1969, a great year for rebellion, “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an event, a birth, a summation, Roth’s triumph over what he has called “the awesome graduate school authority of Henry James,” as if history’s lid had blown open and out erupted a generation’s worth of Jewish guilt and desire.

At last, Roth was writing with the charge of Wolfe and of Bellow in his own breakthrough book, “The Adventures of Augie March.” Narrated by Alexander Portnoy, Roth’s novel satirized the dull expectations laid upon “nice Jewish boys” and immortalized the most ribald manifestations of sexual obsession, forever changing the way readers thought of liver and cored apples.

“Saul used to refer to his first two books (‘Dangling Man’ and ‘The Victim’) as ‘correct books,’ ” Roth says. “To borrow from this great man, I would say mine were also ‘correct books.’ “

Although the novel was banned in Australia and attacked by scholar Gershom Scholem as the “book for which all anti-Semites have been praying,” many critics welcomed the novel as a celebration of creative freedom. “Portnoy’s Complaint” sold millions, making Roth wealthy, and, more important, famous. The writer, an observer by nature, was now observed. He was an item in gossip columns, a topic at parties, an inspiration for countless dirty jokes.

With Roth finding himself mistaken for Portnoy, several of his post-Portnoy novels amounted to a challenge: Is it fact of fiction? In “The Anatomy Lesson,” “The Counterlife” and other novels, the featured character is a Jewish writer from New Jersey named Nathan Zuckerman. He is a man of similar age to Roth who just happened to have written a “dirty” best seller, “Carnovsky,” and is lectured by friends and family for putting their lives into his books.

“For years and years, everything got read through the lens of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and I got read through the lens of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ in a very primitive and childish way,” he says. “But I survived.”

He is less controversial now, perhaps less famous. But over the past decade, he has been honored as simply a writer, from the fury of “Mickey Sabbath,” winner of the National Book Award, to the elegiac “American Pastoral,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Last year’s “The Plot Against America” was his most popular novel in a long time and its story, the anti-Semitic presidency of Charles Lindbergh, was proof that his imagination was active as ever.

“I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer,” says author and critic Cynthia Ozick. “There’s nothing he’s afraid to say.”

He is ever alert to time and mortality, worrying about “the long haul” and looking in wonder at those who keep at it into old age. He admires historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., still at work in his late 80s. And he remembers Bellow, who completed his last novel, “Ravelstein,” when he was 86.

” ‘Ravelstein’ was not my favorite book, although it has some beautiful portraits. … But the fact that he was 86 when he wrote it, which is incredible. To get up every morning and work? And think? And remember the words?”Roth says, eyes wide with amazement.