"'That’s what I want carved on my gravestone. Philip Roth. He came here to be insulted.'"
From "Excerpt: Novelist Philip Roth’s Unsettled Marriage to Claire Bloom 'God, I’m fond of adultery,' Roth liked to say. 'Aren’t you?'" by Blake Bailey (Vulture).
That's from an excerpt from the Philip Roth biography we've been talking about, the one the publisher has been withholding because of allegations about the biographer. I've been reading about this book — have read several articles — and blogged it more than once. This morning, my readings brought me around to the subject of Claire Bloom, and I got to the point of blogging the quote above before I realized what I was reading was the writing of the accused man, the biographer — Blake Bailey. Strange!
Claire Bloom and Philip Roth sound like an awful pair. I don't know if I want to read about them. I considered buying Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House," but it's not available on Kindle. I'll keep her at a distance, as the star of one of my all-time favorite movies, "Limelight."
As for Philip Roth, it seems better to encounter him through his novels, and in fact, I'm reading one of his novels, "The Human Stain." When I blogged about the biography yesterday, I ran into a quote from that book, and it was fine enough to send me to Amazon to download the text and the audio.
Here, I highlighted one quote so far. It's all one sentence:
My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.
Sure, you can diagram it. I'll start: point | is....
ADDED: The OED defines "caterwaul" as "The cry of the cat at rutting time. Also transferred. Any similar sound." It could be modernized into "catwail," but it's an old word, first seen in English in this sentence: "If the cattes skyn be slyk and gay, forth she wil, er eny day be dawet, To schewe hir skyn, and goon a caterwrawet." That's Chaucer. Circa 1386.
FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy sends this, from a NYT article on Leaving a Dollhouse:
''He's tense; she's tense,'' Gore Vidal said from his home in Ravello, Italy. ''Each is neurotic. They were together 17 years; it couldn't have been all that bad.'' Like most of the couple's friends, Mr. Vidal is trying to distance himself from the memoir. ''It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces,'' he said. ''And their civil wars.''
Very funny and true!
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