Summertime in Connecticut
When Philip Roth’s novel Zuckerman Unbound came out in 1981, a June Saturday Review featured the 48-year-old novelist on the magazine cover with the headline: “Philip Roth Still Waiting for His Masterpiece.”
By most accounts, that “masterpiece” would come to readers 16 years later with the publication of American Pastoral in 1997. Of interest to us looking back is that along with Henry Weil’s Saturday Review cover story was a short article by Roth’s close friend Richard Stern sharing his impression of a stay at Roth’s home in Connecticut where writing and companionship thrived the summer before in 1980.
Stern, who became Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at University of Chicago, began his friendship with Roth when they met at the university in 1956. Roth was 23, and Stern, 28. It became a “57-year-long literary conversation and friendship,” Roth wrote in a remembrance after Stern died in 2013.
Of those summer days in 1980, Stern wrote that he was one of Roth’s regulars at summer retreats, and upon getting to his assigned room on the second floor, Stern saw a view out his window of lawns, apple trees, a hay field, and Roth’s partner Claire Bloom (they would marry in 1990) hanging out clothes to dry before driving to get the night’s vegetables and swimming 40 laps in the pool upon her return.
“This is no vacation retreat,” Stern wrote. “It’s a house in which vocation and vacation fuse. The whole point is there’s no vacation. Not that the atmosphere doesn’t alter when a book’s being started instead of finished or a play’s getting prepared rather than recovered from.”
“…This is a house of fiction-makers. Human beings in and out of the house, in and out of books, are analyzed, magnified, felt with and against so that more interesting ones can get invented. During the day, everyone’s at a different typewriter; groans over misplaced commas are bouncing off every wall. We assemble at meals, breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table, Roth and Bloom squeezing oranges, cutting bread, pouring coffee. In late afternoon, it’s the pool under birch trees…”
Stern added that there could be a wrap-up seminar and a candle-lit dinner at the table in the barn and someone back at a typewriter at night.
Through the years, Roth credited Stern, whose own best- known novel would be Other Men’s Daughters as the key motivator to Roth getting his first book published. During their lunches in Chicago, Roth would tell stories about growing up in New Jersey and after recounting one summer romance, Stern told him to “write it down.” Roth did and his novella Goodbye, Columbus came out in May 1959.
Of Stern, Roth wrote:
“Frequently, while listening to Dick speak of a new colleague, project, sorrow, hardship, idea, improbability, of another blast of news from the great fallen world—while listening to his vivid, focused, unfailingly unhackneyed responses—the same three words would be catalyzed in me: ‘You’re so human.’”
References:
Richard Stern, “Roth Unbound,” Saturday Review, June 1981, pp. 28-29.
Philip Roth, “A Formidable Writer, An Exceptional Man: Philip Roth on Richard Stern,” Literary Hub, Sept. 1, 2017. https://lithub.com/a-formidable-writer-an-exceptional-man-philip-roth-on-richard-stern/