On the girls – Jane Maas in TLS:

‘Jane Maas (then Jane Brown) met Philip Roth as a fellow student at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He played the Ragpicker to her starring role in Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot. They remained friends until his death in 2018. He showed her his writing and inscribed at least one book to her – from “the Ragpicker”.
After Roth died Jane got a contract for a book about Roth and his women. “Portnoy in Love” would explore his many relationships – and the one true love of his life. Lung cancer intervened. Jane didn’t have the strength to continue and she returned the publisher’s advance. She died in November 2018. What follows is from her book proposal.
Kenneth Roman, 2023’

(…)

‘For a time Philip thought about being an actor instead of a writer. Then he thought that instead of writing novels, he would write plays. He tried his hand at it, but never got very far. He explained to me that the only way he could think of getting his characters to exit was in order to go to the bathroom.’

(…)

‘Ever since I knew him at Bucknell Philip had been attracted to, and attracted by, women. And vice versa. After the publication of Portnoy, and the tales of his eroticism, fact or fiction, spread in the media, the attraction grew feverish. Jacqueline Susann famously said on a popular late-night talk show, “I’d like to meet Philip Roth, but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand”. He said, “I got sexual fame. I also got Mad Men fame. I got hundreds of letters, one hundred a week, some of them letters with pictures of girls in bikinis. I had lots of opportunities to ruin my life”. Philip managed to have affairs with some of the most beautiful, sexually desirable, famous women in the world. It didn’t seem to ruin his life at all.’

(…)

‘Philip moved to London in 1976 to live with the actress Claire Bloom. He claimed they were never happy, and that he married her only because she begged him to and he felt sorry for her. One evening at dinner with Philip in his apartment, I challenged his recollections of a dismal time from start to finish. “You looked pretty happy in those photos of you and Claire strolling London hand in hand.” He didn’t reply. Philip was never at home in London; it made him feel estranged. “England made a Jew of me in only eight weeks.”’

(…)

‘After the divorce Claire wrote a vicious nonfiction account of the marriage and its failure, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). She accused him of misogyny, physical and mental abuse, mental disorders and more. Philip countered with the fictional I Married a Communist (1998), designed to shoot down every one of her accusations. But Philip was still worrying this bone. Around 2014 he showed me another score-settling manuscript, in which he referred to Claire throughout simply as “Bloom”. Someone talked him out of publishing it.

There was yet another factor complicating the Roth-Bloom relationship. Philip was not a monogamous mate. In 1986, Roth and Bloom were invited to a dinner party for Leonard Bernstein at the American embassy in London. Some party planner with a sense of drama seated Philip next to Ava Gardner. “I used to go out with a boy from Hoboken”, Ava told Philip by way of introduction. The two remained in deep conversation for the rest of dinner. I can only imagine Claire’s fury. Of course Philip and Ava had an affair, and of course Claire knew about it. Ava would often have too much to drink and call to speak to her lover in the middle of the night. Claire would answer. The next morning Claire would tell Philip, “Your girlfriend called last night. I think she was drunk”. Philip told me he feigned innocence. “Girlfriend?” “Ava”, he wrote in Sabbath’s Theater (1995). “Blessed Ava. Wasn’t much about men that could astonish Ava. Elegance and filth, immaculately intertwined.”’

(…)

‘After my husband, Michael, died in 2002, I began coming into the city more often, so I saw more of Philip and heard from him too. Philip being Philip, he was worried about my being lonely or sad, and he entertained me with tales of his latest romance. That’s how I know there were a lot of Bettys in his life then and for the next decade.
I met some of them, saw photos or heard descriptions of others. They were all pretty, blonde, bright; they were all in their twenties. Two of them stand out. There was “Catherine of Oregon”, who made him cry; and Lisa Halliday, who made him laugh. Privately he praised her book. “She got me.”’

(…)

‘In early fall Philip and his doctors decided it was time for another back operation. (“My life is broken on the wheel of my back”, he once said to me, melodramatically. Sex, for this reason, was often difficult for Philip, and oral sex tended to be the best solution for him and his lovers.) He called to tell me that Catherine would not be there for his surgery. “She’s going to Rome with friends. She’s going to Rome instead of being with me.” He had never experienced such perfidy and began to cry. In the end Catherine’s father offered to buy her an apartment in Brooklyn if she would give Philip up. She chose Brooklyn.’

Read the complete book proposal here.

This must be one of the better book proposals and it makes me want to read ‘Asymmetry.’

I’m not sure how much will remain of the books by Roth, the same can be said about Bellow. But of course, I have to read and reread them again, before such an opinion can have any merits. And perhaps there will be a renaissance of the Jewish-American experience.

To me the best part of this book proposal was the anecdote father who offered his daughter an apartment in Brooklyn if she would give up on Philip Roth. The daughter chose Brooklyn, rightly so. You have to be practical in life.
Interesting also is that she didn’t continue the relationship in secret, at least according to this book proposal.