Review: Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sometimes at a funeral there will be that person whose central place confuses you. You’ll recognize the surviving spouse, siblings, and children, but then there will sometimes be that mysterious friend who’s given the same standing. Sometimes that person, recognizing the potential discomfort that comes with being elevated beyond other mourners, will be considerate enough to explain the backstory. Other times, the person stands presumptuously, implicitly blaming you for not recognizing the special nature of the friendship.

Benjamin Taylor is presumptuous here. He puts himself forward as a chief mourner of the great Philip Roth, and he takes it for granted that his memories of their friendship are a balm to those many of us who have mourned him after knowing him only from a distance.

Not long ago, I read and enjoyed James Atlas’s Remembering Roth – another of the short memoir/biographies of Roth that we are getting as we await the promised seminal biography from Blake Bailey. In it, Atlas told the story of how he’d been swept into Roth’s circle the way a lot of people were. Roth would find something to admire in a younger writer’s work, would send a note, and then their friendship would erupt.

Just as often, though, as Atlas tells it (and as others suggest), Roth would grow prickly and distant. He didn’t write such people out of his life, but he’d let a friendship lose its luster. Atlas is especially good at recording the slow-growing sadness of realizing that he was getting pushed out of an inner circle he’d been fortunate to be part of for a decade or so. There was always someone new, someone full of promise and without baggage to fill the vacated place.

Taylor, it turns out, was more or less the last man standing when Roth died. I understand there were others – Adam Gopnik was a famous late-life intimate – but, as we get the story here, Taylor is the central one.

And, whether that claim is true, his descriptions of it are almost cringe-worthy. On the last page – though it’s hardly the first time he says something so self-serving – he records saying to Roth, “You have been the joy of my life.” And then he quotes Roth’s answer, “And you of mine.” I’ll believe Roth said it, and I’ll believe he meant it. But I won’t believe he never said it to anyone else, and I won’t believe he’d have looked at his life differently a week before or a week after. We know enough about Roth’s mercurial moods to know that much of his power came from living within such moments.

As such, it’s an awkward and uncomfortable experience to have Taylor record such sentiments without putting them into a larger context. He never tells the story of his friendship with Roth; he merely basks in it. And that leaves the rest of us feeling like excluded mourners.

I could forgive some of that awkward tone if there were more substance or more new information here.

To Taylor’s partial credit, we do learn (for what I think may be the first time) that Roth did indeed continue writing after he stopped publishing. He has volumes of late-life material that some publisher will likely release some day. We also get some brief snippets of Roth’s private correspondence with Taylor, and some of the lines are genuinely memorable. One, for instance, is Roth’s observation, “Hawthorne, that visionary pessimist, had it right: Our enemies are forever the legions of purifiers and pleasure-haters.”

And then there’s Roth’s reported claim that he slept with Ava Gardner sometime in the 1980s. Here’s how Taylor records that in what may be the most uncomfortable moment in a short book filled with them. “ ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis? You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the eighties. When I had her.’ (I tell you this, reader, in strict confidence – as it was told to me.)”

As for substance, Taylor seems a solid reader of Roth though not an extraordinary one. He offers quick critical observations every now and then, but he rarely explores or supports them. One of my favorites, and potentially the most substantive claim in the book, turns on how Roth – who could not bring himself to believe in an afterlife – dealt with what it means to lose somebody, and to be lost oneself. As Taylor puts it, “Philip’s solution was to rename mortality and declare himself indestructible till death. It’s not a bad gloss on what’s always been the ultimate human problem.”

That kernel of insight might have served as the heart of a worthwhile book here. I’d have wanted to see Taylor slow down, give context to, and reflect on Roth’s fading years.

Instead, we’ve gotten something that awkwardly celebrates a friendship that, as it might have meant a lot to Roth and surely did to Taylor, doesn’t really concern itself with those of us who had our own readerly relationship to the man.


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