“I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn’t question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world.”
Author Marilyn French wrote this passage in her seminal work The Women’s Room. I read her novel when it came out almost fifty years ago. I was in college, the year was 1977, and on campuses and town squares and city streets all over the country, men and women were demanding equal rights for everyone.
At the time, I was familiar with two books by Roth, Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth was over the top, eviscerating and defiantly Jewish, and viciously funny about Jewish mothers. I took college literature classes about important writers: the classics and contemporary writers including Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all the other males. The fact that French simply dismissed Roth along with many of them as ‘silly’ took my breath away. Marilyn French had the audacity to not be impressed! What exactly did French mean by her comment? Her words stayed with me.
Over the years I picked up other novels by Philip Roth. Each time I was impressed with the virtuosity of his writing, struck by the pomposity of his self-awareness of himself as a major writer, and appalled at his contempt for women. His female characters are embarrassing and pathetic. In Roth’s novels they weep copiously, threaten dramatically, and are inevitably reduced to a description of the shape of their tits and cunts. Roth’s male protagonist usually has four simultaneous affairs going on – as well as a wife who wants him back. Okay, I get it. It’s male fantasy. Good for you, Phil.
But the book I recently finished reading, 1979’s The Ghost Writer, goes beyond mere contempt for women. Roth wrote it at the time I read The Women’s Room and was still in college. The Ghost Writer was wildly feted and named a finalist for both the 1980 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In this short novel Nathan Zuckerman, the character Roth acknowledged as his alter ego, has fought bitterly with his Jewish parents about his writing. Nathan arrives at the secluded home of E.I. Lonoff, a great Jewish writer. Nathan is forced to spend the night when a storm hits and he overhears arguments between Lonoff and Lonoff’s wife, as well as Lonoff’s mysterious graduate assistant Amy Bellette.
Nathan lusts after Amy and believes she may be Anne Frank. Yes, that Anne Frank. According to Roth, she didn’t die in Bergen-Belsen. What an imagination! And who but the über-Jewish author, Philip Roth, could pull it off! As I read on, my initial admiration vanished. Anne Frank, now Amy Bellette, is in love with Lonoff, who is thirty (30!) years her senior. Zuckerman eavesdrops as she begs him to run away with her to Florence, Italy.
“Oh, Manny, would it kill you just to kiss my breasts? Is that dreamy, too? Would it cause the death of anyone if you just did that?”
“You cover yourself up now.”
“Dad-da, please.”
I couldn’t help it: I began to laugh. What woman says this sort of nonsense? Anne Frank begs him to kiss her breasts, would it kill him to give in and do it? And then I stopped laughing. “Would it kill you?”
In the next chapter, writing as Zuckerman, Roth creates a shameful past for Anne Frank. She hid her identity after surviving the concentration camp. Her father Otto Frank published her journal, and she can’t bring herself to contact him. Anne has transferred her father fixation to Lonoff. But perhaps she’s not Anne Frank after all….
The story is a metafiction as convoluted as Roth’s identity. Is Roth or Zuckerman speaking to us? Is Anne real, or is she Amy Bellette? The layers of identities and reality bend so far that the actual Anne Frank becomes inextricably bound up in who Philip Roth wants to be.
What a coward Roth is. He doesn’t have the courage to grant Anne Frank a worthy life. Instead, he effaces her identity while writing as Nathan Zuckerman. She exists only in Nathan’s imagination, where he now controls the details of her life and her actions. Maybe he can talk her into running away with him. He’ll show up at home with Anne Frank on his arm, and his Jewish family will forgive him. Anne Frank’s existence will redeem his own. Trying to destroy Anne Frank via his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman – while wanting to drape himself in the glory of her reputation – is repellant on so many levels. Metafiction indeed!
Roth as Zuckerman talks about Anne Frank as the Jewish writer who matters. He takes her identity as the world’s most revered Jewish author and purposely writes her as willingly under the sway of a great male Jewish writer. He turns her into a needy neurotic young woman, subservient and desperate, prepared to do anything to win his love.
Philip Roth isn’t content to relegate her to a footnote. The real Anne Frank did die. She succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Roth penned The Ghost Writer to erase Anne Frank’s terrible death and her marvelous writing. To eliminate the competition, so to speak. Thus is the natural order of things restored.
To be sure the reader doesn’t miss the point, Roth’s Anne Frank takes the name of Amy Bellette as her alias. “Amy she got from an American book she had sobbed over as a child, Little Women.” What matters to Roth is the title of the book, little women, and not the character of Amy March. It’s also an easy stretch to recognize the term belle lettres, bellistric in Amy’s chosen last name. Belle lettres are works of literature that are honest and straightforward. There is nothing complicated about them. Another definition of belle lettres and bellistric means they’re pretty and artistically pleasing, rather than particularly serious or filled with information. The Diary of Anne Frank? Oh, please. It’s a sentimental bauble. Go to real writers like Roth for meaningful literature. If this isn’t bad enough, what did Roth name the writer she’s supposedly obsessed with? Lonoff’s nickname is Manny. We mustn’t for even a moment forget who belongs on top: a man. Amen. Ah, men.
Roth was desperate to destroy Anne Frank. His hatred extends to having her repudiate her own significance. Roth/Zuckerman writes a terrible scene in which Amy tells Anne “The importance, so-called, of this book is a morbid illusion.” And yet, despite all his efforts to erase her, I console myself by recalling that Anne Frank and The Diary of Anne Frank was and remains assigned reading in high schools across the world.
Roth wasn’t. Roth isn’t.
JADI CAMPBELL is an American author who writes frequently for Stuttgart’s New English American Theater. She is a Best American Essays-nominated writer. Her work has been published in Epistemic Literary, THEMA, Hindsight, and the International Human Rights Art Movement Magazine. Her books are Broken In, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, The Trail Back Out, and The Taste of Your Name. Her most recent award was the Winner of the 2023 San Francisco Book Festival in General Fiction for The Trail Back Out. She is currently a Finalist for Greece’s 2025 Eyelands Short Story Award.
