Word: rothe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unpracticed eye, Roth's ordinary routine might seem the epitome of boredom. His favorite place to write is a gray colonial 1790 farmhouse set on roughly 40 acres of land in Connecticut's Litchfield County. He bought the place in 1972, in part to get away from the demands and notoriety that had hounded him after Portnoy. He got plenty of solitude for his money, sometimes, he acknowledges, a bit too much: "Night up here can come down like a heavy thing." Before that happens, Roth has usually put in a reclusive day. By 9:30 each morning...
...Roth's monastic schedule varies only a little when Actress Claire Bloom, 55, is in residence. The two have lived together since 1976 and occasionally worked together as well. His co-adaptation of The Ghost Writer appeared on PBS's American Playhouse in 1984, with Bloom playing a woman trapped in her writer-husband's hermetic life somewhere in New England. Roth and Bloom are hardly trapped; they now divide each year between Connecticut and her house in London. "We try not to be apart for more than a month at a time," says Roth. The author and the actress...
Actually, he is not as curmudgeonly as this byplay suggests. In Connecticut, Roth and Bloom regularly see such neighboring friends as Arthur Miller, Richard Widmark and William Styron; London, her turf, involves plenty of evenings with theater and literary people, including Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser...
Another form of recreation for Roth is travel. In the early '70s, he left for Prague. An impression later arose that he went to Czechoslovakia out of guilt, a rich American attempting to atone for his success by visiting oppressed Soviet-bloc writers. "Guilt?" Roth asks. "I was out to have a good time." But he found Prague "overwhelming within an hour. I felt, as I did when I went to Jerusalem later, that this was a place I had to see again...
...made visits each spring and friends among Czech artists. This experience had literary consequences: The Prague Orgy, a novella recounting Nathan Zuckerman's misadventures in that city, included as the coda for the trilogy published as Zuckerman Bound (1985); and Roth's editorship of a series, "Writers from the Other Europe," which has given Eastern European writers exposure in the West. Roth's access to Prague ended in the mid-'70s, when his visa was not renewed. He had been tailed and questioned there, as had those who associated with him. "After I left one time," he recalls, "the authorities...