(4 of 5)
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 are, in some ways, an odd match; she needs people, other actors, crews, audiences for her work just as much as he requires isolation for his. So when Bloom is in rural Connecticut, her enforced idleness leads to a good deal of teasing banter. He: "There is no social life around here." She (to a visitor): "That's what he keeps telling me." He: "Nobody goes to parties. Hey, I got you a telephone, didn't I?"
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."
He 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 went to one of my Czech friends and demanded to know what Roth was up to, what does he want here. My friend answered, 'Haven't you read his books? He comes for the girls.' "
The distraction from his work Roth most willingly tolerates is baseball. "My fandom," he says, without a trace of irony, "is the most interesting fact of my life." He talks eagerly about going to games as a boy and watching the old Newark Bears of the International League along with his older brother Sanford and his father, now a retired insurance-company executive. His boyhood passion was the Brooklyn Dodgers. "I went off to college, and then the Dodgers went off to L.A.," he says, shaking his head. Eventually, he transferred his allegiance to the New York Mets. Last summer he had a dish antenna installed atop an outbuilding on the Connecticut property so he could follow the fortunes of the Mets on the road.