Philip Roth - Sabbaths Theater

SABBATHS THEATER

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 20032004.

Recently Roth received PENs two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for a body of workof enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose scale of achievement over a sustained careerplaces him or her in the highest rank of American literature.

Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013

ALSO BY PHILIP ROTH

Zuckerman Books

The Ghost Writer

Zuckerman Unbound

The Anatomy Lesson

The Prague Orgy

The Counterlife

American Pastoral

I Married a Communist

The Human Stain

Exit Ghost

Roth Books

The Facts Deception

Patrimony Operation Shylock

The Plot Against America

Kepesh Books

The Breast

The Professor of Desire

The Dying Animal

Nemeses: Short Novels

Everyman Indignation

The Humbling Nemesis

Miscellany

Reading Myself and Others

Shop Talk

Other Books

Goodbye, Columbus Letting Go

When She Was Good Portnoys Complaint Our Gang

The Great American Novel My Life as a Man

PHILIP ROTH

SABBATHS THEATER

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Epub ISBN 9781407018638

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Published by Vintage 1996

14 16 18 20 19 17 15 13

Copyright Philip Roth 1995

Philip Roth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

The author is grateful for permission to quote Meru and lines from For Anne Gregory, from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1934 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1962 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. The Sheik of Araby by Harry B. Smith, Ted Snyder and Francis Wheeler. All rights reserved. Made in U.S.A. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc., Miami, Florida 33014. The quotation on p. 88 is from Western Attitudes Towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present by Phillipe Aris, John Hopkins University Press, 1974. The quotation on p. 280 is from A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder, by R. P. Bentall, Journal of Medical Ethics, June 1992.

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Jonathan Cape

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ISBN 9780099582014

FOR TWO FRIENDS

JANET HOBHOUSE

19481991

MELVIN TUMIN

19191994

PROSPERO:

Every third thought shall be my grave.

The Tempest, act v, scene 1

E ITHER FORSWEAR fucking others or the affair is over.

This was the ultimatum, the maddeningly improbable, wholly unforeseen ultimatum, that the mistress of fifty-two delivered in tears to her lover of sixty-four on the anniversary of an attachment that had persisted with an amazing licentiousnessand that, no less amazingly, had stayed their secretfor thirteen years. But now with hormonal infusions ebbing, with the prostate enlarging, with probably no more than another few years of semi-dependable potency still hiswith perhaps not that much more life remaininghere at the approach of the end of everything, he was being charged, on pain of losing her, to turn himself inside out.

She was Drenka Balich, the innkeepers popular partner in business and marriage, esteemed for the attention she showered on all her guests, for her warmhearted, mothering tenderness not only with visiting children and the old folks but with the local girls who cleaned the rooms and served the meals, and he was the forgotten puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, a short, heavyset, white-bearded man with unnerving green eyes and painfully arthritic fingers who, had he said yes to Jim Henson some thirty-odd years earlier, before Sesame Street started up, when Henson had taken him to lunch on the Upper East Side and asked him to join his clique of four or five people, could have been inside Big Bird all these years. Instead of Caroll Spinney, it would have been Sabbath who was the fellow inside Big Bird, Sabbath who had got himself a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sabbath who had been to China with Bob Hopeor so his wife, Roseanna, delighted in reminding him back when she was still drinking herself to death for her two unchallengeable reasons: because of all that had not happened and because of all that had. But as Sabbath wouldnt have been any happier inside Big Bird than he was inside Roseanna, he was not much bruised by the heckling. In 1989, when Sabbath had been publicly disgraced for the gross sexual harassment of a girl forty years his junior, Roseanna had had to be interned for a month in a psychiatric institution because of the alcoholic breakdown brought on by the humiliation of the scandal.

One monogamous mate isnt enough for you? he asked Drenka. You like monogamy so much with him you want it with me too? Is there no connection you can see between your husbands enviable fidelity and the fact that he physically repels you? Pompously he continued, We who have never stopped exciting each other impose on each other no vows, no oaths, no restrictions, whereas with him the fucking is sickening even for the two minutes a month he bends you over the dinner table and does it from behind. And why is that? Matija is big, powerful, virile, a head of black hair like a porcupine. His hairs are