Re Philip Roth:
the perpetual accusations of misogyny
Well, OK:
In the witness box for the prosecution: both wives, waving lurid accounts of two truly disastrous marriages. Roth was trying to break up with his first, Maggie Martinson, in 1959 when she announced, mendaciously, that she was pregnant. He asked her to take a test. Maggie found a pregnant woman in the park and paid her to pee in a jar. When the results came back positive, Roth agreed to marry her as long as she had an abortion. They divorced in 1963 after four histrionically unhappy years.
That’s evidence for misogyny? Or justification?
They clearly deserved each other…
+1 JM – as my mother would say, ‘they’d spoil another couple’.