Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir

I just was reading the most recent of Philip Roth's books, which I adore. I have read everything he's written more than once. Then I decided to open "Leaving a Doll's House" again. I was taken with how honest is Bloom, and how what others take to be personal vitriol really isn't. It was more fun reading Bloom after Roth. She's not a genius and she gives him plenty of credit for being one, but she is smart and has a great warmth... and is not just dishing about Philip but is telling how it was for her. Is there a woman alive, over 30, who would not totally relate to her hurt? Well done, Ms. Bloom.

I think the British honor of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire has missed wonderful Claire Bloom. In this book, she reveals all to her audience including her difficult and turbulent relationship with equally brilliant and disturbed Philip Roth. Their union should have been a happy one but it wasn't after so many years together. Sadly, their relationship ended in divorce. I remember watching this glorious actress on As The World Turns as Lily's mother-in-law, Orlena. As Claire gets older, she gets better on stage, film or television. I would love to see her become a Dame because she is in every sense of the world. While she writes about her life, she writes about her relationships especially with Philip Roth and understands him better than literary critic could because she was so close to him. As somebody who has read many of his works, Roth is both a literary genius and equally troubled as a person. He wrote that he didn't need to be surrounded by people but Claire needs constant human contact. Somehow, these two brilliant artists didn't make it. It's not a happy divorce but then what is. I think Claire for the first time needed to be independent and free from a relationship with a man like Philip Roth. Prior to Roth, she was married to Rod Steiger and Hillard Elkins. I think Claire like Nora in Henrik Ibsen's Doll's House needs to leave for her own sanity and become independent and free of others. I hope Claire has happiness in her life. Still, I believe she deserves to be a British Dame.

Claire Bloom put her heart into this book, writing the truth about her life with the same sensitivity and refinement she brought to so many of her stage and film roles. Of course, critics hated it -- especially female critics. And you know why? Because there's nothing ugly ducklings hate worse than the idea that even swans suffer. For nasty old yentas like Daphne Merkin, it's bad enough that Claire Bloom is the most perfect, lovely English rose who ever lived. They hate her for that no matter what she happens to be like as a human being. But the fact that she can feel, and think, and love, and write -- intolerable! This book reveals all the horror of Philip Roth's failures as a writer and a human being. The fact that his self-loathing is so often disguised as megalomania and artistic temperament is no excuse for the unbelievable suffering he caused to those around him. Reading this book makes it much easier to understand the fundamental ugliness of his later works. Plainly, Roth needs to believe that the whole world hates him as much as he hates himself. Reading the story, one senses that if anything Claire Bloom has been too kind, making excuses for a man who obviously has no pride and no shame, no sense of resonsibility and not a shred of common decency. Not even Trick E. Dixon or Big John Baal or Gil Gamesh himself could have behaved this atrociously! At the same time, Claire Bloom herself emerges from these pages as a very fragile soul who never really recovered from a painful childhood. It's impossible not to wish she had been a little stronger -- or that the men in her life had been more worthy of her. Gore Vidal, Yul Brynner, Richard Burton, all legendary figures in one way or another, yet none of them had the special decency or the courage to recognize the heavenly, radiant, ethereal beauty that was Claire Bloom. There will never be another like her.

Claire Bloom's "Leaving a Doll's House" is poignant in its honesty, but a bit underwritten. The first time I reached for my highlighter pen was on page 104, where Bloom describes a distraught Vivien Leigh. Leigh, of course, was the incomparable beauty who portrayed Scarlett O'hara in "Gone with the Wind." Leigh's marriage was unsteady; she suffered from mental illness. Leigh kept her emotions in check, but one night Bloom entered Leigh's dressing room and found her in tears. "Vivien in tears was not like anyone I knew; no red nose, sniffles...she simply sat at her table, in her beautiful scarlet [how appropriate] costume; diamond tears rolled down her cheeks, her beauty undiminished, her make-up untouched." What an image. Page 149 includes a similarly brief, and pointedly telling, anecdote. Bloom's husband, the author Philip Roth, insists that a skunk has anti-Semitic feelings toward him. This anecdote goes a long way towards explaining Roth's new book, "The Plot Against America." For the most part, though, the book is frank, and underwritten. For example, Bloom's father was a feckless businessman and gambler who abandoned Bloom, her mother, and her brother. Years later, when she became a successful actress, Bloom's father reappeared, backstage in her dressing room, with a new, rich wife in tow. Bloom, by her own account, was pointedly cold and humiliating to him. Three days later, he died. "I believed," Bloom writes, "that it had been my callous behavior that had killed him" (79). Bloom does not pause after this remarkable confession; only one sentence is offered as denouement, "I picked up and went on with my life." Bloom played an essential role in a superlative film, "The Haunting." This film is unsurpassed in its genre; its psychological and sociological undercurrents raise it far above most horror films. Though made in 1963, in black and white, and since remade, it regularly makes top ten lists for "the scariest movie ever made." Bloom never mentions it here. Too, Bloom partnered some of the biggest names among twentieth century actors: Richard Burton, Yul Brynner, Rod Steiger, Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier. If the reader had never seen a Burton film, I'm not sure he would get an adequate impression of Burton from this book. Bloom's Burton has intense green eyes; she quotes a critic who says, beautifully, that his voice is so powerful "he carries his own cathedral with him" (50). But this reader never understood why Bloom risked the pain she reports feeling being his lover while he lived with, and loved, his first wife, Sybil Burton. Bloom's brief fling with Brynner is enlivened by a late night visit to a Paris nightclub where Brynner, who mythologized his ethnic and professional roots, was adored, and sang with, the Gypsies he said raised him. The night was capped in Russian fashion, Bloom reports; drinking glasses were thrown against the wall. Pages 195-220 contain, without comment, Bloom's diary entries from a particul

Claire Bloom's journey deserves a considered read. She reveals that no matter how beautiful, successful and intelligent a woman she might be, when confronted with choices from men of greater success and/or influence, Bloom was willing to pay an inordinately high price to share their worlds---even the manic-depressive world of Philip Roth, in which Bloom ends up in a psych ward just as Roth is leaving it. Rather than condeming Bloom for her weaknesses, readers should thank Bloom for the candid tour .