CLAIRE BLOOM'S COMPLAINT

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Is [love] what binds all these couples we know together--the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? ...Please, let us not bull__ one another about "love" and its duration. --Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

Even the most casual readers of Philip Roth's fabulously inventive novels, those slyly tangled weavings of fiction and autobiography, can get some sense that the author might not make an ideal mate. An unforgettable lover, perhaps; a witty dinner companion, absolutely. But Roth, as Alexander Portnoy's psychoanalyst might put it, clearly has some "issues" about women.

The English actress Claire Bloom may have known all this in 1990, when she and Roth at last wed after 15 difficult and profoundly engaging years living together in London and Connecticut. Yet according to Bloom, nothing prepared her for the mental collapse she says Roth suffered in the early 1990s and for the subsequent psychological torture he inflicted on her--a shattering breakdown that is the climax of Bloom's new memoir, Leaving a Doll's House (Little, Brown; 272 pages; $23.95).

Bloom's descriptions of her now ex-husband's bizarre behavior--which included sending her bills for $150 an hour for the hundreds of hours he spent going over scripts with her and for $62 billion for contesting their prenuptial agreement--have been setting New York City literary circles abuzz, but Bloom waits until she is more than halfway through this memoir to begin dishing the dirt. For, Roth aside, Bloom, 65, has her own moderately interesting story to tell. She starred in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, played virtually every major classical role on the stage and has acted opposite--and been romantically involved with--some of the great leading men of her era. About these men, she has much and, in the way of people who cannot translate the lessons of therapy into compelling prose, frustratingly little to say. Of her great passion, Richard Burton, she says their love was "precious and deeply spiritual for us both," while a dry and rather lifeless Laurence Olivier was "brimming with a kind of false charm." Bloom also devotes a chapter to her nine-year marriage to Rod Steiger, with whom she had a daughter, Anna.

For Roth, though, Bloom sacrificed everything. Early in their relationship, for instance, the author told Bloom that he refused to share a home with Anna, and the girl, 18, was promptly kicked out. Then in 1993, Bloom writes, Roth spiraled into a severe, inexplicable depression. He was institutionalized and became deeply paranoid, accusing his wife of trying to poison him, dredging up misdeeds, real and imagined, and, in the end, divorcing her. With this sad memoir Bloom gets the last word--for now. But it is hard not to wonder what will happen when Roth turns his novelist's eye to this same material. Claire Bloom has good reason to shudder at the prospect.

--By Elizabeth Gleick