When Philip Roth pokes his head around the conference room door of the New
York office of his literary agency, he looks familiar to me — but not
because his photograph gazes out from the jackets of his books. I grew up on
the Upper West Side of this city, where Roth keeps an apartment these days
for when the winter weather at his Connecticut home becomes too severe. He
appears familiar because — his tall frame a little stooped, his look a
little anxious — he looks, at first, like any number of the older guys you
see trundling up Broadway, heading into the Fairway supermarket and peering
into boxes of eggs. But then, after the obligatory handshaking and hellos,
he settles into a chair, straightens his spine, fixes his dark eyes on me
and all thoughts of Fairway are banished from my mind. I tell him I’m glad
to meet him; that I get a feeling giving interviews isn’t his favourite
occupation. “I have worse things to do,” he says, but I am not convinced.
Philip Roth is a giant and no mistake. The boy from Newark, New Jersey, the
son of an insurance salesman, the upstart young novelist whose third novel,
Portnoy’s Complaint, caused a scandalous sensation when it was published 40
years ago (and probably put a whole generation off eating liver), has made
good. Unwilling as he would be to admit it, he is a scion of the American
literary establishment, and surely, now that Bellow, Updike, Mailer and
Miller have passed from us, its greatest figure. Roth made his mark with
Goodbye, Columbus — his first book, published in 1959. The New York Times
noted that this novella and accompanying stories by a 26-year-old “English
instructor at the University of Chicago”, as he was then, was an impressive
debut, “concerned with depicting the role of the Jew in American society”.
Goodbye, Columbus is a boy-meets-girl love story, on the surface: but his
characters’ American lives are shadowed by a generational past that has its
roots in the European ghetto from which their ancestors, and Roth’s, escaped.
When Portnoy’s Complaint was published, he was catapulted into celebrity, or
notoriety — Alexander Portnoy’s rantings from the psychiatrist’s couch, his
guilt-edged, gilt-edged tales of a suffocated life in the bosom of his
family and his adventures with girls nicknamed variously The Pilgrim, The
Pumpkin and The Monkey, caused that same newspaper to send a reporter back
to Roth’s own high school, Weequahic High, where they spoke to a real-life
psychiatrist, Dr Martin Weich, “who has maintained his friendship with Mr
Roth since high school”. “You could be misled,” Weich remarked, “if you took
everything very literally in the last book.”
That’s a good rule of thumb to apply when it comes to Roth. Ten years after
Portnoy he published The Ghost Writer, the first book narrated by Nathan
Zuckerman — perceived as Roth’s alter ego. (The Facts: A Novelist’s
Autobiography contains the following sentence in a final section addressed,
“Dear Roth,” from Zuckerman: “Your medium for the really merciless
self-evisceration, your medium for self-confrontation, is me.”) Zuckerman’s
character — that of an American of the middle part of the 20th century, a
Jew not particularly interested in Jewishness, with a healthy interest,
let’s say, in women — has become a classic figure of literature, an Everyman
(as Roth would title one of his most recent books) who is, at the same time,
absolutely an individual. There is a clarity, almost a ruthlessness, to his
work, which makes the experience of reading any of his books a bracing, wild
ride, whether it’s The Counterlife, a Zuckerman novel from 1986, or The Plot
Against America, a vivid fantasia from 2004 that imagines a United States
that elected the pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh to the presidency in 1940.
Such fearlessness, such vigour, has not gone unrewarded. The back flap of his
new book — his 30th — lists the prizes he has won in his lifetime: it’s a
long list. A Pulitzer prize; the National Medal of the Arts; the Gold Medal
in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the National Book
Award, twice; and the National Book Critics Circle Award, also twice.
He says, however, that such things don’t mean much to him. “The child in one
is always elated,” he says, regarding me coolly when I ask whether they
matter. “And the adult knows better. They’re all fine, it’s better to get
them than not get them. And you can only be snooty about them if you get
them. And I’m not snooty about them, but they’re markers that the literary
world makes, they’re relevant to the moment, but they don’t much change the
daily grind.”
That said, we are speaking two days before the Nobel Prize for Literature is
due to be announced: does he have any tips for that one? “I try not to think
about it,” is his deadpan answer, which is good enough for me.
But he’s right, of course, about the daily grind; the work will always be the
work. It’s in talking about the process of writing that he becomes animated,
alive. The Humbling is a short novel about a great actor, Simon
Axler, a giant of the American stage, who suddenly, mysteriously, feels that
he has lost his gift: what follows is the result of this catastrophic loss.
How did this book — how do all his books — begin for him? What starts them
off? He pauses. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “Out of nothing. This book
began with a story I heard years ago, about an actor, a successful
well-known actor, who’d forgotten how to act. That’s what I had to go on. I
wanted to see what would happen to him, really. So I began with that line,
‘He’d lost his magic’” — the first words of the book — “and went from there.
That was my springboard.”
Just those words, and a whole book follows — a book that will be his third in
three years. Indignation, set during the Korean War, was published
last year and another book, Nemesis, has already been finished and
will be published next year. Roth is 76, but shows no sign of slowing down,
despite open-heart surgery a couple of decades ago and back surgery more
recently. He has never not been productive, but over the past 15 years he
has shifted, it seems, into an even higher gear. Yet it is not ambition that
drives him. “I don’t know any other way to be a human being,” he says of his
ruthless work habits. Rarely a day goes by when he’s not at his desk. “I
don’t know any other way to be a man, except to do this. Without it I’d be —
the way Axler is, without his talent.”
The deaths of friends, too, make him think, but do not set him back. When I
mention the lost giants of literature, he adds William Styron and Harold
Pinter. “How does it make me feel, all these fellows dying? Very sad.
Several of them were friends. William Styron was a close friend, he also
died in the past few years, Arthur Miller was also a friend. I think I’ve
had something like six male friends die in the last couple of years. It
reminds me, if I need reminding, that time runs out. How does it make me
feel about my work? Well, I’ve done a lot a work, but I want to continue
working until I can’t work any more.”
I wouldn’t say that he seems haunted by loss, but I ask him whether he misses
his parents; he wrote movingly of his father’s death in Patrimony,
published in 1991. “For the first few years after they were dead, I went
through what everybody goes through, which is that you wish they had
telephones in cemeteries. Because I’d think of something I wanted to tell
them on the telephone — but of course they were dead. I’m over that, really.
But my brother died recently, so his death reawakened the memory of my
parents. So I’m the last of our little foursome, the last remaining.”
His work has to a large extent been inspired by his native land — the United
States of America, with all its glories and all its flaws. He balks at being
identified as a Jewish writer, saying simply, with laughter in his voice, “I
don’t write in Jewish.” He lived, of course, for a time in England, thanks
to his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom, mercilessly chronicled by her
in her memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, published in 1996. It
is, to say the least, an unflattering portrait, and reveals the author’s
struggles with depression that led to a period in a psychiatric hospital.
The breakdown of his relationship with Bloom aside, it’s clear that he was
never meant to live for too long on foreign soil. The trouble with living
overseas, he says, is that “you can’t see anything out of the corner of your
eye. You can only see what’s directly in front of you. You can’t pick up the
small clues. At least I couldn’t. I was losing touch with what was going on
in America. When I got back and saw my friends and talked to them, I
realised that I hadn’t read the paper every day.”
From 1976 he had lived in London seven months out of every year; in 1989 he
came back to the United States for good. “When I got back here I had a great
rush of enthusiasm, and a great sense that I was at home. I tell you, I was
driving over to New Jersey to see my father, about a week after I got back.
I must have been daydreaming in the car, and I cut somebody off. And the guy
rolled down his window, and said, ‘You f***in’ asshole, you f***in’ son of a
bitch!’ — and I said, pour it on! I can’t get enough. I was back in the
American stuff. I got re-interested in this place. And then quite
consciously I read about 20 American novels, books I’d read in the past. I
reread Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, lesser-known writers, too, just to
get my American juices flowing again. Then I began writing Sabbath’s
Theater. And though it doesn’t seem perhaps like an American book, it
is. Very much so.”
After that came the run of books that are thought of now as late, great Roth: American
Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain — the
American trilogy, as it’s sometimes called. “That was all pretty much a
result of discovering a new subject that was an old subject. I had a fresh
take on it,” he says. He is hopeful about the new President. “You know, if
McCain were President, there would be no health bill to debate; there would
be no policy in Afghanistan to reconsider; no economic stimulus package;
there would be a deep Depression. So whatever happens is the best that can
happen, given the circumstances, you know. So I am still rather high on
[Obama]. He’s done remarkably, really. He’s fighting an entrenched army of
ignoramuses. He’s not a magician.”
The Humbling, unlike its predecessor, Indignation, does not
engage directly with the political or the social: it is more like Everyman,
published in 2006. It is the story of a man’s life — or rather, of his
downfall. Having suffered the loss of his talent, Axley becomes involved
with a woman, the grown-up daughter of old friends of his. The relationship
goes awry when he begins to want it to be more than a temporary liaison —
and then a threesome, with a woman called Tracy the pair of them pick up.
Roth, who sees his work as a process of line-by-line “discovery”, didn’t see
that one coming: “You know there’s a scene in John Updike’s Rabbit
at Rest, the last book, where he’s recuperating from heart surgery, and
he’s staying with his son, and his son has to go out somewhere, and his
daughter-in-law is taking care of him. Tending to his needs, he’s in bed.
And — there’s a flirtatious conversation — and I remember reading it and
thinking, oh, you son of a bitch, you’re really going to do it. And of
course Rabbit screws the daughter-in-law. It’s so audacious, and so
wonderful, and inevitable — after the fact. And I remember getting that
feeling, are you going to really do this? And he did it. Well, a similar
thing happened to me in that scene with Tracy, so that all was ... my own
little ... porno kit.” He laughs. It’s a wicked laugh. “I had my own little
porno kit. I took the tools out of my porno kit, and I did the scene.”
That’s a handy kit to have, I say. “Oh, yeah. I’m going to sell them,” he
says. Now we’re both laughing.
Some people think the “porno kit” is his stock-in-trade; some that his books
are merely versions of his own life. He, however, has no truck with the idea
that his books (even the ones where the central character is called “Philip
Roth”) are autobiographical. The reality of life, he says, “is endlessly
mineable; because when you start to tell the story you never really tell the
story. You wind up telling quite a different story. In fact the original
biographical material is almost untouched,” he says. Many readers disagree,
I say. They think you’ve touched it and touched it again.
“Well, they’re wrong,” he says flatly.
It’s that simple?
“Simpler.”
And that might be that; but he’s willing to explore the reason for this
reductive thinking a little further. “People have very little else to say
about fiction. They don’t know what handle to pick a book up by; and the
only handle they can think to pick it up by is one that doesn’t even exist,
and that’s the biographical handle. And that’s really another species of
gossip. If you don’t allow them that handle to pick it up by, they’re mute.
They’re silenced, they have nothing to say.” He adds: “Since Hemingway, the
life of a writer has become part of his myth. Hemingway invited the
association between himself and his characters; with Faulkner people don’t
ask the biographical question. He stayed out of people’s way, Faulkner. The
cult of the interview didn’t exist in his day. He never really left Oxford,
Mississippi. When he was invited for dinner at the White House under
Kennedy, he said that’s a long way to go to eat. So he stayed home.”
This kind of talk makes him edgy; but then we return to the business of
writing and he opens up again. The Humbling isn’t in the shops yet:
but he’s already finished Nemesis — a novel set during a polio
epidemic in New Jersey in 1944. Hunting for a new subject, he found he kept
returning to the subject of polio. “It was a menace when I was a child. All
parents were tremendously concerned about it; I mean, people get upset about
swine flu, where nothing much can happen to you; but polio could maim you,
deform you, kill you or cripple you — and it came from we knew not what.
“At one point one of my characters says that in the decade of the 1940s the
things to fear were war, the atomic bomb and polio. And that was about
right, for a family with kids. This is very much a neighbourhood story, it’s
a story about how polio comes to a neighbourhood. The main character is a
23-year-old playground director, who gets caught up in the thing when the
epidemic sweeps through the playground. The trick really, and it’s quite a
trick, is to find the character who best reflects and demonstrates the
subject. I think I found him this book. He’s 23, a new man, involved with
issues of manhood and responsibility. His job puts him right in the middle
of the epidemic. I mean, I could have had a parent tell it, I could have had
a doctor tell it, the way Camus does in The Plague, but he doesn’t
tell it, it’s told about him by one of the boys on the playground as a man.
You have got to come up with somebody who’s going to bring that subject to
life.”
Roth makes it sound so simple; but “it’s quite a trick” is an understatement,
to say the least. This is not a man who is willing to rest on his laurels:
speaking to him about making fiction is an intense and inspiring experience.
The English author Alan Garner has called the drive to write a kind of
pathology, and the comparison comes to mind speaking to Roth. Would anyone
be so driven if he were not compelled by some inner, inescapable need to
remake the world? At the moment, he’s hunting for a subject: “I sit with a
yellow pad for as long as I possibly can without going out of my mind, and
write down whatever crosses through my brain, no matter how trivial. My
critics would tell you that that indeed is what I do — but I write
everything down. And then I go over the notes and see if there’s anything
that’s occurred more than once or twice that seems like a subject that wants
to be handled ... right now, I haven’t found anything.”
The process of discovery, for Roth, never ceases. We’ve been talking
about another character in The Humbling, Sybil Van Buren, a woman
Axler meets during a spell in a psychiatric hospital. She’s there because
she’s found her husband has been abusing her daughter, his stepdaughter, an
eight-year-old girl. “I had dinner with a friend last night who had just
read The Humbling,” he says, “a friend who pointed out something I
have never thought about. Which is very rare. You go over the books so many
times there isn’t anything you don’t think about. She said, ‘Do you realise
the number of recent books in which you have a suffering woman?’ No, tell
me. She said, the suffering woman here, in The Humbling, Sybil, the
one who kills her husband; in Indignation the girl who is suicidal;
in Everyman, the woman who kills herself; there’s always a suffering
woman to whom the character is drawn. She was perfectly right.”
But the men suffer, too, I say, to which he replies: “That goes without
saying.” I tell him that I am a little puzzled by Sybil’s appearance in the
book; that her character and her actions don’t seem fully resolved. His
response is not the response of the grand man of literature who can’t stand
criticism: his response is that of a seeker. “You are puzzled by her — so am
I. These two stories seem to me to connect in some way. I could never really
work out how, and I never wanted to try to articulate it in the book. I
thought, just tell the two stories and let the book take care of itself.
Someone smarter than I am will have to tell me what it’s all about.”
Then your friend didn’t take it any further with you than to notice the
suffering women?
“No,” he says, “she’s smart. That’s as far as she goes.” It’s hard to explain,
but in this moment the sense of Philip Roth, the writer, fills my mind. In
these few words his last night’s dinner appears before me nearly whole; an
image of his friend, a woman I’ve never met. Like his dining companion, he
has no explanation: “So there it is, the suffering woman. It’s like the Dark
Lady of the Sonnets.” His hands are folded in his lap. During our talk he
has indicated that he tries not to think about winning the Nobel Prize; now
he aligns himself with Shakespeare. But as I get ready to leave, as he
co-operates with the photographer — he clearly hates having his picture
taken — I think, well, why not? He is the great postwar chronicler of
America, of the wonder, the will, and the darkness that make up the American
soul. He is the last of the giants. As I walk back out towards Broadway, I
wish him well with all my American heart.
The Humbling is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £12.99, on Nov 5. To
order it for £11.69 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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