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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Philip Roth’s American Portraits and American Prophecy
00:55:44
The novelist and short-story writer Philip Roth died in May at the age of eighty-five. In novels like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Human Stain,” and “American Pastoral,” Roth anatomized postwar American life—particularly the lives of Jewish people in the Northeast. And in works like “The Ghost Writer” and “The Plot Against America,” he speculated on how the shadow of authoritarianism might fall over the United States. The breadth and depth of Roth’s work kept him a vital literary figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and established him among the most respected writers of fiction in American history. David Remnick speaks with Roth’s official biographer, Blake Bailey, about Roth’s life and career. Judith Thurman, Claudia Roth Pierpont, and Lisa Halliday discuss the portrayals of women in Roth’s work and the accusations of misogyny that he has faced. And, finally, we hear an interview with the author, from 2003, when he sat down with David Remnick for the BBC. Pl...
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Narrator/Producer
From one World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
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Liev Schreiber
Abolishing Death. A thrilling thought. For all that he wasn't the first person on or off a subway to have it. Have it desperately turning life back like a clock in the fall, just taking it down off the wall and. And winding it back and winding it back until you're dead. All appear like standard time.
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David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We just heard a passage from Philip Roth's favorite novel of his from 1995, Sabbath's Theater, read by Liev Schreiber. Philip roth died on May 22, 2018. Today we're going to look at Roth's remarkable contributions to literature in books like American Pastoral, the Ghostwriter, and the book that absolutely changed his career, Portnoy's Complaint. Philip Roth published some of his earliest stories in the New Yorker in the late 50s and in his following 30 odd books. Philip was many a realist, a satirist, a postmodernist, a writer about lust, identity, Jewishness, the self. And as he entered his 60s, he became one of the great chroniclers of the 20th century in America. Roth's writing provided a vision of life during and after the Great War, and he portrayed the chaos created by the conflict in Vietnam. He even anticipated the rise of a Trump like figure in the form of Charles Lindbergh in his book the Plot Against America. He was always thinking about what made America what it is, which we talked about in 2003.
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Philip Roth
Times aren't shocking if they're finely modulated distinctions. Times are shocking when there's a great clash of things in a society. Life during the French Revolution was shocking. Do you know Chauffeur, the great French epigramist? He said during the Revolution you'd have to eat a live toad for breakfast in order not to run into something more disgusting during the course of the day. Well, that's true of that decade I'm writing about, too. What was disgusting that was going on in Vietnam was incredibly disgusting because of the confusion about the cause. Right. Not to mention the means being used.
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David Remnick
My conversation with Philip Roth will be later in the hour, but first we're going to hear from Blake Bailey, who's hard at work on Roth's biography. Bailey has written a number of literary biographies, including one of John Cheever. Like so many things with Philip, the story starts in or around Newark, New Jersey. Now, Roth is born in 1933 in Newark.
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Interviewer/Host
What Was the world that he was born into. What were the surroundings like at the time? What is the milieu that helped create.
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David Remnick
Both his obsessions and his personality?
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Blake Bailey
Well, I mean, he lived in the Weequay section of newark, which was 96% Jewish, I think. And he felt very safe and secure and. And had, for the most part, a very happy childhood. You know, Herman's work as a Metropolitan life insurance agent was very tough in those early years. He was working six days a. And he was, you know, selling burial insurance which was like 25 cents a week or less pennies.
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David Remnick
Herman was Roth's father?
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Blake Bailey
Yes. So there was a certain amount of financial insecurity in the house, but I think it was a happy household. Bess Roth was a very competent homemaker. However, he became more and more aware, especially during the war, that, you know, there was, you know, very virulent anti Semitism out there in the 30s. You know, the decade of his childhood was the most anti Semitic decade in American history.
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Interviewer/Host
How did he feel it living in a neighborhood that's 96% Jewish?
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Blake Bailey
He would feel it when Herman would listen to Father Coplon, the notorious anti Semitic radio priest, talking about the Jewish warmongering banking interests.
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David Remnick
This is on the radio, of course.
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Blake Bailey
Yeah. And you know, that's the only time he ever heard Herman use profane language. He would hear it when he, you know, drove through Irvington or Union, these environs of Weequiac of Newark and see gatherings of the German boond. And again, Herman would expostulate. So he became aware of that. And of course, during the war, you know, he became more and more aware of what was happening in Germany.
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David Remnick
Now Roth publishes Goodbye Columbus, which makes.
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Interviewer/Host
Him famous to a degree. And after that, his real breakthrough book comes 10 years later with Portnoy's Complaint. And we've talked with others, with friends.
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David Remnick
Of Philip's, and I never knew this.
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Interviewer/Host
That Philip, in some way, even though that book made him was a huge bestseller, made him both famous and notorious.
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David Remnick
He in many ways regretted the publication.
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Interviewer/Host
Of Portnoy's Complaint to some degree it ruined his life.
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Blake Bailey
I mean, he often said, certainly in light of his later achievement, he said, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have published that book. But let's also bear in mind, okay, that Portnoy's Complaint, when it was published in 1969, was the best selling novel in Random House history. It sold 420,000 copies in hardback. It outsold the Godfather in 1969 and it sold within five years, almost 4 million copies in paperback. It was far, far and away Roth's most successful book. And who knows how Roth's later career would have gone had it not been for that, the sort of world fame that followed from that book. So that needs to be borne in mind in Random House. Jason Epstein at Random House was saying, this is going to be the biggest book in history.
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David Remnick
Why would Jason Epstein think it would.
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Interviewer/Host
Be the biggest book in history? What would give him that idea? Because of the sex part?
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Blake Bailey
Well, yeah. I mean, the New York Times was very straightforward when explaining six weeks before publication day why this is a guaranteed bestseller. They wrote the Preponderance of Masturbation. Okay, that was a very novel element in American fiction at the time. But what made it such a big deal was that Philip had published, beginning in 1967, he had published four long excerpts to Portnoy. And they had caused a sensation. Now, the biggest one, arguably, was a second one titled Whacking Off.
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David Remnick
This was an Esquire.
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Blake Bailey
No, no, no. The first one was in Esquire. Whacking off he deliberately gave to. Published in, you know, the temple of high modernism, Partisan Review. And so Whacking off appears in Partisan Review. And like the 8th street bookstore can't keep the summer 1967 partisan review in stock. You know, I mean, people are lining up outside. But the worst part, of course, was that in the reviews, I mean, Brendan Gill and the New Yorker, Time magazine, everyone was treating this as a confession. And they were equating Portnoy with Philip Roth. So he was famous, as he liked to. To say, you know, I'm famous as a jerk off artist. I'm not famous as a novelist.
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David Remnick
And it drove him out of New York, Portnoy's complaint.
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Interviewer/Host
The attention was so intense and the jokes on the street were so wearying after a while. And it drove him to the Connecticut countryside, didn't it?
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Blake Bailey
It did at first. He was. He was seeing a very nice young woman named Barbara Sproul at the time, and they rented a house together in the mountains of Woodstock. Woodstock, New York. And Philip was, again, people may think, looking at the jacket photos or perhaps they've seen an interview, that Philip is this very grim and tough guy. But Philip is very vulnerable and very sensitive, and he was traumatized by what had happened in New York. And so Barbara is kind of trying to talk him down from this, okay. And they're walking one day along some mountain road in the woods, woods, you know, around Woodstock. And she's saying, Philip, you know, you need to calm Down. Look where we are. We're fine. Nothing's going to touch you here. They hear this car in the distance, you know, coming along the mountain road. The car comes abreast of them, slows down the window rolls down and they go. It's port.
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David Remnick
Let's hear a little from Portnoy's Complaint.
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Liev Schreiber
Because to be bad, Mother, that is the real struggle. To be bad and to enjoy it, that is what makes men of us boys, Mother. But what my conscience, so called, has done to my sexuality, my spontaneity, my courage, never mind some of the things I try so hard to get away with. Because the fact remains, I don't. I am marked like a roadmap from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear. See, I am too good too, Mother. I too am moral to the bursting point, just like you. Did you ever see me try to smoke a cigarette? I look like Bette Davis. Today, boys and girls not even old enough to be bar mitzvahed are sucking on marijuana like it's peppermint candy. And I'm still all thumbs. A lucky strike. Yes, that's how good I am, Mama. Can't smoke, hardly drink no drugs, don't borrow money or play cards. Can't tell a lie without beating into sweat as I'm passing over the equator. Sure, I say a lot, but I assure you that's about the sum of my success with transgressing.
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David Remnick
Blake.
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Interviewer/Host
You know, a funny thing happens in.
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David Remnick
Writers careers or artists careers.
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Interviewer/Host
There's the apprenticeship, there's the development, there's the prime work, the originality, if they're lucky, if they're colossal talents. And then there's the kind of falling off, the self imitation and the falling off. Roth's career is completely different in the sense that you could argue that in the Portnoy period there was this explosion. And then there's a middle period exemplified by the Ghost Rider, right?
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David Remnick
And then there's a later period where.
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Interviewer/Host
There'S a run of novels particularly about the theme of America.
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David Remnick
American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, the.
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Interviewer/Host
Human Stain and more, really.
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David Remnick
And then his very favorite novel, Sabbath's Theater. Where did the juice come from?
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Interviewer/Host
The capacity to invent and then reinvent and raise the stakes all the time.
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Blake Bailey
Well, you know, it. It kind of chagrined Philip that, for example, his sometime rival Risk, but very pleasant acquaintance John Updike, was writing the Rabbit novels, for example. And they were deeply researched, fastidiously detailed representations of American life of, you know, a given era from decade to decade. Wanted to do something like that. But he said, you know, these other guys, they shine their light out into the world while I'm shining mine down into this little hole. You know, it's. It's always sort of Zuckerman's problems and, and so on. His career is Jewishness, his inner life. Around the time he was struggling to finish My Life As a man, 1973, let's say he wrote the first pages of American Pastoral about Swede Levov, the great Jewish sports hero of Wyquaic who goes on to live the American dream, marries Don Levov, a gentile Miss America contestant, and they have a daughter and he's very successful in his glove making business and so forth, and the daughter is radicalized and becomes a terrorist and blows up the general store. And this is his great novel of the 60s, and it's his first masterpiece of the American trilogy that he wrote in the 90s. He had those, say, 60 pages that he had written in the early 70s. And he knew, and really, if you see these pages, the core episodes of what would become American Pastoral are all there. And he would always, after every book he finished, he would go back to those pages because this, he knew this material was the opportunity to transcend the merely personal. And finally he found a way to do it.
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David Remnick
You know, this as well, that even a colossus of contemporary writing can have an uncertain fate into the future. There are writers that seemed enormous in their time, and then 50 years later, or even less, something else happens. They disappear from the syllabus, they disappear.
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Interviewer/Host
From consciousness, and some occupy the opposite. They occupy a, a large place in the canon as we go forward and people read them. What do you think will happen with Philip Roth's novels going into the future?
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Blake Bailey
I'm. I'm pretty optimistic, you know, I mean, Philip was one of the. I mean, for a while he was the only living American writer in the Library of America. He eventually had 10 volumes that's kind of as concretely canonical as you can get. His achievement is so diverse. You know, he did so many different things. He did the comical novels, he did the early Jamesian Letting Go novel. He did sort of the naturalistic Flo Berrishn when she Was Good. He though. He hated all sorts of theoretical cantwords. You know, he did the postmodern stuff, he did the metafictional stuff, the Counter Life and so on. Then he does these sprawling, beautifully reported, dense portraits of American life. In the post war era and so on. And then these very incisive elegiac looks at human mortality toward the end of his career. So there's such a breadth of achievement there, so many themes, so many approaches from a genius writer. I mean, who I rank with Faulkner, and certainly the French rank him with Faulkner. Philip is bigger arguably in France than he is here. So, you know, I mean, I think that. I think Philip will wear well over time.
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David Remnick
Blake Bailey, thank you so much.
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Blake Bailey
It was a pleasure, David. Thanks for having me.
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Liev Schreiber
Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around us, nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had been disappeared. Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again en masse, everyone in it together. If that wasn't sufficiently inspiring. The miraculous conclusion of this towering event. The clock of history reset, and a whole people's aims limited no longer by the past. There was the neighborhood, the communal determination that we, the children should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation. Escape, above all, insignificance. You must not come to nothing. Make something of yourselves.
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David Remnick
That was Liev Schreiber reading from American Pastoral. Before that, we heard from Blake Bailey. His biography of Roth will be published. Well, when it's done, he thinks around 20, 21. Ahead this hour, we tackle some of the more pressing personal questions around Rothschild and hear from the man himself. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we're paying tribute to Philip Roth, and here's Liev Schreiber reading a passage from the 2006 novella Everyman.
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Liev Schreiber
Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folder role meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness, the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers, no hocus pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven. For him, there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it. He'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental that was, the whole of it, should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it the Life and Death of a Male Body.
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David Remnick
After Roth died in May Many critics praised him. Almost all critics praised him as one of the most audacious and original voices in the history of American fiction. But there were some detractors too. Not so much about the quality of his writing, but about the way he wrote about women. This was a criticism he often had to answer to in his lifetime. And in the era of MeToo, even some of the material from the distant past, like Portnoy's Complaint, was now being re evaluated. I asked the writers, Judith Thurman, Lisa Halliday and Claudia Roth Pierpont, no relation to the novelist, to weigh in on the issue.
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Interviewer/Host
Judith, I want to begin with you meeting Philip Roth.
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David Remnick
And I think you met through the mail, right?
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Interviewer/Host
I mean, we have this picture of Philip as a writer who lived his life largely, almost in a kind of soldierly discipline in the country, alone much of the time, writing all the time.
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David Remnick
Doesn'T really care much about other writers.
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Interviewer/Host
And yet what happened?
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Judith Thurman
He cared very much, passionately, really, about other writers. I was a young biographer. I was in my early 30s, and my first book had just been published, published biography of Isaac Dinesen. And one day I opened. There was no, of course, email. And I went to the mail and there was a letter, handwritten letter in it, and it was a fan letter from Philip Roth. And I thought it was my crazy friend Max imitating Philip Roth, imitating Philip Roth and telling me how great my work was. And I actually called Max, and he disavowed any knowledge of the letter. So I wrote back still suspiciously. If you were Philip Roth the writer, not the candlestick maker, I'm very grateful for this. Let I said something more than really grateful. I was floored and elated to receive it. And so he said, let's meet. And so we met. It was 1983.
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Interviewer/Host
Claudia, you wrote a kind of critical biography. It's a mixed genre book. I would say it's both biographical and critical. And my understanding is Philip Roth, like any number of other writers, was not exactly inviting to the biographical enterprise.
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
He was terrified of it.
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Blake Bailey
Yeah.
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
He said there are two things to fear in life, death and biography.
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Interviewer/Host
Why did he fear biographies so much?
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
I think because he read some of them and some of them about his friends.
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Judith Thurman
In the 80s and the 90s there were a series of sort of gotcha biographies of great writers. And he had a particular revulsion and fear of someone treating him as a case or. Or rather than going out to understand him, going out to get him.
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Interviewer/Host
Lisa, what do you think that Philip Roth felt were his weak Points that somebody would go at him, as it were. What was he defensive of?
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Lisa Halliday
Well, listening to Judith and Claudia, I've been thinking about how Philip really was about as famous as a writer could be. And I think a lot of people, when they meet someone like Philip, they want so badly to take away from it a story, an anecdote. And so everything he says, everything he does, every expression he makes, means so much to someone who's meeting him for the first time or even the second or third or fourth or tenth time. And I think he just became used to people taking away impressions that surprised him.
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Interviewer/Host
You've just published a novel, a remarkable novel, in which I think it's pretty apparent you had a relationship with and a friendship with Philip Roth. And when I read the sections about that novelist, about that relationship, I can hear Philip Roth talking. The jokes, the sentences, the spring in the personality. So, in a sense, you brought him into fiction. How did he react to that?
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Lisa Halliday
Well, he knew I was working on something for a long time, and maybe he was a little nervous, but he was also wonderful about it. I mean, no one knows better than Philip. No one knew better than Philip what it's like to write fiction. You use whatever you can. You do it however you can. I really did want to share with the reader some of what I loved about Philip, what I loved most about him. But all of that said, it is a novel. It's not a faithful account of our own story. Things that happened to me and to Philip do not happen in the book, and vice versa.
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Interviewer/Host
Lisa, I. And I could ask this question to all of you, but you're, as it were, the youngest person in the room. Philip Roth is my birthright. I grew up in New Jersey. A Jewish boy, a male of a certain age. I almost imagined if my father had not become a dentist, but rather had been a literary genius, he'd be Philip Roth. So there was no question that this was going to enter my bloodstream and shape my so much of me. I wonder how you, as somebody considerably younger, came to those books. Which books? And what effect they had on you.
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Lisa Halliday
Well, the very first time I heard Philip's name was not until I was in college and my Jewish boyfriend's mother told me that I had to read Portnoy's Complaint.
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Interviewer/Host
Let's pause over that for a moment. The boyfriend's mother wanted you to read Portnoy.
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Philip Roth
Yes.
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Interviewer/Host
There's a young woman who works here named Carla Blumenkrantz who wrote about reading Portnoy as a young woman, as a 14 or 15 year old. And she was thrilled by. But it also scared the hell out of her. Meaning this is what men think. This is what's running through their mind all the time. It was a scary book to them.
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David Remnick
Judith.
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Judith Thurman
That's actually sort of touching to me because I always assumed that was what men thought. Maybe that's a generational. Generational divide.
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Interviewer/Host
And you think differently now?
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Judith Thurman
No, no. But my mother also. My mother was obsessed with Mrs. Roth. I think she was afraid that I. I was a writer from a very young age, that I would do a Portnoy which was not in the stars for my family.
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Interviewer/Host
But Philip was very self aware of this. He always quote. I forget who the quote is from Milos.
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
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Interviewer/Host
There goes the family. Did Philip feel a sense of. Even though his mother was hardly Sophie Portnoy and did he feel that he was consuming or even violating the people he knew and loved or even came to hate?
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
I think the Mrs. Portnoy thing haunted him for a long time. And I think he made amends, if you will, and in a very reverential way. In the Plot Against America, the extreme over cautiousness that drives Portnoy crazy. When you get to plot against America, it becomes heroism because they are actually in a situation that these American Jews back in the 40s might have imagined themselves to be, in which their son thought was absurd because he was an American and nobody was coming after him. Now plot against America. When you bring fascism to the United States, they are confronted with a situation where their cautiousness is a virtue. He creates a situation to elevate them while not changing who they were at all.
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Judith Thurman
It should also be said that Philip really regretted Portnoy.
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Interviewer/Host
Regretted it?
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Judith Thurman
Yes.
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Interviewer/Host
Even though it's the breakthrough.
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Judith Thurman
He deeply regretted Portnoy. We talked about it a lot. It made him into a joke on late night television. The Jacqueline, the famous, endlessly repeated Jacqueline Suzanne remark. It made it. Jacqueline Suzanne said something about.
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David Remnick
It's on Johnny Carson.
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Judith Thurman
On Johnny Carson. I wouldn't want to shake his hand.
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Interviewer/Host
And people would see him on the streets.
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Judith Thurman
People would see him on the streets, make jokes about masturbation in liver.
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Interviewer/Host
And the first 5,000 times it was funny.
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Judith Thurman
Right. He felt he completely lost his privacy. That's when he sort of fled to the country.
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
He tried to imagine what his life would have been like had he not written it.
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Lisa Halliday
Yes, often our talking about all of this has reminded me of how not so long ago, Philip had recommended to me rereading Madame Bovary and also gave me a copy of a book that someone had recently sent to him, which is called the Perpetual Orgy. After he gave it to me, and in fact after I brought it back to Milan, I noticed in the book that he had written on the back of the letter something that Flaubert once said, which is the task is not to change humanity, but to know it. And I just, when I saw that, I thought you could apply that to every book of Phillips. Every complaint that anyone has ever made tends to be, well, he's a misogynist or he's got it out for the Jews and this is just not what he was doing. He wanted to know humanity and to reflect it, not to change it or make it into a moral project.
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Interviewer/Host
You raised the misogyny question and I guess it's inevitable in Harper's. Vivian Gornick wrote in 2008 in Portnoy's complaint, probably for the first time in Jewish American literature, by the way, a phrase that Philip would describe was horrible, right? Woman hating is openly associated with a consuming anger at what it has meant to be pushed to the margin. Generation after generation, humiliated time and again into second class lives. I think it's fair to say Vivian Gordon was not a fan. Now she, at one point, she said.
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David Remnick
For Philip Roth, women are monstrous.
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Claudia Roth Pierpont
His work is full of female characters who mean something to me, to whom I am deeply attached, from Dranka to Amy Billett. I mean, one could name them and name them and name them what he doesn't do. And some more subtle or younger critics have blamed him for not having major female protagonists, for seeing the world through the eyes of. Of a male figure who somewhat resembles Philip Roth, usually born in 1933. And I would say this about it, that that all talents come with conditions. And I think his condition was to present the world through the eyes of someone who is not himself at all, but someone who took a stand somewhere similar on ground that he understood. And I see it as a kind of lighthouse in a way. If that's a bad simile, you set up your building, but on the top of that building is a flashing, radiating light. And that light, those eyes of that protagonist, whoever that protagonist might be, took in the world. Men, women, children. I think there are as many fascinating and interesting female characters in his work as in anybody's work. They may not be the person who is presenting the story, but they are taken in and they are alive. The first book I ever fell in love with was the Ghostwriter, and there are two male characters and two female characters. And I think you'd be hard put to say who's the most fascinating in that book.
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Interviewer/Host
Then where does this critique come from?
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Judith Thurman
It comes from the perception of sexual predation. I think. I think it comes from on the page. On the page, which is a confusion. Well, this is a very, very thorny subject in me two times. It's, in my view, it's a confusion of lust with misogyny. There's a certain kind of rampaging, voracious sexual appetite. And I don't think anybody deny that Philip had that as a man. His characters certainly have that on the page. And that's not misogyny. It's a certain kind of a very intense desire.
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Interviewer/Host
Lisa, are there any books that you read of Phillips that you do pause over and think, hmm, this bit is making me uncomfortable, and not in a good way?
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Lisa Halliday
No, no.
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Philip Roth
No.
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Lisa Halliday
I don't know. You asked where the issue comes from, and I have never really understood it myself. I think it comes from lust, but also awe. I mean, Philip was in awe of so many women, and I think that comes through in the books as well. His narrators are in awe of many of the female characters, and. And maybe occasionally that translates into a slight sense of fear on the part of the male character, the narrator. But I don't know how we get from there to misogyny. I don't understand it.
- [31:46]
Claudia Roth Pierpont
I think that there's something to be said about making an analogy between the early criticism that the Jews had of him and the criticism that some women have of him now. And that criticism was about presenting characters who are less than perfect. In the late 50s, his Jewish readers, who became so irate, said, how dare you present a Jewish adulterer? In other words, how dare you give them ammunition? And he came to understand that although it didn't change his writing because he felt literature was about presenting what is. It wouldn't be literature to present a world of perfect Jews with no characters. He had nothing to write about. He was writing a book about people, and people have flaws and his women have flaws. And somehow I think we're in a little bit of a position regarding him where it's considered wrong or hateful for him, maybe because he already has acquired the reputation he has to look at women who are flawed. But everybody in his books is flawed.
- [32:39]
Judith Thurman
I sometimes have a pause. It's a personal one, because so many. Philip himself had a weakness for the fragile woman, the waifish woman, the woman who needed to be saved. And there are so many women, their Characters are fascinating and interesting, but they are a little broken or very broken or I think that's something that gives someone like Vivian a pause. But it's not the only thing.
- [33:05]
Interviewer/Host
I want to talk about his prose. He was actually quite interesting when comparing himself to his people he thought were his peers. And I was talking about Updike. He said, I don't have the gush of prose, which he felt that Updike absolutely did. I have the gush of invention, dialogue, event, but not of prose. Is he right about himself? What's the shape of the achievement of Philip Roth's book?
- [33:36]
Claudia Roth Pierpont
His achievement? Book after book after book. In my mind, we haven't had anybody like that. I mean, that covers such a range over 50 years, continually reinventing himself. When people say, what should I read? You have to say, well, who are you? Where do you want to start?
- [33:52]
Interviewer/Host
And although the later novels remain hyper intimate, they've become large, in a sense, and they become political. And Claudia, you've written that America and Philip Roth grew up together, and then along comes Donald Trump. Did Philip Roth die disappointed in America?
- [34:11]
Judith Thurman
Yes, he did. He said he had never been more terrified in his entire life, having lived through everything. He lived through Lindbergh, including Lindbergh, the Depression, the war, the 50s, the McCarthy hearings, Nixon, Watergate, all he was, I don't want to say despairing, but I don't think that is horrified. He was beyond horrified. And in some ways, the degradation of language that Donald Trump represents was one of the most personally excruciating aspects of the Trump presidency. The Orwellian Newspeak that we wake up every morning and tune into.
- [34:58]
Interviewer/Host
Lisa, Claudia, and Judith. We were all at Philip Roth's funeral, which was quite a small funeral in a small cemetery at Bard College. And what happened was people read passages from Philip's book. There was no Kaddish. There was no prayer at all. It was the most secular funeral I ever attended. I think all of you were much closer friends. But I always got the sense that Philip never, never expected to live even as long as he did. He died with 16 stents in his heart. Any number, spinal problems, depression, all kinds of things that happened over the course of his middle age and older age. Death is all through these books.
- [35:50]
David Remnick
There's so many graveyard scenes.
- [35:51]
Interviewer/Host
It's much more than in Shakespeare. How did he think about death toward the end?
- [35:57]
Lisa Halliday
Lisa well, actually, I think it was a couple of years ago. I was visiting him out in Connecticut, and he and another friend and I were watching a miniseries about John Adams and At the end, John Adams dies. And the next morning I was leaving, and of course, I was very sad. And he said, don't worry. I decided last night that I'm going to live a very long time. He said, if John Adams can make it to 91, then so can I. And I'm a little angry with him for not keeping that promise.
- [36:34]
Claudia Roth Pierpont
I think that'll all disappoint. His emphasis on death in the books shows exactly what he didn't want. I think he was very attached to life up until the end, and I think he was ready to go on. I don't think he was happily resigned to this until maybe the last couple of days when there was no other way out.
- [36:51]
Interviewer/Host
Was he scared?
- [36:53]
Claudia Roth Pierpont
I didn't see fear. I saw eventually a resignation. I saw a lot of tenderness for the people around him, telling us, you have to let me go. Knowing that, I think he was afraid it was causing us more pain than it was him.
- [37:10]
Judith Thurman
He lived in terms of health, an almost monkish life. To prolong it as long as it could be prolonged. And when it couldn't be prolonged in such a way as to give him what he considered a real life. Being able to swim, being able to walk, being able to move, being able to enjoy things. He was adamant about not going on, he chose. He pulled the plug on himself. He said, I want to live or I want to die, but I'm not going to stay in the middle. And after that, he saw dying as the same kind of work that he had saw writing. And he said at a certain point, he didn't want people around the bed anymore. He said, I have work to do. And by that he meant, I have the work of dying.
- [38:02]
Liev Schreiber
He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime. The light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up, they had the Atlantic. You could touch your toes. Where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house, the porch, the screens, the icebox, the tub, the linoleum, the broom, the pantry, the ants, the sofa. Sofa, the radio, the garage, the outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built in the drain that always clogged in summer. The salty sea breeze and the dazzling light. In September, the hurricanes. In January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And then January. And then again January. No end to the stockpile of January's, of Mays, of marches, August, December, April. Name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He'd grown up on endlessness. And his mother. In the beginning, they were the same thing.
- [39:45]
David Remnick
Lev Schreiber reading from Sabbath's Theater. Before that, you heard Judith Thurman, Claudia Roth, Pierpont and Lisa Halliday, all friends of Philip Roth. And you can find Judith's writing about Roth on newyorker.com Claudia wrote the book Roth Unbound. And Lisa's new novel, featuring a character very much like Philip Roth, is called Asymmetry. Coming up, my conversation with Philip Roth himself, which was recorded on the eve of publication of I Married a communist some 15 years ago. That's in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
- [40:54]
Liev Schreiber
Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia. But am I completely mistaken to think that living as well born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up with an aromatic range of Tobacnik's pickle barrels? Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail, the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life, like the six feet of dirt that'll be packed on your grave when you're dead? Perhaps by definition, a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention. That's the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, 50 years later, I ask you, has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house, the walls, ceilings, doors and windows of every last friend's family apartment came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minute gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrtzite candles and cooking smells, by Ronson, table lighters and venetian blinds about one another? We knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Sid's we knew one another's every physical attribute. Who walked pigeon toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who over salivated when he spoke. We knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb. We knew whose mother had an accent and whose father had a mustache. Whose mother worked and whose father was dead. Somehow we even dimly grasped how every family's different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem.
- [43:33]
David Remnick
That's from American Pastoral, which won Roth the Pulitzer Prize. American Pastoral was the first in a trilogy of books about post war American history. It tackled the chaos of the Vietnam War. I Married a Communist, was steeped in the McCarthy era and the human stain looked at the late 90s battles over political correctness and sex. In 2003 I had the privilege of sitting down with Philip for the BBC and we talked about the trilogy which is situated like so many of his books in and around Newark, New Jersey.
- [44:03]
Interviewer/Host
Well, Philip, let's start out by talking about what Newark was and what is. It's the kind of Arcadia for you and has always been in your books. That's where you're from.
- [44:14]
Philip Roth
Arcadia?
- [44:15]
Interviewer/Host
No, but a very specific part of Newark. And talk a little bit, I think to begin about what Newark was as opposed to New York City right across the river.
- [44:25]
Philip Roth
My orientation as a boy was by no means to New York City, nor did I know anybody in New York City. We had no. Our family was spread out but not. They weren't in New York. So there was no reason ever to go to New York. The only time I ever went to New York as a child was for some birthday celebration or for my parents anniversary. And where did we go? We went to the Radio City Musical to see the Rockettes and went to Chinatown to sinfully eat Chinese food. That was the sinning part of our life. Newark was a substantial city. A subsidy of what? About a quarter of a million people. It was one of the 15 or so largest cities in America. It had a very vibrant life as an industrial working class city. So who needed New York?
- [45:20]
Interviewer/Host
And your family got there in the first place. You had Yiddish speaking grandparents and your father sold insurance. It was not a bookish house particularly, was it?
- [45:30]
Philip Roth
We had a book. There were about three books. Yeah, I remember them very vividly. I didn't go near them, but I remember they were there. There were books that were given as presents when someone was ill. I'm not saying that to burlesque, that's a fact. No, there were no books you once.
- [45:50]
David Remnick
Remarked that sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness.
- [45:53]
Interviewer/Host
Are my closest friends. What did you mean by that?
- [45:57]
Philip Roth
I think that's the formula to describe the concoction that energizes virtually any writer worth his or her salt, isn't it? The sheer playfulness may also be described as the ability to imagine oneself into a situation which is not necessarily connected to the life you lead whatsoever. To let the ball, you know, let the ball bounce, you know. And by itself a deadly seriousness is another affliction which has to be there. Things have to seem to you to matter a great deal. I think that the writer tends to have spiritually, if not outwardly, a moral stake in everything. This can be the timidest person who's. Once he or she leaves the desk, is absolutely terrified by everything, doesn't go into the world. Emily Dickinson would be a good example. It doesn't matter. It's at the moment the person is being. A writer should be a tiger of some kind.
- [47:16]
Interviewer/Host
You write, you live a certain way every day. You engage them for I don't know how many hours a day while you're actually at the desk. It's the consuming activity of your life. What's it for?
- [47:31]
Philip Roth
Who is it for? Yeah, you might well ask. I don't know what else to do. I don't know what else to do. I don't know how else to do anything. I can't do anything else. So otherwise I just sit idly in this seat without the television stuff. I don't know what to do. David. I've been doing it all my life. If it were taken away from me, I think I would die probably. Without being overly dramatic, I would be emptied.
- [48:11]
Interviewer/Host
Is there a sense of mastery at some point that you might not have had at 40?
- [48:20]
Philip Roth
There's patience.
- [48:21]
Interviewer/Host
What did age give you?
- [48:22]
David Remnick
What did experience give you?
- [48:23]
Philip Roth
Patience. That is the patience to outlast your frustration. The confidence that if you just stay with it, you'll master it. But that doesn't mean tomorrow necessarily, but that I think it gives you confidence in your instincts and those spontaneous activities I spoke of earlier. You don't feel like such a gambler, such a risk taker in laying down the first 10 or 20 or 50 pages. So I guess age and experience give you patience, confidence. But the confidence can be shattered at the end of a first draft. Probably any work where you start with nothing on a page and you have to fill the page is accompanied by a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear. Fear is simply you can't do it and frustration as you're doing it. Because what comes is very crude. But over the years, I think what you develop is a tolerance for your own crudeness and patience. Patience with your own crap, really. And a kind of belief in your crap. Which is, just stay with your crap. And it'll get better. If you just stay with it. And come back every day and keep going. But it's a living. It's turned out to be. I make about as good living as a New York dermatologist. And the difference is that he's been making it for longer than I have.
- [50:04]
Interviewer/Host
Philip, you had the experience of going back and reading these three books this last week. Preparation, just for our talk. What was it like to read your own books?
- [50:16]
Philip Roth
I haven't read these books in a while. I can't honestly say I was displeased by what I read. I saw my own method, you know.
- [50:30]
David Remnick
How do you mean?
- [50:31]
Philip Roth
Well, I mean, I guess it's like watching the videos of the game. Where you had five for six at bats, you know, and you see your swing. And I saw the. That what I'd staked everything on was density.
- [50:52]
Interviewer/Host
Density of surface.
- [50:58]
Philip Roth
Give you a painting analogy. Jackson Pollock's big paintings. Which I think are marvelous and wonderful. Everything, they're covered, and they're covered with energy. They're covered with pictorial substance, too, which is the paint. And they're covered, as we know, with energy. And they're completely covered. And it's dramatized in every square inch. Somehow. That's the amazing thing. As opposed to, say, Mark Rothko. It's also covered, but it's covered in a different way. And what I felt was a kind of affinity in these three books. In terms of the compositional struggle and solution to those big Pollock paintings. That I tried to cover every square inch with real stuff. The other thing is, I wish I could know what this guy knows. I think I could make a life out of this. That is, there's a knowledge that the writing produces. That is not your knowledge. It's produced by the demands of the narrative. And lo and behold, there's knowledge there, or wisdom, even, of all things.
- [52:29]
David Remnick
But it's not yours as a reader.
- [52:31]
Interviewer/Host
Rather than in a different way.
- [52:33]
Philip Roth
I know I don't know these things. I mean, this. I'm not trying to be cute or precious or whatever it comes of the activity. So when Jackson Pollock isn't painting, he doesn't know anything but how to drink. And when I'm not writing, I don't know anything either.
- [53:03]
David Remnick
Philip Roth. That interview was recorded for the BBC in 2003.
- [53:12]
Liev Schreiber
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank like as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick. You come at them unmenacingly on your own 10 toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads. Take them on with an open mind as equals, man to man, as we used to say. And yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them while you're anticipating meeting them. You get them wrong while you're with them, and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you. The whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong. That is living. Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then, on carrying careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive, we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that, well, lucky you.
- [54:49]
David Remnick
That passage was from American Pastoral, read by Liev Shriver. I'm David Remnick and that's it for today. Thanks for being with us for our special hour about Philip Roth. And if you've enjoyed the show, you can always subscribe to the podcast and catch up on anything you've missed. See you next time.
- [55:07]
Narrator/Producer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mythali Rao, Steven Valentino and Richard Yeh, with help from Michelle Moses, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. Special thanks this hour to the BBC, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Wiley Agency. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.