I know Philip Roth would not have minded either way. But I do. I feel sad that I could not write about him before he passed away last Tuesday in a hospital in Manhattan, two months after his 85th birthday. It was three weeks ago that I decided he would be the hero of my world, in this space today. And it breaks my heart that instead of writing about a living legend I ended up writing an appreciation of a great writer who is no more. How sad can it be to turn all the sentences I had planned to write in the present tense into the past.
It’s doubly sad to read the last interview he gave the New York Times a few months ago. Asked what it was like to grow old Roth replied, “Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day. Getting into bed at night I smile and think, “I lived another day.” And then it’s astonishing again to awaken eight hours later and to see that it is morning of the next day and that I continue to be here. “I survived another night,” which thought causes me to smile once more. I go to sleep smiling and I wake up smiling. I’m very pleased that I’m still alive. Moreover, when this happens, as it has, week after week and month after month since I began drawing Social Security, it produces the illusion that this thing is just never going to end, though of course I know that it can stop on a dime. It’s something like playing a game, day in and day out, a high-stakes game that for now, even against the odds, I just keep winning. We will see how long my luck holds out.”
Sadly, his luck ran out on the night of 22nd May, when his heart failed. This was the seventh year since he retired from writing. Having spent his entire life as a writer, he yet claimed after he retired he never missed his work, nor thought of ‘un-retiring’. He was confident he had already done his best work and anything more that he wrote would be inferior. He also confessed he was no longer in “possession of the mental vitality or the verbal energy or the physical fitness needed to mount and sustain a large creative attack of any duration on a complex structure as demanding as a novel...” He believed, “Every talent has its terms — its nature, its scope, its force; also its term, a tenure, a life span.... Not everyone can be fruitful forever.”
Critics claim Philip Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers —Saul Below and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Roth wrote more novels than either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America. Yet, Roth did not see similarities between his work and the work of the other two writers. “Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,” he once said, “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”
As fate would have it Roth’s name was mentioned year after year when the Nobel prize in literature was pending. His many admirers regarded Roth as the most important novelist of his generation. But the Nobel eluded him. Among the awards he won however, were the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Award, and three times the Pen/Faulkner Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize.
According to Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, “In public Roth, was tall and good-looking, was gracious and charming but with little use for small talk. In private he was a gifted mimic and comedian. Friends used to say that if his writing career had ever fizzled he could have made a nice living doing stand-up. But there was about his person, as about his writing, a kind of simmering intensity, an impatience with art that didn’t take itself seriously.”
Born in Newark on March 19, 1933, Philip Milton Roth was the younger of two sons. (His brother, Sanford, a commercial artist known as Sandy, died in 2009.) His father, Herman, was an insurance manager for Metropolitan Life. Roth once described him as a cross between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman. His mother, Bess Finkel, was a secretary before she married and then became a housekeeper of the heroic old school — the kind, he once suggested, who raised cleaning to an art form. As revealed in the New York Times, the family lived in a five-room apartment on Summit Avenue within which were only three books when he was growing up — given as presents when someone was ill. He went to Weequahic High, where he was a good student but not good enough to win a scholarship to Rutgers, as he had hoped. In 1951 he enrolled as a pre-law student at the Newark branch of Rutgers, with vague notions of becoming “a lawyer for the underdog.”
But he yearned to live away from home, and the following year he transferred to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. Inspired by one of his professors, Mildred Martin, Roth switched his interests from law to literature. He helped found a campus literary magazine, where in an early burst of his satirical power he published a parody of the college newspaper so devastating that it earned him an admonition from the dean.
Roth graduated from Bucknell, magna cum laude, in 1954 and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1955. That same year, he enlisted in the Army but suffered a back injury during basic training and received a medical discharge. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a Ph.D. in English but dropped out after one term.
Some years after the failure of his first marriage to Maggie Michaelson, he lived in London with the actress Claire Bloom. They married in 1990 but divorced four years later. In 1996, Bloom published a memoir, “Leaving the Doll’s House,” in which she depicted Roth as a misogynist and control freak, so self-involved that he refused to let her daughter, from her marriage to the actor Rod Steiger, live with them because she bored him.
Like Coetzee most of Roth’s novels (more than 23 altogether) were autobiographies. To quote McGarth Roth’s favorite topic in his novels was “himself or rather one of several fictional alter egos he deployed as a go-between, negotiating the tricky boundary between autobiography and invention and deliberately blurring the boundaries between real life and fiction.” Nine of his novels are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist whose career closely parallels that of his creator. Three more are narrated by David Kepesh, a writerly academic who shares some of Roth’s preoccupations, women especially. And sometimes Roth dispensed with the disguise altogether — or seemed to. The protagonist of “Operation Shylock” for example, is a character named Philip Roth.
These ‘fake biographies’ that he wrote, which the tidy-minded conventional critics and some Jewish readers hated, created doubts, demands for clarification and accusations with regard to his work. In an angry out-burst Roth warned them, “I write fiction, and I’m told its autobiography. I write autobiography and I’m told its fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide.”
Looking back now at all his work, it seems as though Roth had only one intention in mind – that of freeing American literature from the suffocating shackles of respectability and seriousness. As he said in a lecture entitled Writing American Fiction he was ready to draw boldly upon everything around him and within him that was aggressive, crude and obscene. As Roth saw it, the age demanded nothing less.
It was obvious that he cared little about how the world perceived him. In a 1984 interview with Hermione Lee in The Paris Review Roth said, some writers “pretend to be more lovable than they are and some pretend to be less...Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.”
Nor did he care about his readers. When asked if he had a Roth reader in mind when he wrote, he replied with his characteristic honesty, “No. I occasionally have an anti-Roth reader in mind. I think, “How he is going to hate this!” That can be just the encouragement I need.”
Philip Roth:
Quotable Quotes
1) “You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.”
2)“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.
3)” “Pain is like a baby
crying. What it wants it can’t name.”
4) “You can no more make someone tell
the truth than you can force
someone to love you.”
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