Philip Roth - My Life As A Writer - NYTimes

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SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | INTERVIEW | PHILIP ROTH
My Life as a Writer
MARCH 2, 2014
The following is an interview Philip Roth gave to Daniel Sandstrom, the
cultural editor at Svenska Dagbladet, for publication in Swedish
translation in that newspaper and in its original English in the Book
Review.
Sabbaths Theater is now being translated into
Swedish, almost 20 years after its original release. How
would you describe this book to readers who have not yet
read it or heard of it, and how would you describe the main
character, the unforgettable Mickey Sabbath?
Sabbaths Theater takes as its epigraph a line of the aged
Prosperos in Act 5 of The Tempest. Every third thought, says
Prospero, shall be my grave.
I could have called the book Death and the Art of Dying. It is a
book in which breakdown is rampant, suicide is rampant, hatred is
rampant, lust is rampant. Where disobedience is rampant. Where
death is rampant.
Mickey Sabbath doesnt live with his back turned to death the way
normal people like us do. No one could have concurred more heartily
with the judgment of Franz Kafka than would Sabbath, when Kafka
wrote, The meaning of life is that it stops.
His book is death-haunted there is Sabbaths great grief about
the death of others and a great gaiety about his own. There is leaping
with delight, there is also leaping with despair. Sabbath learns to
mistrust life when his adored older brother is killed in World War II. It
14/3/2014 My Life as a Writer - NYTimes.com
is Mortys death that determines how Sabbath will live. The death of
Morty sets the gold standard for grief. Loss governs Sabbaths world.
Sabbath is anything but the perfect external man. His is, rather,
the instinctual turbulence of the man beneath the man. His repellent
way of living he is a kiln of antagonism, unable and unwilling to hide
anything and, with his raging, satirizing nature, mocking everything,
living beyond the limits of discretion and taste and blaspheming against
the decent this repellent way of living is his uniquely Sabbathian
response to a place where nothing keeps its promise and everything is
perishable. His repellent way of living, a life of unalterable contention,
is the best preparation he knows of for death. In his mischief he finds
his truth.
Lastly, this Sabbath is a jokester like Hamlet, who winks at the
genre of tragedy by cracking jokes as Sabbath winks at the genre of
comedy by planning suicide. There is loss, death, dying, decay, grief
and laughter, ungovernable laughter. Pursued by death, Sabbath is
followed everywhere by laughter.
I know that you have reread all of your books recently.
What was your verdict? And what was your opinion of
Sabbaths Theater while reading it again?
When I decided to stop writing about five years ago I did, as you
say, sit down to reread the 31 books Id published between 1959 and
2010. I wanted to see whether Id wasted my time. You never can be
sure, you know.
My conclusion, after Id finished, echoes the words spoken by an
American boxing hero of mine, Joe Louis. He was world heavyweight
champion from the time I was 4 until I was 16. He had been born in the
Deep South, an impoverished black kid with no education to speak of,
and even during the glory of the undefeated 12 years, when he defended
his championship an astonishing 26 times, he stood aloof from
language. So when he was asked upon his retirement about his long
career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just 10 words. I did the best I
could with what I had.
In some quarters it is almost a clich to mention the
word misogyny in relation to your books. What, do you
think, prompted this reaction initially, and what is your
response to those who still try to label your work in that
way?
Misogyny, a hatred of women, provides my work with neither a
structure, a meaning, a motive, a message, a conviction, a perspective,
or a guiding principle. This is contrary, say, to how another noxious
form of psychopathic abhorrence and misogynys equivalent in the
sweeping inclusiveness of its pervasive malice anti-Semitism, a
hatred of Jews, provides all those essentials to Mein Kampf. My
traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed
venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to
the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred.
It is my comic fate to be the writer these traducers have decided I
am not. They practice a rather commonplace form of social control: You
are not what you think you are. You are what we think you are. You are
what we choose for you to be. Well, welcome to the subjective human
race. The imposition of a causes idea of reality on the writers idea of
reality can only mistakenly be called reading. And in the case at hand,
it is not necessarily a harmless amusement. In some quarters,
misogynist is now a word used almost as laxly as was Communist by
the McCarthyite right in the 1950s and for very like the same
purpose.
Yet every writer learns over a lifetime to be tolerant of the stupid
inferences that are drawn from literature and the fantasies implausibly
imposed upon it. As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I dont
pretend to be.
The men in your books are often misinterpreted. Some
reviewers make the, I believe, misleading assumption that
your male characters are some kind of heroes or role
models; if you look at the male characters in your books,
what traits do they share what is their condition?
As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant
and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power
impaired. I have hardly been singing a paean to male superiority but
rather representing manhood stumbling, constricted, humbled,
devastated and brought down. I am not a utopian moralist. My
intention is to present my fictional men not as they should be but vexed
as men are.
The drama issues from the assailability of vital, tenacious men with
their share of peculiarities who are neither mired in weakness nor made
of stone and who, almost inevitably, are bowed by blurred moral vision,
real and imaginary culpability, conflicting allegiances, urgent desires,
uncontrollable longings, unworkable love, the culprit passion, the erotic
trance, rage, self-division, betrayal, drastic loss, vestiges of innocence,
fits of bitterness, lunatic entanglements, consequential misjudgment,
understanding overwhelmed, protracted pain, false accusation,
unremitting strife, illness, exhaustion, estrangement, derangement,
aging, dying and, repeatedly, inescapable harm, the rude touch of the
terrible surprise unshrinking men stunned by the life one is
defenseless against, including especially history: the unforeseen that is
constantly recurring as the current moment.
It is the social struggle of the current moment on which a number
of these men find themselves impaled. It isnt sufficient, of course, to
speak of rage or betrayal rage and betrayal have a history, like
everything else. The novel maps the ordeal of that history and, if it
succeeds, by doing so probes the conscience of the society it depicts.
The struggle with writing is over is a recent quote.
Could you describe that struggle, and also, tell us
something about your life now when you are not writing?
Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened
also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the
next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of
self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy,
not talent, saved my life. It was also my good luck that happiness didnt
matter to me and I had no compassion for myself. Though why such a
task should have fallen to me I have no idea. Maybe writing protected
me against even worse menace.
Now? Now I am a bird sprung from a cage instead of (to reverse
Kafkas famous conundrum) a bird in search of a cage. The horror of
being caged has lost its thrill. It is now truly a great relief, something
close to a sublime experience, to have nothing more to worry about than
death.
You belong to an exceptional generation of postwar
writers, who defined American literature for almost half a
century: Bellow, Styron, Updike, Doctorow, DeLillo. What
made this golden age happen and what made it great? Did
you feel, in your active years, that these writers were
competition or did you feel kinship or both? And why
were there so few female writers with equal success in that
same period? Finally: What is your opinion of the state of
contemporary American fiction now?
I agree that its been a good time for the novel in America, but I
cant say I know what accounts for it. Maybe it is the absence of certain
things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelists
indifference to, if not contempt for, critical theory. Aesthetic freedom
unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness.
(Can you think of an ideology capable of corrective self-satire, let alone
one that wouldnt want to sink its teeth into an imagination on the
loose?) Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda or
even political responsibility. The absence of any school of writing. In a
place so vast, no single geographic center from which the writing
originates. Anything but a homogeneous population, no basic national
unity, no single national character, social calm utterly unknown, even
the general obtuseness about literature, the inability of many citizens to
read any of it with even minimal comprehension, confers a certain
freedom. And surely the fact that writers really dont mean a goddamn
thing to nine-tenths of the population doesnt hurt. Its inebriating.
Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much
calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce
passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing
the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy
tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of
the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to
haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most
undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the
Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz,
indebtedness on everyones tail, families not knowing how bad things
can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing that frenzy
and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through
representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the
old American plutocracy worse than ever.
You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing
the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a
new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the
malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. Its hard not to feel close to
existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world.
Do you feel that there is a preoccupation in Europe with
American popular culture? And, if so, that this
preoccupation has clouded the reception of serious
American literary fiction in Europe?
The power in any society is with those who get to impose the
fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the
church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the
totalitarian superstate that imposes the fantasy, as it did for 12 years in
Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy
that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular
culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young
especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the
societys most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded
by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may
attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into
the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance
of the power is not with them.
I cannot see what any of this has to do with serious American
literary fiction, even if, as you suggest, this preoccupation has [or may
have] clouded the reception of serious American fiction in Europe. You
know, in Eastern Europe, the dissident writers used to say that socialist
realism, the reigning Soviet aesthetic, consisted of praising the Party so
that even they understood it. There is no such aesthetic for serious
literary writers to conform to in America, certainly not the aesthetic of
popular culture.
What has the aesthetic of popular culture to do with formidable
postwar writers of such enormous variety as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison,
William Styron, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, James Baldwin, Wallace
Stegner, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Penn Warren, John Updike, John
Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Robert Stone, Evan Connell, Louis
Auchincloss, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, William
Kennedy, John Barth, Louis Begley, William Gaddis, Norman Rush,
John Edgar Wideman, David Plante, Richard Ford, William Gass,
Joseph Heller, Raymond Carver, Edmund White, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter
Matthiessen, Paul Theroux, John Irving, Norman Mailer, Reynolds
Price, James Salter, Denis Johnson, J. F. Powers, Paul Auster, William
Vollmann, Richard Stern, Alison Lurie, Flannery OConnor, Paula Fox,
Marilynne Robinson, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Hortense
Calisher, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Jamaica Kincaid, Cynthia Ozick,
Ann Beattie, Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Mary Gordon, Louise Erdrich,
Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty (and I have by no means exhausted the
list) or with serious younger writers as wonderfully gifted as Michael
Chabon, Junot Daz, Nicole Krauss, Maile Meloy, Jonathan Lethem,
Nathan Englander, Claire Messud, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan
Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer (to name but a handful)?
You have been awarded almost every literary prize,
except one. And it is no secret that your name is always
mentioned when there is talk of the Nobel Prize in
Literature how does it feel to be an eternal candidate?
Does it bother you, or do you laugh about it?
I wonder if I had called Portnoys Complaint The Orgasm Under
Rapacious Capitalism, if I would thereby have earned the favor of the
Swedish Academy.
In Claudia Roth Pierponts Roth Unbound, there is
an interesting chapter on your clandestine work with
persecuted writers in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.
If a young author a Philip Roth born in, say, 1983 were
to engage in the global conflicts of 2014, which ones would
he pick?
I dont know how to answer that. I for one didnt go to Prague with
a mission. I wasnt looking to pick a trouble spot. I was on a vacation
and had gone to Prague looking for Kafka.
But the morning after I arrived, I happened to drop by my
publishing house to introduce myself. I was led into a conference room
to share a glass of slivovitz with the editorial staff. Afterwards one of the
editors asked me to lunch. At the restaurant, where her boss happened
to be dining too, she told me quietly that all the people in that
conference room were swine, beginning with the boss party hacks
hired to replace those editors who, four years earlier, had been fired
because of their support for the reforms of the Prague Spring. I asked
her about my translators, a husband-and-wife team, and that evening I
had dinner with them. They too were now prevented from working, for
the same reasons, and were living in political disgrace.
When I returned home, I found in New York a small group of
Czech intellectuals who had fled Prague when the Russian tanks rolled
in to put down the Prague Spring. By the time I returned to Russian-
occupied Prague the following spring, I wasnt vacationing. I was
carrying with me a long list of people to see, the most endangered
members of an enslaved nation, the proscribed writers for whom
sadism, not socialism, was the state religion. The rest developed from
that.
Yes, character is destiny, and yet everything is chance.
If you would interview yourself at this point in your life
there must be a question that you havent been asked,
that would be obvious and important, but has been ignored
by the journalists? What would that be?
Perversely enough, when you ask about a question that has been
ignored by journalists, I think immediately of the question that any
number of them cannot seem to ignore. The question goes something
like this: Do you still think such-and-such? Do you still believe so-and-
so? and then they quote something spoken not by me but by a
character in a book of mine. If you wont mind, may I use the occasion
of your final question to say what is probably already clear to the
readers of the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, if not to the ghosts
of the journalists I am summoning up?
Whoever looks for the writers thinking in the words and thoughts
of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a
writers thoughts violates the richness of the mixture that is the very
hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is
the thought that makes him a novelist.
The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters
or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his
characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike
ramifications of the ensemble they make their density, their
substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced
particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.
The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality
previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination.
The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the
novels action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the
elaborate pattern in the newly emerging constellation of imagined
things that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called
simply the arrangement of the parts, the matter of size and order.
The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel.
The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style.
Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.
The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novelist is not a tiny
cog in the great wheel of human thought. He is a tiny cog in the great
wheel of imaginative literature. Finis.
A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 2014, on page BR14 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: My Life as a Writer.
2014 The New York Times Company

Philip Roth - My Life As A Writer - NYTimes

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