I feel as if I have lost a good friend, similar to the
way I felt when John Updike died now more than nine years ago. I grieved then and I grieve now. These are the two towering writers of
my lifetime and no one, for me at least, will even begin to approach them. They were not only the most prolific writers of our
era, but were the most perceptive observers of our cultural scene, now turning
into a cultural wasteland. And they spoke personally to me in ways other
writers often have as well, but never with such fecundity.
Roth was ten years older than I am (and Updike was about
the same number of years older than I was when he died), a coincidence which
does not fail to strike a looming chord in me.
I’ve read everything by Updike and most by Roth, noting a couple of his
novels still on my “to read” shelf.
One of my earliest entries in this blog cited the importance of both Updike and Roth to me. Here’s just a part of what I said about Roth,
still relevant today:
Where Updike
awakens the Calvinist background of my early years and the suburban existence
of my later life, Roth explores the “Jewishness” of my New York City years.
I’ve long felt his American Pastoral is one of the great novels of the
20th century,
The novel made me
relive those Vietnam years of the 60’s and the social upheavals of the times.
It is a novel in the negative universe of Updike’s Rabbit, in that the
main character is also a former high school star athlete, but from the inner
city, one who in his attempt to create the “perfect life” of the American
dream, an American pastoral, finds his daughter caught up in Weather
Underground violence as he also helplessly witnesses the destruction of his
once beloved inner-city Newark in the 1970s. An American Dream turned American
Nightmare, capturing exactly the way I felt at the time.
Several years ago Roth declared that he would not be
writing any more fiction; believing that he had given all he had (and he did),
recognizing that his creative and physical powers were declining. Consequently I decided to reread his first
major work, Goodbye, Columbus . It
had been “merely” 50 years since I first read it. This is some of what I said after the second reading:
It was a very different experience reading
the book as a septuagenarian. I see Roth as a young colt writing this
novella, exploring themes that would develop over the next fifty plus years,
with clear signs of the literary thoroughbred he would become. Certainly the work foreshadows my favorite
Roth work, American Pastoral.
Nonetheless, it was somewhat painful reading his youthful work, bringing
up issues of my own formative years that were submerged long ago, ones I was
hardly conscious of when I first read the book, crazy families’ impact on their
children, the first real romantic love, and youth’s obliviousness that old age
would one day arrive. And true to Roth,
it is a very funny work as well.
The title
symbolizes the soon-to-be-lost youth of Brenda's brother, as he is about to be
married (like me, at an early age), but still a boy, dreaming of his basketball
days at Ohio State, listening to an old radio broadcast of the big game which
begins: "The place, the banks of the Oentangy." My friend Bruce and I spent part of the
summer at Ohio State University in Columbus as representatives to the National
Student Association from our university.
It was a different world from New York, indeed, but we, like the youth
of Roth’s first major work, were ready to be swept along into the stream of
life as if it was endless.
Coincidentally that same entry covers another book I read
at the same time, Tom Wolfe’s journalistic masterpiece, The Right Stuff. I had read
most of Wolfe’s fiction. We mourned the
death of Tom Wolfe only a week before Roth’s.
A few years after Roth decided to stop writing fiction he
gave an interview, one of his few in his later years, where he commented on
that decision: It is now truly a great relief, something close to a sublime
experience, to have nothing more to worry about than death.
Indeed, the few slender novels he produced towards the
end of his writing life are ruminations about death. They are hard to read and yet mesmerizing, a
phase of life for which we are all preparing. I quoted parts of that interview in this entry. Now a great voice has been silenced, but what he had to say will live
into the future of American fiction and thought.
There is another coincidence to his death yesterday. The day before my wife, Ann, met someone who
revealed he was a childhood friend of Philip Roth. How the conversation turned to Philip Roth was
preternatural. She told him how much I
(and she) admire Roth. He suggested we
talk and provided his email contact. I
wrote him a long, chatty email suggesting we meet, maybe over lunch, as I’d
love to hear about him as he was then.
That was yesterday, the day Roth died.
I grieve for his childhood friend and for us all. There will never be another like him.
Post Script:
Among the tributes published in the New York Times on Roth was one which quoted a paragraph from American Pastoral. I remember reading this exact paragraph out
loud to my wife when I first read it. Great
literature captures universality. My
father was not Jewish but this could mostly apply to him, as it could to almost
anyone “for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between”
and whose “most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything.” Here’s what Roth wrote:
Mr. Levov was one
of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective
goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father
for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong
way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases and
beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape
from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly
and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep
going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.
And as readers it is our job to love Philip Roth and
remember him always.
