An absolutely fascinating, revealing, brilliant interview
was given by Philip Roth to a Swedish journalist, Svenska Dagbladet, for
publication there on the occasion of his novel, Sabbath’s Theater being translated into Swedish. The interview appeared in the March 18 New York Times Book Review as well. It is almost unsuitable to quote any part of
it without the whole, but I do so with the hope that by quoting the most
salient points (to me), any reader of this will be motivated to read the full unexpurgated version on the NYT's web site.
Roth like Updike are in the pantheon of the authors I've
followed most closely, having read nearly everything they've written. Updike was silenced by his death a few years
ago, a great loss and now Roth has decided not to write fiction any more. I've felt his last few novels presaged that
decision, being very-end-of-life focused.
Hopefully, Roth will long be a commentator on the literary scene and on the
state of our nation for years to come, as evidenced by this interview.
About the main character in the novel, Sabbath, Roth says Mickey
Sabbath doesn’t 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.”
When asked about his decision to stop writing, he said When I decided to stop writing about five years
ago I did, as you say, sit down to reread the 31 books I’d published between
1959 and 2010. I wanted to see whether I’d wasted my time. You never can be
sure, you know.....My conclusion,
after I’d finished, echoes the words spoken by an American boxing hero of mine,
Joe Louis. ..... 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.”
About the often heard accusation that misogyny runs
deeply in his works, he replies: 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....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. .... 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 don’t pretend to be.
On the subject of the men in his books, 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 interviewer then asks “'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 didn’t 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 Kafka’s 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.
Asked about his generation of writers and the state of
contemporary American fiction, he morphs from fiction to his feelings about the
world we now inhabit. His observations
on today's world are particularly profound:
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 everyone’s 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. It’s
hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner
of the world.
His comments on American popular culture are priceless: The power in any society is with those who
get to impose the fantasy....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 society’s 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.
His final thoughts in the interview are about the nature
of writing itself and what it may or may not reveal about the writer. Whoever
looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is
looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer’s “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
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.
May we hear again and again from Philip Roth, perhaps not
in imaginary literature, but in interviews such as this and essays. To me he is still the reigning dean of American
literature and intellectual thought.
