Philip Roth Unleashed Part 1 imagine...

This programme contains some strong language and sexual references

It's Philip Roth's 80th birthday and his entire home town

of Newark, New Jersey, has turned out to celebrate with him.

-# ..Happy birthday to you. #

-CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Roth is considered by many to be America's greatest living writer,

but he hasn't always been this accessible.

We've been talking about making a film together for over 20 years,

but it's only now, having decided that he will not write again,

that he feels able to tell the whole story.

I found it so treacherously difficult

to make our film originally with you.

-Yes, that was a different period.

-Yeah, it was a different period.

That's what I felt, that you were ready now to talk about those things

which you weren't ready to talk about

when we first discussed them, all those years ago.

I didn't need that.

I didn't want to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

Now, you see, now that I don't write, I just want to chatter away.

Widely feted for a career spanning six decades, after a shocking

debut, the scope and achievement of Roth's work only grew.

Over 31 books, he charted the American century,

detailing both the political and the personal.

His 1960s novel, Portnoy's Complaint

about a teenage boy's efforts

to keep his obsessive masturbation a secret

from his overbearing Jewish family

was a sensation and marked him out as a provocateur.

He then turned the same fearless vision to the American dream,

never afraid to look hard at the extremes of human experience

as his characters become impaled on history.

He explores the heights of love and the depths of depravity and loss.

MAN SHOUTS

But the intensity of his childhood growing up in Newark, New Jersey,

never left him.

This vibrant immigrant city became central to his work

and this is where our story begins.

Welcome to Philip Roth's Newark.

You have chosen to visit Newark through the eyes

and genius of Philip Roth.

Our first stop this morning will be Weequahic High School,

Philip's alma mater, and on to his childhood home and Philip Roth Plaza.

Fans now come by the busload to visit the setting of Roth's novels.

Newark was home to a thriving, close-knit community,

where Philip grew up, happy at home and school.

"The women worked all the time

"with little assistance from labour-saving devices,

"washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks."

"If you're from New Jersey", Nathan had said,

"and you write 30 books and you win the Nobel Prize,

"and you live to be white-haired and 95,

"it's highly unlikely, but not impossible, that after your death

"they'll decide to name a rest stop for you on the Jersey Turnpike."

-MAN:

-"It is a relatively good neighbourhood in Newark..."

His early books were set here in these quiet residential streets,

where his father sold insurance door to door

and where his family was to become not so much famous as infamous

with the publication of Goodbye, Columbus

and Portnoy's Complaint.

But how did this nice Jewish boy become such a troublemaker?

I'm going to read you a little bit of Portnoy.

-OK. I didn't bargain for this, you know?

-No, I know.

I shouldn't... I'm not going to let you do this.

-You can deny that it's yours.

-OK.

"My wang was all I really had that I would call my own."

I'm a distinguished writer of 80. Must you dredge up my past?

"What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick

"up these girls as much as I stick it up their backgrounds..."

"..as though through fucking, I will discover America, conquer America.

"Maybe that's more like it.

"Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington,

"now Portnoy."

-What do you want me to say?

-No comment.

Do you want me to apologise to the world?

"Then came adolescence,

"half my waking life spent..."

"..in the laundry hamper..."

"..before which I stood in my dropped drawers,

"so I could see how it looked coming out."

I still have my old paperback from back in the day,

pretty battered and falling open at the dirty bits!

And I just thought

it was the funniest thing I'd read in ever, you know?

It just made me laugh out loud reading it.

You have to know that for many people...

For me, for instance, that book was just a revelation.

-I brought you out of the closet.

-Yeah.

It was, it was an extraordinary moment, that book, really,

and in a way it's what everyone had been thinking about,

-but nobody dared speak its name, and you spoke its name.

-Mm, mm.

And for we Jewish boys it was even more so, I have to say.

Yes, how so?

Well, I mean, there are elements of farce.

I mean, certainly in the notorious chapters, you know,

whacking off and so on, that it actually is written like farce,

you know, with the mother banging on the door outside, you know?

"Don't flush!" you know, et cetera.

It's... It's very, very clever farce

and even though, you know, he got into trouble with conservative Jews,

it actually is a kind of absolutely American Jewish novel.

"Alex. Are you eating hamburgers out?

"Answer me, please, is that why you flushed the toilet -

"was there hamburger in it?"

"I told you - I don't look in the bowl when I flush it!

"I'm not interested like you are, in other people's poopie!"

"Oh, oh, oh - 13 years old and the mouth on him!

"Tell me please what horrible things have we done to you

"all our lives that this should be our reward?"

-PHILIP:

-And it was a sensation.

It was an experience unlike any I was ever to know in the future

and unlike anything that had happened to me in the past.

Because this was a scandal.

Nothing in my education prepared me to be a scandalous writer.

I thought I was going to be a serious writer,

but the moment I became comical and freewheeling in this way,

I became a scandalous writer.

"This hero is not just some miserable wretch

"writhing in his lusts.

"He is the Jew avenging himself of his upbringing in a Jewish home,

"which has become detestable to him, by going out and laying shikses,

"thereby freeing himself from the nightmare of mameh.

"This is the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying.

"I dare say that with the next turn of history, this book will make

"all of us defendants at court."

"WE will pay the price, not the author who revels in obscenities."

It felt very natural to me to write it.

I didn't feel like I was breaking any taboos.

Didn't you really?

No, because my friends and I, we all joked like this.

We'd been joking like this since we were in high school.

One thing the boys I grew up with

and I had was tremendous verbal freedom.

We weren't afraid to say things. And it wasn't just dirty words.

It was great curiosity about sex and mostly the great question,

we raised our voices to the heavens and, "When, when?

"When, where, how will this thing occur?"

CAR HORN BEEPS

-TV: Somebody, I say, somebody knocked.

-Yes, I knocked.

I goes the name Senator Claghorn, that is.

I know you're from the South.

When I'm in New York I'll never go to the Yankee Stadium.

Now, wait a minute...

-PHILIP:

-I had imbibed the mood

and aura of family life

in my neighbourhood very strongly, I think,

and I didn't just grow up in my house,

and I think when you take a look at the street I grew up on

you see that there are some 40 or 50 houses on that street,

maybe even more, and in each house lived ten or 12 people,

so there we've got 500 people for a start, and that's only one street.

"Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments

"of a microscopic surface of things conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth,

"by Yahrzeit candles and cooking smells,

"by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds?"

-PHILIP:

-"About one another,

"we knew who had what kind of lunch in his bag in his locker

"and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd's,

"who smelled of hair oil and who over-salivated when he spoke,

"whose mother worked and whose father was dead.

"Perhaps by definition, a neighbourhood 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."

Well, I think what you're reading about is the deep perceptiveness

of a kid that comes through his intimate knowledge of all these

households in the neighbourhood and the gradations of class.

He just smells... In fact, you can smell them sometimes.

So I was writing then about the perspective of a young person.

You have a great perch as a child writer.

You are in people's houses, you're in their kitchens, you're in their

bedrooms, you're in their bathrooms, you sleep over, you hear everything.

No-one dreams that you're going to turn out to be

this terrible littler writer.

It's not your fault you don't know what gentiles think

when they read something like this, but I can tell you,

they don't think about how it's a great work of art.

People don't READ art, they read about people.

And how do you think they will judge the people in your story?

-Have you thought about that?

-Yes.

-And what have you concluded?

-I can't put it into a conclusion.

I didn't write 15,000 words

so as now to put it all into a one-word conclusion.

Well, I can.

Your story, Nathan, as far as gentiles are concerned,

is about one thing and one thing only.

It is about kikes, kikes and their love of money.

That is all our good Christian friends will see.

I've watched you all your life.

You are a good, kind and considerate young man.

You aren't somebody who writes this kind of story

and then pretends it's the truth.

But I did write it.

I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story.

'My parents became his protector.

'You know, he took a lot of gaff from the Jewish community.'

My father had to take some of the punishment.

And then there was a lot of, "Are you this..." To them -

"Are you one of these characters?

"Is this your character, is that your character?"

Of course, you leave home at 17

and because you have to get away from your father.

You have that quarrel with your father.

He still drove me nuts when I was an adolescent.

Not after that.

But when I was an adolescent he drove me crazy.

He said in one of his books that he wanted to go to a university,

a Christian university...

..to find out how the other half of the world lived.

And...

-Did he find out?

-He found out.

Well, I'm only following the path taken by other writers,

and I don't mean to compare my work to Joyce's, but Joyce left Dublin

and he couldn't get out of Dublin fast enough.

And then he couldn't write about anything else for the rest of his life.

It was a very moral campus there in 1951 when Philip Roth arrived.

Philip was a gorgeous man.

He was a dashing young man and there was a whiff of danger about him

because he was so much smarter than anybody, and so witty.

-Philip was a kind of iconoclast.

-He was a renegade.

Philip was the first one to be spectacularly sexually successful.

He found older women pursuing him.

Well, older women - a year older, eight months older!

We've got your school mates all talking about you in that Arena, which is very nice.

-Talking about what?

-Talking about you at college and your sexual prowess and your...

-I didn't have any sexual prowess.

-Well, they said you did.

-They're wrong.

Uh, I didn't have any sexual prowess because I didn't have any sex.

Um, it was not a...

-Are you sh- are you...

-I'm sure of it.

I have - this great memory of mine that you talk about, I have it.

-You had no sex at college?

-Very little.

You assume there was lots of - no, that wasn't the way it was.

We were very, um...

The norm was a certain kind of decency.

The whole system of rules, the parietal rules,

were laid down and it made it impossible for you unless you

had greater ingenuity than I had, and I had great ingenuity.

Where would you do this thing? Where would you do it?

Then, not long out of college, Roth became passionately involved

with a troubled older woman.

'..specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction.

Reader, I married her.'

He was married.

His wife, Margaret Anderson, who later became Margaret Roth,

whose marriage was not a very successful one,

unfortunately was killed in an automobile accident in Central Park.

Clearly this was a critical event in his life,

and was very damaging to him personally but.

He says that his marriage to Maggie helped make him the writer he is.

In fact, he says it very clearly.

It freed him from being a good boy,

from being the person his parents had raised to believe that

no-one would ever do him serious harm and the world was -

although he knew about many things, he knew about anti-Semitism, he knew about prejudice,

it's not as though he grew up in a coddled environment.

Still the idea that he could be made to suffer in this way for years

was astonishing news to him, and it filled him with anger.

-A woman who had a sign on her saying, 'Stay Away, Keep Out'.

-Mm.

-And of course who betrayed him from the very beginning.

-Mm-hm.

I had seen life in a darker way than I ever had before.

My upbringing had not been dark.

Whatever problems we had, whatever tensions

and conflicts there were, they weren't dark.

This was a darkness that I knew nothing about.

He was 23 years old when he met her.

He was 35 when he died. That's a big chunk of life.

Did you actually undergo psychoanalysis yourself at that time?

-Mm. It befell me.

-It befell you.

Yes. For a while. I had a bad time of my first marriage.

I came out of it feeling very, uh, crippled and bewildered,

and, um, I felt I needed to be put together again.

It was the only place I knew where you could go to be put together.

It was the great era, the flourishing of psychoanalysis in America and in New York.

Were you kind of liberated by this psychoanalysis? Did it help you

as a writer, if not as a man, is what I want to know?

The psychoanalytic situation liberated a certain language in me as a writer.

'A moment comes, as it did for me some months back,

when I was all at once in a state of helpless confusion

and could not understand any longer what was once obvious to me.

Why do I do what I do?

My desk had become a frightening, foreign place.

I came to believe that I just could not make myself over yet again.

Far from feeling capable of remaking myself,

I felt myself coming undone.'

Starting with Portnoy, Roth created a series of fictional disguises,

which have teased his readers as to how much is based on himself.

Nathan Zuckerman is a young writer from New Jersey.

-Would you like me to come along?

-No need.

I can use the exercise after my egg.

Besides, you must things to write down. There's paper on my desk.

Paper for what?

For your feverish notes.

-You had an earful this morning.

-It wasn't so much.

So much as what? Last night?

I'll be curious to see how we all turn out some day.

It should make an interesting story.

You're not so nice and polite in your fiction.

You're a different person.

Am I?

I should hope so.

You've been having this conversation with your fictional protege,

Nathan Zuckerman, since The Ghost Writer in 1979.

The Zuckerman story changes over the course of nine or 10, however many books there are.

In the beginning, it's about him coming of age,

developing as a writer, et cetera, et cetera.

And then we get to The Counterlife

and American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, it's not about him.

He's the ear, he's the voice, he's the observer, he's the eye.

Zuckerman seems to be the most important mask that Roth has.

He doesn't really exactly have Roth's previous life experience,

although he's from Newark and he has much the same family and some of

the same experiences, and we watch him over the course of a lifetime.

We trace him until he's 71 years old, so we get to see this man live through history.

'In the absence of a self, one impersonates selves,

and after a while impersonates the best self that gets one through.'

-This is obviously Zuckerman talking.

-Aha.

'What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do

and not only of myself. A troupe of players that I have internalised,

a permanent company of actors that I can call upon

when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces

and parts that form my repertoire.

I'm a theatre, nothing more than a theatre.'

-Now I know what you're talking about.

-Oh, did you really?

'Being Zuckerman is one long performance

and the very opposite of what is thought of as being one's self.

In fact, those who most seem to be themselves appear to me

people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they

ought to be or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards.

So in earnest are they that they don't even recognise

that being in earnest is the act.'

Just as Portnoy and Zuckerman were young Jewish males from a background much like Roth's own

Roth's other alter ego, David Kapesh, is, like Roth, now a professor of literature.

The Kapesh books are a trilogy

exploring the nature of sexual desire,

beginning with a surrealist tale of a man who finds himself

in hospital because of a Kafkaesque metamorphosis.

And so I wrote a story called The Breast

about a man who turns into a breast.

I was in very high spirits during those years,

very happy, and I think that out of this happiness and high spirits

these books were born.

'"Calm down now, Mr Kapesh", a woman said. "I'm only washing you.

I'm only washing your face." "My face? Where is my face?

Where are my arms, my legs? Where is my mouth?

What happened to me?" And then I began to sob uncontrollably

and had eventually to be put to sleep.'

I was washed gently but thoroughly every morning

and then my nipples and aureole were lubricated with oil.

Six days a week these ablutions were performed by a woman,

Miss Clarke, and on Sunday by the man.

It was ten weeks before I had sufficiently recovered

from the horror of hearing the truth about myself to be able

to relax again beneath Miss Clarke's ministering hands.'

When I was writing The Breast I was living in Woodstock,

as was my great friend, Philip Guston, the painter.

And Philip read a manuscript of the book and he produced these drawings for me as a present.

And you will see at the very top The Breast enters the hospital.

He's put into his hammock and there's a medical chart hanging off him.

Then down below he's being cleaned up, and the nurse is cleaning him.

He seems excited by it, there's lots of movement.

And down below, number three, the doctor comes. It's serious.

And then the unserious pictures of his girlfriend comes in.

They have a relationship. And his father comes to visit,

and his father is very understanding and very accepting of it, I think,

and they talk. A psychiatrist comes. He's a serious man.

He smokes a cigar like Freud.

Depression, The Breast is depressed.

Philip Guston decided to kill him. He doesn't get killed in my book,

but Philip put him out of his misery.

And I thought of these three books as three different dreams

or nightmares of an erotic nature.

I was very curious as a writer as to how far I could go.

What happens if you go further?

Shame isn't for writers. You have to be shameless.

Writing about sex involves fictional choices and tact,

and tactlessness...

..and you don't want to be necessarily indecorous

but you don't necessarily want to be decorous either.

So you have to have a good ear, um, and be able to weigh

the power of the word.

'There's no way to negotiate metrically this wild thing.

It's not 50/50 like a business transaction.

It's the chaos of Eros we're talking about,

the radical destabilisation that is its excitement.

You're back in the woods with sex. You're back in the bog.

"What it is is trading dominance, perpetual imbalance.

"You're going to rule out dominance, you're going to rule out yielding.

"The dominating is the flint.

"It strikes the spark, it sets it going. Then what?

"Listen. You'll see. you'll see what dominating leads to.

"You'll see what yielding leads to."

Clearly at the centre of all this is the writer,

the male, preoccupied in his case with sex,

because he's a provocateur, that's what he is.

But at the same time, his portrayal of women has made many people call

him a misogynist, many intelligent people call him a misogynist.

I think his books are as filled with

all kinds of women as they are all kinds of men.

There are good characters, bad characters, sweet characters,

nasty characters - he runs the gamut.

He's got some wonderful,

great heroines, and they run from early on,

from people like Brenda who's a smart, engaging girl

in Goodbye Columbus, but especially in some of these later books.

I got literary fame and I also got sexual fame

and I also got madman fame.

I got hundreds of letters, 100 a week, say, some of them

letters with pictures of girls in bikinis.

I had lots of opportunity to ruin my life.

The last thing I wanted to do was make myself more visible than

I already was.

The visibility unnerved me. I liked it the old way.

And so I moved out to the country.

You can be quite a solitary creature yourself

and you obviously enjoy Connecticut very much.

I find it very congenial to live in the natural beauty

of the place as I have in Connecticut.

And when I have a project,

there's no place else I can do it except there.

I work during the day, do some kind of exercise late in the day,

come in and have my dinner, read for a few hours and go to sleep,

and I haven't lost contact with what I've been doing all day.

There hasn't been all that hubbub that gets you out of where you were.

You do this day in and day out,

and I found it was the only way for me to keep the connections alive

from one day's work to the next because you can't do it with notes.

There's a tone, there's a pace, there's the scale of things,

and you can keep that from day to day.

And then if I'm stuck, and I often am stuck,

I walk out the door and I'm away.

I'm virtually in the woods, and I walk around for ten minutes,

I come back and try again.

The rhythm is there. Nothing intervenes in your...

-Yes, that's right.

-Even if you can pick up where you left off,

it may be just as frustrating but you're back where you were.

But if you go... If you go at it every day, and I did do it

six or seven, sometimes seven days a week, then the work gets done.

Quit when you think it's... You can put it into the world.

Then, in the early '70s,

Roth's attention shifted as a trip to see Kafka's Prague revealed

a city in turmoil that would come to absorb and ignite him.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

NEWSREEL: The marvellous spring,

the unbelievable summer, the promise of a new world called

socialism with a human face, were to be crushed, stamped upon.

But for the few precious months that it lasted,

this spring of freedom was a wildly exhilarating experience.

In 1968 there had been the Prague Spring in which the Russians

had put down the Czechs' movement for freedom.

The Communists dominated totalitarian Prague

when they entered.

TANK RUMBLES

I began to meet the dissidents.

My job isn't to be enraged.

My job is what Chekhov said the job of an artist was, which is

the proper presentation of the problem.

There's a journalistic side to writing novels because you

need the facts, you need the information, you need the details.

You have to invent off of something.

I got to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality.

After my four or

so visits to Prague, I began to think of an idea for a book in which

a character, writer, who had endured a kind of crazy success of the kind

I had, then goes to Czechoslovakia and sees the consequences of

THEIR art,

what happens to THESE people as a result of the political system.

SHOUTING

"You can do whatever you want.

"No drugs but plenty of whisky.

"You can fuck, you can masturbate, you can look at dirty pictures.

"You can look at yourself in the mirror, you can do nothing.

"All the best people are there, also the worst.

"We're all comrades now. Come to the orgy.

"You will see the final stage of the revolution."

"Balotka explains who is who and who likes what.

"That one was a journalist till they fired him. He loves pornography.

"I saw him with my eyes fucking a girl from behind,

"reading a dirty book at the same time.

"That one, he's a terrible abstract painter.

"The best abstract painting he did was the day the Russians came.

"He went out and painted over all the street signs so the tanks

"wouldn't know where they were.

"He has the longest prick in Prague.

"That one, the little clerk, that's Mr Vodika.

"He's a good writer, an excellent writer, but everything scares him.

"If he sees a petition he passes out.

"Just this week, Mr Vodika told the

"Government that if he made bad politics he's sorry.

"He's hoping this way they will let him write again about

"his perversion.

"Will they? Of course not.

"They will tell him now to write a historical novel about Pilsen beer."

This is the way he likes to work, I think,

where everything is on the line, where everything matters,

Prague and why Prague was so riveting to him.

This is a society where life is on the line every day with

simple decisions and this gives a quickness and a force

and a meaning to everything.

It was thrilling to find such a place and to be able to write about it.

You quote Zuckerman in front of your book.

"I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us.

"If a book we're reading does not rouse us

"with a blow to the head then why read it?"

It's a fabulous quote,

and it applies to Roth throughout his career.

When you say why him, why this writer, do you know, that quote

can tell you why because none of these books

go down easy, because somebody's mad about every one of these books.

Somewhere somebody's mad about every one of these books,

somewhere, somebody is hysterical in the print

somewhere because they do bite and sting you.

They're not easy, they're not about the landscape,

they're not comforting, they're not pretty.

They're about people.

They're about people in all their depths and disarray.

"They said they would put in jail for what you're doing here,

"for espionage, plotting against the Czech people.

"Recently, an American got off the train in Bratislava and was

"immediately put into jail for two months because he was mistaken

"for somebody else.

"A West German journalist, they drowned in the river.

"They said he was fishing and fell in.

"I hear very clearly the sound of the river splashing against the

"steep stone embankment outside."

Roth began a series with Penguin books,

Writers From The Other Europe,

and devised an elaborate scheme to smuggle

funds to the blacklisted writers under the watchful eyes of

the Soviet authorities.

Philip recruited American writers and scholars to donate 50

a month that Philip would then take to this grungy little travel agency

in Manhattan and he would convert the cash into currency that could be

transferred safely without the Czechoslovakian government finding

out because if the government found out that these writers were getting

money from the West they would not only confiscate the money but

they would further punish the people who were supposed to receive it.

So it was a very ingenious scheme

and Philip got William Styron to help a novelist,

he got Arthur Schlesinger to help a Czech historian,

he got Arthur Miller to help a Czech playwright and so forth.

And this gave Philip a sort of new purpose in life.

INDISTINCT

And then, in 1976, Roth moved to London.

"England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks which,

"on reflection, might be the least painful method.

"A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without

"Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly

"without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

"You in England, the Jersey boy with the dirty mouth who writes

"the books Jews love to hate, how do you survive there?

"How can you stand the silence?

"I was invited a couple of years ago to lecture at Oxford.

"I was there six months.

"At dinner, whatever I said, somebody next to me always replied,

"'Oh, really?'

"You didn't like the small talk. truthfully, I didn't mind it.

"I needed a vacation from this place."

Roth's retreat from the politeness of England, both in life and

in literature, were his frequent trips to Israel and the chaos

of the promised land.

"In Israel, it's enough to live.

"You don't have to do anything else, and you go to bed exhausted."

They have to. They're going to sing right there.

"Have you ever noticed that Jews shout?

"Here everything is black and white, everybody is shouting and

"everybody is always right."

Roth had come to England to set up home with the actress Claire Bloom.

At first, I think he felt very released,

as one does in a new place, and very free of the old burdens,

made a lot of new friends, which he's kept,

and was very happy.

Then I think he became,

he would perhaps tell you something else, but I think be became very

much afraid of being cut off from his subject, which is American life.

I came to England because England is Claire's home

and when we began to live together, we decided

we would live half of each year in my country and half in hers.

It was a simple as that, really.

For any writer, you have to know the inside world in order to make it totally authentic.

I don't think he really could settle here, Philip loves America,

he is an American.

He said to me the other night,

I'm interested in American history, in everything American.

He was as well, it has to be said, or is as well a quite secretive man -

he's both very open and ebullient and also secretive.

England's never really featured in your work at all.

Well, I wrote about it. England didn't feature.

That's true, because I couldn't write a feature-length

book about London or anything.

My experience wouldn't allow that.

But England with Israel was a combination that interested me,

so, particularly on the issue of anti-Semitism,

because when Zuckerman goes to Israel and is talking to some people

on a West Bank settlement, they tell him about how the West is the just

the home of anti-Semitism and that America is anti-Semitic and England

is anti-Semitic, and Zuckerman protests and says, "This is paranoia.

"You have it all wrong. Neither place is that.

"In fact, America is Zion, America is the true Zion."

Then he goes back to England and, irony of ironies, his wife's

family, his new wife's family, turns out to be anti-Semitic.

'"You must open a window immediately.

'"There's a terrible smell in here."

'"Is there, madam?" he courteously replied.

'"Absolutely. The stink in here is abominable."

'Turning to Maria, I quietly told her, "I am that stink,

'"the emanation of Jews.

'"She is hypersensitive to Jewish emanations. Don't be dense."

'"Oh, this is ridiculous. You're being absurd."

'From down the banquette, I heard the woman saying, "They smell so funny, don't they?"'

You also say, "Jews" or I say this, Nathan says,

"Jews are to history what Eskimos are to snow."

What was your experience of actually going into Israel at that

time on various visits?

What did you make of it yourself?

There were a multitude of points of view,

all of them held powerfully, and all of them in conflict,

and a society in conflict is irresistible to me as a writer.

'"Philip, I cannot sit and have coffee here.

'"Triumphant Israel is a terrible, terrible place to have coffee."

'"Who do they think they are, these provincial nobodies?"

'"Jailors, this their great Jewish achievement, to make Jews

'"into jailers and jet bomber pilots.

'" Suppose they were to win and have their way and every

'"Arab in the Nablus and every Arab in the Hebron

'"and every Arab in the Galilee and in Gaza,

'"suppose every Arab in the world were to disappear courtesy of the Jewish nuclear bomb,

' "what would they have here 50 years from now?

'"A noisy little state of no importance whatsoever.

'"That's what the persecution and the destruction of the

"'Palestinians will have been for, the creation of a Jewish Belgium,

"'without even a Brussels to show for it.'"

It was the conflict, the contagious conflict, that intrigued me.

The emotional volatility,

the political volatility...everything was

at stake always, it seemed.

BBC NEWS: In Israel, the alleged Nazi war criminal,

John Demjanjuk,

has again appeared in court.

He's charged with operating the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp.

At the time I was there, John Demjanjuk,

the American auto worker,

previously Ukrainian guard in one of the German death camps,

John Demjanjuk was on trial for his life, and I went every day to the

trial, and I sat there probably three or four hours every morning.

I was gripped by it. Anybody would have been.

There were incredible and horrifying dramatic moments in the trial.

'There he was, there it was, bald now and grown stocky,

'a big, cheerful palooka of 68, a good father,

'a good neighbour, loved by his family and all his friends.

'It was nearly 50 years

'since he'd last smashed open anyone's skull and he was

'by now as benign and unfrightening as an old boxing champ.

'Good old Johnny. Man, the demon, as good old Johnny.'

The trouble for the prosecution was that there was

no certainty that this man they had in the courtroom, was Ivan

the Terrible who had committed these horrors at Sobibor and Treblinka.

So immediately there wasn't one Demjanjuk,

there were two Demjanjuks.

The Demjanjuk who the Israelis' prosecution said was Ivan the

Terrible and the Demjanjuk on trial who said, "I am not Ivan the Terrible.

"This is a case of mistaken identity."

'Loved his garden, everyone said.

'Rather tend tomatoes now

'and raise string beans than bore a hole in somebody's ass with a drill.

'He'd sowed his oats and settled down,

'all that rough stuff sworn off long ago.

'He could only barely remember now all the hell he'd raised.

'So many years, the way they fly.

'No, he was somebody else entirely.

'That hell raiser was no longer him.'

'So there he was, or there he wasn't.'

Were you ever a guard in an SS Nazi extermination camp?

Never.. Never.

Never.

Was that your picture?

I don't know.

You can't be sure?

I am not sure. I don't know.

I just thought if my narrator, Roth's, confusion mirrored

the struggle between Demjanjuk one, Demjanjuk two, mirrored

the struggle between the Jews, the Israelis and the Palestinians, all

the conflict in this society, that somehow I could make use of this.

I didn't know what it was.

In writing Operation Shylock, Roth used the idea of double identity,

creating two protagonists who shared the same name, Philip Roth.

It was a new twist on his game with the reader.

It turns out that at that time, roaming through the world,

there was a man who, for all I know is still living, though I haven't

heard from him in recent years, who pretended to be me, a man bearing

a very strong resemblance to me, a rather uncanny resemblance to me.

He arrived in Israel, registered at the King David Hotel,

and announced that he was a spokesman for a doctor in what he called diasporism.

He presented himself as a kind of anti-Moses who was going to

lead the Jews out of Israel back to Europe

because he felt that Zionism had exhausted itself as an ideology

and as a programme for the Jews,

that he was there to prevent a second Holocaust.

Well, these are not ideas I hold

and I didn't much like these ideas being expounded as mine.

Roth then uses the voice of a Palestinian ex-patriot, speaking

to her nationalist husband and his friend Roth, about the futility

of the conflict and the emotional propaganda on both sides.

'"Palestine is a lie,

'"I will not sacrifice Michael to more lies.

'"People like you,

'(meaning me as well) "run from backwaters provinces like this one.

'"You ran, you were right to run, both of you, as far as you could from

'"the provincialism and egocentricity and the xenophobia and the lamentation.

'"You were not poisoned by the sentimentality of these

'"childish, stupid, ethnic mythologies.

'"You plunged into a big, new, free world,

'"with all your intellect and all your courage.

'"Truly free young men, devoted to art, books, reasons, scholarship.

'"Well, all I mean is that you couldn't possibly have

'"been as idiotic as you are now.'"

And my head was turning with all this.

I went to meet people in Ramallah in the West Bank in the refugee

camps and so on.

I thought I was getting deep into the Jewish...nightmare...

..that through Demjanjuk I entered the nightmare of 1939 to 1945.

Through the friend who took me to Ramallah and through

the settler leader who took me all round, I entered the struggle

that's been going on since 1948 in Israel and this just

ignited me.

NEWS REPORT: Demjanjuk himself, in court today, Ivan or not Ivan,

cried out for all to hear, "I am innocent, innocent, innocent."

HE SPEAKS UKRANIAN

'"Did six million really die? Come off it.

'"The Jews pulled a fast one on us again, keeping alive their

'"new religion, Holocaust-omania.'

'"Read the revisionists.

'"What it really comes down to is there WERE no gas chambers.'

'"Note to the reader, this book is a work of fiction.

'Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or

'dead is entirely coincidental.

'This confession is false.'

I remember I had lunch once in the Knesset with Olmert,

who later became Prime Minister.

He was telling me how the

American Jews were going to come to Israel by the boatload.

I told him that no-one's coming here.

They're very happy where they are. I said, "There is a Zion.

"It's called America."

Certainly New York is Zion, you know,

and I sense your comfort, you can be an American Jew and say you're

an American Jew and say you're an American, which you are.

I just wanted to talk to you about Irving Berlin.

"I took more pride in Easter Parade than

"in the victory of the Six Day War, found more

"security in White Christmas than in the Israeli nuclear reactor."

HE LAUGHS

That's very good. Who wrote that?

Well, that's you.

MUSIC: Easter Parade by Judy Garland

"The radio was playing Easter Parade and I thought that this is

"Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments.

"God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave to Irving Berlin

"Easter Parade and White Christmas, the two holidays that celebrate

"the Divinity of Christ, the Divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish

"rejection of Christianity, and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do?

"He de-Christs them both.

"Easter he turns into a fashion show

"and Christmas into a holiday about snow.

"Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ,

"down with the Crucifix and up with the bonnet.

"He turns their religion into schlock but nicely, nicely,

"so nicely the goy don't even know what hit them.

"They love it. Everybody loves it."

That just chi... That's so true.

And then there's God Bless America, to boot.

Irving Berlin wrote God Bless America.

THEY SING "God Bless America"

It's now a staple of everybody's baseball game played in America.

In the seventh inning, when there's always a little break,

everybody stands up and some American soldier or seaman or airman

sings God Bless America.

# God bless... #

And the whole crowd sings,

and the ball players put their hands over their heart and this song was

written by an immigrant from Russia, Jewish immigrant from Russia.

# God bless America... #

'Roth, now separated from Claire Bloom, had returned home

'to America, to the place and the subject closest to his heart.

'The book he now chose to write was a touching and powerful portrait

'of his father in the last months and days of his life.'

Can we just talk about Patrimony for a second,

because I don't know whether you intended to write that book

or you just felt that you needed to chronicle that experience

as it was happening because it was so personal to you.

When my father became seriously ill in 1988, I guess,

and I came to be with him in America, and I would go over

to Elizabeth and spend the day with him,

when I came back in the evening,

I was very depressed because I knew how it was going to end, and

it was going to be awful too, and so I wrote down what happened that day.

I don't know why the hell I did it.

I was keeping a book of crisis, you know.

I wrote if we went to the doctor, what he said,

what we learned at the doctor and so on.

It was very banal, really.

But then it went on for months and months and months,

and the record got larger, and I paid attention.

So, using my notes, I wrote the book.

I wanted to, um, have a snapshot of his character.

"He was, for his age, a fit-looking man of medium height

"whose spontaneous, unassuming virility and spirited decency

"had made him instantly appealing to the widows around.

"Only his eyes really remained beautiful and you would never

"have known that unless you happened to be nearby when he slipped

"off his glasses for a moment, then you would have seen how much

"grey there was in those eyes.

"Up close, you would have seen how gentle and untroubled

"those eyes were, as though they alone had existed since 1901,

"beyond the reverberations of that crude, imperfect, homemade

"dynamo whose stubborn output had driven him through everything."

RECORDING: 'I was born on August 26th

'1901, in the city of Newark

'in the county of Essex.

'And what's today's date?

'Today's date is January 7th, 1984.

'And you have how many sons?

'I have two sons. The first-born is Sandy, and Philip.

'Philip was born in '33, I believe.'

"I must remember accurately, I tell myself,

"remember everything accurately so that

"when he is gone I can recreate the father who created me.

"You must not forget anything."

I wanted to get them, you know, take a photograph of them in motion,

and, erm, so I did remember him, as I thought he was.

I don't think I idealised him.

"'You must not forget anything.'

"That's the inscription on my father's coat of arms.

"To be alive to him is to be made of memory.

"To him, if a man's not made of memory, he's made of nothing."

And then I had a friend of mine lived in that building right over there,

which is now a gutted, empty building.

"'See those steps?

"'1917 I was sitting on that stoop with Al Borok.

"'Remember Al Borok? He had the furniture store.

"'I was sitting there with Al the day America went into the war.

"'It was springtime, April or May, I forget.

"'There's where your great aunt had the candy store.

"'That's where my brother Maurice had his first shoe store.

"'Gee, is that still there?' he says.

"On and on."

I don't know if you want me to read this,

but there are these pieces about the very difficult moments in which

you looked after your father in those last years in Patrimony.

-Mm-hm.

-"I tiptoed back into the bedroom where he was asleep,

"still breathing, still living, still with me.

"Yet another setback,

"outlasted by this man who I'd known unendingly as my father.

"I felt awful about his heroic, hapless struggle to cleanse

"himself before I'd got up to the bathroom

"and about the shame of it, the disgrace he felt himself to be,

"and yet now that it was over and he was so deep in sleep, I thought

"I couldn't have asked anything more from myself before he died.

"This, too, was right and as it should be."

So, again, this...

Well, he'd beshat... As he said, "I beshat myself,"

he said, and I had to...left lunch where there were some family

and I followed him upstairs.

He'd gone out about 10 minutes earlier,

and he'd just come out of the hospital about two days earlier.

He hadn't been able to move his bowels,

and suddenly just had this explosion about, as happens,

two feet from the toilet, and it was just a God-awful mess.

And, of course, he was humiliated, and all that time that he went

through so much with his terrible brain tumour

and losing his faculties one by one, he never cried except when that

humiliating thing happened, and he was infantilised, as it were.

"The defunct warship drifting blindly into shore.

"This is not a picture of my father

"at the end of his life that my wide-awake mind with its resistance

"to poetic metaphor was ever likely to have licensed.

"Rather, it was a sleep that, in its wisdom, kindly delivered up

"to me this childishly simple vision, so rich with truth and

"crystallised my own pain so aptly,

"in the figure of a small fatherless evacuee on the Newark docks."

Now in his mid-50s, Roth had much of his greatest work ahead of him.

He would return to the subject of Newark but not with

the introspective vision of a Jewish son but looking outward at America

and the American century.

Philip is extremely patriotic but he has his idea of what

America should be

and America, you know, should be

liberal and tolerant

and sort of in the spirit of FDR's America and a place of fairness,

of fair economic opportunity, and obviously a place where people

of various races and religious backgrounds are treated equally.

Philip is incredibly incisive

and incredibly engaged with what it means

to be an American, what it means to become an American.

The moment which gives Philip his greatness

is this moment in the last third

of his life, you know, when he stops

doing all these reflexive, ludic, post-modern, introverted,

self-interested things and says,

"OK, I'm going to look at my country.

"I'm going to," you know, "from everything that I've done,

"with that experience of everything that I've done, I'm going

"to turn the beam away from myself and out at America."

And he starts taking on, you know,

some of the big things that had been the big themes of America in his

life, so he talks about McCarthyism in I Married A Communist,

he talks about race, he talks about Vietnam, you know, and he finds

a kind of grandeur, you know,

that you wouldn't have said was there before.

He's just hitting it out of the ballpark one after the next.

Every book is worth reading

and worth relating to the other books that he writes,

and you have the feeling of a body of work

that is coming out, thought out one book in relation to the other,

and each book taking on a subject of its own

and yet speaking to the book that preceded it.

I think the little run of novels that begins with Sabbath's Theater

and goes through the trilogy The Human Stain and American Pastoral

and I Married A Communist, it's just... It's the most extraordinary

piece of work that I think anybody's done in a very long time.