0:00:13 > 0:00:17There's a journalistic side to writing novels,
0:00:17 > 0:00:24because you need the facts, you need the information,
0:00:24 > 0:00:26you need the details.
0:00:26 > 0:00:28You have to invent off of something.
0:00:30 > 0:00:32My job isn't to be enraged.
0:00:32 > 0:00:36My job is what Chekhov said
0:00:36 > 0:00:38the job of an artist was,
0:00:38 > 0:00:42which is the proper presentation of the problem.
0:00:45 > 0:00:47So I need some reality.
0:00:47 > 0:00:51I have to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality.
0:00:54 > 0:00:56In a series of novels begun in the mid '90s,
0:00:56 > 0:01:00Philip Roth took reality and twisted it.
0:01:01 > 0:01:06What if Roosevelt hadn't become President...but this man had?
0:01:06 > 0:01:10'He crossed from New York to Paris in 33 hours.
0:01:10 > 0:01:14'Thus bridging the old world and the new.'
0:01:14 > 0:01:20What if a horrific polio epidemic had swept Roth's home town of Newark
0:01:20 > 0:01:23and killed and maimed a generation of children.
0:01:26 > 0:01:30What if a black professor had pretended he was white?
0:01:31 > 0:01:34What would happen next?
0:01:44 > 0:01:48So it's a kind of "what if" situation, you walk into something,
0:01:48 > 0:01:51and then, somehow or other, that's a starting point
0:01:51 > 0:01:54and that's where you pick up from, is that right?
0:01:54 > 0:01:56Well, yes.
0:01:56 > 0:02:00I count on the original ignition to get me started.
0:02:00 > 0:02:04And then one sentence produces the next sentence.
0:02:04 > 0:02:06And that's the way you work.
0:02:06 > 0:02:09Then something may occur to me - what if this happens?
0:02:09 > 0:02:12So I write down that for later.
0:02:12 > 0:02:15And I'm sure then you begin to be stimulated by the invention
0:02:15 > 0:02:18and more invention follows.
0:02:20 > 0:02:26And if the invention seems silly or preposterous or outlandish
0:02:26 > 0:02:30you think, "Let it sit here, just keep going,
0:02:30 > 0:02:32"maybe it will pay off down the way."
0:02:35 > 0:02:38Roth's engagement with history and the American century
0:02:38 > 0:02:42began with a moment where a family, much like his own,
0:02:42 > 0:02:45feels the impact of events that were changing the world.
0:02:51 > 0:02:54ROTH RECITES FROM SABBATH THEATER: "It was a Tuesday in December 1944.
0:02:56 > 0:02:59"I came home from school and saw some cars.
0:02:59 > 0:03:01"I saw my father's truck.
0:03:01 > 0:03:03"Why is that there?
0:03:03 > 0:03:05"I knew something was wrong.
0:03:07 > 0:03:11"In the house, I saw my father in terrible pain.
0:03:11 > 0:03:16"My mother hysterical, her hands, her fingers, moaning, screaming,
0:03:16 > 0:03:18"people there already.
0:03:18 > 0:03:21"A man had come to the door.
0:03:21 > 0:03:24"'I'm sorry,' he said, and gave her the telegram.
0:03:24 > 0:03:26"'Missing in action.'
0:03:28 > 0:03:31"Another month before the second telegram arrived.
0:03:31 > 0:03:35"The death notice was like losing another brother.
0:03:36 > 0:03:39"The family was finished. I was finished.
0:03:42 > 0:03:45"Morty played clarinet and dance band in high school.
0:03:45 > 0:03:48"He was a track star, a terrific swimmer.
0:03:50 > 0:03:55"He was great with his hands, the Sabbath digital artfulness
0:03:55 > 0:03:58"that Mickey too would one day exhibit to the world.
0:03:58 > 0:04:02"All their freedom was in their hands."
0:04:03 > 0:04:07From the shadows of the lost war hero, the brother Morty,
0:04:07 > 0:04:10comes the unlikely character of Mickey Sabbath,
0:04:10 > 0:04:15the flawed, mischievous younger brother, the ultimate anti-hero.
0:04:17 > 0:04:20Mickey Sabbath and Sabbath Theater which was such a change
0:04:20 > 0:04:22from where you had been, and that's...
0:04:22 > 0:04:24I just wondered where that came from.
0:04:24 > 0:04:28Well, you know, whatever lights a fire under you,
0:04:28 > 0:04:30you relish, strangely.
0:04:30 > 0:04:35He gave me great verbal freedom. Verbal energy.
0:04:35 > 0:04:40And his mind and his thinking and his situation...
0:04:41 > 0:04:43..produced verbal sparks.
0:04:45 > 0:04:49I made him into a puppeteer, with hand puppets.
0:04:49 > 0:04:52# I see trees of green... #
0:04:54 > 0:04:58"..His trademark was to perform with his fingers.
0:04:58 > 0:05:03"When each is moving purposefully and has a distinctive voice,
0:05:03 > 0:05:07"their power to produce their own reality can astonish people."
0:05:07 > 0:05:11# ..What a wonderful world
0:05:15 > 0:05:20# I see skies of blue... #
0:05:20 > 0:05:25"He emerged from behind a screen at the conclusion of a 25-minute show,
0:05:25 > 0:05:30"smiling most wickedly above his close-clipped black chin beard."
0:05:30 > 0:05:32# And I think to myself... #
0:05:34 > 0:05:39"A small, ferocious, green-eyed buccaneer from his years at sea,
0:05:39 > 0:05:42"as massive through the chest as a bison."
0:05:43 > 0:05:45# ..The colours of the rainbow... #
0:05:45 > 0:05:50"He has one of those chests you didn't want to get in the way of.
0:05:50 > 0:05:53"A squat man, a sturdy, physical plant,
0:05:53 > 0:05:56"obviously very sexed up and lawless,
0:05:56 > 0:05:59"who didn't give a damn what anybody thought."
0:06:03 > 0:06:06He's a wicked man...Sabbath.
0:06:06 > 0:06:10It's hero was distasteful to many.
0:06:10 > 0:06:13I found him...wonderful.
0:06:13 > 0:06:16And he was my lucky discovery.
0:06:16 > 0:06:19Writers, and for that matter readers,
0:06:19 > 0:06:21they like wicked characters.
0:06:21 > 0:06:26Mickey Sabbath has a narrow moral compass,
0:06:26 > 0:06:30but he has a huge human compass.
0:06:30 > 0:06:33And that means that he can do anything.
0:06:33 > 0:06:35And does do anything.
0:06:35 > 0:06:39He's wild, he's wicked, to use Philip's word,
0:06:39 > 0:06:43he's inventive, he reinvents himself.
0:06:43 > 0:06:45He's a magician, of sorts.
0:06:46 > 0:06:50And he seems not to be troubled by conscience.
0:06:53 > 0:06:56"Whenever he spotted an attractive girl
0:06:56 > 0:06:59"amongst the 20 or so students who stopped to watch,
0:06:59 > 0:07:03"he would break off the drama in progress or wind it down.
0:07:03 > 0:07:07"And the fingers would start in whispering together.
0:07:07 > 0:07:10"Then, the boldest finger, the middle finger,
0:07:10 > 0:07:14"would edge nonchalantly forward
0:07:14 > 0:07:16"and beckon her to approach.
0:07:18 > 0:07:20"After an exchange of polite chitchat,
0:07:20 > 0:07:24"the finger would begin a serious interrogation,
0:07:24 > 0:07:27"asking if the girl had ever dated a finger,
0:07:27 > 0:07:30"if her family approved a finger,
0:07:30 > 0:07:33"if she herself could find a finger desirable.
0:07:34 > 0:07:39"And the other hand stealthily began to unbutton her outer garment.
0:07:39 > 0:07:42"Only twice did the fingers undo a brassiere catch.
0:07:42 > 0:07:47"And only once did they endeavour to caress the nipples exposed.
0:07:47 > 0:07:50"And it was then that Sabbath was arrested."
0:07:52 > 0:07:58I was particularly entertained by the descriptions in Sabbath Theater.
0:07:58 > 0:08:00This is about Nikki...
0:08:01 > 0:08:05"Climaxes overtook her seemingly from without,
0:08:05 > 0:08:07"breaking upon her like a caprice.
0:08:07 > 0:08:11"A hailstorm freakishly exploding in the middle of an August day.
0:08:11 > 0:08:15"Rosanna's, on the other hand, had to be galloped after,
0:08:15 > 0:08:19"like a fox in the hunt." How do you know all this about women?
0:08:19 > 0:08:24- About how it works for them?- I try to go into things with my eyes open.
0:08:30 > 0:08:34"Drenka dragged herself mournfully beside him.
0:08:34 > 0:08:37"Up the steep wooded hillside to the heights
0:08:37 > 0:08:39"where their bathing brook bubbled forth.
0:08:41 > 0:08:45"A respectable woman who was enough of a warrior
0:08:45 > 0:08:48"to challenge his audacity with hers.
0:08:48 > 0:08:50"'I will give up all other women.
0:08:50 > 0:08:56"'In return,' he told her, 'you must suck off your husband twice a week.
0:08:56 > 0:08:59"'Think of how it will excite me -
0:08:59 > 0:09:02"'sucking off your husband to please your lover.
0:09:04 > 0:09:09"'You want to feel like a real whore? That ought to do it.'
0:09:09 > 0:09:13"'Stop,' she cried out, throwing her hands over his mouth.
0:09:14 > 0:09:17"'I have cancer, Mickey, stop!'"
0:09:22 > 0:09:26People have objected to Roth's treatment of his female characters.
0:09:26 > 0:09:29He's even been described as a misogynist.
0:09:31 > 0:09:36Philip has been known to love women, but he may not always like them.
0:09:36 > 0:09:39And there is a difference. You see, Philip can...
0:09:39 > 0:09:44he can be very savage, it's not just confined to women.
0:09:44 > 0:09:48But I think women and feminists have noticed it more,
0:09:48 > 0:09:52the way they have with, let us say, Ernest Hemingway,
0:09:52 > 0:09:54who was also a great writer.
0:09:54 > 0:09:58In Sabbath's Theater, he has one of the great heroines of our time.
0:09:58 > 0:10:01I don't know what more you could want of a woman.
0:10:01 > 0:10:03Some people say she should want less sex than she does,
0:10:03 > 0:10:05well, but she does.
0:10:05 > 0:10:08But she's full of life, she's full of humour, she is full of wisdom,
0:10:08 > 0:10:11she's a hard worker, she runs a hotel with her husband.
0:10:11 > 0:10:14She's an adulterers, but we've seen that before in great literature.
0:10:14 > 0:10:16I don't think you can knock her for that.
0:10:16 > 0:10:19She has as hearty a sexual appetite
0:10:19 > 0:10:22as any male character he's ever given us.
0:10:22 > 0:10:24She's warm, she's a good mother.
0:10:24 > 0:10:26And Sabbath loves her.
0:10:26 > 0:10:28He doesn't just have sex with her every which way,
0:10:28 > 0:10:30which he does, he loves her
0:10:30 > 0:10:32and I think women might be interested to know this is
0:10:32 > 0:10:35a 50-something-year-old woman who he's passionately,
0:10:35 > 0:10:38sexually involved with and he describes her that way.
0:10:38 > 0:10:40"It was supposed to be otherwise.
0:10:40 > 0:10:44"With the musculature everywhere losing its firmness.
0:10:44 > 0:10:46"But even where her skin had gone papery
0:10:46 > 0:10:48"at the low point of her neckline,
0:10:48 > 0:10:50"even that palm-sized diamond
0:10:50 > 0:10:52"of minutely crosshatched flesh,
0:10:52 > 0:10:55"intensified not merely her enduring allure,
0:10:55 > 0:10:58"but his tender feelings for her as well.
0:10:58 > 0:11:01"He was now 6 short years from 70.
0:11:01 > 0:11:04"What had him grasping at the broadening buttocks
0:11:04 > 0:11:08"as though the tattooist. Time had ornamented neither of them
0:11:08 > 0:11:12"with its comical festoonery was his knowing, inescapably,
0:11:12 > 0:11:15"that the game is just about over."
0:11:15 > 0:11:19Drenka is dying of cancer in a hospital.
0:11:19 > 0:11:21She's near the end.
0:11:23 > 0:11:26Sabbath goes to see her. Their affair is a secret.
0:11:26 > 0:11:30But he goes to the hospital to see her
0:11:30 > 0:11:32when he knows her husband isn't visiting.
0:11:33 > 0:11:34And, um...
0:11:36 > 0:11:40..she...is hallucinating from morphine.
0:11:42 > 0:11:47And he sees the whole situation, the drainage bags,
0:11:47 > 0:11:49what she looks like.
0:11:50 > 0:11:54She reminds Sabbath on her deathbed
0:11:54 > 0:11:57about the time they pissed on each other.
0:11:58 > 0:12:00In a brook.
0:12:00 > 0:12:05The brook was in the woods and the woods was a place they went
0:12:05 > 0:12:07because they could be alone there.
0:12:07 > 0:12:11And she reminds him, while she's dying, of this.
0:12:13 > 0:12:17And she tells him how she felt when they were doing it.
0:12:19 > 0:12:22And then she says, "How did you feel?"
0:12:23 > 0:12:28And he tells her that really he wasn't as good at it as she was.
0:12:31 > 0:12:33And it's a very touching scene.
0:12:35 > 0:12:39I think it's as good a deathbed scene as I can write.
0:12:39 > 0:12:44Because I found the right wrong topic for them to be talking about.
0:12:46 > 0:12:48The right wrong topic.
0:12:55 > 0:12:59Having written Mickey Sabbath, which we've talked about...
0:13:00 > 0:13:03..you then create this character called Swede Levov.
0:13:03 > 0:13:07It's a deeply compassionate portrait of this man,
0:13:07 > 0:13:12a very...a man who is very contrasted to Mickey Sabbath, for instance.
0:13:12 > 0:13:14Where was the "what if" in this instance?
0:13:14 > 0:13:17- How did I get from one book to the other?- Yes.
0:13:17 > 0:13:22Well, you know, you balance off the book you've just finished.
0:13:22 > 0:13:26You want to escape the book you've just finished
0:13:26 > 0:13:29and do something utterly different.
0:13:32 > 0:13:34"..Who could have imagined that his life
0:13:34 > 0:13:37"would come apart in this horrible way?
0:13:37 > 0:13:41"A sliver off the comet of the American chaos had come loose
0:13:41 > 0:13:46"and spun all the way out to Old Rimrock and him.
0:13:46 > 0:13:50"His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory,
0:13:50 > 0:13:52"our sense of his having been exempted
0:13:52 > 0:13:54"from all self-doubt by his heroic role.
0:13:56 > 0:14:01"That all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder
0:14:01 > 0:14:05"made me think of the compelling story of Kennedy.
0:14:05 > 0:14:08"John F Kennedy, only a decade the Swede's senior
0:14:08 > 0:14:12"and another privileged son of fortune.
0:14:12 > 0:14:16"Another man of glamour exuding American meaning.
0:14:16 > 0:14:20"Assassinated whilst still in his mid-40s,
0:14:20 > 0:14:24"just five years before the Swede's daughter violently protested
0:14:24 > 0:14:28"the Kennedy/Johnson war and blew up her father's life.
0:14:31 > 0:14:34"I thought, 'But of course, he is our Kennedy.'"
0:14:37 > 0:14:39I didn't have any plan beforehand.
0:14:41 > 0:14:45Just sitting down and writing and beginning with two words.
0:14:45 > 0:14:47I began with two words.
0:14:47 > 0:14:50Which were Swede Levov, the name of this character.
0:14:50 > 0:14:55Once I had those two words, I had hundreds of pages to write.
0:14:57 > 0:15:01Who is he? What is he? Where does he live?
0:15:01 > 0:15:03How is he destroyed?
0:15:06 > 0:15:09It was delightful to move from Mickey Sabbath,
0:15:09 > 0:15:14from the gutter to the higher reaches of domesticity.
0:15:14 > 0:15:21And I wanted to imagine this decent, hard-working, successful,
0:15:21 > 0:15:24more than successful young man.
0:15:24 > 0:15:27He stuck out, he didn't want to live in the suburbs
0:15:27 > 0:15:30or in the Jewish suburbs, he wanted to live out beyond that.
0:15:30 > 0:15:34He wanted to make a new kind of American life for himself.
0:15:34 > 0:15:37He's not a hero, he was just a decent man.
0:15:40 > 0:15:42"The elevation of Swede Levov
0:15:42 > 0:15:45"into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews
0:15:45 > 0:15:48"can best be explained, I think,
0:15:48 > 0:15:50"by the war against the Germans
0:15:50 > 0:15:54"and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered.
0:15:58 > 0:16:01"With this Swede indomitable on the playing field,
0:16:01 > 0:16:03"the meaning and surface of life
0:16:03 > 0:16:06"provided a bizarre delusionary kind of sustenance.
0:16:08 > 0:16:12"The happy release into a Swedean innocence, for those who lived
0:16:12 > 0:16:15"in dread of never seeing their sons
0:16:15 > 0:16:18"or their brothers or their husbands again."
0:16:24 > 0:16:27So I gave him this daughter and I gave him this wife
0:16:27 > 0:16:29and I gave him this father.
0:16:29 > 0:16:34And I gave him this moment of the late '60s and early '70s.
0:16:34 > 0:16:36And I lit the match.
0:16:39 > 0:16:44"You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her. With a vengeance.
0:16:44 > 0:16:45"She's your daughter.
0:16:45 > 0:16:49"You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American Marine,
0:16:49 > 0:16:51"a real American hotshot
0:16:51 > 0:16:55"with a beautiful gentile babe on your arm?
0:16:55 > 0:17:00"You longed to belong like everybody else in the United States of America?
0:17:00 > 0:17:03"Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter.
0:17:03 > 0:17:06"The reality of this place is right up in your kisser.
0:17:06 > 0:17:08"With the help of your daughter,
0:17:08 > 0:17:11"you're as deep in the shit as a man can get.
0:17:11 > 0:17:14"Real, American, crazy shit.
0:17:14 > 0:17:17"America amok, America amok."
0:17:19 > 0:17:21I was reflecting something real.
0:17:21 > 0:17:23That is the battles that began to go on
0:17:23 > 0:17:26in households over the Vietnam war were real.
0:17:26 > 0:17:29Young people battling with their parents.
0:17:29 > 0:17:33Young people against the war battling with their parents.
0:17:33 > 0:17:36Radicalising their parents in some instances
0:17:36 > 0:17:39and flying off the handle sometimes themselves.
0:17:39 > 0:17:43And there began to be violence on the left here, anti-war violence,
0:17:43 > 0:17:45and that's what I wrote about.
0:17:49 > 0:17:53The '60s, from say 1963, the Kennedy assassination,
0:17:53 > 0:17:58to 1974, I think that's the Nixon resignation.
0:17:59 > 0:18:04Those years were unlike any years I've ever known in America.
0:18:06 > 0:18:10They were alive with horror.
0:18:10 > 0:18:12The horror of the war.
0:18:13 > 0:18:17They were alive with menace.
0:18:18 > 0:18:21The menace of the sexual revolution.
0:18:21 > 0:18:24They were alive with the politics.
0:18:24 > 0:18:26The resistance to the politics.
0:18:27 > 0:18:31They were alive with resistance. Resistance to authority.
0:18:31 > 0:18:34Nothing like that had happened before.
0:18:37 > 0:18:41They were young, college-educated women,
0:18:41 > 0:18:44some of them just out of college, who...
0:18:47 > 0:18:49..resorted to violence to protest the war.
0:18:50 > 0:18:52This was brand new.
0:18:59 > 0:19:02The uncanny thing for the writer
0:19:02 > 0:19:06is the invention of a cast of characters.
0:19:06 > 0:19:10So all I know is Swede Levov has got a daughter who's going to blow up,
0:19:10 > 0:19:14when she's 16 or 17, blow up the post office in this town.
0:19:14 > 0:19:15But what is she?
0:19:15 > 0:19:18What is she?
0:19:18 > 0:19:21She just can't be a bomb thrower.
0:19:21 > 0:19:25What does she say, do, how does she act?
0:19:32 > 0:19:35"Meredith Levov, Seymour's daughter.
0:19:35 > 0:19:40"The Rimrock bomber was Seymour's daughter.
0:19:40 > 0:19:44"The high school kid who blow up the post office and killed the doctor.
0:19:44 > 0:19:48"The kid who stopped the war in Vietnam by blowing up somebody
0:19:48 > 0:19:50"out mailing a letter at 5am.
0:19:50 > 0:19:56"A doctor on his way to the hospital, 'Charming child,' he said,
0:19:56 > 0:20:00"in a voice that was all contempt and still didn't seem to contain
0:20:00 > 0:20:04"the load of contempt and hatred that he felt."
0:20:07 > 0:20:11Had she not been born into the 1960s, she would have just been
0:20:11 > 0:20:15a pain in the ass for three or four years and gone on.
0:20:15 > 0:20:18Maybe to be a pain in the ass for the rest of her life,
0:20:18 > 0:20:20but she wouldn't have got into the trouble she got into.
0:20:24 > 0:20:29You call it American Pastoral, yet some of the most powerful passages
0:20:29 > 0:20:33are of the destruction and defilement of the place you loved.
0:20:33 > 0:20:35Your hometown, Newark.
0:20:43 > 0:20:47"Three generations, all of them growing,
0:20:47 > 0:20:52"the working, the saving, the success.
0:20:53 > 0:20:56"Three generations in raptures over America.
0:20:58 > 0:21:01"Three generations of becoming one with the people.
0:21:04 > 0:21:08"And now with the fourth, it had all come to nothing."
0:21:09 > 0:21:11So what happened?
0:21:11 > 0:21:12Well, the whole city worked.
0:21:12 > 0:21:15Everybody was at work and the city worked.
0:21:15 > 0:21:19By the time the '60s came around, there were very few jobs
0:21:19 > 0:21:23and people were not at work, and that's the beginning of trouble.
0:21:23 > 0:21:26Had my city remained the way it had been when I was young,
0:21:26 > 0:21:30I probably would never have written another book about Newark.
0:21:30 > 0:21:34I wasn't interested in that placid, harmonious place where I grew up.
0:21:34 > 0:21:37I loved it, but I couldn't keep writing books about it.
0:21:37 > 0:21:40And I wanted to write about the turmoil.
0:21:40 > 0:21:43This city I came from, Newark,
0:21:43 > 0:21:49which was destroyed in 1967 in a wild, arson-laden riot.
0:21:53 > 0:21:55"There was nothing.
0:21:55 > 0:21:57"There was a mattress discoloured
0:21:57 > 0:22:01"and waterlogged like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole.
0:22:02 > 0:22:06"The pole still held up the sign telling you what corner you were on.
0:22:06 > 0:22:07"And that's all there was.
0:22:12 > 0:22:15"The last of the cobblestone streets, the old cobblestone streets,
0:22:15 > 0:22:19"had been stolen about three weeks after the riots.
0:22:19 > 0:22:22"While the rubble still reeked of smoke
0:22:22 > 0:22:24"where the devastation was the worst,
0:22:24 > 0:22:28"a developer from the suburb had arrived with a crew around 1am.
0:22:28 > 0:22:34"Three trucks and some 20 men moving stealthily, and during the night,
0:22:34 > 0:22:38"without a cop to bother them, they dug up the cobblestones.
0:22:39 > 0:22:43"'Now they're stealing the streets?' his father asked.
0:22:43 > 0:22:45"'Newark can't even hold on to its streets?
0:22:45 > 0:22:47"'Seymour, get the hell out.'"
0:22:50 > 0:22:53I began to be...interested again
0:22:53 > 0:22:56in what I'd taken a crack at at the beginning,
0:22:56 > 0:22:58but now was more serious.
0:22:58 > 0:23:06And also, between the time of my writing Goodbye Columbus and 1989,
0:23:06 > 0:23:09something colossal and tragic had happened to the city.
0:23:11 > 0:23:15And I became interested in Newark then,
0:23:15 > 0:23:17as a place that had been
0:23:17 > 0:23:22a functioning, blue-collar, hardworking city.
0:23:22 > 0:23:25And therefore, I had in my mind, when I went over to visit,
0:23:25 > 0:23:29the Newark that was and the Newark that now is.
0:23:30 > 0:23:34It was more...really, it was being a historian
0:23:34 > 0:23:35more than a sentimentalist.
0:23:38 > 0:23:41I think it's...I think American Pastoral
0:23:41 > 0:23:46is as deep...a profoundly psychological novel
0:23:46 > 0:23:49as you could wish to read, you know?
0:23:49 > 0:23:54It is kind of extraordinary that Philip was able to do that,
0:23:54 > 0:23:56to be both the author of American Pastoral
0:23:56 > 0:23:58and Portnoy's Complaint.
0:23:58 > 0:24:04You know? It's really hard to believe that the same sensibility
0:24:04 > 0:24:05could have that range.
0:24:07 > 0:24:11- REPORTER:- Seized by FBI agents in a high sierra hideout,
0:24:11 > 0:24:14four Communist Party members are arraigned in San Francisco.
0:24:14 > 0:24:15Two of them are fugitives...
0:24:17 > 0:24:19Are you a member of the Communist Party
0:24:19 > 0:24:22or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
0:24:22 > 0:24:25It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee...
0:24:25 > 0:24:29That's not the question... GAVEL BANGS
0:24:29 > 0:24:33Betrayal is a returning theme in Roth's next book,
0:24:33 > 0:24:34I Married A Communist,
0:24:34 > 0:24:38as Ira Ringold's movie star wife, Eve Frame,
0:24:38 > 0:24:41writes a best-selling memoir that brands Ira,
0:24:41 > 0:24:44a successful radio journalist, as a Bolshevik.
0:24:46 > 0:24:48"I married a communist, I slept with a communist,
0:24:48 > 0:24:51"a communist tormented my child.
0:24:51 > 0:24:55"Unsuspectingly, America listened to a communist,
0:24:55 > 0:24:58"disguised as a patriot, on network radio.
0:24:58 > 0:25:02"A wicked, two-faced villain,
0:25:02 > 0:25:04"the real names of real stars,
0:25:04 > 0:25:08"a big Cold War backdrop - of course, it became a best-seller.
0:25:12 > 0:25:16"And it didn't hurt to name all the other Jewish Bolsheviks
0:25:16 > 0:25:18"affiliated with Ira's show."
0:25:20 > 0:25:25I Married A Communist comes next in what becomes a sort of trilogy.
0:25:25 > 0:25:28You go back in time, you go even deeper back,
0:25:28 > 0:25:30- to the '40s in America.- The '40s.
0:25:30 > 0:25:34Well, you know, what I would try to do in American Pastoral,
0:25:34 > 0:25:38in I Married A Communist, and again in The Human Stain,
0:25:38 > 0:25:40was to personalise the historical.
0:25:40 > 0:25:44And I wanted to bring it home.
0:25:45 > 0:25:50And the anti-Communist crusade in America
0:25:50 > 0:25:52that began about '45...
0:25:52 > 0:25:56I guess I wanted to write about another American crisis
0:25:56 > 0:25:57that I had known.
0:26:06 > 0:26:09"Russian spies. Russian documents.
0:26:09 > 0:26:13"Secret letters, phone calls,
0:26:13 > 0:26:16"hand-delivered messages pouring into the house day and night
0:26:16 > 0:26:18"from Communists all over the country.
0:26:18 > 0:26:21"Cell meetings in the house
0:26:21 > 0:26:23"and in 'the secret communist hideaway
0:26:23 > 0:26:27"'in the remotest wilds of New Jersey.'
0:26:28 > 0:26:31"'Lies!' I cried. 'Completely crazy lies!'
0:26:32 > 0:26:36"But how was I to know for sure? How was anyone?
0:26:36 > 0:26:39"What if the premise to her book was true?
0:26:39 > 0:26:40"Could that possibly be?"
0:26:44 > 0:26:48Following the acclaim of I Married A Communist,
0:26:48 > 0:26:51Roth was awarded the National Medal Of Arts by President Clinton.
0:26:51 > 0:26:54American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize.
0:26:54 > 0:26:59But Roth was only part-way through his American Trilogy.
0:27:00 > 0:27:04I do know, as anybody who knew him at all in those years knew,
0:27:04 > 0:27:06that writing was everything,
0:27:06 > 0:27:10that he didn't want to go more than a day or two without writing.
0:27:10 > 0:27:13I did ask him at one point when he was between books,
0:27:13 > 0:27:15"How long can you go without working on a book?"
0:27:15 > 0:27:17And he said, "Oh, about two hours."
0:27:17 > 0:27:20In the '90s, when he was working
0:27:20 > 0:27:23on the American Trilogy.
0:27:23 > 0:27:26No, really beginning with Sabbath's Theater,
0:27:26 > 0:27:27which was published in '95,
0:27:27 > 0:27:31erm...he rarely left Connecticut,
0:27:31 > 0:27:34and he rarely saw people.
0:27:34 > 0:27:37And even his good friends
0:27:37 > 0:27:38lost track of him.
0:27:38 > 0:27:41You needed writing, you needed to write,
0:27:41 > 0:27:44but did you actually enjoy it, as a matter of interest?
0:27:50 > 0:27:51It was...
0:27:51 > 0:27:54Like many jobs, writing is hard work.
0:27:54 > 0:27:57And sometimes the work was very hard
0:27:57 > 0:28:01and, as with everyone who has to do hard work,
0:28:01 > 0:28:03it wasn't always pleasurable.
0:28:03 > 0:28:05Especially if you feel you can't do it.
0:28:05 > 0:28:09And that's the hardest part of it,
0:28:09 > 0:28:11that you don't feel you're up to it,
0:28:11 > 0:28:15and you've been working at it for 20 or 30 or 40 years
0:28:15 > 0:28:18and you're an amateur all over again when you're writing this page.
0:28:18 > 0:28:21Not just a new book, but every page you're starting fresh.
0:28:21 > 0:28:24The other was my own...
0:28:24 > 0:28:27capacity to deal with the frustration of writing
0:28:27 > 0:28:30was not as great as it once had been,
0:28:30 > 0:28:33and you need a great capacity for frustration.
0:28:33 > 0:28:36Because frustration is your daily companion,
0:28:36 > 0:28:39your companion sentence by sentence.
0:28:43 > 0:28:45OPERA MUSIC PLAYS
0:29:17 > 0:29:22But I want to say one thing to the American people.
0:29:22 > 0:29:25I want you to listen to me,
0:29:25 > 0:29:26I'm going to say this again -
0:29:26 > 0:29:30I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
0:29:30 > 0:29:33I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to me.
0:29:33 > 0:29:35I'm going to say this again.
0:29:35 > 0:29:39I did not have sexual relations
0:29:39 > 0:29:42with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.
0:29:43 > 0:29:46I went to the book called The Human Stain.
0:29:46 > 0:29:50I wanted to treat the moment we were in in America -
0:29:50 > 0:29:54we were all in collectively - as history.
0:29:54 > 0:29:57And it was the moment when
0:29:57 > 0:30:01Bill Clinton was accused of...
0:30:01 > 0:30:05He was impeached over his affair with a White House intern.
0:30:05 > 0:30:07And there was this...
0:30:07 > 0:30:11The persecuting spirit was alive in America.
0:30:11 > 0:30:13The situation released...
0:30:13 > 0:30:15Released me.
0:30:15 > 0:30:18Indeed I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky
0:30:18 > 0:30:19that was not appropriate.
0:30:19 > 0:30:22In fact, it was wrong.
0:30:25 > 0:30:28"It was the summer in America
0:30:28 > 0:30:30"when the nausea returned,
0:30:30 > 0:30:33"when the joking didn't stop,
0:30:33 > 0:30:36"when the speculation and the theorising
0:30:36 > 0:30:38"and the hyperbole didn't stop,
0:30:38 > 0:30:43"when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life
0:30:43 > 0:30:47"was abrogated in favour of maintaining in them
0:30:47 > 0:30:49"every illusion about adult life.
0:30:53 > 0:30:57"It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind,
0:30:57 > 0:31:00"and life, in all its shameless impurity,
0:31:00 > 0:31:03"once again confounded America."
0:31:10 > 0:31:12Talk about an assailable man,
0:31:12 > 0:31:15which is more or less the subject of these three books,
0:31:15 > 0:31:18the assailability of these men who seem so strong,
0:31:18 > 0:31:20Swede Levov, Ira Ringold,
0:31:20 > 0:31:23and later Coleman Silk - and Bill Clinton.
0:31:26 > 0:31:28The challenge for me...
0:31:28 > 0:31:33was to treat the present as history.
0:31:35 > 0:31:37The history of the present moment.
0:31:38 > 0:31:41In The Human Stain, this persecuting spirit
0:31:41 > 0:31:45comes to haunt college professor Coleman Silk,
0:31:45 > 0:31:48who, like Bill Clinton, has told a lie.
0:31:48 > 0:31:50As with others of Roth's characters,
0:31:50 > 0:31:53he wants to reinvent himself.
0:31:54 > 0:31:57You want to be left to be yourself...
0:31:57 > 0:32:00- You want to be left to be who you want to be.- Yeah.
0:32:00 > 0:32:01Not wanting to follow in the tracks
0:32:01 > 0:32:03of his family, or his father, or whatever...
0:32:03 > 0:32:05He doesn't want to be black.
0:32:05 > 0:32:07Simple as that.
0:32:07 > 0:32:10But he doesn't want to be part of somebody else's "we".
0:32:10 > 0:32:14He doesn't want to be the "we"
0:32:14 > 0:32:16that the "they" see.
0:32:16 > 0:32:19So there's the gigantic pronouns.
0:32:19 > 0:32:23There's the "I", there's the "we", which you are a part of
0:32:23 > 0:32:26and they want to take you in very quickly. His is the Negro "we".
0:32:26 > 0:32:30And then there's the "they", the rest of the Americans who say...
0:32:30 > 0:32:35Who have their sense of where the black belongs.
0:32:35 > 0:32:37And so that's what I decided on.
0:32:37 > 0:32:41This would be one of those pale-skinned blacks who can,
0:32:41 > 0:32:42as they used to say, pass.
0:32:42 > 0:32:45And many people passed, tens of thousands,
0:32:45 > 0:32:47before the civil-rights era.
0:32:47 > 0:32:49And so that's what I decided on.
0:32:49 > 0:32:54This would be a black American who had the opportunity,
0:32:54 > 0:32:56as he saw it, because of his pale skin,
0:32:56 > 0:32:57to pretend he was white.
0:33:02 > 0:33:06"That's what comes of being hand-raised.
0:33:06 > 0:33:11"That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us.
0:33:11 > 0:33:12"The human stain.
0:33:15 > 0:33:17"That's how it is.
0:33:17 > 0:33:19"We leave a stain, we leave a trail,
0:33:19 > 0:33:22"we live our imprint.
0:33:22 > 0:33:25"Impurity, cruelty,
0:33:25 > 0:33:27"abuse, error,
0:33:27 > 0:33:29"excrement, semen.
0:33:32 > 0:33:35"There's no other way to be here.
0:33:35 > 0:33:37"Nothing to do with disobedience.
0:33:37 > 0:33:41"Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption.
0:33:41 > 0:33:44"It's in everyone.
0:33:44 > 0:33:46"Indwelling. Inherent.
0:33:46 > 0:33:48"Defining.
0:33:50 > 0:33:53"The stain that is there before its mark."
0:33:59 > 0:34:02Coleman Silk is born about 1925, I think, or '26.
0:34:02 > 0:34:06And he comes to maturity in the 1930s...
0:34:06 > 0:34:09The limitations on a black life,
0:34:09 > 0:34:12or then called a Negro life,
0:34:12 > 0:34:15were in place, you know?
0:34:15 > 0:34:17And this young man,
0:34:17 > 0:34:22mischievous, audacious, playful,
0:34:22 > 0:34:26thinks... He doesn't see the whole future, he thinks,
0:34:26 > 0:34:27"Maybe I can get away with this?
0:34:27 > 0:34:31"I'll try it." And so he goes into the Navy and he tries it.
0:34:31 > 0:34:33And he doesn't get away with it in the Navy entirely,
0:34:33 > 0:34:36but then when he gets out of the Navy he can try it again.
0:34:36 > 0:34:39So he goes down to Greenwich Village to live
0:34:39 > 0:34:42and he tries it on.
0:34:49 > 0:34:53"One evening she takes him around to a tiny Bleecker Street jewellery shop
0:34:53 > 0:34:56"where the white guy who owns it makes beautiful things out of enamel.
0:34:59 > 0:35:01"Just shopping the street,
0:35:01 > 0:35:06"out looking, but when they leave she tells Coleman that the guy is black.
0:35:07 > 0:35:10"'You're wrong,' Coleman tells her, 'he can't be.'
0:35:10 > 0:35:14"'Don't tell me that I'm wrong' - she laughs - 'you're blind.'
0:35:14 > 0:35:18"Another night, she takes him to a bar on Hudson Street.
0:35:18 > 0:35:20"'See that one? The smoothie?'
0:35:20 > 0:35:24"'Him,' she says. 'No,' says Coleman,
0:35:24 > 0:35:26"but he's the one laughing now.
0:35:28 > 0:35:31"Maybe there are a dozen more guys like him
0:35:31 > 0:35:33"hanging around Greenwich Village.
0:35:33 > 0:35:36"Not just everybody has that gift.
0:35:36 > 0:35:39"That is, they have it, but in petty ways:
0:35:39 > 0:35:41"they simply lie all the time.
0:35:41 > 0:35:45"They're not secretive in the grand and elaborate way that Coleman is.
0:35:45 > 0:35:48"He's back on the trajectory outward.
0:35:49 > 0:35:52"He's got the elixir of the secret,
0:35:52 > 0:35:55"and it's like being fluent in another language -
0:35:55 > 0:35:58"it's being somewhere that is constantly fresh to you."
0:36:01 > 0:36:03They call it chutzpah in...
0:36:03 > 0:36:06- Chutzpah? Is that the Negro term for it?- Yeah, that's right!
0:36:06 > 0:36:08It is a nice irony, that.
0:36:08 > 0:36:12That, of course, again in this period he chooses to be,
0:36:12 > 0:36:14or you choose him, to be Jewish.
0:36:14 > 0:36:17Well, he chooses to be Jewish for a variety of reasons.
0:36:17 > 0:36:19One is...
0:36:19 > 0:36:24Jews can have that very tight... Tightly coiled hair
0:36:24 > 0:36:27that resembles African-American hair.
0:36:27 > 0:36:33He thinks, "If I tell 'em I'm a Jew, I've got my hair covered," you know.
0:36:33 > 0:36:36He's not a traitor to his people, he's mischievous.
0:36:36 > 0:36:40He sees if it works and then, at one point...
0:36:42 > 0:36:43he claims it.
0:36:43 > 0:36:46And the claiming of it comes with some trouble,
0:36:46 > 0:36:49because he decides he will disown his family.
0:36:49 > 0:36:52His loving, loving, loving mother.
0:36:52 > 0:36:55And he has to go to his mother
0:36:55 > 0:37:00and he realises he has to have the guts...
0:37:00 > 0:37:02to kill his mother, as it were.
0:37:04 > 0:37:06As he says about his father,
0:37:06 > 0:37:08who was an optometrist
0:37:08 > 0:37:12who lost his little shop in the Depression,
0:37:12 > 0:37:15became a Pullman porter on the trains,
0:37:15 > 0:37:18and he says, "The world will take care of murdering my father,
0:37:18 > 0:37:20"it already has,"
0:37:20 > 0:37:22but you've got to murder your own mother.
0:37:22 > 0:37:24By which he means he wants absolute freedom from them.
0:37:31 > 0:37:34"'I'm never going to know my grandchildren,' she said.
0:37:36 > 0:37:39"He prepared himself.
0:37:40 > 0:37:44"The important thing was to let her speak,
0:37:44 > 0:37:45"let her find her fluency
0:37:45 > 0:37:48"and, from the soft streaming of her on words
0:37:48 > 0:37:51"create for him his apologia.
0:37:53 > 0:37:56"'You're never going to let them see me,' she said.
0:37:56 > 0:38:00"'You're never going to let them know who I am.'
0:38:00 > 0:38:02"'Mom,' you'll tell me.
0:38:02 > 0:38:05"'Ma, you come to the railroad station in New York,
0:38:05 > 0:38:08"'and you sit on the bench in the waiting room,
0:38:08 > 0:38:10"'and at 11.25am,
0:38:10 > 0:38:14"'I'll walk by with my kids in their Sunday best.'
0:38:16 > 0:38:19"'That'll be my birthday present five years from now.
0:38:23 > 0:38:25"'Sit there, Mom, say nothing,
0:38:25 > 0:38:27"'and I'll just walk them slowly by.'
0:38:31 > 0:38:33"'And you know very well that I will be there.'"
0:38:46 > 0:38:50Reinvention is maybe
0:38:50 > 0:38:53the great theme of American literature.
0:38:53 > 0:38:56The self as a creation of the self.
0:38:56 > 0:38:58You see how it comes out of immigrant literature,
0:38:58 > 0:39:00people are coming to America from other countries
0:39:00 > 0:39:03and becoming this new thing, which was American.
0:39:03 > 0:39:07Whether they come from, you know, Russia or Italy or Ireland,
0:39:07 > 0:39:09or wherever it may be,
0:39:09 > 0:39:11you come to America and you reinvent yourself.
0:39:11 > 0:39:14You become this thing called an American.
0:39:14 > 0:39:16So that is one of the great...
0:39:16 > 0:39:19And every American writer - it's at the heart of American literature.
0:39:19 > 0:39:22Does he genuinely mean, Philip, as a writer,
0:39:22 > 0:39:25that it's not just through the facts but through fiction
0:39:25 > 0:39:27that you can understand your life?
0:39:27 > 0:39:29That we can understand our lives?
0:39:29 > 0:39:31That's what great fiction writers do, of course.
0:39:31 > 0:39:33I think he proves it in his books.
0:39:33 > 0:39:36That it is through great fiction we can understand our lives.
0:39:36 > 0:39:37Absolutely.
0:39:37 > 0:39:40You can know these fictional characters -
0:39:40 > 0:39:41and I don't only mean Roth,
0:39:41 > 0:39:44I mean Madame Bovary, pick who you will -
0:39:44 > 0:39:47you can know them better than you know most of your friends.
0:39:47 > 0:39:48That's what a writer can do.
0:39:50 > 0:39:52You can trace somebody's life so deeply
0:39:52 > 0:39:54and reflect upon it how you will.
0:40:00 > 0:40:04Roth next moved from the reinvention of a single man's history
0:40:04 > 0:40:08to reinventing the history of America itself
0:40:08 > 0:40:12by putting a Nazi sympathiser in the White House.
0:40:13 > 0:40:17In 1940 there were people on the extreme right of the Republican Party
0:40:17 > 0:40:21who wanted to nominate the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.
0:40:21 > 0:40:25Erm, but nothing ever came of it.
0:40:25 > 0:40:26I then thought, "What if?
0:40:26 > 0:40:28"What if they had nominated Lindbergh?"
0:40:30 > 0:40:35And, as I imagined it, Lindbergh would've won.
0:40:35 > 0:40:38Roosevelt was going for a third term,
0:40:38 > 0:40:42which was taboo in American presidency.
0:40:42 > 0:40:44He was a polio victim, he was a crippled man,
0:40:44 > 0:40:47and I think if Lindbergh,
0:40:47 > 0:40:50with all his youth and charm and fame,
0:40:50 > 0:40:53had run for president in 1940,
0:40:53 > 0:40:56I think he might well have defeated Roosevelt.
0:40:58 > 0:41:00"And then the White House.
0:41:00 > 0:41:03"A twilight spring evening.
0:41:03 > 0:41:06"Shadows falling across the sprawl of lawn.
0:41:06 > 0:41:08"Blooming bushes. Flowering trees.
0:41:08 > 0:41:10"Gracious smiles.
0:41:10 > 0:41:12"Quiet laughter.
0:41:13 > 0:41:16"The lean, beloved, handsome president.
0:41:16 > 0:41:19"Beside him the talented poetess,
0:41:19 > 0:41:21"daring aviatrix,
0:41:21 > 0:41:23"and decorous socialite
0:41:23 > 0:41:25"who is the mother of their murdered child.
0:41:26 > 0:41:30"The loquacious silver-haired honoured guest.
0:41:30 > 0:41:34"The elegant Nazi spouse in her long satin gown.
0:41:34 > 0:41:36"Welcoming words, witticisms,
0:41:36 > 0:41:38"and the Old World gallant,
0:41:38 > 0:41:41"steeped in the theatrics of the royal court
0:41:41 > 0:41:46"and looking in his evening clothes like a million bucks.
0:41:46 > 0:41:50"As persuasively civilised a sham as human cunning could devise."
0:41:53 > 0:41:55I had to imagine two things.
0:41:55 > 0:42:00I had to imagine the history and the politics that had not happened.
0:42:00 > 0:42:02And I had to imagine
0:42:02 > 0:42:06who felt this stuff on their backs.
0:42:06 > 0:42:09What might have made...
0:42:09 > 0:42:12- If it had happened, how might it have happened?- If it had happened...
0:42:12 > 0:42:17how would it have affected X, Y and Z, and who are X, Y and Z?
0:42:17 > 0:42:19Who was I going to write about there?
0:42:19 > 0:42:23I decided who better should it happen to but my family.
0:42:23 > 0:42:26So I was able to imagine the American reality
0:42:26 > 0:42:30and I was able to imagine what would my - MY - my mother,
0:42:30 > 0:42:34my father, my brother and I and our relatives and our neighbours
0:42:34 > 0:42:37and our family, what would we have done in this situation,
0:42:37 > 0:42:40if we were confronted with this crisis.
0:42:40 > 0:42:44Erm, and I was ignited again.
0:42:44 > 0:42:47I had two things I had to imagine at the same time,
0:42:47 > 0:42:49make them work together.
0:42:50 > 0:42:53"Pandemonium. Unspeakable delight.
0:42:53 > 0:42:57"Lindbergh had at last stepped onto the Garden stage,
0:42:57 > 0:42:59"and like someone half demented,
0:42:59 > 0:43:03"my father leaped from the sofa and snapped off the radio
0:43:03 > 0:43:06"just as my mother came back into the living room and asked,
0:43:06 > 0:43:08"'Who would like something? Alvin,'
0:43:08 > 0:43:11"she said, with tears in her eyes, 'a cup of tea?'
0:43:13 > 0:43:16"Her job was to hold our world together
0:43:16 > 0:43:19"as calmly and as sensibly as she could.
0:43:19 > 0:43:21"That was what gave her life fullness
0:43:21 > 0:43:24"and that was all that she was trying to do,
0:43:24 > 0:43:28"and yet never had any of us seen her rendered so ridiculous
0:43:28 > 0:43:32"by this commonplace maternal ambition.
0:43:32 > 0:43:34"'What the hell is going on!'
0:43:34 > 0:43:36"my father began to shout.
0:43:36 > 0:43:39"'What the hell did he do THAT for?
0:43:39 > 0:43:41"'Did he think that one single Jew
0:43:41 > 0:43:44"'is now going to go out and vote for this anti-Semite
0:43:44 > 0:43:47"'because of that stupid, lying speech?
0:43:47 > 0:43:50"'Has he completely lost his mind? What does this man think he's DOING?'
0:43:51 > 0:43:56"'Koshering Lindbergh,' Alvin said. 'Koshering Lindberg for the goyim.'"
0:43:58 > 0:44:00These later, epic works
0:44:00 > 0:44:02were acknowledged to be masterpieces,
0:44:02 > 0:44:06an astonishing achievement for a writer now in his 70s
0:44:06 > 0:44:09and for whom things have not come easily.
0:44:09 > 0:44:13Roth had suffered chronic physical and psychological pain
0:44:13 > 0:44:14from his 50s onwards.
0:44:17 > 0:44:20I have a character in Everyman,
0:44:20 > 0:44:22a woman, who has back pain,
0:44:22 > 0:44:25and I gave her my despair.
0:44:25 > 0:44:28I gave her all my back pain with it.
0:44:28 > 0:44:32Long periods of chronic pain are terrible,
0:44:32 > 0:44:35which, in my case was back pain,
0:44:35 > 0:44:37and how you become crazed.
0:44:37 > 0:44:40Because in addition to being crazed by the pain,
0:44:40 > 0:44:42you're crazed by the drugs.
0:44:42 > 0:44:45And you want something to help you,
0:44:45 > 0:44:48and when you find a drug that will help you,
0:44:48 > 0:44:50you get caught.
0:44:50 > 0:44:51You get caught.
0:44:58 > 0:44:59"She took the pill,
0:44:59 > 0:45:03"an opiate could kill pain for three or four hours,
0:45:03 > 0:45:05"a large, white, lozenge-shaped pill
0:45:05 > 0:45:09"that caused her to swallow with the anticipation of relief
0:45:09 > 0:45:10"the instant she swallowed it.
0:45:12 > 0:45:15"'I do apologise for all this,' she said as he was leaving.
0:45:15 > 0:45:19"'It's just that pain makes you so alone.'
0:45:20 > 0:45:25"And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands.
0:45:28 > 0:45:32"'It's so shameful.' "'There's nothing shameful about it.'
0:45:34 > 0:45:37"'You're wrong. You don't know.
0:45:37 > 0:45:39"'The dependence, helplessness,
0:45:39 > 0:45:42"'the isolation, the dread -
0:45:42 > 0:45:45"'it's all so ghastly and shameful.
0:45:47 > 0:45:51"'The pain makes you frightened of yourself.
0:45:51 > 0:45:53"'The utter otherness of it is awful.'"
0:45:58 > 0:46:01I don't think that Philip
0:46:01 > 0:46:03is by nature a depressive person.
0:46:03 > 0:46:05I think that he has to be
0:46:05 > 0:46:10ground and ground and ground down by pain.
0:46:11 > 0:46:13I think Everyman is a masterpiece,
0:46:13 > 0:46:16I think it is beautifully wrought
0:46:16 > 0:46:18and elegiac and moving
0:46:18 > 0:46:19and genuinely wise.
0:46:19 > 0:46:23I think it's one of the wisest meditations
0:46:23 > 0:46:26on human mortality.
0:46:31 > 0:46:32Have I ever thought I lost my magic?
0:46:35 > 0:46:36Sure.
0:46:36 > 0:46:38Sure.
0:46:38 > 0:46:40Erm...
0:46:40 > 0:46:42Sporadically.
0:46:42 > 0:46:45Certainly between books it's very easy to think you can't do it again.
0:46:49 > 0:46:52And then not long after Everyman came The Humbling.
0:46:52 > 0:46:57I wanted to tell this story about an actor who loses his talent.
0:46:57 > 0:46:59It's called The Humbling, the book.
0:46:59 > 0:47:02And it was based on a story someone had told me
0:47:02 > 0:47:06about an actor who did indeed come out on the stage one night
0:47:06 > 0:47:08and found he couldn't do it.
0:47:08 > 0:47:09He just couldn't do it.
0:47:09 > 0:47:12And it wasn't stage fright,
0:47:12 > 0:47:14he'd been doing it well all his life,
0:47:14 > 0:47:18and as I said in the first line of that book,
0:47:18 > 0:47:20he'd lost his magic.
0:47:20 > 0:47:22That's it, that's the premise of the book.
0:47:22 > 0:47:25And if a man loses his magic, as this man did,
0:47:25 > 0:47:27what then happens to him?
0:47:29 > 0:47:30BELL RINGS
0:47:30 > 0:47:32"He tried to occupy the hours
0:47:32 > 0:47:36"doing a hundred seemingly necessary things to prepare:
0:47:36 > 0:47:38"I have to look at this speech again,
0:47:38 > 0:47:40"I have to rest, I have to exercise,
0:47:40 > 0:47:42"I have to look at that speech again,
0:47:42 > 0:47:47"and by the time he got to the theatre he was exhausted.
0:47:47 > 0:47:49"And dreading going out there.
0:47:49 > 0:47:53"He would hear the cue coming closer and closer
0:47:53 > 0:47:55"and know that he couldn't do it.
0:47:55 > 0:47:59"He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real,
0:47:59 > 0:48:04"he waited to forget who he was and become the person doing it,
0:48:04 > 0:48:08"but instead he was standing there, completely empty,
0:48:08 > 0:48:10"doing the kind of acting you do
0:48:10 > 0:48:13"when you don't know what you're doing.
0:48:13 > 0:48:16"He could not give and he could not withhold.
0:48:16 > 0:48:20"He had no fluidity and he had no reserve.
0:48:20 > 0:48:23"Acting became a night-after-night exercise
0:48:23 > 0:48:26"in trying to get away with something."
0:48:28 > 0:48:31And I wanted him to commit suicide at the end.
0:48:31 > 0:48:33- You wanted him to?- Yes.
0:48:33 > 0:48:36I never had a suicide in a book of mine,
0:48:36 > 0:48:39except for a woman in Everyman,
0:48:39 > 0:48:43and I wanted to see if I could get a character to that point
0:48:43 > 0:48:46where it was credible that he would kill himself.
0:48:46 > 0:48:48What would he have to lose?
0:48:48 > 0:48:51How would he have to be unbalanced?
0:48:51 > 0:48:55Where would his equilibrium have to go to get him to that point?
0:48:55 > 0:49:00A man who'd led a very engaged
0:49:00 > 0:49:02and impassioned life.
0:49:02 > 0:49:05How could he get to this point where he wanted to surrender life?
0:49:05 > 0:49:07And so my goal was to get there.
0:49:07 > 0:49:09Have you ever, in your worst moments,
0:49:09 > 0:49:11during those moments when you did have a very hard time,
0:49:11 > 0:49:13has that ever come your way?
0:49:13 > 0:49:15- Suicide?- Yeah.
0:49:15 > 0:49:17Do I think about committing suicide?
0:49:17 > 0:49:19Sure.
0:49:19 > 0:49:21Out of circumstances.
0:49:21 > 0:49:23Erm...
0:49:25 > 0:49:27But I haven't done it.
0:49:27 > 0:49:29- So I see!- And here we are.
0:49:32 > 0:49:34"Finally it occurred to him
0:49:34 > 0:49:38"to pretend that he was committing suicide in a play.
0:49:39 > 0:49:41"In a play by Chekhov.
0:49:41 > 0:49:42"What could be more fitting?
0:49:43 > 0:49:46"There was a note of eight words found alongside him
0:49:46 > 0:49:49"when his body was discovered on the floor of the attic
0:49:49 > 0:49:52"by the cleaning woman later that week.
0:49:52 > 0:49:56"'The fact is Konstantin Gavrilovich
0:49:56 > 0:49:57"'has shot himself.'
0:49:59 > 0:50:02"It was the final line spoken in The Seagull.
0:50:02 > 0:50:05"He had brought it off.
0:50:05 > 0:50:10"The well-established stage star, once so widely heralded
0:50:10 > 0:50:12"for his force as an actor,
0:50:12 > 0:50:16"whom in his heyday people would flock to the theatre to see."
0:50:17 > 0:50:21I think Philip became very interested,
0:50:21 > 0:50:24for obvious reasons, in the subject of death.
0:50:24 > 0:50:29And I think just, when death is sitting in the room every day,
0:50:29 > 0:50:33you know, you can't... when it's always in the corner,
0:50:33 > 0:50:36you know, you have to confront it in a way
0:50:36 > 0:50:40that you have to confront your own mortality,
0:50:40 > 0:50:43in a way that you don't when you're a kid starting out.
0:50:44 > 0:50:47And I think what's happened to Philip was that,
0:50:47 > 0:50:50that he began to understand his own mortality,
0:50:50 > 0:50:55the fact that there wasn't that much time and he was this thing,
0:50:55 > 0:50:57he was the dying animal.
0:50:57 > 0:51:03And it made him look again at his life, but through that lens.
0:51:03 > 0:51:06Through the lens of a mortal being.
0:51:06 > 0:51:09Saul Bellow's death, William Styron's death,
0:51:09 > 0:51:13Arthur Miller's death, John Updike's death,
0:51:13 > 0:51:17Sandy's death - your brother - your mother's death before all this,
0:51:17 > 0:51:22the last ten years of your life have been full of death.
0:51:22 > 0:51:25Did you spent a lot of time thinking about this
0:51:25 > 0:51:31and as you thought about it, you began to see scenarios and possibilities and stories?
0:51:31 > 0:51:38Well, it was the shock of the deaths that prompted these stories.
0:51:38 > 0:51:43Um, and if you live to be 80,
0:51:43 > 0:51:46you're going to see a lot of people die
0:51:46 > 0:51:48in the last 20 years of your life.
0:51:48 > 0:51:53My experience is universal. Everybody dies, until you disappear.
0:51:53 > 0:51:58And so sure, it marked those last books, it stimulated me.
0:51:59 > 0:52:02It stimulated me, I wasn't depressed by it.
0:52:02 > 0:52:08Um, I wanted to write about... people dying,
0:52:08 > 0:52:13what it was like for them, for the people around them.
0:52:13 > 0:52:14How it came.
0:52:21 > 0:52:25"He imagined that if Alan lay roasting in that box for much longer,
0:52:25 > 0:52:28"the box would somehow ignite and explode
0:52:28 > 0:52:31"and as though a hand grenade had gone off inside,
0:52:31 > 0:52:35"the boy's remains would come bursting out all over the hearse and the street.
0:52:38 > 0:52:42"Why does polio strike only in the summer?
0:52:44 > 0:52:47"At the cemetery, standing there bare-headed but for his yarmulke,
0:52:47 > 0:52:51"he had to wonder if polio couldn't be caused by the summer sun itself.
0:52:53 > 0:52:56"At midday, in its full overhead onslaught,
0:52:56 > 0:53:01"it seemed to have more than sufficient strength to cripple and kill.
0:53:01 > 0:53:03"And to be rather more likely to do so
0:53:03 > 0:53:06"than a microscopic germ in a hot dog.
0:53:09 > 0:53:12"As Alan's casket was lowered into the ground,
0:53:12 > 0:53:17"as Mrs Michaels lunged for the grave crying 'No, not my baby!'
0:53:17 > 0:53:20"death revealed itself to him no less powerful
0:53:20 > 0:53:24"than the incessant beating of the sun on his yarmulke'd head."
0:53:28 > 0:53:32How did you capture that, it wasn't clearly from memory,
0:53:32 > 0:53:35how did you recall what went on at that time?
0:53:35 > 0:53:38- Do you mean the polio?- Yeah.
0:53:38 > 0:53:40Well, it was memory.
0:53:40 > 0:53:44The vaccine didn't come around until I was in college.
0:53:46 > 0:53:52And so the annual polio anxiety and worry,
0:53:52 > 0:53:55I knew about as a child, and as a young adult.
0:53:55 > 0:54:02So this was largely based on my memory of how people worried,
0:54:02 > 0:54:05what happened when kids died.
0:54:08 > 0:54:12I wanted to write about this community in crisis.
0:54:15 > 0:54:20In 1944 - there was always polio, annually - but there was no epidemic that I knew of.
0:54:20 > 0:54:25So I invented an epidemic because I wanted to see what happened.
0:54:29 > 0:54:33"Mr Cantor, the great athlete, still had a withered left arm
0:54:33 > 0:54:36"and a useless left hand.
0:54:36 > 0:54:38"Yet on the afternoon near the end of June,
0:54:38 > 0:54:41"running with the javelin aloft,
0:54:41 > 0:54:44"bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin
0:54:44 > 0:54:49"high over his shoulder and releasing it then, like an explosion,
0:54:49 > 0:54:52"he seemed to us invincible."
0:54:56 > 0:55:01This was the last line in the last book that Philip Roth would write.
0:55:01 > 0:55:04Yet, in an interview recorded ten years ago,
0:55:04 > 0:55:07he couldn't conceive of a life without writing.
0:55:09 > 0:55:12If it were taken away from me, I think I would die, probably.
0:55:12 > 0:55:15Without being overly dramatic, I would be emptied.
0:55:17 > 0:55:18I don't know what else to do.
0:55:21 > 0:55:23I don't know what else to do.
0:55:24 > 0:55:27"I don't know how else to do anything," he said.
0:55:27 > 0:55:31- I don't know how to do anything else.- "I can't do anything else.
0:55:31 > 0:55:35"Otherwise, I'd just sit idly in this seat, without a television..."
0:55:35 > 0:55:37I see you've got one now.
0:55:37 > 0:55:43"I've been doing it all my life. If it were taken away from me, I think I would die, probably.
0:55:43 > 0:55:45"Without being overly dramatic, I would be emptied."
0:55:45 > 0:55:47Mm-hm.
0:55:47 > 0:55:49So how are you feeling now?
0:55:49 > 0:55:50I feel great.
0:55:50 > 0:55:52I was wrong!
0:55:52 > 0:55:54I was wrong.
0:55:54 > 0:55:58I had reached the end. There was nothing more for me to write about.
0:55:59 > 0:56:04I was fearful, yes - I was fearful that I would have nothing to do.
0:56:04 > 0:56:09I was terrified, in fact. But I knew there was no sense continuing.
0:56:11 > 0:56:15I was not going to get any better and why get worse, you know?
0:56:15 > 0:56:22Um, and so I set out upon the great task of doing nothing.
0:56:24 > 0:56:28He has turned the key on the door
0:56:28 > 0:56:32of his creative fictional self.
0:56:32 > 0:56:37When writers stop writing, it usually ends badly.
0:56:37 > 0:56:39Drink, the lunatic asylum,
0:56:39 > 0:56:43depression, divorce, lots of things.
0:56:43 > 0:56:48And I thought at first when Philip, as indeed he did announce it,
0:56:48 > 0:56:52I thought it was bravura, I thought, "He's a bit tired, he's written,
0:56:52 > 0:56:57"and in two years' time, he'll be saying to me, 'Guess what? I've started.'"
0:56:57 > 0:57:00He has not and he will not.
0:57:00 > 0:57:04I've never seen him more content, and I mean it.
0:57:04 > 0:57:10I've had a very good time over the last three or four years, yeah.
0:57:10 > 0:57:12For a variety of reasons.
0:57:12 > 0:57:17I do have things to do, I just don't do that thing any more.
0:57:17 > 0:57:22One of the biggest tasks that's come to me is working with a biographer.
0:57:22 > 0:57:24Blake Bailey.
0:57:24 > 0:57:27And ever since then, I've been in the employ of Blake Bailey.
0:57:29 > 0:57:32I came by his apartment on the Upper West Side,
0:57:32 > 0:57:35and he motioned for me to sit down.
0:57:35 > 0:57:38And he clamped on these enormous horn-rimmed glasses
0:57:38 > 0:57:40and had this sheaf of paper,
0:57:40 > 0:57:44on which he had written a series of questions.
0:57:44 > 0:57:48And the first question for me was,
0:57:48 > 0:57:53"Why should a Gentile from Oklahoma be my biographer?"
0:57:53 > 0:57:56To which I replied,
0:57:56 > 0:58:02"I am not a bisexual alcoholic with an ancient puritan lineage
0:58:02 > 0:58:05"but I wrote a biography of John Cheever."
0:58:05 > 0:58:07Which he seemed to accept.
0:58:07 > 0:58:10And it went on for about three hours from there.
0:58:10 > 0:58:15It was tough. I felt like a clubbed seal at the end of it.
0:58:17 > 0:58:23He has supplied me with literally thousands of pages
0:58:23 > 0:58:28of typed notes that are addressed directly to me.
0:58:29 > 0:58:34He has turned over all his personal papers to me.
0:58:34 > 0:58:38There's a Philip Roth Archive at the Library of Congress
0:58:38 > 0:58:43and that's mostly, not entirely but mostly a manuscript archive,
0:58:43 > 0:58:47which you can imagine is in itself quite large.
0:58:47 > 0:58:52But most of his personal papers are up on the third floor of this house, in my office.
0:58:52 > 0:58:58And it will take me years to excavate them entirely.
0:59:01 > 0:59:04I have miles of files.
0:59:04 > 0:59:10In my basement, my studio, and so on, in two houses, and file by file,
0:59:10 > 0:59:14I took things out and saw what they were about
0:59:14 > 0:59:17and wrote a commentary for him.
0:59:17 > 0:59:19He's absolutely diligent and wonderful,
0:59:19 > 0:59:22he's interviewed over 100 people in the last year
0:59:22 > 0:59:25and he has another 100 to go.
0:59:25 > 0:59:29He just pursues people, and he goes right for the jugular.
0:59:31 > 0:59:39So Blake thinks it'll take him till the year 2022, I think he said.
0:59:39 > 0:59:44And we talked about this, I said, "You know, I'll do anything for you.
0:59:44 > 0:59:48"But I don't know if I can stay alive till...
0:59:48 > 0:59:53"I'll do my best to stay alive till 2020, but don't push me over the top, you know."
0:59:53 > 0:59:56So it'll be published after my death.
0:59:57 > 0:59:59Philip Roth.
0:59:59 > 1:00:02APPLAUSE
1:00:03 > 1:00:07I want to jump now, because I remember the occasion when it happened,
1:00:07 > 1:00:09when Obama gave you the...
1:00:09 > 1:00:12We got these medals, two groups of people,
1:00:12 > 1:00:16those who got the medal of the humanities
1:00:16 > 1:00:19and those who got the medal in the arts.
1:00:19 > 1:00:25- First of all, he is a fan of Portnoy, he's a fan of yours, a big deal.- I think so, yes.
1:00:25 > 1:00:27- But he loved Portnoy, he read Portnoy.- He spoke about it.
1:00:27 > 1:00:32How many young people have learned to think
1:00:32 > 1:00:38by reading the exploits of Portnoy and his complaints?
1:00:38 > 1:00:40LAUGHTER
1:00:43 > 1:00:46LOUDER LAUGHTER
1:00:49 > 1:00:53And then upon the stage, when he gave me the medal, he whispered to me
1:00:53 > 1:00:56when he put it on, he said, "You're not slowing down, are you?"
1:00:57 > 1:00:59I said, "I am indeed slowing down".
1:00:59 > 1:01:02APPLAUSE
1:01:11 > 1:01:14I met him, you know, a few months ago,
1:01:14 > 1:01:19after he had stopped, and put the Post-it note on the computer,
1:01:19 > 1:01:22saying, "The battle is over," or whatever it said.
1:01:22 > 1:01:27And I think he gave every sign of being somebody who was happy
1:01:27 > 1:01:31to be released from the ordeal of creation.
1:01:31 > 1:01:36I mean, he has written - goodness knows, 34, 35 books,
1:01:36 > 1:01:41something like that. I mean, it's a lot more than I'm ever going to write.
1:01:41 > 1:01:43So he's entitled to a rest.
1:01:43 > 1:01:47And if he feels like having the rest of his life off,
1:01:47 > 1:01:49that's kind of OK with me.
1:01:49 > 1:01:54I don't know, I always... I wonder, you know? I just wonder.
1:01:54 > 1:01:57Because it seems to me that the writing bug
1:01:57 > 1:02:01is something which is more or less incurable.
1:02:01 > 1:02:04You've had your birthday, you've had the acclamation,
1:02:04 > 1:02:08many people, most people think you are the greatest living writer,
1:02:08 > 1:02:11not just the greatest living American writer.
1:02:11 > 1:02:13Some don't, maybe.
1:02:13 > 1:02:15Quite a few don't.
1:02:15 > 1:02:17Most of Pakistan doesn't.
1:02:17 > 1:02:19THEY CHUCKLE
1:02:19 > 1:02:22- Well, maybe that'll change with the internet! - PHILIP LAUGHS
1:02:22 > 1:02:26Now that I don't write, I just want to chatter away.
1:02:26 > 1:02:28When are you coming back?
1:02:28 > 1:02:30Quite soon.
1:02:30 > 1:02:31You know something?
1:02:31 > 1:02:36I can guarantee you that this is my last appearance ever on television.
1:02:38 > 1:02:42- Well, I think we'd better put the end credits up now.- Absolutely.
1:02:42 > 1:02:49Absolute last one. Absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere.
1:02:49 > 1:02:51- Goodbye.- Bye-bye.