Philip Roth Unleashed Part 2 imagine...

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.

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.

So I need some reality.

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

In a series of novels begun in the mid '90s,

Philip Roth took reality and twisted it.

What if Roosevelt hadn't become President...but this man had?

'He crossed from New York to Paris in 33 hours.

'Thus bridging the old world and the new.'

What if a horrific polio epidemic had swept Roth's home town of Newark

and killed and maimed a generation of children.

What if a black professor had pretended he was white?

What would happen next?

So it's a kind of "what if" situation, you walk into something,

and then, somehow or other, that's a starting point

and that's where you pick up from, is that right?

Well, yes.

I count on the original ignition to get me started.

And then one sentence produces the next sentence.

And that's the way you work.

Then something may occur to me - what if this happens?

So I write down that for later.

And I'm sure then you begin to be stimulated by the invention

and more invention follows.

And if the invention seems silly or preposterous or outlandish

you think, "Let it sit here, just keep going,

"maybe it will pay off down the way."

Roth's engagement with history and the American century

began with a moment where a family, much like his own,

feels the impact of events that were changing the world.

ROTH RECITES FROM SABBATH THEATER: "It was a Tuesday in December 1944.

"I came home from school and saw some cars.

"I saw my father's truck.

"Why is that there?

"I knew something was wrong.

"In the house, I saw my father in terrible pain.

"My mother hysterical, her hands, her fingers, moaning, screaming,

"people there already.

"A man had come to the door.

"'I'm sorry,' he said, and gave her the telegram.

"'Missing in action.'

"Another month before the second telegram arrived.

"The death notice was like losing another brother.

"The family was finished. I was finished.

"Morty played clarinet and dance band in high school.

"He was a track star, a terrific swimmer.

"He was great with his hands, the Sabbath digital artfulness

"that Mickey too would one day exhibit to the world.

"All their freedom was in their hands."

From the shadows of the lost war hero, the brother Morty,

comes the unlikely character of Mickey Sabbath,

the flawed, mischievous younger brother, the ultimate anti-hero.

Mickey Sabbath and Sabbath Theater which was such a change

from where you had been, and that's...

I just wondered where that came from.

Well, you know, whatever lights a fire under you,

you relish, strangely.

He gave me great verbal freedom. Verbal energy.

And his mind and his thinking and his situation...

..produced verbal sparks.

I made him into a puppeteer, with hand puppets.

# I see trees of green... #

"..His trademark was to perform with his fingers.

"When each is moving purposefully and has a distinctive voice,

"their power to produce their own reality can astonish people."

# ..What a wonderful world

# I see skies of blue... #

"He emerged from behind a screen at the conclusion of a 25-minute show,

"smiling most wickedly above his close-clipped black chin beard."

# And I think to myself... #

"A small, ferocious, green-eyed buccaneer from his years at sea,

"as massive through the chest as a bison."

# ..The colours of the rainbow... #

"He has one of those chests you didn't want to get in the way of.

"A squat man, a sturdy, physical plant,

"obviously very sexed up and lawless,

"who didn't give a damn what anybody thought."

He's a wicked man...Sabbath.

It's hero was distasteful to many.

I found him...wonderful.

And he was my lucky discovery.

Writers, and for that matter readers,

they like wicked characters.

Mickey Sabbath has a narrow moral compass,

but he has a huge human compass.

And that means that he can do anything.

And does do anything.

He's wild, he's wicked, to use Philip's word,

he's inventive, he reinvents himself.

He's a magician, of sorts.

And he seems not to be troubled by conscience.

"Whenever he spotted an attractive girl

"amongst the 20 or so students who stopped to watch,

"he would break off the drama in progress or wind it down.

"And the fingers would start in whispering together.

"Then, the boldest finger, the middle finger,

"would edge nonchalantly forward

"and beckon her to approach.

"After an exchange of polite chitchat,

"the finger would begin a serious interrogation,

"asking if the girl had ever dated a finger,

"if her family approved a finger,

"if she herself could find a finger desirable.

"And the other hand stealthily began to unbutton her outer garment.

"Only twice did the fingers undo a brassiere catch.

"And only once did they endeavour to caress the nipples exposed.

"And it was then that Sabbath was arrested."

I was particularly entertained by the descriptions in Sabbath Theater.

This is about Nikki...

"Climaxes overtook her seemingly from without,

"breaking upon her like a caprice.

"A hailstorm freakishly exploding in the middle of an August day.

"Rosanna's, on the other hand, had to be galloped after,

"like a fox in the hunt." How do you know all this about women?

-About how it works for them?

-I try to go into things with my eyes open.

"Drenka dragged herself mournfully beside him.

"Up the steep wooded hillside to the heights

"where their bathing brook bubbled forth.

"A respectable woman who was enough of a warrior

"to challenge his audacity with hers.

"'I will give up all other women.

"'In return,' he told her, 'you must suck off your husband twice a week.

"'Think of how it will excite me -

"'sucking off your husband to please your lover.

"'You want to feel like a real whore? That ought to do it.'

"'Stop,' she cried out, throwing her hands over his mouth.

"'I have cancer, Mickey, stop!'"

People have objected to Roth's treatment of his female characters.

He's even been described as a misogynist.

Philip has been known to love women, but he may not always like them.

And there is a difference. You see, Philip can...

he can be very savage, it's not just confined to women.

But I think women and feminists have noticed it more,

the way they have with, let us say, Ernest Hemingway,

who was also a great writer.

In Sabbath's Theater, he has one of the great heroines of our time.

I don't know what more you could want of a woman.

Some people say she should want less sex than she does,

well, but she does.

But she's full of life, she's full of humour, she is full of wisdom,

she's a hard worker, she runs a hotel with her husband.

She's an adulterers, but we've seen that before in great literature.

I don't think you can knock her for that.

She has as hearty a sexual appetite

as any male character he's ever given us.

She's warm, she's a good mother.

And Sabbath loves her.

He doesn't just have sex with her every which way,

which he does, he loves her

and I think women might be interested to know this is

a 50-something-year-old woman who he's passionately,

sexually involved with and he describes her that way.

"It was supposed to be otherwise.

"With the musculature everywhere losing its firmness.

"But even where her skin had gone papery

"at the low point of her neckline,

"even that palm-sized diamond

"of minutely crosshatched flesh,

"intensified not merely her enduring allure,

"but his tender feelings for her as well.

"He was now 6 short years from 70.

"What had him grasping at the broadening buttocks

"as though the tattooist. Time had ornamented neither of them

"with its comical festoonery was his knowing, inescapably,

"that the game is just about over."

Drenka is dying of cancer in a hospital.

She's near the end.

Sabbath goes to see her. Their affair is a secret.

But he goes to the hospital to see her

when he knows her husband isn't visiting.

And, um...

..she...is hallucinating from morphine.

And he sees the whole situation, the drainage bags,

what she looks like.

She reminds Sabbath on her deathbed

about the time they pissed on each other.

In a brook.

The brook was in the woods and the woods was a place they went

because they could be alone there.

And she reminds him, while she's dying, of this.

And she tells him how she felt when they were doing it.

And then she says, "How did you feel?"

And he tells her that really he wasn't as good at it as she was.

And it's a very touching scene.

I think it's as good a deathbed scene as I can write.

Because I found the right wrong topic for them to be talking about.

The right wrong topic.

Having written Mickey Sabbath, which we've talked about...

..you then create this character called Swede Levov.

It's a deeply compassionate portrait of this man,

a very...a man who is very contrasted to Mickey Sabbath, for instance.

Where was the "what if" in this instance?

-How did I get from one book to the other?

-Yes.

Well, you know, you balance off the book you've just finished.

You want to escape the book you've just finished

and do something utterly different.

"..Who could have imagined that his life

"would come apart in this horrible way?

"A sliver off the comet of the American chaos had come loose

"and spun all the way out to Old Rimrock and him.

"His great looks, his larger-than-lifeness, his glory,

"our sense of his having been exempted

"from all self-doubt by his heroic role.

"That all these manly properties had precipitated a political murder

"made me think of the compelling story of Kennedy.

"John F Kennedy, only a decade the Swede's senior

"and another privileged son of fortune.

"Another man of glamour exuding American meaning.

"Assassinated whilst still in his mid-40s,

"just five years before the Swede's daughter violently protested

"the Kennedy/Johnson war and blew up her father's life.

"I thought, 'But of course, he is our Kennedy.'"

I didn't have any plan beforehand.

Just sitting down and writing and beginning with two words.

I began with two words.

Which were Swede Levov, the name of this character.

Once I had those two words, I had hundreds of pages to write.

Who is he? What is he? Where does he live?

How is he destroyed?

It was delightful to move from Mickey Sabbath,

from the gutter to the higher reaches of domesticity.

And I wanted to imagine this decent, hard-working, successful,

more than successful young man.

He stuck out, he didn't want to live in the suburbs

or in the Jewish suburbs, he wanted to live out beyond that.

He wanted to make a new kind of American life for himself.

He's not a hero, he was just a decent man.

"The elevation of Swede Levov

"into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews

"can best be explained, I think,

"by the war against the Germans

"and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered.

"With this Swede indomitable on the playing field,

"the meaning and surface of life

"provided a bizarre delusionary kind of sustenance.

"The happy release into a Swedean innocence, for those who lived

"in dread of never seeing their sons

"or their brothers or their husbands again."

So I gave him this daughter and I gave him this wife

and I gave him this father.

And I gave him this moment of the late '60s and early '70s.

And I lit the match.

"You wanted Miss America? Well, you've got her. With a vengeance.

"She's your daughter.

"You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American Marine,

"a real American hotshot

"with a beautiful gentile babe on your arm?

"You longed to belong like everybody else in the United States of America?

"Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter.

"The reality of this place is right up in your kisser.

"With the help of your daughter,

"you're as deep in the shit as a man can get.

"Real, American, crazy shit.

"America amok, America amok."

I was reflecting something real.

That is the battles that began to go on

in households over the Vietnam war were real.

Young people battling with their parents.

Young people against the war battling with their parents.

Radicalising their parents in some instances

and flying off the handle sometimes themselves.

And there began to be violence on the left here, anti-war violence,

and that's what I wrote about.

The '60s, from say 1963, the Kennedy assassination,

to 1974, I think that's the Nixon resignation.

Those years were unlike any years I've ever known in America.

They were alive with horror.

The horror of the war.

They were alive with menace.

The menace of the sexual revolution.

They were alive with the politics.

The resistance to the politics.

They were alive with resistance. Resistance to authority.

Nothing like that had happened before.

They were young, college-educated women,

some of them just out of college, who...

..resorted to violence to protest the war.

This was brand new.

The uncanny thing for the writer

is the invention of a cast of characters.

So all I know is Swede Levov has got a daughter who's going to blow up,

when she's 16 or 17, blow up the post office in this town.

But what is she?

What is she?

She just can't be a bomb thrower.

What does she say, do, how does she act?

"Meredith Levov, Seymour's daughter.

"The Rimrock bomber was Seymour's daughter.

"The high school kid who blow up the post office and killed the doctor.

"The kid who stopped the war in Vietnam by blowing up somebody

"out mailing a letter at 5am.

"A doctor on his way to the hospital, 'Charming child,' he said,

"in a voice that was all contempt and still didn't seem to contain

"the load of contempt and hatred that he felt."

Had she not been born into the 1960s, she would have just been

a pain in the ass for three or four years and gone on.

Maybe to be a pain in the ass for the rest of her life,

but she wouldn't have got into the trouble she got into.

You call it American Pastoral, yet some of the most powerful passages

are of the destruction and defilement of the place you loved.

Your hometown, Newark.

"Three generations, all of them growing,

"the working, the saving, the success.

"Three generations in raptures over America.

"Three generations of becoming one with the people.

"And now with the fourth, it had all come to nothing."

So what happened?

Well, the whole city worked.

Everybody was at work and the city worked.

By the time the '60s came around, there were very few jobs

and people were not at work, and that's the beginning of trouble.

Had my city remained the way it had been when I was young,

I probably would never have written another book about Newark.

I wasn't interested in that placid, harmonious place where I grew up.

I loved it, but I couldn't keep writing books about it.

And I wanted to write about the turmoil.

This city I came from, Newark,

which was destroyed in 1967 in a wild, arson-laden riot.

"There was nothing.

"There was a mattress discoloured

"and waterlogged like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole.

"The pole still held up the sign telling you what corner you were on.

"And that's all there was.

"The last of the cobblestone streets, the old cobblestone streets,

"had been stolen about three weeks after the riots.

"While the rubble still reeked of smoke

"where the devastation was the worst,

"a developer from the suburb had arrived with a crew around 1am.

"Three trucks and some 20 men moving stealthily, and during the night,

"without a cop to bother them, they dug up the cobblestones.

"'Now they're stealing the streets?' his father asked.

"'Newark can't even hold on to its streets?

"'Seymour, get the hell out.'"

I began to be...interested again

in what I'd taken a crack at at the beginning,

but now was more serious.

And also, between the time of my writing Goodbye Columbus and 1989,

something colossal and tragic had happened to the city.

And I became interested in Newark then,

as a place that had been

a functioning, blue-collar, hardworking city.

And therefore, I had in my mind, when I went over to visit,

the Newark that was and the Newark that now is.

It was more...really, it was being a historian

more than a sentimentalist.

I think it's...I think American Pastoral

is as deep...a profoundly psychological novel

as you could wish to read, you know?

It is kind of extraordinary that Philip was able to do that,

to be both the author of American Pastoral

and Portnoy's Complaint.

You know? It's really hard to believe that the same sensibility

could have that range.

-REPORTER:

-Seized by FBI agents in a high sierra hideout,

four Communist Party members are arraigned in San Francisco.

Two of them are fugitives...

Are you a member of the Communist Party

or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee...

That's not the question... GAVEL BANGS

Betrayal is a returning theme in Roth's next book,

I Married A Communist,

as Ira Ringold's movie star wife, Eve Frame,

writes a best-selling memoir that brands Ira,

a successful radio journalist, as a Bolshevik.

"I married a communist, I slept with a communist,

"a communist tormented my child.

"Unsuspectingly, America listened to a communist,

"disguised as a patriot, on network radio.

"A wicked, two-faced villain,

"the real names of real stars,

"a big Cold War backdrop - of course, it became a best-seller.

"And it didn't hurt to name all the other Jewish Bolsheviks

"affiliated with Ira's show."

I Married A Communist comes next in what becomes a sort of trilogy.

You go back in time, you go even deeper back,

-to the '40s in America.

-The '40s.

Well, you know, what I would try to do in American Pastoral,

in I Married A Communist, and again in The Human Stain,

was to personalise the historical.

And I wanted to bring it home.

And the anti-Communist crusade in America

that began about '45...

I guess I wanted to write about another American crisis

that I had known.

"Russian spies. Russian documents.

"Secret letters, phone calls,

"hand-delivered messages pouring into the house day and night

"from Communists all over the country.

"Cell meetings in the house

"and in 'the secret communist hideaway

"'in the remotest wilds of New Jersey.'

"'Lies!' I cried. 'Completely crazy lies!'

"But how was I to know for sure? How was anyone?

"What if the premise to her book was true?

"Could that possibly be?"

Following the acclaim of I Married A Communist,

Roth was awarded the National Medal Of Arts by President Clinton.

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize.

But Roth was only part-way through his American Trilogy.

I do know, as anybody who knew him at all in those years knew,

that writing was everything,

that he didn't want to go more than a day or two without writing.

I did ask him at one point when he was between books,

"How long can you go without working on a book?"

And he said, "Oh, about two hours."

In the '90s, when he was working

on the American Trilogy.

No, really beginning with Sabbath's Theater,

which was published in '95,

erm...he rarely left Connecticut,

and he rarely saw people.

And even his good friends

lost track of him.

You needed writing, you needed to write,

but did you actually enjoy it, as a matter of interest?

It was...

Like many jobs, writing is hard work.

And sometimes the work was very hard

and, as with everyone who has to do hard work,

it wasn't always pleasurable.

Especially if you feel you can't do it.

And that's the hardest part of it,

that you don't feel you're up to it,

and you've been working at it for 20 or 30 or 40 years

and you're an amateur all over again when you're writing this page.

Not just a new book, but every page you're starting fresh.

The other was my own...

capacity to deal with the frustration of writing

was not as great as it once had been,

and you need a great capacity for frustration.

Because frustration is your daily companion,

your companion sentence by sentence.

OPERA MUSIC PLAYS

But I want to say one thing to the American people.

I want you to listen to me,

I'm going to say this again -

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

I want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to me.

I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations

with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

I went to the book called The Human Stain.

I wanted to treat the moment we were in in America -

we were all in collectively - as history.

And it was the moment when

Bill Clinton was accused of...

He was impeached over his affair with a White House intern.

And there was this...

The persecuting spirit was alive in America.

The situation released...

Released me.

Indeed I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky

that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

"It was the summer in America

"when the nausea returned,

"when the joking didn't stop,

"when the speculation and the theorising

"and the hyperbole didn't stop,

"when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life

"was abrogated in favour of maintaining in them

"every illusion about adult life.

"It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind,

"and life, in all its shameless impurity,

"once again confounded America."

Talk about an assailable man,

which is more or less the subject of these three books,

the assailability of these men who seem so strong,

Swede Levov, Ira Ringold,

and later Coleman Silk - and Bill Clinton.

The challenge for me...

was to treat the present as history.

The history of the present moment.

In The Human Stain, this persecuting spirit

comes to haunt college professor Coleman Silk,

who, like Bill Clinton, has told a lie.

As with others of Roth's characters,

he wants to reinvent himself.

You want to be left to be yourself...

-You want to be left to be who you want to be.

-Yeah.

Not wanting to follow in the tracks

of his family, or his father, or whatever...

He doesn't want to be black.

Simple as that.

But he doesn't want to be part of somebody else's "we".

He doesn't want to be the "we"

that the "they" see.

So there's the gigantic pronouns.

There's the "I", there's the "we", which you are a part of

and they want to take you in very quickly. His is the Negro "we".

And then there's the "they", the rest of the Americans who say...

Who have their sense of where the black belongs.

And so that's what I decided on.

This would be one of those pale-skinned blacks who can,

as they used to say, pass.

And many people passed, tens of thousands,

before the civil-rights era.

And so that's what I decided on.

This would be a black American who had the opportunity,

as he saw it, because of his pale skin,

to pretend he was white.

"That's what comes of being hand-raised.

"That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us.

"The human stain.

"That's how it is.

"We leave a stain, we leave a trail,

"we live our imprint.

"Impurity, cruelty,

"abuse, error,

"excrement, semen.

"There's no other way to be here.

"Nothing to do with disobedience.

"Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption.

"It's in everyone.

"Indwelling. Inherent.

"Defining.

"The stain that is there before its mark."

Coleman Silk is born about 1925, I think, or '26.

And he comes to maturity in the 1930s...

The limitations on a black life,

or then called a Negro life,

were in place, you know?

And this young man,

mischievous, audacious, playful,

thinks... He doesn't see the whole future, he thinks,

"Maybe I can get away with this?

"I'll try it." And so he goes into the Navy and he tries it.

And he doesn't get away with it in the Navy entirely,

but then when he gets out of the Navy he can try it again.

So he goes down to Greenwich Village to live

and he tries it on.

"One evening she takes him around to a tiny Bleecker Street jewellery shop

"where the white guy who owns it makes beautiful things out of enamel.

"Just shopping the street,

"out looking, but when they leave she tells Coleman that the guy is black.

"'You're wrong,' Coleman tells her, 'he can't be.'

"'Don't tell me that I'm wrong' - she laughs - 'you're blind.'

"Another night, she takes him to a bar on Hudson Street.

"'See that one? The smoothie?'

"'Him,' she says. 'No,' says Coleman,

"but he's the one laughing now.

"Maybe there are a dozen more guys like him

"hanging around Greenwich Village.

"Not just everybody has that gift.

"That is, they have it, but in petty ways:

"they simply lie all the time.

"They're not secretive in the grand and elaborate way that Coleman is.

"He's back on the trajectory outward.

"He's got the elixir of the secret,

"and it's like being fluent in another language -

"it's being somewhere that is constantly fresh to you."

They call it chutzpah in...

-Chutzpah? Is that the Negro term for it?

-Yeah, that's right!

It is a nice irony, that.

That, of course, again in this period he chooses to be,

or you choose him, to be Jewish.

Well, he chooses to be Jewish for a variety of reasons.

One is...

Jews can have that very tight... Tightly coiled hair

that resembles African-American hair.

He thinks, "If I tell 'em I'm a Jew, I've got my hair covered," you know.

He's not a traitor to his people, he's mischievous.

He sees if it works and then, at one point...

he claims it.

And the claiming of it comes with some trouble,

because he decides he will disown his family.

His loving, loving, loving mother.

And he has to go to his mother

and he realises he has to have the guts...

to kill his mother, as it were.

As he says about his father,

who was an optometrist

who lost his little shop in the Depression,

became a Pullman porter on the trains,

and he says, "The world will take care of murdering my father,

"it already has,"

but you've got to murder your own mother.

By which he means he wants absolute freedom from them.

"'I'm never going to know my grandchildren,' she said.

"He prepared himself.

"The important thing was to let her speak,

"let her find her fluency

"and, from the soft streaming of her on words

"create for him his apologia.

"'You're never going to let them see me,' she said.

"'You're never going to let them know who I am.'

"'Mom,' you'll tell me.

"'Ma, you come to the railroad station in New York,

"'and you sit on the bench in the waiting room,

"'and at 11.25am,

"'I'll walk by with my kids in their Sunday best.'

"'That'll be my birthday present five years from now.

"'Sit there, Mom, say nothing,

"'and I'll just walk them slowly by.'

"'And you know very well that I will be there.'"

Reinvention is maybe

the great theme of American literature.

The self as a creation of the self.

You see how it comes out of immigrant literature,

people are coming to America from other countries

and becoming this new thing, which was American.

Whether they come from, you know, Russia or Italy or Ireland,

or wherever it may be,

you come to America and you reinvent yourself.

You become this thing called an American.

So that is one of the great...

And every American writer - it's at the heart of American literature.

Does he genuinely mean, Philip, as a writer,

that it's not just through the facts but through fiction

that you can understand your life?

That we can understand our lives?

That's what great fiction writers do, of course.

I think he proves it in his books.

That it is through great fiction we can understand our lives.

Absolutely.

You can know these fictional characters -

and I don't only mean Roth,

I mean Madame Bovary, pick who you will -

you can know them better than you know most of your friends.

That's what a writer can do.

You can trace somebody's life so deeply

and reflect upon it how you will.

Roth next moved from the reinvention of a single man's history

to reinventing the history of America itself

by putting a Nazi sympathiser in the White House.

In 1940 there were people on the extreme right of the Republican Party

who wanted to nominate the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.

Erm, but nothing ever came of it.

I then thought, "What if?

"What if they had nominated Lindbergh?"

And, as I imagined it, Lindbergh would've won.

Roosevelt was going for a third term,

which was taboo in American presidency.

He was a polio victim, he was a crippled man,

and I think if Lindbergh,

with all his youth and charm and fame,

had run for president in 1940,

I think he might well have defeated Roosevelt.

"And then the White House.

"A twilight spring evening.

"Shadows falling across the sprawl of lawn.

"Blooming bushes. Flowering trees.

"Gracious smiles.

"Quiet laughter.

"The lean, beloved, handsome president.

"Beside him the talented poetess,

"daring aviatrix,

"and decorous socialite

"who is the mother of their murdered child.

"The loquacious silver-haired honoured guest.

"The elegant Nazi spouse in her long satin gown.

"Welcoming words, witticisms,

"and the Old World gallant,

"steeped in the theatrics of the royal court

"and looking in his evening clothes like a million bucks.

"As persuasively civilised a sham as human cunning could devise."

I had to imagine two things.

I had to imagine the history and the politics that had not happened.

And I had to imagine

who felt this stuff on their backs.

What might have made...

-If it had happened, how might it have happened?

-If it had happened...

how would it have affected X, Y and Z, and who are X, Y and Z?

Who was I going to write about there?

I decided who better should it happen to but my family.

So I was able to imagine the American reality

and I was able to imagine what would my - MY - my mother,

my father, my brother and I and our relatives and our neighbours

and our family, what would we have done in this situation,

if we were confronted with this crisis.

Erm, and I was ignited again.

I had two things I had to imagine at the same time,

make them work together.

"Pandemonium. Unspeakable delight.

"Lindbergh had at last stepped onto the Garden stage,

"and like someone half demented,

"my father leaped from the sofa and snapped off the radio

"just as my mother came back into the living room and asked,

"'Who would like something? Alvin,'

"she said, with tears in her eyes, 'a cup of tea?'

"Her job was to hold our world together

"as calmly and as sensibly as she could.

"That was what gave her life fullness

"and that was all that she was trying to do,

"and yet never had any of us seen her rendered so ridiculous

"by this commonplace maternal ambition.

"'What the hell is going on!'

"my father began to shout.

"'What the hell did he do THAT for?

"'Did he think that one single Jew

"'is now going to go out and vote for this anti-Semite

"'because of that stupid, lying speech?

"'Has he completely lost his mind? What does this man think he's DOING?'

"'Koshering Lindbergh,' Alvin said. 'Koshering Lindberg for the goyim.'"

These later, epic works

were acknowledged to be masterpieces,

an astonishing achievement for a writer now in his 70s

and for whom things have not come easily.

Roth had suffered chronic physical and psychological pain

from his 50s onwards.

I have a character in Everyman,

a woman, who has back pain,

and I gave her my despair.

I gave her all my back pain with it.

Long periods of chronic pain are terrible,

which, in my case was back pain,

and how you become crazed.

Because in addition to being crazed by the pain,

you're crazed by the drugs.

And you want something to help you,

and when you find a drug that will help you,

you get caught.

You get caught.

"She took the pill,

"an opiate could kill pain for three or four hours,

"a large, white, lozenge-shaped pill

"that caused her to swallow with the anticipation of relief

"the instant she swallowed it.

"'I do apologise for all this,' she said as he was leaving.

"'It's just that pain makes you so alone.'

"And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands.

"'It's so shameful.' "'There's nothing shameful about it.'

"'You're wrong. You don't know.

"'The dependence, helplessness,

"'the isolation, the dread -

"'it's all so ghastly and shameful.

"'The pain makes you frightened of yourself.

"'The utter otherness of it is awful.'"

I don't think that Philip

is by nature a depressive person.

I think that he has to be

ground and ground and ground down by pain.

I think Everyman is a masterpiece,

I think it is beautifully wrought

and elegiac and moving

and genuinely wise.

I think it's one of the wisest meditations

on human mortality.

Have I ever thought I lost my magic?

Sure.

Sure.

Erm...

Sporadically.

Certainly between books it's very easy to think you can't do it again.

And then not long after Everyman came The Humbling.

I wanted to tell this story about an actor who loses his talent.

It's called The Humbling, the book.

And it was based on a story someone had told me

about an actor who did indeed come out on the stage one night

and found he couldn't do it.

He just couldn't do it.

And it wasn't stage fright,

he'd been doing it well all his life,

and as I said in the first line of that book,

he'd lost his magic.

That's it, that's the premise of the book.

And if a man loses his magic, as this man did,

what then happens to him?

BELL RINGS

"He tried to occupy the hours

"doing a hundred seemingly necessary things to prepare:

"I have to look at this speech again,

"I have to rest, I have to exercise,

"I have to look at that speech again,

"and by the time he got to the theatre he was exhausted.

"And dreading going out there.

"He would hear the cue coming closer and closer

"and know that he couldn't do it.

"He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real,

"he waited to forget who he was and become the person doing it,

"but instead he was standing there, completely empty,

"doing the kind of acting you do

"when you don't know what you're doing.

"He could not give and he could not withhold.

"He had no fluidity and he had no reserve.

"Acting became a night-after-night exercise

"in trying to get away with something."

And I wanted him to commit suicide at the end.

-You wanted him to?

-Yes.

I never had a suicide in a book of mine,

except for a woman in Everyman,

and I wanted to see if I could get a character to that point

where it was credible that he would kill himself.

What would he have to lose?

How would he have to be unbalanced?

Where would his equilibrium have to go to get him to that point?

A man who'd led a very engaged

and impassioned life.

How could he get to this point where he wanted to surrender life?

And so my goal was to get there.

Have you ever, in your worst moments,

during those moments when you did have a very hard time,

has that ever come your way?

-Suicide?

-Yeah.

Do I think about committing suicide?

Sure.

Out of circumstances.

Erm...

But I haven't done it.

-So I see!

-And here we are.

"Finally it occurred to him

"to pretend that he was committing suicide in a play.

"In a play by Chekhov.

"What could be more fitting?

"There was a note of eight words found alongside him

"when his body was discovered on the floor of the attic

"by the cleaning woman later that week.

"'The fact is Konstantin Gavrilovich

"'has shot himself.'

"It was the final line spoken in The Seagull.

"He had brought it off.

"The well-established stage star, once so widely heralded

"for his force as an actor,

"whom in his heyday people would flock to the theatre to see."

I think Philip became very interested,

for obvious reasons, in the subject of death.

And I think just, when death is sitting in the room every day,

you know, you can't... when it's always in the corner,

you know, you have to confront it in a way

that you have to confront your own mortality,

in a way that you don't when you're a kid starting out.

And I think what's happened to Philip was that,

that he began to understand his own mortality,

the fact that there wasn't that much time and he was this thing,

he was the dying animal.

And it made him look again at his life, but through that lens.

Through the lens of a mortal being.

Saul Bellow's death, William Styron's death,

Arthur Miller's death, John Updike's death,

Sandy's death - your brother - your mother's death before all this,

the last ten years of your life have been full of death.

Did you spent a lot of time thinking about this

and as you thought about it, you began to see scenarios and possibilities and stories?

Well, it was the shock of the deaths that prompted these stories.

Um, and if you live to be 80,

you're going to see a lot of people die

in the last 20 years of your life.

My experience is universal. Everybody dies, until you disappear.

And so sure, it marked those last books, it stimulated me.

It stimulated me, I wasn't depressed by it.

Um, I wanted to write about... people dying,

what it was like for them, for the people around them.

How it came.

"He imagined that if Alan lay roasting in that box for much longer,

"the box would somehow ignite and explode

"and as though a hand grenade had gone off inside,

"the boy's remains would come bursting out all over the hearse and the street.

"Why does polio strike only in the summer?

"At the cemetery, standing there bare-headed but for his yarmulke,

"he had to wonder if polio couldn't be caused by the summer sun itself.

"At midday, in its full overhead onslaught,

"it seemed to have more than sufficient strength to cripple and kill.

"And to be rather more likely to do so

"than a microscopic germ in a hot dog.

"As Alan's casket was lowered into the ground,

"as Mrs Michaels lunged for the grave crying 'No, not my baby!'

"death revealed itself to him no less powerful

"than the incessant beating of the sun on his yarmulke'd head."

How did you capture that, it wasn't clearly from memory,

how did you recall what went on at that time?

-Do you mean the polio?

-Yeah.

Well, it was memory.

The vaccine didn't come around until I was in college.

And so the annual polio anxiety and worry,

I knew about as a child, and as a young adult.

So this was largely based on my memory of how people worried,

what happened when kids died.

I wanted to write about this community in crisis.

In 1944 - there was always polio, annually - but there was no epidemic that I knew of.

So I invented an epidemic because I wanted to see what happened.

"Mr Cantor, the great athlete, still had a withered left arm

"and a useless left hand.

"Yet on the afternoon near the end of June,

"running with the javelin aloft,

"bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin

"high over his shoulder and releasing it then, like an explosion,

"he seemed to us invincible."

This was the last line in the last book that Philip Roth would write.

Yet, in an interview recorded ten years ago,

he couldn't conceive of a life without writing.

If it were taken away from me, I think I would die, probably.

Without being overly dramatic, I would be emptied.

I don't know what else to do.

I don't know what else to do.

"I don't know how else to do anything," he said.

-I don't know how to do anything else.

-"I can't do anything else.

"Otherwise, I'd just sit idly in this seat, without a television..."

I see you've got one now.

"I've been doing it all my life. If it were taken away from me, I think I would die, probably.

"Without being overly dramatic, I would be emptied."

Mm-hm.

So how are you feeling now?

I feel great.

I was wrong!

I was wrong.

I had reached the end. There was nothing more for me to write about.

I was fearful, yes - I was fearful that I would have nothing to do.

I was terrified, in fact. But I knew there was no sense continuing.

I was not going to get any better and why get worse, you know?

Um, and so I set out upon the great task of doing nothing.

He has turned the key on the door

of his creative fictional self.

When writers stop writing, it usually ends badly.

Drink, the lunatic asylum,

depression, divorce, lots of things.

And I thought at first when Philip, as indeed he did announce it,

I thought it was bravura, I thought, "He's a bit tired, he's written,

"and in two years' time, he'll be saying to me, 'Guess what? I've started.'"

He has not and he will not.

I've never seen him more content, and I mean it.

I've had a very good time over the last three or four years, yeah.

For a variety of reasons.

I do have things to do, I just don't do that thing any more.

One of the biggest tasks that's come to me is working with a biographer.

Blake Bailey.

And ever since then, I've been in the employ of Blake Bailey.

I came by his apartment on the Upper West Side,

and he motioned for me to sit down.

And he clamped on these enormous horn-rimmed glasses

and had this sheaf of paper,

on which he had written a series of questions.

And the first question for me was,

"Why should a Gentile from Oklahoma be my biographer?"

To which I replied,

"I am not a bisexual alcoholic with an ancient puritan lineage

"but I wrote a biography of John Cheever."

Which he seemed to accept.

And it went on for about three hours from there.

It was tough. I felt like a clubbed seal at the end of it.

He has supplied me with literally thousands of pages

of typed notes that are addressed directly to me.

He has turned over all his personal papers to me.

There's a Philip Roth Archive at the Library of Congress

and that's mostly, not entirely but mostly a manuscript archive,

which you can imagine is in itself quite large.

But most of his personal papers are up on the third floor of this house, in my office.

And it will take me years to excavate them entirely.

I have miles of files.

In my basement, my studio, and so on, in two houses, and file by file,

I took things out and saw what they were about

and wrote a commentary for him.

He's absolutely diligent and wonderful,

he's interviewed over 100 people in the last year

and he has another 100 to go.

He just pursues people, and he goes right for the jugular.

So Blake thinks it'll take him till the year 2022, I think he said.

And we talked about this, I said, "You know, I'll do anything for you.

"But I don't know if I can stay alive till...

"I'll do my best to stay alive till 2020, but don't push me over the top, you know."

So it'll be published after my death.

Philip Roth.

APPLAUSE

I want to jump now, because I remember the occasion when it happened,

when Obama gave you the...

We got these medals, two groups of people,

those who got the medal of the humanities

and those who got the medal in the arts.

-First of all, he is a fan of Portnoy, he's a fan of yours, a big deal.

-I think so, yes.

-But he loved Portnoy, he read Portnoy.

-He spoke about it.

How many young people have learned to think

by reading the exploits of Portnoy and his complaints?

LAUGHTER

LOUDER LAUGHTER

And then upon the stage, when he gave me the medal, he whispered to me

when he put it on, he said, "You're not slowing down, are you?"

I said, "I am indeed slowing down".

APPLAUSE

I met him, you know, a few months ago,

after he had stopped, and put the Post-it note on the computer,

saying, "The battle is over," or whatever it said.

And I think he gave every sign of being somebody who was happy

to be released from the ordeal of creation.

I mean, he has written - goodness knows, 34, 35 books,

something like that. I mean, it's a lot more than I'm ever going to write.

So he's entitled to a rest.

And if he feels like having the rest of his life off,

that's kind of OK with me.

I don't know, I always... I wonder, you know? I just wonder.

Because it seems to me that the writing bug

is something which is more or less incurable.

You've had your birthday, you've had the acclamation,

many people, most people think you are the greatest living writer,

not just the greatest living American writer.

Some don't, maybe.

Quite a few don't.

Most of Pakistan doesn't.

THEY CHUCKLE

-Well, maybe that'll change with the internet!

-PHILIP LAUGHS

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

When are you coming back?

Quite soon.

You know something?

I can guarantee you that this is my last appearance ever on television.

-Well, I think we'd better put the end credits up now.

-Absolutely.

Absolute last one. Absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere.

-Goodbye.

-Bye-bye.