American Masters

Piano ballad plays

Well, in the coming years,

I have two great calamities to face

death and a biography. Let's hope the first comes first! I'm not crazy about seeing myself described as an American Jewish writer. Uh... I don't write in Jewish, I write in American. My... Most of my work, nine tenths of it, takes place in America. I was raised in America. I am an American. Therefore, I'm an American writer. Yeah, I published a short story in 1958 in The New Yorker, my first publication and my last for many years, a story called "Defender of the Faith," about the army and two -- some Jewish guys in the army. The day that the story was coming out, every half-hour I went out to the newsstand to see if they had in The New Yorker because I was dying to see my story. And I took it home and I read it. I read it twice. I read it backwards. I read it upside down. I took it to the bathroom with me. I read it while I was eating and this was the greatest achievement in my life. And I met with opposition right off. It caused a furor. The New Yorker began to get letters, dozens and dozens of letters canceling subscriptions by Jews. And I began to get angry phone calls

from various Jewish organizations

"Would you write these stories if you were in Nazi Germany?" And I was suddenly being assailed as an anti-Semite, this thing that I detested all my life. And a self-hating Jew. I didn't even know what it meant. It never dawned on me when I was writing that story that this was going to cause a conflagration. But that's what happened when I began to write. What is doubly unusual about Roth is not only that he's endured, but that he has reimagined and reinvented himself so many times over these decades, so that you actually get a very different Roth depending upon what book you read. To my mind, he's a little bit like Picasso in that way, always reinventing himself. Because that's what literature is. I mean we don't -- we don't go to literature for moral perfection, we go there for moral ambiguity, for moral failing, for moral struggle. And I think that is his territory. And that is what he has done year after year, decade after decade. He's like, I'm just going to follow myself, and I'm going to be more honest and more outrageously only about me than any other writer has ever been. And he did it. That story, "Defender of the Faith," then appeared the next year, 1959, in my first book "Goodbye, Columbus," and so it started up again. "Goodbye, Columbus" was essentially a success, after all, not commercially. I think it sold 4,000 copies. But about eight months after it came out, the book won the National Book Award for Fiction. So that was what gave it some status. "Goodbye, Columbus" was a spontaneous and immediate response to the world I'd come out of. But there were those who were offended. And there were the rabbis who gave sermons denouncing me as an anti-Semite and I suppose what riled them about "Goodbye, Columbus" was a story about a Jewish middle-aged man who is an adulterer, Jewish girl having sex, who bought a diaphragm. I maintain then, as I do now, that there were Jewish girls who bought diaphragms and there were Jewish husbands who were adulterers. You know, Isaac Singer, when he was criticized by Jewish critics and Jewish readers for his stories, they would say rather, "Mr. Singer, why must you write about Jewish whores and Jewish pimps?" And Singer said, "What should I write about -- Portuguese whores, Portuguese pimps?" But there were some good reviews and one was the Saul Bellow's and to my mind our greatest, our greatest writer of the second half of the 20th century in America. I read "Augie March" in my last year of college and I didn't know what to make of it, I'd never read anything like it in my life. Uh... I didn't know what freedom was in a writer until I read that book. That you can do anything, that you can go anywhere. You can use your background. Just as Bellow used his in Chicago, the west side of Chicago, and Malamud used his in a grocery store in Brooklyn, I can use mine in Newark. It never occurred to me. I wrote stories in college for the literary magazine that I edited so I could publish my own stories. And they were awful little things and not a one of them mentions Jew, Newark -- you'd think I was the child of Lord Chesterfield, you know. And suddenly began writing stories set in my neighborhood.

PIERPONT

Roth begins by writing about Newark Jews. You begin with the people you know. It becomes a part of your story and it's very definitely always been a part of Roth's story, especially those who have come from immigrant backgrounds who have seen America as a tremendous goal from their youth, from starting out. He comes out of a very specific place, out of a Jewish community in Newark, but as he continues and he does write for 50 years, there is an ever-expanding range.

WOMAN

Welcome to Philip Roth's Newark, if you have chosen to visit Newark through the eyes and through the genius of Philip Roth. Our first stop, this morning, will be Weequahic High School, Philip's alma mater, and on to his childhood home and Philip Roth Plaza.

ROTH

My mother was born in 1904, in Elizabeth, of Jewish immigrants. She grew up in a kind of Irish Catholic neighborhood. And my father was born in Newark. They met when they were young, in their early twenties, and they married, my mother and father. And they came to Newark. And they started life. There was digging into American life. They didn't talk about the past. There was no remembering elsewhere. So there was no nostalgia for the old country, nor any talk about it. I never heard a word about it. I might have heard something about it from my grandparents, but they spoke only Yiddish. And I spoke only English. My parents were -- were and were not -- religious. They came from religious families. But I never sensed that we were in a religious household. Roth has a kind of interesting relationship with his past, obviously, with his childhood. When he speaks of his parents, it is with such tenderness. My brother was born first, in 1927, and my mother was 23. And I was born in 1933 and my mother was 28. She didn't drink, she didn't smoke, and she had terrific energy, terrific thoroughness. You know Freud's line -- "He who is loved by his mother is a Conquistador." His parents would be very warm, and I did not find his mother to be the archetype of the Jewish mother. They were not overbearing at all. Philip came from a mirth filled home. There were no books in the house, three or four that had been given as gifts. But... And I was the only one who read them. But my mother read a lot in the evening, for an hour or so, and she had -- she would rent books from the local pharmacy, and so I used to go -- She'd give me the name of the book and I used to go to the drugstore and get the book, and give the guy the quarter so she could have it for five days. So I saw her reading in the evening. But books weren't in any of the houses in the neighborhood where I grew up. And I read them and I enjoyed them. Then I went into more serious books. And I began to read when I was probably 12, and I came upon books I'd never heard of before. My brother also had some of them in paperback editions. He would have been 19, I would have been 14. "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." "Ulysses." And, uh... that changed everything. I had leaped forward into adult reading. But I wasn't intimidated by it. Of course, I was intimidated by "Ulysses." I don't think I got past page 20. What I liked very much was one line in "Ulysses" that made a deep impression on me. It'll show you how childish I am. At one point, Bloom goes down -- the hero of the book -- goes down to the waterfront, to the shingle to watch a girl down there, Gerty MacDowell, I think her name is. and he goes down to watch her. Probably it's not the first time. And she's young and pretty. And he puts his hand in his pocket and he has cut the lining in the pocket so his hand can go right through to his privates. And so Joyce tells you what's going on but you still don't get it until the next paragraph begins. "At it again." I loved "At it again." I think it should be on my tombstone. "At it again." My brother wanted to be a painter and he went to art school. It was quite stupendous that I had a brother who went over to the big city, exotic city, New York, went to a school where you sat in a room with a naked woman and you looked at her and drew her, you know. And I was stunned. I'd never seen nude figures before, even drawn, you know. And my father expected that I would be a lawyer. And I thought I would become a lawyer too. But I began to fall in love with literature. So then I was going to be a writer. What did he know about a writer? What did I know about a writer? Surely he didn't want me to be a writer. What parent in his right mind would want a child to be a writer? I certainly wouldn't! Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, the Nobel Prize winner, who was asked, "How does all this stuff affect your family, that you write?" And Milosz said, "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished." "As soon as my brother and I started giving genuine signs of burgeoning independence, she had relaxed the exacting, sometimes overly fastidious strictures that had governed our early upbringing and began to be mildly intimidated by our airs of maturity. In a way she fell in love with us all over again, like a shy schoolgirl this time, hoping for a date. It was a rather prototypic kind of movement, I think, for the mother to go from nurturing her sons to being a little afraid of them, and for the sons to move out of their mother's province at 13 or 14." That's a fair and accurate description of the situation when I was contemplating going off to college. When I got to be 16 and I graduated from high school and I got to be 16 and was going to college, and I went my first year in Newark and then I had to get out, I had to get away, I really wasn't getting away from Newark, I was getting away from my father. My father became a terrific pain in the ass. He was just overseeing my life and he feared my adult independence, you know. He didn't know what to do about it. And so I just went off to Bucknell. Uh... And then I never came back to Newark again. Well, I'm only following the path taken by other writers. And I don't mean to compare my work to Joyce's, but Joyce left Dublin and he ha-- He couldn't get out of Dublin fast enough. And then he couldn't write about anything else for the rest of his life. And he would send letters to his mother saying, "What's the color of the shutters on the house on the corner of such and such and such and such?" He wanted to get everything exactly right, but he'd fled. Faulkner left the south, he left Mississippi. And Hemingway wrote his great stories about Upper Michigan and Michigan from Paris. American writers seem to do that -- leave where they came from and then write about it for the rest of their lives. And so I did, I went off to Bucknell. I didn't know a thing about Bucknell when I went off to it. I just wanted to get the hell away. It was a very moral campus there in 1951 when Philip Roth arrived. Women, freshmen women, had to be in their dormitories at eight o'clock at night. You could take them to the movies, you could take them for an ice-cream Sunday, you could take them for a walk. But everything else had to be more or less fought for. And so the struggles began. There were housemothers on every floor to see that you obeyed all the rules and the rules were very stringent. For instance if you wore Bermuda shorts one inch too short for the regulations, that was very bad. The rules were in place. Girls were largely, almost entirely, inaccessible. They were so protective of the virginity of the young women with a housemother on every floor, with eight o'clock curfews. Men weren't allowed in women's dorms. Where were you supposed to do this thing, you know? So it wasn't done. Except on occasion. He dated quite a lot of young women and he had very good taste. They tended to be the most beautiful women on campus. Philip was a gorgeous man. He was a dashing young man and there was a whiff of danger about him because he was so much smarter than anybody and so witty and... and so, so fast. I don't mean fast in a sexual way, but he was just so quick. He was very popular and particularly one might note that he dated older women. Now older women, we're talking -- we were 17 years old and he maybe had a 19-year-old girlfriend. We were envious, yes. Women found Philip quite attractive. Others of us were on the sidelines. I didn't have success. I had what everybody had then, which was nothing. I wondered, here is Philip Roth just 15 years later writing "Portnoy's Complaint" and where, where did that come from? It certainly didn't come from Bucknell University! I started writing at college. The stories I wrote don't count as writing. They're just very bad little stories. Highly sensitive however. Salinger was published when I was in college and he influenced those little sensitive stories I wrote in college. I wanted to be sensitive too. And by the way, if the person excited you, it doesn't mean they were an influence, necessarily. Because after the first ten years, the influences fall away. And by then you're pretty much yourself. After the University of Chicago, and I began to do some writing there, and then I went in the army and that's when I really began writing. And after dinner, at night, on the base, I might walk around with the guys for a while, but then I'd go over to the office, which I had a key for, and go in and use the typewriter. And I wrote a couple of stories that I think -- "The Conversion of the Jews," which appeared in... Goodbye, Columbus and maybe one more. I wrote another three or four but they were not good. So I really began at -- in 1955, at the age of 22. He was a young writer trying to figure out what to do. He'd published a couple of good books, but it was 1961. He writes this essay called "Writing American Fiction" and he's basically saying, "This is a self-parodying culture. the stuff that you read in the newspaper, if I were to make it up, it would seem unreal. We're being outdone by reality." And in Roth's case, making yourself into a character in your own novels. And not just once but repeatedly in Roth, he becomes -- he becomes the central figure, really, in much of his later fiction. Between 1962 and 1967, I published nothing. I wrote crap. And I was frustrated and pretty unhappy, yeah. I had a very bad first marriage. It was brutal and lurid. Uh... I couldn't write. And I felt like somebody who'd been derailed, shunted off the track he'd been on from age one, through early childhood, school, high school, college, graduate school, the army, teaching at one of the great universities, the University of Chicago, and suddenly I was shunted off this track, and I was in hell. Uh... I needed somebody to help me out, to understand what had happened, and to recover my confidence, which was shot. It was necessary to talk, I had to talk about all of this. But I couldn't talk about it to civilians because they repeated it. That is, there was no way that in New York City I could tell anybody the intimate things in my life. Why would I want to anyway? But I had to talk about it. And I began to go to a psychoanalyst, three, four times a week. I was really a wreck. And that was a great help. When I returned to New York alone, unmarried, I met a group of fellows, they were all Jews, and with them, I began to perform. Uh... And I could make them laugh, I discovered. He had a wonderful sense of humor and he showed it. And he would say things in the middle of a group and he immediately was recognized as someone who is very, very funny, very capable, and he was terrific. And I realized that I had never done this in my work. How could I release stuff like this in my work? How do I get this performance on paper? And the discovery I made was, make it a psychoanalytic session. Then you can do it. I didn't know when I was doing it. I'd been performing for these guys, so here I was best performing on a page. "Portnoy's Complaint" is a performance -- not the performance I gave for my friends, maybe some of the stuff is. But Alexander Portnoy is talking to a psychoanalyst who doesn't speak, he just has the last line. So you have no idea who or what he is. But I knew something about psychoanalysis; I had been in it. I know the rules of the game of psychoanalysis, which is, "say anything. Whatever comes into your mind, say. Freely associate, don't censor yourself, don't censor your language, for God's sakes. That's the worst thing you could do." Great, I thought, great! I now have all this permission that a psychoanalytic patient has, that perhaps a writer doesn't have. So I had a justification, a powerful justification, for the tone, the style, the vocabulary. Before "Portnoy's Complaint" was published, I had my mother and father come over from New Jersey where they lived to New York where I was living, to prepare them for the publication of the book. I couldn't just leave them alone with the publication of this book. And so we had lunch and I explained that this book was coming out and that it was going to be a big hit. And that I told them what the story was and I said, "People are going to assume that you are the mother and father in it." So I tried to prepare them for that, and I said, "You're going to get phone calls from journalists, reporters, newspapers, and magazines, and TV and so on, you can hang up. It's not a crime to hang up on a journalist," you know. And they got into a taxicab. And they went home. Some years later, I asked my father, "What happened when you two got in the taxi, after that?" you know, and he said, "Your mother burst into tears." I said "Why?" He said, "He has delusions of grandeur." "He was never like that," she said, "he was never a boy like that. Now he has delusions of grandeur." So that's how my mother took it. When the book came out, in the first month, it sold 350,000 copies. It was a sensation. The New York Times had interviews of my high school teacher, can you imagine? There were television programs. There was then six Jewish mothers to talk about my book and...me. Uh... The first book by Roth that I read was when I was 12 years old and it was "Portnoy's Complaint." And strangely enough -- I can't explain this now -- my mother gave it to me. I don't know whether she simply thought this is one of the great American writers and you should be familiar with him, whether she thought I would be entertained, or whether she forgot what was in it. Needless to say it was for me like entering into a world that I never knew existed. For me as a religious kid, as a conservative kid in this closed world where we didn't talk about sex and didn't address these things, I feel like I got to read "Portnoy's Complaint" with the true shock that is built into that book, and I'm really thankful for that. I just laughed my head off. You know he's so funny and so sharp and it's dazzling writing and, uh... His provocations, his jokes, sense of humor, his intelligence have kept me company as a reader almost all my life. I was properly ashamed, you know, as a person. You know, it was just the perfect time to read this book about like wanton sexuality. By 1969, when he writes "Portnoy's Complaint," America has entered on a completely different moment in history and it was his brilliance and good fortune, perhaps, to capture that moment, to encapsulate it in "Portnoy's Complaint." It seemed to many people to be the 60s, to be freedom, sexual freedom as people took it, narrative freedom and storytelling freedom as he took it, a great jump forward in how you could talk about sexual life. In America there's no censorship in writers of sexuality or obscenity or... To the contrary, uh... the word

bleep

ROTH

appears too much, you know. Maybe I started it. There was lots of open, direct, obscene talk about sex in it. I think that's what made it such a hit and that's what made it such a scandal. People objected to its obscenities, people objected to what they felt was an insult to the Jews and so on. So there were -- There was a guy walking on one side of the street one day and I was walking on the other and from across the street I hear him say, "Philip Roth, the enemy of the Jews!" I certainly didn't help things with "Portnoy's Complaint." I got literary fame. And I also got sexual fame. I and I also got madman fame. Oh, gosh, everything happened really. I got hundreds of letters, a hundred a week say, through my publisher. Some of them letters with pictures of girls in bikinis. I had lots of opportunity to ruin my life. My... The woman who I was seeing at that time sent me a clipping from the New York Post, from a columnist named Leonard Lyons, saying, "Barbra Streisand has no complaints about her dates with Philip Roth." I just got this in an envelope with nothing else. Well, then I became terrifically recognizable on the street. I lost my anonymity.

People shouted

"Hey, Portnoy," and "Stop doing that!" So everything that people perceived in Portnoy, they then perceived in me. I remember walking up in the hills in Woodstock, which is beautifully set in the mountains, in the hills. And I was walking with my then lady friend, Barbara, and I was complaining to her. I had just gone down to New York, I think, and said, "Why don't they leave me alone?" and so on.

And she says

"Well, you're here now, and stop complaining because we're in the middle of the mountains." Suddenly a car went by and someone rolled down

the window and said

"Hey, Portnoy, leave it alone!" But there were those who recognized me and those who who didn't. And one day I got into a taxi cab, shortly after publication, maybe three months. And, uh... I sat down in the cab and told the guy where I was going. And when I looked at his license, which is up in front, on the right hand side, it said "Ed Portnoy." So I said to him, "I'll bet you've been having a hard time since that book came out." He says, "Oh, man," he says, "that

bleep

the window and said

son of a bitch." And he says, "My life, everybody gets

into this taxi cab says

Portnoy, hey Portnoy, you know about the book Portnoy, are you Portnoy?" And so I listened to him for a while. He went on. And I said... "I have to tell you something, Portnoy... I'm the guy who wrote the book." "You son of a bitch, you!" But pleasantly, pleasantly. "You son of a bitch! I thought it was you" and so on. And so I got out of the taxi when I did it, and I gave him a 20-buck tip. Though there were pleasant sides to it. The book became number one on the bestseller list. And suddenly I had money. I was able to move into a very nice apartment near the Metropolitan Museum. Um... I was able to buy a car. I hadn't had a car up until then. I was able to go on a trip around the world with my girlfriend. At the age of 36, I'd never really made any money. My parents took a cruise a couple of months after the book came out, a cruise on which I sent them to get them away from the "Portnoy's Complaint" fireworks. And that's what I thought I was doing. My mother told me when they came back that my father had taken about a dozen copies of "Portnoy's Complaint" on the ship. And he was a salesman. And when they make some friends on the ship, so he'd go down to the cabin, get a copy of "Portnoy's Complaint" he had with him, and signed it, write in it, "From Philip Roth's father Herman." So that's how my family took the book. "He works, so hard, and for whom, if not for me? And then at last, after turning on his belly and making a few choppy strokes, that carry him nowhere, he comes wading back to shore, his streaming compact torso glowing from the last pure spikes of light driving in, over my shoulder, out of stifling inland New Jersey, from which I am being spared. And there are more memories like this one, Doctor. A lot more. This is my mother and father I'm talking about." After "Portnoy's Complaint," I moved out to the country, first to Woodstock, New York, and then after about two years or three years in Woodstock, I found this house in rural Connecticut and discovered how wonderful it was to be in silence, the beauty of the place which is terrific and to have trees and water and birds to look at. And I like the seclusion to work. I've never been solidly connected to New York. I always found it strange being a writer in a building say with 50 families and in the morning all the mothers and fathers go off to work and the older children go to school and it's just me, the nannies and the little ones. This building is empty all day, except for me and the little tots. And we play -- They play the way they play; I play the way I play. I sit alone in a room in New York, double-glazing my windows so that no sound of New York comes in, writing. "There is no more worldly in the world place than New York, full of all those people on their cell phones, going to restaurants, having affairs, getting jobs, reading the news, being consumed with political emotion. And I thought to come back in from where I'd been to resume residence there re-embodied, to take on all the things I decided to relinquish -- love, desire, quarrels, professional conflict, the whole messy legacy of the past. A guy tries to come back into the world, having withdrawn from it for a while, for I think ten or twelve years, and when he comes back he finds he doesn't have the talent for it anymore. He doesn't have the wisdom for it -- though he's a man in his late sixties. He doesn't have the strength and energy for it. And he finds himself up against a lot of young people who run him ragged.

Horns blaring

into this taxi cab says

There's a line that he gives to Nathan Zuckerman in "Zuckerman Unbound" where Zuckerman is quoting Kafka, where he says, "We should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book you're reading does not rouse you with a blow to the head, then why read it?" And I think that Roth writes books that are meant to rouse you with a blow to the head. And I think that's one thing that distinguishes his work. These books are provocative, full of energy, full of ideas.

ROTH

And I wrote "The Ghost Writer." Then the fame book, "Zuckerman Unbound." Then the pain book, "The Anatomy Lesson" -- which was The Prague Orgy. And then when all of those books were taken together, you had my story. When I'm working, when I'm writing, when I'm in the midst of it, or beginning it or ending it, the only reader that counts is myself. You know what they say in baseball, "keep your eye on the ball." That's the ball. I have to keep my eye on that and not on anything else. When I know I'm on a final draft or I think I am, I get to the end and then I prepare four or five copies and I mail them or get them to friends whose critical acumen I trust. I'll go and sit in her house and we'll talk about the book and I'll tape-record what they're saying so I don't have to take notes and not be involved in the conversation with them. And then I get them home and I transcribe them. And so I begin to make changes. Or one person has got it all wrong, I think, and I ignore them. So the book is being described back to me in language which opens my thinking up. So even if they're wrong, they're right. There's something, there's something to be gained, even if I think they're wrong. So that's what I do. It's been a wonderful, it's been a wonderful help. One of the astonishing things about his career is what happens in the mid-'80s with "The Counterlife," which is a kind of a breakthrough book for him. I love the Zuckerman trilogy that precedes it. But in 1987 he writes a big book. He hasn't written a big book since "Letting Go," way back at the beginning of his career. It's a big book, it's daring, it's bold, it's inventive, it's ingenious. "The Counterlife" was a big turning point. The books changed after that. And before that I was a different writer. I was the same writer, but I was a different kind of writer. Now, what entered my work was politics and history. I don't think that either of those concerns were present to any significant degree before "The Counterlife." And that continued after that. But between writing that one, I wrote a nonfiction book about my father's dying and death, "Patrimony." "Patrimony" got to be written because when my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I came back to New York to take care of him. I wasn't depressed, I was just sad. I was terrifically sad because I realized that now this probably meant that within a year, he'll be dead. So what I did do was I began to write down what happened that day, just in the most truncated note form. And it helped. It helped to remember what had happened that day, to get it down and -- but I had no objective other than what I was doing, to pass an hour or so and calm down. And then as the week went -- weeks went by, there were more and more notes. And then in October he died. So that was it. And now I had all these notes and I knew how it ended. I always knew how it would end, I didn't know where and when. And I began to write. This was my response to the family catastrophe. My mother had already died, and now my father was dead. And my response was to write this book. And that's how it came into being. I was incredibly moved by that book. I think he describes the relationship between a child and his parent -- particularly of that generation. But he got at something very beautiful at the heart of that relationship. The scenes where his father is desperately trying to give away all of the things in the house and every time Philip comes to see him, he's wrapped something else in bubble wrap and giving it away. He's a great listener. And he's there like rock solid as a friend. And I know, undoubtedly, he was a great son, a great brother. And he's a great friend. And from that point on, it's as though he's just unstoppable. In '91, there's "Patrimony." Then in 1993, when he turns 60, there's "Operation Shylock." 1995, there's the great "Sabbath's Theater. 1997 is "American Pastoral." Straight on through the end of the century, 2000. The year 2000 is "The Human Stain." It is just one book after another, more or less out of the ballpark, you'd have to say. When I'm into the book, then I work every day. I work every day, I work seven days a week. I need lots of quiet, I need lots of hours, I need lots of regularity. Then I work for a year, two, three. "The Human Stain," say, and "American Pastoral" take two years to write or under two years to write. And the books like "Everyman" and "The Humbling" take about a year to write. I wrote standing up, and if you stand up, I discovered, my mind was freer standing up. And that I could walk around when I became blocked at a passage. And then naturally, the imagination -- I have one -- begins to go. The very first pages I would write would be farfetched -- will I be able to do it again? Where the hell is the next book coming from? Then when you begin the next book,

you think

This is awful, I got to begin a new book. You're completely lost again. Where you're going, what you're doing -- What is it you propose to do? Where should I lift the curtain? When should I lift the curtain, to begin the story? And so on. I had to fight my way to the freedom of drawing upon what I knew. Life isn't good enough in some ways. If it was just a matter of putting things down that happened to you or happened to your friend, or happened to your wife or how your wife happened to you, et cetera, you wouldn't be a novelist. I invent a character as I go along. You must find everything about this man. Who he is, where he's from, what he's done, what his family is. Then I get to his wife. And then you begin to invent on that wavelength. You've got to begin to shade it in the way a kid shades in in a coloring book. 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. You can't invent off of nothing. I can't, certainly. I have to have real stuff to invent off of. So I need some reality. I got to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality. Years ago in, "I Married a Communist," I had a taxidermist in mind when I was writing it and then I thought why don't you go down to this taxidermy guy in New Jersey? So it's like being a kid on a school trip and I had a terrific time in this stinking, stinking taxidermy place where his father was skinning a fox. And it stank. And I had a wonderful day. And I used jewelry store in "Everyman." I walked up Broadway here, I went right all the way up and when I found a jeweler, I went in pretending to buy an engagement ring for my girlfriend. They never believed that. This old doddering man coming in and he wants an engagement ring for his girlfriend. But I finally -- you know, if you keep going, you'll find one guy who will talk. And the gravedigger, there's a gravedigger I know. Doesn't everyone? And I went up and watched him. I said, "Let me know when you're digging a grave." And he called me and said he's digging a grave the next day. So I went up, brought my lunch in a bag, hung around the cemetery, watched him, talked to him. And I began to realize I had no place to be buried and that I should look into it. So I got in my car and began to drive around to the various cemeteries. But every time I got out of the car and walked into the cemetery I felt, I'm not going to be happy here. Who will I talk to? Why don't you go down to New Jersey and look where my mother and father are buried? So I went down to New Jersey and I wandered around with the guy who looks after the cemetery. And he showed me various plots and so on. I wanted to be near my parents. But there's nothing running free near my parents. And I say, "What about this one over here?" which was just sort of a stone's throw from my parents. And he said, "I don't like that for you, Mr. Roth, there's no leg room." And I said, "Well, that is important because I'm going to be here a long time." And so it turns into a comedy, and the result of all this was a book called "Sabbath's Theater," in which my hero, Mickey Sabbath, wants to kill himself and begins to look for a graveyard. Roth exposed parts of himself that no one had ever dreamed of exposing before. And in the fullness of time, it became really inspiring to me, not just the early work, not just the famous outrageous scenes in "Portnoy's Complaint," but also just the devastating self-portrait of the self-preoccupied old satyr in "Sabbath's Theater." And that was very different and there, the permission came from the character, not from the situation. Sabbath bears no resemblance to Portnoy. Portnoy's struggle with repression and seeking freedom is a joke to Sabbath, who doesn't struggle with repression and doesn't bother seeking freedom, he just takes it. "Sabbath's Theater," which may be his greatest book, or is certainly among his greatest books, written in the mid-'90s, has one of the most extraordinary heroines in modern American literature, a woman called Drenka, who is just as sexually ambitious and rambunctious as any of the men in any of his books. She's also a woman of integrity, hardworking, moral, funny. She's smart, she's strong, she's a good mother. She's all these things. She's a woman who, in the sexual game she plays with Sabbath, she sometimes -- she once -- pretends to be a whore, takes a lot of money from him for the fun of it and then takes that money and buys her grown son a set of power tools with the money because she's such a devoted mother -- her son is a police officer. I think that this is an original woman. She's in her fifties, she's not young, she's not beautiful. She's a sexual heroine, and a moral heroine, if you will. Sabbath is... one of... in a great history of adulterers. He's a great adulterer, and so is Drenka, his mate. She's not his wife, she's his lady friend. And they're both sort of exuberant adulterers and writing about them made me feel good. And imagining their adventures made me feel good. I felt very free in writing that book. And the tradition of writing about adultery was a passion of the 19th-century. The greatest of writers wrote about adultery. Tolstoy wrote a book called "Anna Karenina," Flaubert wrote a book called "Madame Bovary." God, I'm fond of adultery. Aren't you? "The softness it brings to the hardness. A world without adultery is unthinkable. The brutal inhumanity of those against it, don't you agree? The sheer

bleep

you think

depravity of their views. The madness. There is no punishment too extreme for the crazy bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity. To demand of human flesh fidelity. The cruelty of it, the mockery of it, is simply unspeakable. The sexuality in "Sabbath's Theater" shocked me far more than "Portnoy," I think because "Portnoy" was so funny... that I laughed through it. And "Sabbath's Theater" was so much darker that the sexual scenes just loomed larger and darker for me. Philip's shocking. Philip's shocking.

ROTH

I was very curious as a writer as to how far I could go. What happens if you go further? It's best, certainly in the early stages of the book, to abandon self-censorship, do whatever what you want to do. Let it be. Shame isn't for writers. You have to be shameless. You can't worry about being decorous. This doesn't mean that you have to be obscene and crazy and smear your pages with feces, that's not the point. But shame won't do. I couldn't have written "Sabbath's Theater" if I felt shame. I couldn't have written -- I feel plenty of shame in my own life, don't get me wrong. I'm just as shame-ridden as the next person is. But when I sit down to write, I'm free from shame. When Portnoy is enraged or lust-ridden, I'm happy. Just as when Mickey Sabbath is full of lust, I'm sitting in my studio inventing Mickey Sabbath in a state of horniness. I'm not horny while I'm sitting there writing it. So that this is a crucial distinction that has to be made. Contrary to public opinion such as it is, Zuckerman has no sex life whatsoever, in any of those books. I found him being described as the sex obsessed and so on. It's isn't so. Kepesh is a learned man, he's a learned hedonist. And for instance Kepesh and Zuckerman bear no relationship whatsoever. Kepesh has only sexual experience. I wanted him to be the vessel to carry all the sexual experience that Zuckerman doesn't have. So, Kepesh has a crazy hallucinatory sexual experience in "The Breast." He has a poignant sexual experience in "The Professor of Desire." And he has a tough old man's sexual experience in "The Dying Animal." So, if you look at them carefully, you see that they're not all about sex, for one thing, and that the characters are very different. Zuckerman, in "The Ghost Writer," has no sexual experience. In "Zuckerman Unbound," he has no sexual experience. In "The Anatomy Lesson," he has no sexual experience. No. In "The Counterlife," no. In "American Pastoral," no. In "I Married a Communist," no. In fact, in these -- and "The Human Stain," no. In fact in those three books, he's impotent. So he has virt-- in nine books, he has virtually no sexual experience. He was described repeatedly as sex obsessed, et cetera. Well, that's because Roth is. All readers want to put them together but nobody has in a way suffered from that more than Roth. I think he has, you know, spoken about this at great length, the way that people have always assumed his characters are him. Many of the writers I know have a stand-in. Bellow has Hertzog. Mailer had this character named Sergius O'Shaugnessy. C\line had C\line. Gombrowicz had Gombrowicz. Those -- they didn't have stand-ins. They were stand-ins indeed but they labeled them with their own name, you know. The stand-in both frees you to draw on your own experience and to invent off of your own experience. It's a mask, and in masks, there is freedom. The critique from people of our generation -- "Oh, these narcissists, all they care about is themselves." And as a young writer, I had this kind of moralistic response of, "oh, you bad person, Philip Roth." Why -- And eventually I came to feel as if that was coming out of an envy, like wow, I wish I could be as liberated of worry about other people's opinions of me as Roth is, like here's a person who really has decided he doesn't care what the world thinks of him. And he is not shameable. "Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone, of any sex, that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you that enchanted by? Nobody." I don't say I don't write about sex -- I love to write about sex. But it's vast, it's a vast subject. And, uh... depicting it and understanding it and... it's hard. And whether it's believable or not, most of the events in my books never happened. But then the books which really tangle with history are, follow "Sabbath's Theater" -- "American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist," and "The Human Stain." And then "The Plot Against America." And in those four books again history enters in a way it never had before. When I wrote "The Plot Against America," I was trying to figure out what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and extreme right wing political figure -- if Charles Lindbergh had become President in 1940 and beaten Roosevelt in the election. Imagining politically, historically and personally what the results would be of that, how it affected this one family, my family. There was a very laudatory and generous piece by Franck Rich in The New York Times in which he said the book was really an allegory about the Bush administration. And this apparently made the book catch on as a book people wanted to read, a book against the Bush administration. But it isn't what my intention was. Now, if it was resonant, if what I wrote was resonant, fine. And if it addressed emotions that people had at the moment, fine. But all of that is accidental. I think it is in "Exit Ghost" where he's talking about the 2004 election which he's watching with great, great pain as George W. Bush is reelected. And he tries to console these young people who are watching the election with him. He's in New York briefly and he's -- Zuckerman is an old man in his seventies and he's with a couple who are 29 or 30 and they're just devastated. It's the second completely miserable electoral loss as they've witnessed and all their ideals are going down the drain and they want to leave the country. And all he wants to tell them is, "Look, I was there for the assassinations, all of the assassinations. I got through Nixon, we got through Vietnam, I got through Pearl Harbor, this will be over." And I think the line he has is, "It's amazing how much punishment we can take." And I think there's a lot of memories stored up there. There's also -- this is just about memory -- a rather intriguing moment in a very late book called "Indignation," which is about a soldier who dies in the Korean War at the age of 19. It happened to come out, to be published during the Iraq War and I think many people saw an overlap there. I don't know if Roth intended it at all, but we were at that point in time very concerned with... the newspaper everyday had the list of soldiers dead with ages like 19, 20, 21, 24. It was horrifying to read and we also had this issue going on that we were not allowed to see photographs of the coffins being sent home. My job isn't to be enraged. My job is what Chekov said that the job of an artist was, which is "the proper presentation of the problem." The obligation of the writer is not to provide the solution to a problem. That's the obligation of a legislator, a leader, a crusader, a revolutionary, a warrior and so on. That's not the goal or aim of a writer. You're not selling it and you're not inviting condemnation. You're inviting understanding. And at the same time, he reacts from book to book. One book will produce sort of an opposite number in the next book. He'll do, after "Sabbath's Theater," which is about this diabolically dark, fascinatingly dark, almost Falstaffian character, he'll do "American Pastoral" because he wanted to deal with a good man. So he's written, he wanted to deal with a good man. So the books are back to back in a way. One book can emerge from another. "Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive -- we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that, well, lucky you." When I wrote "American Pastoral" about a man whose wonderful family is destroyed during the Vietnam War, I invent the character as I go along. "American Pastoral's" hero is a good man who is brought down, who is brought down by the war, and is destroyed really. At the time, there was nothing for me to write. I was in it like everybody else. I don't mean in Vietnam, I mean in here in New York, in Connecticut. I had been engaged by the war, terrifically, disturbed terribly, angered, like all my friends. By the time twenty years had passed, I was ready to, to write about it, and I tried to put into it everything I knew about that time from living through the sixties and living through the war and the turbulence that it produced. And this was the story I came up with. He has been close to the spirit of his times often throughout his work so that many years later, in "American Pastoral," where he's looking back now on the Vietnam War, he deals with American history and things that are happening in American history in an oblique way, through families, through people, through what has gone on in the domestic scene at home as the result of what is going on in the country. To me it's a little bit like the way Virginia Woolf deals with World War I in "Mrs. Dalloway," how the people at home are affected by what happens. Once I'd written "American Pastoral," I thought maybe I should look more closely at what I'd lived through aside from the Vietnam War, which is the stuff that's in the "American Pastoral." And, of course, I quickly saw that the decade that rivaled the '60s for vividness and importance in my own life, young as I was, was the postwar '45 to '55. Uh... Because the... so-called McCarthy period really precedes McCarthy because McCarthy doesn't appear until June of 1950. There were a couple communists in my family. The whole family was to the left of center. And so I'd heard them talk when I was a kid. And so I set out to write "I Married a Communist," with a communist at the center who's accused of being a communist. I didn't want a guy who wasn't a communist being accused of being a communist. That's the old story. We know that story. But what was it like for this communist who was accused of being a communist? So as an American writer, he has been with us through the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, the '90s. He's been with us as we've changed and grown. He's written a diatribe against Nixon. He's written a book that had to do with the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, obliquely again, but with the kind of moral issues that the country was dealing with at that time. I don't remember exactly how I began "The Human Stain," with which ingredient I began. I had several. And one of them was the... the Clinton persecution over a sexual matter, a sexual scandal, I suppose. Something about the false accusation interested me as it had in "I Married a Communist." "It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered, "Why are we so crazy?," when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. 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.

Orchestra playing

Woman sings aria

ROTH

I listen to music in my house, in my house at night, especially when I'm alone here. In the summertime, there are some music festivals nearby, and I go there. I took Mia up to Tanglewood because they were doing Mahler's third which I'm very fond of. And Mia's mother had died not long before, who she was very fond of, very close -- I mean deeply in love with and very close to. And when they were playing the third movement of the Mahler, which can make you cry without you having lost your mother, you know, I saw that Mia was very emotional and crying. And that's all that happened. And then we came back and I was writing "The Human Stain." And so I thought to put in this scene of Zuckerman going to the very same... Tanglewood rehearsal by himself and there he sees the hero of my book, Coleman Silk, with his paramour. And all of that came from our drive up to Tanglewood. This is extraordinary -- you hear something on the radio, somebody says something to you, you read something in the newspaper and it's useful to your book. When I wrote "Nemesis," before I began writing it, I made a long list of historical moments and events in American life, in my lifetime, that I had never contemplated fictionally. And I had a list of events and some of them were events I couldn't contemplate fictionally. But then in the list there was polio. And when I went back to read the list I circled polio. And that was the beginning. I had just that word, but that's all I needed. We've talked, Philip and I, about when I had polio and I confided to him the effect it had on me of being a pariah, you know, at nine years old, as somebody that my friends didn't want to go near even after I had recovered. So I decided to write a book about this menace, the greatest single menace to kids like me when polio began. The parents were frightened of it, it was terrifying. I'd talked to a few people who'd had polio and then I invented this playground director and off the book went. And I saw a lot of what I had told him but translated, you know, into something else in the new book about, you know, the effect of polio on a community. And I couldn't finish the book because I just didn't want to go back there. It's by my bed. I will finish it, but I just put it aside for the time being because for me to revisit that is so personal. People meet their nemesis, which is what? Which is the enemy you can't conquer. Now I wrote that trying to see if I could write shorter books. For years I was trying to do that, I couldn't do it. Bellow, at the end of his life, began to write these short books -- "The Bellarosa Connection," "The Actual," and so on. And I wondered what he was doing and why he was doing it. And I also wondered, how do you do it? How... I'd been writing rather longish novels, in which the principle of creation is amplification -- amplify, amplify, amplify, amplify. But what if you condensed, condensed, condensed, condensed? How do you pack a punch? I asked Saul, how do you do it in a short novel? Well, he just laughed. So I decided I would do it. And I guess I wrote "Everyman." The book "Everyman" does draw on certain aspects of my brother's experience as an advertising man and so on. And before it was published, I sent him a manuscript. And I also wrote a note which said that, "a lot of people who know you and know me are going to assume this is you. But you know, from reading the book, where it has nothing to do with you whatsoever." And in many ways it doesn't. So he was fine. When the book came out he may have thrown it down the toilet for all I know. He may have walloped his wife. He may have gone up to the building thinking, "I'll jump off the top." He never told me about any of that. I have a character in "Everyman," a woman, who has back pain, and I gave her my despair. You know, I gave her all my back pain with it. And she eventually kills herself. 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. So it's a plague. It's there when you wake up in the morning and you got to be somebody stronger than I am to not begin to be affected psychologically. I was at my wits' end. Then you're really behind the eight ball. And I was suicidal. I have contemplated suicide in these circumstances. And it gets worse as you get older. You have no choice. You don't have to go looking for suffering if you want to be a writer, it will find you soon enough. Writing turns out to be a dangerous job when you think of the number of writers who have committed suicide. So there's probably something inherently dangerous in the job or something in the temperaments of those who choose the job. The list is long. So the question is, why? What is it that's inherent to the job that leads so many first class writers to commit suicide? I don't know. I don't want to join the list. In "The Humbling," the guy does commit suicide at the end. Now, I wrote that, trying to see if I can write a book about a man who commits suicide. Could I get this character to suicide persuasively? And that's what I set out to do. "The Humbling," the first line of it is, "He'd lost his magic." Now the "he" is an actor and his magic is the ability to act. This guy goes out on the stage one day to perform and he can't act, and he's a wonderful actor. He is brought down by not being able to do what he does. And then he has an affair and he loses that. And so he runs home and he kills himself. He's humbled. He loses his power. He loses his talent, he loses his magic. There we are. Have I ever thought I lost my magic? Sure. Sure. Uh... Sporadically. Certainly between books it's very easy to think you can't do it again. I think it's a fear that stays with me between books. But I certainly don't seem not to write. I keep doing it, I never quit. My worst times are when I... My worst times are when I'm not writing. I'm prone then to be unhappy, depressed, anxious, and so on. So I need it desperately. I think, in the books that he's been writing in the last several years, there is, Philip has been expressing his concern about growing old, about losing, losing his magic. We were talking about old age, and I had a friend, Alfred Kazin, who said, "Old age is not for sissies," and Philip said, "Old age is a massacre." "Can you imagine old age? Of course you can't. I didn't. I couldn't. I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image -- no image. And nobody wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur." His view of old age as represented in the books seemed... seems just as bleak as it could possibly be. And really depressing. But he's such a young man in his spirit and in his writing that to read those later books representing, you know, an older man, in age, and the finality and hopelessness and helplessness of that, it made me sad. Sometimes he's said that that's his last book. But I've heard that and I don't believe it anymore. One day I was walking down the road, I'd walked about a mile, and...

CHUCKLES

ROTH

I looked up on the side of the road, I couldn't miss it. Attached to a tree with a nail, on a piece of wood, was a big sign that said "Bring back Portnoy!" It was wonderful. It was a hilarious moment for me, really. And I actually thought about it for the rest of the walk. Why don't I do that? I never thought of doing it, bringing back Portnoy. That was a one-off performance, you know, one night only. One-man show. And it happened at a certain moment in cultural time, it happened at a certain moment in my private history, and I thoroughly enjoyed the work. And, um... some other people enjoyed it too, some people hated it, and let it rest.

Woman singing aria

ROTH

I read the writers I read 30, 40, 50 years ago, who I want to read now as an old man. I want to read now in a way fresh. Turgenev I had a good time with. Conrad I had a good time with. Hemingway and Faulkner I had a good time with. Oh, my goodness, I read Kafka like crazy. I think I saturated myself with Kafka. A way of telling a story that no one had ever come upon before. The invention of a world that no one had invented before. It's astonishing. So I want to read these books before I die, again. I wrote "Everyman," "Indignation," "The Humbling," and I wrote "Nemesis" and they all are characterized by the cataclysm of death, how dying affects the lives of those who are about to die. Now why, at this time of life, isn't difficult to figure out. If you look at your address book, it's like walking through a cemetery. Um... So one is at a funeral, as anybody my age or older knows, one is at a funeral every six months. Of who? No longer of your parents or grandparents, of course, of your friends. And it's particularly painful losing friends. It's a bitch, but your friends die. The prospect of death is... generates fear, sadness, the desire to have the whole thing all over again. But not rage. I am not worried. I'm sad but I'm not worried. The time is running out. There's nothing I can do after that. There's nothing to be done. And who cares, anyway? Nobody cares. You know, just, they see this little old man walking down the street and they help me. So fame now is good. They help me across the street, you know. Where am I going to be buried? If I were to tell you where I'm going to be buried, the result would be, at the moment I was in the ground, and the address of the place was out, the place would be overrun by teenyboppers. We got to have an ending, we have an ending, a moving ending about the poor fellow, the poor old guy who's gonna die. And let that be the end, okay?

Chuckles

Piano playing ballad

Piano playing ballad

ROTH

To learn more about Philip Roth and other American masters, visit pbs.org/americanmasters or find us on Facebook. "Philip

Roth

Unmasked" is available on DVD for $24.99. To order, call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen.

Ballad continues