In 2011 Philip Roth was awarded the Man Booker International
Prize for lifetime achievement. In the lead-up to an intimate celebratory
dinner that he was due to attend with Roth in New York, Rick Gekoski, chairman
of the judges, asked around to see if there was anything he shouldn’t raise in
conversation with the thin-skinned and easily irritated novelist. The answer
was the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel has become for Roth, who turns 80 on March 19,
what the second world war was for Basil Fawlty: the great unmentionable. No one
who knows him would doubt that this brilliant, proud, ultra-competitive and
astoundingly self-absorbed writer wants to win the prize that no American
novelist has won since Toni Morrison in 1993, and which his friend and mentor
Saul Bellow won, at the age of 61, in 1976.
In a BBC interview in 2007, Roth, who lives alone in rural
Connecticut but also keeps a flat in Manhattan, loftily dismissed prizes as
“childish”. And yet the biographical note on every book he has published over
recent years is little more than an inventory of prizes: “In 1997 Philip Roth
won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National
Medal of Arts at the White House ... ” He has won everything worth winning, it
seems, except the Big One, about which he must not be asked.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, the second son
of a lower-middle-class Jewish family. He attended Bucknell and Chicago
universities. As a writer, he first came to prominence in the early 1960s, a
time of heightened ambition and profile for the American novel. His early
influences included Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis
Singer and, of course, Bellow, who had found a new way of writing about the
tumultuous challenges of American modernity in a voice uniquely his own. For
Roth, as for the likes of Bellow and Norman Mailer, writing was a kind of
heroic activity, an art of public engagement and performance.
“When success happens to an English writer,” Martin Amis
wrote in the early 1980s in an essay on Kurt Vonnegut, “he acquires a new
typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new
life.”
Roth’s life changed, irreversibly, with the publication of
his third novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Wildly comic and wilfully
outrageous, it made him famous and it made him rich. It also made him many
enemies, especially in Jewish America – he was accused of self-hatred – and
among social conservatives, who were appalled by the novel’s sexual
explicitness and indecency (Portnoy is a furious masturbator), by its exuberant
excesses and irreverence. This, after all, was the late 1960s and Roth was a
man of his times, thrilled by the possibilities opening up around him.
Alexander Portnoy is a clever, disturbed young fellow and
he’s sickened by his own American reality. He is in open revolt against the
conventions and expectations of his petit bourgeois Jewish family. His mother
swaddles him in love and he dislikes his father. What shocked readers most
about Portnoy, Roth said in 2005, was not the sex, but “the revelation of brutality
– brutality of feeling, brutality of attitude, brutality of anger. ‘You say all
this takes place in a Jewish family?’ That’s what was shocking.”
Portnoy was the precursor to and archetype of all the Roth
men who were to follow, from Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s fictional alter-ego, and
David Kepesh to Mickey Sabbath, the anti-hero of Sabbath’s Theater (1995),
which is generally considered to be one of his three best novels. (The others
are 1986’s The Counterlife and 1997’s American Pastoral.)
Roth Man, as Amis once called him, is sex-obsessed,
narcissistic, garrulous, often raging. He knows no bounds. He is wary of
commitment. He relentlessly asserts his individuality. But he is also isolated
and often deeply, hilariously confused – many of Roth’s novels are existential
comedies of misunderstanding.
In The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of the Zuckerman
novels, Nathan is staying at the house of his literary hero, an aged and
reclusive writer named EI Lonoff. An attractive young literary groupie is also staying
in the house. Zuckerman convinces himself that she’s having an affair with the
married Lonoff and, absurdly, that she is none other than Anne Frank. Roth Man
understands, indeed insists, that in our singularity and isolation we are
mysteries ultimately even to ourselves, and that life can be a kind of black
farce – Kepesh, in the late novella The Dying Animal (2001), speaks of the
“stupidity of being oneself”, of the “unavoidable comedy of being anyone at
all”.
To Roth, for whom sex and death are inextricably linked,
women can seem unknowable. There is very little romantic love in his fiction.
He writes very well about the love between a parent and a child – especially in
Patrimony (1991), American Pastoral and Indignation (2008) – or between siblings,
but seldom, if ever, between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife. For Roth,
marriage is a kind of cage in which couples are locked in mutual recrimination
and loathing.
“Did Roth hate women?” asks the Russian-American novelist
Keith Gessen, as part of a caucus organised by New York magazine to mark the
author’s 80th birthday. He suggests that a man who spends so much of his time
thinking about having sex with women cannot possibly hate them: misogyny is the
accusation most often and most damagingly made against Roth. “Still,” Gessen
continues, “it might be said that Roth is slightly less useful in a world that
is slightly more equal than the world he knew; where men and women do not stand
on opposite sides of the question of sex but arranged, together, sometimes
helplessly, against it; where sex is less of a battlefield and more of a
tragedy.”
Roth has been married twice and has no children. His second
marriage, to the English actress Claire Bloom, ended notably unhappily. Roth
fictionalised aspects of his life with Bloom and this wounded her. In 1996, she
published a memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, in which she denounced her former
husband, accusing him of misogyny and adultery. She wrote of his “deep and
irrepressible rage: anger at being trapped in marriage; fear of giving up
autonomy; and a profound distrust of the sexual power of women”.
Roth himself has said: “Making fake biography, false
history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my
life is my life.” He is fascinated by doubleness and deception, hence all those
metafictional tricks he plays and the alter-egos through whom he speaks. They
invariably share much of his own early biography – the Newark boyhood, the
conflicted Jewish identity, the troubles with women – as well as his
preferences and prejudices. Several of his novels feature characters named
Philip Roth – the best of them being Operation Shylock (1993), set partly in
Israel and exploring the period when Roth was recovering from depression and a
breakdown after heart surgery. He simultaneously asserts the veracity of the
stories he tells while seeking to undermine them by drawing attention to their
artificiality. Roth’s strategy is one of complete disclosure interwoven with
complete disavowal. He’s only too happy to show the strings from which his
creations dangle.
In November last year, Roth declared that he would write no
more novels. “I’m done,” he said. Can it really be that this most prolific and
prodigiously gifted novelist, this writer who, after his divorce from Bloom and
retreat to rural Connecticut, began publishing a series of masterpieces in his
sixties and seventies, will write no more? There has, I think, been nothing
comparable to his late flourishing in the history of Anglo-American letters. It
is difficult to accept that this has now come to an end, when as recently as
2010 Roth published one of his most poignant and tender novels, Nemesis, set
during a polio epidemic in wartime Newark. Many of the novels of Roth’s late
period are preoccupied with illness and death, as is Nemesis. The scabrous
comedy and laughter disappeared from his work around the time of Sabbath’s
Theater. The old rage was replaced by something approaching resignation. Even
Zuckerman withdrew from centre stage and became, in Roth’s great
political-historical trilogy comprising American Pastoral, I Married a
Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000), the narrator no longer of his own,
but of other people’s stories, a benign facilitator.
In Exit Ghost (2007), a belated follow-up to The Ghost
Writer, an ageing and sick Zuckerman (he now wears nappies because of
incontinence following prostate surgery) encounters a cocky, smart-talking
literary academic in Central Park. The young man is described, in a jewelled
phrase, as being “savage with health, and armed to the teeth with time”.
Philip Roth knows he is running out of time. He speaks now
of the end – certainly of the end of his writing life. He ought to have won the
Nobel Prize long ago, but perhaps his work is simply too American for the
august Swedes of the Nobel committee, who have grumbled about the parochialism
of the American novel, of how it looks inward rather than out to the rest of
the world. That is nonsense, of course. The greatest living American writers –
Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and, preeminently, Roth – are universalists who in
radiant prose ask, again and again: what does it mean to be human and how
should we act in a world that is as mysterious as it is indifferent to our
fate?
At the end of The Tempest, as he prepares to take his leave,
Prospero, a magician of words, hints that “the story of my life” is ending, and
now “Every third thought shall be my grave”. Roth has told the story of his
life many times and in many different ways, and now he is done.
“At the end of his life,” Roth said in an interview last
year, “the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s
exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”
We can ask no more.
Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman
__
De FINANCIAL TIMES, 16/03/2013
Imagen: Philip Roth (right) and RB Kitaj in 1985 with the artist’s
drawing of the author and a painting of a combative couple
No comments:
Post a Comment