Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013 (The Library of America)
From start to finish, readers will experience Philip Roth’s love of language, sharpness of insight, playfulness, and power of imagination.
Though Why Write is not a biography, what readers will find in this collection may best be described by the author himself, “[W]hat nonfiction I have written has arisen mainly from a provocation—responding to the charges of anti-Semitism and Jewish self hatred—or to answer a request for an interview from a serious periodical or to acknowledge my acceptance of an award or to mark a milestone birthday or to mourn the death of a friend.”
Why Write is organized into three sections: the first contains early essays and interviews conducted by Roth. The second section contains interviews of Philip Roth; and the third section contains miscellaneous essays and speeches made to various organizations or for celebrations held in his honor.
The first essay surprised the reviewer as it began, seemingly, as a work of fiction. The essay however is presented as alternative-history nonfiction as Roth imagines an alternate history for Franz Kafka that intersects with Roth’s own childhood. What if Kafka had immigrated to Newark and became a Hebrew instructor to a nine-year-old Philip Roth, was invited to Roth’s house for dinner, and met and wooed Roth’s mother’s sister? One imagines this piece as foreshadowing for The Plot Against America.
The remaining essays in this section remain closer to expectations. Roth identifies writers who influenced him, including Salinger, Malamud, Bellow, and other authors less familiar to this reviewer. Roth also identifies authors he has feuded or disagreed with him (identified by name) and the reasons for his feuding.
His early essays also address Jewish writers and Jewish stereotypes, and the role of Jews in literature whether portrayed as archetypes or portrayed as whole human beings. To no surprise, Roth stands strongly in the “portray as a whole person” camp.
The essays on Jewish writers and Jewish stereotypes serve as setup for a defense of the criticism he received from the novels that brought him fame: Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth includes a number of essays on how Portnoy’s Complaint came to be and the celebrity and notoriety that followed publication. When Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint were first published, both novels touched a nerve but the response to Portnoy’s Complaint was electric.
On the day of publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth was away at Yaddo, a writer’s retreat. There was no small amount of publicity raised but as Roth was unable to be found, rumors spread that he had a breakdown and had been committed to a mental hospital. Of his absence Roth points out, “[A] novel in the guise of a confession was received and judged . . . as a confession in the guise of a novel.”
Roth was also attacked by leaders in the Jewish community for depicting Jews as being imperfect; Jews having what Roth called “the perils of human nature.” Roth also quotes from letters sent to him from readers angry at his depiction of Jews behaving as normal human beings. The readers’ concerns were that his novels were easy to misread and misinterpret, and so should not have been written. He calls these critics small-minded and holding the “petit-bourgeoisie morality“ of the 1950s, their criticisms having “more to do with their own moral perspective than the one they would ascribe to me.”
In a series of essays, Roth critiques these two works in terms of structure, literature, and art, though in a later essay he acknowledges with hindsight that at times, he pushed the boundary of acceptable language and the depiction of sexuality. The essays written in defense seem dated today, for once an argument in society has been won, society moves on and tends to forget there was ever a battle. In an interview conducted in 1984—15 years after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint—Roth appears less combative as he recognizes that he has been vindicated.
For readers who have not read Portnoy’s Complaint, this book can be compared to having the same rude humor as the movie American Pie.
As for success and fame, Roth appears to want to have his cake and eat it, too. Two examples: The first, after achieving fame Roth complained that the point of his later stories was being ignored, “Instead of being taken seriously as a threat, a man is essentially silenced by being made popular.”
And second, though Roth compares himself to an artist who paints photo-realistically or an actor who is talented at dissembling, Roth says he is an author who writes photo-realistically, but he is upset when readers are not able to separate the art from the artist stating, “If all these readers see in my work is my biography, then they are numb to fiction—to impersonation, to ventriloquism, to irony, numb to the thousand observations on which a book is built, numb to devices by which novels create the illusion of a reality more like the real than our own. End of lecture.”
The first section of Why Write also includes essays that take a step back from Roth’s novels to consider the nature of storytelling as storytelling. Roth writes, “One of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experiences in ways not always available tin day-to-day conduct.” And continues, “we may not even know that we have such a range of feelings and responses until we have come into contact with a work of fiction.”
As the first section of Why Write contains interviews conducted by Philip Roth, the second section of Why Write contains, logically, interviews of Philip Roth. The many interviews of Roth feel repetitive but are not excessively so; as the interviews were conducted over a period of years, there are detectable nuances across the interviews. The earlier interviews show Roth to be a pedant-academic idealist, defensive, and combative against his critics. The later interviews show Roth’s self-expressions to be less academic and more relaxed; however, he is also more cynical.
There is a lacunae, a huge shadow across all the interviews of Roth. Philip Roth the writer does not talk about Philip Roth the non-writer. When Roth is writing, which apparently was all the time right up to his retirement, will easily talk about his influences and the process of writing, his imagination and the hard work it takes to create characters so real that readers believe what they say and do are true, and talk about how critics and readers just don’t get it—but Roth never talks about his non-writing life (except for his childhood, which becomes part of his fiction). In fact Roth denies having a non-writing life, claiming, “Making false biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.”
The interviews of Philip Roth are followed with interviews conducted by Philip Roth. These pieces include interviews of Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Milan Kundera, and Edna O’Brien. This section also includes an exchange of letters between Roth and Mary McCarthy, and essays on Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and artist Philip Guston, along with sketches drawn by Guston inspired by scenes in Roth’s books.
Each interview has a historical and cultural theme that begins with a warm portrait of the interviewee. Roth’s interview of Primo Levi focuses on the Holocaust but also on the significance and influence of Kafka. The interview of Ivan Klima was conducted post-Soviet breakup but pre-Czechoslovakia breakup and focuses on the events of 1968 and also on literature, life, the search for truth, and again Kafka. In the interview of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Roth and Singer discuss the difference between publishing works in Polish versus Yiddish in pre-WWII Poland, and the life of Bruno Schulz, a writer and artist who was murdered by the Nazis and Kafka.
The last section is titled Explanations, which is self-explanatory but also contains speeches Roth has given at various social clubs and ceremonies. There are more than a dozen speeches though few will be of interest, except to note Roth’s consistent ability to use verbal jujitsu in turning an honor into praise of those who honor him.
There is one address given by Roth at his 75th birthday celebration, however, that is quite funny in an ironic way. In it Roth recounts his efforts in trying to correct his Wikipedia entry on his influences in writing The Human Stain. Despite his best efforts, the Wikipedia editors would not let him make corrections because he was not a credible source.
The last section also includes one interesting explanation of note, “My Uchronia.” This essay provides the background to how The Plot Against America came to be written. For those who are unfamiliar with the novel, the plot of The Plot Against America consists of a series of vignettes surrounding unlikely events that promote Charles Lindberg from an American hero in aviation into in 1940 to a successful presidential candidate. Though parts of The Plot Against America echo the consequence of Trump’s election, the book was written in 2004, and Roth discounts those who might read too much into it, “It is not my objective to be metaphoric or allegorical.”
Philip Roth retired from writing in 2009. He explains that he had simply gotten too old to sustain the effort and concentration to complete more novels. In a pessimistic interview given in 2014, Roth expresses his doubts on the future of literature, “I don’t think that aesthetic literacy . . . has much of a future here,” and compared future of the novel to the status of poetry today i.e., ignored. Roth cynically blames “popular culture” for this, and quotes Kafka to defend his belief, “In the struggle between you and the world, bet on the world.”
It is difficult for this reviewer to reconcile the early combative Roth with the later cynical Roth without knowing more about who Roth was when he wasn’t writing. Here’s hoping a thorough biography is in the works.
Why Write includes Endnotes, chronology, and an index.