I recently listened to an archived interview of Eleanor Wachtel of CBC Radio speaking to Philip Roth, on an episode of Writers and Company that aired in 2009. I knew of Philip Roth, as his writing won just about every American literary award there is, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. At some point in my adult reading, I recall labelling Roth’s writing as having an angry male protagonist and, unconsciously or otherwise, I steered clear. But after listening to him speak on CBC, I re-evaluated my earlier impressions of his writing and have put a hold on a few of his titles at my local library.
Roth was open and honest about his work. He grew up American, he explained, meaning his grandparents were immigrants, but they very much embraced the idea of what it meant to be American, separately from being Jewish. His parents were both born in the United States, and Roth himself grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic that appears in his fiction. Born in 1933, he faithfully studied Hebrew as a child for the three years leading up to his Bar Mitzvah, after which he considered himself free of the faith, with his parents understanding. Many or most of the characters of his books are Jewish, so he didn’t stray far.
Roth’s relationship with his father had difficulties in that his father wasn’t prepared for his son’s independence as he matured. Roth was close to his mother. “We are all shaped by where we come from,” Roth said. That is certainly true, both good and bad. The dinner table in his home was a time for stories, which created within him the social background of his time. Do we have dinner table conversations with our children now or do most children get their world perspectives from social media? I wonder.
Roth viewed a writing career as the freedom to think out loud. “It frees the gag in your mouth,” he said, “but it comes at a cost.” With his success, came a loss of anonymity he wasn’t expecting. The reading public came to view him as the characters in his book; their sins were his sins, their weaknesses his. When Portnoy’s Complaint was published in 1969 it “sparked a storm of controversy” and turned Roth into a celebrity for which he wasn’t prepared. He warned his parents of the potential chaos in social conversation after the book was released, but Roth himself had no idea of the intensity of that chaos. He left New York as a result, to find the quiet again.
Roth’s subjects were deep, difficult, and sometimes uncomfortable. He took risks to get at the truth of his existence. He wanted to provoke conversation. He quoted Chekhov who said, “The task of the writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” Many writers would say the freedom of writing is worth the cost of admission. The freedom to love and hate, the freedom of outrage over society’s injustices, the freedom to challenge those holding the power, helps the writer get closer to her or his own sense of purpose. Writing can unearth the questions for which we are seeking answers.
If he could live his life again, Roth wouldn’t be a writer, he said, nor would he have advised his children, had he any, to be a writer. That surprised me considering his success. He confessed his books required the story being dragged out of him. Writers are always an amateur, he said; other books may have been written but not this one. The first months are wearying and when the book is finally finished, a writer must start again. It is a go it alone profession; the writer is the only one who can make this individual piece of work happen. He would have liked to have been a doctor, to engage with patients and their concerns and struggles. We tend to envy others their work, he confessed, and knows he had been envied.
In his later years, his writing focussed on aging and the education aging provides. He became used to the hospital setting, spending last days with friends as one by one they departed. His writing time was taken up by eulogies for those who had gone ahead. “Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre,” wrote Roth in Everyman, published in 2006. Roth died in 2018, leaving his collection of 7000 books to Newark’s Public Library.
Writers are snowflakes, each with their own process. When I write, the world around me vanishes and I’m on the page with my characters, a silent observer. They are not me: they are bits and pieces of people I knew and admired, and I get to spend time with them again, in a world where I control the weather and I stretch out those precious moments that were but a blink in real time and I let them stay in this private reunion. It matters not if anyone picks up my work to read. The joy is in the writing.
wendistewart@live.ca
