The meaning of life is that it stops. Especially in his later years, Philip Roth often quoted this remark attributed to Kafka, and it was hard not to think of it when the news came that his heart had given out. He lived to be eighty-five, but he had little expectation of making it much past seventy. Over the years, there had been stretches of depression, surgeries on his back and spine, a quintuple bypass, and sixteen cardiac stents, which must be some kind of American League record. By the time Roth was in his seventies, he would open his eyes in the morning and experience a moment of ecstatic surprise: he had pulled it off again, stolen another taste of being alive, a self, conscious of the beautiful and chaotic world.
Roth’s vitality never dwindled, particularly on the page; the propulsive force that first announced itself in the late fifties, with “Defender of the Faith,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” persisted for more than half a century, to the last elegiac description of a javelin thrower in “Nemesis,” his career-closing novella. In interviews and public appearances, Roth could be slightly grand, ending an observation with an Anglo-ish “Do you know?” Talking about “the indigenous American berserk,” he tamped down his more antic side, as if to stand apart from the madness. But, released from obligation, he could easily flip a switch and be once more the wiseacre of Weequahic. He was in competition with the best in American fiction—with Melville, James, Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner, Cather, Ellison, Bellow, Morrison—but he was funnier, more spontaneous, than any of them. Recently, when I asked him what he thought of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, he said, “It’s O.K., but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”
Most creative careers follow a familiar arc: the apprentice work; the burst of originality; the self-imitation; and, finally, the tailing off. Had Roth’s creative career reached its pinnacle at the typical point, his achievements would still have included “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Ghost Writer,” and “The Counterlife.” But then Roth, having faced the crises of a failed marriage and a barrage of illnesses, redoubled his sense of discipline and set himself free. He became a monk of fiction. Living alone in the woods, he spent his days and many of his nights trained on the sentence, the page, the “problem of the novel at hand.” Month after month, at a standing desk, he went about exploring American history (“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist,” “The Human Stain,” “The Plot Against America”) and, always, the miracles, the hypocrisies, the mistakes, the strangenesses of being alive while facing the inevitable “massacre” of aging.
“I work, I’m on call,” he told me in the midst of this creative ferment. “I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.” Roth’s concentration on the task was absolute. When a friend left him with a kitten, he couldn’t endure the distraction of having to provide food and attention. “I had to ask my friend to take it back,” he recalled. I once asked him if he took a week off or a vacation. “I went to the Met and saw a big show they had,” he told me. “It was wonderful. I went back the next day. Great. But what was I supposed to do next, go a third time? So I started writing again.” Roth kept a little yellow note near his desk. It read “No Optional Striving.” No panels, no speeches, no all-expenses-paid trips to the festival in Sydney or Cartagena. The work was murder and the work was the reward. Roth said he was never happier, never felt more liberated, than when he was working on his favorite of his novels, “Sabbath’s Theater.”
Then, in 2010, at the age of seventy-seven, Roth did something utterly unexpected. He retired. He adored Saul Bellow—adored the work and the man—but he thought that Bellow had made a mistake by continuing to write and publish even as his mental acuity waned. Roth read his own work, the whole of it, and determined that he was done. Quoting Joe Louis, he said, “I did the best I could with what I had.” And, in the last eight years of his life, Roth, living mostly in his apartment, near the Hayden Planetarium, gave himself the rest he had earned. He spent more time with friends, he read volumes of American and European history, he went to chamber-music concerts, he watched baseball and old movies. He appointed a biographer, Blake Bailey, and gave him what he needed “to do the job.” With his competitiveness long faded, he became a reader, and a booster, of younger writers—Teju Cole, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Lisa Halliday. And he waited. He had had his portion, and then some. As he put it in “The Dying Animal,” “You tasted it. Isn’t that enough?” ♦
