Our writers and contributors reflect on the novelist’s life and writing.
The Times obituary called him “towering,” which he would not have minded, but, too often, the reviews left the impression that Philip Roth lived in a tower of his own making, aloof, solitary, remote, caught up in Henry James’s “madness of art”—something like the character of E. I. Lonoff, in the “The Ghost Writer”—insufferable even to his wife, and, owing to inevitable condescension, bereft of friends. Philip was indeed alone in Connecticut, where he lived part of the year, and might even have cultivated a reputation for aloofness, in interviews and in public appearances, as a way of protecting himself from excess fame, spite, and sentimentality. He had no children. He also protected his space for his work—his cultural ambitions. He cultivated those at the University of Chicago, where he had been a graduate student. He told Christopher Lydon, in a radio interview in 2006, that he had always thought that “the final score would be University of Chicago 22–Popular Culture 7.” He knew better by then, he said, but wanted to keep doing “his job.”—from “How Philip Roth Saw His Job,” by Bernard Avishai
I walked to the mailbox and pulled out a sheaf of envelopes that included a letter from Philip Roth. I was twenty-nine and pregnant. I had written a book but assumed that no one would read it—and, anyway, I was preoccupied with three older children, a passel of miserable cats, barn spiders in the eaves of the house, and a pot of rice. I set down the pile of mail and didn’t open the letter. Assuming that it was an invitation to join a famous person for a cause or a favorite charity, I forgot about it.
As it turned out, the envelope contained a bona fide letter of appreciation from Philip Roth, a response to a story of mine that The Atlantic had just published, “Saint Marie.”—from “A Letter from Philip Roth,” by Louise Erdrich
In the fall of 2007, I sat down to try to write a letter to Philip Roth, whom I’d never met. I’d started many letters to him in the past, only to put each aside, newly frustrated by my inability to write the letter I had in mind. But the more time that I let pass without writing to him, the more it bothered me that a certain longstanding gratitude and affection had gone unvoiced. So I explained to him that in his books I found a peculiar, sustaining solace. That, although there were other writers whose work I returned to often, no matter how much I loved them, they didn’t provide me with the very particular thing that he did. What was it? This was the difficult bit to express. “I suppose it has something to do with a certain force of life that everything you write seems to throw off,” I told him, “as well as the promise that such aliveness can exist in something that sits so aside and seemingly apart from life (or so it seems up in one’s writing room); perhaps, even, has a better chance of existing there. Something to do with your lifelong examination of the writing mind, its needs and paradoxes, its incompatibility with so much else, and also its fierce pleasures. And it has everything to do with how, reasonably and unreasonably, I feel at home in your books.”—from “The Presence of Philip Roth,” by Nicole Krauss
Considering the tributes to Philip Roth I’ve already read today, and contemplating the many more I’ll surely have read by tomorrow—all the just and heartfelt testaments to the titanic force of his intellect and his sensibility, his ear both for language and for human hunger, human fallibility, human rage—I can see emerging from even the most praiseful tribute an image of a somewhat self-enclosed life. Triply self-enclosed, even: in Rothian self-regard; in his alter-ego, Zuckerman; in the writing studio, the daily life of which he once compared to being in a hospital emergency room (“and I’m the emergency” goes the famous quote). Yet I’d like to glance for a moment at one counter-example, one Counter-Roth: the extraordinary reader and colleague who formed, out of his sympathy with the dissident Czechs he first met during a visit in the early seventies, a passionate curiosity about the literature we’d been missing from the Iron Curtain countries—principally Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. This territory Roth dubbed “the Other Europe” in the title for a Penguin Books series of reprints of little-read novels and stories in translation, over which he presided for more than a decade. For readers of my generation, the Roth sub-imprint, which was launched in 1976, was an index of one superb and revelatory book after the next: Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Bohumil Hrabal’s “Closely Watched Trains,” Bruno Schulz’s “The Street of Crocodiles” and “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” and works by Danilo Kis, Milan Kundera, and on from there. In this commitment, not selfless but marvelously generous, Roth enlarged our collective literature—and, I think, from the evidence of the books he wrote soon after, emboldened the capacities of his own.
Roth was also a Mets fan, and in my view it was the decision to play Jose Reyes at third that killed him.—Jonathan Lethem
The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of that atom bomb of American-Jewish hetero masculinity, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” includes an afterword in which Philip Roth tells a joke, passed off with a straight face as a factual account, of how his famous novel came to be. He was a twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Chicago, he writes, freshly returned from an uneventful stint in the Army, and had just sat down to dinner at the campus cafeteria when he discovered a sheet of paper lying on his usual table. On it were typed “nineteen sentences that taken together made no sense at all,” which Roth reproduces in a single dense paragraph. They are the openings of each of the novels that he had published up to the present, starting with “Goodbye, Columbus,” in 1959 (“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses”), and ending with “Operation Shylock,” from 1993 (“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book”). It was now 1994; at sixty-one, Roth had finally fulfilled his obligation to realize the stories suggested by this mysterious list. “Free at last,” he wrote. “Or that’s what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.”—from “Reading and Wrestling with Philip Roth,” by Alexandra Schwartz
One time, I was having a conversation with Philip Roth about lane swimming, a thing it turned out we both liked to do, although he could swim much farther and much faster. He asked me, “What do you think about as you do each length?” I told him the dull truth. “I think, first length, first length, first length, and then second length, second length, second length. And so on.” That made him laugh. “You wanna know what I think about?” I did. “I choose a year. Say, 1953. Then I think about what happened in my life or within my little circle in that year. Then I move on to thinking about what happened in Newark, or New York. Then in America. And then if I’m going the distance I might start thinking about Europe, too. And so on.” That made me laugh. The energy, the reach, the precision, the breadth, the curiosity, the will, the intelligence. Roth in the swimming pool was no different than Roth at his standing desk. He was a writer all the way down. It was not diluted with other things as it is—mercifully!—for the rest of us. He was writing taken neat, and everything he did was at the service of writing. At an unusually tender age, he learned not to write to make people think well of him, nor to display to others, through fiction, the right sort of ideas, so they could think him the right sort of person. “Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest,” he once said. For Roth, literature was not a tool of any description. It was the venerated thing in itself. He loved fiction and (unlike so many half or three-quarter writers) was never ashamed of it. He loved it in its irresponsibility, in its comedy, in its vulgarity, and its divine independence. He never confused it with other things made of words, like statements of social justice or personal rectitude, journalism or political speeches, all of which are vital and necessary for lives we live outside of fiction, but none of which are fiction, which is a medium that must always allow itself, as those other forms often can’t, the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths.—from “Philip Roth, a Writer All the Way Down,” by Zadie Smith
Roth was the liberator. From the moment I read him, I knew it was going to be O.K. One could have dreams and desires (oh, the desires) and somehow work them into art; one could mine family, community, religion for whatever ore was needed to make the word-generator run. As a forty-five-year-old, I am now perfectly positioned to look back at early Roth (wanting, lusting, needing) and forward to late Roth (preparing, accepting, dying). No writer has made a fuller meal out of life. His “complete works” are just that: complete. I am humbled to have met him and ecstatic over what he has accomplished. This is a sad day for many, but the books will live on in endless celebration. As I write this, I am smiling.—Gary Shteyngart
In Milwaukee last month, I had the chance to go to a Brewers game, where I bought a bratwurst and cheese curds and sat in the sunshine deliberating over whether getting the “baseball experience” required me to pay attention to baseball. There were five of us; from my left, I processed basic explanations of the scoreboard, and, from my right, a statistical, almost Talmudic stream of mythography about the diamond. I have forgotten many of the things I learned, but I will not forget that a ball caught in the field does not need to be thrown to first base in order to tag the batter out—it’s curtains for him, no matter how fast he runs. There’s nothing he can do to save himself. Baseball, eloquent of the lost pastoral, revealed to me its elegiac shape.
I had been primed to react this way because I had read Philip Roth. For him, baseball was never just baseball—it was a theatre for the energies of American life. The sport embodied the country’s unattained ideals. “Through baseball,” Roth wrote in an essay for the Times, in 1973, “I came to understand and experience patriotism in its tender and humane aspects, lyrical rather than martial or righteous in spirit, and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not quite so easily be sloganized.” The game “was a kind of secular church,” Roth continued, “that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms.”—from “Philip Roth’s Dream of Baseball,” by Katy Waldman
Everyone thought he would go on forever. And didn’t many of us assume that the public retirement was merely private retrenchment—that Philip Roth was still writing every day at home, because he could never not write? More than any other postwar American novelist, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced, but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language. (In the English tradition, that writer would be D. H. Lawrence, who seems Roth’s truer precursor in every way.) You could find him at times repetitive, only intermittently good; you could certainly find his increasingly conservative politics resistible, and hope that, one day, he might represent relations between men and women as something other than purely erotic. But I admired him above all other living American novelists because his life and work had the only quality that really matters: that of unceasing necessity. He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease; and the varieties of fiction existed in order for him to explore the varieties of experience. Roth wrote some essays, and some of them are really fine. His memoir of his father, “Patrimony,” is a beautiful book. But he was essentially a monomaniac, a fanatic of fiction. The novel was the only instrument that mattered. He lived with it and through it, like any demented virtuoso. Purity of heart is to will one thing, says Kierkegaard. Roth, that vitally dirty-minded man, was very pure.—from “The Unceasing Necessity of Philip Roth,” by James Wood
