Philip Roth: In his own words

Also in this article:
The life of Roth
The other man: Nathan Zuckerman

Lawson: You might think that a writer whose recent novels have been enthusiastically received by critics, reached bestseller lists and lead many to describe him as America's best living author, would sit down at his desk now with considerable confidence. But for Philip Roth, despite the extraordinary praise given to his recent books including American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America, the writer is a perennial apprentice.

Roth: You're always lost at the beginning. You're maybe so lost that you don't even know what you're going to write about. But when you discover what you're going to write about, you have no idea how you're going to go about doing it, and the sentences are ugly and clumsy and awkward and you can't imagine that you could ever reach any competence again. And then gradually over time, as you come to grips with the subject, the manner begins to be more apparent and easier to handle.

Roth is talking to me at his agent's office in New York, on the eve of the publication of his 24th novel, Exit Ghost. Unusually, he arranges the list of his earlier works inside his books, not by dates or alphabetical titles, but by character. So there are the "Kepesh" books, a triology about a fictional academic; then the "Roth" books, a sequence of volumes including both fiction and non-fiction; and "Other Books", which include one of the most famous novels of the 20th century, Portnoy's Complaint. But at the top of the page are the "Zuckerman" books, a series about the Jewish American author Nathan Zuckerman, first encountered in the 1979 novel Ghost Writer. Almost three decades later, Exit Ghost is Zuckerman's ninth, and almost certainly final appearance. I asked Roth if, when he published the Ghost Writer, he'd intended Nathan Zuckerman to be a one-off.

Yes, I had no idea what was coming, and he just became useful to me, and was able to absorb certain experiences that I either imagined or had. Then after the first triology with Prague Orgy I thought that was the end of it, and then in the middle 80s I think I wrote Counter Life, and I thought that was the end of it, and then in the 1990s I began to write that series of books – American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, and I thought that was the end of it. And now I've written Exit Ghost I'm sure that's the end of it.

As you well know, there has been a widespread assumption that Nathan Zuckerman overlaps with you to a great degree.

Well, I've been getting sympathetic looks from people who imagine that I've had prostrate cancer [like Zuckerman]. You know, you may begin picking up strong identifying marks in the character, that identify him as it were you, but by the time you feed this material through the meat grinder, it comes out a strange kind of hamburger, you know, which isn't you. I'm not a hamburger, as Flaubert also said.


Zuckerman throughout the books, and particularly in Exit Ghost, warns about lazy reading, identifying the author with the character. To some degree those lazy readings have been encouraged by the fact that Zuckerman was born in 1933, as you were, in New Jersey, as you were, and has similar experiences. To some extent, perhaps you were teasing the readers, but you invite the reader down that route.

I'm not teasing anyone; I'm just using what's useful to me. Having a character born at the same time I was means I'm familiar with the decades that follow. It would be foolish for me to deny that they're aren't likenesses between myself and the character, but let's take this book as an example, for instance. The strongest fact about Zuckerman in this book, and what determines so much of the action, is that he has prostate cancer. Well, fortunately for me, I've never had this illness. Why did I give it to Zuckerman? Because at the time I was writing American Pastoral, it seemed that every third or fourth man I knew had prostate cancer. And I came to know quite a bit about it just from talking to them, and visiting them in the hospital, and so on. And I thought, " Well, why not give it to this guy?"

I remember in the 1980s a quite serious literary figure in Britain told me that your father had died while reading Portnoy's Complaint, while cursing you. Which, in the Zuckerman sequence, is what happens to Zuckerman.

Yeah, well... people project all over novelists. There's an awful lot of chatter, you know? It's just the nature of one, writing fiction; and two, being, for good or bad, a celebrity, as it were.

And a dramatic example of this happened after Portnoy's Complaint, in which you rang Bloomingdales to sort out something, and they were amazed that you were ringing because they assumed that you were in a lunatic asylum, which was the rumour going round New York at the time.

Only a lunatic could have written that book. Portnoy's Complaint provoked the most spurious speculations. Someone came to a cousin of mine and said that they had been to high school with my sister, and the way I treated her in the book was scandalous. Well, alas, I have no sister.

And again, that's something that, in our culture, people are very reluctant to think that writers can make things up.

I mean, I myself read in such a different way, it really never dawns on me when I'm reading somebody's novel that this happened to him. It may after the fact, I may wonder after the fact if Conrad was in fact in a typhoon, if there was a black on board one of the boats he sailed on. But these are a different kind of curiosity. It isn't a gossip curiosity.

There are going to be biographies of you – it's inevitable, given your standing.

There's one commissioned now.

Are you cooperating with that book, or are you standing back?

No, I'll cooperate. I mean, I haven't seen him for a while – but whenever he wants to talk about some aspect of the work or life, I do.

I'm at risk of reading your views into Zuckerman's but you would have some apprehension about being the subject of a biography.

I think everybody will. I make up the stories, you know – and now he's going to make up a story about me. You know, even the best biographies are only two-thirds correct, and there's nothing much you can do about it. This is the reward you get for a certain kind of achievement – to have your life examined and plucked like that.

Zuckerman gets very angry about this: 'An astonishing thing it is too that one's prowess and achivement such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition'. It's a strong phrase but it's about this – the way in which the biography comes to eclipse the work.

Well, it comes to eclipse the life. That is the life that the writer has lived, and which he or she knows, is eclipsed by the biography and that becomes the life.

And also, I thought reading Exit Ghost, that the fear that one fact comes to stand for everything. It happened recently with Arthur Miller, the revelation in Vanity Fair that he had had a Down's Syndrome child who he sent to a home. Now, that got a massive coverage in what you call book chat, but on front pages of newspapers in Britain and America.

That was most unfortunate. Arthur was a friend of mine. That story was – I don't know if this word matters anymore – scandalous, since it was not a secret that he had a Down's Syndrome child, number one. The air of revelation in the presentation of the story was false. Number two is that in the Sixties, Fifties, Forties it was completely routine to institutionalise such children. Number three is that Arthur was said by The New York Times to have been "in denial" about the child. He wasn't in denial. He saw the child, had the child, he and his wife reached a very hard decision, and they took the decision and he kept his mouth shut.

Mentioning Arthur Miller is probably a good point to mention – there's a strong theatrical stain in your writing. I read that you thought you were very interested in acting in college?

Yes, I was quite the little actor in college.

What did you play?

Scandalously, I played the shepherd in Oedipus Rex, the one who knows that the baby was found on the lake with its ankles tied together. I played that character as a very old man – I played it as older even than I am now, and I still don't walk that way. Then I played in Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, I was the son Happy, and then another half-dozen plays. But yes, I liked jumping around on the stage, you know, at that age.

The phrase Exit Ghost is from Shakespeare, but the previous novel Everyman had a play laying beneath the title and the theme, and there are references lying throughout to Ibsen, to Chekhov. Your knowledge of theatre – I mean, theatre is still a source of reference for you?

Very much so – it's a part of literature, and a part of literature I know something about. Exit Ghost appears in three Shakespeare plays: Hamlet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, and it came to me because of Macbeth. Last year in the summer I was going to see a production of Macbeth here in America, and I re-read the script that afternoon, and I came upon the Banquo scene, ghost scene, and it just leaped out – exit ghost – and that's the title of my book, so I just lifted it.

There's a moment in Patrimony, your non-fiction book, about the illness and death of your father, where you go to his retirement community in Florida and one of the residents says to you: "You're Philip Roth, thank you for all the laughs." Now it struck me as interesting reading that, because I'm not sure she would say that now because the books have become different in tone, have become more serious. I'm not even sure you would welcome that as a comment now, would you?

I would welcome that. It's not a bad one, actually; thank you for all the laughs. Err, especially if they read Exit Ghost and say: "Thank you for all the laughs." Yeah, I've written some dark books lately and this book is certainly dark, it's without any laughs.

But I think also you're not happy with classification as a "comic" writer?

I don't think I am. I wrote a series of, they were intended to be highly comical books, beginning with Portnoy's Complaint, and then Our Gang, and then a farce called the Great American Novel. So there was a moment there when I wanted to see how far I could go, and how extreme the comedy could be. I mean, it was the spirit of the times – late Sixties, early Seventies.

Another reason your tone might have changed, it seems to me, is that – you talk about those books coming very much out of the Sixties and Seventies. There were taboos to be challenged.

That's interesting, I hadn't thought of it. I don't know, if you sat and thought about it, what would shock. Well, look – you talk about the piece about Arthur Miller, that was meant to be shocking, the implied moral text was, "That is a pretty bad man." So there's still plenty of piety out there – and as long as there's piety out there, you can still shock people.

Race is also taboo, I think; isn't it? If a writer or his books were branded "racist" or "anti-semitic", that is a very hard charge to escape.

I've had the label attached to me – each label attached to me. " Anti-semitic" for Portnoy's Complaint by Jewish authorities, and then my book Human Stain was thought to be anti-black by a few black writers. These are screwing misreadings, but yes – you are referring in a way to political correctness. I don't know what's politically incorrect in this book of mine; I guess I'll find out soon enough.

One reason that even not determinedly lazy readers might connect that with you is that it might be that someone who comes from your literary generation – who comes from a time when John Updike would be on the cover of Time magazine, living into a time when Dan Brown is on the cover of Time – might have a certain disgruntlement with the way that the culture has gone.

Between John Updike and Dan Brown, Time skipped me! I think what you're pointing to is that there's been a shift in the cultural importance of writers. Good writers had a following that was more substantial than it is today. I'm not pointing back to some paradise by the way. Writers have always been extremely marginal to the cultural concerns of American citizens, but there was a moment when there were books that interested the general public that were written by some fine writers... Then the attention of readers has shifted away. They've been overcome by so many other distractions; and the habit of concentation I think has been badly damaged, by the nature of the cultural stimuli. So it feels to me very much like a dying moment, for literary culture in my own country – but you can't have computers and iPods and BlackBerries and blueberries and raspberries, and have time left to sit for two or three hours with a book.

When that phrase is used, "The book that the world is talking about," whether it's The Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter, are you ever tempted to find out what it is?


I read about 20 pages of The Da Vinci Code; I found it unreadable. My problem with those books is that I can't understand them. They operate on a psychology that is foreign to me.

Again at the risk of identifying you with Zuckerman; Zuckerman, in what he calls the final stage of his reading life, is reading the great European novelists – Tolstoy, Conrad, in particular, in this book.

In matter of fact, I have begun in the last several years to re-read the great writers, who I hadn't read since college or graduate school. What's surprising is that I remember so little. So over the last few years I've been reading various people with great pleasure; I read Hemingway pretty thoroughly about a year ago, and I was fascinated by the small time frame in which Hemingway was a wonderful writer. It's really between the ages of 25 and 38 – and so in terms of biography I tried to work out what happened to him. It's a sad story.

If you take the case of Arthur Miller, the major plays tend to be from the early part of the career. That isn't the case with you. As a reader, there is this huge outpouring of energy later in your career, beginning with American Pastoral. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Do you have any sense of why that happened?

What did I eat? Well, I think that – I don't know. I did get home from living abroad for a while. Not that I felt constrained from living abroad at all; it was the opposite, it was very liberating. I lived in London for 10 or 12 years, and when I came back I began to write about America with some new fervour. So I sort of rediscovered America and found when I got back that I had a new subject which was an old subject, which was a perfect situation really.


It is relatively unusual in literary careers to have a run of such major books in the latter half of the career.

You know, it may just be that at a certain point your talent is increased by the accrue of experience and knowledge. And I live in a remote part of the countryside, uninterrupted, and I had the time, I guess had the energy, and I had the ideas – and they just kept coming. So I don't think we have to wait for the biography to find out what happened – it's just something that can happen. [I'm not] the only person it's ever happened to.

There's a lot of medical decline in your books, but to some degree you had a medical second life, didn't you? Because you had heart problems, surgery and that must have had some psychological effect.

Yeah, in 1989 I had an emergency bypass operation and it sure did feel good to make it. And about three months later my father died, which was a big blow to me because my mother had died several years before, and I was feeling very bereft, so I don't know. Luckily we will have to wait for the biography.

Americans, I'm afraid, have to get used to being asked who the next American president will be – or who they'd like it to be and who it will be.

Well, I'd like it to be Al Gore, although it appears as though he's not going to run, and so I'll take any Democrat.

Hillary Clinton – do you think she has a realistic chance of election?

I didn't for a long time. Many people feel alienated by her, for good or bad reason. I don't know, I don't know.

Finally, it seems to be the end of Nathan Zuckerman, as far as we can tell. For Philip Roth as a writer, do you know what will come next yet?

No, you'll have to wait for the biography.

This is adapted from an interview for BBC Radio 4's Front Row. A full version can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow

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The life of Roth


By Rob Sharp

Born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, Philip Roth was the oldest child of Herman and Bessie Roth, first-generation Jewish-Americans. He graduated from high school at the age of 16 and studied under Saul Bellow at the University of Chicago.

His first novel, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), earned him the prestigious National Book Award. But it was 1969's Portnoy's Complaint that caused him to become a bestselling behemoth. Some of its nebbish characters caused him to be branded a "self-hating Jew" by fellow members of the tribe and the author's first wife, Margaret Martinson, is thought to have inspired one of the characters. But the ultimate last laugh ensued when Roth enjoyed the book's colossal sales: 400,000 in hardback.

In 1990, he married the British actress Claire Bloom, but divorced her in 1995. The split formed the impetus for Bloom's book Leaving a Doll's House (1996). In turn, Roth created the character of spoilt actress Eve Frame in I Married a Communist (1998), a social climber who ruins her husband's life by spilling the goods through kiss-and-tell.

He famously said his writing has always been about "making a fake biography" and much of this instinct was ploughed into Nathan Zuckerman, his celebrated alter ego, a sex-mad Jewish-American writer who got famous off the back of scandalous writing. Other prominent works include 2000's The Human Stain and 1993's Operation Shylock, trumpeted as a "pseudo-confessional" work.

Roth's work underwent particular success during the 1990s, when, during five years, he won all four of America's leading literary prizes, for four different books, including the Pulitzer for 1997's American Pastoral. Now 74, he has earned himself the moniker of "America's greatest living novelist".

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The other man: Nathan Zuckerman

By John Walsh

Priapic, wisecracking, angsty Jewish Nathan Zuckerman has been the central figure in nine Philip Roth novels since his first appearance in The Ghost Writer in 1979. A still-only-promising novelist in his early forties, he goes to stay with an eminent writer called E I Lonoff (who some have taken to be Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth, author of Call It Sleep) and encounters in his house a woman called Amy Bellette, whom he suspects of being Anne Frank, alive and well and living in America.

In Zuckerman Unbound, Nathan hits the big time and the bestseller lists with Carnovsky, a scandalous novel of pubertal outrage not a million miles from the real-life Portnoy's Complaint. In The Anatomy Lesson, a mysterious illness stops Nathan writing and inspires him to return to his old university in Chicago and study medicine. The Prague Orgy offers a short coda to the trilogy in the form of diary entries from Nathan's journey to Communist Prague, in search of the manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer.

The Counterlife, perhaps Roth's most sustained attempt to confront the nature of his Jewish identity, concerns the dilemma of Nathan's brother, Henry, a middle-aged dentist who has to choose, essentially, between impotence and a life-threatening illness; and who transforms himself into a gun-slinging Zionist in Jerusalem.

In American Pastoral, Zuckerman encounters an old classmate, "Swede" Levov, at a class reunion and hears his tragic story – how a seemingly perfect American family spawns a political terrorist. I Married a Communist concerns another of Nathan's school contemporaries, Ira Ringold, and his downfall, during the McCarthy era, at the hands of his nasty anti-Semitic wife (possibly based on Claire Bloom, who accused Roth of vanity in her autobiography.)

In The Human Stain, we learn that Nathan has become impotent and incontinent from prostate cancer, and has moved to New England to live as a recluse; but he tells the story of his neighbour Coleman Silk, a classics professor destroyed by accusations of racism. Exit Ghost concludes Nathan's saga: he returns to New York for a prostate operation, re-encounters Amy Bellette, tries to stop a biographer revealing a scandalous secret about his hero Lonoff, and (unable to seduce any more) writes a fictional seduction of his new love object, Jamie Logan.

Roth has spent his career teasing readers with the correspondences between his life and his alter ego's. Nathan is three years younger than Roth. Both men grew up in Newark, New Jersey, both wrote scandalous novels, both are Jewish liberals with identity crises. The climactic tease was a passage in Roth's non-fiction memoir, The Facts, when Nathan drops him a letter about plausibility. "You are far better off writing about me than accurately reporting your own life," he tells Roth. And he's right.