‘Getting people right is not what living is all about anyway’: Seven ways to remember Philip Roth

Philip Roth, one of the most gargantuan figures in American literature died on Wednesday, leaving behind a formidable body of work, spanning five decades. The author, known for his darkly comic writing, investigation of male sexuality and Jewish identity, was not one to spare words. Roth’s lasting legacy, other than accusations lobbed by fans at the Swedish Academy for never awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature, will be of his observations on everything from politics to love, merging incisiveness with profundity.

“The question to ask about the writer isn’t ‘Why does he behave so badly? but ‘What does he gain by wearing this mask?’, Roth said in an interview with The Paris Review in 1984. Thanks to his penchant for mixing autobiography and fiction, we’re left with invaluable commentary by his many fictional alter-egos, in addition to what he signed with his own name. Here, then, is the best of Roth, in his own words.

On writing

“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.”

(The Ghost Writer, published in 1979)

On (never) getting people right

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion...The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.”

(From American Pastoral, published in 1997)

On alter-egos and autobiographical fiction

“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down.

You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it – all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life.”

(Interview with Hermione Lee in The Paris Review, 1984)

On ‘humanly impoverished’ Donald Trump

“I was born in 1933, the year that FDR was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognising subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

(Interview with The New Yorker, January 2017)

On love

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love’. People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”

(From The Dying Animal, published in 2001)

On politics and literature

“‘Politics is the great generaliser,’ Leo told me, ‘and literature the great particulariser, and not only are they in a inverse relationship to each other – they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn’t be. Why? Because the particularising impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist, the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, à la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow for the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. Otherwise you produce propaganda, if not for a political party, a political movement, then stupid propaganda for life itself – for life as it might itself prefer to be publicised.’”

(From I Married A Communist, published in 1998)

On growing old

“Yes, in just a matter of months I’ll depart old age to enter deep old age – easing ever deeper daily into the redoubtable Valley of the Shadow. Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day. Getting into bed at night I smile and think, “I lived another day.” And then it’s astonishing again to awaken eight hours later and to see that it is morning of the next day and that I continue to be here. “I survived another night,” which thought causes me to smile once more. I go to sleep smiling and I wake up smiling. I’m very pleased that I’m still alive.”

(Interview with The New York Times, January 2018)