Bye-bye ...Philip Roth talks of fame, sex and growing old in last interview/ Philip Roth: Unmasked
In October 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily Beast website to promote The Humbling,
Roth considered the future of literature and its place in society,
stating his belief that within 25 years the reading of novels will be
regarded as a "cultic" activity:
I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to
be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a
small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but
somewhere in that range... To read a novel requires a certain amount of
concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in
more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that
kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by —
it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people,
significant numbers of people, who have those qualities[.][22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933)[1] is an American novelist.
He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American-Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction,[2][3] Roth's fiction, regularly set in Newark, New Jersey,
is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for
philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality
and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative
explorations of Jewish and American identity.[4] His profile rose significantly in 1969 after the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalyticalmonologue
of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor", filled with
"intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language".[3][5]
Roth is one of the most awarded U.S. writers of his generation: his books have twice received the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize and, in 2012, he received Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for Literature.
Philip Roth, having recently announced his retirement
from writing — news that not everyone takes entirely at face value —
turns 80 next week. Celebration, and maybe valediction, are certainly
the order of the day. Visitors to Newark can take a bus tour past his
old high school and pause at the intersection of Summit and Keer
Avenues, now designated Philip Roth Plaza, an honor that will have to
suffice until the Swedish Academy gets its act together. New York magazine,
meanwhile, convened what amounted to an awkward literary frat party, at
which younger writers, almost all of them men, were invited to pay
implicit tribute to themselves by professing their great, not always
unqualified, admiration for Mr. Roth. The best way to celebrate a
writer, of course, is to read his work, but that solitary pursuit, which
replicates and requites the writer’s own lonely labor, lacks a sense of
occasion. So you might go to the movies instead.
While I wouldn’t recommend seeking out the film adaptations of Mr.
Roth’s novels (which, while not all terrible, lack the crucial,
inimitable fact of his voice), I can point you in the direction of Film
Forum, where William Karel and Livia Manera’s new documentary, “Philip
Roth: Unmasked,” is being shown — free, thanks to the beneficence of the
Ostrovsky Family Fund — for the next week.
The film is part of the sturdy “American Masters”
franchise on PBS (which will broadcast it nationally on March 29), and
like most of the other entries in the series, it is respectful, serious,
absorbing and exactly 90 minutes long. A handful of creditable writers —
the novelists Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Franzen, the critic and
journalist Claudia Roth Pierpont
— offer their thoughts on Mr. Roth, and some of their observations are
insightful. Friends of long standing (Mia Farrow, Martin Garbus and Jane
Brown Maas, who has known Mr. Roth since his undergraduate days at
Bucknell) speak fondly of him and carefully refrain from betraying any
confidences.
But fittingly enough, given that his great subject has always been
himself, it is Mr. Roth who dominates the screen. Mr. Karel and Ms.
Manera spent 10 days in his company, in New York and at his house in
western Connecticut, and succeeded in putting him at ease. He is, for 90
minutes, marvelous company — expansive, funny, generous and candid.
Though not unduly self-revealing. Mr. Franzen commends him for
“exposing parts of himself that no one had ever exposed before,” but of
course those parts technically belonged to Alexander Portnoy, Neil
Klugman (of “Goodbye, Columbus”),
Nathan Zuckerman and other alter egos. Mr. Roth calls them “stand-ins”;
the literary term is personae, which is Latin for masks. So the writer
is “unmasked” in the movie in the sense that he, rather than any of his
characters — including the one called, in the memoirs “Patrimony” and
“The Facts,” as well as in fiction like “Operation Shylock” and “The
Plot Against America,” Philip Roth — is the person we see.
His private life is, for the most part, kept that way. Passing
mention is made of a “brutal, lurid” first marriage, but those
interested in Mr. Roth’s relationships with women will have to await
Blake Bailey’s authorized biography or else succumb to the
irresponsible, irresistible vice of treating novels as source material.
The related critical question of Mr. Roth’s misogyny — a thorny and
interesting matter catastrophically fumbled by at least one of the New
York magazine symposiasts, Keith Gessen
— is mostly sidestepped here, and perhaps implicitly defused by the
eloquence and enthusiasm of Ms. Farrow, Ms. Krauss and Ms. Pierpont.
Other controversies are aired more extensively, notably the tribal
uproar that greeted Mr. Roth’s first stories when they were published,
in magazines and then in “Goodbye, Columbus” in the late 1950s. Then,
and again with the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint,”
he was arraigned as an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew, charges he
did not so much refute as transcend, turning the drama into grist for
subsequent imaginative flights.
Mr. Karel, a French filmmaker, and Ms. Manera, an Italian journalist,
have the advantages of standing outside the scrum of American literary
politics and also of coming from countries that have venerated their
writers with statues, standard editions, postage stamps and occasional
prison time. We do not see their faces or hear their questions, but it
is clear that they paid their subject the courtesy of being interested
in, and familiar with, his work and that he repaid them by reflecting on
its sources and meanings.
The result is an inordinately satisfying essay in self-criticism, an
excavation of roots followed by a chronicle of labor. We learn that Mr.
Roth composes standing up and that he sends finished manuscripts around
to a few friends, whose reactions he then tape records and transcribes
as part of the revising process. This practice shows remarkable openness
and self-confidence, and it suggests something very different from the
neurosis and narcissism so often ascribed to writers who draw from the
reservoir of the self.
And if Mr. Roth has been an unusually frank and inventive
self-portraitist, he has also painted vast and intricate canvases of
everything else. “Philip Roth: Unmasked” is especially strong when it
reaches what might be thought of as his major phase, the extraordinary
period that began with “The Counterlife” (1986) and that includes “Sabbath’s Theater” and “American Pastoral,” surely two of the finest novels of the past quarter-century.
Pleasurable as it is to hear the author reflect on those and other
books — he has written 31 in all — the greatest service “Philip Roth:
Unmasked” performs is to remind you of their existence and encourage
rereading or discovery. A writer, in the end, is the sum of the masks he
has devoted his life to making.
Bye-bye ... Philip Roth talks of fame, sex and growing old in last interview
Great US novelist insists he is quitting public life as he reflects on his many literary identities
Surely a novelist who had devoted
himself as singlemindedly to his art as Roth could not be serious? Was
it possible that Nemesis, his 24th novel, would be his last? Well, yes, it was.
This
week, in a BBC interview, Roth will not only reaffirm his literary
retirement, he will also, with gleeful finality, guarantee to the camera
that "this is my last appearance on television, my absolutely last
appearance on any stage anywhere".
Roth's last word that, quoting
American heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, he had "done the best he could
with what he had", has been typically smart and self-conscious. It's a
good retirement. Literary lives often end badly with poor health,
rejection and neglect and it's all about Roth – how could it not be? He
has devoted his long and distinguished literary career to reinventing
himself in countless teasing ways. Now, at 81, he continues to tantalise
his audience.
On Tuesday the BBC will broadcast his "last
interview", a valedictory two-part conversation with Alan Yentob, shot
at his Manhattan home in a film for Imagine, directed by Sarah Aspinall.
This
latest episode in Roth's long goodbye shows the novelist, whom some
consider to be America's greatest living writer, in a mood of playful
relaxation, conceding that, hitherto, he had not wanted to "talk, talk,
talk, talk, talk". Now, he says, "now that I don't write, I just want to
chatter away". Inevitably, with his eye on his readers, Roth's chatter
is all about the polyvalent character of his career. He has lived many
literary lives. First, there was the wunderkind author of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a landmark postwar debut. Next came the enfant terrible of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the late-60s comic sensation, dubbed "a wild blue shocker" by Life
magazine. "I got literary fame," he recalls. "I got sexual fame and I
also got mad man fame. I got hundreds of letters, 100 a week, some of
them letters with pictures of girls in bikinis. I had lots of
opportunity to ruin my life."
So then he began to retreat into a kind of rancour, and became the experimental satirist of Our Gang (1971)and The Breast (1972). Next, in young middle age, Roth continued the exploration of his turbulent self in My Life as a Man (1974)and The Professor of Desire (1977).
Later, he nurtured a more secure literary alter ego in his Zuckerman
novels. The best was to come. In 1997, in his mid-60s, Roth embarked on a
sequence of novels, well-wrought reinventions of America's recent past,
that were hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Here in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal and The Plot Against America was a vigorous refutation of Fitzgerald's bitter aside that "there are no second acts in American lives".
No
writer in living memory has had such an extraordinary late-season
surge. Roth's own account of this switch from the personal to the public
is that, as he puts it, "in the beginning, it's about [Roth] coming of
age, developing as a writer. Then it's not about him. He's the ear, the
voice, he's the observer, he's the eye." Before his retirement, Roth's
mood became valedictory (Exit Ghost, 2007) but still defiant (Indignation, 2008).
He
reports that, in old age, "the last thing I wanted to do was to make
myself more visible then I already was. The visibility unnerved me. And
so I moved to the country." Roth retreated to an isolated farmhouse in
Connecticut. He describes, almost for the first time, the conditions
under which he wrote the sequence of novels that followed American Pastoral.
"I find it very congenial to live in the natural beauty of the place I
have in Connecticut. I work during the day, do some exercise late in the
day" – he swims regularly – "and so I haven't lost contact with what
I've been doing all day."
This, for many years, was standing for
hours at his writing desk, to spare his back, "day in and day out. Then
if I'm stuck, and I often am stuck, I walk out the door and I'm in the
woods. I walk around for 10 minutes, and I come back and try again."
Roth quotes his own character, Zuckerman, to explain this monk-like
dedication: "I believe that we should read only those books that bite
and sting us. If a book we're reading does not rouse us with a blow to
the head, then why read it ?"
In 1976, Roth moved to London to
live with actress Claire Bloom. But he didn't feel at home. "I couldn't
write a feature-length book about London," he says now. "England made a
Jew of me in only eight weeks."Here, Roth's conversation covers much
contentious territory, including the repeated accusations of the
novelist's alleged misogyny. But one tantalising detail is omitted.
According to Yentob, when Roth attended a 70th birthday party for
conductor Leonard Bernstein, he was seated next to Ava Gardner, who had
been living in seclusion in London for several years. Gardner, who had
been married to Frank Sinatra, joked to Roth, "I used to go out with a
boy from Hoboken", and the pair spent the evening in intense
conversation. In the course of his interview with the BBC, Roth
occasionally challenges Yentob with "Go on, ask me about Ava Gardner",
but discretion appears to have prevailed.
"We will leave that to Blake Bailey [Roth's biographer]," says Yentob coyly.
Roth
has never seemed so relaxed or content. Usually, a cocktail of vanity,
optimism, and defiance, spiked with raw economic necessity, keeps old
writers in the game long after they should have bowed out. Roth has
beaten the odds. When challenged with his 2004 statement that he "could
not conceive of a life without writing", he replies: "I was wrong. I had
reached the end. There was nothing more for me to write about." With a
flash of candour, he adds: "I was fearful that I'd have nothing to do. I
was terrified in fact, but I knew there was no sense continuing. I was
not going to get any better. And why get worse ? And so …
"I set
out upon the great task of doing nothing. I've had a very good time over
the last three or four years." Much of this has been devoted – in
another reinvention – to assisting Bailey, who says he will complete his
biography in 2022. To this, Roth jokes: "I'll do my best to stay alive
'til 2020, but don't push me. Now that I don't write, I just want to
chatter away. Bye, bye."
沒有留言:
張貼留言