American Masters (1985–…): Season 27, Episode 2 - Philip Roth: Unmasked - full transcript

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.

Well, in the coming years,

I have two great calamities
to face:

death and a biography.

Let's hope the first
comes first!

I'm not crazy about seeing
myself described

as an American Jewish writer.

Uh...

I don't write in Jewish,
I write in American.

My...

Most of my work,
nine tenths of it,



takes place in America.

I was raised in America.
I am an American.

Therefore,
I'm an American writer.

Yeah, I published a short story
in 1958 in The New Yorker,

my first publication and my last
for many years,

a story called "Defender of
the Faith,"

about the army and two...
Some Jewish guys in the army.

The day that the story was
coming out,

every half-hour I went out
to the newsstand

to see if they had in
The New Yorker

because I was
dying to see my story.

And I took it home
and I read it.

I read it twice.
I read it backwards.

I read it upside down.



I took it to the bathroom
with me.

I read it while I was eating

and this was the greatest
achievement in my life.

And I met with opposition
right off.

It caused a furor.

The New Yorker began to get
letters,

dozens and dozens of letters

canceling subscriptions by Jews.

And I began to get angry
phone calls

from various
Jewish organizations:

"Would you write these stories
if you were in Nazi Germany?"

And I was suddenly being
assailed as an anti-Semite,

this thing that I
detested all my life.

And a self-hating Jew.

I didn't even know
what it meant.

It never dawned on me when I was
writing that story

that this was going to cause
a conflagration.

But that's what happened
when I began to write.

What is doubly unusual
about Roth

is not only that he's endured,
but that he has

reimagined
and reinvented himself

so many times
over these decades,

so that you actually get
a very different Roth

depending upon what book
you read.

To my mind, he's a little bit
like Picasso in that way,

always reinventing himself.

Because that's
what literature is.

I mean we don't...

We don't go to literature for
moral perfection,

we go there for moral ambiguity,
for moral failing,

for moral struggle.

And I think that is his
territory.

And that is what he has done
year after year,

decade after decade.

He's like, I'm just going to
follow myself,

and I'm going to be more honest
and more outrageously

only about me than any other
writer has ever been.

And he did it.

That story,
"Defender of the Faith,"

then appeared the next year,
1959,

in my first book
"Goodbye, Columbus,"

and so it started up again.

"Goodbye, Columbus" was
essentially a success,

after all, not commercially.

I think it sold 4,000 copies.

But about eight months
after it came out,

the book won the National
Book Award for Fiction.

So that
was what gave it some status.

"Goodbye, Columbus"
was a spontaneous

and immediate response
to the world I'd come out of.

But there were those
who were offended.

And there were the rabbis
who gave sermons

denouncing me as an anti-Semite

and I suppose what riled them
about "Goodbye, Columbus"

was a story about a Jewish
middle-aged man

who is an adulterer,

Jewish girl having sex,

who bought a diaphragm.

I maintain then, as I do now,

that there were Jewish girls
who bought diaphragms

and there were Jewish husbands
who were adulterers.

You know, Isaac Singer,
when he was criticized

by Jewish critics
and Jewish readers

for his stories,
they would say rather,

"Mr. Singer, why must you write
about Jewish whores

and Jewish pimps?"

And Singer said, "What should
I write about...

Portuguese whores,
Portuguese pimps?"

But there were some good reviews
and one was the Saul Bellow's

and to my mind our greatest,
our greatest writer

of the second half
of the 20th century in America.

I read "Augie March"

in my last year of college

and I didn't know what
to make of it,

I'd never read anything
like it in my life.

Uh...

I didn't know what freedom was
in a writer

until I read that book.

That you can do anything,
that you can go anywhere.

You can use your background.

Just as Bellow
used his in Chicago,

the west side of Chicago,

and Malamud used his in
a grocery store in Brooklyn,

I can use mine in Newark.

It never occurred to me.

I wrote stories in college for
the literary magazine

that I edited so I
could publish my own stories.

And they were awful little
things

and not a one of them
mentions Jew, Newark...

You'd think I was the child of
Lord Chesterfield, you know.

And suddenly began writing
stories

set in my neighborhood.

Roth begins by writing
about Newark Jews.

You begin with the people
you know.

It becomes a part of your story

and it's very definitely always
been a part of Roth's story,

especially those who have come
from immigrant backgrounds

who have seen America
as a tremendous goal

from their youth,
from starting out.

He comes out
of a very specific place,

out of a Jewish community
in Newark,

but as he continues and he does
write for 50 years,

there is
an ever-expanding range.

Welcome to Philip Roth's Newark,

if you have chosen to visit
Newark through the eyes

and through the genius
of Philip Roth.

Our first stop, this morning,
will be Weequahic High School,

Philip's alma mater, and on
to his childhood home

and Philip Roth Plaza.

My mother was born in
1904, in Elizabeth,

of Jewish immigrants.

She grew up in a kind of
Irish Catholic neighborhood.

And my father was born
in Newark.

They met when they were young,
in their early twenties,

and they married,
my mother and father.

And they came to Newark.

And they started life.

There was digging into
American life.

They didn't talk about the past.

There was no remembering
elsewhere.

So there was no nostalgia
for the old country,

nor any talk about it.

I never heard a word about it.

I might have heard something

about it from my grandparents,
but they spoke only Yiddish.

And I spoke only English.

My parents were... were
and were not... religious.

They came from
religious families.

But I never sensed that we were
in a religious household.

Roth has a kind of interesting
relationship

with his past, obviously,
with his childhood.

When he speaks of his parents,
it is with such tenderness.

My brother was born first,

in 1927,

and my mother was 23.

And I was born in 1933

and my mother was 28.

She didn't drink,
she didn't smoke,

and she had terrific energy,

terrific thoroughness.

You know Freud's line...

"He who is loved by his mother
is a Conquistador."

His parents would be very warm,

and I did not find his mother
to be

the archetype of the Jewish
mother.

They were not overbearing
at all.

Philip came from
a mirth filled home.

There were no books
in the house,

three or four that had been
given as gifts.

But...

And I was the only one
who read them.

But my mother read a lot
in the evening,

for an hour or so,

and she had...
She would rent books

from the local pharmacy,
and so I used to go...

She'd give me the name
of the book

and I used to go to the
drugstore and get the book,

and give the guy the quarter so
she could have it for five days.

So I saw her reading
in the evening.

But books weren't
in any of the houses

in the neighborhood
where I grew up.

And I read them
and I enjoyed them.

Then I went into
more serious books.

And I began to read when I was
probably 12, and I came upon

books I'd never heard of before.

My brother also had some of them
in paperback editions.

He would have been 19,
I would have been 14.

"Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man."

"Ulysses."

And, uh...

that changed everything.

I had leaped forward

into adult reading.

But I wasn't intimidated by it.

Of course,
I was intimidated by "Ulysses."

I don't think I got
past page 20.

What I liked very much

was one line in "Ulysses"

that made a deep impression
on me.

It'll show you how childish
I am.

At one point, Bloom goes down...

The hero of the book...
Goes down to the waterfront,

to the shingle
to watch a girl down there,

Gerty MacDowell,
I think her name is.

And he goes down to watch her.

Probably it's
not the first time.

And she's young and pretty.

And he puts his hand
in his pocket

and he has cut the lining
in the pocket

so his hand can go right through
to his privates.

And so Joyce
tells you what's going on

but you still don't get it until
the next paragraph begins.

"At it again."

I loved "At it again."

I think it should be on
my tombstone.

"At it again."

My brother wanted to be
a painter

and he went to art school.

It was quite stupendous

that I had a brother who went
over to the big city,

exotic city, New York,
went to a school

where you
sat in a room with a naked woman

and you looked at her
and drew her, you know.

And I was stunned.

I'd never seen nude figures
before, even drawn, you know.

And my father expected that
I would be a lawyer.

And I thought I would become
a lawyer too.

But I began to fall in love
with literature.

So then I was going
to be a writer.

What did he know about a writer?

What did I know about a writer?

Surely he didn't want me to be
a writer.

What parent in his right mind

would want a child to be
a writer?

I certainly wouldn't!

Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet,
the Nobel Prize winner,

who was asked,

"How does all this stuff
affect your family,

that you write?"

And Milosz said, "When a writer
is born into a family,

the family is finished."

"As soon as my brother and I
started giving genuine signs

of burgeoning independence,

she had relaxed the exacting,

sometimes overly fastidious
strictures

that had governed our early
upbringing

and began to be mildly
intimidated

by our airs of maturity.

In a way she fell in love
with us all over again,

like a shy schoolgirl this time,

hoping for a date.

It was a rather prototypic
kind of movement, I think,

for the mother to go from
nurturing her sons

to being
a little afraid of them,

and for the sons to move

out of their mother's province
at 13 or 14."

That's a fair and
accurate description

of the situation when I was
contemplating

going off to college.

When I got to be 16 and I
graduated from high school

and I got to be 16 and was going
to college,

and I went my first year
in Newark

and then I had to get out,
I had to get away,

I really wasn't getting away
from Newark,

I was getting away from
my father.

My father became
a terrific pain in the ass.

He was just overseeing my life

and he feared my adult
independence, you know.

He didn't know what
to do about it.

And so I just went off
to Bucknell.

Uh...

And then I never came back
to Newark again.

Well, I'm only following
the path taken by other writers.

And I don't mean to compare
my work to Joyce's,

but Joyce left Dublin
and he ha...

He couldn't get out
of Dublin fast enough.

And then he couldn't write about
anything else

for the rest of his life.

And he would send letters to his
mother saying,

"What's the color of
the shutters on the house

on the corner of such and such
and such and such?"

He wanted to get everything
exactly right, but he'd fled.

Faulkner left the south,
he left Mississippi.

And Hemingway wrote his great
stories about Upper Michigan

and Michigan from Paris.

American writers seem to do
that...

Leave where they came from
and then

write about it for the rest of
their lives.

And so I did,
I went off to Bucknell.

I didn't know a thing about
Bucknell when I went off to it.

I just wanted to
get the hell away.

It was a very moral campus
there in 1951

when Philip Roth arrived.

Women, freshmen women,

had to be in their dormitories
at eight o'clock at night.

You could take them to
the movies,

you could take them for
an ice-cream Sunday,

you could take them for a walk.

But everything else had to be
more or less fought for.

And so the struggles began.

There were housemothers
on every floor

to see that you obeyed
all the rules

and the rules were very
stringent.

For instance if you wore
Bermuda shorts

one inch too short
for the regulations,

that was very bad.

The rules were in place.

Girls were largely,
almost entirely, inaccessible.

They were so protective
of the virginity

of the young women with
a housemother on every floor,

with eight o'clock curfews.

Men weren't allowed
in women's dorms.

Where were you supposed to do
this thing, you know?

So it wasn't done.

Except on occasion.

He dated quite a lot
of young women

and he had very good taste.

They tended to be

the most beautiful
women on campus.

Philip was a gorgeous man.

He was a dashing young man

and there was a whiff of danger
about him

because he was so much smarter
than anybody

and so witty and...

and so, so fast.

I don't mean fast
in a sexual way,

but he was just so quick.

He was very popular and
particularly one might note

that he dated older women.

Now older women,
we're talking...

We were 17 years old

and he maybe had a 19-year-old
girlfriend.

We were envious, yes.

Women found Philip
quite attractive.

Others of us were
on the sidelines.

I didn't have success.

I had what everybody had then,
which was nothing.

I wondered, here is Philip Roth
just 15 years later

writing "Portnoy's Complaint"

and where,
where did that come from?

It certainly didn't come
from Bucknell University!

I started writing at college.

The stories I wrote don't
count as writing.

They're just very bad
little stories.

Highly sensitive however.

Salinger was published
when I was in college

and he influenced those little
sensitive stories

I wrote in college.

I wanted to be sensitive too.

And by the way,
if the person excited you,

it doesn't mean they were
an influence, necessarily.

Because after the first
ten years,

the influences fall away.

And by then you're pretty
much yourself.

After the University of Chicago,

and I began to do some
writing there,

and then I went in the army

and that's when I really
began writing.

And after dinner, at night,

on the base, I might walk around
with the guys for a while,

but then I'd go over to
the office,

which I had a key for, and go in
and use the typewriter.

And I wrote a couple
of stories that I think...

"The Conversion of the Jews,"
which appeared in...

Goodbye, Columbus

and maybe one more.

I wrote another three or four
but they were not good.

So I really began at... in 1955,

at the age of 22.

He was a young writer trying
to figure out what to do.

He'd published a couple of good
books, but it was 1961.

He writes this essay called
"Writing American Fiction"

and he's basically saying,

"This is a
self-parodying culture.

The stuff that you read
in the newspaper,

if I were to make it up,
it would seem unreal.

We're being outdone by reality."

And in Roth's case,

making yourself into a character
in your own novels.

And not just once but repeatedly
in Roth, he becomes...

He becomes the central figure,
really,

in much of his later fiction.

Between 1962 and 1967,

I published nothing.

I wrote crap.

And I was frustrated
and pretty unhappy, yeah.

I had a very bad first marriage.

It was brutal and lurid.

Uh...

I couldn't write.

And I felt like somebody
who'd been derailed,

shunted off the track he'd been
on from age one,

through early childhood,

school, high school,

college, graduate school,

the army,

teaching at one of the great
universities,

the University of Chicago,

and suddenly I was shunted off
this track, and I was in hell.

Uh...

I needed somebody
to help me out,

to understand what had happened,

and to recover my confidence,
which was shot.

It was necessary to talk, I had
to talk about all of this.

But I couldn't talk about it
to civilians

because they repeated it.

That is, there was no way that
in New York City

I could tell anybody the
intimate things in my life.

Why would I want to anyway?

But I had to talk about it.

And I began to go
to a psychoanalyst,

three, four times a week.

I was really a wreck.

And that was a great help.

When I returned to New York
alone, unmarried, I met a group

of fellows, they were all Jews,
and with them,

I began to perform.

Uh...

And I could make them laugh,
I discovered.

He had a wonderful sense
of humor and he showed it.

And he would say things
in the middle of a group

and he immediately was
recognized

as someone who is very,
very funny,

very capable,
and he was terrific.

And I realized that I had
never done this in my work.

How could I release stuff like
this in my work?

How do I get this performance
on paper?

And the discovery I made was,

make it
a psychoanalytic session.

Then you can do it.

I didn't know
when I was doing it.

I'd been performing
for these guys,

so here I was best performing
on a page.

"Portnoy's Complaint" is
a performance...

Not the performance I gave
for my friends,

maybe some of the stuff is.

But Alexander Portnoy is talking
to a psychoanalyst

who doesn't speak,
he just has the last line.

So you have no idea who
or what he is.

But I knew something about
psychoanalysis;

I had been in it.

I know the rules of the game of
psychoanalysis,

which is, "say anything.

Whatever comes
into your mind, say.

Freely associate,
don't censor yourself,

don't censor your language,
for God's sakes.

That's the worst thing
you could do."

Great, I thought, great!

I now have all this permission

that a psychoanalytic patient
has,

that perhaps a writer
doesn't have.

So I had a justification,

a powerful justification,
for the tone,

the style, the vocabulary.

Before "Portnoy's Complaint"
was published,

I had my mother and father
come over from New Jersey

where they lived to New York
where I was living,

to prepare them for
the publication of the book.

I couldn't just leave them alone

with the publication
of this book.

And so we had lunch

and I explained that this book
was coming out

and that it was
going to be a big hit.

And that I told them what
the story was and I said,

"People are going to assume

that you are the mother
and father in it."

So I tried to prepare them
for that,

and I said, "You're going to get
phone calls from journalists,

reporters, newspapers, and
magazines, and TV and so on,

you can hang up.

It's not a crime to hang up on
a journalist," you know.

And they got into a taxicab.

And they went home.

Some years later,
I asked my father,

"What happened when you two got
in the taxi, after that?"

you know, and he said,

"Your mother burst into tears."

I said "Why?"

He said,
"He has delusions of grandeur."

"He was never like that,"
she said,

"he was never a boy like that.

Now he has delusions of
grandeur."

So that's how my mother took it.

When the book came out,
in the first month,

it sold 350,000 copies.

It was a sensation.

The New York Times had
interviews

of my high school teacher,
can you imagine?

There were television programs.

There was then

six Jewish mothers to talk
about my book

and... me.

Uh...

The first book by Roth
that I read

was when I was 12 years old

and it was
"Portnoy's Complaint."

And strangely enough...
I can't explain this now...

My mother gave it to me.

I don't know whether she
simply thought

this is one of the great
American writers

and you should
be familiar with him,

whether she thought I would be
entertained,

or whether she forgot what was
in it.

Needless to say it was for me
like entering into a world

that I never knew existed.

For me as a religious kid,
as a conservative kid

in this closed world where
we didn't talk about sex

and didn't address these things,
I feel like

I got to read
"Portnoy's Complaint"

with the true shock
that is built into that book,

and I'm really thankful
for that.

I just laughed my head off.

You know he's so funny
and so sharp

and it's dazzling
writing and, uh...

His provocations, his jokes,
sense of humor, his intelligence

have kept me company as a reader

almost all my life.

I was properly ashamed,
you know, as a person.

You know, it was just
the perfect time to read

this book about
like wanton sexuality.

By 1969, when he writes
"Portnoy's Complaint,"

America has entered on

a completely different moment
in history

and it was his brilliance
and good fortune, perhaps,

to capture that moment,
to encapsulate it

in "Portnoy's Complaint."

It seemed to many people to be
the 60s, to be freedom,

sexual freedom as
people took it,

narrative freedom and
storytelling freedom

as he took it, a great jump
forward in how you could talk

about sexual life.

In America there's no censorship
in writers of sexuality

or obscenity or...

To the contrary, uh...

the word appears
too much, you know.

Maybe I started it.

There was lots of open, direct,
obscene talk about sex in it.

I think that's what made it such
a hit

and that's what made it such
a scandal.

People objected to
its obscenities,

people objected to what they
felt was an insult to the Jews

and so on.

So there were...
There was a guy walking

on one side of the street
one day and I was walking

on the other and from across
the street I hear him say,

"Philip Roth,
the enemy of the Jews!"

I certainly didn't help things
with "Portnoy's Complaint."

I got literary fame.

And I also got sexual fame.

I and I also got madman fame.

Oh, gosh, everything
happened really.

I got hundreds of letters,
a hundred a week say,

through my publisher.

Some of them letters
with pictures

of girls in bikinis.

I had lots of opportunity
to ruin my life.

My...

The woman who I was seeing
at that time

sent me a clipping from
the New York Post,

from a columnist named
Leonard Lyons,

saying, "Barbra Streisand has
no complaints

about her dates
with Philip Roth."

I just got this in an envelope
with nothing else.

Well, then I became terrifically
recognizable on the street.

I lost my anonymity.

People shouted: "Hey, Portnoy,"
and "Stop doing that!"

So everything that people
perceived in Portnoy,

they then perceived in me.

I remember walking up
in the hills in Woodstock,

which is beautifully set
in the mountains, in the hills.

And I was walking with my
then lady friend, Barbara,

and I was complaining to her.

I had just gone down to
New York, I think, and said,

"Why don't they leave me alone?"
and so on.

And she says:
"Well, you're here now,

and stop complaining because

we're in the middle
of the mountains."

Suddenly a car went
by and someone rolled down

the window and said:
"Hey, Portnoy, leave it alone!"

But there were those
who recognized me

and those who didn't.

And one day
I got into a taxi cab,

shortly after publication,
maybe three months.

And, uh...

I sat down in the cab and told
the guy where I was going.

And when I looked at
his license,

which is up in front,
on the right hand side,

it said "Ed Portnoy."

So I said to him,

"I'll bet you've been having
a hard time

since that book came out."

He says, "Oh, man," he says,
"that son of a bitch."

And he says, "My life,
everybody gets

into this taxi cab says:
Portnoy, hey Portnoy, you know

about the book Portnoy,
are you Portnoy?"

And so I listened to him for
a while.

He went on.
And I said...

"I have to tell you
something, Portnoy...

I'm the guy who wrote the book."

"You son of a bitch, you!"

But pleasantly, pleasantly.

"You son of a bitch!
I thought it was you" and so on.

And so I got out of
the taxi when I did it,

and I gave him a 20-buck tip.

Though there were pleasant sides
to it.

The book became number one
on the bestseller list.

And suddenly I had money.

I was able to move into
a very nice apartment

near the Metropolitan Museum.

Um...

I was able to buy a car.

I hadn't had a car up
until then.

I was able to go on a trip
around the world

with my girlfriend.

At the age of 36,
I'd never really made any money.

My parents took a cruise

a couple of months after
the book came out,

a cruise on which I sent them

to get them away from the
"Portnoy's Complaint" fireworks.

And that's what I
thought I was doing.

My mother told me when they
came back

that my father had taken about
a dozen copies

of "Portnoy's Complaint"
on the ship.

And he was a salesman.

And when they make some friends
on the ship,

so he'd go down to the cabin,
get a copy

of "Portnoy's Complaint"
he had with him,

and signed it, write in it,

"From Philip Roth's
father Herman."

So that's how my
family took the book.

"He works, so hard, and for
whom, if not for me?

And then at last, after turning
on his belly

and making a few choppy strokes,

that carry him nowhere,
he comes wading back to shore,

his streaming compact torso

glowing from the last pure
spikes of light driving in,

over my shoulder, out of
stifling inland New Jersey,

from which I am being spared.

And there are more memories
like this one, Doctor.

A lot more.

This is my mother and father
I'm talking about."

After "Portnoy's Complaint,"
I moved out

to the country, first
to Woodstock, New York,

and then after about two years
or three years in Woodstock,

I found this house
in rural Connecticut

and discovered how wonderful
it was to be in silence,

the beauty of the place
which is terrific

and to have trees and water
and birds to look at.

And I like the
seclusion to work.

I've never been solidly
connected to New York.

I always found it strange
being a writer in a building

say with 50 families

and in the morning
all the mothers and fathers

go off to work and the older
children go to school

and it's just me, the nannies

and the little ones.

This building is empty all day,

except for me
and the little tots.

And we play... They play the way
they play;

I play the way I play.

I sit alone in a room
in New York,

double-glazing my windows

so that no sound of New York
comes in, writing.

"There is no more worldly in
the world place than New York,

full of all those people on
their cell phones,

going to restaurants, having
affairs, getting jobs,

reading the news, being consumed
with political emotion.

And I thought to come back in
from where I'd been

to resume residence there
re-embodied,

to take on all the things
I decided to relinquish...

Love, desire, quarrels,
professional conflict,

the whole
messy legacy of the past.

A guy tries to come back into
the world,

having withdrawn from it
for a while,

for I think ten or twelve years,

and when he comes back he finds
he doesn't have

the talent for it anymore.

He doesn't have the wisdom
for it...

Though he's a man
in his late sixties.

He doesn't have the strength
and energy for it.

And he finds himself up against
a lot of young people

who run him ragged.

There's a line that he gives
to Nathan Zuckerman

in "Zuckerman Unbound" where
Zuckerman is quoting Kafka,

where he says, "We should read
only those books

that bite and sting us.

If a book you're reading does
not rouse you

with a blow to the head,
then why read it?"

And I think that Roth writes
books that are meant to

rouse you with a blow
to the head.

And I think that's one thing
that distinguishes his work.

These books are provocative,
full of energy, full of ideas.

And I wrote

"The Ghost Writer."

Then the fame book,

"Zuckerman Unbound."

Then the pain book,

"The Anatomy Lesson"...

Which was The Prague Orgy.

And then when all of those books
were taken together,

you had my story.

When I'm working,
when I'm writing,

when I'm in the midst of it,
or beginning it or ending it,

the only reader that counts
is myself.

You know what they say
in baseball,

"keep your eye on the ball."

That's the ball.

I have to keep my eye on that
and not on anything else.

When I know I'm on a final draft
or I think I am,

I get to the end and then
I prepare four or five copies

and I mail them or get them
to friends

whose critical acumen I trust.

I'll go and sit in her house
and we'll talk about the book

and I'll tape-record
what they're saying

so I don't have to take notes

and not be involved in
the conversation with them.

And then I get them home and I
transcribe them.

And so I begin to make changes.

Or one person has got it all
wrong, I think,

and I ignore them.

So the book is being described
back to me in language

which opens my thinking up.

So even if they're wrong,
they're right.

There's something,
there's something to be gained,

even if I think they're wrong.

So that's what I do.

It's been a wonderful,
it's been a wonderful help.

One of the astonishing things
about his career

is what happens in the mid-'80s
with "The Counterlife,"

which is a kind of
a breakthrough book for him.

I love the Zuckerman trilogy
that precedes it.

But in 1987 he writes
a big book.

He hasn't written a big
book since "Letting Go,"

way back at the beginning of
his career.

It's a big book, it's daring,
it's bold,

it's inventive, it's ingenious.

"The Counterlife"
was a big turning point.

The books changed after that.

And before that I
was a different writer.

I was the same writer, but I was
a different kind of writer.

Now, what entered my work was

politics and history.

I don't think that either of
those concerns were present

to any significant degree before
"The Counterlife."

And that continued after that.

But between writing that one,

I wrote a nonfiction book

about my father's dying

and death, "Patrimony."

"Patrimony" got to be written

because when my father was
diagnosed with a brain tumor,

I came back to New York
to take care of him.

I wasn't depressed,
I was just sad.

I was terrifically sad
because I realized that now

this probably meant that within
a year, he'll be dead.

So what I did do was I began

to write
down what happened that day,

just in the most
truncated note form.

And it helped.

It helped to remember
what had happened that day,

to get it down and...

But I had no objective other
than what I was doing,

to pass an hour or so
and calm down.

And then as the week went...
Weeks went by,

there were more and more notes.

And then in October he died.

So that was it.

And now I had all these notes
and I knew how it ended.

I always knew how it would end,
I didn't know where and when.

And I began to write.

This was my response to
the family catastrophe.

My mother had already died,
and now my father was dead.

And my response
was to write this book.

And that's how it came
into being.

I was incredibly moved by
that book.

I think he describes
the relationship between

a child and his parent...
Particularly of that generation.

But he got at something

very beautiful

at the heart of that
relationship.

The scenes where his father

is desperately trying
to give away

all of the things in the house

and every time Philip comes
to see him, he's wrapped

something else in bubble wrap
and giving it away.

He's a great listener.

And he's there like rock solid
as a friend.

And I know, undoubtedly, he was
a great son, a great brother.

And he's a great friend.

And from that point on, it's as
though he's just unstoppable.

In '91, there's "Patrimony."

Then in 1993, when he turns 60,
there's "Operation Shylock."

1995, there's the great
"Sabbath's Theater.

1997 is "American Pastoral."

Straight on through the end
of the century, 2000.

The year 2000 is
"The Human Stain."

It is just one book
after another,

more or less out of the
ballpark, you'd have to say.

When I'm into the book,
then I work every day.

I work every day,
I work seven days a week.

I need lots of quiet,
I need lots of hours,

I need lots of regularity.

Then I work for
a year, two, three.

"The Human Stain," say,
and "American Pastoral"

take two years to write
or under two years to write.

And the books like "Everyman"
and "The Humbling"

take about a year to write.

I wrote standing up, and if you
stand up, I discovered,

my mind was freer standing up.

And that I could walk around

when I became blocked
at a passage.

And then naturally,
the imagination...

I have one... begins to go.

The very first pages I would
write would be farfetched...

Will I be able to do it again?

Where the hell is the next book
coming from?

Then when you begin the next
book, you think:

This is awful, I got to begin
a new book.

You're completely lost again.

Where you're going,
what you're doing...

What is it you propose to do?

Where should I lift the curtain?

When should I lift the curtain,
to begin the story?

And so on.

I had to fight my way to
the freedom of drawing

upon what I knew.

Life isn't good enough
in some ways.

If it was just a matter
of putting things down

that happened to you
or happened to your friend,

or happened to your wife

or how your wife happened
to you, et cetera,

you wouldn't be a novelist.

I invent a character
as I go along.

You must find everything
about this man.

Who he is, where he's from, what
he's done, what his family is.

Then I get to his wife.

And then you begin to invent on
that wavelength.

You've got to begin
to shade it in

the way a kid shades in
in a coloring book.

There's a journalistic side

to writing novels

because you need the facts,

you need the information,
you need the details.

You have to invent off
of something.

You can't invent off of nothing.

I can't, certainly.

I have to have real
stuff to invent off of.

So I need some reality.

I got to rub two sticks of
reality together

to get a fire of reality.

Years ago in, "I Married
a Communist,"

I had a taxidermist

in mind when I was writing it

and then I thought why don't you
go down

to this taxidermy guy
in New Jersey?

So it's like being a kid
on a school trip

and I had a terrific time

in this stinking, stinking
taxidermy place

where his father
was skinning a fox.

And it stank.

And I had a wonderful day.

And I used jewelry store
in "Everyman."

I walked up Broadway here,

I went right all the way up
and when I found a jeweler,

I went in pretending to buy
an engagement ring

for my girlfriend.

They never believed that.

This old doddering man coming in

and he wants an engagement ring
for his girlfriend.

But I finally... you know,
if you keep going,

you'll find one guy
who will talk.

And the gravedigger,
there's a gravedigger

I know.

Doesn't everyone?

And I went up and watched him.

I said, "Let me know when
you're digging a grave."

And he called me and said he's
digging a grave the next day.

So I went up, brought my lunch
in a bag,

hung around the cemetery,
watched him,

talked to him.

And I began to realize I had no
place to be buried

and that I should look into it.

So I got in my car and began
to drive around

to the various cemeteries.

But every time I got out
of the car

and walked into the cemetery
I felt,

I'm not going to be happy here.

Who will I talk to?

Why don't you go down
to New Jersey

and look where my mother
and father are buried?

So I went down to New Jersey
and I wandered around

with the guy who looks after
the cemetery.

And he showed me various plots
and so on.

I wanted to be near my parents.

But there's nothing running free
near my parents.

And I say, "What about this one
over here?"

which was just sort of
a stone's throw from my parents.

And he said, "I don't like that
for you, Mr. Roth,

there's no leg room."

And I said, "Well, that is
important

because I'm going to be here
a long time."

And so it turns into a comedy,
and the result of all this

was a book called
"Sabbath's Theater,"

in which my hero,
Mickey Sabbath,

wants to kill himself

and begins
to look for a graveyard.

Roth exposed parts of himself
that no one

had ever dreamed
of exposing before.

And in the fullness of time,

it became really inspiring
to me,

not just the early work,

not just the famous outrageous
scenes in "Portnoy's Complaint,"

but also just the devastating
self-portrait

of the self-preoccupied old
satyr in "Sabbath's Theater."

And that was very different
and there,

the permission came from
the character,

not from the situation.

Sabbath bears no resemblance
to Portnoy.

Portnoy's struggle with
repression

and seeking freedom

is a joke to Sabbath, who
doesn't struggle with repression

and doesn't bother seeking
freedom, he just takes it.

"Sabbath's Theater," which may
be his greatest book,

or is certainly among
his greatest books,

written in the mid-'90s,
has one of the most

extraordinary heroines in modern
American literature,

a woman called Drenka, who is
just as sexually ambitious

and rambunctious as any
of the men in any of his books.

She's also a woman of integrity,
hardworking, moral, funny.

She's smart, she's strong,
she's a good mother.

She's all these things.

She's a woman who, in the sexual
game she plays with Sabbath,

she sometimes... she once...
Pretends to be a whore,

takes a lot of money from him
for the fun of it

and then takes that money
and buys her grown son

a set of power tools
with the money

because she's such
a devoted mother...

Her son is a police officer.

I think that
this is an original woman.

She's in her fifties, she's not
young, she's not beautiful.

She's a sexual heroine, and
a moral heroine, if you will.

Sabbath is...

one of...

in a great history of
adulterers.

He's a great adulterer,
and so is Drenka, his mate.

She's not his wife,
she's his lady friend.

And they're both sort of
exuberant adulterers

and writing about them made me
feel good.

And imagining their adventures
made me feel good.

I felt very
free in writing that book.

And the tradition of writing
about adultery was a passion

of the 19th-century.

The greatest
of writers wrote about adultery.

Tolstoy wrote a book
called "Anna Karenina,"

Flaubert wrote a book
called "Madame Bovary."

God, I'm fond of adultery.
Aren't you?

"The softness it brings
to the hardness.

A world without
adultery is unthinkable.

The brutal inhumanity of those
against it, don't you agree?

The sheer depravity
of their views.

The madness.

There is no punishment
too extreme

for the crazy bastard who came
up with the idea of fidelity.

To demand
of human flesh fidelity.

The cruelty of it, the mockery
of it,

is simply unspeakable.

The sexuality in
"Sabbath's Theater" shocked me

far more than "Portnoy,"
I think because "Portnoy"

was so funny...

that I laughed through it.

And "Sabbath's Theater"
was so much darker that

the sexual scenes just loomed
larger and darker for me.

Philip's shocking.

Philip's shocking.

I was very curious as a writer

as to how far I could go.

What happens if you go further?

It's best, certainly
in the early stages of the book,

to abandon self-censorship,

do whatever what you want to do.

Let it be.
Shame isn't for writers.

You have to be shameless.

You can't worry about
being decorous.

This doesn't mean that you have
to be obscene and crazy

and smear your pages with feces,
that's not the point.

But shame won't do.

I couldn't have written
"Sabbath's Theater"

if I felt shame.

I couldn't have written...
I feel plenty of shame

in my own life,
don't get me wrong.

I'm just as shame-ridden
as the next person is.

But when I sit down to write,
I'm free from shame.

When Portnoy is enraged
or lust-ridden,

I'm happy.

Just as when Mickey Sabbath
is full of lust,

I'm sitting in my studio
inventing Mickey Sabbath

in a state of horniness.

I'm not horny while I'm sitting
there writing it.

So that this is a crucial
distinction that has to be made.

Contrary to public opinion
such as it is,

Zuckerman has no sex life
whatsoever,

in any of those books.

I found him being described as
the sex obsessed and so on.

It's isn't so.

Kepesh is a learned man,
he's a learned hedonist.

And for instance
Kepesh and Zuckerman

bear no relationship whatsoever.

Kepesh has only sexual
experience.

I wanted him to be the vessel

to carry all the sexual
experience

that Zuckerman doesn't have.

So, Kepesh has
a crazy hallucinatory

sexual experience
in "The Breast."

He has
a poignant sexual experience

in "The Professor of Desire."

And he has a tough old man's
sexual experience

in "The Dying Animal."

So, if you look at them
carefully,

you see that they're not all
about sex, for one thing,

and that the characters
are very different.

Zuckerman, in
"The Ghost Writer,"

has no sexual experience.

In "Zuckerman Unbound," he has
no sexual experience.

In "The Anatomy Lesson," he has
no sexual experience. No.

In "The Counterlife," no.

In "American Pastoral," no.

In "I Married a Communist," no.

In fact, in these...
And "The Human Stain," no.

In fact in those three books,
he's impotent.

So he has virt... in nine books,

he has virtually no
sexual experience.

He was described repeatedly as
sex obsessed, et cetera.

Well, that's because Roth is.

All readers want to put them
together but nobody has in a way

suffered from that
more than Roth.

I think he has, you know, spoken
about this at great length,

the way that people have
always assumed

his characters are him.

Many of the writers I know have
a stand-in.

Bellow has Hertzog.

Mailer had this character named
Sergius O'Shaugnessy.

Céline had Céline.

Gombrowicz had Gombrowicz.

Those... they didn't
have stand-ins.

They were stand-ins indeed
but they labeled them

with their own name, you know.

The stand-in

both frees you to draw on your
own experience

and to invent
off of your own experience.

It's a mask, and in masks,
there is freedom.

The critique from people
of our generation...

"Oh, these narcissists, all they
care about is themselves."

And as a young writer,
I had this kind

of moralistic response of,

"oh, you bad person,
Philip Roth."

Why...

And eventually I came to feel
as if

that was coming out of an envy,

like wow, I wish I could be
as liberated

of worry about other people's
opinions of me as Roth is,

like here's a person who really

has decided he doesn't care what
the world thinks of him.

And he is not shameable.

"Sex is all the enchantment
required.

Do men find women so enchanting
once the sex is taken out?

Does anyone find anyone,
of any sex, that enchanting

unless they have sexual business
with them?

Who else are you
that enchanted by?

Nobody."

I don't say

I don't write about sex...
I love to write about sex.

But it's vast,
it's a vast subject.

And, uh...

depicting it
and understanding it and...

it's hard.

And whether it's believable
or not,

most of the events
in my books never happened.

But then the books which really

tangle with history are,
follow "Sabbath's Theater"...

"American Pastoral,"

"I Married a Communist,"

and "The Human Stain."

And then "The Plot
Against America."

And in those four books
again history enters

in a way it never had before.

When I wrote
"The Plot Against America,"

I was trying to figure out
what would have happened

if Charles Lindbergh,
the aviator

and extreme right wing
political figure...

If Charles Lindbergh had
become President in 1940

and beaten Roosevelt
in the election.

Imagining politically,
historically and personally

what the results would be
of that,

how it affected this one family,
my family.

There was a very laudatory
and generous piece

by Franck Rich
in The New York Times

in which he said the book was
really an allegory

about the Bush administration.

And this apparently made
the book catch on

as a book people wanted to read,

a book against the Bush
administration.

But it isn't
what my intention was.

Now, if it was resonant, if what
I wrote was resonant, fine.

And if it addressed
emotions that people had

at the moment, fine.

But all of that is accidental.

I think it is in "Exit Ghost"
where he's talking

about the 2004 election which
he's watching with great,

great pain as George W. Bush
is reelected.

And he tries to console these
young people

who are watching the
election with him.

He's in New York briefly
and he's...

Zuckerman is an old man
in his seventies

and he's with a couple who are
29 or 30

and they're just devastated.

It's the second completely
miserable electoral loss

as they've witnessed and
all their ideals

are going down the drain and
they want to leave the country.

And all he wants to
tell them is, "Look, I was there

for the assassinations,
all of the assassinations.

I got through Nixon,
we got through Vietnam,

I got through Pearl Harbor,
this will be over."

And I think the line he has is,

"It's amazing how much
punishment we can take."

And I think there's a lot
of memories stored up there.

There's also... this is just
about memory...

A rather intriguing moment
in a very late book

called "Indignation," which is
about a soldier

who dies in the Korean War
at the age of 19.

It happened to come out, to be
published during the Iraq War

and I think many people saw
an overlap there.

I don't know if Roth intended it
at all,

but we were at that point in
time very concerned with...

the newspaper everyday
had the list of soldiers dead

with ages like 19, 20, 21, 24.

It was horrifying to read and we
also had this issue going

on that we were not allowed
to see photographs

of the coffins being sent home.

My job isn't to be enraged.

My job is what Chekov said

that the job of an artist was,
which is

"the proper presentation
of the problem."

The obligation of the writer
is not to provide the solution

to a problem.

That's the obligation of
a legislator, a leader,

a crusader, a revolutionary,

a warrior and so on.

That's not
the goal or aim of a writer.

You're not selling it and you're
not inviting condemnation.

You're inviting understanding.

And at the same time,
he reacts from book to book.

One book will produce sort
of an opposite number

in the next book.

He'll do, after
"Sabbath's Theater,"

which is about this
diabolically dark,

fascinatingly dark,
almost Falstaffian character,

he'll do "American Pastoral"

because he wanted to
deal with a good man.

So he's written, he wanted
to deal with a good man.

So the books are back to back
in a way.

One book can emerge from
another.

"Is everyone to go off and lock
the door

and sit secluded
like the lonely writers do,

in a soundproof cell,
summoning people out of words

and then proposing that
these word people

are closer to the real thing
than the real people

that we mangle with our
ignorance every day?

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."

When I wrote "American Pastoral"

about a man whose
wonderful family

is destroyed
during the Vietnam War,

I invent the character
as I go along.

"American Pastoral's" hero is
a good man who is brought down,

who is brought down by the war,
and is destroyed really.

At the time, there was nothing
for me to write.

I was in it like everybody else.

I don't mean in Vietnam,
I mean in here in New York,

in Connecticut.

I had been engaged by the war,
terrifically,

disturbed terribly, angered,

like all my friends.

By the time

twenty years had passed,
I was ready to,

to write about it,
and I tried to put into it

everything I knew about
that time

from living through the sixties

and living through the war
and the turbulence

that it produced.

And this was the story
I came up with.

He has been close to the spirit
of his times often

throughout his work so that many
years later,

in "American Pastoral,"
where he's

looking back now on
the Vietnam War,

he deals with American history
and things that

are happening in American
history

in an oblique way, through
families, through people,

through what has gone on
in the domestic scene at home

as the result of what is going
on in the country.

To me it's a little bit like
the way Virginia Woolf

deals with World War I
in "Mrs. Dalloway,"

how the people at home are
affected by what happens.

Once I'd written
"American Pastoral,"

I thought maybe I should look
more closely

at what I'd lived through aside
from the Vietnam War,

which is the stuff that's
in the "American Pastoral."

And, of course, I quickly saw

that the decade that rivaled
the '60s for vividness

and importance in my own life,
young as I was,

was the postwar '45 to '55.

Uh...

Because the...

so-called McCarthy period
really precedes McCarthy

because McCarthy doesn't appear
until June of 1950.

There were a couple communists
in my family.

The whole family was
to the left of center.

And so I'd heard them talk when
I was a kid.

And so I set out to write
"I Married a Communist,"

with a communist at the center

who's accused of being
a communist.

I didn't want a guy who wasn't
a communist

being accused of being
a communist.

That's the old story.

We know that story.

But what was it like for
this communist

who was accused of
being a communist?

So as an American writer,
he has been with us

through the '60s, the '70s,
the '80s, the '90s.

He's been with us as we've
changed and grown.

He's written a diatribe
against Nixon.

He's written a book
that had to do

with the Clinton-Lewinsky
scandal,

obliquely again, but
with the kind of moral issues

that the country was dealing
with at that time.

I don't remember exactly how I
began "The Human Stain,"

with which ingredient I began.

I had several.

And one of them was the...

the Clinton persecution

over a sexual matter,
a sexual scandal, I suppose.

Something about the false
accusation interested me

as it had in "I Married
a Communist."

"It was the summer in America
when the nausea returned,

when the joking didn't stop,

when the speculation
and the theorizing

and the hyperbole didn't stop,

when the moral obligation to
explain to one's children

about adult life was abrogated
in favor of maintaining in them

every illusion about adult life,

when the smallness of people was
simply crushing,

when some kind of demon had been
unleashed in the nation

and, on both sides,
people wondered,

"Why are we so crazy?,"

when men and women alike,
upon awakening in the morning,

discovered that during
the night,

in a state of sleep

that transported them beyond
envy or loathing,

they had dreamed of
the brazenness of Bill Clinton.

It was the summer when
a president's penis

was on everyone's mind,
and life,

in all its shameless impurity,
once again confounded America.

I listen to music in my house,
in my house at night,

especially when I'm alone here.

In the summertime, there are
some music festivals nearby,

and I go there.

I took Mia up to Tanglewood

because they were doing
Mahler's third

which I'm very fond of.

And Mia's mother had died not
long before,

who she was very fond of,
very close...

I mean deeply in love with
and very close to.

And when they were playing
the third movement

of the Mahler, which can
make you cry

without you having lost
your mother, you know,

I saw that Mia was very
emotional and crying.

And that's all that happened.

And then we came back
and I was writing

"The Human Stain."

And so I thought to
put in this scene of

Zuckerman going
to the very same...

Tanglewood rehearsal by himself

and there he sees the hero
of my book, Coleman Silk,

with his paramour.

And all of that came
from our drive up to Tanglewood.

This is extraordinary... you
hear something on the radio,

somebody says something to you,

you read something
in the newspaper

and it's useful to your book.

When I wrote "Nemesis,"
before I began writing it,

I made a long list of historical
moments and events

in American life,
in my lifetime,

that I had never
contemplated fictionally.

And I had a list of events
and some of them were events

I couldn't contemplate
fictionally.

But then in the list
there was polio.

And when I went back to read
the list I circled polio.

And that was the beginning.

I had just that word,
but that's all I needed.

We've talked, Philip and I,
about when I had polio

and I confided to him
the effect it had on me

of being a pariah, you know,
at nine years old,

as somebody that my friends
didn't want to go near

even after I had recovered.

So I decided to write a book
about this menace,

the greatest single menace

to kids like me

when polio began.

The parents were frightened
of it, it was terrifying.

I'd talked to a few people
who'd had polio

and then I invented
this playground director

and off the book went.

And I saw a lot of what I had
told him

but translated, you know,
into something else

in the new book about, you know,

the effect of polio
on a community.

And I couldn't finish the book

because I just didn't want to go
back there.

It's by my bed.

I will finish it,
but I just put it aside

for the time being

because for me to revisit that
is so personal.

People meet their nemesis,
which is what?

Which is the enemy
you can't conquer.

Now I wrote that trying to see
if I could write shorter books.

For years I was trying
to do that, I couldn't do it.

Bellow, at the end of his life,

began to write
these short books...

"The Bellarosa Connection,"
"The Actual," and so on.

And I wondered what he was doing

and why he was doing it.

And I also wondered,
how do you do it?

How...

I'd been writing
rather longish novels,

in which the principle
of creation is amplification...

Amplify, amplify, amplify,
amplify.

But what if you condensed,
condensed, condensed, condensed?

How do you pack a punch?

I asked Saul, how do you
do it in a short novel?

Well, he just laughed.
So I decided I would do it.

And I guess I wrote "Everyman."

The book "Everyman" does draw on
certain aspects

of my brother's experience
as an advertising man

and so on.

And before it was published,
I sent him a manuscript.

And I also wrote a note

which said that, "a lot of
people who know you and know me

are going to assume this is you.

But you know, from reading
the book, where it has

nothing to do with you
whatsoever."

And in many ways it doesn't.

So he was fine.

When the book came out he may
have thrown it

down the toilet for all I know.

He may have walloped his wife.

He may have gone up
to the building

thinking,
"I'll jump off the top."

He never
told me about any of that.

I have a character
in "Everyman,"

a woman, who has back pain,
and I gave her my despair.

You know, I gave her
all my back pain with it.

And she eventually kills
herself.

Long periods of chronic
pain are terrible,

which in my case was back pain,

and how you become crazed.

Because in addition to being
crazed by the pain,

you're crazed by the drugs and
you want something to help you.

And when you find a drug that
will help you, you get caught,

you get caught.

So it's a plague.

It's there when you wake up
in the morning

and you got to be somebody
stronger than I am

to not begin to be affected
psychologically.

I was at my wits' end.

Then you're really
behind the eight ball.

And I was suicidal.

I have contemplated suicide
in these circumstances.

And it gets worse
as you get older.

You have no choice.

You don't have to go looking
for suffering

if you want to be a writer,
it will find you soon enough.

Writing turns out to be a
dangerous job when you think

of the number of writers
who have committed suicide.

So there's probably something
inherently dangerous

in the job or something
in the temperaments

of those who choose the job.

The list is long.

So the question is, why?

What is it that's inherent
to the job

that leads so many
first class writers

to commit suicide?

I don't know.

I don't want to join the list.

In "The Humbling," the guy does
commit suicide at the end.

Now, I wrote that, trying
to see if I can write a book

about a man who commits suicide.

Could I get this character
to suicide persuasively?

And that's what I set out to do.

"The Humbling," the first line
of it is,

"He'd lost his magic."

Now the "he" is an actor and his
magic is the ability to act.

This guy goes out on the stage
one day to perform

and he can't act,
and he's a wonderful actor.

He is brought down by not being
able to do what he does.

And then he has an affair
and he loses that.

And so he runs home
and he kills himself.

He's humbled.

He loses his power.

He loses his talent,
he loses his magic.

There we are.

Have I ever thought I lost
my magic?

Sure. Sure.

Uh...

Sporadically.

Certainly between books
it's very easy to think

you can't do it again.

I think it's a fear that stays
with me between books.

But I certainly
don't seem not to write.

I keep doing it, I never quit.

My worst times are when I...

My worst times are when
I'm not writing.

I'm prone then to be unhappy,

depressed, anxious, and so on.

So I need it desperately.

I think, in the books
that he's been writing

in the last several years,

there is, Philip
has been expressing his concern

about growing old,

about losing, losing his magic.

We were talking about old age,

and I had a friend,
Alfred Kazin,

who said, "Old age is not
for sissies,"

and Philip said,
"Old age is a massacre."

"Can you imagine old age?

Of course you can't.
I didn't.

I couldn't.
I had no idea what it was like.

Not even a false image...
No image.

And nobody wants anything else.

Nobody wants to face any of this
before he has to.

How is it all going to turn out?

Obtuseness is de rigueur."

His view of old age as
represented in the books

seemed...

seems just as bleak as it could
possibly be.

And really depressing.

But he's such
a young man in his spirit

and in his writing that
to read those later books

representing, you know,
an older man, in age,

and the finality and
hopelessness and helplessness

of that, it made me sad.

Sometimes he's said that that's
his last book.

But I've heard that
and I don't believe it anymore.

One day I was walking down
the road,

I'd walked about a mile, and...

I looked up on the side of
the road,

I couldn't miss it.

Attached to a tree with a nail,
on a piece of wood,

was a big sign that said
"Bring back Portnoy!"

It was wonderful.

It was a hilarious moment
for me, really.

And I actually thought about it
for the rest of the walk.

Why don't I do that?

I never thought of
doing it, bringing back Portnoy.

That was a one-off performance,
you know, one night only.

One-man show.

And it happened at a certain
moment in cultural time,

it happened at a certain moment
in my private history,

and I thoroughly enjoyed
the work.

And, um...

some other people enjoyed it
too, some people hated it,

and let it rest.

I read the writers I read
30, 40, 50 years ago,

who I want to read now
as an old man.

I want to read now
in a way fresh.

Turgenev I had a good time with.

Conrad I had a good time with.

Hemingway and Faulkner
I had a good time with.

Oh, my goodness,
I read Kafka like crazy.

I think I saturated myself
with Kafka.

A way of telling a story

that no one had ever
come upon before.

The invention of a world

that no one had invented before.

It's astonishing.

So I want to read these books
before I die, again.

I wrote "Everyman,"

"Indignation," "The Humbling,"

and I wrote "Nemesis"

and they all are
characterized by

the cataclysm of death,

how dying affects the lives

of those who are about to die.

Now why, at this time of life,

isn't difficult to figure out.

If you look
at your address book,

it's like walking
through a cemetery.

Um...

So one is at a funeral,

as anybody my age
or older knows,

one is at a funeral every
six months.

Of who? No longer of your
parents or grandparents,

of course, of your friends.

And it's particularly
painful losing friends.

It's a bitch,
but your friends die.

The prospect of death is...

generates fear, sadness,

the desire to have
the whole thing all over again.

But not rage.

I am not worried.

I'm sad but I'm not worried.

The time is running out.

There's nothing

I can do after that.

There's nothing to be done.

And who cares, anyway?

Nobody cares.

You know, just, they see this
little old man walking

down the street
and they help me.

So fame now is good.

They help me across the street,
you know.

Where am I going to be buried?

If I were to tell you where
I'm going to be buried,

the result would be,
at the moment

I was in the ground,

and the address of the place
was out,

the place would
be overrun by teenyboppers.

We got to have an ending,

we have an ending,
a moving ending

about the poor fellow, the poor
old guy who's gonna die.

And let that be the end, okay?

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.