September 26, 2007
Philip Roth speaks in this week’s New Yorker
Philip Roth spoke with author Hermione Lee in this week’s New Yorker (link to article unavailable). Most of the interview focused on Roth’s new novel, “Exit Ghost
On Zuckerman’s return to New York City and the haunting of his past:
“Who of us has returned to a childhood home or a city that may have figured prominently in his biography without knowing full well that seeing it again was bound to be an experience at once exciting and sad? ‘Haunted by the past’ is a commonplace phrase because it’s a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, ‘haunted,’ the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become. I agree with the Chekhov character who, when, in a crisis, he is reminded that ‘this too, shall pass,’ responds, ‘Nothing passes.’”
On the source of Zuckerman’s animus against biography (in the book, Zuckerman has a run-in with Richard Kliman, an opportunistic ‘literary predator’ out to do a hatchet job on E.I. Lonoff, Zuckerman’s former mentor. The way it comes out in the New Yorker piece, Hermione Lee’s question could just as easily been directed at Roth himself):
“As for the novelist’s animus against biography—there is none. The animus is against the kind of biography Zuckerman believes Kliman to be writing, and his assessment is grounded in what he judges to be the highly dubious evidence that Kliman presents of Lonoff’s ‘secret history.’ It would be as wrong-headed to read into the presentation of Kliman an attack on the genre of biography as to read, say, my presentation of Portnoy as an attack on the practice of masturbation. I count myself a friend of both.”
On how President Bush weighs on his spirits and on his writing:
“Yes, what Bush is doing to America disgusted me, just as it has scores of millions of others. But, no, this weight has not infiltrated my work as a writer.”
On reading his own books:
“I don’t like to reread my own books; at this stage of the game I’d much rather spend my reading time—as I have been doing—revisiting, for the last time around, other writers, like Conrad and Hemingway and Faulkner and Turgenev.”
On whether Zuckerman has really exited for good:
“Yes, I mean for him to be—in the final words of the book—“gone for good.”
Well, I guess that makes it official. It was good knowing you, Zuckerman.
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