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There are those for whom he will always be the author (and alter ego?)
But he was equally unsparing to those he knew, loved, and fictionalized.
And now of course its impossible.
You go to feminist prison; you serve 20 years to life.)
This is fertile ground for a biographer.
I dont want you to rehabilitate me, Roth told him.
Just make me interesting.
(It weighs in at 898 pages.)
This one is more stressful than my Cheever book, Bailey admitted when we spoke this week.
Its very hard to kindly everybody with a biography of Philip Roth.
Maybe we can start at the beginning.
Roth was a live subject in every sense of the word.
Philip certainly tried to influence me.
I took those obviously into account.
I very much declare ownership of this book.
I think it is a very independent-minded production.
Would Philip be happy with it?
I think he essentially would.
But I think that there were certain things in it that would have been extremely mortifying to Philip.
Im asking because its something thats come up in some of the reviews.
Im sure you saw theTimesreview…That was brutal.
If you love Philip, Im way too hard on him.
And if you hate him, I cant possibly be hard enough.
A lot of people said that approvingly.
Do I give air to his better qualities?
I certainly do, and they were numerous.
He was in many ways a darling man.
He certainly seems to have felt that.He did.
He wanted the public to perceive him as sort of somewhat above it all.
But really one of Philips most endearing qualities was that he was extremely vulnerable.
I mean,Claire Blooms bookdevastated him.
He never responded publicly, but he never got over it.
That must be a minefield for a biographer, since those arent necessarily your terms.
We had a very nice rapport.
I did not openly discuss, unless he confronted me, what sort of conclusions I was reaching.
I let him do the talking.
He was feeling really shitty.
So I kept questioning him about it.
And he kept saying, Im not going to answer that.
Thats not in my interest to answer.
And he started getting worked up.
That was very Philip.
He could do the whole sort of baleful, browbeating stuff.
I was quite capable of pushing back on Philip, too, when he was hassling me.
Im fond of you, Philip, but Im not your best friend.
And I would attempt to remind him of that.
For the most part, Philip really did have a go at kind of respect that difference.
He knew we had a binding agreement.
He knew he had to cooperate and make himself accessible to me.
And he knew I was going to let the chips fall where they may.
I call herInga Larsenin my book.
And Philip and I went back and forth about this.
First, he thought that she didnt deserve the protection of a pseudonym.
I said, thats a violation of our agreement.
If she will only talk to me pseudonymously, then then thats something Im willing to grant.
It was understood between us that I did not have to show him anything of that sort.
And this was eating him alive.
He was terrified of what had been disclosed.
So I showed him the transcripts.
I wonder whether they hastened his end.
He found them very harrowing.
I very much tell Ingas side of things in my book.
Tell me a little bit about the process of reporting the book.
For example,Maggiesdaughter, who I called Helen in the book …
The 28-year-old Philip Roth, counterintuitively enough, was a wonderful stepfather.
Parul got all over me because Im hard on Maggie Maggie was a disaster, okay?
Philip filled that void.
He did what the nice Jewish boy remained to the end of his days would have done.
There was a huge mensch streak in Philip.
One of the titles for this biography that he suggested to you was Dont Step on the Underdog.
This at a point in his career where he was a favorite for the Nobel Prize.
Did he truly believe to the end of his life that he still was the underdog?He didnt.
He didnt perceive himself as the underdog, his heart went out to the underdog.
That was the underdog or the way his father was treated at Metropolitan Life as a Jew.
Thats why he wanted to be a lawyer on behalf of the underdog, possibly for Bnai Brith.
But Philip wanted his cake and to eat it too.
That was a side of Philip.
But what he didnt understand what heaffectednot to understand was that there was also the Mickey Sabbath side.
Philip brought this controversy on himself.
So here we are.
Those kinds of books and those kinds of jokes play differently in 1969 than they play 1999 and 2019.
The distance that hes come in the public conception whatever the private truth may have been is great.
I mean, he wroteThe Human Stain he saw cancel culture coming.
He saw the sort of moral absolutism, especially on college campuses, that political correctness was tending toward.
He equally disliked the assholes on the left as he disliked the assholes on the right.
Toward the end, he lived long enough to see Me Too, and I think it terrified him.
He didnt know what was going to come streaming out of the woodwork.
And thats when he revived the issue of Inga between us, because that had him thoroughly rattled.
As he liked to say, he let the repellent in.He let the repellent in.
And that is an aesthetic, I think, that will be his legacy.
In a good way.
Show people as they are.
Certainly, we exhaustively discussed his controversial sex life and how he thought he was perceived because of that.
So there was sufficient animus for something like that to happen.
Who knows what the future will bring.
I am startled by the vehemence of certain reactions to my book, for example.
But I never imagined that I would be implicated as implicitly condoning Philips behavior.
I dont see how anyone in good faith can reach that conclusion reading my book.
Thats just astonishing to me.
She deeply resented her family being portrayed as these archetypal Jewish suburban Philistines.
Drenka is another one.
Maria Freshfield inThe Counterlifeis another one.
Theyre both very intelligent, well spoken, and sympathetic people.
But Philip didnt spare himself in his writing.
You know, he gave us Portnoy, he gave us Sabbath.
Well, thats a pretty damning thing to say.
It was listed on Amazon.
It was ready to go.
But is it a lost Roth gem?
No, absolutely not.
Whats the phrase thatHermioneused?
Philip wasnt a deliberate fabricator like John Cheever was.
But he saw things through his very subjective lens, and usually it was as an apologist for himself.
Id like to talk about the Roth canon more broadly, the published Roth canon.
I also likeIndignation,a very underrated book.
Im also interested in which didnt stick out to you the first time and later did.
I was surprised to read that Roth thoughtThe Breastwas particularly worthy of rediscovery.Thats astonishing to me.
Well, of course, hes talking about fucking a nurse with his nipple.
Kind of a mixed blessing if youre a feminist.
I dont get his fondness forThe Breast, either.
Ill leave it at that.
One thing that doesnt come up very much in the book is Roths influence.
I think what Zadie Smith said gets nearest to the heart of it.
He also wrote about sympathetic Jewish characters.
Its a question of voice.
I think that there is a sort of ranting loquacity to much of Philips work.
And I think that we find that, especially in young Jewish writers.
I think Jonathan Lethem would concede the influence.
And many others as well.
This isTheBiography, as the subtitle has itThats pissing people off.
Look, Philips dead now.
No biographer will ever have access to the living man again.
All his private papers are under public seal until 2050.
I will probably be dead.
And many people in my generation.
Some of those papers will not even make it to 2050.
I had hours and hours of interview tapes with Sandy, who has been dead since 2009.
Its a defensible point, and I dont ask you to litigate it.
Which I think can be safely assumed about Ira [Nadel]s book too.
And I think I can take a break from Roth, especially after this month is over.
