{"id":41706,"date":"2012-11-13T10:39:29","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T15:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=41706"},"modified":"2018-05-23T12:18:30","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T16:18:30","slug":"in-which-philip-roth-announces-his-retirement-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/13\/in-which-philip-roth-announces-his-retirement-in-english\/","title":{"rendered":"In Which Philip Roth Announces His Retirement (in English)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last month our friends at the French cultural magazine <\/em>Les Inrockuptibles<\/a> reported that Philip Roth has called it a day, and the world took notice. Here is the full interview with Nelly Kaprielian<\/a>, in English. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/em><\/p>\n

Out of all your novels, Nemesis<\/strong><\/em> seems to be the one where you lay out most clearly your own vision of existence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s true. I think everything in life is a matter of luck. I don\u2019t believe in psychoanalysis, or in a subconscious that guides our choices. All we have is the good luck or the bad luck to meet certain people who will be either good or bad for us. My first wife, for example, turned out to be a criminal\u2014she was always stealing, lying, and so forth\u2014and it\u2019s not as if I chose her for that reason. I hate criminals. But there you are, I had the bad luck to marry a bad person. Psychoanalysts will tell you that I chose her unconsciously\u2014I don\u2019t believe in that, though in a certain way this isn\u2019t far from my own view, which is that, in the face of life, we are innocents. There is a certain innocence in each of us in the way we deal with our lives.<\/p>\n

Nemesis<\/strong> belongs to a group of four novels entitled \u201cNemeses\u201d (including Everyman<\/em>, Indignation<\/em>, and The Humbling<\/em>). How are they connected?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Each one deals with the subject of death from a different point of view. In each of these books, the protagonist has to face his \u201cnemesis,\u201d a word one hears a lot in the United States, and which could be defined as doom, or misfortune, a force that he can\u2019t overcome and that chooses him as its victim. In Nemesis<\/em>, the nemesis seems to be polio, but in the case of Bucky Cantor, it is actually his troubled conscience. One thing that\u2019s always interested me as a writer, ever since Letting Go<\/em>, one of my first novels, is people who have an extreme\u2014and finally misplaced\u2014sense of their own responsibility. Bucky is a man who defines himself solely by his virtue, and that\u2019s a very dangerous thing. It isn\u2019t just polio that\u2019s going to ruin his life, but his aspiration to total responsibility.<\/p>\n

Why polio?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, because it\u2019s a new subject for me, somthing I\u2019ve never written about before, and also because for people born like me in the 1920s or \u201930s in America, polio loomed very large. Until the vaccine was discovered, in 1955, we all lived with the threat of it, and it terrified us. It wasn\u2019t until after I wrote Nemesis<\/em> that I saw its connection to my novel The Plot Against America<\/em>. In both cases, I imagine a tragedy that strikes the Jewish community of Newark in the 1940s\u2014the community I come from. In the case of The Plot<\/em>, I made up the menace, the nemesis\u2014the Nazi Charles Lindbergh becoming president of the United States. In Nemesis<\/em>, it\u2019s polio, which existed, although there wasn\u2019t an epidemic in 1944. And also illness is the most extreme form of misfortune. It pounces on you and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it.<\/p>\n

Beyond the question of bad luck, it seems to me that you are interested in writing about what we do with our luck and how a man reacts to what happens to him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although we may believe that Bucky destroys his life by breaking up with his fianc\u00e9e, for Bucky, who wants to be the embodiment of the word \u201cresponsibility,\u201d this breakup is a great success, even if it condemns him to solitude. But I don\u2019t have any judgment about that, I only wanted to raise the question. That above all is how I see my job as a writer. What happens when people are faced with a polio epidemic? The novel is made to raise questions, not to give answers. I don\u2019t write books of philosophy.<\/p>\n

And yet Nemesis<\/em> raises the question of destiny or chance, of the meaning of life… <\/strong><\/p>\n

To tell you the truth, I\u2019m not much given to abstractions. I don\u2019t have that turn of mind. And as soon as a conversation gets into metaphysics or philosophy, I fall asleep. The only thing that really interests me\u2014all I know how to do\u2014is to tell a story. As soon as people start talking in abstractions, I feel as if I\u2019m ten years old again, I stop understanding, and I just want to take a long nap.<\/p>\n

Your recent books are all haunted by some menace. How much do you think it influenced you to be a Jewish child during the war?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had a very protected childhood. My parents never got divorced, I lived in a neighborhood that was ninety-nine percent Jewish, so we weren\u2019t touched by anti-Semitism. Of course, from the time I was eight until I was twelve, the country was at war, and I was very interested in that. Every generation that lived through the Second World War, whether it was in France or Germany or here, was marked for life. The other menace, a real one, was polio. Every summer, when we\u2019d spend the day playing outside, we heard people talking about polio. We didn\u2019t care until one of us died of it. But you know, I don\u2019t believe that the biography of a writer has anything to do with his books.<\/p>\n

So what makes you write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The desire to experiment, to ask what if. What if \u2026 such and such occurred, what would happen then? I begin all of my books with a what if. For example, \u201cWhat if a polio epidemic had struck my neighborhood in Newark in 1944?\u201d<\/p>\n

Can you see yourself begining to write with a \u201cWhat if \u2026 this great guy married this wonderful girl and they were happy together?\u201d Is happiness not a good subject for writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

But I already wrote that book! Years ago, when I wrote The Professor of Desire<\/em>, I wanted to write about a very common phenomenon that you never read anything about\u2014if two people fall in love with each other and get married \u2026 what happens? Well, sex disappears, the sexuality between them disappears. Marriage is the direct route to chastity. So you see, I started writing The Professor of Desire<\/em> about a situation that was happy but that led to a real problem.<\/p>\n

Was it autobiographical?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It would be simplistic to think that a writer only writes what happened to him. Most of the time I write about things that didn’t happen to me\u2014because I\u2019m curious. A writer can even be drawn to subjects that are way outside his universe. The important thing is to find what will unlock a wave of writing in him, what\u2019s going to spark verbal energy. Certain subjects have potential, others don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Do you know why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not at all. Or rather, I stopped knowing why a while ago. That’s the great achievement of my life\u2014today I know that I don\u2019t know. And that subjects don\u2019t come to me easily. For me, writing has always been something very difficult. The problem is that when I was a child I fell in love with literature. Later on I told myself that I could be a writer. So I tried and that worked to a certain degree. If I could have done something better, believe me, I would have, gladly! But in the beginning it was exciting, so I kept at it.<\/p>\n

Do you still have the desire to write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. Anyway, I have no intention of writing in the next ten years. To tell the truth, I\u2019m finished. Nemesis<\/em> is going to be my last book. Look at E.\u2009M. Forster. He stopped writing at around the age of forty. And I, who used to churn out book after book, haven\u2019t written anything in three years. I\u2019ve been working instead on my archives so I can turn them over to my biographer. I\u2019ve turned over thousands of pages which are like memoirs but not literary, not publishable as such. I don\u2019t want to write my memoirs, but I wanted my biographer to have the material for his book before I die. If I die without leaving him anything, what will he start with?<\/p>\n

But you just spent our whole interview saying that the life of a writer has no bearing on his work, and yet you find it important that someone write your biography?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have no choice. If it were up to me, I\u2019d prefer that there not be any biography of me, but there will be biographies after I die, so at least I want to make sure that one of them\u2019s correct. Blake Bailey wrote an excellent biography of John Cheever, who was a friend of mine and a tough subject for a biography, since, being gay and alcoholic, he spent almost his entire life in concealment. Bailey got in touch with me, we spent two whole days talking, and he convinced me. But I won\u2019t control his work. In any case, twenty percent of it will be wrong, but that\u2019s always better than twenty-two percent.<\/p>\n

How have you started to prepare your archives for after your death?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once Blake Bailey has got what he needs, I\u2019ve asked my executors\u2014my agent, Andrew Wylie, and a friend who\u2019s a psychoanalyst\u2014to destroy them after my death. I don\u2019t want my personal papers dragged all over the place. No one has to read them. All my manuscripts are already in the Library of Congress and have been there since the seventies.<\/p>\n

At seventy-eight, how do you feel about what you\u2019ve written?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I turned seventy-four, I realized that I didn\u2019t have much time left, so I decided to reread the novels that I loved when I was twenty or thirty, because that\u2019s what you never reread. Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Conrad, Hemingway \u2026 and when I finished, I decided to reread all my books, starting at the end, Nemesis<\/em>. I read until I got tired of them, just before Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/em>, which is a flawed book. I wanted to see whether I\u2019d been wasting my time by writing. And I decided that I\u2019d actually done all right. At the end of his life the boxer Joe Louis said, \u201cI did the best I could with what I had.\u201d That\u2019s exactly what I\u2019d say about my work. I did the best I could with what I had.<\/p>\n

And after that, I decided that I was done with fiction. I don\u2019t want to read any more of it, write any more of it, I don\u2019t even want to talk about it anymore. I\u2019ve given my life to the novel. I\u2019ve studied it, I\u2019ve taught it, I\u2019ve written it, and I\u2019ve read it. To the exclusion of practically everything else. It\u2019s enough! I don\u2019t feel that fanaticism about writing that I felt all my life. The idea of trying to write one more time is impossible to me!<\/p>\n

Aren\u2019t you exaggerating a little bit?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing means always being wrong. All your drafts tell the story of your failures. I don\u2019t have the energy of frustration anymore, or the strength to confront myself. Because to write is to be frustrated. You spend your time writing the wrong word, the wrong sentence, the wrong story. You continually fool yourself, you continually fail, and so you have to live in a state of perpetual frustration. You spend your time telling yourself, That doesn\u2019t work, I have to start again. Oh, that doesn\u2019t work either\u2014and you start again. I\u2019m tired of all that work. I\u2019m in a different stage of my life. And I don\u2019t feel at all melancholy.<\/p>\n

So there won\u2019t ever be another Philip Roth novel? <\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think another novel more or less can change whatever it is I\u2019ve already done. And if I write a new book, it will almost certainly be a failure. Who needs another mediocre book?<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have any desire to write about America today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m seventy-eight, I don\u2019t know anything anymore about America today. I watch it on TV. But I don\u2019t live there.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to end with a political question, two months before the elections. Do you think Mitt Romney has a chance against Obama?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, but not for good reasons, just because he has no charisma and even Americans are beginning to understand how boring he is. If he won, it would be a disaster\u2014right-wing American presidents are always disasters. But I\u2019m still impressed with Obama. It\u2019s been a long time since we had someone so intelligent in the White House. So I look forward to voting for him again. But you know, I don\u2019t like talking about politics. Who am I to give a public opinion? I\u2019m just a citizen like anybody else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month our friends at the French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles reported that Philip Roth has called it a day, and the world took notice. Here is the full interview with Nelly Kaprielian, in English. \u2014Lorin Stein Out of all your novels, Nemesis seems to be the one where you lay out most clearly your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9200,529,241,9197,5099,99,9198,9199,530,2021],"class_list":["post-41706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-blake-bailey","tag-french","tag-interview","tag-nemesis","tag-obama","tag-philip-roth","tag-the-plot-against-america","tag-the-professor-of-desire","tag-translation","tag-world-war-ii"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Which Philip Roth Announces His Retirement (in English) by Nelly Kaprielian<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 13, 2012 \u2013 Last month our friends at the French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles reported that Philip Roth has called it a day, and the world took notice. 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