{"id":48949,"date":"2013-03-23T10:04:29","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T14:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=48949"},"modified":"2018-05-23T12:16:46","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T16:16:46","slug":"here-we-are-on-the-occasion-of-philip-roths-eightieth-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/23\/here-we-are-on-the-occasion-of-philip-roths-eightieth-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Here We Are: On the Occasion of Philip Roth\u2019s Eightieth Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Birthday-Party\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Upon the occasion of Philip Roth\u2019s eightieth birthday, acclaimed critic and biographer Hermione Lee likened the newly retired writer first to Shakespeare and then to one of his creations, The Tempest<\/i>\u2019s Prospero, who famously invokes the audience\u2019s applause as a means to his freedom. But surely, not even Prospero enjoyed such applause as Mr. Roth received on his birthday night, as family, friends, and fans gathered at the Newark Museum on Tuesday evening to honor the literary legend. Dressed in their party best, yet casual and comfortable (no black ties here), guests at the invitation-only celebration\u2014including Philip Gourevitch, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, Library of America\u2019s Max Rudin, official Roth biographer Blake Bailey, and many dedicated Roth scholars and members of the Philip Roth Society\u2014perused collections of American and Tibetan art and visited the nineteenth-century home of the Ballantines, then mingled in the museum\u2019s airy classical court, pacing the marble floors, conversing, sipping sodas and sparkling water, and nibbling on hors d\u2019oeuvres and crudit\u00e9s before moving to the auditorium for a program of tributes and speeches. <\/p>\n

Liz Del Tufo of the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee first welcomed the crowd\u2014and Roth\u2014\u201cwith affection,\u201d followed by Aimee Pozorski, president of the Philip Roth Society, who spoke of the society\u2019s wish to honor \u201cthe great writing of a great man.\u201d Jonathan Lethem took to the podium, joking that he had prepared “a counter-Roth tribute” and recalling with equal humor his early experience with Roth\u2019s risqu\u00e9 Kafkaesque novel The Breast<\/i> as a young man.\u00a0Roth had, said Lethem, \u201cclosed the distance between [Saul] Bellow and Mad<\/em> Magazine,\u201d helping to quell \u201cthe yearning for high seriousness\u201d at a time when this was most needed. Perhaps suggesting, for those who were curious, the manner by which Roth handles his detractors, Claudia Roth Pierpont spoke of his humor and wit. When she complained directly to the author about the character Jaime of Exit Ghost<\/i>, she recalls that Roth quipped, \u201cYou should hear what she says about you.\u201d Edna O\u2019Brien, who described the author\u2019s \u201cprodigious energy and zest\u201d that \u201calmost never spiral out of control\u201d and gushed that Roth was \u201cthe most perfect tuning fork of the written word of any period,\u201d set the record straight once and for all that the two had never, despite any rumors the contrary, been lovers. Despite this admission, she displayed no shortage of affection for the guest of honor, sharing accounts of her time with Roth and describing him as \u201cmorally rigorous \u2026 a frugal man but also capable of great generosity \u2026 feared and revered \u2026 undoubtedly one of Yeats\u2019s great Olympians.\u201d<\/p>\n

At long last Roth took to the stage himself amidst a crowd on its feet, now applauding, whistling, cheering. He sat at a large table, appeared calm and composed. \u201cThere is no good reason for an eighty-year-old man to regret that things are different,\u201d Roth said, recalling briefly the best and worst days of his life. A clever bout of what the author recognized as paralipsis\u2014speaking of exactly those subjects of which one has promised not to speak\u2014was followed by what David Remnick has called\u2014and what so many others are sure to state\u2014\u201cthe most astonishing literary performance I\u2019ve ever witnessed\u201d: a reading of a scene from what Roth has often described as his favorite novel, Sabbath\u2019s Theater<\/i>, that begins at a cemetery that holds the remains of those closest to the main character, Mickey Sabbath, and ends with the words \u201cHere I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those hoping for the news that Roth\u2019s retirement was a hoax or an egregious rumor were surely disappointed, as Roth left little hope for a literary encore when he spoke to a hushed room of \u201chaving concluded over a half a century of writing.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve described my last javelin throw,\u201d he said. \u201cI don’t want to describe another death.\u201d Still, the mood of the evening (and Roth) was always upbeat and\u2014to borrow from Lethem\u2014absent of any \u201chigh seriousness.\u201d Nathan Englander, who reflects on the author and his works in Philip Roth: Unmasked<\/em>, for PBS\u2019s American Masters<\/em> series, airing March 29, explained, \u201cIt\u2019s a joy to be here. There are people from Brazil and Rome, critics and literary people from all over the world. It\u2019s great to have so many of Roth\u2019s friends, so many writers together here in Newark.\u201d Indeed, with literary guests from all over the world wandering the court, this Puritan-founded city with its industrial steel landscape and sputtering smokestacks was transformed\u2014or, more accurately, revealed\u2014not only as a literary landmark, as so many cities are, but as proof of a kind of indefatigable literary resilience and fortitude; proof of the existence, still, of an unquenchable literary love that has dwelled in each town and city in America since Melville and Twain.<\/p>\n

The celebration wound down with champagne, a toast given by Louise Erdich, cake (in the shape of a book, of course)\u2014and a marching band that paraded ever briefly through Engelhard Court before, finally, everyone joined in to sing a birthday song for the guest of honor. What must the many writers in the crowd have thought upon witnessing such a scene? As guests gathered around Roth to give him their well wishes at the night\u2019s end, Jonathan Lethem remarked to me simply and poignantly, \u201cIt makes me think about the goal line.\u201d Doubtless, many in the audience were thinking the same. We had begun as readers\u2014as readers of Roth and of those that preceded him\u2014and now were committed to that same work from which Roth had stepped back and dusted his hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou flood into history and history floods into you,\u201d thought Zuckerman.*<\/p>\n

Here we are.<\/p>\n

Je Banach is a member of the Residential Faculty in Fiction at the Yale Writers\u2019 Conference. In June of 2013, she will also lead the conference\u2019s seminar on literary discourse (criticism and review). She is the author of teaching and reading guides to works of fiction and nonfiction for Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Simon & Schuster. Most recently, she wrote guides to Ian McEwan\u2019s <\/em>Sweet Tooth, Salman Rushdie\u2019s <\/em>Luka and the Fire of Life, and the Dalai Lama\u2019s <\/em>Beyond Religion. Banach was a longtime contributor to Harold Bloom\u2019s literary series with Infobase Publishing. A recipient of the New Boston Fund Fellowship in Fiction, she has written for many other academic and popular venues, including <\/em>Esquire, Granta, <\/em>Guernica, KGB Bar Lit, <\/em>Bookforum, Oxford University Press, <\/em>Publishers Weekly, and PEN.<\/p>\n

* From Roth\u2019s I Married a Communist<\/i>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Upon the occasion of Philip Roth\u2019s eightieth birthday, acclaimed critic and biographer Hermione Lee likened the newly retired writer first to Shakespeare and then to one of his creations, The Tempest\u2019s Prospero, who famously invokes the audience\u2019s applause as a means to his freedom. But surely, not even Prospero enjoyed such applause as Mr. Roth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":503,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[10435,10436,1351,8426,10434,1482,10433,10432,122,1787,99],"class_list":["post-48949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aimee-pozorski","tag-engelhard-court","tag-jonathan-lethem","tag-jonathan-safran-foer","tag-liz-del-tufo","tag-louise-erdrich","tag-max-rudin","tag-newark","tag-nicole-krauss","tag-philip-gourevitch","tag-philip-roth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHere We Are: On the Occasion of Philip Roth\u2019s Eightieth Birthday by Je Banach<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 23, 2013 \u2013 Upon the occasion of Philip Roth\u2019s eightieth birthday, acclaimed critic and biographer Hermione Lee likened the newly retired 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