Roth - Reading Myself and Others

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Contents

To Saul Bellow, the other I have read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration

Acknowledgments

All but one of the pieces in this book originally appeared in the publications cited below; some were published under other titles and in slightly different form. The author is grateful for permission to reprint.

Writing and the Powers That Be, La Trappola e la Nudit: Lo Scrittore e il Potere, edited by Walter Mauro and Elena Clementelli (Rizzoli, 1974); in English, in The American Poetry Review, July/August 1974.

On Portnoys Complaint, The New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1969.

How Did You Come to Write That Book, Anyway? The American Poetry Review, July/August 1974.

On Our Gang, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1971; reprinted as an afterword to the Watergate Edition of Our Gang (Bantam Books, 1973).

The President Addresses the Nation, The New York Review of Books, June 14, 1973; also included, somewhat abridged, as a skit in Watergate Capers, a satirical review performed in repertory at the Yale Drama School in November and December 1973.

On The Breast, The New York Review of Books, October 19, 1972.

On The Great American Novel, Partisan Review, No. 3, 1973.

On My Life as a Man, The Literary Guild, June 1974.

After Eight Books, The Ontario Review, No. 1, Fall 1974.

Writing American Fiction, Commentary, March 1961.

Some New Jewish Stereotypes, American Judaism, Winter 1961.

Writing About Jews, Commentary, December 1963.

The Story of Three Stories, The New York Times, October 24, 1971.

The Newark Public Library, The New York Times, March 1, 1969.

My Baseball Years, The New York Times, April 2, 1973.

Cambodia: A Modest Proposal, Look, October 6, 1970.

Our Castle, The Village Voice, September 19, 1974.

Alan Lelchuk, Esquire, October 1972.

Milan Kundera, portions in Esquire, March 1974, and in The American Poetry Review, March/April 1974; in its entirety it served as the introduction to Laughable Loves (Knopf, 1974).

Fredrica Wagman, introduction to Playing House, ou les jeux rprouvs (Seghers, 1974).

Imagining Jews, The New York Review of Books, September 29, 1974.

I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting; or, Looking at Kafka, American Review 17, May 1973. Quotations from The Castle and The Trial are from the texts published by Knopf; all others from Kafkas works (and from Max Brods biography) are from the Schocken editions.

Authors Note

These twenty-three pieces were written sporadically over the last fifteen years, between the time my first book of fiction was published in 1959 and my eighth in 1974. Most come out of the end of that period, a few are from the beginning, hardly any out of the middlesuggesting, rightly enough, that they are largely the by-products of getting started as a novelist, and then of taking stock. Because recognitionand with it, oppositioncame to me almost immediately, I seem (from the evidence here) to have felt called upon both to assert a literary position and to defend my moral flank the instant after I had managed to take my first steps; of late I have tried to gain some perspective on what Ive been reading and writing since.

Together these pieces reveal to me a continuing preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world. This simple distinction (embracing a complex phenomenon) is borrowed from Paul Goodman. It is more useful to me than the distinction between imagination and reality, or art and life, first, because everyone can think through readily enough to the clear-cut differences between the two, and second, because the worlds that I feel myself shuttling between every day couldnt be more succinctly described. Back and forth, back and forth, bearing fresh information, detailed instructions, garbled messages, desperate inquiries, nave expectations, baffling new challenges in all, cast somewhat in the role of the courier Barnabas, whom the Land Surveyor K. enlists to traverse the steep winding road between the village and the castle in Kafkas novel about the difficulties of getting through. (Also about what comes of taking yourself too seriouslyor is it what comes of believing you are not being taken seriously enough? Or is that the same thing?)

Reading Myself and Others is divided into two parts, each arranged more or less chronologically, and separated (or hinged) by the conjunction of the title. There is considerable overlap, but myselfas reader and readis whats at the heart of Part One. This section consists mainly of interviews in which I describe what I think has generated my work, the means employed from book to book, and the models with which I associate my efforts (as distinguished from my achievement, whatever that may be). All the interviews reached their final form in writing, though some began in conversational exchanges that roughly laid out the terrain and suggested the tone and focus of what appeared in print.

Part Two is made up of selected articles and essays, many of them occasioned by an invitationto give a talk, to oppose an adversary, to introduce a writer, to mark an event. I have never been good at keeping a diary or a journal and these pieces (I now find) are what I have instead as a record of whats been on my mind while most of my energy went into writing fiction. They point to difficulties, enthusiasms, and aversions that have evolved along with my work. At the bottom of the opening page of very nearly every piece I have briefly noted the occasion that prompted it; similarly, in the first section, the interviewer is identified, the date given, and, where it seemed at all pertinent, the circumstances of the interview described. The full details of publication appear in the Acknowledgments.

Almost all these pieces were first published in slightly different form. For clarity and readability (and for the sake of my own self-respect), sentences along the way have been sharpened, several dozen paragraphs have been unclogged, and any number of redundancies and irrelevancies have been painlessly excised; also, some titles have been changed. But what I wrote appears substantially as it was written, even where I am now not wholly taken with the writers mode of self-presentation, or might not undertake his seemingly interminable task of self-justification in the same way. It may even turn out that this task will no longer seem so pressing now that I have accumulated so many words in its service. Perhaps that is the benefit to be derived from publishing this sort of book. Then again it may not be within my power, or for that matter, in my own best interest, ever to consider that particular job done.

One

Writing and the Powers That Be

Tell us first of all about your adolescenceits relationship with the type of American society you have represented in Goodbye, Columbus; your rapport with your family; and if and how you felt the weight of paternal power.

Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. After the victories of an exuberant and spirited childhoodlived out against the dramatic background of Americas participation in World War III was to cool down considerably until I went off to college in 1950. There, in a respectable Christian atmosphere hardly less constraining than my own particular Jewish upbringing, but whose strictures I could ignore or oppose without feeling bedeviled by long-standing loyalties, I was able to reactivate a taste for inquiry and speculation that had been all but immobilized during my high school years. From age twelve, when I entered high school, to age sixteen, when I graduated, I was by and large a good, responsible, well-behaved boy, controlled (rather willingly) by the social regulations of the self-conscious and orderly lower-middle-class neighborhood where I had been raised, and mildly constrained still by the taboos that had filtered down to me, in attenuated form, from the religious orthodoxy of my immigrant grandparents. I was probably a good adolescent partly because I understood that in our Jewish section of Newark there was nothing much else to be, unless I wanted to steal cars or flunk courses, both of which proved to be beyond me. Rather than becoming a sullen malcontent or a screaming rebelor flowering, as I had in the prelapsarian days at elementary schoolI obediently served my time in what was, after all, only a minimum-security institution, and enjoyed the latitude and privileges awarded to the inmates who make no trouble for their guards.

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