Philip Roth - Philip Roth at 80

I D TAKEN the train out to East Hampton, bringing with me to read only the first volume of John Cowper Powyss Wolf Solent . This was an ambiguous mission I was onId been invited to a very nice rich girls familys summer house, and Im justified calling her a girl because this was the summer after my first year of college and I was nineteen, a boy of nineteen. Wed been only friends, at college, but might be more, away from college: that was the ambiguous mission. I didnt know what I wanted. On the train I stared out the window, not making it past more than a chapter of the Powys. The girl and her mother picked me up at the station, a five-minute drive there and back, just long enough that by the time we entered the house, through the kitchen, the girls younger brother was caught in the act of pulling from the broiler two overdone, smouldering lobsters, their red partly blacked. The mother chided him, but affectionately, and insisted the lobsters be dumped immediately in the trash. I thought Ill eat those , but no. This was a period in my life where I was persistently being startled, to the point of violation, by the behavior of the wealthy. No readingnot Powys, nor F. Scott Fitzgerald, nor Karl Marxcould have prepared me to witness such a thing in real life. We ate something other than lobsters. Then I was shown to the guestroom. It was beautifully quiet, with a scattering of books on shelves. An evening seemed to yawn before methe girl and I would have time to be confused about one another tomorrow, and the next day. Everything was done very graciously in this house, no hurry. Left alone there with ponderous Powys, I reached instead for a book I hadnt known existed: The Breast . Id at that point in my reading life kept a useless partition against Roth, who, thanks to the intimidating aura generated by a paperback copy of Letting Go on my mothers shelves, Id decided was a bestselling writer of grown-up realist novels of a sort that couldnt possibly interest me. Oh judgmental and defended youth! But wait, now I had to consider the claims of the books dust jacket, that Roth worked in the realm of morbid fantasy, too. The realm of Kafka. This wasnt fair, I thought. Kafka should belong to me. Alone in the East Hampton guestroom, I gobbled The Breast in one gulp. Thats how it came about, thats how I began taking Roth aboard, the first tiny dose a kind of inoculation to make me ready for the long readerly sickness I still endure. For it is a sickness, most especially for a reader who wants to be a writer, to open oneself to a voice as torrential and encompassing, as demanding and rewarding, as that of Roth. I am therefore here to address you all as my fellow sanitarium inmates, gathered jubilantly and defiantly in the presence of the source of our sickness himself.

My situation in the East Hampton summer house was the stuff of Jewish comedy, if Id had my Jewish antennae up. Had the brother been played by Christopher Walken, I was in a scene from Annie Hall . But I not only didnt have my Jewish antennae up, I didnt know I possessed any. By chance, and unlike a majority of Jews, Id been raised so as not to take being Jewish, or in my case half-Jewish, in any way personally. Id have to acquire those antennae elsewhere, by my reading. It took overtly Jewish-American writingby Bernard Malamud, whod retired but was still lingering, thrillingly, around at the college the girl and I attended, and Saul Bellow, and yes, sometimes Roth, who is in general overt, and is sometimes, when it serves the cause of the writing, overtly Jewishto illuminate and make unmistakable what I knew only semi-consciously from the writing of the less-overt, like Nathanael West or Barry Malzberg or Norman Mailer, as well as from sources like Groucho Marx and Abbie Hoffman and my uncle Fred. What was it that was illuminated? That something aggravated and torrential in my voice, or perhaps I should call it my attempt at having a voice, was cultural in origin, even if aggravated and torrential frequently in the cause of disputing or even denying that point of origin. As Roth points out, the books arent Jewish because they have Jews in them. The books are Jewish in how they wont shut up or cease contradicting themselves, theyre Jewish in the way theyre sprung both from harangue and from defense against harangue, theyre Jewishly ruminative and provocative. Roth once said of Bellow that he closed the distance between Damon Runyon and Thomas Mannwell, given the generation of readers Im from, Roth, in turn, closed the distance between Saul Bellow and Mad Magazine . Thats to say, once Id gained access to what he had to offer, Roth catalyzed my yearnings to high seriousness with the sense that the contemporary texture of reality demanded not only remorseless interrogation but remorseless caricature and ribbing. Contemporary reality, including perhaps especially the yearning to high seriousness, needed to be serially goosed.