In 2012, the great American writer Philip Roth announced to the world that he would stop writing. At the age of 79 — after a lifetime of 30-odd novels, a cupboard full of prizes, and more criticism and adulation than most writers could imagine — he declared that he was done chiselling away at paragraphs to build temples of prose. His literary back, after one too many Sistine Chapels in words, had given away. He was tired of being alone, standing in front of his computer, while his fingers and mind agonised to birth another novel. It wasn’t the literary artefact called the ‘novel’ that tired him; it was the very act of writing, the fog of loneliness in front of a blank page through which all who seek to write must ferry past.
As for the the art form of the ‘novel’, he said to a French magazine, Les inRocks, in 2012: “I dedicated my life to the novel. I studied them, I taught them, I wrote them, and I read them. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!” He, like the rest of us, wanted to watch sports, go to museums, put his feet up and watch TV. Nearly two weeks ago, when Roth died at the age of 85, I wondered if his last years were what he had hoped or imagined they would be when he stopped writing.
A literary engine
Since 1959, when he published his first collection of short stories ( Goodbye, Columbus ), Roth’s presence simmered in the American literary skies, like the trails of a jet engine: as a wonder to behold but also proof that the afterglow of his fame was a consequence of the extraordinary literary engine that operated with great precision and efficiency. His literary output appeared in bookstores with a constancy that belied how finely choreographed his novels were in terms of plot, psychological depth, and sensuousness of style. From afar, one could form the impression that all that Roth wrote was about Jews in America. Up close, however, one begins to discern that his writings transcended simple-minded meditations on identity. His themes were ultimately all too human in that they watched with sensitivity and candour the various strategies of reconciliation, deception and rebellion adopted by individuals to survive the hand they are dealt with by life.
Roth burst into popular fame in the 1960s, by then well into his thirties and struggling in the aftermath of his divorce, when he wrote a cunningly architected but terribly funny psychoanalytic confessional ( Portnoy’s Complaint ) by a garrulous, chronically masturbating bachelor living under the omniscient gaze of his mother. By the 2000s, in an act of startling premonition, he imagined an America swept into the arms of an isolationist, anti-Semitic, quasi fascist, malevolent demagogue. Along the way, his novels made pit stops to reflect upon public shaming, a lightly coloured black man accused of racism, the consequences of political radicalisation of children on families, the complex relationship between an American Jew and Israel, watching the death of one’s own father, capitalist paranoias about secret Communists organisations, the use of an alter ego as a narrator, and so on. However, to imagine Roth’s novels as a narratives in search of a cause to shroud themselves around is to mistake the proverbial trunk for the elephant.
An inward gaze
The social contexts of Roth’s novels were merely ecologies, which were in themselves less interesting. Of even lesser interest to his novels were the ideologies, the various -isms, in whose name much social tumult followed. In contrast, he was interested in humans and how they seek to present themselves to other humans. The result of this inward gaze were unrelenting, sensitive, and close-up observations of human behaviour. Resultantly, one could mistake Roth’s oeuvre for a catalogue of human grotesque. Deceptions, infidelities, self-deceptions and betrayals abounded in his works. This resulted in protagonists who were comical, self-aware, lustful, despairing, cruel, misunderstood and ultimately lost in the labyrinths of their own making. The women in Roth’s novels were often a foil for male anxieties; they were stoic recipients of the mindless cruelty that men are capable of doling out without forethought or contrition. Predictably, during his life, charges of misogyny and Jewish self-hatred followed. Faced with such criticisms, Roth did what he had always done: he wrote another novel. Not as a petulant response but as a sort of refuge in the only real shelter he knew he could rely on.
In 2012, when he stopped writing, it meant giving up on his “fanatical habit of writing” every day. It was as if an island had lowered its levees, not only to learn to quit the narcotic joys of rhythm and predictability, but also to let life enter in all its chaos and beauty.
The last years of Philip Roth would have made a good premise for a Philip Roth novel — the afterlife of an author who had given up on writing and begun to live. But that is now never to be. A great and magnificent island has submerged.
