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Between the lines
NOV 20 - American novelist Philip Milton Roth (b. March 19, 1933) won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral, which features his best known character, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other Roth novels. Often acknowledged as the best writer in English never to have won a Nobel, Roth talks about his writing life in the following extracts taken from his interviews given to various newspapers and magazines over the course of the last decade.
Philip Roth
There’s been a shift in the cultural importance of writers. Good writers had a following that was more substantial than it is today. I’m not pointing back to some paradise by the way. Writers have always been extremely marginal to the cultural concerns of American citizens, but there was a moment when there were books that interested the general public that were written by some fine writers... Then the attention of readers has shifted away. They’ve been overcome by so many other distractions; and the habit of concentration I think has been badly damaged, by the nature of the cultural stimuli. So it feels to me very much like a dying moment, for literary culture in my own country—but you can’t have computers and iPods and BlackBerries and blueberries and raspberries, and have time left to sit for two or three hours with a book.
(But it’s also to do with the books.) I read about 20 pages of The Da Vinci Code; I found it unreadable. My problem with those books is that I can’t understand them. They operate on a psychology that is foreign to me. I have begun in the last several years to re-read the great writers, who I hadn’t read since college or graduate school. What’s surprising is that I remember so little. So over the last few years I’ve been reading various people with great pleasure; I read Hemingway pretty thoroughly about a year ago, and I was fascinated by the small time frame in which Hemingway was a wonderful writer. It’s really between the ages of 25 and 38—and so in terms of biography I tried to work out what happened to him. It’s a sad story.
I once said I don’t think novels are going to be read 25 years from now. I was being optimistic about 25 years. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think people will always be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.
It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities…
(Although some of my short novels almost feel like they have been written in one bite), I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books—and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting. The first draft is extremely crude, but at least it’s down. So when I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on.
I do a lot of vomit draft, where you kind of just throw it all on the page and then go back and do the whole thing. And I may do several more vomit drafts. But eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.
I don’t care about X more books. I care about being occupied in writing. So I want my time to be occupied with writing. I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes really. I don’t feel that I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell or that story to tell, but I want to be occupied with the writing process while I’m living.
Writing doesn’t get any easier with time. But I also don’t know that it’s any harder. It’s always been a task, and it continues to be a task. I am always fearful when I finish a book that I won’t be able to write another one. It’s been like that from the beginning, and it continues the same way. What the hell do I write? What is there to write about? And I still have that feeling.
Each time you start a project, you start as an amateur because you’re not the professional who’s written 25 and 26 or 27 books. You’re somebody who’s never written this book you’re about to write. So you’re absolutely an amateur about that book. And you feel all the uncertainty of an amateur, and the first draft, these first six or eight months, are painfully hard. It can sometimes be hard later on too, but the beginning is bound to be hard.
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