You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. How much of a book is in your mind before you start? After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there that’s the first paragraph of the book. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it-that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. The result provides an example, as well as an account, of Philip Roth’s presentation of himself.īeginning a book is unpleasant. And the several drafts in themselves displayed Roth’s methods of work: raw chunks of talk were processed into stylish, energetic, concentrated prose, and the return to past thoughts generated new ideas. The mood of the interview had changed in the six months between his finishing a novel and starting new work it became more combative and buoyant. I found this process extremely interesting. Early in 1984, on his next visit to England, we resumed he revised my version and we talked about the revision until it acquired its final form. Then there was a long pause while he went back to America and The Anatomy Lesson was published. I edited them down to a manageable size and sent my version on to him. The transcripts from this taped conversation were long, absorbing, funny, disorganized, and repetitive. Thinking on his feet, he develops his ideas through a playful use of figurative language-as much as a way of avoiding confessional answers (though he can be very direct) as of interesting himself. Just underneath this benign appearance there is a ferocious concentration and mental rapacity everything is grist for his mill, no vagueness is tolerated, differences of opinion are pounced on greedily, and nothing that might be useful is let slip. He listens carefully to everything, makes lots of quick jokes, and likes to be amused. Roth’s manner, which matches his appearance-subdued, conventional clothes, gold-rimmed spectacles, the look of a quiet professional American visitor to London, perhaps an academic or a lawyer-is courteous, mild, and responsive. I was looked after with great thoughtfulness. We talked in this businesslike cell for a day and a half, pausing only for meals. The room had been turned into a small, meticulously organized office-IBM golf-ball typewriter, alphabetical file holders, Anglepoise lamps, dictionaries, aspirin, copyholder, felt-tip pens for correcting, a radio-with a few books on the mantelpiece, among them the recently published autobiography by Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, David Magarshaek’s Chekhov, John Cheever’s Oh What a Paradise It Seems, Fordyce’s Behavioral Methods for Chronic Pain and Illness (useful for Zuckerman), Claire Bloom’s autobiography, Limelight and After, and some Paris Review interviews. We met in the early summer of 1983 at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, where Roth occasionally takes a room to work in when he’s visiting England. Just after he finished The Anatomy Lesson we began the Paris Review interview. After our first meeting, he sent me the fourth draft of The Anatomy Lesson, which we later talked about, because, in the final stages of writing a novel, Roth likes to get as much criticism and response as he can from a few interested readers. He read the book and wrote me a generous letter. I met Philip Roth after I had published a short book about his work for the Methuen Contemporary Writers Series. Interviewed by Hermione Lee Issue 93, Fall 1984
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