Roth on Roth

I’ve been reading Volume IV of the always intriguing Paris Review Interviews with writers—poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists, journalists and critics. In the introduction to this volume Salman Rushdie calls the set “the finest available inquiry into the how of literature.” They began over fifty years ago in the first issue of the periodical (1953) with an interview of E. M. Forster. A year later an interview was conducted with William Styron, then only 27, who was one of the Paris Review’s founders.

Volume IV includes an interview of Philip Roth conducted in 1984 when Roth, then 51, was well into his writing life, having recently published Portnoy’s Complaint and in 1983, The Anatomy Lesson. The interview begins with Roth describing his writing day and what he goes through each time he starts a new novel. He says he works almost every day, all day, morning and afternoon. “If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.”

Every writer knows that the beginning, sometimes simply the first sentence, is usually the hardest part of writing a new work. Even for Roth, a writer who has published countless works of fiction and non-fiction, it is a bit of an ordeal. He says, “I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive…that has some life in it.”

This is a tale told by many writers—those first hundred pages often end up in the recycling basket. I imagine that is an impossibly difficult thing for any writer. To be utterly frank, more than once I have thought of doing the same.

But there is another far more difficult struggle that Roth goes through when he embarks on a new book. That is the struggle for a problem, a dilemma, a predicament that makes for compelling fiction. When he begins, he claims he hasn’t the slightest idea what that will be. “What matters most isn’t there at all.”

He says the central character in his novels have to be going through a major transformation or “radical displacement” in their life. And to create this kind of person, Roth says he needs to be going a little bit crazy. He comments, “…a writer has to be driven crazy to help him see. A writer needs his poisons. The antidote to his poisons is often a book.” Does this suggest the novels he writes are Roth’s way of getting in a little writing therapy?

Roth has always downplayed the power of literature to bring about social or personal change. He reiterates his position in the interview: “I don’t believe that, in my society, novels effect serious changes in anyone other than the handful of people who are writers, whose own novels are of course seriously affected by other novelists’ novels. I can’t see anything like that happening to the ordinary reader, nor would I expect to.”

Here he leaves unanswered the question of just how one writer’s work influences another. Writers often say they have been influenced by one writer after another, by Tolstoy or Chekhov or Fitzgerald or Hemingway. I always wonder in what way. They may have greatly admired their work, but how was that admiration translated into their own work?

Roth’s view about the effects of literature on the ordinary reader is contrary to the abundant evidence, in some cases anecdotal in others empirical, that suggest otherwise. See, for example, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, the fascinating answers given by many well-known individuals to the question “What book did you read when you were young that most influenced your life?" at The Academy of Achievement Web site, the life-changing accounts given in Jack Canfield and Gay Hendrick's volume, You’ve Got to Read This Book: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life, Gordon and Patricia Sabine’s Books That Made the Difference, the “Changing Lives Through Literature Program,” etc.

The interviewer, Hermione Lee, who has written a study of Roth’s work, then asks him, “What do novels do then for the ordinary reader?” Roth replies as if he had not earlier said they don’t. “At their best writers change the way readers read. That seems to me the only realistic expectation. It also seems to me quite enough. Reading novels is a deep and singular pleasure, a gripping and mysterious human activity…”

Here we have Roth saying a novel does sometimes give rise of a reader’s pleasure and change the way they read, whatever he means by that. In this sense he does acknowledge the “power of the pen” to influence a person and if he is willing to admit these not insignificant effects, surely it is conceivable for a work of literature to have an even greater impact on some readers, if only to cause them to think more seriously about an issue or, in the most extreme, but far from unknown case, of changing the course of their life.

Paris Review Interviews

The remaining passages I recorded from the third volume of Paris Review Interviews are posted below. The writers interviewed were Isak Dinesen, Harold Pinter, John Cheever, Jean Rhys, Joyce Carol Oats and Ralph Ellison. The responses of Jean Rhys were unusually personal.

She comments: What came first with most of them [her books] was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.

It is widely believed that writing about emotional trauma and long standing conflicts is an effective way to eliminate them. James Pennybaker, one of the most prominent investigators of this purported effect writes: The degree to which writing or talking about basic thoughts and feelings can produce such profound physical and psychological changes is nothing short of amazing.

On the basis of his research he reports, for example, that it leads to fewer illnesses and physician visits, improvements in immune function, and decreasing stress as measured by autonomic function. Students show an improvement in their grade point average. Employees report a decline in work absenteeism and an increased likelihood of reemployment following job loss. And the majority of research participants he has studied indicate they experience less stress, negative affect and symptoms of depression.

Can it be this simple? Were that it was so. There is much to be skeptical about in the many studies of writing therapy. Readers who wish to know more about this issue might read the third essay at www.the-essayist.com/on-writing. The remaining passages from the Rhys interview are cited below and those of the other writers follow, in turn.

Jean Rhys
They had told me when I left Dominica that I would not feel the cold for the first year—that my blood would still be warm from the tropic sun. Quite wrong!

I’ve never written when I was happy.

Some books can really take you away. It’s marvelous.

…I don’t quite know why I should go on writing so much about myself…I guess I write about myself because that’s all I really know.

Isak Dinesen
We absorb so much without being aware.

I discovered Shakespeare very early in life and now I feel that life would be nothing without him.

Harold Pinter
I don’t know what kind of characters my plays will have until they…well, until they are.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

John Cheever
As for lying, it seems to me that falsehood is a critical element in fiction.

The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

This table seems real, the fruit basket belonged to my grandmother, but a madwoman could come in the door any moment.

In no way does it [academic papers on fiction] help those who write fiction or those who love to read fiction.

If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can’t write a story. You might as well give up.

…what he [Fitzgerald] could do best…which was to try to give a sense of what a very particular world was like.

Joyce Carol Oates
I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don’t really experience a text until you’ve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

I would have liked, I think, to have established an easygoing relationship with some other writers, but somehow that never came about.

There are some stories (I won’t say which ones) that evolved almost entirely out of their settings, usually rural.

I have no idea why he’s so angry with me. But does a disturbed person really need a reason…?

Ralph Ellison
I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

The major flaw in the hero’s character is his unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success.

What is important is not the scene but his failure to question their decision.

Action is the thing. We are what we do and do not do.

Marilynne Robinson

I haven’t read any of Marilynne Robinson’s novels and I am not sure I ever will. As I understand her work, there is a religious overtone to her tales and that rarely finds a receptive audience with me. But I did enjoy reading her recent interview in the Paris Review, No. 198.

I also learned from her views on writing and the writing life she lives. Perhaps you can glimpse why from the following passages I collected. When I review them, as I did now, I'm no longer quite so sure I won't be reading her novels after all. Much of what she says rings true to me. Perhaps that might also be the case with her works of fiction.

I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself.

Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you’re trying to work on something and it’s not going anywhere, you can go to school and there’s a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.

The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking.

Q: Does writing come easily to you?
A: The difficulty of it cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the world.

I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence that I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.

Frankly you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.