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Philip (Milton) Roth (1933-) |
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American novelist and short story writer. Philip Roth first achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which consisted of a novella and five short stories and described the life of a of Jewish middle-class family. Ten years later appeared Portnoy's Complaint. In this "masturbation story" the narrator searches for freedom by using sex as his way of escape. The book gained a great international success. "Between first discovering the Newark Bears and the Brooklyn Dodgers at seven or eight and first looking into Conrad's Lord Jim at age eighteen, I had done some growing up. I am only saying that my discovery of literature, and fiction particularly, and the 'love affair' – to some degree hopeless, but still earnest – that has ensued, derives in part from this childhood infatuation with baseball. Or, more accurately perhaps, baseball – with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters', its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate – was the literature of my boyhood." (Roth in 'My Baseball Years', from Reading Myself and Others, 1975) Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, which became the
scene for his early novels. His father, Herman Roth, was an insurance
salesman of Austro-Hungarian stock. Later in Patrimony (1991)
Roth portrayed his eighty-six-year-old father, who suffered from a
brain tumor, but who still in his early eighties "had no difficulty
convincing the wealthy widows... that he had only just reached
seventy." Roth's mother Bess (née Finkel) died in 1981; her life
revolved around caring for her family. Roth attended Rutgers University for a year before
transferring to Bucknell University. He studied at the University of
Chicago, receiving his M.A. in English. In 1955 Roth joined the army,
but was discharged after an injury during his basic training period.
Roth continued his studies in Chicago, and worked from 1955 to 1957 as
an English teacher. He dropped out of the Ph.D. program in 1959 and
started to write film reviews for the New
Republic. Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book
Award, was later adapted to the screen, like several other of Roth's
novels. Jewishness has been Roth's major territory in his examination of the American culture. From Malamud and Bellow, his older colleagues, Roth has differed in a more ironic – sometimes characterized as "less loving" – view of the lives of the Jews. Often the readers have identified the writer himself with the obsessions of his fictional characters, and accused him of sharing their thoughts. "Publishing a book is like taking a suitcase and putting it out in a public place and walking away and leaving it there," Roth has said in an interview. "There is no way a writer can control what happens to his book when it is out in the world." (Mein Leben als Philip Roth, dir. Christa Maerker, 1998, e-Motion-Picture/SWR) From
1960s Roth has worked at the State University of Iowa, Princeton, the
State University of New York, the University of Pennsylvania and
elsewhere. Since 1988 he was Distinguished Professor at Hunter College,
New York. Roth's several awards include the Guggenheim fellowship
(1959), the National Book Award (1960, 1995), the Rockefeller
fellowship (1966), the National Book Critics Circle award (1988, 1992),
and the PEN/Faulkner Award (1993, 2000). In 1998 Roth received the
National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2001 he received the
highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold
Medal in fiction. In 2011 Roth won the fourth Man Booker International
Prize, worth £60,000. Roth has constantly wrestled with the problem of the
identity of the Jewish-American male. The
Breast (1972) made a humorous allusion to Kafka's famous short
story 'Metamorphosis' – Roth's hero, David Kepesh, finds himself
transformed into a massive female breast. Kepesh appears also in The Professor of Desire (1977),
which chronicled his life to the age of 34, and The Dying Animal (2001),
in which he has an affair with his student. "This novel – which takes
its title from Yeats's lines, "Consume my heart away; sick with desire
/ And fastened to a dying animal" – wants to address the big
subjects of mortality and the emotional fallout of the 1960s, but after
the large social canvas of Mr. Roth's post-war trilogy ("American
Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain"), it feels
curiously flimsy and synthetic." (Michico Kakutani in The New York Times, May 8, 2001)
Another veteran character, Nathan Zuckerman, is involved in
several love affairs in My Life as a
Man (1975). He has appeared as the author's mouthpiece in
subsequent novels, including I
Married a Communist (1998), set in the1950s. The novels deals
with divorce, the cold war, and the McCarthy-era witch hunts. Through
Zuckerman Roth has explored the relationship between a fictional
character and its creator, or the process of aging, as in the
melancholic novel Exit Ghost (2007),
Roth's last novel featuring his fictional alter ego. In an interview in
November 2012 set to promote the release of the French edition of the Nemesis (2010), Roth said that that
he won’t write any more books. Sometimes Roth views his own life as a part of his fiction. In The Plot Against America (2004), an alternate history, in which the famous pilot Charles Lindbergh is the 33rd President of the fascist U.S., Philip Roth is one of the characters, suffering from his Jewish background. In Operation Shylock (1993) Roth meets a doppelganger, the other Philip Roth, a man, who claims to be the author. A true incident inspired the story: the novelist Richard Elman had recalled in his book his seduction of a beautiful actress and his upset the next morning when he learns that she thought he was Philip Roth. Elman allowed her to leave unenlightened. Another subject in the book was John Demjanjuk's trial – the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Demjanjuk claimed that he had had a doppelganger, who had committed all the crimes he was accused of and murdered Jews in concentration camps. Roth's memoir of his family, Patrimony, won the National Critics Circle Award in 1992. A Time reviewer called Sabbath Theater (1995), about a retired puppeteer, one of the best-written works of 1995; it won the National Book Award. The Human Stain (2000) was set in the 1990s at the height of the Clinton sex-scandal. The narrator is Zuckerman who tells about Coleman Silk, the dean of a small college. He is forced to resign after alarming the guardians of politically correct usage. "Does anyone know these people?" he asks about two students who never showed up for class. "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They do, and turn out to be African Americans. And off-campus, with the help of Viagra, Silk starts an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia. "Most novelists wouldn't or couldn't handle the variety of elements that Roth does here. Few have his radical imagination and technical mastery. Fewer still have his daring." (R.Z. Sheppard in Time, May 22, 2000) Robert Benton's film version of the book from 2003, starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, was adapted for the screen by Nicholas Meyer. Roth's first wife was Margaret Martinson Williams; they separated in 1963. In 1990 he married the distinguished Shakespearean actress Claire Bloom – their relationship had already started in the 1970s. The couple divided their time between homes in Connecticut and London. Their neighboring friends in Connecticut included Arthur Miller and William Styron. After they separated Bloom published her memoir Leaving a Doll's House (1996). Her 1982 memoir, Limelight and After, centered on her early years and particularly the collaboration with Chaplin. Bloom has acted in several classic and modern plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire and The Cherry Orchard. Films: Limelight (written and directed by Charles Chaplin, 1952), Look back in Anger (directed by Tony Richardson, play John Osborne, 1959), A Doll's House (as Nora, play Henrik Ibsen, directed by Patrick Garland, 1973), Islands in the Stream (based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, directed by Franklin Schaffner, 1977), Crimes and Misdemeanors (written and directed by Woody Allen, 1989). Television dramas: Brideshead Revisited, Shadowlands, Shadow on the Sun. For further reading: The Fiction of Philip Roth by John McDaniel (1974); Critical Esays on Philip Roth, ed. Sanford Pinsker (1982); Philip Roth by Lee Hermione (1982); Reading Philip Roth by Asher Milbauer and Donald Watson (1988); Philip Roth Revisited by Jay Halio (1992); Beyond Despair by Aharon Applefield (1994); Philip Roth and the Jews by Alan Cooper (1996); The Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth by Stephen Wase (1996); Philip Roth Considered: The Controversial Universe of the American Writer by Steven Milowitz (2000); Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth by Mark Shechner (2003); Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity by Ross Posnock (2006); The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, ed. by Timothy Parrish (2007) Selected works:
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