Philip Roth pays a call

It began several weeks ago, almost as an aside. “Read Nemesis for December 9,” announced Professor Taylor at the end of class. “The author will be with us to discuss it.”

The author of Nemesis is Philip Roth.

I leaned over to Sophia, sitting next to me. “Wait, did he just say Philip Roth was coming?” Sophia: “I think he did.” We looked at each other wide-eyed.

As promised, Roth was there this afternoon, waiting for us, stretching his rust-colored Mephistos out under the table and scanning the room. He made eye contact, smiled slightly, and responded to students who greeted him. He looked like he looks in his publicity stills: every bit the fit septuagenarian.

Nemesis author Philip Roth

Striking were the exchanges between prolific author and earnest fiction writers on a quest for directives, seeming hopeful for a key to unlock the Roth route to success. They sought incisive explanations for plot and character choices; they asked about routines and regimens, presumably so they might imitate them. Roth was often tight-lipped or gave slim responses, such as “I didn’t think about that” and “I don’t know what style I was writing in.”

I say “they” as though I wasn’t also waiting for pearls. I was speechless, until I stood in line and then blithered out some noise about New Jersey. He signed my book, and I skittered away.

There were pearls, and I scribbled them down as quickly as I could.

On God: “I’ve never been a believer. Ever. [Religion has] not been something I think about as a writer or as a man.”

On the response to his first book written in 1959, Goodbye, Columbus, which on its release, was widely considered Jew hating: “I was called an anti semite, a self-hating Jew, and bad for the Jews. It made me angry and combative….I'd go around to hillels and synagogues and tell them I wasn’t a bad Jew.... But I've come to accept that I am.”

On his earliest works: “Reading the first four or five books I wrote doesn't delight me.”

On writing fiction: “I need to make it up, and I need to ground it in the real thing. And the real thing leads to invention.”

And: “I write from front to back.... I find my way into the book. The logic of the plot directs my choices, and the logic of the characters.”

On getting started on a new project: “Beginnings are hard.... The voice of the last book is usually still in my head. I'll write a hundred pages. Then you go back and figure out what’s alive. Then I take that paragraph and put it at the front.”

That last reminder was perhaps the most illuminating: that even a literary lion casts about for a way into his work.