Posted on 06/02/2018 1:26:19 PM PDT by Twotone
When the novelist Philip Roth died a few days ago, I thought, briefly, about re-posting an ancient piece of mine from The American Spectator. But de mortuis nihil nisi bonum and all that. Then I picked up The Daily Mail, and figured I might as well hop aboard the bandwagon. I came to Roth via the film of Goodbye, Columbus, with Ali McGraw and Richard Benjamin, who rather spoilt the book for me, and then read Portnoy's Complaint, and thereafter whatever review copy I was obliged to digest for my BBC artsy endeavors. As to the oeuvre, the defining Philip Roth anecdote comes to us courtesy of Hermione Lee, a great literary biographer with whom I used to shoot the breeze on the Beeb's "Kaleidoscope" half a lifetime ago. Hermione was rather too adoring a worshiper of Roth's undoubted talent for my tastes, but there was a droll moment in one of her interviews with him in which she suggested that as a creative artist he had something of an over-reliance on autobiography - for example, the similarities between "the deaths of the parents, which are so important in the last two Zuckerman novels, and the deaths of your own parents". Roth replied:
The best person to ask about the autobiographical relevance of the climactic death of the father in Zuckerman Unbound is my own father, who lives in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I'll give you his phone number.
Funny. Like many famously Jewish writers, Roth had no faith, and his novel Indignation posits a grim vision of the afterlife:
Is this what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae?
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
de mortuis nihil nisi bonum translates to: Of the dead, nothing but good
Nonetheless, Philip Roth was a good writer. The problem was that after you read hundreds of pages about the glove-making industry in Newark, NJ, did you really want to read hundreds more about the parks system or the butcher shops of the same city? Especially since all that is gone now.
I know, they said the same thing about Faulkner. But sometimes "they" were right. You might not have wanted to keep taking those fictional trips to Yoknapatapha county, and it was the same way about Weequahic.
The best comment about Roth came from an (I think) Asian-American reviewer who read The Plot Against America and said that she learned from the book that if FDR had been defeated we would have had concentration camps in the US (think about it a minute).
Oh, Claire Bloom’s memoir is a howler! I read it a few years ago. I once was seated next to her at a dinner. She was as pretty and nice as an Englishwoman can be. Philip Roth is a nut - he used to hang outside my college in NYC looking for the prettiest girls (who were all the richest, too!) Dick Cavett and Alan Alda used to hang out in front as well. Not Donald Trump. He just met them at dances and asked them out to Maxwell’s Plum.
meaning Don’t speak ill of the dead.
Roth is a wonderful writer. Actresses are attracted to writers - you know, they might write a great part for them. Bloom is Jewish, too, so that may have been part of the attraction.
I still love Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint.
I always had contempt for Roth, and could never be bothered with more than reading a few pages of his stuff. You knew immediately where it was going with characters whose lives held no interest. Today someone could program a computer to write his dross.
I love Steyn's description of William F. Buckley's sparring partner, and friend of Claire Bloom, Gore Vidal:
The jacket tells its tale as much as anything inside. The two male friends she turns to for enthusiastic endorsements are Vidal and John Gielgud, neither of whom has any reputation -- how shall we put this? -- as a ladies' man.
Some might remember Buckley's famous exchange with Vidal:
BUCKLEY (snarling, teeth bared): Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or Ill sock you in your goddam face, and youll stay plastered …
i also loved what Truman Capote said about Gore Vidal: “He’s not a writer, he’s a typist.”
Yep.
I liked the two I read, “I Married a Communist” and “American Pastoral.”
The writing style is great, the characters and plot are interesting, and they’re historical novels (a genre I like).
Good writer; apparently a bad guy. So what else is new?
Roth and Faulkner were pikers compared to James Michener when it came to writing hundreds of tangential pages.
Wrong. He said it about Jack Kerouac.
Vidal, what ever his failings, was a brilliant essayist and novelist. Which is just one more reason Truman disliked him. A very jealous (although very talented!) queen.
Because of his notorious reputation, people don’t generally know that Gore Vidal wrote great (and straight!) historical novels, like “Empire” and “Hollywood.”
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