Arena: Philip Roth

unconsciously Zukerman was frightened of everything frightened of success and frightened of failure frightened of being known and frightened of being forgotten frightened of being bizarre and frightened of being ordinary frightened of being admired and frightened of being despised frightened of being alone and frightened of being among people frightened after karnovski of himself and his instincts and frightened of being frightened unconsciously suppressing his talent for fear of what it might do next philip roth became a household name in the late 1960s with his outrageous bestseller port noise complaint since then his chronicles and comedies of jewish america have established him as one of the key writers of his generation but success has come with its share of hostile criticism Roth has been attacked for obscenity accused of anti-semitism charged with plundering his own life and calling it fiction amid speculation about the links between his novels and the facts of his life Roth has consistently declined every request for a television interview or profile now to mark his 60th birthday he is broken his long silence to set at least some of the record straight about his life his books and the links between the two note to the reader this book is a work of fiction the names characters places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or our use fictitiously any resemblance to actual events or locales a persons living or dead is entirely coincidental this confession is false years ago I had to give a lecture Miami Beach where there's a large Jewish audience and I was son destruct by the hostility to Roth and one lady said with really little crescendo mounting with every vocable why does Philip Roth hate the Jews and I said no madam he does not hate the Jews he merely writes about them American Jews had shifted from immigrant status to their fantastic post-war middle-class bourgeois supremacy in many ways Philip Roth caught perfectly some of the ludicrousness and the pathos of people who weren't quite used to their new prosperity and their new self-importance goodbye Columbus was written when Roth was a young college instructor at Chicago University it won him the National Book Award but also marked the beginning of Roth's long battle with some of his Jewish readers who saw it as a betrayal there were some pretty nasty attacks now those who launched the nasty attacks would say these were pretty nasty stories I don't agree there and they were not nasty stories they were so mildly satiric it seemed to me that this was a gross overreaction but there it was a rather eminent rabbi I mean I didn't know he was an eminent rabbi because I don't keep up with those things but I was told he was an immune arrived I wrote a letter to the B'nai B'rith anti-defamation league which came into my hands which included with this line what is being done to silence this man it's not your fault you don't know what Gentiles think when they read something like this but I can tell you they don't think about how it's a great work of art people don't read art they read about people and how do you think they will judge the people in your story have you thought about that yes and what have you concluded I can't put it into a conclusion I didn't write 15,000 words so it's now to put it all into a one word conclusion well I can your story Nathan as far as Gentiles are concerned is about one thing and one thing only it is about and their love of money that is all our good Christian friends will see I've watched you all your life you you are you're a good kind and considerate young man you want somebody who writes this kind of story and and pretends it's a truth but I did write it I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story and then in 69 I published port noise complaint well that certainly didn't help people instantly took this book as as autobiography and it's shameful autobiography some extent it was I mean nobody had written a book in which the hero and knowing that readers automatically it will identify author with hero so it's a bit disingenuous to to say as fellow sometimes did that hop he couldn't imagine how why could they mistake him for this guy because he had the courage to students to reveal certain things that everybody did for example masturbation which became almost attendant shorthand term for that book the attitude behind it as I read it is you don't want me to do this but I'm gonna do it anyway you know in spite of all prohibitions I'm irrepressible and that's how it's going to be you're gonna have to listen to me I think he does have some of the air I'm a stand-up comic about him I don't know whether it was written as a provocation manok book comes out of many many things and rather far down a list is the desire to provoke somebody it's very hard to spend two years working at a book simply to provoke others you'd have to be a more peculiar character than I am I think for that to be your primary mode of your sole mode or even up there with them with the high motives but who knows I have low motives too at any rate this was taken as a considerable provocation and the reaction to it was much greater even in the reaction to goodbye Columbus this was not a youthful indiscretion clearly and so the world of readers on this book divided very sharply between those who seem to take it as something worthwhile entertaining a live new novel etc and those who saw it as a kind of anti-semitic tirade this hero is not just a miserable wretch writhing in his lusts he is the Jew avenging himself of his upbringing in a Jewish home which has become detestable to him by going out and Lane oxes thereby freeing himself from the nightmare of mama this is the book for which all anti-semites have been praying I dare say that with the next turn of history this book will make all of us defendants at court we will pay the price not the author who revels in obscenities they were saying to me your books will endanger others physically that's a serious question I always took it seriously I always believed they were wrong I think I've been proved right by the way I don't think that any book I've published any word I've written has endangered any Jew physically nor do I really believe that my books have been as they said fuel for the fires of the anti-semites so I believe that in that case they were wrong about the consequences and I was right about the consequences now how had I abided by the prohibitions they would have laid down what would have been served if the consequences did not follow I guessed sure it's a hell of a gamble you say who are you to guess whether there will be dangerous consequences flowing out of your work well there's a certain audacity in writing books without the audacity you can't write the books and perhaps there's even a certain recklessness in writing books I think that the the society I live in can live with my recklessness such as it is I didn't write these books in Czechoslovakia I didn't write these books in Nazi Germany I wrote these books in 20th century America and I was pretty sure that in this society the consequences predicted would not occur and I turned out I guessed correctly lucky me lucky then my parents became his protector you know he took a lot of gaff from the Jewish community my father had to take some of the punishment and then there was a lot of our youth sorry to them are you one of these characters does this your character is that your character no the man writes beautifully so no matter how much is is autobiographical and it's not in that sense it's fiction she was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to believe that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise as soon as the last pellets sound that I would rush off for home wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she had succeeded in transforming her suit invariably she was already in the kitchen by the time I arrived and setting out and so I'm hoping to explain I knew that my father and sister were innocent of my mother's real nature and the burden of betrayal that I imagined would fall to me if I ever came upon her unawares was more than I wanted to bear at the age of five I think I even feared that I might have to be done away with were I to catch sight of her flying in from school through the bedroom window or making herself emerge limb by limb out of an invisible state and into her apron anyone who's read Ross knows that he's the most family-oriented writer imaginable you know he has done Newark stone by stone brick by brick and by aunt uncle by uncle synagogue by synagogue gutter by gutter I don't know anyone in the world who has done his old environment so thoroughly so lovingly so nostalgic Lee at the same time so unsparingly in the 1930s and 40s the week way exception of Newark was a peaceful thriving almost entirely Jewish suburb I had imbibed the mood and all our family life in my neighborhood very strongly I think and I didn't just grow up in my house and I think when you take a look at the street I grew up on you see that there are some 40 or 50 houses on that Street maybe even more and in each house lived 10 or 12 people so there we've got 500 people for a start and that's only one Street you multiply that times the ten streets adjacent to us you have a huge population and you're a school kid you have kids in school you make friends and so on so you're in a lot of how you have a you have a great perch as a child writer you're in people's houses you're in their kitchens you're in their bedrooms you're in their bathrooms you sleep over you hear everything no one hide dreams that you're gonna turn out to be this terrible little writer and if you are an incipient writer you tend to have a good memory you tend to be observant you may even be a good mimics you hold the material that way and all this stuff was there to be tapped was a matter of fact I told him he puts me in a book I'll kill him because he's tough he's also my confidant so he said to me if you don't want it in a book don't tell me I said you're dead kill you how do the people close to you react to being written about and did you think about that while you were writing that inhibit you in any way the Polish Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz as a poet said this apropos your question when a writer is born into a family the family is finished I think that Max is through one of the first torez they ever wrote which appeared in goodbye Columbus it's a story about an adulterous middle-aged man and the affair he carries on with a woman across the street and I supposed by now I won't be libelous if I say that in 1945 when I was 12 years old a gentleman who lived in that house that I hoped was off-camera had an affair with a woman who lived in that house across the street and my father was called in to soothe everybody's temper and and make peace between the families and between the respective spouses and so on and he'd come home in the evening after having been out at his peacemaking mission and tell us my mother my brother he what had happened and so I was delighted by the story of adultery not only on our street but next door for a kid in his background to become an author that formidable word requires an act of self anointment you you're the only one with you could to pour the oil on you you pour the oil on your own head you are not licensed in any way you haven't gone through any school that churns you out as it would a dentist or a lawyer so it all happens on your own authority and everyone that would make its way into the quake I speak wait I think it even says we quit high school yeah let's yeah let's see if anybody's ever read it though that would I have eight copies don't you do but that's an awful lot of companies this is a little cheer I don't even remember that what appears in this book III Kai I guess nobody likes us we are the boys of weak quake high high Caiaphas Kashmiri and Topher's we are the boys of weak fish beer until this is Yiddish which I can translate politely politely we can talk about anything I think food was the first one to be spectacularly sexually successful he went he found older women pursuing him or older women that's right year older older and Phil had a special quality I think I would say when you mentioned this too he sort of started to know his path he sort of had the courage I think to really branch out in a way I mean we we all went into professions right and that even though most of our families our forebears had not been involved we were we were making strides in that direction it was almost more acceptable Philip was a kind of iconoclast he was like you know and even though he did finally he didn't finally do what his father wanted him to do but at at the beginning it was not that last alright he said you'd be the biographer and I'll be the friend the biographer is still at the point after having done a lot of research where he's not even sure he wants to go through with it do I want to write this life what's the real interest in this life he doesn't just want to retell the story of Zuckerman's boring newark what interests him is the terrible ambiguity of the eye the way a writer makes a myth of himself and particularly why what started it where do they come from all these improvisations on a self how did born August the 26th 1901 in the City of Newark in the county of Essex today's date is January the 7th 1984 I have two sons the first part is sandy who is now was born on February that's 26 56 years ago and you had to figure it out for yourself and Phillip Phillip was born in 33 I believe he went to we changed later school graduated caught the guys with quite high school couldn't go to college so he went one year to Rutgers University he was too young so he had the way this this is a confused description of my college career but let it stand so he went to Rutgers University for a year he then went to Bucknell University firstly I don't know but I think he he said in one of his books that he wanted to go to a university of christen university to find out how the other half of the world live and he found out well he was a very strong will and strong-willed man and I was a strong willed adolescent and I think when I went off to college in my first year we had a terrific round once when I came home it was about a corny enough stuff about late hours or something but I was accustomed to being on my own my father said where were you and I said really it's none of your business where I was and we had a terrific knock-down drag-out verbal fight everybody crying it was the first real outburst of strong defiance of saying I am separate from you I'm independent from you the person who should of course be standing right here to receive an award of Honor from the New Jersey Historical Society he is not the author of patrimony but the subject of patrimony my father Herman Roth who was tenure as a resident in New Jersey and didn't end like mine after less than two decades but extended without interruption from his birth in Newark Central Ward in 1901 to his death in an Elizabeth Hospital 88 years later and who for nearly half his long life so life insurance here alas it's the insurance man and not the novelist who came to know palpably the social history of Newark New Jersey's largest and during the decades my father was employed there its liveliest and most productive city so know it not just neighborhood by neighborhood not even just block by block and house by house and flat by flat but hallway by hallway stairwell by stairwell furnace room by furnace room and of course kitchen my kitchen his father who you know was one of his great characters who appears over and over again as his favorite which I say Tyron the Yiddish waiters noise you know the one who's always probing the father was really a shrew of gigantic proportions you know but a loving shrew like many shrews and who never let the poor guy alone that put it very simply two years ago Roth published patrimony a nonfiction account of his father's old age and eventual death from a brain tumor patrimony began as just some notes I was making to myself at the end of each day it's in my nature as a writer as a person to record things when the going gets rough I've always done it and I did it of course then I didn't know what these notes would come to I imagined that perhaps somewhere down the line it would be useful to know what it was actually like to watch somebody who loved died useful to me as a writer to authenticate what I wrote after three or four months my father situation more or less became resolved that is to say we knew that we're not going to have to an operation he decided against that we all decided against it and we were going to wait for the tumor to kill him in other words we were gonna let him live with this tumor and he would live out his life with his tour and then his end would come so after the first three or four months and all of us having reached this decision life returned to normal more or less your grandmother right was Fanny Rock sure and originally and then she met her married Nathan Cohen on and on remembering the illnesses the operations the fevers the transfusions the recoveries the comas vigils the deaths the burials his mind in its habitual way working to detach him from the agonizing isolation of a man at the edge of oblivion and to connect his brain tumor to a larger history to place his suffering in a context where he was no longer someone alone with an affliction peculiarly and horribly his own but a member of a clan whose trials he knew and accepted and had no choice but to share I don't think it was pain it was that he was slowly losing vital functions the one to go the one that killed him was his couldn't swallow and very shortly he would have had to have some surgery so that he could be fed other than through his mouth this is a guy was a tiger was being diminished by inches and we to say that one is is glad that his father was out of that and prevented from what would have come next and next is somewhat inaccurate I mean losing him just as physical mother was terrible anybody's lost a parent that they loved knows that however he was 87 he had a good run to be sure I knew what the ending had to be but I didn't know what the circumstances of the ending would be what the particulars would be what the ugly particulars would be and in time I found out because in time he became terribly ill from this thing it happened very quickly and then he died and then after the funeral and after several days I sat down I didn't waste very much time and I wrote the last chapter of the book and that was that now did I ever tell my father that I was working on this book the answer is no what I have published this book had he continued living the answer is no I felt a certain freedom in writing it knowing that it would not be published while he was alive and that's the story of the writing of that book and on the next corner there was another drugstore you must not forget anything that's the inscription on my father's coat of arms to be alive to him is to be made of memory to him if a man's not made of memory he's made of not a friend of mine lived in that building right over there which is now guarded empty building see those steps 1917 I was sitting on that stupid Alboran remember al borock he had the furniture store I was sitting there with out the day America went into the war it was springtime April or May I forget there's where your great-aunt had the candy store that's where my brother Morris had his first shoe store jeez that's still there he says on and on we passed his school 13th Avenue School where he was the teachers favorite my teacher she loved me Herman she said on he goes all the way across the city I think that I have had great care and my family and thought for my family as a son and as a relative to the rest of my family and as a brother to my brother and so on and I think I've had considerable affection for the people who have been close to me as a husband as a friend what have you what I'm a writer I'm someone else and I don't mean that I am consciously or deliberately or maliciously destructive I mean and I'm free and as it were unburdened by allegiances that mean a great deal to me in my life and so I'm without the restrictions of life which I don't feel as restrictions in my life at whatsoever but I would feel them as restrictions in my work if I had to abide by all sorts of considerations of discretion of decorum and so on now I don't mean that I intend in my work to write expose is sensational documents whatsoever I just feel that as a writer I must be free to have a perspective larger deeper darker than that of a son a husband a relative or a friend the writer is isn't those things the writer is a writer he was married he his wife Margaret Anderson who was later became Margaret marriage was not a very successful when unfortunate was killed an automobile accident Central Park I was really only married for for a few years that is married and living with my wife for I think it was in the bottom two and a half years a little less than two and a half years and that was prior to between goodbye Columbus and letting go so I was out of that really when I was running letting go and when she was good but the consequences of the marriage had been for me rather grave and that gravity I think determined very much the tone of letting go and a tone of when she was good I had seen life in dark away than I ever had before my upbringing had not been dark whatever problems we had would have attention conflicts there were they weren't dark this was a darkness that I knew nothing about my life as a man is the first of the books really in which he begins to engage as a subject and almost half no anyway I think because he had some difficulty of getting into it begins to engage as engage as a subject the tension between himself and his readers caused by the explosion of speculation about what was invented and what was imagined as against what was simply transcription of his actual life in important eyes complaint I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and wasn't getting it right and the ways in which I was getting it wrong and gave me the idea for how to put the book together but I became interested in somebody writing versions of a thing to get it right and so this story which is to put it very simply and reduce it is about a terrible terrible terrible marriage that doesn't separate it from many many other books but it's one of that genre and very lurid marriage very bruising for both the man and woman and what I decided to do was to divide the book into two parts one part I called useful fictions the opening and the second part is called calling upon the trademark of an old terrible magazine my true story and the opening useful fictions consisted of two short stories or rather longer stories written by the writer who will then narrate my true story so these are his versions of his story these are his useful fictions to the reader who has not just gotten the drift but begun to balk at the uniformly dismal situation that I have presented here to the reader who finds himself unable to suspend his disbelief in a protagonist who voluntarily sustains an affair with a woman sexless to him and so disaster written I could say that in retrospect I find him nearly impossible to believe in myself why should a young man otherwise reasonable farsighted watchful judicious and self concerned a man meticulously precise in the bread-and-butter concerns of life and the model of husbandry with his endowment why should he pursue in this obviously weighty encounter a course so defiantly not in his interest for the sake of defiance does that convince you then he delivers my true story and says no no those were just stories I was telling this is the real story and he proceeds to tell it the story of his marriage as straightforwardly as he possibly can leaving in the rage leaving in the self-pity and so on my writing by this time was wholly at the mercy of our marital confusion how I struggled for a description and alas struggles still but from one version to the next nothing of consequence ever happened locale shifted peripheral characters parents old flames comforters enemies allies came and went and with about as much hope as a man attacking the polar ice cap with his own warm breath I would attempt to release a flow of invention in me by changing the color of her eyes or my hair of course to give up the obsession which surely have made the most sense only obsessed I was as incapable of not writing about what was killing me as I was of altering or understanding it in 1971 Roth made the first of many visits to Prague and in the years that followed he played a key role in supporting the work of Eastern European writers and getting it published for the first time in the West eventually his fascination with this part of the world was to find its way into his fiction as one part of a major series of books charting the life of an imaginary American novelist called Nathan Zuckerman can I describe Zukerman as a person I can't I don't I guess I don't even choose to the reason being that it took me four and a half books to present him in his fullness the description has to come from someone else really from and that's what a good critic can do on the other hand having said that I can give you the biographical data about this guy a sacrament he happens to have been born in the same year I was born and happens to I think have been born in the same place I was born he's a writer in the first book in the ghost writer he's a young writer who gets in trouble with the Jewish readers for a story he writes it's published somewhere I think it's rather like my it's a rather like my experience and defender was defender of the faith so needless to say I drew upon by my own biographical data and then off of that biographical data invented a story which would encapsulate all my various experiences and collapsed them into a strong central single potent narrative if I was successful and that's what I tried to do in the ghostwriter to me when I first read you it was as though the hallucinatory strains of Gogol had been somehow filtered through the humane skepticism of Chekhov relax Nathan it's not necessary what did you do in the army you were in Korea he goes to visit an elderly writer this elderly writer happens to in the story to be younger than I am now but at the time even when I wrote this a part of him is an elderly writer alas and meets up with a young woman there who was kind of young protege of the writers about whom he has many many strong imaginings and one of his imaginings he sees her as an Anne Frank who survived the concentration camp and came to live in America and had her adventures here where had you been before England oh that's a long story you've been through the war I miss the war now so look I suppose that's how I missed it too what did you have instead my childhood what did you have instead somebody else's I think perhaps you should go mr. Derfner shouldn't we say goodbye to the lanos I thought we had he helped you to come to America yes pardon me for insisting it's just you bear some resemblance to Anne Frank not really uh Kermit is a writer to whom fame comes and celebrity and I should say better notoriety a lot like the notoriety that came to me and close as the resemblances are in some instances between my experience in his the resemblance really furnished me with a jumping-off place the resemblance is to complicate and ruin the metaphor a kind of diving board and I get out on the end of the diving board and I jump up and down the diving board or jump up and down on the biographical data of my life and then I leap forward into the imagining and into the Zukerman books so I leap into the water what is the water the water is the supplement books I leave behind the diving board enough of my writing thought Zukerman enough of their scolding rebellion obedience discipline explosion injunction resistance accusation denial defiance shame no the whole goddamned thing has been a colossal mistake this is not the position in life but I'd hope to fill I want to be an obstetrician who quarrels with an obstetrician even the obstetrician who delivered Bugsy Seigel goes to bed at night with the clear conscience he catches what comes out and everybody loves him and the baby appears they don't start shouting and call that a baby that's not a baby no whatever he hands them they take it away every writer has his favorite material in the case of Roth it's very important to remember that he's not using Zuckerman as as a as a creature of narcissism a thing like that in the contrary so command has more troubles the United States Treasury this moment he's his crisis Laden everything I have for him as a crisis which is a very familiar Jewish feeling you know the Roth is not the center of it his mind's at the center of it there's a great difference being Zukerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself in fact those who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be believed they ought to be or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards so in earnest are they that they don't even recognize that being in earnest is the act for certain self-aware people however this is not possible to imagine themselves being themselves living their own real authentic or genuine life as for them all the aspects of a hallucination he was very highly strong fellow and he still is but I think and he was the reason we am it was extraordinary that we met when we did we were both going through a very difficult periods in our lives were both totally alone which doesn't often happen at the age that we both were and I think for both of us certainly for him I know I having a proper home that's you know that that's there and someone who is there and and a partnership in a relationship it doesn't hurt it doesn't hurt anybody I came to England because England is Claire's home and when we began to live together we decided we would live half of each year in my country in half in hers it was as simple as that really the saga of Nathan Zukerman ends in London where in the last chapter of the counter light the American writer is made to feel increasingly unwelcome this time it was some of Roth's English readers who took exception if there is no anti-semitism in Great Britain and if there is no group of people in Great Britain who hold anti-semitic beliefs in disproportion to the general population then I was mistaken in the counter life to propose that there might be a young woman Maria fresh feel from a privileged from the privileged provincial gentry who discovers that her family is less than thrilled when she arrives back from America to say you're gonna marry in New York Jew if on the other hand there is anti-semitism in Great Britain as perhaps there might be and if there is a group of people in Great Britain who do hold anti-semitic beliefs in disproportion to the general population as perhaps there might be man I wasn't mistaken to propose that refresh filled and her New York Jew Nathan Zuckerman might have certain difficulties when they married and those scenes in which I depicted their difficulties might not be the outpourings of a paranoid Jewish imagination as some of my English critics maintain but in fact well within the range of English possibilities England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks which on reflection might be the least painful method a Jew without Jews without Judaism without Zionism without Jewishness without a temple or an army or even a pistol a Jew clearly without a home just the object itself like a glass or an apple at first I think he felt very released as one does in a new place a very free of the old burdens made a lot of new friends which he's kept and was very happy then I think he became he would perhaps tell you something else but I think he became very much afraid of being cut off from his subject which is American life to the extent that he perhaps feared that he couldn't wouldn't have enough material to feed him and we came back good morning Edward good how about my newspaper since Zukerman I seem to have shed disguises and spoken in my own name I met lost by and large I have abandoned port noise cap ashes fell in the breasts Zoo Commons and presented a character called Philip Roth anything else for no that's it word that's all today that's all today thank you sir let's lose prospects keep Eddie I tried in the facts to be as candid as I could be about how I became a writer all the influences that had converged to make me not only a writer but the write the kind of writer on became and that was a an unusual kind of writing for me I'd never done that before I had to rely on memory I had to rely on other people who I asked about the period I couldn't use any scenes or dialogue I decided against that I think if one looks at that book you'll see there and there are no scenes are no dialogues those are things I rely on pretty heavily in a novel now at the end of that book Zukerman appears because i say that i send this manuscript to him in a preface I send the manuscript I look around I ask him what he thinks of this this book it's my shot not at his biography but of my own and in the long a coda to the book some fifty pages or so Declan writes me back and says don't publish this book it you don't know how to write this kind of stuff and besides I don't believe it says hey dear Roth I've read the manuscript twice here is the candor you asked for don't publish you are far better off writing about me than accurately reporting your own lives could it be that you've turned yourself into a subject not only because you're tired of thing but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can detach yourself from your biography at the same time that you explored its crises themes tensions and surprises well on the basis of what I've just read I'd say you're still as much in need of me as I've you and then I need you is indisputable as for characterization you are the least completely rendered of all your protagonists your gift isn't to personalize your experience but to personify it to embody it in the representation of a person who is not yourself you are not an autobiographer you're a personification you have the reverse experience of most of your American contemporaries your acquaintance with facts your sense of the facts is much less developed than your understanding your intuitive weighing and balancing of fiction you make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the world to comes out my guess is that you've written metamorphosis of yourself so many times you no longer have any idea what you are ever were by now what you are is a walking text what I was really demonstrating in that Khoda we took Herman appears to challenge my book my story was my doubt because that's part of that's a strong ingredient in my autobiography I wanted to dramatize my doubt my doubt not only about my ability to tell my own story but my doubt about anybody's ability to tell his or her own story and so my story has told by me and Zuckerman's challenge to my story that's my story in Roth's 20th book operation true and false biographies become a matter of life and death the central character is Roth himself and the book includes a description of his visit to the trial in Jerusalem of John Damien yolk later convicted of being the Nazi war criminal Ivan the Terrible there he was there it was bald now and grown stocky a big cheerful palooka of 68 a good father a good neighbor loved by his family and all his friends it was nearly 50 years since he'd last smashed open anyone's skull and he was by now as benign and on frightening as an old boxing champ good old Johnny man the demon as good old Johnny it was a startling moment for me because to begin with is here is it isn't he was here wasn't he there's that question which is very large and then if he was Ivan the Terrible then what was in the presence of a human monster if he wasn't Ivan the Terrible then one was in the presence of some tremendous misunderstanding and human injustice loved his garden everyone said rather tend tomatoes now and raise string beans than bore a hole in somebody's ass with a drill no you've got to be young and in your prime you've got to be on top of things in rare to go to manage successfully even something as simple as having a little fun like that with somebody's big fat behind he'd sodas oats and settled down all that rough stuff sworn off long ago could only barely remember now all the hell he'd raised so many years the way they fly no he was somebody else entirely that Hellraiser was no longer him so there he was or there he wasn't as the book progresses Roth's adventures in Israel become ever more bizarre embroiling him in a secret mission for Israeli intelligence the Mossad and an extraordinary personal encounter perhaps the strangest ever described in Roth's writing it turns out that at that time roaming through the world there was a man who for all I know is still living though I haven't heard from him in recent years for tale pretended to be me man bearing a very strong resemblance to me rather uncanny resemblance to me he arrived in Israel read registered at the King David hotel which is a very nice big hotel in Jerusalem and announced that Philip Roth had arrived in Israel the writer and that he was a spokesman for a doctor he called diaspora ISM he said present himself as a kind of anti Moses who was going to lead the Jews out of Israel back a to Europe and because he felt that scientism had exhausted itself as an ideology as a program for the Jews and in fact he said in interviews and to all kinds of journalists Israeli and foreign that he was there to prevent a second Holocaust which he felt the Zionism was not unlikely to produce well these are not ideas I hold and I didn't much like these ideas being expounded his mind when he sent me the manuscript of Operation I was in no way prepared for it though I had read everything I believed previously that he had published I found myself quite astonished by the time I had reached the end of the first hundred pages I did not know where I was I was so surprised and these surprises kept coming well it's a very bold book it's going to delight some people in a front many deeply because they won't really know what to make of it and there is a sort of the focus of the irony is sliding you don't you you don't know when he means when he means you to take him seriously when you think you've got him fixed to Pacifica nectar to a position you find that he's gotten away from you it wasn't just meeting somebody who looks like you it was somebody who was exploiting my name for his own purposes purposes which I still cannot fathom and the book is an attempt to fathom those purposes of his at one point in the book I described this man as a wildly delineated nothing the vividness he did not lack how much was craziness and how much was cunning how much was strategic and how much was improvisation how much was perverse 'ti and how much was willful deliberate and meaningful I haven't the faintest idea he has now gone I think probably further than I would have thought any writer ever could do in mixing up arts and reality it is very difficult indeed by the time you have finished operation and you come to the disclaimer at the end of it saying that all this is fiction you quite agree that all of this is fiction but it's very hard to know exactly how you are to deal with it then on the local level when you go back into it where it depends upon the shock of an drawner verisimilitude and an insistence that this indeed did happen note to the reader this book is a work of fiction the names characters places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are use fictitiously any resemblance to actual events or locales a persons living or dead is entirely coincidental this confession is false I was asked by my Mossad supervisor to say this at the end of his book in fact in the last section of the book I recount the scene and the conversation in which he makes this request of me because he didn't want me to reveal anything about this assignment I was on and he felt I shouldn't say the book was fiction so it seemed to me he had sufficient clout with me and I decided to accede to his wish and so I have this note here and I did my duty beyond that there isn't much to say I've tried to explain mr. Shane so kiss me and say that you understand

Channel: thegreatnamedropper

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Id: 5G8Z2vrLpzA

Length: 58min 33sec (3513 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2015