ellauri106.html on line 46: Philip Roth has not had much luck with biographers. Late in his life, furiously aggrieved after the failure of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the publication of Bloom’s incendiary memoir of their years together, he asked a close friend, Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, to take on the task. Roth sent Miller lists of family members and friends he wanted to be interviewed, along with the questions that he felt should be asked. (“Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?”) It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Roth had wanted Miller to refute a familiar charge, “this whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit!” that he felt flattened his long erotic history into one false accusation. But Miller came to his own conclusion. “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip,” he told a cousin of Roth’s. (Sandy was Roth’s older brother.) “They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”
ellauri106.html on line 104: He enjoyed a robust childhood and was poplar in high school where he was a bright student but not quite diligent enough in his studies to win a prized full scholarship to Rutgers where he wanted to study law. Roth attended Rutgers University in Newark for a year, then transferred to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A. magna cum laude in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in English literature in 1955 and briefly worked as an instructor in the university´s writing program. Less prestigious Bucknell University in Pennsylvania was Roth’s fallback school. There he abandoned his vague dreams of becoming a lawyer for the underdog and turned his attention to writing.
ellauri106.html on line 126: A committed atheist, Philip Roth feared only one form of posthumous punishment: being trapped for all eternity in a hostile biography. In 2007, Roth, echoing a similar quip from Oscar Wilde, said, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Roth’s had already been the subject of a harsh and unforgiving portrait in Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), the memoirs of his former wife, the actor Claire Bloom. As John Updike noted in The New York Review of Books, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” This crisp summary ended Roth’s friendship with Updike, even after Updike made clear he was recapping Bloom’s book and not affirming its accuracy.
ellauri106.html on line 180: Not far behind will be some Jewish critics who always found Roth’s portraits embarrassing for their relentless sexuality and discomfort with aspects of the culture that were at odds with his identity as an American. Others were angered at his voraciously espoused atheism—“I’m exactly the opposite of religious, I’m anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It’s all a big lie.” Some Jewish critics hounded him from the beginning of his career. Rabbi Gershom Scholem, the great kabbalah scholar, said Portnoy’s Complaint was more harmful to Jews than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And Roth was heckled and booed at an early appearance at Yeshiva University which stunned and shocked the author.
ellauri106.html on line 241: INFLUENTIAL WOMEN Who are Philip Roth’s ex-wives Claire Bloom and Margaret Martinson, when did they get divorced and did he have any children?
ellauri106.html on line 256: The couple separated acrimoniously in 1963 and she subsequently refused to divorce Roth. They separated in 1963 and she died in a car crash in 1968, something that deeply affected Roth’s work.
ellauri106.html on line 386: A committed atheist, Philip Roth feared only one form of posthumous punishment: being trapped for all eternity in a hostile biography. In 2007, Roth, echoing a similar quip from Oscar Wilde, said, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Roth’s had already been the subject of a harsh and unforgiving portrait in Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), the memoirs of his former wife, the actor Claire Bloom. As John Updike noted in The New York Review of Books, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” This crisp summary ended Roth’s friendship with Updike, even after Updike made clear he was recapping Bloom’s book and not affirming its accuracy.
ellauri106.html on line 430: American Pastoral represents Roth’s return to Judaism "of a sort." Ultimately, for Roth, retelling and struggling with biblical narrative enables the negotiation of Jewish and postmodern identities, resolves suffering, and reveals means by which seemingly irreconcilable ideologies can intermingle, inform one another, and have sexual intercourse.
ellauri106.html on line 434: Roth’s works have no Talmud, no Jewish philosophy, no mysticism, no religion, and as a self-professed atheist, Roth has consistently opted against reinforcing the tenets of Judaism as an author such as eg Cynthia Ozick does (whodat?). Roth writes out of hatred more often than not, and his work is open to the charge of anti-Semitism.
ellauri106.html on line 440: As a result, like Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych(1886), a retelling of Ivan Ilych’s life that Roth mentions and a work that marks Tolstoy’s return to Christianity of a certain sort, American Pastoral is Roth’s return to Judaism — but also only of a sort. Without Jehovah for starters. Tolstoy was banned from Orthodox Church in 1901 for his anarcho-pacifism.
ellauri106.html on line 507: Roth’s plots are masked by a fundamentally conservative denial of ideology. They metaphorize the particular crises of these particular men into transcendent markers of the human condition and, in doing so, once again reinforce the “romance” of "modernization." (Whazat? Lue alempaa. Se tarkottaa talousliberalismia.)
ellauri106.html on line 520: In Roth’s nostalgic past, the practical influence of the New Left — the impact of the anti-war movement on ending the Vietnam war, for instance — is as easily dismissed as was the old left’s voice in the New Deal and postwar industrialization.
ellauri106.html on line 527: “Comically agnostic,” an apt description, I think, of much of Roth’s later work. With all of history suddenly exposed as fictional constructs, artists were freed to interrogate it with impunity, making it the stuff of parodic play.
ellauri106.html on line 531: Confident from its victory over Fascism and emboldened by the subsequent economic boom, America jelled behind what social theorist Jeffrey Alexander has called modernization or romantic liberalism. As has been the case throughout much of Roth’s career, the socio-political touchstone of his American Trilogy is the “patriotic war years” and the consensus culture that blossomed immediately afterward. “Everything was in motion,” Zuckerman says in the opening pages of American Pastoral. “The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together”. Reagan-propagandaa.
ellauri106.html on line 536: Although Roth’s heroes vary slightly—Levov, for instance, comes from a somewhat more privileged background and is five or ten years younger than Ringold and Silk—they share a demanding physical presence and, more significantly, the formative experiences of the Great Depression and World War II.
ellauri106.html on line 541: Roth’s disdain for the American Communist Party surpasses even his contempt for the reactionaries who hunted down its members during the McCarthy era:
ellauri106.html on line 556: Before his death from congestive heart failure on Tuesday, he made no secret of his contempt for Donald Trump, was instinctively liberal in most respects, and thought of himself as a Roosevelt Democrat. Yet his political novels have a nagging MAGA aftertaste. Successful, decent, hardworking men, who in the time of our fathers would have been appreciated, are mindlessly destroyed by modern women as the embodiments of a degenerate society. Roth’s desire, ultimately, is the same as Reagan’s: an impossible return to the promised land of modernization. Not by coincidence, the final chapter of The Human Stain is titled, “The Purifying Ritual.” Puhdistuxesta kuumuu kaikki anaalis-obsessiiviset henkilöt Hitleristä Rothiin ja Sofi Oxaseen. Puhamaan! Äiitii mä oon vallmiiis! Tuu PYYHKIMÄÄN!
ellauri106.html on line 621: Mailer was hugely popular at his peak, but now he’s probably best known for that whole stabbing-his-second-wife awkwardness; Updike is regularly derided as “a misogynist”; and Bellow’s female characters are often, at best, thinly drawn, or full-on bitches and shrews. Now, inevitably, it’s Roth’s turn. Roth’s women were either “vicious and alluring” or “virtuous and boring”.
ellauri106.html on line 624: Roth’s ex-wife, Claire Bloom, wrote about their relationship in her memoir, Leaving A Doll’s House, 25 years ago. You could also read Roth’s not-exactly-contrite reaction to Bloom’s complaints, his 1998 novel, I Married A Communist, in which the protagonist’s vicious wife was clearly based on Bloom.
ellauri106.html on line 628: “Roth’s misogyny infuses everything that he writes,” according to Meg Elison, a novelist recently described by the Times as “re-examining Roth”. This is typical of the all-or-nothing approach that is popular today, where if you don’t like everything about a public figure, then you can’t like anything. (Uskokaa tai älkää tää mielipide tulee naiselta. Se oli varmaan käynyt modernin kirjallisuuskritiikin koulua.)
ellauri106.html on line 630: Stop treating the misogyny in Philip Roth’s work like a dirty secret, sanoo feministisempi ääni vasemmalta. Roth’s sex-positive sexism is one of the ways he truly portrayed the American soul. the question “Is Roth a misogynist?” was pooh-poohed memorably by Keith Gessen. “If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them?” he asked. For many 21st-century Americans, it’s still not misogyny at all but the normal psychology of the male.
ellauri107.html on line 395: The antihero of Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theatre blinds us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism - and yet he makes us care shit. The depraved Mickey Sabbath, the hero, anti-hero and villain of Philip Roth’s 1995 tour d'Eiffel, Sabbath’s Theatre. Just what he does to deserve this affection over the course of 450 bile-filled pages is hard to fathom. He virtually copies that bête noire of creative writing courses, the unsympathetic character. To discover such a monstrous creation on the page is a shock.
ellauri107.html on line 398: He’s a supernova of sin, or a Roman candle, or a fire cracker at the very least, blazing away in Roth’s virtuoso paragraphs; blinding us with his astonishing misogyny, his exponential misanthropy, his audacious nihilism.
ellauri109.html on line 505: What artichokes tell us about the pandemic: That the immediate appeal of Roth’s early books is the antic sex and impious humor.
ellauri109.html on line 507: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.” Roth turned self-obsession into art. He was a consummate bullshit artist.
ellauri109.html on line 519: In Roth’s “Exit Ghost” (2007), the last of the Zuckerman books, half a century has elapsed since the visit with Lonoff. Zuckerman, suffering from prostate cancer, has been sapped of his physical and creative vitality. Yet his greatest anxiety does not concern his impotence and incontinence, or his deteriorating short-term memory. He fears, above all, the tyranny of the biographer.
ellauri109.html on line 541: In March, 1959, The New Yorker published Roth’s story “Defender of the Faith,” in which a Jewish enlisted man tries to manipulate a Jewish sergeant into giving him special treatment out of ethnic kinship. Various rabbis and Jewish community leaders accused Roth of cultural treason. “What is being done to silence this man?” Emanuel Rackman, the president of the Rabbinical Council of America, wrote. “Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.”
ellauri109.html on line 547: Roth’s extramarital forays were numerous, Kleinschmidt was right about that.
ellauri109.html on line 565: “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995). is probably the most profane of Roth’s novels; it was also his favorite, the book in which he felt himself to be utterly free and at his best. “Céline is my Proust,” he used to say.
ellauri109.html on line 575: Roth’s mental health, like his physical health, proved less than stable. There were harrowing periods of depression; a Halcion-induced breakdown; stays at a psychiatric hospital.
ellauri109.html on line 589: Miller became Roth’s health-care proxy. One year, Roth wrote him a check for ten thousand dollars, telling him, “I want you to share in the general prosperity."
ellauri109.html on line 591: Roth began to hear that Miller was describing him as “manic-depressive.” The theatre critic and producer Robert Brustein, an old friend of Roth’s, reported back that Miller had told him, “He knows he’s writing shit now. It just lies there like a lox.” By the end of 2009, the arrangement and the friendship were over. So was Roths career.
ellauri109.html on line 605: We learn of Roth’s generosity with unearned money he did not need (just like JFK, who was privately stingy as hell but basked in high-visibility free-of-charge charity) of his remarkable service in getting Milan Kundera published in English.
ellauri109.html on line 609: At the University of Pennsylvania, a friend and colleague—acting, the friend admits, almost as a “pimp”—helped Roth fill the last seats in his oversubscribed classes with particularly attractive undergraduates. Roth’s treatment of a young woman named Felicity (a pseudonym), a friend and house guest of Claire Bloom’s daughter, is particularly disturbing. Roth made a sexual overture to Felicity, which she rebuffed; the next morning, he left her an irate note accusing her of “sexual hysteria.” When Bloom wrote about the incident in her memoir, Roth answered in his unpublished “Notes” with a sense of affront rather than penitence: “This is what people are. This is what people do. . . . Hate me for what I am, not for what I’m not.”
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 428: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.” Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction. In each performance of a self, Roth captured the same sound and consciousness. in nearly fifty years of reading him I’ve never been more bored. I got to know Roth in the nineteen-nineties, when I interviewed him for this magazine around the time he published “The Human Stain.” To be in his presence was an exhilarating, though hardly relaxing, experience. He was unnervingly present, a condor on a branch, unblinking, alive to everything: the best detail in your story, the slackest points in your argument. His intelligence was immense, his performances and imitations mildly funny. “He who is loved by his parents is a conquistador,” Roth used to say, and he was adored by his parents, though both could be daunting to the young Philip. Herman Roth sold insurance; Bess ruled the family’s modest house, on Summit Avenue, in a neighborhood of European Jewish immigrants, their children and grandchildren. There was little money, very few books. Roth was not an academic prodigy; his teachers sensed his street intelligence but they were not overawed by his classroom performance. Roth learned to write through imitation. His first published story, “The Day It Snowed,” was so thoroughly Truman Capote that, he later remarked, he made “Capote look like a longshoreman.”
xxx/ellauri178.html on line 157: Portnoy, he says later on, “is about talking about yourself…. The method is the subject.” Likewise, “The comedy in The Great American Novel exists for the sake of no higher value than comedy itself; the redeeming value is not social or cultural reform, or moral instruction, but comic inventiveness. Destructive, or lawless, playfulness—and for the fun of it” (Roth’s italics).
xxx/ellauri215.html on line 127: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.”
xxx/ellauri215.html on line 131: It wasn’t until “The Ghost Writer,” in 1979, that Roth regained his footing. Zuckerman, Roth’s most Roth-like surrogate, was a perfectly pitched instrument. The costs of radical freedom—the challenge of grappling openly, outrageously, with even the ugliest impulses of life—became a subject of his work.
xxx/ellauri215.html on line 143: In 1961 Roth visited Bernard Malamud in Oregon. Roth was still in his twenties and had just published his first book of stories, Goodbye, Columbus. Malamud was almost 50 and one of the most famous writers in America. This meeting was immortalised in one of Roth’s greatest books, The Ghost Writer. In this 1979 work, a young writer, Nathan Zuckerman, visits EI Lonoff, a first-generation immigrant modelled on Malamud, who found a new voice for Jewish-American literature. He had found a voice but, more importantly, he had a subject: “life-hunger, life-bargains, and life-terror”—a Jewish experience rooted in the traumas of east Europe and Russia.
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