I love sports clips but interviews with writers are the best. They are unrelated, except in my level of interest. People who write fiction for a living are forced to establish a value based world and elucidate its reality. Even nihilistic works provide a moral framework to consider.
Like all art, novels give you a chance to get inside another life, another mind, another consciousness. That is, art gives a chance to, in that horrid phrase, truly escape, but in a productive, imaginative way, that tells you about yourself as you learn about the world. Sometimes art is presented as something that is "good for you", like health food, and you should have at least a little to keep your Self substantial. But art is really an invitation to an interior journey, and that is functionally useful: the unexamined life is not worth living.
In this video Tina Brown talks with Philip Roth. Roth, even with the mollifying effects of age, is dour as ever, in the way serious people can sometimes come across. Roth has run the gauntlet of a life lived as an artist in our time. Brown, as interviewer, is something of a contradiction: both flakey and down to earth. She has had a knack for stirring the pot successfully: a pop culture talent for gaining attention, with top-10 thinking and a what's-hot-what's-not-sensibility, but winningly, with a built-in appreciation for talent, even it needs be pre-approved. Brown is, like the popular culture, values-free.
Roth has always been interesting when he appeared on Fresh Air, but the combination of Roth and Terry Gross was like listening to a deeply withheld father and daughter painfully trying to communicate. Roth always seemed on the verge of getting ticked off, but over the years came to trust Terry, so the interviews worked pretty well. Brown's approach, very different, is contemporary and quotidian. She evoked quite a bit from Roth, so here are some random thoughts and notes to self that might interest others:
Roth feels the novel is dead — a cultic artifact, which even the Kindle cannot save. The "screen wins" over print, he says. He really means the attention span and willingness of the audience to engage have been eroded. An unexamined product of popular culture. The screen is a passive thing — yes, even touch screens. Touch screens substitute mental and emotional engagement for physical movement. Stories, well told, well written, as only serious writers can create, will never be dead. We need stories, and create our own, called our life.
He loves writing and wants to spend the rest of his life doing it. He is in his 70s and, as I have heard many times from those in that decade, can hardly believe it. Health, he says, is the big issue in aging. But it is also the big issue in living, for all.
I compared Roth's speaking style with that of Mailer. Mailer had a flair with language; it was exciting to hear him entangle surprising ideas with brilliant language junctures. Even thrilling. Roth is more methodical, thoughtful, cautious to the point of being ungiving. There is no poetry in the man. He leaves the impression of someone who knows how to play the game — although, I don't think it is cynical, it is just his nature.
Roth started his recent book with a first line, an actor having lost his "magic". He wanted to follow that idea and discovered the story as he went. That is, the journey is not only for the reader, but for the artist as well, in any truly creative work.
Roth says that he writes a rough draft to discover the story; what Tina Brown called a "vomit draft", where you put anything down — he liked that phrase. He says he tries to get the story down first and then, and only then, does he begin a serious rewrite. That is the point at which, he says, "the book becomes alive".
Roth regards his fourth book, Portnoy's Complaint, as a "youthful indiscretion". He said he would avoid re-reading it. He has written thirty books and is more productive as the years have gone on.
Roth's success, beyond his talent and imagination, is something very American. It is a success borne of subject matter. Roth has a shrewd sense of subject and festoons his works with "realism", another American obsession, although the idea of realism is, well, relative. Roth talked to actors to understand what an actor who couldn't act anymore might face. But that hardly gives Roth the credit that is due him for a lifetime spent elucidating the world, with seriousness and wit, as the gift for all that art can be.
