Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Philip Roth in 1964, two years after the publication of "Letting Go." (Sam Falk/The New York Time)
I am like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing.
-- Philip Roth
On Life:
Interviewer:
Do you have painful feelings on looking back?
Roth:
Looking back I see these as fascinating years -- as people of fifty often do contemplating the youthful adventure for which they paid with a decade of their lives a comfortingly long time ago. I was more aggressive then than I am today, some people were even said to be intimidated by me, but I was an easy target all the same. We're easy targets at twenty-five, if only someone discovers the enormous bull's-eye.
Interviewer:
And where was it?
Roth:
Oh, where it can usually be found in self-confessed budding literary geniuses. My idealism. My romanticism. My passion to capitalize the L in Life. I wanted something difficult and dangerous to happen to me. I wanted a hard time. Well, I got it. I'd come from a small, safe, relatively happy provincial background -- my Newark neighborhood in the thirties and forties was just a Jewish Terre Haute -- and I'd absorbed, along with the ambition and drive, the fears and phobias of my generation of American Jewish children. In my early twenties, I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't afraid of all those things. It wasn't a mistake to want to prove that, even though after the ball was over I was virtually unable to write for three or four years. From 1962 to 1967 is the longest I've gone, since becoming a writer, without publishing a book. Alimony and recurring court costs had bled me of every penny I could earn by teaching and writing and, hardly into my thirties, I was thousands of dollars in debt to my friend and editor Joe Fox. The loan was to help pay for my analysis, which I needed primarily to prevent me from going out and committing murder because of the alimony and court costs incurred for having served two years in a childless marriage. The image that teased me during those years was of a train that had been shunted onto the wrong track. In my early twenties, I had been zipping right along there, you know -- on schedule, express stops only, final destination clearly in mind; and then suddenly I was on the wrong track, speeding off into the wilds. I'd ask myself, How the hell do you get this thing back on the right track? Well, you can't. I've continued to be surprised, over the years, whenever I discover myself, late at night, pulling into the wrong station.
Philip Roth's novels have won two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize (American Pastoral, 1997). His Paris Review interview was published in 1984.
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