The End of An Era: Remembering Philip Roth
This Week: a gem of a conversation from the Open Source archives. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Mary McGrath: We’re putting out a short newsie on a holiday weekend to share the story of how this conversation came about.
Chris Lydon: Roth had called me to ask where, in Boston, a demagogue would stand to rouse working-class family folk in the early 1940s. No more than that about what he was up to. I said : Lemme think about it. And then thought: South Boston, of course, probably at the corner of Broadway and Dorchester Street, “Perkins Square” in the old signage. I sent him Anthony Sammarco’s second picture history of South Boston then waited many months to open the book and see what he’d done with my tip.
From The Plot Against America… Ch 7 “The Winchell Riots,” in the summer of 1942, when the columnist and radio star Walter Winchell went on tour against President Lindbergh. From NYC Winchell went to industrial Connecticut — Bridgeport, the shipyards of New London, then working-class Providence, into Fall River, Brockton and Quincy on his way to South Boston and Perkins Square where West Broadway bends into East Broadway.
“And the moment Winchell opened his mouth to speak, somebody brandishing a burning cross rushed toward the soapbox to set him aflame and a gun was fired twice into the air, either as a signal from the organizers to the rioters or as a warning to the marked man from ‘Jew York,’ or both…”
And then a little lesson in how Philip Roth assembled a scene and a sentence:
“There in the old brick cityscape of little family-run shops and streetcars and shade trees and small houses, each topped back then, before TV, only by the appendage of a towering chimney, in the Boston where the Depression had never ended, amid the storefronts sacred to the American main street — the ice cream parlor, the barber shop, the pharmacy — and just up the way from the dark, spiky outline of St. Augustine’s Church, thugs with clubs surged forward screaming ‘Kill him!’ and, two weeks from its inception in New York’s five boroughs, the Winchell campaign, as Winchell had imagined it, was under way.”
MM: Our conversation is from 2006 at Philip’s farm in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, and circles, eerily, around questions of death. Roth begins with a reading of the last words from his novel Everyman, about an old New Jersey athlete with a failing heart who is pondering failed relationships, physical decay and coming extinction. The unnamed protagonist is on the operating table, awaiting cardiac surgery, and he doesn’t wake up. His life has been extinguished.
My big brother Chip McGrath was pals with Philip and wrote the Times obit this week, and the Times also published a good Roth cheat sheet for your summer reading. Philip’s friend (and ours) Bernie Avishai remembers his friend among the New Yorker tributes, along with James Wood’s aptly titled , “The Unceasing Necessity of Philip Roth:”
More than any other postwar American novelist, Roth wrote the self — the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced, but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language…I admired him above all other living American novelists because his life and work had the only quality that really matters: that of unceasing necessity. He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease; and the varieties of fiction existed in order for him to explore the varieties of experience. Roth wrote some essays, and some of them are really fine…but he was essentially a monomaniac, a fanatic of fiction. The novel was the only instrument that mattered. He lived with it and through it, like any demented virtuoso. Purity of heart is to will one thing, says Kierkegaard. Roth, that vitally dirty-minded man, was very pure.
Zadie Smith, nails it, of course. Read the whole piece; there’s a wonderful insight there.
Sheer energy — Roth’s central gift and the quality he shared with America itself — is his legacy to literature, and it will always be there, ready to be siphoned off or mixed with some new element by somebody new. That Rothian spirit — so full of people and stories and laughter and history and sex and fury — will be a source of energy as long as there is literature. My first thought when he died was that he was one of the most alive, the most conscious, people I ever met, right to the end. The idea that consciousness like that could ever stop being conscious! And yet there it is preserved, in book after book, thank goodness.
He was a biggie for sure; irreplaceable says Chip. RIP, Philip; America will miss you!
Coming Up: The Radio Master
We’re hard at work on a killer Studs Terkel show for next week and getting lost in the archive of 5600 interviews that WFMT in Chicago just released. It’s a who’s who of the 20th Century, and it’s a treasure. Dive in and stay tuned for a radio show for hard core radio nerds. We’re collecting our favorites and compiling a playlist.
The Reporter: Seymour Hersh
Sy Hersh has a new memoir out, and Chris will be talking with him next week. Also on deck — David Graeber on his theory of Bullshit Jobs.
No bullshit jobs at Open Source, as you know, just devoted, hardworking folk. Show them your appreciation this Memorial Day and make a donation. Your support keeps us reading, writing, scouring, listening and producing all the live long day.
As Studs says, take it easy, but take it!
The OS slackers
