{"id":1339,"date":"2014-02-03T15:24:10","date_gmt":"2014-02-03T15:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/group\/bookclub\/cgi-bin\/wordpress\/?p=1339"},"modified":"2014-02-03T15:24:10","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T15:24:10","slug":"the-novelists-obsession-is-with-language-philip-roth-on-writing-the-future-of-language-and-the-ghost-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/?p=1339","title":{"rendered":"‘The novelist’s obsession is with language’: Philip Roth on writing, the future of language and The Ghost Writer<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Philip Roth’s 1979 classic,\u00a0<\/em>The Ghost Writer, will be spotlighted at Stanford at a February 25 “Another Look” book club event. Cynthia Haven interviewed the author in preparation for the event. His weapon-of-choice was the email interview, rather than a telephone conversation. Roth was precise, nuanced and to the point. He turned around a thoughtful and polished transcript in one quick weekend.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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BY\u00a0CYNTHIA HAVEN<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Each book starts from ashes.” (Photo: Nancy Crampton)<\/p><\/div>\n

Cynthia Haven<\/strong>: “There is no life without patience.” This thought is expressed at least twice in\u00a0The Ghost Writer<\/em>. Could you expand on it a little?<\/p>\n

Philip Roth<\/strong>: I can expand on it only by reminding you that the six words are spoken not by me but by a character in a book, the eminent short-story writer E.I. Lonoff. It is a maxim Lonoff has derived from a lifetime of agonizing over sentences and does a little something, I hope, to portray him as writer, husband, recluse and mentor.<\/p>\n

One of the several means of bringing characters to life in fiction is, of course, through what they say and what they don’t say. The dialogue is an expression of their thoughts, beliefs, defenses, wit, repartee, etc., a depiction of their responsive manner in general. I am trying to depict Lonoff’s verbal air of simultaneous aloofness and engagement, and too his pedagogical turn of mind, in this case when he is talking to a young prot\u00e9g\u00e9e. What a character says is determined by who is being spoken to, what effect is desired, and, of course, by who he or she is and what he or she wants at the moment of speaking. Otherwise it’s just a hubbub of opinions. It’s propaganda. Whatever signal is being flashed by those six words you quote derives from the specificity of the encounter that elicits them.<\/p>\n

Haven:\u00a0<\/strong>You’ve said of your two dozen or so novels, “Each book starts from ashes.” How did\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Ghost Writer<\/em>, in particular, rise from the ashes? Could you describe how it came about, and your labor pains bringing it into being?<\/p>\n

Roth<\/strong>: How I began\u00a0The Ghost Writer<\/em>\u00a0almost 40 years ago? I can’t remember. The big difficulty came with deciding on the role Anne Frank was to have in the story.<\/p>\n

Haven:\u00a0<\/strong>It must have been a controversial choice, since she has held a somewhat sacrosanct space in our collective psychic life \u2013 even more so in 1979, when the book was published, and even more than that in 1956, when the action of your book takes place, a little over a decade after the war’s end. Were you criticized for this portrayal? How has the perception of her changed in the years since the book was published, especially given Cynthia Ozick’s landmark 1997 essay, “Who Owns Anne Frank,” which decried the kitschification of Frank?<\/p>\n

Roth:<\/strong>\u00a0I could have had Amy Bellette\u00a0be\u00a0<\/em>Anne Frank, and don’t think I didn’t put in some hard time trying to pull that off. The attempt wasn’t fruitful because, in Cynthia Ozick’s words, I did not want to “own” Anne Frank and assume a moral responsibility so grand, however much I had been thinking about bringing her story, which had so much power over people, particularly Jews of my generation \u2013her<\/em>\u00a0generation \u2013 into my fiction as early as 10 and 15 years earlier. I did want to imagine, if not the girl herself \u2013 and in truth, I wanted to imagine that too, though in some way others had ignored \u2013 the function the girl had come to perform in the minds of her vast following of receptive readers. One of them is my protagonist, young Nathan Zuckerman, trying to get used to the idea that he was not born to be nice and for the first time in his life being called to battle. One is Newark’s sage Judge Wapter, watchdog over the conscience of others. Another is Zuckerman’s poor baffled mother, wondering if her own son is an anti-Semite dedicated to wiping out all that is good.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Philip Roth’s 1979 classic,\u00a0The Ghost Writer, will be spotlighted at Stanford at a February 25 “Another Look” book club event. Cynthia Haven interviewed the author in preparation for the event. His weapon-of-choice was the email interview, rather than a telephone … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}