intervista a philip roth su the plot against america

8/12/2019 Intervista a Philip Roth Su the Plot Against America

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Philip Roth Discusses Latest Novel The Plot Against America

Intervista con Jeffrey Brown, 27 ottobre 2004

JEFFREY BROWN: It's 1940, and flying hero Charles Lindbergh has galvanizedpublic opinion against intervention in World War II, and pulled off a stunning

defeat of incumbent Franklin Roosevelt. President Lindbergh signs a non-

aggression pact with Hitler, the Germans roll through Europe, and in Newark, New

Jersey, the Jews on Summit Avenue fear an outbreak of anti-Semitic violence. It 's

fiction, of course, a novel called "The Plot Against America."

But it 's fiction that feels real and frightening in the hands of Philip Roth, for

almost 50 years now one of the nation's leading writers. Roth himself grew up in

Newark, and in this novel, he's carefully depicted his own family in the 1940s:

Father; mother; brother; and himself as a young boy. Now 71, the very private

Roth invited us for a rare visit on a glorious fall day at his home in Cornwall,

Connecticut.

He said the idea for his novel came from a single line in a book by historian

Arthur Schlesinger, stating that some Republicans in 1940 had considered

nominating Lindbergh for president.

PHILIP ROTH: My eye landed on the sentence, and in the margin I wrote, "what if

they had?"

JEFFREY BROWN: "What if they had," that was it?

PHILIP ROTH: What if they had nominated Lindbergh? And that just started my

wheels spinning. And you can see how, because immediately you have to... you

have to answer that question. And the answer to that question is dense, it 's not one

line. "What if they had?"

JEFFREY BROWN: What was it about that "what if," though, that grabbed you and

made you realize that you had a book there?

PHILIP ROTH: Mm. I can't say that I knew in the beginning. I think I had a

spontaneous reaction to the possibility. I didn't know what the possibilities were,

however. I should say, however, of course, Lindbergh's name was a loaded name

for me.

I knew Lindbergh's history and I knew about Lindbergh's isolationism. And the

first thing I wanted to imagine was what would it have been like if an isolationist

had been elected president-- it needn't have been Lindbergh, by the way-- and we

hadn't gone to war.

So that was the first, "what if?" But Lindbergh carried another possibility in that I

knew he was famous for anti-Semitic remarks he'd made during his times as

spokesman for America First. And I realized that he would be a threat or a menace

to American Jews as a candidate.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, one of the things you're doing here is you've got big

history, you've got one big change to history, but most of your story unfolds with

one family. So, how did you decide that you could look at history through the lens

of this one small family?

PHILIP ROTH: Oh, I think it 's the novelist's way, you know? I think that decision

was made for me when I became a writer; that is, to see history through the livesof ordinary people has always interested me. You're correct to say that there was

just one change. I was very conscious of that . Just change the outcome of the 1940


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election and make everything else as close to reality as you possibly can, which is

why I chose my family as the family to whom all this happens. And that excited

me because it opened up a question which is: How would we have behaved in these

circumstances?

JEFFREY BROWN: And did you go back, in your mind at least, and recreate your

actual life at the time?PHILIP ROTH: I think so. I remembered.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's a work of fiction, but it 's a work of memory?

PHILIP ROTH: Well, yes, it 's a false memoir, isn't it? So it's an act... it appears to

be an act of memory, but it 's a false memoir. I had a little slogan I would use with

myself when I was writing this book, and from-- if you want more falsification-- I

said to myself whenever I got stuck, which was frequently, "Don't invent, just

remember."

JEFFREY BROWN: "Don't invent, just remember."

PHILIP ROTH: Remember what happened. But, of course, as you know the history

didn't happen. So I had to pretend to myself that it did happen, and say, "When

Lindbergh was elected, what did we do that night?"

JEFFREY BROWN: What did we listen to on the radio? What did we have for

dinner?

PHILIP ROTH: Exactly. Rather than having to invent it, which is what you're

normally doing in a book.

JEFFREY BROWN: One of the things that struck me is the relationship of the

young boy-- you-- to his parents, particularly his father, because he sees his

father's flaws for the first time. So it's very sort of personal and raw, in a sense.

PHILIP ROTH: I think the subject of the book that interested me was, to put what

I said earlier another way, how much pressure can you bring to bear on this f amily,

and what will happen when you bring maximum pressure to bear on them? They're

all trying to cope with thi s menace, the menace of Lindbergh, and the pressures are

enormous. And they're all trying to cope with the humiliation, too, even the little

tiny boy, the humiliation of being... of the Jews somehow being separated out, of

appearing to be not welcome.

JEFFREY BROWN: There's a passage, maybe you could read for us, in which the

son does see his father breaking down.

PHILIP ROTH: Yeah, he says, "a new life began for me. I'd watched my father fall

apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was

now away all day working for Hanes, the brother on call was now off after schoolworking for Lindbergh, and the father who'd defiantly serenaded all those callow

cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open,

crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured, because he was

powerless to stop the unforeseen.

And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made it clearer to me, the unfolding of

the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way around, the relentless

unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as history, harmless history, where

everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The

terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into

an epic."JEFFREY BROWN: Well, in fact, we don't want to give away what happens in the

plot in your book, but in the end, I think we can say, that histor y resumes.


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PHILIP ROTH: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: The history that we all are familiar with.

PHILIP ROTH: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: So while on the one hand you've written a book of menace--

and it's quite scary-- on the other hand, it didn't happen.

PHILIP ROTH: In a manner of speaking, my book gets it all wrong.

JEFFREY BROWN: Fortunately.

PHILIP ROTH: Luckily. Yes, indeed.

JEFFREY BROWN: So is it a book of fear or of hope?

PHILIP ROTH: Well, in a manner of speaking, it 's an optimistic book. It imagines

something that did not happen, and as you had said, could it have happened? And

the answer is, sure, it could have happened, but it didn't happen, which tells you a

lot about the country, this country.

JEFFREY BROWN: Was it comforting to you as a writer, as a human being, that

history resumed?PHILIP ROTH: (Laughs) Yes, now that you... now that you ask that question. Yes,

to know that this came to an end, that this nightmare came to an end. Yes, it was a

comfort.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Philip Roth, thanks for letting us visit.

PHILIP ROTH: You're quite welcome.

JIM LEHRER: In part two of our conversation, Philip Roth talks about his almost

50 years as a writer of fiction.

JEFFREY BROWN: Philip Roth has been one of this country's leading writers

since the 1959 publication of "Goodbye, Columbus."

Ten years later, his bestseller, "Portnoy's Complaint," with its hilarious coming-

of-age sexuality, earned Roth both praise and outrage, and made him a literary

celebrity.

In all, he's published 26 novels and other works, and won most every literary

award available. His new novel, "The Plot Against America," presents an alternate

American history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1940, the

nation remains out of World War II, and the Jews in Roth's own childhood

neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, live in fear of anti-Semitic violence.

Roth, now 71, lives a private country life in Connecticut and rarely gives

television interviews, but let us come visit recently for a talk about his writing

life.

JEFFREY BROWN: Phillip Roth , thank you for letting us come visit.

PHILIP ROTH: It's ni ce to have you.

JEFFREY BROWN: What is it that you want to do when you start a novel? What

are you trying to do?

PHILIP ROTH: Get to work.

JEFFREY BROWN: Get to work?

PHILIP ROTH: Get to work, work. Without a novel, I'm empty. I'm empty and not

very happy. So when I get to work on a novel I begin to do what, what I'm

supposed to do. It's a long process. Usually, it takes between two and three yearsto write a novel, for me.


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And the first six, eight, ten months can be very difficult because you don't know

what you're doing; you don't know what you have. So the work is difficult in the

beginning, and it's also difficult in the middle and it's difficult in the end, as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: But put it in terms of us, your readers. What do you want to

do for us?

PHILIP ROTH: Oh, I'm going to sound very ungracious -- nothing, frankly. I can'tworry about the reader, just as the reader can't worry about me. We all have to

take care of ourselves, and I don't think about the reader.

I think about the book. I think about the sentence, I think about the paragraph, I

think about the page. I go over it and over it and over it. The book begins to make

its demands. The demands are intellectual, they're imaginative; they're aesthetic.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's interesting because you're often described as something of

a provocateur, sort of throwing out literary bombshells, I mean, you get a lot of

reaction to your work.

PHILIP ROTH: I'm a very bad judge of how people will respond to my work, how

the general reader will respond to a book, and I'm always surprised by theresponses that a book elicits.

I don't think I'm the only writer who experiences this, too. There's... there's a kind

of dummy who lives here, too, you know, and you don't know what you've done.

JEFFREY BROWN: Roth lived in London for much of the late 1970s and '80s.

Returning home, he began a series of prize-winning books that look at big

movements in postwar America through the lives of ordinary people, including

"Sabbath's Theater", which won a national book award, "American Pastoral,"

which earned the Pulitzer Prize and for "The Human Stain," winner of the

Pen/Faulkner Award.

In "The Plot Against America," which depicts Roth's own family life in the 1940's,his father says, "What's history? History is everything that happens everywhere,

even here in Newark, even here on Summit Avenue, even what happens in this

house to an ordinary man."

PHILIP ROTH: Yes, I kind of put my words in his mouth there. That's a moment

where I push things a bit. Yeah. History comes into the living room. The large

forces that make the world go, they come into our living room, and I like that, I

like depicting that.

JEFFREY BROWN: Many observers have noted this great run of books that you've

had over the last, say, ten years or so. What happened?

PHILIP ROTH: (Laughs) What did I eat for breakfast, you mean? Um, I don'tknow, maybe it's a consequence of age. But I did feel energetic and I did feel

ambitious, and I did the work.

JEFFREY BROWN: What was your ambition t o do?

PHILIP ROTH: To be able to write this kind of book, to be able to broaden the

subject, while at the same time keeping it a novel, while at the same time having

the subject enacted by people.

JEFFREY BROWN: And "broaden the subject"-- what is the subject?

PHILIP ROTH: When I came back to live in America in 1989, all the time, I felt

enormously energized by being home.

But also, I realized that I had in front of me a new subject that was an old subject,which was this country; that it was brand new to me in a strange way, yet I knew

all about it because I had been brought up here.


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So being away for ten or twelve years produced, I think, a burst of writ ing energy.

JEFFREY BROWN: Are you able to look back now over the long arc of your

career and sum it up?

PHILIP ROTH: I look back... with just with a little wonder, really, wonder that I

stuck with this thing.

JEFFREY BROWN: This thing of writing, you mean?

PHILIP ROTH: Yeah, yeah.

JEFFREY BROWN: And when you look back and when you think about, now, do

you see a different writer, a better writer, a worse writer?

PHILIP ROTH: Oh, I like to think a better writer, a different writer, sure. You

begin with, or I began certainly with enormous naivet and rawness. You're very

raw when you begin.

And I don't think I'm... I think I'm only half as naive now, and raw, I'm only raw

from the hard work. I'm not raw in th e way a young fellow would be raw.

JEFFREY BROWN: Some years ago, I know you were involved with EasternEuropean writers at a time when they were a kind of moral voice against a

totalitarian society. What do you see as your role, or as the role of a writer in our

society?

PHILIP ROTH: Your role is to write as well as you can. You're not advancing

social causes as far as I'm concerned. You're not addressing social problems.

What you're advancing is... there's only one cause you're advancing; that's the

cause of literature, which is one of the great lost human causes. So you do your

bit, you do your bit for fictio n, for the novel.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it's become one of the great lost causes of

our time?PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don't think in twenty or twenty-five years

people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it 's inevitable. I think the... there are other

things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to

be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the

novel. So I think the novel's day has come and gone, really.

JEFFREY BROWN: I would imagine you would think this is a great loss for

society.

PHILIP ROTH: Yes, I do. There's a lot of brilliance locked up in all those books inthe library. There's a lot of human understanding. There's a lot of language.

There's a lot of imaginative genius. So, yes, it 's a great shame.

JEFFREY BROWN: And what happens for you?

PHILIP ROTH: Me?

JEFFREY BROWN: You.

PHILIP ROTH: (Laughs) I'm going to keep doing it. I'll keep doing it, stubbornly.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay, Philip Roth, thank you for letting us come to talk to

you.

PHILIP ROTH: You're welcome.

intervista a philip roth su the plot against america

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