Philip Roth Unbound: Interview Transcript

Click here to watch Tina Brown’s video interview with Philip Roth; read the transcript below.

Tina Brown: The last 12 years, we’ve seen the most incredible creative surge from you—American Pastoral, Plot Against America, The Human Stain. And now you’ve written your 30th novel, The Humbling. Why such an incredible creative surge do you think just lately?

Philip Roth: I don’t know. I don’t know. I do the same things I always did. I work just as much as I always worked. And I can’t explain the fact that there have been a series of books coming rather regularly out of me. I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

Tina Brown: I think that your writing is probably at its best now because it seems almost more direct, more simple. It has an urgency—particularly these short novels that you’ve been doing where you can sort of read them in a sitting and it feels like you’re taken over in one mood and that it’s almost written in one bite, which I’m sure it isn’t. How much rewriting do you do with these short books?

Philip Roth: I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books—and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting. The first draft is extremely crude, but at least it’s down. So when I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

Tina Brown: So you don’t keep on writing one paragraph? You sort of do what I used to call a vomit draft, where you kind of just throw it all on the page and then go back and do the whole thing.

Philip Roth: Yes. That’s a good phrase—vomit draft. I do a vomit draft. And I may do several more vomit drafts. But eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

Tina Brown: Do you usually start with a thematic idea or do you start with a character or a situation?

Philip Roth: Well, I’ll give you an example from The Humbling. I began with a line, which is the first line of the book: “He lost his magic.” I was thinking of an actor—not a particular actor, but an actor, who couldn’t act. The idea just intrigued me.

Tina Brown: Somebody you knew or somebody that you read of?

Philip Roth: No somebody that I’d heard about. Yeah. And I didn’t know much about him, but I liked the idea that he went on stage and suddenly it’s all deserted you and that you’ve lost your power. So the situation was very promising. And the first line was “He lost his magic” and so I wrote from that first line onward for me to find what happened.

Tina Brown: So performance anxiety must afflict writers as well as actors. I mean, have you ever felt that situation yourself that you wonder you might—I was going to say sit down, but you write standing up, don’t you?—that you might stand there at your lectern and you’ve lost your magic. Has that ever occurred to you?

Philip Roth: Yes, yes. It happens routinely between books. I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on. But routinely when I finish a book, I think, “What will I do? Where will I get an idea?” And a kind of low-level panic sets in. And then eventually something happens. I don’t know. If I knew how it happened I would repeat the process, but I don’t know—something just occurs to me.