Philip Roth Unbound: Interview Transcript

Tina Brown: In The Humbling, the character, Simon Axler, the actor, he embarks on this very self-destructive affair with this very threatening, sort of predatory girl. She’s a fascinating character. I mean, tell me about the genesis of this character, of this woman, who is predatory lesbian, actually?

Philip Roth: Is she predatory?

Tina Brown: She feels it to me. She’s so sinister.

Philip Roth: Mmm. Well, you’re a reader. The book has only had a very small handful of readers so far and nobody has said that about her before. I didn’t mean for her to be predatory. I meant for the situation to be unreliable. That is, he was embarking on an unreliable situation. I don’t think she’s any more predatory than everybody is. But she’s watching out for herself. She has a certain charm. A certain sexual charm, erotic charm. She makes him happy. So before we call her predatory, we must remember that for a while there, he’s extremely happy—this guy who’s miserable when the book begins and she destroys his misery. And then when she leaves him, she dumps him back into his misery, but I’ll remember that you called her predatory.

Tina Brown: At what point did you feel, or perhaps it was always in your mind, that she would be gay? She didn’t have to be gay to be unreliable.

Philip Roth: That was from the beginning. I thought that that was an unusual situation. I wanted to think about it. I didn’t remember anybody writing about it. There must be a book which has the situation in it—do you know about any?

Tina Brown: No. It was very striking.

Philip Roth: Yeah so there’s a heterosexual man—strongly heterosexual. And there’s this young woman, she’s forty—that’s young. And she comes to him directly from a long love affair—she’d been with this woman, I think, six or seven years. And her woman lover decides to become a man, if you recall. And she leaves her and then she comes upon Simon Axler who she knows because her family knew him when they were all young actors in New York.

Tina Brown: It’s a very striking moment in the book when she straps on that dildo- a green dildo. Tell me about writing those scenes. I mean, is it a hard thing to write a sex scene with a woman in a green dildo?

Philip Roth: No. I mean, no harder than writing a sex scene with a woman without a green dildo really. Most of my sex scenes have been with women without green dildos. This is a first for me, too, you know? It was actually interesting imagining it—imagining what would happen, how he would respond to it, what she would do with it, and what the byplay between them would be. So for me, it was fresh.

Tina Brown: Are sex scenes harder to write than other scenes or not—just the same?

Philip Roth: Well, you don’t want to repeat yourself for one. You don’t want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don’t want to be licentious really. You want to be descriptive, if you can be. And you’re not setting out to arouse anybody. A friend of mine read the book and told me that he was tremendously aroused by those scenes so I don’t want to tell you what I think about him, but I didn’t intend for that to be said.