Philip Roth and the whale
Iremember when Philip Roth told me he’d stopped writing fiction. He was talking with my wife and me, and — looking honestly happy and relaxed about his new situation — he said, “Now I can have a glass of orange juice in the morning and read the newspaper.” And I remember thinking, “You could have had your orange juice after Portnoy’s Complaint or The Ghostwriter, that you probably earned at least a scan of the A-section by book 10 or 12 or 14.”
Beyond Philip’s charm and wit, beyond the joy of talking to him about anything and everything — sharp and eloquent and funny, funny, funny right up to the end — it was these kinds of offhand reflections about craft from a master craftsperson that always struck me. I saw them as inadvertent tips on how to live the writing life from a person who used his time on this planet for little else.
Philip once told me about finishing a novel and how, with a new book under his belt and nothing to do, he’d walked out the door of his Manhattan apartment to the American Museum of Natural History, a few steps away. He’d strolled around the displays and told me that, standing in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life, he’d gazed up at the giant model of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling and thought, “What am I supposed to do, look at a whale all day?” And so he went back up to his apartment and started writing again.
I can’t tell you how greatly that anecdote affected me. When I finished my last book, I didn’t waste an instant before starting the next, solely because I had that comment of Philip’s floating around in my head.
As for being able to hear Philip in my noggin, the Rothian voice I’m most thankful to be able to call up — as I’m sure he’d want it to be — is that of his fiction, the Roth of the novels and stories, the voice that first forged a deep connection between us, a literary friendship in one world, that somehow crossed into another, breaking its bounds.
I have told my own story of discovering Philip’s work — of what it meant to find a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint tucked away on my mother’s bookshelf — so many times that Philip, when I participated in one of his events, banned it from my opening act.
I’ll spare you (and him) the jokey part and all the flourish, and say only how transcendent it was, as a super-religious, superisolated kid, to find my universe represented on the page, to see my questions and concerns wrestled with bravely and honestly and with their weightiness leavened, again and again, by good cheer.
I thought about all this on May 22 when, at the end of the big annual fundraiser for PEN America, I heard the news about Philip’s death. It was sometime after midnight and, oddly, impossibly, I wasn’t home in bed in Brooklyn but together with a group of writers and readers, remembering Philip at his doorstep.
We’d all just spent the evening at the gala (where Philip himself was honored in 2013). A swathe of our literary community gussied up and gathered at the Museum of Natural History and sitting under that giant whale.
As I absorbed the loss of a legendary American writer, as I processed the death of a friend, I couldn’t help thinking what a fitting and inadvertent sendoff it was, everyone joined together to champion free expression and free speech and the wonder of books — celebrating everything that mattered to Philip in this life. To be in that glorious company, right there and right then, felt like a little novelistic happenstance in honor of one of the greats. It was an accidental memorial, a vigil we didn’t know we were having, outside Philip’s door and looking his way.