PEN salutes Roth
NEW YORK — Philip Roth’s latest honour was as much for what he has done for other writers as for his own work.
Roth received the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award Tuesday night. He was cited for such novels as Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, but also for his advocacy in the 1970s and 1980s for writers in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern bloc countries during the Cold War.
PEN, in the midst of a weeklong World Voices Festival, is an international writers’ organization that defends human rights.
The ceremony included readings from two Roth books, Everyman and American Pastoral, and brief films of and about Roth. The author laughed along as he watched himself on screen joking about the daring humour of James Joyce, and was clearly moved by a clip of Czech writer Ivan Klima thanking him.
Roth’s support for Klima, Milan Kundera and other Eastern European writers was personal and literary. He travelled to Prague every spring from 1972 to 1977, arranged to have such peers as Arthur Miller and William Styron send money to persecuted authors and oversaw the U.S. publication of novels by Klima, Kundera and others.
Roth, 80, has announced his retirement from writing books, but not from the written word or prepared text. He spoke briefly, and forcefully, before the hundreds gathered for the PEN Literary Gala at the Museum of Natural History, with attendees including Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Jeffrey Eugenides.
During his speech, Roth recalled the “thoroughgoing education” his friends in Eastern Europe had given him about life under a totalitarian government.
He spoke of some of the best minds of Czechoslovakia being forbidden to write, travel or even drive, and forced to work at “menial jobs” such as selling cigarettes and washing windows.