Philip Roth’s alarm clock gets auctioned: Why it rings for me
By the time this column runs, I may be the proud owner of the clock radio that sat on the nightstand in Philip Roth’s master bedroom.
You know Philip Roth, National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of classics such as “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “The Plot Against America”? He died last year, and last weekend some of his stuff was sold in an estate auction featuring online bidding.
The clock radio is a Proton Model 320, and there is nothing special about it other than it sat in Philip Roth’s master bedroom. Presumably it is what Roth looked at when he would wake in the middle of the night as some bit of his brain gnawed on a particular writing problem. As he stared at the lighted numbers in the display, did he curse his affliction that kept him from sound sleep or was it a comfort to know that even as he was at rest, some part of him was writing?
I do not know exactly why I wish to own something owned by Roth, but once I came across the auction online, I became a bit obsessed.
Unfortunately, I have already been outbid on the manual Olivetti typewriter Roth used early in his career. The IBM Selectric models Roth moved to later are also too rich for my blood.
I have been eyeing a leather sofa from Roth’s writing studio that you’d drive by if it was sitting for free on the curb. It is scratched and stained, battered beyond recognition. I can almost smell the must through the computer screen and yet I stare at it.
I’m considering putting in an offer, trying to calculate how much it will cost to have it shipped to me. Maybe I would take a road trip and rent a truck to bring it back. I’d get a story out of it: “Me and Philip Roth’s Moldy Couch Across America.”
Even though my own work space is utterly mundane — a spare bedroom with a desk — I have always been interested in seeing glimpses into the writing habitats of writers.
On a book tour years ago, I made sure to schedule time for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s former home in Oxford, Miss. It now serves as a museum where you can see his writing room, arranged as it might’ve been when he was working, glasses on a nearby table. In another room, you can see the outline for his novel “A Fable” sketched directly on the walls.
I’m not allowed to write on the walls of my office. Hurts resale value.
If you visit Duke University, you can see Virginia Woolf ’s writing desk, a solid work of oak with a hinged top for storage and a painted scene of Clio, the muse of history on the surface. Roth’s estate doesn’t offer anything so fancy, at least not in this auction.
It is supposed to be the words that matter, not the objects surrounding their creator. Roth’s wicker porch furniture (zero bids as of this writing) is not the source of his genius. Maybe the objects themselves aren’t all that important, and I’m infusing them with meaning they don’t deserve.
The papers and correspondence relevant to Roth’s literary career are held at the Library of Congress, where they will be preserved and accessible hopefully forever.
Still, I hope I win something. If not the clock radio, perhaps the desk lamp.
Keep your fingers crossed for me.