ROTH

Fragments from David Remnick's "Into the clear," May 15, 2000

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/08/into-the-clear

“The writer is just not of interest to the public as somebody who may have an inroad into consciousness. The writer is only interesting in terms of how much money did he get and what’s the scandal. That’s all they’re interested in. Why? Because the other stuff is useless, they don’t want it. There has always been a debate over what literature is and what’s it for, because it is a mysterious thing, and the mysterious side of existence, certainly for secular people, is not an urgent problem.

 

“I’m not a good enough student of whatever you have to be a student of to figure this out, but one gets the sense—and not just on the basis of the death of reading—that the American branch of the species is being retooled. I see the death of reading as just an aspect of this. I have to see it that way, otherwise it’s just cultural whining, and cultural whining is boring. It’s an aspect of some great shift that’s occurred—been going on for a while—in that which interests the most intelligent members of American society.”

 

“So when I talk of the death of reading, I’m not saying, ‘Poor me, or poor the other guy, we don’t have the readership.’ I just mean that this great human endeavor has come to an end, when we’re talking about the serious novel, and that is worth marking. I’m sixty-seven years old and writing now in 2000. I started publishing in 1959 in The New Yorker. Believe me, I know. If it were otherwise I’d be delighted. But I’m not despairing, I tell you. How can you be despairing about this and spend ten hours a day writing? I’d do it anyway.”

 

“I have to tell you that I don’t believe in death, I don’t experience the time as limited. I know it is, but I don’t feel it,” Roth said. “I could live three hours or I could live thirty years, I don’t know. Time doesn’t prey upon my mind. It should, but it doesn’t. I don’t know yet what this will all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there’s no stopping. And this stuff is not going to matter anyway, as we know. So there’s no sense even contemplating it, you know? All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right, and the rest is the human comedy: the evaluations, the lists, the crappy articles, the insults, the praise.

“I want only to respond to my work. I don’t want to respond to all that stuff. It’s not important. It was, and it is for others at a certain time, but it can’t be important anymore.

“If I’m healthy and strong and writing every day, who cares? Whatever problem is raised for me by what I’m writing, I think, Don’t worry about it, all it takes is time. That’s all it takes. I don’t worry anymore that I don’t have what it takes to solve the problem. There are no interruptions, and I’ve got all the time in the world. Time is on my side.” 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/08/into-the-clear