St. Peter (checks list): Philip Roth! Philip Roth? Shouldn’t you be in Jew heaven?
Roth: There is no Jew heaven. Except maybe Connecticut.
St. Peter: Welcome to … what are you doing?
Roth: I’m getting on the couch.
St. Peter: That’s a heavenly cloud.
Roth: Every week, Tuesday 4pm. Psychoanalysis!
St. Peter: But I’m not an analyst.
Roth: A Jew in a beard in front of a set of pearly gates? Listen, I hate to break it to you …
St. Peter: This is getting a little more Woody Allen than Philip Roth.
Roth: Woody Allen is a lot more Philip Roth than Woody Allen — the best film ever made of my books was Annie Hall — but ack, I couldn’t stand to write a straight obit in my head. It’s going to be wall-to-wall portentous, the great man, American Pastoral, Zuckerman unbound yada yada yada.
St. Peter: Really, and how does that make you — oh my god!
Roth: Ya see? That was what I did I guess. It’s all there in Goodbye Columbus, my first book, a sensation in the 50s. A smart Jew from Newark, New Jersey — the city that looks at Manhattan across the water — got into Chicago U, with one aim only …
St. Peter: To reconcile and synthesise the American anglo literary tradition with the shadow, irony and humour of a European Jewish tradition in ways that was not possible for writers such as Isaac B Singer and Bernard Malamud?
Roth: Shiksas!
St. Peter: Excuse me?
Roth: Shiksas. Tall nervous blondes who want you to read their poetry, toothy brunettes from the glee club, later goy English birds. And finally the students: episcopalians with footballer brothers whose hobby is “gangling”.
St. Peter: I didn’t pick that up in the obit.
Roth: Neither you won’t. Notice how my obits aren’t actually about anything? Apparently I wrote studies of American life. But it’s obvious from ‘Columbus onward that I wrote from ambition, the outsider’s drive, sexual hunger, the need for mastery.
St. Peter: They’re saying American Pastoral is your best book.
Roth: American Pastoral isn’t my best book. A high-school reunion, a blonde Jewish athlete type, a daughter turned Weatherman-style terrorist? It’s John Updike’s best book, sure — man does that guy’s oeuvre read like a raunched up LL Bean catalogue with each passing day — but it’s not mine. It’s in all the obits because it’s the book of mine most acceptable to the current era. Which, as I said, when I quit novel-writing in 2010, is an era in which novels don’t matter anymore. Ya see, doctor.
St. Peter: I’m not a doctor.
Roth: Ya see, doctor, Carmen Callil had it right when she quit the panel that gave me the first international Booker prize. My best work can’t be assimilated to the current era. If I’d died in 1975, everyone would be talking about Portnoy’s Complaint and nothing else. The raging anger towards a mother, trying to break down the bathroom door when her kid’s in his 20s, and the raging hunger for sexual conquest of Portnoy’: “even while he’s pumping away, he’s thinking of the next pussy”. Assimilate that!
St. Peter: But they say you were the last literar-
Roth: I’m the last vitalist! I’m the Schopenhauer of the deli sandwich counter! I am the most honest straight male writer you’ll ever read. One female protagonist in thirty novels. Relationships virtually transcribed, acts of revenge with an ISBN, all beautifully done. Read Claire Bloom’s memoir of living with me, then read my I Married A Communist for the rebuttal. See? Even my “historical” novels burn with it. Look at the titles: Everyman, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal. It’s not as if I didn’t leave any clues. When the obits quote what I said about quitting writing because it is isn’t enough anymore, they skip what I also said: that it might never have been.
St. Peter: So Nemesis is …
Roth: The rule-proving exception. My last novel, about polio in Newark in the 50s. A rebuke to my more sentimental notion of a purposeful life. Polio makes people … give up. Nemesis is a rebuke to the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness. That it coincided with my departure is no coincidence.
St. Peter: Alright, enough. Coming in?
Roth: What’s there?
St. Peter: Seventy-two shiksas.
Roth: Sounds like hell.
St. Peter: Which for you, is heaven.
Roth: So, vee now at last begin?
Excellent ! First Class! Cheered me up no-end.
If this exchange is original Guy then flick politics and take up literary commentary.
Jack R will love this Guy.
Aye. Exquisite, not just in casual heft, execution, flair. But…sheer effing audacity. Can you even begin to imagine a single other Australian writer – much less an actual nominal lit crit hahahaha – with the stones or twat (and grunt) to do it….like this?
Aye, Graybs: author, author(s)! Fittingly – truly – respectful. Why, subs, annually, etc, etc.
Thought it might draw you out mate. Had been waiting for Guy to discard the chains. Huge gust of fresh air . . .
It’s the subject matter that mostly got dull n’ dreary, Gray, not the local painters. The narcissistic contempt with which the political/knowledge/info class – including most ‘pro’ writers, across all sub-genres – clearly now regards the bulk of humanity that exists outside their human-centipede of a ‘public conversion’ now demands that anyone with a shred of curiosity about the wider world, and a bit of genuine info-talent, refuse to give their self-referential antics any but a half-assed effort. Expecting GR, HR, BK et al…to write interestingly about the dreck in Canberra or Trumpocity or the turgid churn of ID politix is a demeaning category error. Diminishing, too: that shit wipes off, and then it sticks.
Did you cop that nauseating piece about us comment section plebs yesterday (from some self-important PR-release office-girl, AKA 20-year veteran ‘journalist’)? If that’s the qualitative disposition regarding the external world now largely underpinning ‘professional news gathering’ – and all evidence increasingly suggests just that – then ‘professional news gathering’ can go f**k itself. Along with all other forms of ‘professional’ information wrangling. It’ll all be dead inside half a decade anyway, taken down by the absence of any tenably monetising biz model, thank Christ. (Who the eff kept paying scribes to write their letters, in a literate world? A few dopey calligraphy fetishists, is who, and …umm). ‘Information professionals’. Yairs…blah blah blah, they all go, these ‘information professionals’. Blah blah truthy truthy truth blah blah analyse analysey blah blah comment commenty blah blah spin spruik stoush…satisfying the insatiable strictures of 24-7 space-stuffery. Blah blah blah…comment box inanity, is it?! Well, just now on taxpayer-info-flagship 7.30 Report here’s Laura Tingle, one of our better ‘serious political journalists’, describing to Leigh Sales, one of our more insipid, how Labor is (quotes) ‘spewing’ over the by-election timings. Fucking television: The Stupidiser, Graybul. (Modern-day screen zombification the death of our littlies’ grasp of reality, is it Rundle? Ho ho…Dude, the passive schizofication of human sentient acuity by toxic technology has been underway for well over half a century now, and in plain sight. My 11 year old son has more authorial autonomy and power in HIS electronic I-conversations than we Gen X-ers, and certainly the Boomers, ever did. That’s what really sh*ts the wailing, bog-stranded infosauruses of the one-way-only legacy media, these don’t-read-the-comments-box pompostadors of the Secular Priesthood: turns out it was they, not my frighteningly info-lithe and info-agile digital native son and his mates, whose grasp of reality and perspective got so terminally all-fucked-up by electronics.
They – and the public players mutually bonded in the introspective 24-7 info-death spiral with them – go blah blah blah blah endlessly from afar at each other like broadsiding dreadnoughts, never having to actually engage with anyone but their own thundering arseholes, and no-one sane & attuned to the real material world would want anything to do with them or their contrived panto call-n-response shtick anymore.
What do we information ‘amateurs’ do instead? Like my son at my local brewshop, we ignore the ‘grown-ups’ talking their one-way wisdom down uponst them from their hipster high tables…and talk directly with, to, for and about each other instead. Simply because…we can. We don’t need the Secular Priesthood anymore. We just…don’t.
Gray? Of course a Guy Rundle is only going to really make a writerly effort these days on an outworld dwelling heavyweight like Roth. Marx. The arc of big history. Frightening ideas. Things that piss exactly the wrong – which is to say right – people off: all of them info-workers, of some or other rapidly aging sort.
The rest is just rent-paying filler for any authentic talent, the subject matter disqualifing itself from any right to much of it…but…wait, hang on a tic…What the..?
Chortle chortle – see what you did there, Graybs? And here was me doing so well swearing off this blah caper myself for good! Remember: Don’t read the comments boxes, but especially: don’t ever feed the mouthiest of those wot lurk within! Ther, be epistemologically autopeotomising dragyns & tygers… 🙂
All good karma as ever, G. And…Crikey!
Can only whisper/shout out loud Jack, whenever a genuine Grundle whoever, drops their stone into stagnant waters. To see, feel ripples renew possibilities. Only care , know, some have gift of crazy, honest expression. And for that . . . am a sucker; again and again. Think you understand. Stagnation cannot be tolerated; anymore than justice blocked or chained? The professional communicators are in disarray; chaos, false news (even worse, uninformed, all guilty like me, try to fill gaps and more often than not deepen the morass). But stuff me . . . a vacuum is even more frightening if the whole box and dice is left to bastards like the Prime Minister or, Minister for Home Affairs eh? So, simply put . . . I’m in for the long haul and to piss on the fires that don’t deserve to be lit. Am happy whenever . . . Guy, yourself, or any other warrior bounces my neurons and offers hope. (Graeme)
I “think” I am in fundamental agreement with your views to the extent that I understand them. I am similarity challenged by many of the articles by Ms Razer on account of the “modern” jargon and associations to contemporary social media services that apparently “everyone” is expected to “know about”.
I am interested in inter-generational comparisons so I would be grateful if you could expand upon what you intended by ” My 11 year old son has more authorial autonomy and power in HIS electronic I-conversations than we Gen X-ers, and certainly the Boomers, ever did.” – for the sake of my small mind. As it stands, with do desire to criticise, I have no idea as to what the sentence might mean.
Reads like a dry run by grundle for his own obit. coz, hey ne plus ultra.
Ok – AR : flex your literary skills. Link the jazz album [Ne Plus Ultra, of which I haven’t heard for years] and content by a guy with two famous Oz-names (Warne Marsh) to to the St Peter – Roth dialogue. As an aside, the album was good but ne plus ultra? Others may judge.
One of your best Guy! vale yada yada
Quite so, Graeme…for as the Professionals advise us: t’is merely the insignificant sound and fury of the comments box. We can write wot we bloody well please. Worse thing they can do is Mod us into obliv-…
Go well, friend, as ever.