17 November 2012, 03:27 PM IST
Just days after Girish Karnad launched a diatribe against Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, voices in the Western press called for a Nobel to this other great writer of our times – Philip Roth. This, soon after the 79-year-old Roth told a French magazine that he's "done with" writing. "I don't know anything more about America today," he is reported to have said to the surprise of millions of his fans. Retirement for a writer isn't something easily digestible. But for those who have followed Roth, the decision is heartbreaking but not entirely improbable. If he has nothing new to say, what's wrong one may ask. Or as they put it famously in the game of cricket, retire before they ask you `why' rather than `why not?'
Actually Roth never showed signs of his creative tap running dry. There was an inkling of calming down in 1997 when he was 64. Roth, who for years was the inveterate wicked boy of American writing seemed to mellow, showing autumnal colours. The bull-dozer of literary conventions and the spoilsport in politically-correct America had then entered the pastoral territory of contemplation with his novel "American Pastoral". And he won the Pulitzer for it.
Until then perhaps Roth was never one who chewed over a melancholic past. His was a brash and rasping but witty look at middle-class Jewish life. And like his brothers-in-letters Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Roth dealt mainly with the traumatized post-Holocaust mind of the Jew, especially he who had settled in America. His protagonists, some kind of moral hobos, cared little for convention. From "Goodbye Columbus" (1959), his first collection of short stories, he underscored the absurdities of life in a frenzied America that desperately sought to rationalize situations on a psychiatrist's couch.
Take a look at some of his principal characters: a vulnerable Alexander Portnoy (from the bestseller - Portnoy's Complaint) who grows up in the shadow of an overbearing mother and takes comfort in masturbation; the lustful and mean Morris Sabbath ("Sabbath's Theater" written in 1995) a former puppeteer who during a street act, demonstrates deft finger-work in unbuttoning a young woman's blouse; the hot-as-a-fire cracker nymph Drenka, never tired of desperately male company… All this flirting with the forbidden and obnoxious sex had the discreet screwing up their faces. At times, critics frowned upon the frustrated people in his books. Unlike Singer, he was not concerned with the spiritual examination of the Jewish past. His ripsnorter stories describing the offensive behaviour of his men and women, did outrage sensibilities.
Literary commentators threw light on his real life shortcomings, particularly his disastrous marriage with actress Claire Bloom, who as a teenager played the lead role in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Roth had lived with Claire for 15 years before they married. But three years later, in 1994, as Claire writes in her "Leaving a Doll's House", the alliance ended after bitter acrimony, infidelities and mental upheavals. Roth got back at his critics through his fiction and some reviewers believe he got back at Claire too in "I Married A Communist".
It may now seem that in the last few years Roth was showing signals of winding up his literary journey. Two books bore this testimony: "Everyman" (2006), a reflection on aging, illness and death and "Exit Ghost" (2007) which marked the departure of his literary alter-ego, Nathan Zukerman.
After his final book, Nemesis (2010), which speaks of the tragic effect an outbreak of polio has on a Jewish community in the Newark of the 1940s, Roth says he no longer feels "the fanaticism to write". Creative age, they say, needn't follow physical age. E M Forster put away his pen in the mid-forties. If that's an indication, we must take respite in the fact that Roth dedicated his life to writing like few have done and ended up giving us over 25 works of fiction.
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