I got to know Philip Roth in 1983 when I made a TV film for the BBC based on his novel The Ghost Writer. I had written to him out of the blue.
He wrote back, saying, ‘Come to Connecticut and we can discuss a possible film.’
This was Philip 1 – sane, enthusiastic, generous, erudite, good Philip.
A couple of months later, the chosen, highly experienced scriptwriter presented his first draft for Philip, now in London, to approve. It was a disaster. ‘This script exemplifies everything my work is opposed to. It contains every known Jewish family cliché,’ Philip said, holding it over the wastepaper basket.
The scriptwriter humbly said he’d like to try another draft. I knew what the result of that would be. We left.
I rang Philip later and told him I’d fired the writer. This small, unhappy drama pleased – even excited – him. His own life was ordered, often solitary.
His clapboard house, bought on the profits of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), was hidden away up a dirt road, an escape from his unwanted fame in New York. Inside, there were wooden floors, demure curtains and oriental rugs – the deep quiet of a writer’s house, very familiar to me.
At the same time, he loved provocation and disorder as a source of drama. This was Philip 2, the subversive, hilarious voice in Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theatre, who could also be filled with paranoid rage and self-obsession. As he said himself, ‘When God wants to say f**k, he says it through me.’
Philip described how he had escaped from writing well-mannered, ‘good’ books.
Bu hikaye The Oldie Magazine dergisinin April 2021 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The Oldie Magazine dergisinin April 2021 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Travel: Retreat From The World
For his new book, Nat Segnit visited Britain’s quietest monasteries and islands to talk to monks, hermits and recluses
What is... a nail house?
Don’t confuse a nail house with a nail parlour. A nail house is an old house that survives as new building development goes on all around it.
Kent's stairway to heaven
Walter Barton May’s Hadlow Castle is the ultimate Gothic folly
Pursuits
Pursuits
The book that changed the world
On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel
RIP the playboys of the western world
Charlie Methven mourns his dashing former father-in-law, Luis ‘the Bounder’ Basualdo, last of a dying breed
Arts
Arts
My film family's greatest hits
Downton Abbey producer Gareth Neame follows in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandmother, a silent-movie star
Books
Books
A lifetime of pin-ups
Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on