I Turn Sentences Around

Greetings, writers—

In Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, which I recently procured and read under the mildly embarrassing and incorrect assumption that it would have something to do with ghostwriting, the talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman—Roth’s alter ego in his Zuckerman Unbound trilogy, of which this novel is the first—visits a reclusive and venerable literary genius at his isolated New England home. This hoary old master, supposedly modeled on either Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth, is a pure “symbol of scrupulous and stern artistic commitment”; indeed, he enjoys nothing at all but writing.

Well, enjoys would be the wrong word. Obviously.

And yet he can do nothing else. Here is what he tells goggle-eyed, starstruck Zuckerman.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste….And I ask myself, why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?

This poor writer doesn’t want to talk to his desperately lonely wife; he doesn’t want to take a walk in the lovely woods; he doesn’t even want to have sex with the beautiful assistant who flings herself at him in a late-night awkward exchange that Zuckerman physically endangers himself to overhear.

Can you imagine? “That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around” makes my blood run cold. I mean, yes, I do turn sentences around, I do it a thousand times and sometimes even enjoy it, but I do a lot of other things besides and if I didn’t, I would go nuts, my children would starve, and within a week there would be raccoons living in my house.

Say what you will about Roth (e.g., “In the requisite 10 generations, Roth’s work will still have penis problems” or “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can't breathe”) he was wildly imaginative, remarkably perceptive, terrifyingly prolific. Roth wrote about people he knew and people he knew wrote about him—Asymmetry, anyone?—and he, like Joyce Carol Oates, never stopped writing, never stopped being passionately engaged with characters and sentences. And “that Rothian spirit—so full of people and stories and laughter and history and sex and fury—will be a source of energy as long as there is literature,” writes Zadie Smith.

Here’s more of Smith, reflecting on Roth in The New Yorker:

One time, I was having a conversation with Philip Roth about lane swimming, a thing it turned out we both liked to do, although he could swim much farther and much faster. He asked me, “What do you think about as you do each length?” I told him the dull truth. “I think, first length, first length, first length, and then second length, second length, second length. And so on.” That made him laugh. “You wanna know what I think about?” I did. “I choose a year. Say, 1953. Then I think about what happened in my life or within my little circle in that year. Then I move on to thinking about what happened in Newark, or New York. Then in America. And then if I’m going the distance I might start thinking about Europe, too. And so on.” That made me laugh. The energy, the reach, the precision, the breadth, the curiosity, the will, the intelligence. Roth in the swimming pool was no different than Roth at his standing desk. He was a writer all the way down. It was not diluted with other things as it is—mercifully!—for the rest of us. He was writing taken neat, and everything he did was at the service of writing.

He was a writer all the way down.

Unlike the single-minded-genius stuff, I like the sound of that. And though no one will ever be able to say that about me, because of the raccoons, that’s okay.

If we had, say 18% of Roth’s focus and dedication, we’d wind up with five books. Five! (I did the math.) Even with 5% of his focus, we’re still putting out a book and a half, which is a lot better than a kick in the pants.

Dumb as it is, this comforts me somehow. You don’t have to climb mountains; the foothills turn out to be quite lovely.

Instead of a picture of Philip Roth, I offer you Portrait of Lady Morgan, Writer by René Théodore Berthon (c.1818)