Philip Roth’s Eightieth-Birthday Celebration

I saw and heard something remarkable just a few hours ago, something I’m not likely to forget until all the mechanisms of remembering are shot and I’m tucked away for good. Philip Roth celebrated his eightieth birthday in the Billy Johnson Auditorium of the Newark Museum last night with the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed. On his birthday night, and having sworn never again to give himself over to the “stringent exigencies of literature,” he put on a farewell performance, a great burst of writing and sly self-display—a triumphal lope around the bases, like Ted Williams did on his last day in a Red Sox uniform.

Roth lives in rural Connecticut and on the Upper West Side, near the Planetarium, but Newark is his town. They run tour buses these days to Weequahic, his old neighborhood. On a recent bus tour, the visiting Rothians recited the famous schoolboy chant from “Portnoy’s Complaint”:

“Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam
We’re the boys who eat no ham,
We play football, we play soccer—
And we keep matzos in our locker!
Aye, aye, aye Weequahic High!”

The library and the museum are accustomed to Roth exhibits, Roth inquiries, Rothian pilgrims. But this birthday celebration was something quite different. This was a Roth-endorsed, Roth-attended celebration of a writer whose last long run of books—particularly “Operation Shylock,” “The Human Stain,” “The Dying Animal,” “Everyman,” “Indignation,” “The Humbling,” and “Nemesis”—rage against the indignities and inevitabilities, the inescapability, the horrific cosmic joke of age, of death. Three years ago, Roth stopped. He retired. A writer who had once worked with the determination of a cornered infantryman now sensed that better books were not ahead. The trajectory was unpromising. He wanted no part of a falling off. He quit. Quoting Joe Louis, he said, “I did the best with what I had.” And yet he was very much the author of his own birthday party, and he seemed to enjoy it to the last.

The evening began with two charming introductions—from Liz Del Tufo, of the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee, and Aimee Pozorski, of the Philip Roth Society. Del Tufo rightfully claimed Roth for the city and quoted a famous line from “Goodbye, Columbus”: “I felt a deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection.” Nearby, the Newark Library was running an exhibition of photographs of Roth and his city.

Then came a stream of speakers: Jonathan Lethem, who talked about his encounter with “The Breast” after resisting for so long the lure of Roth’s work; Hermione Lee, the biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, who gave a learned survey of Roth’s use of Shakespeare in his novels; Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher and the author of “The Imaginary Jew,” who spoke about Roth’s last book, “Nemesis,” a novel of wartime polio, which reminded the Frenchman, inevitably, of Camus’s “La Peste” (“The Plague”). The best of the talks came from two friends. Claudia Roth Pierpont, whose book “Roth Unbound” will be published in November, took it upon herself to survey the variety, depth, and complexity of Roth’s female characters—a strong, and convincing, rebuke to years of criticism that the books are misogynistic. Then came Edna O’Brien, the novelist and playwright, who fearlessly described her longtime friend in all his wildness, impiety, and obstinate difficulty—and she did an honest, loving, and funny job of it.

As O’Brien finished, Roth walked slowly out onto the stage, smiling, waving, nodding happily, acknowledging the applause. What followed was a highly finished performance, a written performance by a writer who had declared himself out of the game. Roth has suffered from miserable back pain; standing at a lectern was not for him. Instead, he sat down at a table and opened a black binder. He began to read a prepared text, listing all the myriad Newark particulars that he would not be talking about: the city’s schools and the ball fields; the newsreels at the Roosevelt Theatre; the flags in the windows marking the dead during the Second World War; the factories and the butcher shops. Oh, no, he would not wax nostalgic about going to the fights at Laurel Garden. (“For me, it had the synagogue beat by a mile,” he said. Laurel Garden was where he and his friends could bet a nickel per bout and hear, in the screams of “You bum!” the “coarse libretto for a Newark opera buffa.”) Nor would he go on about seeing Jackie Robinson play for the Montreal Royals against the Newark Bears, at Ruppert Stadium. And since he was retired, he said, he was through describing the work of a gravedigger, the mechanics of a glove factory, the life of a butcher, the fate of parents whose daughter becomes a political terrorist. Realism was his métier, he said, but “I’m finished with that stuff, too!” After listing all the glories of Newark, all the familiar set pieces from his novels, after making sly and constant denials that he would dwell on any of it—a rhetorical move, he admitted, known as paralipsis—Roth finally settled into his real theme of the night: death. Happy birthday, indeed!

Roth is the author of thirty-one books. His favorite, he has said, the one in which he felt the most free as he wrote it, is “Sabbath’s Theater.” Laughing a little to himself, Roth said that the novel, which was published in 1995, could easily have been titled “Death and the Art of Dying.” Its epigraph is Prospero’s line in Act V, Scene 1 in “The Tempest”: “Every third thought shall be my grave.” And within is the line from Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

“The book is death-haunted,” Roth said. Mickey Sabbath, the turbulent, profane, and libidinous hero, is a man who is beyond discretion and taste, whose outrageous adulterous behavior is, Roth said, “his response to a place where nothing keeps its promise and everything is perishable.” As a boy, Sabbath lost the person closest to him in the world—his older brother, Morty, whose plane was shot down, in 1944, over the Japanese-occupied Philippines.

With that introduction, Roth read pages three hundred and sixty-three to three hundred and seventy of “Sabbath’s Theater,” one of the most stunning passages in all his work. He was not about to let us forget what eighty means. In the novel, Sabbath has gone south (“Tunnel, turnpike, parkway—the shore!”) to visit the Jewish cemetery where his grandparents, parents, and brother are all buried. I will not ruin it for you. To get the feel of the night, you must read the passage in full—or, better, read the novel entire. And imagine that this passage—with its great elegy of gravestones, with its memories of life lived, of a life cut short, and all of it in particular—imagine that this is what Philip Roth chose, very deliberately, as his birthday message, his greeting, his farewell. These were not his last words—please, not that!—but they were what he chose. Death-haunted but assertive of life. The passage ends with his hero putting stones on the graves of the dead. Stones that honor the dead. Stones that are also meant to speak to the dead, to mark the presence of life, as well, if only for a while. The passage ends simply. It ends with the line, “Here I am.”

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Read David Remnick’s Profile of Roth from 2000, and Adam Gopnik on Roth at eighty.