The Wrath of Roth

A typically petulant Philip Roth accords an interview to a Danish journalist to promote his latest book in that country, and makes it a point not to smile, not even at the charming silly antics of the photographer.

"Do you ever smile at all?" asks the journalist.

"Yes," Roth responds, "when I'm hiding in the corner and no one sees it."

The interview proceeds in this way until the journalist, referring to the theme of ornery older men with nubile younger women found in Roth's books, brings up the scandal about a 68-year-old Danish author who was stripped of all honour after writing openly about a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old black girl in Haiti - the daughter of his servant.

Roth suddenly perks up, wanting to know every detail of the story, before pronouncing, expertly: "That author asked for it. Did he really write about how he had sex with the girl in his master bedroom? Yes, that's interesting. It turned political. If it was an affair with a 25-year-old student at the university in Port-au-Prince, it wouldn't have been a problem."

Such a quick and decisive assessment could only have come from a mind that has thought long and hard about the exact boundaries of sexual morality, about what one can and cannot get away with and the reasons why.

"You know," Roth reflects, " passion doesn't change with age, but you change - you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex that it didn't have before. The pathos of the female body becomes more insistent. The sexual passion is always deep, but it becomes deeper."

The interview concludes, appropriately, with a few reflections on death.

"Are you afraid of dying?" the interviewer asks.

Roth pauses. "Yes, I'm afraid. It's horrible... What else could I say? It's heartbreaking. It's unthinkable. It's incredible. Impossible."

What is he afraid of? "Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it. But the difference between today and the fear of dying I had when I was 12, is that now I have a kind of resignation towards reality. It no longer feels like a great injustice that I have to die."