Readers Place

Philip Roth interview/review

Dante’s Divine Comedy enjoyed immediate success: more than six hundred surviving manuscripts of the poem produced during the fourteenth century confirm its popularity.

Dante is now seen as the creator of modern Italian; before The Divine Comedy , the vernacular was so unformed that he is said to have begun writing it in Latin, doubting that Italian was a fit medium.

Boccaccio was an early commentator, while Dante’s first English mention comes in Chaucer, who drew heavily on Italian Renaissance authors, and he swiftly became popular.

Horace Walpole was an opposing voice (‘absurd, disgusting…a Methodist person in Bedlam’), but the Romantic poets rediscovered him, Blake conjuring limpid, visionary illustrations to the Comedy . The drier modernists also feel his power: Eliot was strongly influenced, and Beckett kept a copy of the Comedy by him until his death.

More recent critics have said: ‘If any work has a claim to the universal, it is The Divine Comedy: all life is written in its burning pages’ Guardian

‘A terrible delight’ Independent

Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theater was an instant critical success:

‘I finished Sabbath’s Theater with my heart and blood thumping and pumping, the pulse racing to the last savage line, the pay off. What more do you want?’ Linda Grant

‘Sabbath explodes like some mad genie out of his bottle… [ Sabbath’s Theater ] has more firestorming prose than any other novel I have read this year’ Observer

‘A work of near-heroic vitality and cunning’ Sunday Telegraph

‘In time this will be seen as Roth’s best novel so far’ Guardian

‘A filthy masterpiece’ Gordon Burn

‘Sabbath’s Theater is a magnificent book full of lines and truths… but the real triumph lies in the broad sweep of the novel, the size of the achievement. It’s as if Roth has put everything he knows and ever knew into the book – and it would appear that he knows everything worth knowing’ Lucretia Stewart

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Dante Alighieri Nine times already since my birth the heaven of light had almost revolved to the self-same point when my mind’s glorious lady first appeared to my eyes, she who was called by many Beatrice (‘ she who confers blessing ’), by those who did not know what it meant to so name her.

She had already lived as long in this life as in her time the starry heaven had moved east the twelfth part of one degree, so that she appeared to me almost at the start of her ninth year, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth. She appeared dressed in noblest colour, restrained and pure, in crimson, tied and adorned in the style that then suited her very tender age.

At that moment I say truly that the vital spirit, that which lives in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble so violently that I felt it fiercely in the least pulsation, and, trembling, it uttered these words: ‘ Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi : Behold a god more powerful than I, who, coming, will rule over me.’

At that moment the animal spirit, that which lives in the high chamber to which all the spirits of the senses carry their perceptions, began to wonder deeply at it, and, speaking especially to the spirit of sight, spoke these words: ‘ Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra : Now your blessedness appears.’ At that moment the natural spirit, that which lives in the part where our food is delivered, began to weep, and weeping said these words: ‘ Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps! : Oh misery, since I will often be troubled from now on!’ From then on I say that Amor governed my soul, which was so soon wedded to him, and began to acquire over me such certainty and command, through the power my imagination gave him, that I was forced to carry out his wishes fully.

He commanded me many times to discover whether I might catch sight of this most tender of angels, so that in my boyhood I many times went searching, and saw her to be of such noble and praiseworthy manners, that certainly might be said of her those words of the poet Homer: ‘She did not seem to be the daughter of a mortal man, but of a god.’ And though her image, that which was continually with me, was a device of Amor’s to govern me, it was nevertheless of so noble a virtue that it never allowed Amor to rule me without the loyal counsel of reason in all those things where such counsel was usefully heard.

But because it might seem fiction to some to dwell on the passions and actions of such tender years, I will leave them, and passing over many things that might be derived from the sample from which these were taken, I will come to those words that are written in my memory under more important heads. Taken from the Vita nuova , on Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice

Philip Roth What is it that you want to do when you start a novel? What are you trying to do? Get to work. Get to work? Get to work, work. Without a novel, I’m empty. I’m empty and not very happy. So when I get to work on a novel I begin to do what, what I’m supposed to do. It’s a long process.

Usually, it takes between two and three years to write a novel, for me. And the first six, eight, ten months can be very difficult because you don’t know what you’re doing; you don’t know what you have. So the work is difficult in the beginning, and it’s also difficult in the middle and it’s difficult in the end, as well.

But put it in terms of us, your readers. What do you want to do for us? PR: Oh, I’m going to sound very ungracious – nothing, frankly. I can’t worry about the reader, just as the reader can’t worry about me. We all have to take care of ourselves, and I don’t think about the reader. I think about the book. I think about the sentence, I think about the paragraph, I think about the page. I go over it and over it and over it. The book begins to make its demands.

The demands are intellectual, they’re imaginative; they’re aesthetic. It’s interesting because you’re often described as something of a provocateur, sort of throwing out literary bombshells, I mean, you get a lot of reaction to your work. I’m a very bad judge of how people will respond to my work, how the general reader will respond to a book, and I’m always surprised by the responses that a book elicits. I don’t think I’m the only writer who experiences this, too. There’s… there’s a kind of dummy who lives here, too, you know, and you don’t know what you’ve done.

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