Pilgrimage

Given Philip Roth's homophobic attack on playwright Edward Albee in the mid-60s, criticizing "Tiny Alice" for "its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee," I suppose I should cancel him.  

Philip Roth by Ian Wright

Instead, I made a pilgrimage to his personal library, housed since his death in 2018 at the Newark Public Library downtown.

Why?  Because his books have given me so much pleasure ever since my mother hid her copy of Portnoy's Complaint in her lingerie drawer, a detail I'm sure he would have appreciated.  No one since Henry James inhabited the minds of his characters better, and James isn't nearly as funny.  Over time, I revered the writer, a generation older than me, as a guide to masculinity (the fact that even straight men think with their dicks came as a great relief!) and the future.  So that is going to be how it feels, I thought, particularly about aging.  

Roth read a lot more than he wrote, and he wrote a lot.  No other old white guy except perhaps John Updike deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature more. Read Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, Indignation and Nemesis if you don't believe me.

Terrible back pain forced him to write in longhand at this standing desk.

He used one of three Olivetti Underwoods to type up his manuscripts.

Many critics--especially Michiko Kakutani--complained that Roth fell short in his depictions of women which I find more than a little ironic at a time when writing about anything other than your own experience leaves you wide open to attacks of cultural appropriation.  He also failed miserably in his two marriages.  But Lisa Halliday, the young author of Asymmetry,  a brilliant novel, had only praise for her mentor.  Never mind that the relationship her protagonist has with a much older writer is rumored to be based on the affair she had with Roth!

Roth fondly recalls the time he spent at Newark Public Library as a child.  

So fondly that he donated his personal library to the institution and endowed its maintenance when he probably could have negotiated a profitable sale to a university.  That's the very definition of mensch in my book, although I wonder if nostalgia blinded him to the building's neglect.

It's certainly got great bones, including this skylight, atrium and mural. But none of them looked as if they've been refreshed since Roth spent his youth there in the late 30s and early 40s.