Would a smile on Roth’s face make the world a better place?
Either I have a perverse sense of humor or I’m reading this completely wrong, but Danish journalist Martin Krasnik’s interview with Philip Roth in the Guardian is so, so funny. I mean, how can you not laugh at exchanges like these:
“It looks like I have a huge dandruff problem,” he says in a low, slow voice. “That poor guy really needs a strong dandruff shampoo.”
“I always use that trick to make people smile,” Flash says.
“I don’t smile.”
There is a long, agonising pause.
“Why don’t you smile?” I ask.
“There once was this photographer from New York. ‘Smile,’ she always said. ‘Smile!’ I couldn’t stand her or the whole phenomenon. Why smile into a camera? It makes no human sense. So I got rid of both her and the smile.”
“Do you ever smile at all?”
He looks at me. “Yes, when I’m hiding in a corner and no one sees it.”
A pity, since Roth has such a nice smile, too. But thinking about it, the whole not-smiling thing kind of makes sense, because if this man were really happy, could he produce great books like THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA? Or rail against literary criticism?
I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there’s no bridge between the two.”
I guess he’s not exactly reading blogs, either…
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