Last Words on Philip Roth

Abstract

Last Words on Philip Roth Timothy Parrish (bio) Philip Roth is dead. Frankly, he's been dead to me since 2009 when he stopped writing. Our relationship was always transactional. He was a writer and I was his reader, a faithful one, I insist. Each of his last five novels I read in one sitting the afternoon they were delivered to my house. Nonetheless, the official notification came as a shock. My wife broke it to me. Honey, she said, better give me your phone. You're going to need to stay away from it for a few days. She apparently had noticed how these past several years I kept eyeballing it for the news flash announcing the title of his latest work. No one person copes with grief like any other. I've kept him as near as I can. My wife even gave her pillow over to Roth's last book, Why Write? Likely she's noticed me talking to it, though I have tried to whisper. The cover mesmerizes me. He doesn't look like he knows he is dead. He looks a little pissed. His narrow eyes would scare me if I weren't able to read his lips when they moved. Hey bub, can it really be I'm actually dead and cannot return but for your glance?! Between us, it's always been the same story. Possession. It's all Roth ever wants with readers. Alone in my study, and several times on park benches in cities I prefer not to recall, I've been possessed by him, repeatedly, as my hands fiercely cling to the bound object from which his face seems to take me in at a glance. Can such joy ever end? For the longest time, everything seemed so private. But for those aliases he used to draw me close—Zuckerman, Kepesh, the heroic self-conqueror, Alexander—it was just Roth and me. Even when I discerned in his shifting manner a vestige of James, a revenant that conjured Hawthorne, or the pleasant aroma of Proust, I knew it was clowning. Only Roth could hold me like that. Truly, I prayed that our intimacy never end. Why should it? We both wanted it that way? Don't lose this good thing, he sometimes sang to me as I read, but something was always coming between us. Life, most obviously, though Roth insisted real life could only happen when I was reading him. I [End Page 116] hate to admit it, but I was the weaker one. Roth was true. I'm the one who compromised the relationship. I couldn't keep our thing to myself. Since he's dead, I may as well confess. I betrayed "us." The way we were together, I told others. He didn't let on that he knew, but his coyness could be maddening. I happen to masquerade as a Roth scholar. Seriously. I wear a Roth mask and ventriloquize the master. It's, like, my job. Nor am I the only one, which is fine. Why shouldn't he have others? I don't care how many readers he possesses. I'm not a jealous person. But Roth is. His view regarding the mask was, and is, presumably, it's his alone to wear. And he had his ways of getting the message across. Shots across the bow. Warning missiles. You remember when that famous English critic confessed Roth sat on her face while she read him? She didn't mean he used his living body, more like the time-space continuum was something he could negotiate at will. Her committee gave him a prize for it. I didn't celebrate. I understood Roth's gesture. The author had issued a gag order. Stop telling lies about me or else. I resolved to quit writing about him. But then a question occurred to me. Or else what? What could Roth do to hurt me except die? I happened to know he was in great shape because I knew a guy who knew a guy whose kid babysat for Roth's physician. He had ten years left, easy. That meant three, maybe four, more books. I...