Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013

"If you’d asked me in 2002, I would have said The Plot Against America but, unfortunately, Philip Roth has retired from writing novels, apparently. Why Write? is a collection of his non-fiction written between 1960 and 2013. I wanted to put it on my list because of the essays on the meaning of literature but also because a large part of the book is these conversations he has—with Primo Levi, with Ivan Klima, with Milan Kundera, with Edna O’Brien. He is a great American writer with a very strong European sensitivity. The fact the Nobel Committee has never given the Nobel Prize to him is an eternal stain on them. Kafka is extremely important to him. He was one of the first to give more space to Primo Levi in America. He’s the one who discovered Ivan Klima and Milan Kundera for the US. Already in the 60s, with Nixon and Watergate, he was writing about the predicament of expressing in fiction what was already so unbelievable. In that respect it will be very interesting to see what kind of novels come out of the Trump world. “That also is what I appreciate in Phillip Roth. He uses his position as a quite influential and famous writer to do the right thing.” The are many, many ideas in the book—including on the responsibility of the writer. The responsibility of the writer is to constantly ask—through the world of the imagination, through the novel—‘What is it to be human? What is it to be humane?’ He confronts you again, and again, and again, with ‘Yes, we are not living in a totalitarian society. But look at the huge impact of trivialization and the mass media—how everything becomes more and more stupid.’ One of the last things in the book is an interview with the Swedish paper, Svenska Dagbladet . He’s asked, ‘Once upon a time you said that people who have an affection for aesthetic literacy will become a tiny, tiny minority. Do you think that’s still the case?’ He said, ‘Yes, that is the case.’ The people who will continue to read the classics—who will continue to read the great novels of Proust, or Thomas Mann, or Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy—or even Philip Roth’s own work will end up a minority, like the people still reading Latin poetry. Now, on the one hand, that is a pretty depressing idea. At the same time, I think it’s realistic, because there is much less reading. Also, 20 years ago we still had the great novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and Saul Bellow. I don’t want to fall into the trap of nostalgia, but it seems to me that literature on that level, it’s probably there, but it’s less and less and less and less and less. However, as long there are books, and as long as there are people who read, it’s not written on any wall that these things cannot return. It’s all the more imperative that we keep our small publishing houses, our small bookshops. That we try to avoid, as much as possible, this terrible Amazon thing. And out of it will grow, like in the Renaissance (which also took 200 years) new communities of people who will read books. Everybody has a certain responsibility. And that also is what I appreciate in Philip Roth. He uses his position as a quite influential and famous writer to do the right thing. Yes, so S. Fischer Verlag, the publisher of Thomas Mann since the end of the 19th century, is working on the critical edition of his collected works, including all the letters and diaries. They are extremely slow, but finally in April 2018, they will publish the critical edition of Joseph and His Brothers . For me, Joseph and His Brothers is the magnum opus of European humanism written in the 20th century. Goethe once observed how the story of Joseph in Genesis is only one and a half pages long, but that there’s a whole story behind it. And Thomas Mann then writes a novel of almost 2000 pages. One lovely anecdote is that when he had finished it and given it to his secretary to type, she says, ‘Herr Professor Mann, now we finally know how the things really happened.’ Which is a great compliment for a writer. He started working on it in the 1920s, in Munich, when Mr. Hitler was rising to power. During World War I, he wrote a book, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen or Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man , in which he still embraced a conservative, anti-democratic worldview. It took him until 1921 to realise how wrong he was. In May 1921, he writes in his diary that “Humanism is not German, but it is essential.” That was a turning point in his own thinking. Hitler and the Nazis created their own mythology—which was inspired by the German nationalistic mythology of Wagner. So what is it that Thomas Mann does? He goes back to another mythology, the one of the Bible. He wants to retell a story of another God and of another chosen people, about what it means to be human. This novel is next to that also a reflection of what it means to be an artist, and a very profound reflection on how to find truth because Joseph, the chosen one, knows what is true, but he also realises that because the times are changing, our knowledge of truth will change as well. This is the best criticism of any form of fundamentalism. Nobody can ever claim to have complete access to TRUTH (in capital letters). Also included in the book are important lessons of life that Joseph has to learn. There is a meaning of life, but you have to be able to read the signs, which are beyond the physical world of facts…and that’s where his dreams come in. The other thing he has to learn is that there are always temptations. You have to be strong to resist the temptations. You have to have the courage to follow your own path in life. So it’s about humanising the world of mythology. In a time of the rise of fascism, he retells the story of the mythology of where civilization comes from and what it means to be a moral human being. The four volumes took him 16 years to write because, in the meantime, he also wrote a book on Goethe and some stories. But he writes the fourth volume when he is already in exile in the United States. Thomas Mann was befriended by Franklin Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, at the time, was doing The New Deal. So in the last chapter, when Joseph is already the vice pharaoh, he makes sure that Egypt is a welfare state, and because of that Jacob, his brothers and the people of Israel can come, and survive. The whole economics of Joseph as vice pharaoh Mann bases on the New Deal, which is, of course, the complete opposite of what you’re seeing in the US now, with this terrible GOP tax bill, etc. etc. So it’s an extremely important and powerful book for our time—on a political level, on a religious level, on a philosophical level and on an artistic level."