The greatest American writer: Trump is a great fraud

Periscop brought the interview given three days ago to The New York Times, the most esteemed American writer of the second half of the 20th century, Philip Roth.

Roth retired three years ago and lived a quiet life at Uper West Side. He meets friends, watches old movies, goes to concerts, checks his e-mail at such an early age. He seems smiling and satisfied. He's pretty thoughtful, and when he gets to him, he gets funny.

He had agreed to interview for Charles McGrath of NYT, but only through e-mail because he wanted time to think about what Periscope would say.

McGrath

In a few months, you'll be 85 years old. Do you feel old? What has the age of aging been like?

Roth.

Yes, in just a few months I'll let old age be forced into very old age by entering deeper and deeper every day into the scary Valley of Shadows. Right now it's an amazing feeling to find myself here, alive, after the end of every day. When you lie down at night smile and think, “I lived another day.” And then it's amazing when I wake up after eight hours and I see that it's the morning of another day and that I'm breathing again. “I survived another night,” I think and laugh again. I sleep smiling and I wake up smiling. I'm so glad I'm still alive. Moreover, when this happens, as it has happened, week after week and month after month since I started making Social Security, it gave me the illusion that there will really be no end, although of course I know it could end at any second. It's like playing a game day after day, a dangerous game that, despite its worst odds, I'm still winning. We'll see as long as I'm lucky.

McGrath

Now that you're retired as a novelist, do you miss writing, or do you think you can go back to your trade?

Roth.

No. That's because the terms that led me to stop writing and fix it seven years ago haven't changed. As I say in the “why write?, 2010” I have a “strong difference that I wouldn't do a good job, except one inferior thing. I haven't had during this time a certain mental vitality or verbal energy or the physical force needed to withstand a strong creative attack until I could extend a complex structure that requires a novel... every talent has its own nature, its field, its strength; also, its terms, and its time... no one can be productive forever. ”

McGrath

When you think about the past, what's your self in mind when you remember your 50 years as a writer?

Roth.

Crying and groaning. Fruit and freedom. Inpsis and uncertainty. Empty hair. Concrete lightning and confusion. The daily restoration of the fluctuation between these dualities that I mentioned in which I described every talent and I forgot my extreme loneliness as well. And silence: 50 years in a quiet room like the bottom of a pool, in trouble, and when all went well, I could do the daily minimum of my prose.

McGrath

In the “Why do you write? ” you retype your famous essay “to write the American object,” which argues that American reality is so crazy that it almost exceeds the writer's imagination. It was 1960 when you said that. Now what? Did you then predict an American we live in today?

Roth.

Nobody I know predicted this America. No one could have imagined that the 19th century disaster would happen in America. And that the worst of all evils, it wouldn't be, the Big Brother Orwellian, but the ridiculous comedy of the figure of the boastful owl. How naive I was in the 1960 ' s when I thought he was an American living in exciting times! But how could I know what would happen in 1963, or 1968, or 1974, or 2001 or 2016?

McGrath

Your 2004 novel, <x0-computer against America,” looks very predictable today. When the novel was published, some people saw it as a comment about Bush's administration, but then there was not nearly as much parallel as the administration today has in your book.

Roth.

As predictable as the “Competent Against America” seems to you, there is undoubtedly a difference between the political circumstances I invented for America in 1940 and the political disaster that scares us today. There's a difference in the data between President Lindbergh and President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in my life as in my novel, could be a racist and a true antisemic, and a white primist close to fascism, but he was also the cause of the extraordinary heroism of trans-Atlantic flight when he was 25 years old an authentic American hero 13 years before I made him win the presidency. Lindbergh, historically, was a courageous young pilot in 1927, for the first time, who flew the cross-atlantic non-stop, from Long Island to Paris. The Trump, compared with it, is a great fraud, a bad sum of all its shortcomings, a deviation of all for the voracious ideology of megalomans.

McGrath

One of your constant themes has been the male lust of lust, and its many manifestations. What do you think about the moment we are facing, with so many women coming out and publicly accusing important people of abuse and sexual harassment?

Roth.

I'm, as you mean, not as strange as a novelist for erotic fury. The male who is kidnapped by his sexual temptations is one aspect of the life of a man I have written about in some of my books. And I'm not surprised at what I've read in newspapers these months.

Periscope