Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...eagerly with 300 other students and eagerly pen down the gilded words of Professor W****** J***** B**** as he expounds on Samuel Johnson. I am no longer an aspiring Norman Mailer, drifting through classrooms in search of a good fray. Now I'm more like a Philip Roth character, working out my intellectual frustrations alone in my room, the same way Alexander Portnoy allayed his sexual troubles. Harvard encourages intellectual masturbation...
...Roth likes his characters anyway because they don't realize this yet: the crumbling castle still conceals a beautiful secret. Even the paltriest character is at least a little more than a little heap of dust. And each can count on having this recognized, if not entirely by his social superiors, at least by the members of his own class...
...movies about similar declines and falls, but a lot of them--Gone with the Wind or Graham Greene's The Quiet American--don't convey the reality of the underside of the world they're nostalgic for, and so they end up in cheap sentimentality or cheap cynicism. Roth takes neither of these easy paths. When Lieutenant Trotta has his men shoot some striking factory workers, he does it with no ill will or satisfaction--but he still kills people for wanting work that doesn't mean getting tuberculosis. All Roth's jokes, even the quietest, have a hard, tired...
...given him away, and no bombardier will reduce them both to dust without ever seeing either. "In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died," Roth begins a long paragraph, one of the best in the translation...
...Roth found that those who lived on memories of beautiful secrets ran into problems with those whose interests demanded quick and complete forgetting. In 1933, just a year after he published The Radestzky March, he left Germany--he was a Catholic son of Jewish parents, and known as an anti-Nazi. He moved to Paris, and never went back to either Germany or Austria. These countries' rulers--the fascists who succeeded the old imperial barons--learned from their predecessors' decline how hard it is to hold change back, and how much strength there was in new ideas like national self...