English class with Mr. Roth

[John F]

English Class With Mr. Roth
By LISA SCOTTOLINE
MAY 3, 2014

MALVERN, Pa. — DO you want to know what it was like to have Philip Roth as a professor?

I’ll tell you.

Let me take you back to the ’70s, when I was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Roth came to teach two seminars there, one in creative writing and another in comparative literature. Though I had dreams of being a writer, I lacked the self-confidence to take creative writing, so I signed up for the literature seminar, which was English 275.

Frankly, I just wanted to be in the same room with him. Plus the seminar was titled, as I remember, “The Literature of Desire.” Who wouldn’t want to read dirty books with Philip Roth? Trust me, in this regard I was no different from the 15 other students in English 275, almost all of whom were women in love with Philip Roth.

I remember the first day of class very well, because every class thereafter was almost exactly the same. We students arrived early, freshly showered and perfumed, already having read every book in the syllabus. We sat down in our chairs, the kind with a half desk attached, and the chairs were arranged in a U-shape around his empty wooden desk. We chattered nervously among ourselves. We crossed and uncrossed our legs. I wore a peasant shirt and a denim skirt made from a pair of jeans, the fashion of the time, sure to drive men crazy.

Precisely when it was time for class, which I seem to remember was 2 o’clock, he entered the room. He’s a very tall, lanky guy, and he walked in a stooped way, his face appearing through the doorway before the rest of him lurched in, leading with his head like a well-read giraffe. He wore a lightly starched oxford shirt of small blue-and-white checks, pressed khaki pants with a brown leather belt, and brown wingtips, an outfit he would wear to almost every class. He barely looked at us or made eye contact, but murmured a hello, then sat down in his chair, crossed one long leg over the other, and slowly unbuckled his watch. That’s as sexy as it got.

His watch had a leather strap, and he took it off and set it face up on his desk. He asked us to call him Mr. Roth, though the other seminar professors had us call them by their first name, in those let-it-all-hang-out days. Then he began to talk about the novel assigned for that week, taking us through its pages and pointing out its various themes, details or particularly terrific sentences. He never consulted his notes, which were handwritten and kept in a slim black binder, but he spoke extemporaneously, point after point, insight after insight, as if he apprehended the entire novel, all of a piece.

Imagine taking physics from Einstein. But you want to be Mrs. Einstein.

We explored love, romance and sex in the novels of Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Musil, Milan Kundera, Yukio Mishima, Kobe Abe, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, but the class was anything but explicitly erotic. The passages on which he lavished attention were never the juicy parts, but rather the subtler passages. I remember he loved this particular line from “Madame Bovary”: “She was just eating a maraschino ice that she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her teeth.”

We spent a lot of time on that sentence, and the more I read it, the sexier it got. Try that yourself. At home.

At the end of every class, he would ask us if we had any questions. I was insecure and never said a word. I wondered if I would someday dare to write, but I doubted it. In those days, I dreamed of marrying what I wanted in my life. Not of becoming what I wanted. Other students would ask questions, or recite fully rehearsed statements disguised as questions, and he answered each one succinctly. His tone was polite; he never cracked a joke, though he’s a brilliantly funny writer. If a student asked him how he would have written the sentence or structured a paragraph differently, he would deflect the question by answering: “But that’s not what Kafka did.”

I later took a second seminar with him on the literature of the Holocaust, for which we read Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski and Hannah Arendt, and he ran the class the same way. As I recall, he didn’t give us essay prompts for our writing assignments, but required us to devise our own, and when he graded our papers, he wrote no comments, only the letter grade on the last page, in red Flair pen.

I got an A from Philip Roth. In both classes. Just saying.

Looking back, I’ve come to understand that he was the best professor I ever had, not only because of his genius, but also because of his distance. We were a group of girls eager to please, to guess at what he wanted us to say, and to say that for him. We all wanted to hear about him, or have him tell us how to write, but that was something he steadfastly denied us. By withholding his own personality, thoughts and opinions, he forced us back on our own personalities, thoughts and opinions. He made us discover what we wanted to write about, and to write about it the way we wanted to.

And eventually, I did. After years of obsessing about trying to write, I finally took a shot at it, partly because Philip Roth gave me those two A’s. I said to myself, you did great with a genius, how dumb can you be? Since then, I’ve published more than 25 books, both novels and nonfiction memoirs.

The best advice you can give to any writer is to find her own voice. He knew he couldn’t tell us that, but like any great writer, he showed us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/opini ... -roth.html

[jbuck919]

I'm going to go out on a limb and call Roth a man's writer If there is a female character in any of his novels who does not revolve around the male "hero," I don't know of it. I did not look at the byline of this column and assumed the writer was male until I got to the part about marrying rather than having talent (and why should I then assume it was a female?). From that we transition to an explicit statement that it was an all-female class ("We were a group of girls"). Wait a minute: an all-female class at the University of Pennsylvania?

Before you ask "What's your point?" John F, I have none, except to report a personal reaction to the column.

[John F]

I realized the author is female rather earlier than that - when I saw the byline "Lisa Scottoline." It surprised me that no male students signed up for a course taught by Philip Roth, and I wonder why not. Women in the class should be no surprise - Penn has been coeducational at the undergraduate level since the 1890s and in its graduate school since the 1880s.

[SONNET CLV]

Women in the class should be no surprise - Penn has been coeducational at the undergraduate level since the 1890s and in its graduate school since the 1880s.

I can think of at least one other reason why women in the class should be no surprise.

[jbuck919]

Women in the class should be no surprise - Penn has been coeducational at the undergraduate level since the 1890s and in its graduate school since the 1880s.

I can think of at least one other reason why women in the class should be no surprise.

Your image didn't come through, but if your post was meant to imply that he resembles J.D. Salinger and/or that smart Jewish (not necessary but it helps) heterosexual and slightly mysterious authors are irresistible, then I get your point. Edit: For some reason I now see your image, and I guess I was right.

[Ricordanza]

I realized the author is female rather earlier than that - when I saw the byline "Lisa Scottoline."

Besides the byline (and I'm very familiar with this writer since she has a weekly column in the Philadelphia Inquirer), another clue is that she remembers exactly what Roth wore in class. What man would recall that detail?

[John F]

I can think of at least one other reason why women in the class should be no surprise.

That wasn't the surprise, it's that there were no men in the class. Not one. Roth isn't just a pretty face, after all. Maybe the Penn men were all studying banking and corporate finance, getting prepared to tank the American economy.

[SONNET CLV]

That wasn't the surprise, it's that there were no men in the class. Not one. Roth isn't just a pretty face, after all. Maybe the Penn men were all studying banking and corporate finance, getting prepared to tank the American economy.

Perhaps the title of the seminar is an indicator: "The Literature of Desire". Hell ... I wouldn't have been caught dead in that class back in the 70's. What would I tell my fraternity brothers? "I can't go to the chugathon tonight, I gotta study for my Desire test."

[John F]

Consider that the class was being given by the then recent author of "Portnoy's Complaint"...

[jbuck919]

Consider that the class was being given by the then recent author of "Portnoy's Complaint"...

I didn't notice that it went back that far. Reminds me of Gael Greene the food critic recounting her one-night stand with Elvis Presley. But Portnoy is grist for my mill, since the only female character in it, and then she is only a figment of the main character's narration, is a semi-hooker and a not so semi slut.

[Tarantella]

Consider that the class was being given by the then recent author of "Portnoy's Complaint"...

Bingo!! Great call, John.

I haven't read any Roth but my sister is a huge fan, having consumed some of it last year on an American trip. This is the same sister who is now writing poetry which is actually being publlished. I'm guessing she'd probably have loved that "Desire" lecture too - as would I, pretty face or not. Well, no, THAT would have helped. (Oh, God, I'm beginning to sound like Phoebe Buffet from "Friends"!)

(Funny comment too, Sonnet!).

BTW: an interesting anecdote about Saul Bellow (who is referred to in Scottoline's article). Christopher Hitchens was taken by his great friend Martin Amis up to Vermont to the home of Saul Bellow. Hitchens includes this anecdote in his memoirs to illustrate the nature of his friendship with Amis. During the lunch, Hitchens says his shin became sore from Amis nudging it under the table with his foot all the way through the meal.

But there was more to it than that. Hitchens's friend Edward Said had been criticized as a supporter of terrorism. Right there on the table at the home of Saul Bellow was a front-cover piece in a magazine about Edward Said and the terrorism issue. Martin had known Bellow's attitude and, without specifically saying so, Amis wanted Hitchens to have the opportunity to defend his friend Edward Said (who had recently fallen out with Hitchens).

That kind of 'tacit' understanding between friends is comparatively rare and very wonderful indeed!!