A Good Story

So many of Philip Roth’s colleagues and friends have shared stories and remembrances with our Philip Roth Personal Library, and continue to do so. What a wonderful gift!

As in the novelist’s own storytelling– and there’s really not a simpler way to convey this -- these remembrances and reflections by those up close to Roth are just so full of life. He was so much about living.

Roslyn Schloss, the book editor who was both a friend and longtime copy editor to Roth through the second half of his 31 books, gives us great detail on how the two went back and forth on getting fiction scenes factually right and believable and the prose to the point where Roth would eventually sign off on it. Her essay, That Unrelenting Need to Unveil Meaning appears in the Philip Roth Personal Library catalogue that came out last year.

In her story, Schloss quotes a message from Roth so that we can feel a little of what she called “the twenty-four-hour-a-day diligence:”

“Six pages follow. I can’t see straight. You know what to do. We’ll speak tomorrow….Twenty pages follow. Any questions, I’m at home tonight. I may go out for an hour around eight to get something to eat....Been futzing with it, what with the Yankees being rained out. This is it, I swear.”

“It was not,” Schloss says. “That diligence, that doggedness, that unrelenting need to unveil meaning was there, of course, to the very end. There were drafts upon drafts; there was never really a final draft because the refining went on until the thing was between hard covers.”

Thank you, Roslyn Schloss, and all of you wrote in the catalogue and so many of you contributing to the Roth library. Keep the stories coming.