How About It, Virginia Woolf?
In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates published in her A Writer’s Journal an interview she conducted in 1974 with Philip Roth who was 41 years old and an author of much international interest following the publication five years earlier of Portnoy’s Complaint.
That Roth gave her the interview in the first place was “remarkably generous,” Oates said because their conversation was going into the first issue of a magazine she and her husband Raymond Smith were starting called Ontario Review: a North American Journal of the Arts, a magazine with a base of no subscriptions.
At one point, Joyce asked Roth if he had experienced unfair critical treatment, and Roth made it clear that he had no patience for “marginal ‘literary’ journalists,” preferring instead to have working writers --young or established -- give him critical feedback on his novels.
“In fact, I don't think there's been a time since graduate school when genuine literary fellowship has been such a valuable and necessary part of my life,” Roth said. “Contact with writers I admire or towards whom I feel a kinship is precisely my way out of isolation and furnishes me with whatever sense of ‘community’ I have.”
Roth suggested writers pursue Virginia Woolf’s proposal in her essay, “Reviewing” to have journalism book reviews abolished and instead hire a serious critic for a fee to meet for an hour and speak honestly and openly about an author’s work. That private set up would prevent a review’s effect on book sales and allow the writer to discuss one’s own case while gaining invaluable feedback from a paid critic of one’s own choosing.
‘How sensible and human,” Oates quotes Roth saying. “It surely would have seemed to me worth a hundred dollars to sit for an hour with Edmund Wilson and hear everything he had to say about a book-of mine—nor would I have objected to paying to hear whatever Virginia Woolf might have had to say to me about Portnoy's Complaint, if she had been willing to accept less than all the tea in China to undertake that task. Nobody minds swallowing his medicine, if it is prescribed by a real doctor. One of the nicer side effects of this system is that since nobody wants to throw away his hard-earned money, most of the quacks and the incompetents would be driven out of business”
“Until this arrangement becomes the custom, I'll continue to look to a few writers whom I admire also as readers, to help mitigate my own feelings of isolation,” Roth says, quoting a letter from Melville to Hawthorne about Moby Dick that said “A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, because of your having understood the book.”
“Just the sort of professional intimacy and trust that is signaled by this simple outpouring of gratitude from one isolated writer to another seems to me the best thing we have to give one another,” Roth added.
Reference:
Joyce Carol Oates, “A Conversation with Philip Roth,” A Writer’s Journal. July 27, 2022: https://joycecaroloates.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-philip-roth