There have been few artists in modern times more single-mindedly devoted to their work than Philip Roth. His level of sustained literary production, from his early twenties to his mid-seventies, has been almost as astonishing as the work itself. For much of his life, Roth has lived alone, in rural Connecticut and in Manhattan, spending long days at his desk—a standing desk, the better to spare his back. The books, from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “Nemesis,” seemed to issue forth every year or so. And there was no diminishment, only change.
Roth’s writing days were spent in long silence—no distractions, no invitations entertained, no calls, no e-mails. After I wrote a Profile of Roth, around the time of the publication of “The Human Stain,” we would meet every so often, and he told me the story of how a friend had asked him to take care of his kitten. “For a day or two, I played with the cat, but, in the end, it demanded too much attention,” he said. “It consumed me, you see. So I had to ask my friend to take it back.” Four years ago, he told me that he was interested in trying to break the “fanatical habit” of writing, if only as an experiment in alternative living. “So I went to the Met and saw a big show they had. It was wonderful. Astonishing paintings. I went back the next day. I saw it again. Great. But what was I supposed to do next, go a third time? So I started writing again.”
But now he has stopped. Roth, who is seventy-nine, recently told the French magazine Les inRocks, “To tell you the truth, I’m done.” “Nemesis,” which was published in 2010, will be his last book.
This is a definitive version of what he has been telling friends privately for a couple of years. (Salon found the piece and confirmed Roth’s retirement from writing with his publisher, Houghton Mifflin.)
Roth told Les inRocks that when he turned seventy-four he reread his favorite authors—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Hemingway. Then, he said, “When I finished, I decided to reread all of my books beginning with the last, ‘Nemesis.’
“I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was more or less a success. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”
“After that, I decided that I was finished with fiction,” Roth went on. “I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. I studied them, I taught them, I wrote them, and I read them. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!”
When asked if there could possibly be another book, Roth said, “I don’t think a new book will change what I’ve already done, and if I write a new book it will probably be a failure. Who needs to read one more mediocre book?”
Roth said that he saw nothing strange in retiring from literature. “Look at E. M. Forster,” he said. “He stopped writing fiction at around forty years old. And me, who wrote one book after another, I haven’t written anything in three years.”
He seemed to admit to a certain distance from everyday life. “I am seventy-eight years old, I don’t know anything anymore about America today. I see it on TV, but I am not living it anymore.”
Roth long resisted the idea of a biography, and he has mocked the form in his fiction and in interviews. Some years ago, he worked for a while with Ross Miller, a professor at the University of Connecticut, but the two fell out and there was no biography. Recently, he wrote a hilarious screed for The New Yorker’s Web site about the Wikipedia entry for “The Human Stain.” But the need for a rather more complete account of his life persisted. This year, Roth relented and signed a collaborative agreement with Blake Bailey, who has written fine biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates. He told Les inRocks that he is allowing Bailey free access to his archives for as long as necessary, but that he has instructed his executors to destroy the archive after his death. “I don’t want my papers lying around,” he said. “No one has to read them.”
Photograph by Chris Maluszynski/Moment/Redux.