The gripes of Roth

As a new biography appears, director Tristram Powell remembers working with a writer who could be kind – and scarily cruel

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I got to know Philip Roth in 1983 when I made a TV film for the BBC based on his novel The Ghost Writer. I had written to him out of the blue.

He wrote back, saying, ‘Come to Connecticut and we can discuss a possible film.’

This was Philip 1 – sane, enthusiastic, generous, erudite, good Philip.

A couple of months later, the chosen, highly experienced scriptwriter presented his first draft for Philip, now in London, to approve. It was a disaster. ‘This script exemplifies everything my work is opposed to. It contains every known Jewish family cliché,’ Philip said, holding it over the wastepaper basket.

The scriptwriter humbly said he’d like to try another draft. I knew what the result of that would be. We left.

I rang Philip later and told him I’d fired the writer. This small, unhappy drama pleased – even excited – him. His own life was ordered, often solitary.

His clapboard house, bought on the profits of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), was hidden away up a dirt road, an escape from his unwanted fame in New York. Inside, there were wooden floors, demure curtains and oriental rugs – the deep quiet of a writer’s house, very familiar to me.

At the same time, he loved provocation and disorder as a source of drama. This was Philip 2, the subversive, hilarious voice in Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theatre, who could also be filled with paranoid rage and self-obsession. As he said himself, ‘When God wants to say f**k, he says it through me.’

Philip described how he had escaped from writing well-mannered, ‘good’ books.