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Philip Roth's Hadada Award Acceptance Speech
at the 2010 Spring Revel |
| Philip Roth |
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I was an instructor at the University of Chicago, teaching freshman composition after a stint in the army, when The Paris Review accepted one of my first short stories, “The Conversion of the Jews,” for publication in 1958. I was twenty-five. This would be my third publication in a literary magazine and, though The Paris Review was only five years old at the time, by far my most prestigious. I was thrilled, and when I visited New York during a break from school, George Plimpton, the magazine’s editor, invited me to lunch at his East Seventy-second Street apartment. That was another thrill. I’d never yet come upon anyone as worldly and glamorous and gracious as George. He had interviewed the great Ernest Hemingway in Key West for The Paris Review Interview Series. He annunciated English with an elevated accent unrecognizable to me, and certainly unlike any I’d ever heard spoken while growing up in Newark. And, on the basis of my one short story, he declared himself terrifically interested in what he quite fantastically referred to as my work.
At George’s that day I met two of the other editors, Bob Silvers and Blair Fuller. Like George, both were a few years older than I was and had already put down roots in the New York literary world. Bob was a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, and Blair, after two years in West Africa, had just published A Far Place, a bold first novel about African diamond smuggling. That lunch was the first of my good times at George’s apartment with this captivating circle of accomplished young men. When I moved to New York in September of 1958, I immediately struck up friendships with Bob and Blair and saw them regularly at George’s and elsewhere.
I also became a friend of another member of The Paris Review circle: the young writer John Marquand, who published under the name of John Phillips. John’s father, John Marquand Sr., was then one of America’s most eminent novelists—a Pulitzer Prize winner and the reigning American chronicler of upper-crust society. A couple of times a week, John and I used to take walk around the village at the end of the workday, winding up at a Bleecker Street café, where we mesmerized each other with descriptions of our wildly disparate social backgrounds.
After the Plimpton lunch, I returned to Chicago and greatly impressed my young faculty colleagues with my New York literary adventure. Fired up, I wrote a story called “Epstein,” a little comedy about a middle-aged Jewish adulterer, drawn from the plight of a colorful next-door neighbor who’d misbehaved on our street when I was a kid. This time I sent my story not to the Paris Review slush pile, from which I’d been plucked first time around by none other than Rose Styron, but right to the top. Not only was it accepted for publication, but it subsequently received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.
That summer I booked third-class passage on the Holland America Line and, for the time, sailed to Europe to travel around England and France, and also to receive the Aga Khan Prize in Paris from Prince Aly Khan—a celebrity diplomat, a horseman, and acclaimed internationally as quite a collector of ladies. Prince Aly was the son of Aga Khan III, the staggeringly rich leader of the Ismaili Muslims. Most intriguing to me was that the prince had formerly been married to the movie star Rita Hayworth.
The awards ceremony and reception were held at Aly Khan’s luxurious Bois du Boulogne villa. I had befriended a vibrant, if scruffy, French student at the Café Odeon the night before and invited her to the shindig. She showed up late, clad in left-bank black on her fearsomely noisy motorbike, and was refused entrance by the butler. I had temporarily to take leave of the impressive array of Parisian swells gathered to honor me to go down to the door to negotiate for her to be let in. Then I came back upstairs to receive my first literary award from the hands of Rita Hayworth’s third husband.
Also at the ceremony was a friend of the editor’s, the writer Irwin Shaw, who was then living in Paris. It was no small thing for me at twenty-five to meet Irwin Shaw. Irwin was a Broadway dramatist, a best-selling novelist, and the author of one of my favorite books, the war novel The Young Lions, which had made a great stir when it was published in 1949. Among his many short stories, Irwin had written two—“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “The Eighty-Yard Run”—whose sophistication had a magical appeal to me then. Afterward, when we all went to dinner in a crowded left-bank restaurant that was a Paris Review favorite, Irwin sat down next to me and, over champagne nonetheless, revealed himself in undisguised, old-fashioned Brooklyn tones, to be anything but a swell. I was ecstatically happy. The Paris Review and the Holland America Line had carried me a long way from correcting comma faults at the University of Chicago.
On that trip I also met a handsome young man of qualities named Nelson Aldrich. A Paris editor of the review, Nelson generously took me around the city to meet his friends and his girls during the course of the summer, a fateful summer altogether for me, since a novella I had just finished, Goodbye, Columbus, was also accepted for publication in The Paris Review.
Then one day in August I learned by telegram from my agent, Candida Donadio, that I had won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. The fellowship carried a prize of seventy-five hundred dollars and the promise of publication of a first book, in my case a collection of short fiction, about two-thirds of which had appeared first in The Paris Review. Seventy-five hundred dollars was three times as much as I was earning teaching freshman English. If not so rich as the Aga Khan, I was flush enough to promptly send off a telegram resigning after just two years from the U of C faculty.
When the summer ended, I returned by boat to New York where I found two rooms in a basement on the corner of East Tenth Street and Stuyvesant Street to house me and my Olivetti portable typewriter. I white-washed both rooms, furnished them with some sticks from the Salvation Army, and there, fifty-two years ago, in a city as new to me as Paris, I began life as a writer on my own. Except that I wasn’t entirely on my own. I now had a publisher behind me, Houghton Mifflin, and I had my friends and supporters at The Paris Review.
Apparently I am here tonight to receive this Paris Review prize because, after all these years, I still have friends and supporters at the magazine—for which I am most grateful. It’s good that in this way, if no other, time has stood still. Thank you.
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