Just underneath this benign appearance there is a ferocious concentration and mental rapacity everything is grist for his mill, no vagueness is tolerated, differences of opinion are pounced on greedily, and nothing that might be useful is let slip. He listens carefully to everything, makes lots of quick jokes, and likes to be amused. Roth’s manner, which matches his appearance-subdued, conventional clothes, gold-rimmed spectacles, the look of a quiet professional American visitor to London, perhaps an academic or a lawyer-is courteous, mild, and responsive. I was looked after with great thoughtfulness. We talked in this businesslike cell for a day and a half, pausing only for meals. The room had been turned into a small, meticulously organized office-IBM golf-ball typewriter, alphabetical file holders, Anglepoise lamps, dictionaries, aspirin, copyholder, felt-tip pens for correcting, a radio-with a few books on the mantelpiece, among them the recently published autobiography by Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, David Magarshaek’s Chekhov, John Cheever’s Oh What a Paradise It Seems, Fordyce’s Behavioral Methods for Chronic Pain and Illness (useful for Zuckerman), Claire Bloom’s autobiography, Limelight and After, and some Paris Review interviews. We met in the early summer of 1983 at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, where Roth occasionally takes a room to work in when he’s visiting England. Just after he finished The Anatomy Lesson we began the Paris Review interview. After our first meeting, he sent me the fourth draft of The Anatomy Lesson, which we later talked about, because, in the final stages of writing a novel, Roth likes to get as much criticism and response as he can from a few interested readers. He read the book and wrote me a generous letter. I met Philip Roth after I had published a short book about his work for the Methuen Contemporary Writers Series. Interviewed by Hermione Lee Issue 93, Fall 1984

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