_-------_-------_-------_------. welcome to "amanpour on pbs." tonight, we celebrate the legacy of two massive literary talents whose works defined an american era from the nixon years to the pc battles of the early 21st century. remembering tom wolfe and phillip roth with two of the people who knew them best. ♪ good evening everyone and welcome to the program. i'm christiane amanpour in london. the literary world is mourning the loss in the space of just two weeks of two massive

talents. and also a time when giants roamed the stage. first, tom wolfe, who reinvented journalism with major best-sellers like "the right stuff" and whose novels like "bonfire of the vanities" established him. then phillip roth whose "port noise complaint" revolution newsed american literature with his outrageous takes of the then goings on a boy. over his career, roth's novels, captured the contradictions and complexities of what he described as indigenous america. the writer mary carr developed a close friendship with phillip roth, she herself a poet.

and dick cabot is the talk show host whose programs became the salon for the literary world. and i spoke with them both about the passing of these two lions of literature. dick cabot and mary carr welcome to our program. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> it's great to have you talking about these two giants in the literary world. let me start by asking you, dick, your reflections as we lose tv and indeed phillip roth. what springs to mind as you think of those two names? >> i thought there they go, two more writers because you never have too many of them. i was sorry in the case of both writers because i liked both of them so much. i never had the luck to meet roth, but i did have the luck to meet the man in the white suit. and he was so affable and so friendly and so easy to talk to

and just such a smart writer about our various trends and affectations in our society. it was disarming because i thought he might be tougher, more spiteful, then i thought let's see if he has a sense of humor the first time i met him. so i said to him, i worry about you in those clothes. he said why? i said, what if you walk through a tough neighborhood? >> and he said? >> that was the reaction. >> let's talk about the white suit because he actually used it for a reason, right? he didn't want to fit in, tom wolfe? >> i just found so utterly sensible, it seed, so stly knowledgeable, and i still always come back to why did he feel the need to wear the white suit? it certainly made him stand out, and we know some writers like to do that. >> mary, you became, late in

life -- or late in phillip roth's life, a close friend of his and you went to the funeral. just tell me how you became such friends. >> well, i just want to say i'm -- i'm the only person in the -- on the planet who could make friends with an 80-year-old with heart trouble and be so shocked when he died. he did have such a life force. very early when i met him, almost three years ago, he had a health crisis. and i guess i just wound up spending a lot of time at the hospital. he didn't have a lot of family -- he didn't have any family. we just became close. he was somebody i saw, i don't know, at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, and then i'd go to connecticut in the summer for a week at a time. and he was the most extraordinary company. you got the feeling from phillip

that he saw you. it was something a lot of people talked about, a sense of being recognized. there were no long monologues and i speak as someone who has -- he was born in 1933 and i speak as someone who has a lot of weariness with men born before 1980, apologies to mr. cabot. i sometimes think all of you guys should be locked in a hotel room one at a time and be deprogrammed. but he was never a monologuist, he was endlessly curious about other people's experience and about psychology. and, of course, i was wildly flattered. i first met him staring off of books in my mother's bookshelf. when i was 7, 8, 9, 10. re i remember reading "port noise complaint" when i was in junior

high. it was so transgressive and racy. >> it was transgressive and racy. i want to quote from the tweet you made. writing about # roth gives me the power of resurrection. then i stop and he's still dead and it's as devastating as the first second. is it a huge loss in your life? your personal life, not just america's literary life? >> you know i promised i wasn't going to cry on this show because he would roll his eyes and, you know, give me -- you know, shake his head. but it was a huge -- it was a devastating loss for me. it seems strange to make such a good friend so late in life but he was so -- he was intense. he was very -- anybody that smart -- and he was somebody i had never really wanted to know. i was not -- i was a roth fan because you can't be a literate human being in america and not be a roth fan to some extent.

but i had never really aspired to meet him. i had imagined him -- you know, some writers represent themselves better than they are, and some represent themselves worse than they are, maybe he was worse before i knew him. >> we'll get to some of that in a minute. but i want to establish tom wolfe's immense, almost equal impact on our culture, on our language. dick, he had so many phrases and turns of phrases which has been absorbed into our culture, the right stuff, the media-cade, radical chic, tell me about his impact. >> one of the impacts that people began to imitate his writing. they're all now running elevators in macy's, but he -- he was imitated, which is allegedly flattery in some instances.

the thing of me is, i remember somebody saying about him and about american writers today, they don't know anything, and that he knew how to talk to every kind of person. that's something you need in that business. >> he also coined the idea and the phrase new journalism. and i think tom wolfe thought that would obviate the need for the great novel. tell us how that became a major issue, you know, culturally in the early days, this idea of new journalism, dick. >> well, a lot of the stand-by, older writers, good and bad, resented it, i think, probably unnecessarily, and who's this guy to tell us that a new journalism is needed when we're supplying one right now. i don't think that kind of thing bothered him one bit.

it's strange to think that i was sitting, talking to him about three or four weeks ago on a terrace in manhattan. and he seemed bent and aged -- and aged, but he seemed to have all the fire there underneath the altered person that he appeared to be at that point. and he was just as smart and talked just as colorfully, and i thought, i hope he lives a long time, one of minor ironies. i remember on a show of mine i mentioned jack kerouac, through truman capote and truman said, famously, oh, that's not writing. that's just typing. >> that's a brilliant imitation. dick, you bring that up now. so let us remember your show, which was such an amazing show

in its day. people still remember it and still bring out the old clips and things. and you really paid a lot of attention to writers in your day, on your show. all the great writers you mentioned jack kerouac and others. you basically locked horns. let's just play this sound bite that you had of norman mayler and yourself. let's just play this. >> okay. >> i guarantee you i wouldn't hit any of the people here because they are smaller. >> in what ways? >> intellectually smaller. >> let me turn my chair and join these three. >> perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect?

>> i see mary just amazed by that. and you just busting in it, dick. that was a beautiful television moment. do you sort of miss those days when there were real giants who strode your stage? >> i have friends who say you're always talking about how things were better in various ways. well, the problem is, they were. in that case, i think it's true now. i don't know how you cast the show now. i had another one with both john updyke and john cheever. and that was wonderful watching updyke just sort of purr when cheever praised his writing. >> i want to turn to you, mary, it wasn't just tom wolfe, he was a full-blown literary celebrity, wasn't he, phillip roth? you mentioned "port noise

complaint" and how racy it was. reading it so many years later, how did you take it, mary? was it as shocking then? >> i think it's still shocking. i really do. he was so baked for it that the shocking thing to me about how people read "port noise complaint" is when they mistake phillip roth for alexander portnoy. it's thinking big brother in 1984 was george orwell. certainly roth's subject was desire and the torments that he would call the two method males. but it was also -- it was also about death. he was writing about death and sex was a way to stave off death but was also kind of a self-murder in portnoy. in some way.

so i think it was still he was a transgressive writer. he was born in 1933 and writing against the puritanism that reigned in those war years and the 1950s. >> obviously phillip roth got a lot of criticism by members of the jewish community in the united states who thought whatever he wrote in "good-bye columbus" and "port noise complaint" was anti-semitic. he was surprised. he didn't think of it like that at all. is that what you mean? >> and i think history has corrected itself. the literature's job, the writer's job is not to solve a problem but to represent it accurately. you don't need to write a sermon saying stealing horses is bad, you need to represent a horse thief. >> that's acutely observed

because many people do confuse the author with the story and the author with the morality of what he's writing about. >> let me say one thing about his death that i was very moved by, which is all these women, all these former lovers were at his deathbed. i want to say there were five women there. not one of them was this sort of sniveling masochist, there was a doctor, a woman who ran a theology department, a woman who ran a vast horse farm in virginia, who had been older than he when they were involved. so i mean, none -- i think -- i mean, i think on my deathbed men i've dated will be standing in line with pillows to smother me. >> i guess what you're saying, you're answering an unasked question right now, which is the complaint of phillip roth by

many women that he was ma soldier nus you can that his female characters were not well developed. >> i don't know what he was like as a human being before the pafs three years. i don't have a great deal of faith and trust in the men of his generation or of my generation. when i first met him, the first dinner we had, he said, just so you know, you're too old for me. i was 60, he was 82. i said, don't -- don't flatter yourself. there was nothing you couldn't say to him. and in my experience with the women -- with these women i just got to know -- i mean, if you spend weeks in a hospital with people, you get to know them. and their affection for him was pretty undiluted. so to me it was kind of astonishing. i can't think of a lot of men who would garner that kind of love from exlovers. >> it's really interesting because obviously an ex-lover clare bloom is one of those who

have written the anti-roth treaty. so it's very interesting to hear. and, in fact, cynthia ozick wrote in the aftermath of his death. so it's important to keep that in mind. dick i wanted you to comment on some of what mary was saying, but also you were a different generation than mary when "port noise complaint" came out. how did you view the criticisms of "good-bye columbus" and "port noise complaint" from members of the jewish community. >> he was apparently afraid of having anything dominate him that would affect the honesty of what he wanted to write. not that they were confessions but the pureness in what he wanted to write. that in port noise went a long way. i had a copy of it propped up on my crib, and i gist loved it. i remember opening it and being stunned and having to look again to see if some of the phrases i

saw were actually there. and then everyone in america took credit for the joke i'll never deliver again -- >> quite all right. i want to meet phillip roth, but i don't want to shake his hand. >> i would like to play you and just talk about this amazing story he told, npr fresh air just recycled some of the interviews he had done with terry gross over the years. and he was explaining this story about how just before "port noise complaint" came out he had to take his parents to a restaurant and sit them down and explain that this very racy book was about to come out and if journalists called them, well, they could talk to the journalists but they didn't have to talk to the journalists. but nonetheless, they should be prepared for the avalanche of attention that he thought this was going to get. >> they left the restaurant -- i

didn't know this until after my mother died, my father and i were taking a walk after -- that they got into the taxicab and my mother burst into tears. my father said what's the matter. and my mother said he has delusions of grandture. he's not like that, but he's going to be terribly, terribly disappointed. >> isn't that just the greatest story ever? >> i think his parents were extremely loving, patient, you know, humble people. >> apparently. >> when you hear that again, dick, how do you think that his parents thought he had delusions of grandure that he thought he was going to be a big-time author? >> if he had the whit of whoever i stole the line from, he would have said, no, i have delusions of adequacy. i think that was the late walter kerr about a writer. >> i want to get back to tom

wolfe because we spent a lot of time talking about roth's affect on literature, culture, his books are still being read today. everybody has them on their bookshelf or should do. i want to know what you make of the enduring quality, if you think he has, of tom wolfe. i think of "the right stuff," i think of "bonfire of the vanities" and i think those summed up entire eras, entire heroic endeavors. speak to me about that. >> i think they did, too. that was what he made his meat. and making memorable his accounts of the -- i hate the word -- of what was going on at that time and various foolish fads and its wealth posing as

liberals and so on. i don't think he was the writer that roth was, would you agree or not. >> i think wolfe was in a way more of a journalist, even though he made beautiful sentences, you have to concede he was a wonderful stylist. for me as a writer of nonfiction he was an enormous aspiration. to read "electric kool-aid" and to think the lsd i was scoring on gal haveston island was part of -- >> he gave you license? >> he gave you license. i think it's ironic the year roth died -- somebody wrote this in the appreciation, the nobel doesn't give a nobel prize because of an internal sex scandal. the irony is right out of a roth novel. but i think the novel like "plot against america" which predicted

the trump administration, with the anti-semite and racist mobs roaming the streets, and books like "aamerican cpastoral" whic is maybe my favorite roth novel. >> formidable. >> it's such a gorgeous book. he told me a beautiful story about that book. you know it took him 30 years to write that book. and every time he finished a book after portnoy, he would take out the same folder and handle the same 30 pages of notes and false starts. and i said to him, so, what did you do? he said i would just sit in my study -- or stand later because of his back. in my study sometimes for six weeks, eight weeks, six months at a time trying to write "american pastoral" and i couldn't get it off the ground.

and i said what allowed you to crack that open? i think it was after his bypass surgery where he thought he might die, he said i took the pages out and i held the folder and i opened it, and i said to myself, now don't panic. i think the idea of phillip roth who wrote 30 novels, some of the greatest american novels ever written, panicking about having to face the blankness of a page, for me that was -- it tells you how deep he had to dig and what a torment the work was. >> that was remarkable story considering that was the book that got him the pulitzer prize. i want to move on to the politics of both of them. in a way, tom wolfe's "bonfire of the vanities" was a precurser to the excesses, the arrogance of the heady financial '80s in

wall street, manhattan but to an extent the politics of today, the trump excesses in terms of the kcatering -- he says to the forgotten, but many think it's to the corporate elite. >> to me he seemed a champion of yes, the go-go '80s wall street and the values that say the rich need to get richer. >> that sort of criticism was aimed at tom wolfe's sort of writing in general that it was -- it was brilliant and wicked about fads and about the american character of the time, and witty of language, coining of words and new phrases and so on. but that -- that does not add up to greatness. and phillip roth does. >> that's really interesting. so now as we end our conversation, i just want to know, your reflections about our culture, our world today, where

we are today, and the power of literature, i suppose, today, given that these two giants died this month, within a week or so of each other. >> about writing and are people reading at all? i think an embare rasingly close examination would show from a couple things i read that americans are reading less, still less -- here's a tweet i put up. imagine trump's library. you'd have to. >> great line. great line. >> and, mary, as you -- you know, as you see the passing of these two literary giants and everybody has paid so much attention to their work and their legacy, what do you think as we close this conversation? >> well, i was riding back from the funeral with don dilillo and

i thought if we crash, it's the real end of kind of these titans of american culture and american literature. i think roth also had, as perhaps wolfe did not, a great sense of -- i hesitate to say spiritual interest because he would have hated the word, but i think his fascination with death and the failures of intimacy and the failures of paternity and the human family and love and certainly, you know, no one should have married him, because i think any kind of constriction on the part -- in that way for him was a torment. but to think about how much less the planet weighs without his words across it i guess is how i feel. i just feel like an enormous

loss personally, but also to literature. i kept hoping he was going to write another novel. you know, i'm an optimist, what can i say? >> that's a nice way to close. mary carr and dick cabot, thank you so much for joining me, for this conversation, and for all of your reflections. >> thank you, christian. >> thank you. >> and the new york public library has two stone lions guarding its entrancing, perhaps for a little while we can rename them wolfe and roth. that's it for our program tonight. thank you for watching "amanpour on pbs," and join us again next time. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com

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