♪ ♪ welcome to "amanpour on pbs." we're looking back at some of our favorite interviews this year. tonight, we celebrate the legacy of two massive literary talents whose work defined a whole american era. from the nixon years to the pc battles of the early 21st centuries, remembering tom wolf and philip roth with two of the people who knew them well. ♪ ♪ 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 gian giants roamed the stage. first, tom wolf who reinvented journalism with major best-sellers like the electric right stuff and whose novels bike bonfire of the vanities established him as america's answer to charles dickens and then philip ross whose complaint revolutionized american literature with his then outrageous take of the goings on of the pubescent boy. over the prolific career like the human stain, american pastoral and prophetically, the plot against america, captured the contradictions and complexities of what he described as indigenous american dessert. the writer, mary carr developed a remarkable and close friendship with philip roth in his later years. she is a memoirist and author of

the lions club ask dick cavitt is the talk show host who became a part of the literary world of the 1960s and '70s and i spoke to them of the passing of these two lions of literature. >> dick cavitt and mary carr, welcome to our program. >> thank you. >> thank you, christiane. >> it's great to talk about these two giants of the literary world. let me start by asking you, your reflections as we lose tom wolf and indeed philip roth, what comes to mind as you think of their names? >> there you go, two more writers because you can never have too many of them and i like ghost writers because i liked both of them so much. i never had the luck to meet ross, 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 he was such a smart writer about our various trends and society. it was disarming because i thought he might be tougher, more spiteful and then i thought, let's see if he has a sense of humor the first time i met him, so i said i worry about you in those clothes, and he said why? i said what if you walk through a tough neighborhood? >> and he said? >> that was the reaction. >> let's just talk about the white suit because he actually used it for a reason, right? he didn't want to fit in, tom wolf. >> i just found him so utterly sensible, it seemed. so vastly knowledgeable and i still always come back to why do you 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 philip roth's life, a close friend of his and you went to the funeral. just tell me how you became such friends. >> i just want to say i'm the only person on the planet who can 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. i -- you got the feelings from philip that he saw you. it's something a lot of people talked about, a sense of being recognized. there were no long monologues, and i speak as someone who had a lot of weary -- he was born in 1933, and i speak as someone who has a lot of weariness with many men who were born before the 1980s apologies to mr. cavitt. i sometimes think you should be locked in a room somewhere one at a time and deprogrammed. he was never a monologuist. he was so 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. i remember reading "port noise complaint" when i was in junior

high. it was so transgressive and racy. >> it sure was transgressive and racy. i just want to quote a little bit from the tweet last week, writing about #ross gave me the power of resurrection, and he's still dead and it's as devastating as the huge second. is it a huge loss, in your personal life, not just america's literary life? >> you know, i promised i wasn't going to cry on the 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, and 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 never really wanted to know. i was not -- i was a ross fan because you can't be a literal

human being in america and not be a ross 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 first want to establish tom wolf's immense, almost equal impact on our culture, on our language and, dick, he had so many phrases and terms of phrases which are being absorbed into our culture. the right stuff, the media cade, radical chic. tell me about his impact. >>. >> one of the impacts was that people began to imitate his writing and they're all now running elevators in macy's, but he was imitated which allegedly

is flattering in some instances. it seemed to me that 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 coins the idea and the phrase new journalism, and i think tom wolf thought that that would obviate the need for the great novel tell us how that became a major issue in the early day, this idea of new journalism, dick. >> well, a lot of the standby, older writers, good and bad, resented it, i think, probably unnecessarily and who is 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 and he was the altered person that he appeared to be at that point, and he was just as smart and talked just as colorfully. i thought, i hope he lives a long time was a minor irony, and i remember on a show of mine i mentioned jack kerouac and truman capote and he 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 and 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 just mentioned jack kerouac and norman mailer. you basically locked horns. let's just play this soundbite that you had of norman and yourself. let's just play this. >> okay. >> i wouldn't hit any of the people here because they're smaller. [ laughter ] >> in what ways? >> intellectually smart. >> let me turn my chair and join these three. [ applause ] [ applause ] perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.

[ applause ] >> i see mary just amazed by that and you just basking in it. 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. i don't know if you would cast a show now. i had another one with both johnnaa and john cheever and that was wonderful watching when chief are phrased his writing. >> i want to talk to you because it wasn't just tom wolf. he was a full-blown literary celebrity wasn't he, philip

ross? and 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, and he was so baked for it that the shocking thing to me about how people read "port noise complaint" is when they mistake philip roth for alexander portnoy. it's sort of thinking big brother in 1984 was george orwell. you know, certainly roth's subject was desire and the torments of what he would call the tumescent male. it was also about death. he was also writing about death and sex was a way to stave off debt, but was also a self-murder in portnoy in some way.

i think it was still -- it was a transgressive writer and was born in 1933 and was writing against the american puritanism that was in the 1950s. >> obviously, philip roth got a lot of criticism by members of the jewish community in the united states who thought that whatever he wrote in, good-bye columbus, to an extent in port noise complaint was antisemitic. he himself was stunned that he could be targeted as antisemitic. he didn't think of himself like that at all. >> and i think history has corrected itself. i guess i always quote chekhov that the literature's job and the writer's job is to not solve a problem, but to represent it accurately. you need to represent a horse thief. >> that's really acutely

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

philip roth who complained that he was misogynistic, that his te male characters were not developed. i don't know what he was like as a human being in the past three years. as i said, i don't have a great deal of faith and trust in the men of his generation or my generation, and when i first met him, he said the first dinner he said, he said just so you know you're too old for me. >> i was 60. he was 82. i said 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, if you spend weeks in a hospital with people you get to know him and it 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 ex lovers. >> it's really interesting because obviously an ex lover

claire bloom is one of those who has written the anti-ross treaty. >> it was very interesting. >> cynthia 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 and how do you view the criticism as columbus from members of the jewish community. always afraid of having everything dominate him that would affect the honesty of what he wanted to write. not that they were confessions and the purity of what he wanted to write. that in port noise went a long way. i had a copy of it propped up on my crib. i just 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 eat liver again. let's not spoil it. >> i want to meet -- i want to meet philip roth, but i don't want to shake his hand. >> i'd like to play you and just talk about this amazing story he told, npr fresh air just recycled some of the interviews that you've done with terry gross over the years, and he was explaining the 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 that the journalists could 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, and i

didn't know this until after my mother died. my father and i were taking a walk. my mother burst into tears. my father said what's the matter? he said, he has delusions of grandeur, and i've never known him to be like -- he's not like that. he's going to be terribly, terribly disappointed. >> isn't that just the greatest story ever? >> i think his parents were extremely loving, patient, humble people. >> apparently. when you hear that again, dick. what do you think that his parents thought he had delusions of grandeur that he thought he would be a big-time author? >>? he'd had the wit of whoever i stole this line from, he would have said that no, i have delusions of adequacy. i think that was the late walter kerr about a writer. >> i want to get back to tom

wolf because we've spent a lot of time talking about roth, indelible effect on literature, on culture and his books are still being read today and everybody has them on their bookshelf or should do, and i want to know what you make of the enduring quality if you think he has of tom wolf. i think of the right stuff. i think of bonfires of vanity and those summed up entire eras and entire heroic endeavors in the case of right stuff and speak to me a little bit about that the. >> i think that was what he made his meat and making memorable his accounts of -- i hate the word guys, of what was going on at that time and foolish wealth posing as liberals and so on,

and i think it was all good. i don't think he was the writer that ross was. would you all agree, ladies, or not? >> mary? i think wolf was, in a way, more of a journalist even though he made beautiful sentences and you have to concede he was a wonderful stylist and for me, as a writer of nonfix, he was an enormous inspiration to read electric kool-aid when i was 17 and the lsd i was scoring on galveston island was actually part of something else. >> he gave you license, did he? >> he gave me license. >> no. i think ross. i think it's ironic that the year roth dies and i think 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's plot against america which had

predicted the trump administration and with, you know, the antisemiits and racist mobs roaming the streets and books like american pastoral which is my favorite roth novel. >> formidable. >> which is such a gorgeous, and he told me a beautiful story about that. 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 and my study, sometimes for six weeks, eight weeks and six months at a time, trying to write american pastoral and he couldn't get it off the ground, and i said, so what permitted you finally to crack that open

and i think it was after his bypass surgery when he had really thought he might die and he said i took the pages out because i held the folder and i opened it and i said to myself, don't panic, and i think the idea of philip roth who wrote novels ever panicking about having to face the blankness of a page. for me it tells me how deep it had to dig and what a torment it was. >> that was a remarkable story that got him the pulitzer prize after 30 years. >> i do want to just move on to the politics of both of them. you know, in a way tom wolf's "bonfire of the vanities" was a precursor of the arrogance of the heady, financial '80s in

wall street and manhattan and even the politics of today and the trump excesses in terms of catering, although he is forgotten, many are to the corporate elite and to me he seemed the champion and yes, and the gogo ladies and the wall street conservative values who say the rich needs to get richer. >> this criticism was aimed at the tom wolf sort of writing in general that was brilliant and wicked and the american character of the time and witty of language and the koing of words and new phrases and so on, but that does not add up to greatness and philip roth does. that's really interesting. so now as we end our conversation, i just want to

know your reflection about our culture, our world today, and the power of literature today given that these two giants died this month within a week or so of each other. about writing and are people reading it all? i think an embarrassingly close examination would show from a couple of things i read is that americans are reading less, still less. here's a tweet i put out, imagine trump's library. dwroo you'd have to. >> great line. great line. >> and mary, as you see these, 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 and i thought well, if we crash it's the end -- it's the real end of kind of these colossi, these titans of american culture and american literature. i think ross also had as perhaps wolf did not s a great sense of -- i hesitate to say spur itch all 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 being briefed across it, i guess, is

how i feel. i just feel like an enormous loss personally, but also to literature. i kept hoping he would write another novel. i'm an optimist, what can i say? >> that's a nice way to close. mary carr and dick cavitt, thank you for joining me for the conversation and for all your reflections. >> thank you, christiane. >> and the new york public library has two stone lions guarding its entrance. perhaps for a little while we can rename them wolf and roth. that's it for our program tonight. thanks for watching amanpour on pbs and we'll see you next time.

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