NOT PYNCHON: ROTH: We will always have Nixon to kick around.

[Mark Kohut]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 5:39 AM
Subject: We will always have Nixon to kick around.
To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>


" He [Philip Roth] turned to political satire, he said, because of a single
word: Nixon. He was proud to say that his New Deal Democratic family had
considered Nixon a crook some twenty years before the rest of the world
caught on. When, in a single week in April 1971, the President granted
leniency to Lt. William Calley, one day after Calley's conviction for the
murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and then released an
anti-abortion statement proclaiming his ""personal belief in the sanctity
of human life," Roth could not resist writing an op-Ed piece, which THE NEW
YORK TIMES rejected as "tasteless". Barbara Sproul, living in Woodstock
with him at the time, tells me that she remembers him banging away on the
typewriter and saying over and over, " Tasteless, I'll show them tasteless!
" IN a mere three months, he had completed the full length anti- Nixon
satire, OUR GANG.

Roth sez he had a very civil conversation with the Pres of Random House,
who were a little worried about publishing it, about the place of satire in
a culture. He brought up Swift, " who you should always bring up when you
want to publish something disgusting"

>From ROTH UNBOUND.


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