0:00 Pull your chair in closer to the fire, now, Earl, because the wind is rattling the glass something fierce tonight.0:08 How does a man know when he's typed his very last word?0:12 I tell you what, Maeve, most folks never do.0:16 They just peter out down the line.0:18 But after we talked about Greta Garbo slipping out of Hollywood into the New York shadows last week, I got to thinking about a fellow who didn't slip away at all.0:31 He just laid his tools down in broad daylight.0:34 Philip Roth.0:35 God rest him, he was a divil for the work, wasn't he?0:39 Thirty-one books, from nineteen fifty-nine right up to the end.0:44 That is not a hobby.0:45 That is a life sentence.0:47 Thirty-one novels, Maeve.0:49 Forty-one years I spent listening to the boxcars bang together, and you learn the sound of a train running out of steam.0:58 Around 2010, after he finished that little book called Nemesis, Roth looked at the page and knew the steam was flat gone.1:07 Whisht now.1:08 A man of seventy-nine looking at a blank sheet of paper.1:12 He didn't just feel tired in the bones, did he?1:16 No, he took stock like an old engineer checking the boiler.1:21 He reread his heroes first — Conrad, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Turgenev.1:26 Then he went and reread all thirty-one of his own books.1:30 Front to back.1:31 Lord above.1:32 I couldn't bear reading letters I wrote forty years ago, let alone whole books.1:38 That must have been like walking through a graveyard of your own younger days.1:44 That's just what it was.1:46 And when he shut the last cover, he realized he didn't have the stamina left to mount another attack on a novel.1:54 He said writing was like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.1:59 Pure humiliation.2:01 But he kept quiet about it for two whole years.2:04 He finished in 2010, but the world didn't hear a peep until 2012.2:09 Now, I know how that sounds, but hang on.2:12 Roth told folks, I didn't want to be like Frank Sinatra, announcing a big retirement and then creeping back on stage next season.2:22 He wanted to sit in that old farmhouse in Connecticut and prove to his own heart that he could leave it alone.2:30 It's the yellow scrap of paper that stays with me, Earl.2:35 Stuck right there on the plastic bezel of his computer monitor.2:39 "The struggle with writing is over." That's what he wrote on that Post-it note.2:45 Just six words.2:47 Every single morning, he would wake up in that quiet room, look at the screen, and read it to himself.2:54 He said it gave him strength.2:57 Imagine that — finding your strength not in picking up the shovel, but in leaving it leaned against the barn wall.3:05 Swear on my tackle box, friend, that is the honest truth.3:10 It takes a powerful nerve to say, I'm done.3:13 He quoted the old prizefighter Joe Louis, saying, I did the best I could with what I had.3:20 And on the other side of that note?3:22 The great task of doing nothing.3:25 That's his phrase!3:26 "The great task of doing nothing." He sat in his apartment on the Upper West Side and read history.3:34 Read biographies.3:35 Watched the light shift across the floorboards without having to turn it into an opening chapter.3:42 Though he couldn't help himself entirely when it came to his own legacy, could he?3:48 One of the neighbors told me he got into an awful row with that internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia.3:56 Oh, he did!3:57 They told him he wasn't a credible witness to his own life.4:01 Roth hit the roof, wrote an open letter, and set them straight.4:06 And he spent hours with his biographer, Blake Bailey, answering questions, handing over the freight.4:14 He said Blake took the burden right off his back.4:17 When you spend fifty years turning your own marrow into ink, pet, handing the ledger over to someone else must feel like putting down an anvil.4:28 He died in 2018, eighty-five years old.4:31 And he didn't have a single half-finished manuscript stuffed in a drawer.4:37 When he said enough, he meant enough.4:39 Sure look, what can you do.4:41 It's a rare soul that knows when the hearth has gone cold, and walks out the half-door without looking back.4:50 Bank the coals now, Earl, and let's get some rest.
