Nineteen Sentences, Explained

Recall from Wednesday the unusual paragraph containing nineteen sentences that turned out to be the first line from each of Philip Roth's first nineteen books.

The story behind the page containing those sentences is told by Philip Roth in the Afterword to the 25th anniversary publication of Portnoy’s Complaint (1994). According to Roth, he was eating at a favorite diner nearly fifty years ago when he discovered a single typewritten sheet of paper, revealing "in the form of a long single-spaced unindented paragraph... [those] nineteen sentences that taken together make no sense at all."

Regarding the fate of that sheet of paper during the next year, Roth says, "Though I could never bring myself to discard it, I did nothing not to lose it." The page would turn up time and again until:

I saw that these sentences, as written, had nothing to do with one another. I saw that if ever a unifying principle were to be discernable in the paragraph it would have to be imposed from without rather than unearthed from within.

What I eventually understood was that these were the first lines of the books that it had fallen to me to write.

...Please don't ask me to defend the notion that I carried away from that piece of paper at the age of twenty-three...I am even willing to concede that my conclusion was completely mistaken and my whole career has been grounded in a baseless premise. An idiotic premise. An insane premise.

...Well, whether it was or wasn't my job to do, the job is now completed. For better or for worse, wisely or stupidly, I did it. The books that, according to my lights, had necessarily to follow from each of those sentences are finished and done with. There is now a little red checkmark beside every single sentence on that piece of paper whose existence I have never before disclosed to anyone and which I have kept securely hidden all these years in a safe deposit box in my bank.

...Free at last. Or that's what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.

      --Philip Roth, March 1994

Unbelievable. Imagine my amazement at happening upon that essay precisely when I did, after weeks of writing on and off about first lines and selecting one of Philip Roth's own for inclusion in my First Line Quiz.

Naturally I wanted to know more and, if need be, to expose the entire Afterword as some literary practical joke on the part of Philip Roth. But it had been ten years since its original publication in both The New York Times Book Review and as the essay, "Juice or Gravy?" I found as an Afterword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Portnoy's Complaint. The trail had grown cold.

There are Roth scholars and well-educated literature junkies who could surely shed some light on the whole affair, I believed. But after following dozens of useless links, I was unable to locate a single essayist, blogger, student or reviewer who could debunk Roth's anecdote.

Until today.

I was finally able to locate one essayist who wrote of Roth's "alleged discovery, in a cafeteria in the late 1950's, of an anonymous, abandoned sheet of paper covered with a paragraph of nineteen unrelated sentences." The essayist considered Roth's "myth of origin" as a "directive to the reader concerning the folly of trying to find coherence in Roth's career."

From there, it took only a bit more sleuthing to identify the essayist as Debra Shostak, Professor of English at the College of Wooster, and author of "Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives," (published, coincidentally, the same month I posted my First Line Quiz). Those credentials are good enough for me, thank you very much.

Free at last.