Joe Tabbacca/AP Photo
The novelist Philip Roth in 1993
The recent revelations about Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey have left me mystified beyond belief. They put me in mind of a Roth novel whose plot flew off its rails; literature, as Roth observed back in 1961, is yet again unable to compete with reality.
My relationship with Roth’s work has been so intense as to be almost religious. I approached the Bailey biography with trepidation as I knew it would test my ideological commitment to art as independent of the artist’s character. Roth, admittedly, tested this commitment by frequently employing protagonists whose lives mimicked his own and sometimes even shared his name, often drawing plot lines from incidents in his own life. I dreaded what I might learn and how it might interfere with my relationship to the texts that had meant so much to me since I first read Goodbye, Columbus in high school. (An aside: The tennis scene at the beginning of the excellent movie version of the book was filmed at my high school; there is a terrific novel by Gish Jen called Mona in the Promised Land in which one of the teenage characters who attends this high school brags about this fact, as I am now doing.)
During the long wait for Bailey’s biography, I took heart—and this is where things get weird for me—in the fact that Bailey, who presumably knew every terrible thing Roth had done, still really liked and admired the guy. This was due to the fact that Bailey seemed (emphasis on that journalistic weasel-word “seemed”) like such a great guy. I loved his John Cheever biography. I had met him once or twice and we kept up a friendly, sometimes lively relationship on Twitter. I was beyond pissed when I discovered that he did not bother to credit me with the one moment I felt I belonged in the book (see below). But his geniality led me to hold my tongue when the book came out.
Bailey does justice, I think, to Philip Roth the person. Roth emerges as a complex human being who suffered from mental illness on occasion, narcissism often, who could be extremely selfish, and gave new meaning to “sex-obsessed,” but who also grew to be a tremendously generous menschy (and lonely) old man. It would be a great book if its subject had been, say, Cary (or even Hugh) Grant. In other words, it’s well researched, heavily footnoted celebrity gossip, nothing more. The many reviewers who have praised it as a great work of literature are, for their own reasons, selling you a bill of goods. (See under “Ozick, Cynthia.”) Roth is not important for how many women he slept with, or how generous his publisher’s advances were, or how much he complained about his publisher’s advertising budgets. Rather, it’s because, beginning in 1959, he wrote more great novels than any other English-language writer during that time and played a crucial role in the coming of age of postwar American Jewry. About his work and its historical significance, Bailey has virtually nothing to say. Roth, like Saul Bellow, hated being referred to as a Jewish American writer, rather than just an American writer. This is no doubt a major reason he chose the ostentatiously goyish Bailey as his biographer. But all Bailey has done with his prodigious research is provide other, more intellectually ambitious writers with his spadework and the rest of the world with fodder for their preconceived notions of “what kind of man” could have written these works.
Now, on to Bailey: I simply can’t get over what a horrible person Bailey must be when he is so damn good at appearing to be such a nice guy. Before he was canceled everywhere, Bailey did a number of Zoomed public appearances for the book. I watched a few of them. Here is one from CBS News, but another one, with Mary Karr, since taken down, is by far the most bizarre of them, in retrospect. In it, Bailey is this likeable, genial fellow who disapproves of Roth’s sexist humor and such, but what is especially weird is how much time their conversation devotes to the olden days when it was “cool” for professors to sleep with their students. They both disapprove, of course, but think of what must have been—or should have been—going through Bailey’s mind. He not only knew what he had done, he knew that the women he had done it to were talking about it, sending emails to his publisher, and contacting reporters. (He had even, allegedly, raped a woman in the home of a New York Times book reviewer in 2015.) After the news broke, I thought immediately of Don Draper, living a lie his whole adult life that could come crashing down any minute. Don, at least, was imaginary. Bailey is real—and terrifying in the charm he musters in support of his sociopathy.
That said, Bailey’s publisher has made a horrible decision in “pausing” the book’s distribution. Yes, its author turned out to be a terrible person, but that is hardly a reason to literally cancel his work. Many writers are terrible people. (I am perhaps not so great, myself.) Readers should be trusted to decide for themselves whether to buy a book by an accused rapist. I understand not wanting to publish a book by a bad person in the first place. I would not give a book contract to anyone who ever worked for Donald Trump or Fox News, for starters. They should be shunned by all people in every aspect of their lives. But once you’ve committed yourself to publishing a work, your own decision has been made and it becomes your job as a publisher to protect and defend freedom of expression. If you’re feeling guilty, feel free to give the money to a fund for rape victims. This book does not, in any way, poison the public discourse; canceling it, however, does.
It saddens me that the publisher here, Norton, is such an important independent voice in a business that is all but overrun by conglomerates that care only for bottom-line calculations. But it turns out that people at Norton had been alerted long before the book was published to the rape allegation mentioned above, and all they did was forward the woman’s note to Bailey. Bailey denied it, and that was good enough for them. That was the wrong decision; also a foolish one, as the woman’s allegation was sure to become public. But again, what’s important here is the defense of freedom of expression at a moment when it is under siege virtually everywhere. And so we writers must demand that Norton drop its “pause” on the book even if it ends up putting money in a rapist’s pocket. The future of our democracy depends on such distinctions.
Alterman’s Complaint: Bailey quotes from Bill Clinton’s awesomely eloquent and deeply truthful tribute to Roth on the occasion of his receiving the National Medal of Arts: “What James Joyce did for Dublin, what William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Philip Roth has done for Newark.” Goddammit, Bailey: I wrote that—for free, no less—and I f*&^%ng told you I wrote it. Alas, its authorship will henceforth be lost to posterity because the SOB would not even put that in the footnote.
Odds and Ends
Mazel tov to all the winners of this year’s Sidney Hillman awards, especially the Prospect’s own David Dayen. These awards will literally never live down the shame of having given a commentary award to Andrew Sullivan, but this year’s choices speak extremely well of the state of progressive journalism at a moment when it is needed more, perhaps, than ever in our country’s history.
I’m pleased to see that President Biden plans to recognize the obvious historical fact of the Armenian genocide that began in 1915 and was conducted by the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire. Candidate Barack Obama promised he would but failed to follow through. One key factor, no doubt, is that the professional Jewish community has since ended its support for the Turks’ campaign of Holocaust denial. AIPAC had been instrumental in promoting the Turkish lie and, interestingly, has not said much about Biden’s belated recognition of reality.
And speaking of history, here’s a documentary about the historian, jazz critic, and lifelong commie Eric Hobsbawm called The Consolations of History.
I watched my DVD box set of the musical highlights of Saturday Night Live from its beginning, and its zenith was the performance by the young Patti Smith. Has there ever been a better opening line to a rock song—much less a better line to a first song on a first album—than “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”? Here she is on the show in 1976, and here, again, 43 years later in the lobby of the Public Theater, doing her anthemic “People Have the Power” with yours truly (among 250 others) as her backup.
Lastly, someone on Twitter asked this week about the best use of history in a pop song. My nomination? Randy Newman, “Sail Away.”
