Tag Archives: Philip Roth

On Blake Bailey and Philip Roth

One morning in April, I was a quarter of the way through the new Philip Roth biography, contemplating Blake Bailey’s take on Roth’s first marriage. I had been a huge fan of Bailey’s work for years — I’d read all his previous biographies, I’d read Richard Yates’s novels largely because he had been Bailey’s subject, and I’d long believed that that Bailey’s life of John Cheever was one of the four or five best biographies I’d ever read. But the Roth book was beginning to unsettle me. As best I can tell, neither Roth nor his first wife covered themselves in glory during this marriage. Still, I was beginning to be a little annoyed that Bailey seemed to not quite understand how unkind and self-centered Roth’s behavior toward his wife was. He seemed much more forgiving of Roth’s excesses than his wife’s. The perils of an authorized biography, I thought. But I was beginning to actively dread the Claire Bloom section.

Then–that very morning–this news broke. Credible accusations against Blake Bailey — that he’d groomed his middle-school students, that he’d harassed and assaulted them when they were older, that he’d raped two women. I felt sick. But the news explained so much! More than that, it cast an entirely different light on Bailey’s depiction of Roth’s first wife, and it made me question the portrayal of all the other women in all the other biographies. I found myself in the perverse position of wishing to reread and reevaluate all of Bailey’s books, and yet also not wanting to read another word by him.

I’ve seen some people argue that Bailey’s sins have nothing to do with the book he wrote. A stranger posted a grumpy Oscar Wilde quote on my GoodReads commentary on Roth and Bailey: “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” That may be true as far as it goes, but when you are looking for someone to offer an analysis of an author’s life — and especially when that author has had, let’s say, contentious relationships with women — surely his own attitudes toward women are relevant. How can you look at the very plausible accusations against Bailey, and think, yeah, this is the guy I want to declare that Philip Roth is not misogynistic? How can you trust Bailey when he assures you that Roth’s first wife was an unreasonable shrew?

W. W. Norton dropped the Roth book within days of the accusations. But Bailey’s found a new publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, the house that has also brought you the memoirs of Woody Allen and Roger Stone. One wonders what Bailey thinks of being among such illustrious company–certainly being published by Skyhorse won’t do much to burnish Bailey’s destroyed reputation among the literary elite; all hope of a Pulitzer seems to be gone, and it’s unclear whether Bailey will ever again have the opportunity to write another of his magisterial biographies.

For myself, I haven’t read a word of the Roth bio since that morning in April. But I think it should be read, though not right now, and perhaps I will even finish it myself one day. Roth was, despite his many faults, an important writer of the twentieth century, and Bailey did have access to sources that no one may ever see again, or at least not for a very long time. Still, Bailey’s take on Roth can never again be thought of as definitive, and in the future it should be read with an eye toward what we are willing to forgive of men we consider geniuses, and how we determine who these geniuses are in the first place. Because it seems to be the case that the gatekeepers who anoint our brilliant writers are often themselves men who treat women very badly indeed. It is just possible that this clouds their judgment when they come to consider misogynists who happen to construct sentences well.

Morning Reading, May 23, 2018

Yesterday was primary day! At least in Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, and my home state, Arkansas. I am relieved to report that the woman who made her gun range into a “Muslim Free Zone” did not win Arkansas’s Republican gubernatorial primary, nor even come close. You can find coverage of the most important and interesting races at Vox and FiveThirtyEight.

Also this morning:

  • My favorite result of the night: Stacey Abrams won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Georgia and could become the first Black woman to govern one of the United States. I love her, and I think she has a real shot in November, especially since the Republican primary is going to a runoff, which means that the two top Republican contenders will be fighting with each other instead of Abrams for the next two months. The Nation has complete coverage of the Abrams win from Joan Walsh and Steve Phillips. Here is what Phillips says about Abrams’s strategy:

    Especially in light of the resistance to Trump, Democratic voter turnout is up in previously conservative-voting Congressional districts, and those re-energized progressive whites can help pick up crucial seats in Georgia, as well as help capture the governor’s mansion.

    Smart investors look at trends, where things are going, not where they were. The plain truth of the matter is that every single day, America—and Georgia—get browner by the hour. Nationally, every single day, 7,000 more people of color are added to the population while the net growth of whites is just 1,000 people (that’s births minus deaths plus legal immigration (which shows why Trump is obsessed with immigration).

    It will cost about $10 million to mobilize the 230,000 previously-uninspired voters of color required to close the gap in Georgia. The question and the challenge for the progressive movement is will they put their money where their mouth is?

    I don’t think this strategy will work in every single state (I thought it would have been idiotic to try to primary Joe Manchin in West Virginia, for example). But I think Georgia might be a place where it will work, and I’m excited to see how this race goes in November.

  • The other big news of the morning (other than the president tweeting nonsense again) is that the death of a major American novelist, Philip Roth. I never could quite warm up to Roth, partly because I couldn’t relate to a sensibility that seemed extremely and specifically male to me (I feel the same way about Saul Bellow, although I did like John Updike for some reason). I also never quite forgave Roth for a passage in his memoir, Patrimony, in which he describes his father having a vulnerable moment and asking Roth not to reveal it to anyone — and then Roth put it in a book. Still, Roth’s work meant a lot of many people and Jeet Heer’s appreciation in the New Republic is well worth reading:

    What liberated Roth was popular culture. As a boy he had been an avid radio listener and as an adult he got to see the birth of modern stand-up comedy in Chicago, where Nichols and May, along with Lenny Bruce, were inventing a new form of stage humor based on the interplay of voices (cerebral, sex-obsessed, and often inflected with the language of therapy). It was Roth’s genius to realize that the language of stand-up comedy could reinvigorate literary fiction.

    The 1960s were also the great age of pop art, with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein bringing the stylistic tics of advertising and comic books to canvases. Roth did something similar to literature: He wrote pop novels, where voice (often wise-cracking, satirical, and self-critical) was central, Flaubertian coolness be damned.

  • Dahlia Lithwick has a long piece in Slate about the moral dilemma some Republicans are finding themselves in: do they give up their positions in government in hopes of retaining personal dignity, or do they stick around in hopes of possibly mitigating the damage the president is doing to the country?

    Moral courage in this setting is almost impossible to define. It’s, in one way, completely understandable and actually quite a relief that so many good people have stayed on at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the State Department, and other agencies, despite the fact that the commander in chief has no compunction about insulting them, their mission, and their leadership almost daily. We need good people to stay on to act as a bulwark against cruelty and instability. But we also need good people to leave, and to speak out, to signal that cruelty and immorality are wrong.

    The question remains the same. At what point are Trump’s attacks on his own law enforcement and national security apparatus potentially damaging enough to warrant some kind of response from patriots in both parties? And are the momentary tweets and the occasional rousing speeches and the retirements and subsequent book tours truly the kind of moral and effective responses that are warranted in times that feel imperiled as they now do?

    Lithwick doesn’t really come to any conclusion about the answers to her questions, other than yeah, some people need to leave but other people need to stay, and every serious Republican should be considering their options. If I were one of these conflicted GOPers, I don’t think this article would clarify anything for me! But it’s interesting and thoughtful nonetheless.

  • And in Foreign Policy, Terence McNamee uses a novel lens to look at the North Korea problem (at least it’s not something I’d read about or considered before): maybe it’s really like South Africa:

    North Korea’s failed promises to dismantle its arsenal in the past and its recent signaling — willing and pragmatic one day, intransigent the next — are obvious reasons to be wary. Yet we can’t assume Kim thinks North Korea can remain a pariah forever any more than de Klerk believed South Africa could. Nuclear weapons may be the only currency North Korea can leverage to rejoin the family of nations. South Africa’s experience offers a glimpse of what a verifiable drawdown of North Korea’s program might deliver internationally.
    If we dare imagine that Kim Jong Un — the third-generation Kim to rule North Korea — is a closet reformer like de Klerk, he might also have an eye on what could be achieved domestically. De Klerk used nuclear rollback as a wedge to steamroll opponents of political reform, particularly in South Africa’s security establishment.
    No one outside North Korea really knows whether a fundamental shift in the country’s nuclear posture would go smoothly or not. A congruence of interests across the constituencies affected — including the military, scientists, senior officials, and Kim himself — cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, the resistance de Klerk faced from recalcitrant generals could be feeble by comparison. Conversely, Kim could be the most hawkish of the bunch, unable to conceive of any foreign-policy alternative to nuclear brinkmanship.

    Unfortunately, McNamee doesn’t offer any ideas about how we get Kim Jong Un to have the same epiphany that de Klerk seemed to have (I mean, sure, I guess he could be a secret human rights devotee who just happens to have tens of thousands of his own people in brutal prison camps), and now that the words “Libya model” have been uttered it’s hard to imagine how it could happen. An intriguing idea nonetheless.