Editor’s note: The publisher of the Philip Roth: The Biography has temporarily suspended the book’s shipping and promotion as its author, Blake Bailey, faces allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.
Blake Bailey is breathless, having ascended two flights of stairs in trying to grab the phone before the answering machine kicks in. But he might be breathless for other reasons.
In the span of a week, The New York Times devoted not one but two reviews (plus a profile) to Bailey’s new book, the definitive biography of acclaimed author Philip Roth. The one by Cynthia Ozick was a flat-out rave, the one by Parul Sehgal, well, not so much.
“They’ve been very generous,” Bailey says from his home in Virginia. “They did a nice profile in the Sunday magazine. Parul’s review ran in print [March 31] and was, of course, an evisceration. And Cynthia’s could not possibly be better.”
Bailey grew up in Oklahoma, where he came to love the work of the late Texas author Larry McMurtry. Years ago, during a Dallas appearance, McMurtry praised Roth as a great American novelist while insisting in the same breath that he was not.
Critics have praised McMurtry as a man who wrote extraordinarily well about women. Despite having twice won the National Book Award, Roth’s novels were often met with derision and contempt from women.
“A lot of younger reviewers want to take their shots at Philip,” Bailey says, “as un-PC and allegedly misogynistic and so forth. Whereas Cynthia [Ozick] is 92 and as lucid as ever and gives Philip his due as not only one of the greatest writers of the 20th century but a human being. And judges the book as a book and not as a political tract.” Ozick called the new biography “a narrative masterwork.”
As for McMurtry’s assessment, Bailey agrees — Roth was a great American author. “The simple answer is yes,” says Bailey, whom Roth selected as his biographer, instructing him: “I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting.” As Bailey notes, McMurtry was hardly alone.
“In 2006, The New York Times canvassed 200 literary critics, professors, etc., to name the best American novel of the last 25 years. On the final list of 22 books, six were by Philip Roth. And bear in mind that his career was 55 years long.” Bailey calls Roth “a figure of vast international and cultural importance. His work is magnificent and deserves to endure. Along with [Saul] Bellow and [Bernard] Malamud, his is the last word on the Jewish experience in America.”
Bailey says he wanted to do the biography, “because I have always admired his work, which is the first criterion in my being interested in any biographical subjects.” Bailey’s body of work includes lavishly reviewed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson.
“I like that fact that he was controversial,” Bailey says of Roth, who died in 2018. “And I wanted to get to the bottom of it. What’s the truth of the matter? Is he the animal that some people view him as? Or what? And I think I do get to the bottom of it.”
Roth was not only a willing collaborator in the course of their eight-year experience, says Bailey, “he was proactive to a fault, because this was the great last task.” Legacy was important to Roth, “because he had taken a lot of lumps.”
For one, the tell-all memoir, the 1996 Leaving a Doll’s House, written by his ex-wife, actress Claire Bloom, “permanently dinged him,” Bailey says. “And that’s how, to this day, my biography notwithstanding, he’s viewed by a majority of the public as this Machiavellian misogynist.”
As a result, it was “tricky,” Bailey says, “negotiating my independent-mindedness and Philip’s feverish determination to influence me.”
Roth’s persistence took the form of “thousands of pages he wrote directly to me, telling me what I ought to think about every nook and cranny of his life. That’s pretty feverish,” Bailey said. Occasionally, there was also, “his effort to charm me.” Or, the author adds, “to browbeat me, if I was going in a direction he didn’t like.”
The most glaring example involved a character Bailey calls “Inga” in Philip Roth: The Biography, “the longest romantic attachment in Philip’s life, even longer than Claire Bloom. And concurrent with Claire Bloom. She had maligned him in Claire Bloom’s memoir under the protection of a pseudonym.”
She was willing to talk to Bailey but “did not want to be publicly known. Philip said, ‘You cannot give her the protection of a pseudonym. She has already maligned me in Claire’s book, and that’s not going to happen again.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s not for you to say.’ "
While Roth enjoyed close friendships with women — who surrounded him by his bedside as he lay dying — his marriages were “catastrophes.” Roth, Bailey says, “made terrible decisions in his private life.”
Roth’s debut came in 1959, when the 26-year-old published a collection of stories headlined by the novella, Goodbye, Columbus, which became a Hollywood movie in 1969 starring Ali MacGraw, who won the Golden Globe as “most promising female newcomer.”
In the story, Brenda Patimkin, who hails from an affluent Jewish family, agrees to what soon becomes a culturally troubled relationship with Neil Klugman, whose lower-middle-class Jewish family is nothing like hers.
So, why was Goodbye, Columbus so controversial?
For one, Bailey says, the 1959 publication of Roth’s debut coincided with the release of Leon Uris’ Exodus and the Broadway release of The Diary of Anne Frank.
“Holocaust consciousness,” Bailey says, “was very much on the rise. Apart from its obvious tragic dimension, the Holocaust was terribly shaming, that a whole ethnicity of people was viewed to be lower than animals. And to be caricatured as they are in Goodbye, Columbus as parvenu vulgarians enjoying the country club life, in a sort of parody of country club life, because they’re so vulgar and unassimilated, was deeply shaming.”
But to others, Goodbye, Columbus felt more like a bitter class struggle than an exercise in Jewish self-hatred. “Very much so,” Bailey says, comparing it to “a Gatsby story — the poor boy who aspires to marry the rich girl.”
Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint and other entries in Roth’s sexually charged portfolio underscore the overarching question of his life and career: Why were his relationships with women so endlessly fraught?
“Philip was highly sexed,” Bailey says. “And he wasn’t monogamous.”
And yet, he loved the company of women, surrounding himself with “formidable, intellectual women all his life. His lawyers were women. His favorite editors were women.”
Even so, “he was promiscuous. He gleefully, sexually objectified women. And made incredibly tasteless jokes about it. Which he put into his work,” Portnoy’s Complaint offering the most glaring examples. “And lastly, he married a famous actress who resented his adultery and abandonment” and wrote a cut-to-the-jugular book about it.
Leaving a Doll’s House “did enormous, irrevocable damage,” with Bailey adding this zinger: “Philip believed he never got the Nobel because of that book.” Which Roth deserved, his biographer contends, adding with a laugh the comment by one prominent critic that Bob Dylan’s winning the Nobel in 2016 was “the ultimate trolling of Philip Roth.”
So, how did Roth respond when asked his reaction to Dylan winning the Nobel? “It’s OK, but next year, I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”
Details
Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey, is published by W.W. Norton & Company. $40. Released April 6.
