A friend called yesterday after it was announced that Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography had been withdrawn from circulation although just recently published by WW Norton and Company. Bailey is now accused of being a sexual predator. In effect, the book is being declared out of print as a consequence of the accusation alone. My friend knows I am a former publisher and correctly thought I must have an opinion on the matter. He was right, although I’ve been away from the publishing scene for some twenty years now.
In full disclosure, I was a “fan” of Blake Bailey’s biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates (two of my favorite writers), and had praised them in this blog.
In fact, I was hoping Bailey would be John Updike’s biographer, who, along with Roth, I considered to be the two most important writers of my generation. But the son (Adam Begley) of another favorite writer (Louis Begley) had an inside track on that and as it turns out Adam Begley’s Updike biography measures up to the work Bailey has done.
So (to me) it was logical someone of Bailey’s stature in the literary biography world would be a leading candidate for Roth’s. I do not know the ins and outs of how Norton, Roth, and Bailey got together, but I have grave doubts it is, as some have contended, one misogynist finding another, a marriage made in cancel culture heaven.
I have always purchased the hard cover editions of literary biographies of the writers most important to me, but because of the sheer size of the Roth biography, and the fact that I had hoped to read it on our travels after COVID shots set us free, I purchased the Kindle edition. I now live in fear that Amazon will be forced to “withdraw” those already purchased and refund the $$, Norton making Amazon whole. Could that be? Seems Orwellian, but so do the past five years, no make it ten plus starting with the Tea Party and now culminating in the post Trump era with the anti-vaxxers vs. the vaxxers.
I was primarily an academic publisher and as such we published books from all over the political spectrum. If we had to run police records on all our authors, and I published more than 10,000 titles in my career, I’m sure we would have found some unsavory people on our list. But no, provided the author documented his/her arguments, be they conservative or liberal on the political spectrum, we published the work. We also published works on and/or by people who I would not want as a friend and I’m sure there were misogynists among them, but hopefully no axe murderers.
I confess that we didn’t have to deal with the kind of high profile cases trade publishers do. I never liked the business of “trade” meaning books that have potentially wide readership, sold in bookstores and now Amazon, and are sometimes published in large editions or subsequent editions, such as Roth’s biography. Trade publishers, when publishing non-fiction, want to have a popular subject or writer as they have to compete not only with other books, but with media in general, everything demanding one’s time. So, the more controversial the better!
The trade publishing world is now considering cancelling planned publications of some of the people from the Trump administration. I think it is fine for a trade publisher to take a political position, but thankfully there is always another one with the opposite position. Imagine if the “me too” or the “cancel culture” was able to dictate not only what should be published in any form by any publisher or what books already in circulation should be declared out of print? We’d probably lose a majority of the classics. This is a symbolic form of book burning that only fascists might applaud.
No, there is only one answer to publishing these works in general: it’s called the 1st Amendment. If someone chooses not to read the Roth biography as he/she neither likes the subject nor the author, don’t buy the book! If it’s proven that Bailey is the monster he is accused of being, let the courts decide what to do with the royalties.
