"Philip Roth," an Encyclopedic Biography by Blake Bailey

 

Cynthia Ozick, a fellow intellectual, a long time friend of Philip Roth, wrote THE review of Blake Bailey’s biography, Philip Roth.  She says that “its nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude.”  I was thinking Dickensian in its cast of characters and encyclopedic magnitude.  If Bailey’s biography is definitive, Ozick’s review of the biography is equally authoritative,

I’ve accumulated some ten pages of notes on Roth’s remarkable life and achievements from this biography, but to what end?  I still have that habit from college days: taking notes.  But looking them over, and having read Ozick’s review, I am tossing all that detail to simply mull about general themes. 

There has been much controversy regarding Roth choosing Bailey to write his biography, the general theme being one misogynist finding another.  This has been fodder for the cancel culture and to me nonsense, completely irrelevant to what Bailey has accomplished.  I addressed that controversy in this entry and although it makes reference to my Kindle edition, I successfully acquired the original clothbound edition, which has always been my preference reading this 2 to 3 pound tome (and taking notes!) mostly in bed in the evening.

From Bailey’s acknowledgements:  “[Roth’s] cooperation was honorable and absolute. He gave me every particle of pertinent information, no matter how intimate, and let me make of it what I would (after telling me, often exhaustedly, what I ought to make of it)….One lovely sun-dappled afternoon I sat on his studio couch, listening to our greatest living novelist empty his bladder [at a nearby bathroom], and reflected that this is as good as it gets for an American literary biographer.”    I think Roth would be pleased by the results, even where Bailey strays from what Roth might have wanted, by the sheer detailed shaping of his life, an ocean into which the reader is totally immersed.

This is as much a treatise on the art of writing, at least at the level that Roth wrote, as it is the details of his life.  His commitment to writing, except for brief interludes, primarily because of health, was absolute.  In his Connecticut home that meant from morning to late afternoon in his separate studio, with a brief break for lunch, usually with someone staying with him at the time, his wife, his friend, or his current lover.  Like Updike, who he generally admired although also greatly in competition with, he could compartmentalize his writing routine, leading to 31 novels.  I wonder whether he (Updike) worked with as much angst as did Roth.  While both novelists saw themselves as the leading writers of their generation, I see (in my mind) Roth with his shoulder to the plow, compared to Updike seemingly effortlessly toiling in the fields of fiction.  This is not to distract from the accomplishments of either, both capturing the American experience in their writing from different perspectives.  Yet, neither writer won the Nobel Prize; disgraceful. This had more to do with the politics of the Prize than it did with their work.

This biography spoke directly to me because of place.  Most of his adult life Roth lived on the Upper West Side of NYC and in Warren CT.  As fame and fortune mounted, he would buy up adjacent apartments and renovate his CT house to include a separate writing studio.  Roth’s roots eventually ran deep in Connecticut and the Upper West Side and I understand why, and can even feel it having lived in both places.

He was only nine years older than I am so the historical bookmarks of his life are indelibly imprinted in me as well.  As Bailey writes about Roth, there is a sensory recollection of the times we shared.  Even without this personal factor, anyone who reads this biography will be struck by its intimacy.  This is more than the story of a life well lived and of an extraordinary man, but one gets to know him like a good friend, accepting his foibles as well as reveling in his accomplishments.  It’s as if Bailey has positioned him as a protagonist in a novel, one with whom we deeply empathize.

His first wife, Maggie, tricked him into marriage through a fake pregnancy test.  She was a troubled woman who had two kids.  Roth was good to them.  His second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote a scathing memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House.  Roth wanted a “corrective biography.”  He got that and more from Bailey.

He was a man who gathered friends, lovers, disciples, ex-lovers who became friends or enemies, a man of enormous magnetism.  They, and the mind of the writer, through his alter ego fictional character Nathan Zuckerman, were fair game in Roth’s fiction.  In his copy of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” he noted “Family as the maker of character.  Family as the primary, shaping influence.  Unending relevance of childhood.”  Bailey opines, “For him it was consummately so, and hard to say where one parent ended and the other began in the formation of his own character.”  He brought this into his literature and into his relationships, even sometimes acting as an ersatz grandparent to the children of ex-girlfriends

Roth was a man of titanic intellect and he did not suffer fools.  Yet he was a man of great generosity, serving as a mentor to other writers, a teacher, a supporter of Czech dissidents, and as a savior to friends (frequently ex lovers).  It was not unusual for Roth to open up his wallet, sometimes anonymously, to help friends, or people who helped him, with education or even living expenses.  Several were there at the end.  He sometimes expected friends who he considered his intellectual equal to be readers of first drafts of his writings.

His political leanings were decidedly liberal, although sometimes libertarian.  He cried when FDR died.  He lampooned Richard Nixon (even being mentioned in the Watergate tapes, Nixon saying to Haldeman: “Roth, of course, is a Jew.”)  Reagan did not escape his political ire, “a terrifyingly powerful world leader with the soul of an amiable, soap-opera grandmother…and with the intellectual equipment of a high school senior in a June Allyson musical….American–style philistinism run amuck.”  He privately thought George W. Bush was the reincarnation of “the devil.”  He didn’t live long enough to suffer and comment on the entire Trump Presidency, but a New Yorker article quotes him saying that Trump was “ignorant of government, of history, science, philosophy, or, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of 77 words that is better called Jerkish than English.“  Bailey comments that he liked to say “I’m eagerly awaiting my White House tweet.“

I’ve written before of his decision to stop writing, and his interview on that subject only scratches the surface of his thoughts on the matter.  

Blake Bailey’s work is an important achievement.  Is it biased?  Perhaps, but is admiration a biased position?  Bailey introduced me to nuances in his fiction as well as works I have still not read.  Roth was concerned about the decline of the American novel and rightfully so.  Who can ever take his place? 

The sheer size of Blake Bailey’s work, more than 800 pages with almost 90 pages of footnotes (much of it from primary sources) and index, makes it a veritable encyclopedia of Philip Roth.  It is a labor of love and faultless scholarship.

To Publish or to “Un-Publish” – That is the Question

 

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 1^st 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.

 

Goodbye, Philip Roth

I feel as if I have lost a good friend, similar to the way I felt when John Updike died now more than nine years ago.  I grieved then and I grieve now.  These are the two towering writers of my lifetime and no one, for me at least, will even begin to approach them.  They were not only the most prolific writers of our era, but were the most perceptive observers of our cultural scene, now turning into a cultural wasteland.   And they spoke personally to me in ways other writers often have as well, but never with such fecundity.

Roth was ten years older than I am (and Updike was about the same number of years older than I was when he died), a coincidence which does not fail to strike a looming chord in me.  I’ve read everything by Updike and most by Roth, noting a couple of his novels still on my “to read” shelf. 

One of my earliest entries in this blog cited the importance of both Updike and Roth to me.  Here’s just a part of what I said about Roth, still relevant today:

Where Updike awakens the Calvinist background of my early years and the suburban existence of my later life, Roth explores the “Jewishness” of my New York City years. I’ve long felt his American Pastoral is one of the great novels of the 20th century,

The novel made me relive those Vietnam years of the 60’s and the social upheavals of the times. It is a novel in the negative universe of Updike’s Rabbit, in that the main character is also a former high school star athlete, but from the inner city, one who in his attempt to create the “perfect life” of the American dream, an American pastoral, finds his daughter caught up in Weather Underground violence as he also helplessly witnesses the destruction of his once beloved inner-city Newark in the 1970s. An American Dream turned American Nightmare, capturing exactly the way I felt at the time.

Several years ago Roth declared that he would not be writing any more fiction; believing that he had given all he had (and he did), recognizing that his creative and physical powers were declining.  Consequently I decided to reread his first major work, Goodbye, Columbus . It had been “merely” 50 years since I first read it.  This is some of what I said after the second reading:

It was a very different experience reading the book as a septuagenarian.  I see Roth as a young colt writing this novella, exploring themes that would develop over the next fifty plus years, with clear signs of the literary thoroughbred he would become.  Certainly the work foreshadows my favorite Roth work, American Pastoral.  Nonetheless, it was somewhat painful reading his youthful work, bringing up issues of my own formative years that were submerged long ago, ones I was hardly conscious of when I first read the book, crazy families’ impact on their children, the first real romantic love, and youth’s obliviousness that old age would one day arrive.  And true to Roth, it is a very funny work as well.

The title symbolizes the soon-to-be-lost youth of Brenda's brother, as he is about to be married (like me, at an early age), but still a boy, dreaming of his basketball days at Ohio State, listening to an old radio broadcast of the big game which begins: "The place, the banks of the Oentangy."  My friend Bruce and I spent part of the summer at Ohio State University in Columbus as representatives to the National Student Association from our university.  It was a different world from New York, indeed, but we, like the youth of Roth’s first major work, were ready to be swept along into the stream of life as if it was endless.

Coincidentally that same entry covers another book I read at the same time, Tom Wolfe’s journalistic masterpiece, The Right Stuff.  I had read most of Wolfe’s fiction.  We mourned the death of Tom Wolfe only a week before Roth’s.

A few years after Roth decided to stop writing fiction he gave an interview, one of his few in his later years, where he commented on that decision:  It is now truly a great relief, something close to a sublime experience, to have nothing more to worry about than death. 

Indeed, the few slender novels he produced towards the end of his writing life are ruminations about death.  They are hard to read and yet mesmerizing, a phase of life for which we are all preparing. I quoted parts of that interview in this entry. Now a great voice has been silenced, but what he had to say will live into the future of American fiction and thought.

There is another coincidence to his death yesterday.  The day before my wife, Ann, met someone who revealed he was a childhood friend of Philip Roth.  How the conversation turned to Philip Roth was preternatural.  She told him how much I (and she) admire Roth.  He suggested we talk and provided his email contact.  I wrote him a long, chatty email suggesting we meet, maybe over lunch, as I’d love to hear about him as he was then.  That was yesterday, the day Roth died.  I grieve for his childhood friend and for us all.  There will never be another like him.

Fortunately Blake Bailey who wrote two superb literary biographies, one on John Cheever and the other on Richard Yates, has been working with Philip Roth on his life's story, with unfettered access to Roth’s papers, friends, and relatives.  This authorized biography will be the final chapter of a remarkable literary life.

Post Script:

Among the tributes published in the New York Times on Roth was one which quoted a paragraph from American Pastoral.  I remember reading this exact paragraph out loud to my wife when I first read it.  Great literature captures universality.  My father was not Jewish but this could mostly apply to him, as it could to almost anyone “for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between” and whose “most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything.”  Here’s what Roth wrote:

Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

And as readers it is our job to love Philip Roth and remember him always.

 

Oh What A Paradise It Could Be

I can't put Oh What A Paradise It Seems back onto our bookshelf, for a second time in my life, without saying something about it, what John Cheever has meant to me, and the catalyst the monumental biography by Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life, has played in this mix.

It is unusual for us to have two copies of the same book and only one such title resides alongside our two different bedsides, here at our home in Florida and on our boat in Connecticut, The Stories of John Cheever.  Before I retired, I used to carry it on any business trip that involved an airport or a hotel.  It was my "get out of jail free" card. In case of any delay, that book was my reclamation, picking out a short story that was ideal to fill in the time, and as I had read them all before, nonetheless always finding some new meaning or just again enjoying Cheever's charmed lyricism.  Cheever was the master short story writer and that is his genre.  His novels, although a pleasure to read, never seemed to measure up to the "reread test." Until recently.

I had read his last novel Oh What A Paradise It Seems when it was first published in the early 1980s.  At the time I was a forty years old.  I hadn't known of Cheever's illness then but probably thought of him as "old man" and the work seemed to me at the time to be disoriented and sad.  But Bailey's biography led me to reread the work and today, from the prospective being not only an older man myself, even older than Cheever when he died, it seems prophetic and profound.  It is a poignant work, clearly written by a man who knew he was dying and knew he would write little afterwards.  And writing to Cheever was like breathing.

I feel Cheever's pain rereading the work, even his personal pain of being so conflicted over his bisexuality, and his failing sexual powers, and the macro-pain of his knowing he was leaving a planet that at times was such a paradise, but one which also seemed to be slouching towards a hellish environmental ruin.

The story is less important to me than the feeling it leaves me with -- almost one of regret.  It is sad to bear witness, as does Cheever in the novel, to an overpopulated, hyperkinetic, media-obsessed society, seemingly hell-bent on environmental self destruction.  This is a far cry from the suburbia normally associated with Cheever's work.  Yet there is always hope and Cheever leaves us with that sense.

Cheever's favorite image, that of rain, begins the novel...

"This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night."

 

The protagonist, Lemuel Sears is skating on the pond in his old village, where his daughter now lives.  (Cheever was separated from his place of boyhood for most of his life, the Quincy, MA area, and he was returned there to be buried.)  The setting of the mythical "sleepy village" of Janice of the novel must be very similar to where he was born. This beautiful passage denotes his "homecoming:" "Swinging down a long stretch of black ice gave Sears a sense of homecoming.  at long last, at the end of a cold, long journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires of the hearth.  It seemed to Sears that all the skaters moved over the ice with the happy conviction that they were on their way home. Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many of them, including Sears, but swinging over the black ice convinced Sears that he was on his way home. Someone more skeptical might point out that this illuminated how ephemeral is our illusion of homecoming."

But the characters seem lost, homeless, nomads in the modern world.  Harold Chisholm is one such character:

"Nothing waited for him in his apartment. There was no woman, no man, no dog, no cat, and his answering tape would likely be empty and the neighborhood where he lived had become so anonymous and transient that there were no waiters or shopkeepers or bartenders who would greet him. He turned on the radio but all the music he seemed able to get was disco music, and disco music from those discos that had been closed the year before the year before last for drug pushing or nonpayment of income tax. He seemed to be searching for the memory of some place, some evidence of the fact that he had once been able to put himself into a supremely creative touch with his world and his kind. He longed for this as if it were some country which he had been forced to leave."

And in its 100 short pages we circle back to water and its primordial symbolism to Cheever:

"Now and then the voice of the brook was louder than Chisholm's voice. A trout stream in a forest, a traverse of potable water, seemed for Sears to be the bridge that spans the mysterious abyss between our spiritual and our carnal selves. How contemptible this made his panic about his own contamination. When he was young, brooks had seemed to speak to him in the tongues of men and angels. Now that he was an old man who spoke five or six languages-all of them poorly-the sound of water seemed to be the language of his nativity, some tongue he had spoken before his birth. Soft and loud, high and low, the sound of water reminded him of eavesdropping in some other room than where the party was."

Cheever died only a few short months after its publication.  Yet, his love of life always shines through as in the lyricism of one of the concluding paragraphs:

"The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none.  The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling, What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come, It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love, What a paradise it seemed!"

I would like to remember Cheever for the beauty he captured in his writings, and as opening day approaches -- with the impending cry of "play ball!" -- I will revisit his short story, "National Pastime," of which I am fortunate enough to have a limited edition, signed by Cheever, something to be cherished. It tells a story, in a small way similar to my boyhood -- when I pursued baseball without much help of my own father who was either bogged down by his troubled marriage or by his photography business.  As Cheever puts it, "the feeling that I could not assume my responsibilities as a baseball player without some help from him was deep, as if parental love and baseball were both national pastimes."