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.“
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.
