Tag Archives: Philip Roth

Roth in Rehab

book reviews, literary lint, ,

I was about a quarter of the way through the Philip Roth biography when the news of Blake Bailey broke. That is, the author of said biography was accused of raping three women and of grooming his 8th-grade female students while he taught at a school in New Orleans in the 1990s. He kept in touch with them, and later, when they were adults in the eyes of the law, he sexually pursued them. The New Yorker has a good explanatory article. And Slate has published an essay from one of Bailey’s former students, as well as a long article interviewing several others. Each new batch of detail is more damning than the last. Norton, his publisher, has pulled the book out of print, the author has been dropped by his literary agency, and I now own one slightly used, copiously annotated ghost biography of Philip Roth, great American writer, dead now almost three years. 

The book is celebrity gossip of the literary sort. After reading it I feel slightly queasy, as if I had gorged on a bag of marshmallows, and that’s completely independent of the meta-narrative of Bailey’s own moral transgressions. The book is stuffed with facts, names, friends, girlfriends, nemeses. The literary game of pin-the-fictional-tail on the factual person is so rigorous as to be exhaustive and exhausting. 

But in the end it’s not a good biography, if by biography we want more than mere facts but a deeper understanding of the person. The portrait of Roth is exceedingly complex — he was a generous friend, a literary crusader, a stand-up comic in tweed, a Hercules of grudges held, as well as an emotional and sexual terrorist — but these disparate counterselves never congeal into a comprehensible whole. Perhaps my desire for a comprehensible whole is a bourgeois affectation that should have been squeezed out of me by the shrieking relentlessness of Roth’s novels, his insistence that we always get people wrong, that life is nothing but a constant parade of getting people wrong. But still I hold onto a smidgen of belief that Roth, as a person, could be made to make sense, at least a little more than what we have here. 

Part of my dissatisfaction with the book is Bailey’s refusal or unwillingness to editorialize about what it all means. There’s very little narrative consciousness here, little if any margin between biographer and subject. The result is almost a collage of quotation and anecdote, mortared together with scant guidance. When Bailey does step forward rhetorically, he blatantly submits to Roth’s view of things. From a footnote: “In most cases I’ve tried to cull only the most telling, pertinent, and perceptive passages in Maggie’s journal, and hence may have inadvertently misrepresented the basic tenor of what is, indeed, a pretty insipid piece of writing.” The consequence of this particular editorial lapse is that we don’t really know if Roth’s first wife Margaret Martinson is, as he would have it, a crazed psychopath, or something more complex and sympathetic. Their tumultuous relationship feels as random and unexplained as a farce. Indeed, Roth’s fictional treatment of the doomed romance in My Life as a Man is more conceptually coherent.

In fine Rothian fashion, the biography is very much a counterlife to previous books, specifically two, the James Atlas biography of Saul Bellow and Claire Bloom’s second memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, which describes her fraught relationship with and marriage to Roth.1 Both books represent perspectives Roth wants to refute. The Atlas biography is depicted here as a once-admirable project that went off the rails, poisoned by the biographer’s editorializing and his growing disapproval of his own subject. Roth expends a great deal of energy trying to correct Atlas’s portrait of Bellow. He proposes a long interview with the rapidly deteriorating Bellow, who is no longer well enough to fight the rigorous reputational fight that Roth wants him to. Finally, his corrective manifests as an essay about Bellow’s work, which appears in Shop Talk, his late collection of essays and interviews. 

The Bloom memoir infuriated Roth for the rest of his life. It’s amazing to witness what a grudge can do to a person. In addition to his novel I Married A Communist, his most direct fictional counterpunch to his ex-wife, Roth contemplated publishing a line-by-line rebuttal to the Bloom memoir (“Notes on a Slander-Monger”), but was mercifully and somewhat surprisingly persuaded to stand down. (I say surprisingly because Roth seems to have forced his way in so many aspects of his life that the precious few times he is told no, it’s shocking, a rupture in the cosmos.) 

He selects his first biographer, then-friend Ross Miller, in part because he can control the biography. This will-to-control manifests everywhere. All the para-text surrounding Roth-the-writer proves unsatisfactory to him so that he inevitably takes it over, writing the notes to his Library of America editions, writing his own jacket copy, his own photo captions, and even attempting to rewrite Hermione Lee’s Paris Review interview questions. (She bravely fights back.)

For Roth, no one does it right. And when Miller doesn’t make progress on the biography in all the ways that Roth sees fit and when he seems to harbor some ambivalence about Roth’s “florid love life,” he is removed from his post.2 Roth approaches Lee to write the biography but she has other projects that conflict. (She bravely fights back.) That brings us to Blake Bailey, whose book also fails because it refuses to answer the question that his own book poses: is this authorized biography a worthwhile endeavor or merely a grocery list of score settling? He quite clearly lays out Roth’s agenda for a biographer and so the agency of that ultimate biographer is pertinent. But Bailey never admits to how he’s dealing with the problem. 

That said, if this biography is a counterlife to the Bloom memoir and is meant to resuscitate Roth’s reputation, it fails in that regard, too. Though Bailey doesn’t condemn Roth’s behavior with women, for example, the steep pile of detail is itself thoroughly condemning. (One jilted-lover’s suicide attempt might be an anomaly; three indicates a trend.) One doesn’t have to be a woke social justice warrior of present-day Twitter to find Roth’s behavior repellent. He often spoke of the aesthetic project of “letting the repellent in.” In that he succeeded. 

Roth seems unwilling or unable to have a long-term meaningful relationship with a woman, despite the fact at the end of his life he had numerous female friends and professional peers who admired and respected him. Throughout his endless flings and relationships, he seems to harbor a cursed attraction toward psychologically damaged shiksa women with addiction problems and absent or abusive fathers. He attempts to save and correct these women, but their very own all too human neediness and inability to minister to his own often outsized emotional needs overwhelms him. His first wife Maggie is the template, Bloom the top-shelf version, and Sylvia, the pseudonym used for the woman Roth had an affair with late in life and who was the model for Faunia Farley in The Human Stain, is the parodic white-trash version. The other women — the stable, capable, ambitious, independently minded long-term girlfriends — all leave Roth when he refuses to marry and have children. That they often remained his friends afterward speaks to a mutual magnanimity that goes insufficiently explored in the current book. (It would be so much more interesting to read long interviews with these women where they discuss the relationships at length from their own perspectives.) His relationship with Bloom, in particular, is like watching two black holes attempt to foxtrot, doomed in every way possible. Roth, the celebrated novelist who was accused of being a self-hating Jew early in his career, proceeds to have a nearly 20 year relationship with an actual self-hating Jew, who also happens to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Star-crossed lovers, indeed. 

There is also an unsettling Humbert Humbertian thread running through the book, noticeable even before the news of Blake Bailey. One of Roth’s girlfriends begins to extricate herself from the relationship when he expresses a worry that he might become attracted to his teenage step-daughter, Helen, daughter of first wife Maggie, as she gets a little older. Is this a Mickey Sabbath-like refusal to be constrained by boundaries or is it a moral blindness to those boundaries, which is then spun into artful debate via forceful lobbyists like David Kepesh and Sabbath? Or is it both? I don’t know. What I also don’t know is the line between this motif in the book and the alleged transgressions of Bailey, who, like a Roth character himself, appears to have been exposed as a sexual predator by the very act of writing a book about another, greater writer who has his own morally suspect sexual history.3 It’s almost as if Blake Bailey is a vicious parody of Roth, and of Humbert Humbert, a predator without the fancy prose style, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. 

“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting” reads the epigraph to the book, a direction from subject to biographer. Does Bailey succeed? Honestly, I started reading Roth’s novels so long ago I don’t have enough perspective to tell. I’m not sure if this book will be useful to anyone besides the morbidly curious. I didn’t necessarily find Roth and his life interesting, oh after about page 400. Even the most florid love life eventually grows tedious. I still find him heroic as a writer because of his relentless dedication, the sheer novelistic work he put in, but as a person he seems rather pitiful. So many lovers and yet so irredeemably alone.

  1. And by “fraught,” I mean totally bananas. 
  2. And by “florid,” I mean totally bananas.
  3. To be fair, Roth was never accused of rape or of grooming underage students, though as a college professor he did pursue his (ostensibly legally adult) female students. Though he doesn’t break any laws as far as I can tell with my civilian eye, he does seemingly pursue any female with a pulse. According to Bailey’s telling, Roth allegedly made two passes at a friend of Claire Bloom’s daughter Anna Steiger, the first when this friend was 21-ish and the second when she was 28-ish. Roth, arguing with the friend the morning after the second occurrence: “Come on, how long is it since I made a pass at you? Ten years? What were you then, twelve? What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” Given the present tornado of altercation, allegation, implication, the reader may be forgiven for asking, “Just who is justifying whom?”

My Life as a Mannequin

essays, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dear friendly people of the Internet,

Are we still capitalizing “Internet”? I refuse to hyphenate “email” and feel increasingly gooby capitalizing “Web.” Surely all linguistic acceptance leads toward lowercase.

Anyway, I have a new essay out in the world. It’s called “My Life as a Mannequin” and it’s about Philip Roth, getting lost, Washington, D.C., good bookstores, and more Philip Roth. It’s in the latest issue of Open Letters Monthly.

I originally read part of this essay at the Roth@80 Conference in Newark, NJ, this past spring, an event that was put on by the Philip Roth Society in honor of Roth’s 80th birthday. You can read more about the extravaganza in this New York Times’ article.

Do I feel smug linking to a New York Times’ article? Yes, I do.

Anyway, this essay wouldn’t have made it out of the gate if it weren’t for Roth scholar extraordinare and friend and all around badass David Gooblar. If you want to know more about Roth, you should read his book, The Major Phases of Philip Roth.

p.s. For the extra diligent, here is David Remnick’s recap in the New Yorker of the same Roth event.

p.p.s. The essay in Open Letters features perhaps my second favorite Roth photo of all time. My first favorite is the Hot Dog Photo, which I can’t find in my preliminary internet searching (little “i”), but which was definitely included in the recent photo exhibit in the Newark Public Library.

A note from the official interlocutor

literary lint, , , , , ,

Well Philip Roth is in the news again, which must mean it’s time for me to blog once again. This time, Roth has written an “open letter” to Wikipedia to correct a collectively generated mistaken presupposition about the origin of his 2000 novel The Human Stain.

The letter is fascinating and amusing for lots of reasons. (O to have one’s open letters published online in the New Yorker!) On the one hand, Roth gets to correct the record, which he seems intent on doing here in his later years. My last blog post and the last occasion for a newsy flare-up related to the novelist was Roth writing in to The Atlantic magazine to clarify whether or not he in fact had a “crack up” way back when, as the magazine had alleged. Both of these clarifications hit the he-doth-protest-too-much sweet spot, and this last Wikipedia correction in particular strikes one as an older generation being caught in the barbed snares of the younger generation, the mustard gas of Web 2.0 wafting overhead.

But at the same time the letter also provides Roth a “second source,” the item he needs to correct the record on Wikipedia. Here is Roth:

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

He gets to point out the ridiculousness of the Wikipedian policy while also submitting to it.

This is of course ludicrous—the man’s Philip Roth!—and simultaneously right and correct. Because even though Roth protests that Coleman Silk, the protagonist of The Human Stain, was not modeled on the late literary critic Anatole Broyard, as the Wikipedia comment claimed, we as readers are free to make that interpretive mistake. It’s not like that charge came out of nowhere. That intrepretation—that the black literary intellectual who was “passing” as a Jewish intellectual, which is essentially what Broyard did—has been in critical circulation ever since the novel came out. And as biographically interpretive theories go, it ain’t that bad (or, all things considered, that violent of a conjecture to the author’s reputation or the novel’s aesthetic import). In short, if we, as readers, want Silk to be modeled on Broyard, then he is modeled on Broyard.

But at the same time it’s awfully fascinating to hear Roth go on in a Henry James-ian rumination about the germ of the original novel and to pontificate briefly about the need to make stuff up. In all of the semi-recent internet chatter about fiction vs nonficton vs nonfiction that may perhaps contain some not-quite-verifiably-truthful elements, it’s heartening to see someone so fully committed to making stuff up—where grafting imagined activities onto the root of reality is both a freedom and a burden.

And at the same time the whole thing reads like a scrap from one of Roth’s own novels—the novelist claiming that he is who he says he is despite the Kafkan internet behemoth claiming that’s not good enough, a desperate impotent rhetorical flight of self-validation! Of all the things that Roth’s ouvre has contained, surely that’s a main ingredient of it.

Notes on Notes

literary lint, , , , , ,

I was on Twitter today and I wondered if people tweet about not tweeting, the way that people used to blog about not blogging. And I have been myself thinking of drafting a blog post about my inability to regularly post a blog post, but then I thought christalmightywhocares. There’s nothing to blog about anyway.

But then, I thought of something to blog about, so here we go. I saw on the Atlantic magazine’s website today that Philip Roth had written them a letter disputing Joseph O’Neill’s claim that he had a “crack-up” in the mid-80s. The factual correction is interesting in and of itself. One could imagine the source of confusion, since Roth’s novel Operation Shylock, narrated by a fictional Philip Roth, talks about a breakdown resulting from taking the same true, factual medication Roth mentions in his letter. (Halcion.) On the one hand, you kind of nod your head primly at the fact-checking wrist-slap, but then think, Well isn’t this factual/fictional biographical confusion partly the point?

But more important than that, one reels at the idea that Roth is up there in New England reading Atlantic essays about himself. Did he actually read it? Was he tipped off? Or is it actually not that hard to imagine him reading the Atlantic? I imagine him writing, walking in the woods, lifting weights with dumbbells made of volumes of the OED, and, for some reason, doing a lot of bikram yoga.

I haven’t read the O’Neill essay, mainly because I’ve grown so crotchety and proprietary in my complicated affection for Roth’s books that I’m wary of reading additional criticism. (How’s that for being intellectually stubborn?) However, cynical defense mechanisms aside, I can recommend without reservation David Gooblar’s recent book The Major Phases of Philip Roth. I interviewed Gooblar about the book for the Quarterly Conversation. His book gives you the best kind of scholarly double-pleasure: it shines new light on Roth’s work while sending you speedily back to the books themselves. It’s scholarship as harmony, a dedicated major third humming above the source text.

One last note about that Atlantic piece: it’s illustrated with what must be one of the only pictures of the older Roth with visible beard stubble. He looks — with his stare, his slightly mussed hair, his stubble — old. I realize that he in fact is old, but it seems like the Atlantic is trying to highlight this with the photo. That is, it seems like they’re trying to make him look bad. Perhaps I’m just projecting but this seems to me in poor taste.

But what’s really in poor taste is how they handle the article’s URL. Here’s how they title the article: “Philip Roth Clears Up His ‘Crack-Up.'” But here’s the web address of the article:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/05/philip-roth-clears-his-crack-/52754/.

Thank you, Atlantic Monthly, for keeping it classy. You must be so proud of yourself.

And with that, I return to my glacial pace of irregular blogging.

Losing Faith with Fiction

Uncategorized, , , , ,

I have been mulling over the news that Philip Roth no longer reads fiction. In a profile in the Financial Times, there is the following exchange:

As we talk, Roth is perfectly courteous, perfectly charming, perfectly defended. Half a century of celebrity, since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 brought him money and a turbulent kind of fame at the age of 36, has made him a master of the polite no-go sign. The conversation I’d longed to have with him since I first read him many decades ago, a conversation about fiction itself, died an early death.

“I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”

How so?

“I don’t know. I wised up … ”

And with those three words he gave me a long look from those fierce eyes and then a significant glance at my notebook, as if to say: that’s what I want you to write down.

So what did he wise up about? On a superficial level, and probably long ago, about the inadvisability of giving anything away when answering journalists’ questions, that’s for sure.

Aside from this moment, the profile is otherwise redundant. All of the information has been so thoroughly catalogued before that the accumulation of words seems unnecessary. No wonder that this statement by Roth received the most attention. But aside from this fleck of gold in an otherwise dry creek bed, the statement seems, if not declared, at least edited to be supremely tweetable. That is, mildly scandalous, gnomicly brief, invested with the shelf life of organic yogurt. And it dutifully sprouted its week’s worth of online mold.

But I’ve kept thinking about it because I think, in its truncated outlandishness, it so disregards Roth’s actual writing. He may no longer read fiction; he may in fact find reading fiction a waste of time. (Geoff Dyer has a great line somewhere where he says that all men eventually only read military history.) This statement actually isn’t that much of a surprise. In interviews over the past several years, as Roth has become an old man, Roth’s said that he’s rereading the classics, perhaps for the last time. A premonition of death seemingly haunts every move he makes–the books he writes, the ones he reads, the plots of his novels, etc. So one doesn’t really expect for Roth to have an informed opinion on that story collection by Miranda July, or the amount of depth to be plumbed in Téa Obreht’s novel.

(Incidentally, I have’t read either of those authors either, but I feel the atmospheric contemporary pressure to have done so.)

But the statement seems to negate what he has done with this life, the way that the news Salman Rushdie is going to work on a TV show and that he thinks TV can be panoramic and sociological in ways the novel no longer can (old news, that), somehow seems to negate the very validity of fiction.

But Roth’s fiction is thoroughly devoted to the fictional, to the idea of the fictional. Or to be more clear: his works are all about making stuff up and about characters who make stuff up, or read books and try to live according to those books, and suffer because of the miscalculation. So much of his mid-career work (the three novels and one novella that comprise Zuckerman Bound) are about the life of an accidentally celebrated author. And his late work takes on various American totemic myths and braids them with individual lives. And one of his best books, The Counterlife, is all about lives re-writing each other, except here it’s not new characters corrupting other characters, but the same characters re-written in multiple ways. The book is a novel bursting into several different novels, characters playing out different versions, different fates. That is, his fiction has been primarily dedicated to this kind of energy, a character’s ability to fictionalize. All of which is a long way of saying that Roth himself may no longer read fiction but the fiction he’s actually written is argument enough for fiction’s value. And not just because it’s “good” fiction, but because the novels argue on behalf of the inescapable need for people to fictionalize. It’s metafiction in the deepest way. It’s not the lighter John Barthian side of fiction, purely investigating the structural conventions of narrative.

I would say that Roth treats fiction on a religious level if he hadn’t stated so clearly that he considers God himself the most supremely harmful fiction.