THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
Philip Roth biography is a colourful, confident and uncompromising triumph
Philip Roth: The Biography Blake Bailey
W.W. Norton
A seasoned literary biographer is tasked with writing the life story of a prickly, reclusive and renowned novelist whose work revels in alter-egos and funhouse transformations of his personal history.
In 2012, it happened to Blake Bailey and the subject was Philip Roth — the man who helped liberate American Jewish characters from underdog and mensch status; brought adolescent male lust and general bodily functions, pleasures and decay into high-resolution narrative focus; and, with The Plot Against America, augured the rise of Donald Trump.
Bailey had written well-received biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson. Roth had encouraged, then scuttled, a biography by his friend Ross Miller, a literature professor. Roth then flirted with the notion of appointing writer and publisher James Atlas for the project but veered away when he read what he considered to be Atlas's hatchet job on Saul Bellow. The timing was off for British biographer and critic Hermione Lee. Atlas connected Roth with Bailey, and the two clicked.
“Why should a gentile from Oklahoma write the biography of Philip Roth?” the novelist asked.
“I'm not a bisexual alcoholic with an ancient Puritan lineage, but I still managed to write a biography of John Cheever,” Bailey counterpunched.
No pushover, this Bailey guy, and his near decade of toil has resulted in a colourful, confident and uncompromising biographical triumph that, at more than 800 pages, also manages to be conversationally readable.
Bailey conveys Roth's wit and charisma as a handsome, vivacious, all-American baseball-loving kid in Weequahic, N.J., a sly undergrad on the make at Bucknell, and a grad student at the University of Chicago discovering both his literary superpowers and his impatience with the posturing, and theory-mongering of academe. A stint in the Army left him with a bad back injury and a reinforced distaste for petty bureaucracy. Bailey chronicles, too, the surreal launch, with Portnoy's Complaint, into wealth and celebrity, Roth's activism on behalf of Czech dissident writers and regular acts of generosity, kindness and networking for needy or ailing friends, lovers, students, fellow authors and others.
But this book is decidedly warts and all. No egotistical rant, petty grievance, control-freak overreach or sexual adventure (often with much younger women), goes unnoted. Nor do neurotic reveries like Roth's imagining his bald pate viewed from a partner's perspective during oral sex. And by the end of the book, such is the accrual of medical details, you'll feel like Roth's internist. But you wouldn't want someone vague and squeamish writing about the creator of Portnoy's Complaint and The Anatomy Lesson.
Most of all, though, apart from his legendary discipline as a tireless multi-draft-hewing craftsman, Roth's odysseys — good, bad and ugly — revolved around women. He has been tarred by some feminists as misogynistic.
But Roth argued — and Bailey offers substantial evidence for the defence — the novelist's most serious problems weren't with all women but with two particular women: the ones he had the misfortune to marry.
His first wife, Margaret Martinson Williams, was deeply unstable, and though he tried to exorcise the trauma of that relationship in his fiction, she haunted him to his grave. His marriage to the actress Claire Bloom was a more decorous disaster. In one episode, she came to see him at a psychiatric unit, where he was being treated for depression. She became so distraught during the visit she was admitted there, too. You get the idea. Their marriage was an Edward Albee play.
No one writing about Roth will be able to sidestep this foundational biography. If nothing else, Bailey's book is a crucial decoder ring for deciphering the Byzantine layers of who became what in Roth's romans-à-clef.
Don't expect facile answers to emerge from future investigations. “Well that's settled” is not a phrase ever uttered in relation to this author's work. Roth's flawed, scarred, madly seeking characters are decidedly flesh and blood and, as Bailey marvellously reveals, so was their creator.
Once a journalist complained to Roth he was “extremely difficult” to interview. Roth laughed and said, “I wasn't put on this earth to make your life easy.”