Roth, but too much froth
Philip Roth: The Biography By Blake Bailey Jonathan Cape, £30 Reviewed by David Herman
Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth is more than 900 pages long. It is clearly written and he has done his research. It’s full of stories about everyone from Jackie Kennedy, Mia Farrow and Nicole Kidman to Bellow, Malamud and Mailer. And if you want to know how many copies Portnoy’s Complaint sold (420,000 in hardback, 3.5 million in paperback in five years); when Roth first met Bellow; or why he fell out with John Updike, this is the book for you.
Bailey starts in 1898, when Roth’s paternal grandfather, Sender Roth, left Galicia for America. Roth’s father Herman was the first of Sender’s children to be born in America and he brought up his family in Newark, New Jersey, the place that was to become one of his son Philip’s greatest subjects. And when Philip Roth was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1998, Bailey recalls, Bill Clinton said of him: “What James Joyce did for Dublin, what William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Philip Roth has done for Newark.”
A year before, Roth had published the colossal novel, American Pastoral. Cynthia Ozick, for one, was overwhelmed. “Roth is Niagara,” she wrote. “They should stop fiddling in Stockholm already and make the telephone call.” They never did.
Blake Bailey, though “a gentile from Oklahoma”, is nevertheless particularly astute in his comments about the Jewish aspects of his subject, including Jewish Newark, antisemitism and Roth’s relationship with Jews and Judaism generally. When Roth was asked what was distinctive about Jewish writing, he said it wasn’t the subject matter, but a particular kind of sensibility: “the nervousness, the excitability, the arguing, the dramatising, the indignation, the obsessiveness, the touchinesss, the play-acting – above all the talking.”
Philip Roth had a suburban upbringing, in an atmosphere very different from the Yiddish-speaking tenements of the Lower East Side or Chicago. “I was brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood,” Roth once said, “and never saw a skullcap, a beard, sidelocks – ever, ever, ever…” When Alan Yentob made a documentary about Roth for the BBC, Roth took him to task over its musical theme: “You give the wrong idea with that diddle-diddle music,” he wrote. He didn’t hear a klezmer band until he was almost 60. He knew exactly what kind of Jew he was – and wasn’t.
Roth’s other grand subject was America. His four great novels on the subject, written in five years, changed the way he was perceived. He was even referred to as “America’s poet laureate”. And certainly, no one wrote better about “America amok”.
There is much to admire in Bailey’s biography. But there are weaknesses. There is far too much about Roth’s two disastrous marriages and his numerous affairs. “I was forty and she was nineteen,” Roth said about one lover. It could be the book’s title.
Was Roth a misogynist? Yes and no. Edna O’Brien, Hermione Lee and Claudia Roth Pierpont were among those who spoke at his 80th birthday celebration. Mia Farrow read at his funeral.
The main weakness, though, is the absence of literary appreciation. Bailey writes about how Roth met Primo Levi, Kundera and Aharon Appelfeld, but he doesn’t tell us what these writers meant to Roth. There are 188 pages on his first marriage, 171 on his second. But only three pages on Eli, The Fanatic and four on Sabbath’s Theater. And none of it is very illuminating. This is a serious drawback in a big book about a major 20th-century novelist. There is much to enjoy in it. It is full of fascinating detail. But the problems are big, too, and I wait with eager anticipation for Steve Zipperstein’s forthcoming book on Roth.
In his Jewish neighbourhood, he ‘never saw a skullcap, beard, sidelocks ever, ever, ever’