Goodbye, Columbus. Hello, Philip Roth!
Everyone who reads Blake Bailey’s 912-page “Philip Roth: The Biography” will say it is well researched, and they will all be right. Mr. Bailey has earned a reputation as a thorough researcher with prior biographies of Richard Yates, John Cheever and Charles Jackson, and this book is no exception. He spent nearly eight years researching and writing it, interviewed close to 150 people (many multiple times), and worked closely with Roth, who died in 2018, and his estate on the project.
In the opening and closing pages of the book, Mr. Bailey describes Roth as “protean,” but the core of Bailey’s portrait is Roth as embattled and misunderstood. He felt constantly misunderstood by those who read him autobiographically, by those who saw him as a Jewish American writer (instead of just an American one), and by anyone who saw misogyny in his work. He was one of the most decorated writers in American history, but he was defined by his inability to win the Nobel Prize. He was devastated when people believed Claire Bloom’s charges about him in her memoir “Leaving aDoll’s House.”
Part of the value of Mr. Bailey’s biography comes from the wealth of information it provides about Roth’s early years. Reading about Roth’s lower middle-class youth in pre-World War II Newark and the expectations he faced as a young Jewish writer, we can understand why he needed to insist on his vision of the world and believe in his talent as fiercely as he did — he had little choice if he wanted to make a life as a writer.
But reading about Roth behaving similarly later in life, when he is wealthy and famous, is a grimmer affair. Instead of an underdog, he comes off as manipulative, obsessive and narcissistic. At one point he tries to arrange a stipend for the writer Lisa Halliday (his romantic interest at the time), but only on the condition that she stay in New York and remain unmarried. One of Bailey’s sources was a 295- page rebuttal to
Bloom’s “Leaving a Doll’s House,” which Roth wrote at age 78 and nearly published until several friends convinced him not to, in part because of its “relentless self-justification.” The list goes on.
Mr. Bailey does not condemn Roth for these actions. Nor does he defend him. Instead, he presents his research as evenly as possible, without making judgments. This was Bailey’s method in his previous biographies and in his gripping 2014 memoir, “The Splendid Things We Planned.” A 2014 New Yorker review commented that the memoir, like all of Bailey’s writing, “lays out plain facts before the reader instead of using them in the service of overarching theories or arguments.”
On one hand, this seems like exactly what Roth would have wanted from his official biographer. At his 80th birthday celebration,
Roth memorably recalled his lifelong commitment to local specificity rather than overarching concepts. Fiction’s lifeblood, he said, is “its concreteness, its unabashed focus on all the mundanities, a fervor for the singular and a profound aversion to generalities.” Mr. Bailey’s biography shares this aversion.
On the other hand, there’s the epigraph to the book, Roth’s request to Bailey: “I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting.” When Roth made this request, it’s possible that he wanted Bailey to turn him into one of his beloved fictional characters. In the last college class Roth ever taught, at Bard College in 1999, the students were objecting to the way Roth portrayed women in his novels. “The great thing about literature,” Roth replied, “is it doesn’t matter if you like Emma Bovary or don’t like her. Only one thing matters: Is she interesting?”
“Philip Roth: The Biography” is voluminously researched, good-humored, and honestly written. Readers will discover new information about Roth’s personal life and probably even learn about written works of his that they didn’t know existed.