Kenneth Whyte on the scandal engulfing Philip Roth’s biographer.
Kenneth Whyte on publishing, Philip Roth’s biography, his biographer and bad behaviour.
On Sept. 27, 2012, the website Publisher’s Marketplace, which assiduously tracks literary deals, announced that Blake Bailey, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award winner for Cheever: A Life, had signed a contract with the publisher W.W. Norton & Co. to produce Philip Roth: The Biography.
Bailey was reported to have arrived at “a collaboration agreement” with his subject that guaranteed him “unrestricted access to materials including Roth’s complete archives, personal papers, taped interviews, and unpublished writings, along with extensive interviews with Roth.”
Announcements of this sort are generally planted in Publisher’s Marketplace by agents, for whom they are the equivalent of deal toys, those crystal trophies that investment bankers order to commemorate their greatest hits. Selling the Roth biography was a “major” deal for Bailey’s agent David Mccormick, and a “major” outlay for W.W. Norton.
That’s an important word, “major.” It means something quite specific at Publisher’s Marketplace. A nice deal, by its standards, gets the author an advance of up to $50,000. A “very nice” deal brings between $50,000 and $100,000. A “good” deal is between $100,000 and $250,000. A “significant” deal jumps up the $250,000-$500,000 range, and a “major” deal is $500,000 or up. That’s top of the heap (although the optional elaboration “major deal for seven figures” is sometimes used).
W.W. Norton patiently waited nine years for Bailey to deliver his major book. It launched on April 6, and the publisher pulled out all stops to make Philip Roth: The Biography a success, as one would expect when there’s major money on the line. David Remnick, the New Yorker editor and a friend of the late Roth (he died in 2018), kicked off the publicity with an early and largely laudatory feature on the book in the New Yorker. Cynthia Ozick, an even closer Roth friend, was assigned the review in the New York Times, where she called it “a narrative masterwork.” Author Bailey himself was the subject of an admiring profile in the New York Times Magazine. All of this landed before the official publication date, after which the rest of the world was permitted to buy or review the book. Norton did a fine job of setting the table.
The real-world reception of Philip Roth has been bumpier. In addition to reporting on deals, Publisher’s Marketplace reports on reviews, and it ranks them as positive, negative, and indifferent. Of the last 500 reviews it has collected, exactly 18 (3.6%) are negative, which demonstrates as neatly as anything I’ve seen that book promotion has replaced book criticism in the public sphere. But of the nine Philip Roth reviews captured by Publishers Marketplace and not written by friends of the subject, two (or 22%) are negative, and decidedly so.
A second, non-ozick review in the New York Times said:
At just under 900 pages, the book is most thoroughly a sprawling apologia for Roth’s treatment of women, on and off the page, and a minutely detailed account of his victimization at the hands of his two wives.
And:
Bailey’s proud refusal to seem prim or judgmental blossoms into a troubling tendency to join the fray. It’s strange to see a biographer get his own shots in at a despised ex-wife…
The Christian Science Monitor picked up on the same problems:
[Bailey’s] research is enormously comprehensive, but although he includes incidents that Roth might have wanted him to exclude, he’s always ready with equivocation, obfuscation, and euphemism.
Roth orchestrates harassment campaigns against reviewers he doesn’t like, and Bailey calls them “pranks.” Roth uses college teaching jobs to stalk and prey on young women, and Bailey demures, “Not all of Roth’s mentoring projects had an erotic component.”
The Publishers Marketplace collection of reviews isn’t complete. The Los Angeles Times didn’t much like Bailey’s biography, either. Nor did the New Republic, for much the same reasons as the reviews quoted above. In today’s climate, that’s a ton of negativity.
You might think that a biographer enjoying his subject’s assholic behavior would be trouble enough for any book. Personally, I was outraged just knowing that the Times and the New Yorker had let Roth’s buddies critique his biography. But the book’s problems were only beginning.
About 10 days ago, the New Orleans Times-picayune reported:
A celebrated literary biographer who taught eighth-grade English at New Orleans’ Lusher Middle School in the 1990s is now facing accusations that he fostered close relationships with girls he taught and then exploited their trust to pursue sex with them early in their adulthood.
Three of Blake Bailey’s former students described sexual encounters with him in interviews with The Times-picayune | New Orleans Advocate, with one accusing him of rape, after he spent years staying in contact with them under the guise of mentorship. A fourth said she fled from a bar meet-up during her freshman year in college when he slid his hand up her thigh following a series of suggestive remarks.
Bailey denied the allegations through a New Orleans defense attorney, but the floodgates had opened. Not only are several women now accusing Bailey of grooming his middle-school students for sex in the 1990s, but one claims that Bailey raped her when she was in her twenties and later told her he’d wanted to do that to her since she was in middle school.
Bailey has also been accused of raping a publishing executive, Valentina Rice, in 2015 at the home of a New York Times book critic, no less. According to thecut.com:
During the height of the #Metoo movement three years later, Rice … reached out to a Times reporter and the president of Norton through an anonymous email account, alleging that Bailey had raped her. “I have not felt able to report this to the police but feel I have to do something and tell someone in the interests of protecting other women,” she wrote to the reporter. “I understand that you would need to confirm this allegation which I am prepared to do, if you can assure me of my anonymity even if it is likely Mr. Bailey will know exactly who I am.”
Rice never heard back from the publishing company. Instead, a week later, she received a response from Bailey himself, who, per the Times, had been forwarded her message. “I can assure you I have never had non-consensual sex of any kind, with anybody, ever, and if it comes to a point I shall vigorously defend my reputation and livelihood,” he wrote.
W.W. Norton last week said it took the Rice allegation “seriously,” very seriously, by which it appears to have meant that it asked Bailey if he did it, and he said no.
Bailey’s literary agent, the Story Factory, declared last week that it is dropping him as a client. Interestingly, this is not the same agency, Mccormick Literary, that announced Bailey’s “major” deal. That suggests Mccormick pocketed $75,000-plus without having to stick around for the denouement.
Norton, initially, appeared to be playing the scandal brilliantly, if fiendishly. “These allegations are serious,” it said last week on announcing that it will pause shipping and promotion of Bailey’s book. Norton’s notion of “serious” here was consistent with its earlier application.
The publisher printed 50,000 copies of Philip Roth. Those were already in market and Norton did not pull them back. You could still buy the book on Amazon and elsewhere. Norton was just saying it wouldn’t produce any more copies of the book once it ran through the first 50,000 and recouped its investment.
As for no longer promoting the book, there was no need for Norton to do anything more. Philip Roth was a juggernaut. The scandal elevated the book to the New York Times bestseller list. And the original promotion was still very much out there, including a lavish display on Amazon where it was reasonable to expect most of Norton’s books would be sold.
I thought they’d get away with this dodge. They didn’t.
The pressures on Norton went up a notch this week and the publisher lost its nerve, announcing that it was cutting all ties with Bailey and permanently pulling his book from the market. (You can still get the book on Amazon but only from its second-tier sellers.) Norton has also promised a donation in the amount of its advance to Bailey to organizations that help victims of sexual abuse.
Far from solving Norton’s problems, this latest move compounded them. The Authors Guild and PEN America are now on the publisher’s case for taking the path of least resistance.
PEN says let miscreants be miscreants:
“If we were to apply that standard writ large there would be thousands of books by bigots, misogynists and miscreants that could be removed from circulation on those grounds. While these books may be picked up elsewhere, once that stigma is attached there may not be another publisher willing to touch them.”
The Authors Guild says there are things to be learned from deviants:
“Freedom of expression and the freedom to publish are the bedrock principles upon which literary culture and civil society are built. Removing a published book from circulation because of the authors’ conduct and resulting adverse public opinion against the author or the subject, no matter how strong and justified, contradicts important principles of free speech and open discourse. The book may, for example, serve as a historical document of Roth’s treatment of women and his own misbehavior, and of conduct that some have even found acceptable in the past. It provides food for discussion about these important topics as well as other aspects of Roth’s life. We cannot rewrite history.”
In my opinion, the publisher should have argued from the outset that bad people can write good books and ignored the pressure to withdraw Bailey.
I don’t know where Norton goes from here but it’s probably time for a Julia Reidhead watch. She’s Norton’s president. She was informed of the allegations against Bailey pre-publication and didn’t take them seriously. She published the book knowing all this was lurking in the background, and since it’s come forward she’s been unable to nail a response.
As for Bailey, he has categorically denied the accusations against him, and he’s received nothing like due process. For all we know, he may eventually be exonerated. Reputationally, as a practical matter, he’s finished.
And then there’s Roth. I’ll always read him because The Human Stain and, especially, American Pastoral are among the best novels I’ve encountered, and I’m accustomed to separating the personalities of artists from their output. But let’s face it. It is well known that Bailey earned Roth’s trust by promising not to take too harsh a view of the novelist’s “florid” sex life. If Roth turns out to have hand-picked a rapist to defend him on charges of misogyny, his reputation will hardly be enhanced.