Literature, with all its human stains

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Sean Kelly explains why he will keep reading Philip Roth.

Abookseller at our local markets recently told me he avoided returning to books he had loved in his youth – they too often disappointed. They had fired something in him then, and thatwas enough.

When I first read Philip Roth, I fell hard. His first works amaze you with precocious skill. Some of the later work is beautifully formed, as is some of its prose. And I had moments of self-recognition as I observed his flawed narrators stumble through their mishaps.

Roth himself liked to say his obsession was with ‘‘particularity’’. Not for him philosophical generalising; life, and therefore literature, existed in the specific.

Then let us go to recent particulars. A new biography of Roth was published to high acclaim. Then accusations were made – several. Women who had, in eighth grade, been taught by the biographer, Blake Bailey, said he had groomed them before initiating sex with them as adults. One said that, when she was 22,he raped her. Another woman has also accused Bailey of rape. Bailey has denied the accusations.

The publisher, W.W. Norton, announced it would not proceed with further printing of the book, or shipping copies, and would cease all promotions.

This is news enough, but has more heft as controversy because of Roth’s own debated history. Some readers believe he was amisogynist and his fiction reflects that in a narrow and uninteresting way. Others, like novelist Cynthia Ozick, believe his true task was the ‘‘lampooning of male lust and lechery’’.

My guess is that both are true in different ways – and the fact I am uncertain is part of the reason I prefer reading fiction to non-fiction. It is, I believe, closer to the way we experience life. There is a freedom in reading great fiction: the freedom to reach our own conclusions. We are rarely sure about an author’s opinion about their characters; and this reflects life, where our own judgments are never final, where we believe amillion things, many incompatible, many unresolved.

Big questions can be asked about the Bailey case. Should a publisher abandon a book? Should we read books by those accused of crimes? Should the publisher’s decision be read as censorship, moral leadership, or smart business?

Reckoning with big ideas like this is important. But culture wars are almost always tedious, because they pretend, each time, that these big debates can be settled, once and for all, by resolving the specific situation in front of us. If you choose to stop watching woody Allen’s films, say, then freedom of artistic expression is dead; and if you do keep watching Allen’s films, then the forces of sexism have won.

But what if, instead, we tried to do what Roth did in his fiction, and limit ourselves to dealing with these questions in the particular? Do you want to read this book?

An important question about Roth’s writing and its connection to his life is whether a failure to think in complex ways about women limited his artistic achievement. Personally, I amnot sure I want to read a 900-page book about Roth by aman who, if these accusations are true, has (to put it mildly) serious problems in the ways he thinks about women.

It is important to know that Roth chose Bailey to write his biography, believing the biographer would not be too prim about Roth’s sex life, and because the two men agreed that the actor Ali Macgraw was attractive. It has also been suggested Roth rejected the biographer Hermione Lee partly because she was a feminist.

This, to me, raises questions far more interesting than ‘‘should I read this book’’, about the ways that literary mythologies are constructed. A famed male novelist handpicks his famed male biographer partly because they can talk about attractive women. Later, awoman contacts the publisher and accuses the biographer of rape. The publisher ignores her, but passes her email on to the man she has accused.

You can still buy Bailey’s biography – if this is censorship, it is of a weak kind. Personally, I am leaning away from reading it. But if I do, it will be with these questions in mind.

But I will keep reading Roth, despite the risk of new disappointment eclipsing that first glow my bookseller talks about. In fact, I will read him partly to see if that glow is gone – if I see flaws missed when I was younger. The waywe respond to books changes as our world changes, and as we do.

When Bailey began work on his book, #metoo was still half a decade away. The world was different (though obviously rape was illegal). It was that world in which Roth chose him, and that world in which Bailey wrote. But his book has been published in this world. And it is in this world that his book is now being judged, in all its particularity. That is a good thing. – Sean Kelly is a former adviser to Australian Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard