Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey

Maureen Freely

First, let me declare an interest.

I’ve been seeing Philip Roth in my nightmares since I was nine. Reading Goodbye, Columbus, I was puzzled as to why the lovers took a diaphragm to bed with them. I went to the dictionary. Imagine my horror when I discovered this couple was having sex with a lung.

I had little interest, therefore, in discovering what Portnoy had to complain about some ten years later, when he found himself transformed into a Breast. Though I did read Leaving a Doll’s House, Claire Bloom’s shockhorror account of her ten-year stint as the second Mrs Roth, it held no surprises.

It simply confirmed my prejudices, leaving me to wonder how a woman so accomplished could ever have fallen for such a self-absorbed posturer.

He never stopped writing like a dream – infuriating one minute, gorgeously astute the next, and almost always disarmingly funny. His athletics on the page never quite made up, though, for the relentless narcissism. His taste in psychodramas grew ever more tiresome – if it wasn’t his ego against his id, it was his id against his superego.

If his heroes weren’t mouthpieces, they were proxy Roths in some sort of surreal disguise. They were always shadow-boxing with puritan orthodoxy. They were always testing the limits, if only to see just how far they could go without landing in what Roth liked to call feminist prison.

But then one day he looked out of the window and began to think about how the world had changed during his many decades of navel-gazing. In the string of extraordinary novels that followed, he again drew from the streets, travels and campuses of his own past, but this time it was to reckon with the ‘massive historical pain’ that lay hidden behind closed doors.

No novel evokes the generational schisms of the Vietnam era as masterfully as American Pastoral. The national obsession with witch hunts has rarely been put into relief as sharp as in I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. In The Plot Against America, Roth turned counterfactual, exploring what might have been, had Charles Lindbergh, the Nazi-sympathising celebrity aviator, become President in 1940.

Published during the Bush administration, it invited readers to connect the contemporary dots. A decade and a half later, it casts a much longer shadow over Trump.

Though Roth never won the Nobel Prize, by the time of his death he was topping lists of great authors who’d been robbed of it. Even so, he was worried for his posthumous reputation. He never got over the Bloom book, and he certainly did not want her to have the final word. But he knew, after a lifetime of trying, that no one was going to believe him, either.

He chose Blake Bailey as his authorised biographer because he liked the thorough, balanced job he’d done in his previous biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates. After granting Bailey full access to his papers, and indeed his life, Roth warned him against any effort at rehabilitation. ‘Just make me interesting,’ he said.

This Bailey has done, in a thorough, balanced, and eminently restrained account which struggles, nevertheless, to hide his affection for the man and his impatience with the man’s many detractors. It is hard, for example, to get any handle at all on Roth’s two marriages. Instead, there is the loyal friend’s shrug of the shoulders: ‘What could poor Philip ever have seen in her?’

Bailey gives equal time to each friend, each relative, each teacher, each publication, each fawning and excoriating critic and each shiksa lover. Each house, each dinner party and birthday surprise, each trip to Europe or the doctor… this 800-page tome gives equal time to all.

It’s Roth himself who keeps us reading. He was a dedicated and endlessly amusing letter-writer, in regular correspondence not just with a wide circle of former teachers and devoted friends, but also with his favourite rivals and all but one of his ex-lovers.

Goliaths didn’t faze him. They just helped him hone his skills. His lifelong wars of words with the pillars of the Jewish establishment served him well in the last decade of the Cold War, when he took on the censors of the Eastern Bloc.

He refused to give up until its greatest silenced writers were household names everywhere. He found time amidst all this to keep a barrage of insults going against anyone who had ever accused him of being a misogynist or a self-hating Jew.

He sometimes thought of his ‘generation of men as the first wave of determined D-day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore to advance triumphantly toward that libidinous Paris we had dreamed of liberating as we inched inland on our bellies, firing into the dark.’

It is impossible to come to the end of this book not loving this man just a little, and forgiving him everything. Even the nightmares.