A narrative path to humanity
Portsmouth's literary biographer Blake Bailey wrote about Philip Roth, getting reviews all over the world. Here's ours.
Anyone who ponders the daunting task of writing a biography — or reading one that weighs in at nearly 900 pages, for that matter — might well examine Steven Millhauser’s joyously poetic and satiric first novel “Edwin Mullhouse” as a warm-up. In a very funny and incisive take on the knotty relationship between biographer and subject, the frustrations and ecstasies, the Dr. Strangelove battles between embellishment and evisceration, Millhauser makes it clear that it’s a near impossible minuet. In “Philip Roth,” Blake Bailey performs the task of the biographer so gracefully that it’s hard to know the dancer from the dance.
All biographies of important writers are initially bildungsromans, portraits of artists in transformation. But the great biography, although always anchored in fact, must transform itself into a work of art in which the characters and their daily lives become as complex and compelling as those in an unforgettable novel. Bernard Malamud, one of Roth’s contemporaries, wrote that all biography is ultimately fiction. Malamud was right, of course, in suggesting that the biographer must take the often-intractable substance of mundane fact and shape it into a story that has dramatic propulsion and meaning. It’s easy enough to step from Malamud’s pronouncement to Didion’s a few years later — “Writers are always selling somebody out.” And that’s where most biographers find themselves: caught between hagiography and demonization. Great biographers find a narrative path to their subjects’ inspiring and frightening humanity.
Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth is that rare sort of book, meticulous without sacrificing dramatic energy, endlessly entertaining without ever surrendering critical integrity, candid without forfeiting compassion. Nearly a decade ago, Bailey, who lives in Portsmouth, was granted access to all of Roth’s papers and letters, no caveats attached in regard to whom the biographer interviewed or what his conclusions should be about the writer’s work or life. There’s a good reason the subtitle of this long-awaited book is “The Biography” rather than “A Biography.” (Disclosure: Bailey and I worked together for three years at Old Dominion University, teaching graduate-level nonfiction writing, while he was a visiting fellow.)
Roth (1933-2018) is one of the most important writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, termed by the BBC “arguably the best writer not to have received the Nobel Prize since Tolstoy.” Too comic and too explicitly sexual for the Scandinavian intellectuals, perhaps. But Roth received many honors — a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for “American Pastoral,” three PEN/Faulkner Awards, two National Book Awards, the International Booker Prize, and others.
Bailey puts his career into personal and historical perspective. Till now, the story of Roth’s life has come from his personal accounts — “Patrimony” and “The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography” — and the unsympathetic story told by Claire Bloom in “Leaving a Doll’s House.” There’s also another biography of Roth, out in March, by Ira Nadel from Oxford University Press. But Bailey’s is the highly anticipated volume, given that he
is renowned for his biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson; a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize, among other honors.
A lesser biographer would have made of Roth’s life a blizzard of salacious details — there are plenty to recount (most of the pseudonyms in the biography are reserved for Roth’s many lovers). Instead, with a persuasive critical insight and what can only be called a novelistic sense of empathy, Bailey gives us the picture of a memorable life, a penetrating look into the troubled genius that was Philip Roth, rising up from a middle-class, Jewish background in Newark, New Jersey, to the pantheon of American and world literature.
Some biographies are simply exercises in self-fulfilling prophecies — the biographer, hogtied to a psychological platitude (Hemingway hated women because his mother kept him in dresses too long or Twain, the split personality, couldn’t decide between being a Victorian gentleman or a bohemian outlaw), does the inevitable tailoring job. Not so with Bailey. He presents Roth’s life and books with grace and unflinching honesty, connecting the man to the work in a way that makes each more compelling as the story proceeds. In an epigraph, Bailey cites Roth’s admonition to him at the beginning of the biographical enterprise: “I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting.” Bailey does that for both Roth and his novels. For instance, in speaking about Roth’s later work, Bailey sums up the contradictions succinctly — “Roth’s great theme going back to ‘Goodbye, Columbus’: the I against the They, a longing to live on one’s own terms, free of the smothering community, amid, too, an abiding wistfulness to belong — to be a good son, a mensch, a libertine, a nihilist — all of the above.”
He tracks the epic cast of
Roth’s lovers, and a few wives as well (the dysfunctional first
marriage Roth claimed to have been conned into in the early 1960s by Maggie Martinson and the disastrous second marriage to actor Claire Bloom that imploded after 18 years, in 1995). He shows how many of them found their way into the autobiographical novels — from “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint” to “My Life as a Man” and “When She Was Good.”
Acerbic and often brutal in his responses to critics in the press or in life, Roth was also often immensely generous, helping writers and acquaintances in financial need. In addition, he could be a loving friend, visiting the sick and the dying. He was a contradiction, though — faithful and unfaithful, loving and self-consumed, hidden from the world and caught in its mael
strom. Bailey examines Roth’s books, as he does the facts of his life, with critical care, not as objects of gossip. Roth used family, friends, enemies, lovers and wives in his eclectic work. He was fond of quoting the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
Roth wrote 31 books, ranging from somber realism and deft satire to a Kafkaesque surrealism and farcical clowning as well as the self-reflexive Zuckerman sequence and the tragedies of his late American Trilogy — “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist,” and “The Human Stain.” As much as Roth has at times been pigeonholed as a writer of sexual slapstick because of “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “The Breast,” more than any other American writer of the past 50 years, his achievement in terms of voice and genre has shown a breathtaking range — as Jonathan Lethem pointed out, encompassing and transcending “modes of historical fiction, metafiction, memoir, maximalist, minimalist, picaresque, counterfactual, etcetera.”
At the celebration for Roth’s 80th birthday, Edna O’Brien remarked, after a few anecdotes, “So, friends, this is the tip of the iceberg, I can only give you a glimmer of the complexity of the man that is Philip Roth, feared and revered, plagiarized, envied, hermit and jester, lover and hater, by his own admission foolish and yet fiercely formidable, too adorable for words, a true friend and undoubtedly one of Yeats’s Olympians.” Roth once joked with Bailey that a good title for the book could have been “The Terrible Ambiguity of the I — The Life and Work of Philip Roth.” Bailey gives us that wonderful ambiguity. This book is not the tip of the iceberg but the iceberg itself.
In “Philip Roth: The Biography,” Blake Bailey provides ample evidence of his understanding of modern American literature and the frailties and achievements of an artist like Roth. The biography of a writer should do one thing above all else: It should send us back to the books. Bailey’s will send readers back to this brilliant, troubled, eclectic creator of Portnoy and Zuckerman and Levov and maybe his greatest character of all — Philip Roth.
Michael Pearson, after a career of three decades teaching creative writing at ODU, is a freelance writer. He lives on the Eastern Shore.