Somehow, Philip Roth keeps making news. Or rather, his biographer does. There is a saying in baseball that if the umpire is the star of the game, something has gone very wrong. The biographer’s corollary of that rule was on display this week, as rapturous reviews of Blake Bailey’s enormous new Roth biography gave way to a cavalcade of revelations of sexual harassment and grooming underage students for later sexual exploitation while he was an elementary school teacher.
Most disturbing of all, an accusation of rape that was reported to Bailey’s publisher W.W. Norton, only to be forwarded on to the biographer himself rather than properly investigated. Bailey has denied the accusations of assault. He has a wife and two daughters.
The substance of the testimonials that have come to light are truly terrible, and deserving of the utmost opprobrium. Bailey has much to answer for, and while no charges have been brought the absence of prosecution does not entail moral exoneration. In telling the story of Roth’s life, Bailey has become a witness and agent in the undoing of his own. If he hopes to stay in the writing game, Bailey has much to answer for.
Some have drawn a loop between Roth’s legendary womanizing, the fashion in which that behavior and attitude worked its way into his fiction, and his biographers sins. In this reading, some definition of ‘toxic masculinity’ is the tie that binds, uniting Bailey, Roth, and the books they wrote in a conspiracy of masculine aggression.
I think this is exactly the wrong approach: it makes Bailey’s alleged offenses feel inevitable and structural rather than the products of choice. It also collapses distinctions precisely when they should be rigorously insisted on. Roth could be cruel, but he was never violent. If lusting after too many people and hurting and being hurt by them was a sin, who among us would be entirely innocent?
There is no simple story to tell about Roth and women. He could be cold and warm, supportive and belittling, gracious and selfish. He was attracted to women whose minds he respected and those he didn’t. He sometimes treated them abominably and sometimes honorably. Are you or I any different? His marriages were disasters, but even an anti-Roth partisan would allow that the blame cascaded in several directions. Every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way. To subsume all of this as “misogyny,” and to erase the literary characters who emerged from this life, is to be a poor reader. Or one with an already made up mind. As the critic Claudia Roth Pierpont (no relation) declaimed on the occasion of Roth’s eightieth birthday, “there are no generalizations to be made about Roth’s women, any more than about his men.” Former lovers and girlfriends thronged his death bed.
The ability to make up one’s mind is exactly why one should be able to condemn Baily while also insisting that the biography be available to read. Unfortunately, in a remarkable turn of events, W.W. Norton has decided to halt distribution and promotion of the biography. Removing books from circulation is rarely the right move, and punishing this tremendous achievement for the sins of its author makes no sense as a matter of justice or policy. It encourages us to see ideas as somehow contaminated, and edits out the complex fact that the great mercy of art is that like a child it eventually totters away from its maker and seeks its own course in the world.
We read books not because we approve of the women and men who write them but because we’d be worse without them: no favors for the authors, only for ourselves as readers. Not for the name on the cover, but the worth of what is between the covers. One of Roth’s consistent maxims over more than a half century of writing fiction every day was “let the repellent in,” not to excuse or justify it but because as he wrote “there’s a knowledge that the writing produces that is not your knowledge. It’s produced by the demands of the narrative.”
We don’t have enough masterpieces, of fiction or non-fiction, of men or women, to cavalierly wish the troubled ones we do have out of existence.
Philip Roth wrote many of them. Blake Bailey’s biography of him is another one, just as much as it was last week. Even if the repellent is newly visible alongside it.
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