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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Damn the Author, but Don't Cancel the Book
On the new, deficient Philip Roth biography and the apparently
sociopathic biographer

The recent revelations

about Philip Roth biographer Blake Bailey have left me mystified beyond
belief. They put me in mind of a Roth novel whose plot flew off its
rails; literature, as Roth observed

back in 1961, is yet again unable to compete with reality.

My relationship with Roth's work has been so intense as to be almost
religious. I approached the Bailey biography with trepidation as I knew
it would test my ideological commitment to art as independent of the
artist's character. Roth, admittedly, tested this commitment by
frequently employing protagonists whose lives mimicked his own and
sometimes even shared his name, often drawing plot lines from incidents
in his own life. I dreaded what I might learn and how it might interfere
with my relationship to the texts that had meant so much to me since I
first read Goodbye, Columbus in high school. (An aside: The tennis scene
at the beginning of the excellent movie version of the book was filmed
at my high school; there is a terrific novel by Gish Jen called Mona in
the Promised Land

in which one of the teenage characters who attends this high school
brags about this fact, as I am now doing.)

During the long wait for Bailey's biography, I took heart-and this
is where things get weird for me-in the fact that Bailey, who
presumably knew every terrible thing Roth had done, still really liked
and admired the guy. This was due to the fact that Bailey seemed
(emphasis on that journalistic weasel-word "seemed") like such a
great guy. I loved his John Cheever biography
. I had
met him once or twice and we kept up a friendly, sometimes lively
relationship on Twitter. I was beyond pissed when I discovered that he
did not bother to credit me with the one moment I felt I belonged in the
book (see below). But his geniality led me to hold my tongue when the
book came out.

Bailey does justice, I think, to Philip Roth the person. Roth emerges as
a complex human being who suffered from mental illness on occasion,
narcissism often, who could be extremely selfish, and gave new meaning
to "sex-obsessed," but who also grew to be a tremendously generous
menschy (and lonely) old man. It would be a great book if its subject
had been, say, Cary (or even Hugh) Grant. In other words, it's well
researched, heavily footnoted celebrity gossip, nothing more. The many
reviewers who have praised it as a great work of literature are, for
their own reasons, selling you a bill of goods. (See under "Ozick,
Cynthia
.")
Roth is not important for how many women he slept with, or how generous
his publisher's advances were, or how much he complained about his
publisher's advertising budgets. Rather, it's because, beginning in
1959, he wrote more great novels than any other English-language writer
during that time and played a crucial role in the coming of age of
postwar American Jewry. About his work and its historical significance,
Bailey has virtually nothing to say. Roth, like Saul Bellow
,
hated being referred to as a Jewish American writer, rather than just an
American writer. This is no doubt a major reason he chose the
ostentatiously goyish Bailey as his biographer. But all Bailey has done
with his prodigious research is provide other, more intellectually
ambitious writers with his spadework and the rest of the world with
fodder for their preconceived notions of "what kind of man" could
have written these works.

Now, on to Bailey: I simply can't get over what a horrible person
Bailey must be when he is so damn good at appearing to be such a nice
guy. Before he was canceled everywhere, Bailey did a number of Zoomed
public appearances for the book. I watched a few of them. Here

is one from CBS News, but another one, with Mary Karr, since taken down,
is by far the most bizarre of them, in retrospect. In it, Bailey is this
likeable, genial fellow who disapproves of Roth's sexist humor and
such, but what is especially weird is how much time their conversation
devotes to the olden days when it was "cool" for professors to sleep
with their students. They both disapprove, of course, but think of what
must have been-or should have been-going through Bailey's mind. He
not only knew what he had done, he knew that the women he had done it to
were talking about it, sending emails to his publisher, and contacting
reporters. (He had even, allegedly, tried to rape a woman in the home of
a New York Times

book reviewer in 2015.) After the news broke, I thought immediately of
Don Draper, living a lie his whole adult life that could come crashing
down any minute. Don, at least, was imaginary. Bailey is real-and
terrifying in the charm he musters in support of his sociopathy.

That said, Bailey's publisher has made a horrible decision in
"pausing" the book's distribution. Yes, its author turned out to
be a terrible person, but that is hardly a reason to literally cancel
his work. Many writers are terrible people. (I am perhaps not so great,
myself.) Readers should be trusted to decide for themselves whether to
buy a book by an accused rapist. I understand not wanting to publish a
book by a bad person in the first place. I would not give a book
contract to anyone who ever worked for Donald Trump or Fox News, for
starters. They should be shunned by all people in every aspect of their
lives. But once you've committed yourself to publishing a work, your
own decision has been made and it becomes your job as a publisher to
protect and defend freedom of expression. If you're feeling guilty,
feel free to give the money to a fund for rape victims. This book does
not, in any way, poison the public discourse; canceling it, however,
does.

It saddens me that the publisher here, Norton, is such an important
independent voice in a business that is all but overrun by conglomerates
that care only for bottom-line calculations. But it turns out that
people at Norton had been alerted long before the book was published to
the rape allegation mentioned above, and all they did was forward the
woman's note to Bailey. Bailey denied it, and that was good enough for
them. That was the wrong decision; also a foolish one, as the woman's
allegation was sure to become public. But again, what's important here
is the defense of freedom of expression at a moment when it is under
siege virtually everywhere. And so we writers must demand that Norton
drop its "pause" on the book even if it ends up putting money in a
rapist's pocket. The future of our democracy depends on such
distinctions.

Alterman's Complaint: Bailey quotes from Bill Clinton's awesomely
eloquent and deeply truthful tribute to Roth on the occasion of his
receiving the National Medal of Arts: "What James Joyce did for
Dublin, what William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Philip Roth
has done for Newark." Goddammit, Bailey: I wrote that-for free, no
less-and I f*&^%ng told you I wrote it. Alas, its authorship will
henceforth be lost to posterity because the SOB would not even put that
in the footnote.

Odds and Ends

Mazel tov to all the winners of this year's Sidney Hillman awards,
especially the Prospect's own David Dayen. These awards will literally
never live down the shame of having given a commentary award to Andrew
Sullivan
,
but this year's choices speak extremely well of the state of
progressive journalism at a moment when it is needed more, perhaps, than
ever in our country's history.

I'm pleased to see that President Biden plans to recognize the obvious
historical fact of the Armenian genocide

that began in 1915 and was conducted by the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire.
Candidate Barack Obama promised he would but failed to follow through.
One key factor, no doubt, is that the professional Jewish community has
since ended its support

for the Turks' campaign of Holocaust denial. AIPAC had been
instrumental in promoting the Turkish lie and, interestingly, has not
said much about Biden's belated recognition of reality.

And speaking of history, here's a documentary about the historian,
jazz critic, and lifelong commie Eric Hobsbawm called The Consolations
of History .

I watched my DVD box set of the musical highlights of Saturday Night
Live from its beginning, and its zenith was the performance by the young
Patti Smith. Has there ever been a better opening line to a rock
song-much less a better line to a first song on a first album-than
"Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"? Here she is on the
show in 1976 , and here, again, 43 years
later in the lobby of the Public Theater, doing her anthemic "People
Have the Power " with
yours truly (among 250 others) as her backup.

Lastly, someone on Twitter asked this week about the best use of history
in a pop song. My nomination? Randy Newman, "Sail Away
."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Donate to The American Prospect

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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