On the material – Nat Segnit in TLS:

‘Towards the end of his 900-page biography of Philip Roth, Blake Bailey quotes from a letter Roth wrote to his friend Bernard Avishai on the subject of the then-nascent #MeToo movement. “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured”, conceded Roth. “But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is publicized accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.” Ten days after the US publication of Philip Roth: The biography in April 2021, several of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher high school in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape. (In the case of the former student, the incident allegedly took place several years after graduation, when she was twenty-two.) Although Bailey denied the allegations, and no formal charges were made, his US publishers, W. W. Norton, withdrew the book from sale and his agent publicly fired him. His friends from the New York literary scene “all but fell over one another” to disassociate themselves. His long-suffering wife finally filed for divorce.’

(…)

‘Reading Canceled Lives, it is all but impossible not to speculate about what Roth would have made of the material – “Let the repellent in”, as Roth often said, and as Blake Bailey quotes approvingly. The difference, however, between Sabbath’s Theater and Canceled Lives is that the former admits the ugly, the uncomfortable, the radically inappropriate, only to transfigure them by the force of its art. The latter lets the repellent in and, to a great extent, leaves it there, just as it was.’

Read the article here.

Let the repellent in or let the insects in?

Nowadays probably the Roth-biography would not have been canceled anymore.

Follow your instinct, often means, follow your wallet.

Poor Roth, no Nobel Prize and a biographer that turned out to be a lech.

The lech is making a comeback.