On a bowl of noodles, among other things – James Wolcott in LRB:

“Bailey’s book was the baby for which the literary world was setting the banquet table and beating the tom-toms. Feature articles on Bailey were fulsome, bestsellerdom was practically assured, and the first spate of reviews, apart from a few dissents that turned out to be prescient, went off like confetti cannons. ‘A stunning feat’ (Publishers Weekly). ‘What a story’ (the Atlantic). When Cynthia Ozick’s champagne-popping review christening the biography ‘a narrative masterwork’ was published in the New York Times Book Review on 1 April, Bailey tweeted a humblebraggy ‘it’s all downhill from here,’ or words to that effect. He was righter than he knew. Ozick’s magisterial blessing of Roth and The Biography represented the heights and from there on it was all abyss. ‘Sexual Assault Allegations against Biographer Halt Shipping of His Roth Book’ was the New York Times headline on 21 April. Bailey was accused of grooming female students as an eighth-grade teacher in New Orleans in the 1990s and of two sexual assaults, the second alleged rape reported to have taken place in 2015 at the home of one of the Times’s book critics. Norton halted shipments and cancelled a second print run; the panels, interviews and book festival events instantly vaporised. What began as a parade float was a runaway dumpster fire.”

(…)

“The tremendous, scandalous success of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), that pyrotechnical display of flying ejaculate, stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations that Roth was a self-hating Jew, an enemy of his own people peddling filth. ‘Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favour, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass – I happen also to be a human being!’ Declining the invitation to furnish his ass further, the philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem compared the novel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Zionist author and activist Marie Syrkin pegged it as something out of the Goebbels-Streicher playbook. The film version of Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus came out the same year, introducing Ali MacGraw to a grateful world and raising qualms with what the New York Times called its ‘overstuffed, blintz-shaped caricatures’ of affluent Jewish suburbanites: another item for the ‘Philip Roth is Bad News for Jews’ file, even though the blame largely belonged to the lampoonish visuals by the director, Larry Peerce. These hate-bursts Roth could handle, employing his rhetorical ninja skills. Such Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the mirth of his countrymen and women when Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls, joked on the Tonight Show that she’d love to meet Philip Roth but wouldn’t want to shake his hand. Here was proof that Portnoy’s wank hand had taken on a Frankensteinian life of its own, and its creator found himself a boldface gossip column item. Norman Mailer might crackle before the TV cameras, Gore Vidal might manicure his aperçus and Truman Capote flick his malice, but Roth had no desire to hop on the carousel horse.”

(…)

“Hypervigilance was Roth’s operating mode in art and in life. A pioneer self-quarantiner and social distancer long before it became our common lot, Roth narrowed down his supporting cast to a trustworthy few, each with a defined role. There was, for example, a recurring slot for a younger woman whom he could mentor in mind and body, a prospective princess bride who might help prop him up in his doddering years.”

(…)

“Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in earnest when Atlas moved to New York in 1978, he had served primarily as a rapt audience for Roth’s intimate showmanship as monologist, impressionist and sit-down stand-up comic with a Jewish joke for every occasion. In his audio memoir, Remembering Roth (Audible, £5.99), Atlas claims not to have been bothered by such one-way transmission. It was the price and privilege of being in the presence of a master spieler: ‘Roth did all the talking – does the operagoer at the Met interrupt Pavarotti?’ Atlas accepted his subordinate place as the price of admission into Roth’s confidences. ‘Our friendship mattered more to me than to Roth, how could it not?’ As Atlas conceded in his memoir, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale, he had a knack for getting up the nostrils of his literary idols. First he made the bonehead error of praising Roth’s novel The Anatomy Lesson to Roth, then badmouthing it to a friend, which got back to Roth, because of course it did. Roth had initially encouraged, endorsed and facilitated Atlas’s biography of Saul Bellow, but once Atlas began cataloguing some of Bellow’s more unsavoury amours and making clucking sounds of bourgeois disapproval, he incurred the ire of King Saul. Roth took Bellow’s side, because of course he did. ‘The writers I admired most in the world were conspiring against me,’ Atlas lamented, victim of a classic squeeze play. As a bonus indignity Roth inserted a nasty sideswipe at an Atlas-like critic and biographer in Exit Ghost, in which Roth’s familiar alter ego Nathan Zuckerman reviles ‘the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research’ as ‘just about the lowest of literary rackets’. Roth seemed to find a spot in nearly every novel to insert a minor character based on somebody who had recently vexed him. That is one of the seldom acknowledged privileges of being a novelist.”

(…)

“Some reviewers have objected that Bailey focuses on the menagerie of Roth’s life at the expense of the writing, his discussion of the fiction being somewhat cursory and pat. It’s an impression one might draw on first reading the book, distracted and beguiled by the cameo appearances and one-liners flung out like tennis serves, but a second look shows Bailey did as well as might be expected given the enormity of the corpus. When a novelist produces as many touted masterpieces and near masterpieces as Roth did, the biographer risks getting stuck leading a glorified museum tour, and Bailey does his best to keep the line moving. So much stellar criticism was expended on Roth’s work when it was hot off the grill – by, among others, Alfred Kazin, Marvin Mudrick, Frank Kermode, Leslie A. Fiedler, Stanley Crouch and Vivian Gornick (how she has been vindicated! Her 1976 Village Voice essay on Roth and company, ‘Why Do These Men Hate Women?,’ was a warning siren) – that fresh illuminations would be tough to unlock. It’s not as if literary criticism is pining for another consideration of the moral gravitas of The Ghost Writer(whose genesis Bailey discusses extensively) or a finely executed rehash of the peekaboo identity gambits in Operation Shylock, and if I never have to entertain another orchestral tune-up for American Pastoral or see the name of its protagonist, ‘Swede’ Levov, again, I will consider life a holiday. The strengths and limitations of Roth’s fiction are hardly concealed behind dense foliage. Once he perfected his voice as a writer, its vibratory tension and apprehensive grip, he was able to arm each novel with a cruciality that either hooked the reader or didn’t, but couldn’t be dismissed as a vanity mirror.”

(…)

“Not since Lenny Bruce had there been such a virtuoso desperado, but how far could Roth ride his comic daimon without it becoming a shtick? After the overblown burlesques of the Watergate satire Our Gang and the Kafkaesque fabulism of The Breastand his baseball opus The Great American Novel (replete with ethnic and racial slurs that wouldn’t fly today, as Bailey notes), Roth appeared in danger of being pegged as a novelty act – a high velocity show-off. Irving Howe’s ex cathedra denunciation ‘Philip Roth Reconsidered’ (Commentary, 1972), which tried to stuff Roth back into his jack-in-a-box before he trespassed again (rereading Portnoy’s Complaint had laid bare its claptrap construction and jejune antics, Our Gang was ‘flaccid’ etc), shook and infuriated Roth. He would later retaliate in The Anatomy Lesson, going after Howe’s Jewish-tenement nostalgia with a wicked spitball, but in the short term he stewed, and a stewing Philip Roth was a menace to propriety. Two years after Howe’s attack, Roth would unleash the maelstrom of My Life as a Man, an exorcism of his first cursed marriage that is to my mind Roth’s supreme yawp of Roth Man in existential extremis. (The subsequent Sabbath’s Theatre seems an overwrought, over-thunk Tarzan yell by comparison, though I concede this is a minority opinion.)”

(…)

“‘Something – many things – happened to Roth from the late 1980s and after,’ Mark Shechner, one of the keenest Rothphiles, noted, ‘and his books throughout the 1990s record, with seismographic precision, a collapse of morale. We need only reflect on what we do know – the death of his father, the dissolution of his marriage to Claire Bloom and his brief institutionalisation afterwards, his harrowing episode with the painkiller Halcion, his cardiac surgery – and wonder how he survived with his creative faculties intact.’ He did survive. As Pauline Kael once said of Jean Cocteau, these wiry guys are tougher than they look. At any point after, oh, The Plot against America (2004), a waking, walking nightmare of democracy undone that gained renewed relevance after the election of Trump, Roth might have rung off for good, having all the money he needed and nothing left to prove, but a sense of mortality perched on his shoulder and cawed forth Everyman, Exit Ghost, Indignation, The Humbling and Nemesis. No American writer since Poe or Melville leaned into death longer, harder and more unflinchingly than Roth (the last paragraph of Everyman slams like a lid), refusing to avert his stare from the empty grave awaiting his arrival and seek solace in the flimsy hope of an afterlife or a reincarnative reboot (as Mailer did). It doesn’t matter that these novels weren’t up to the calibre of his strongest work, though none of them was a bowl of noodles.”

(…)

“One of the crisper exchanges in The Biography occurs when Roth offers to help Chelsea Clinton with any papers she might write about his work, and Hillary shoots back: ‘She doesn’t need any help.’ Hillary really should have been president.”

(…)

“No longer handcuffed to a writing regime, Roth was able to live like any other illustrious retiree. As the beloved paragon of a literary ethos on its last legs, having outlived Bellow, Mailer, Sontag and that fink-weasel Updike (whose review of Operation Shylock was said to have caused Roth a nervous breakdown), he found himself the beneficiary of a valedictory send-off. His annus mirabilis was 2013. France awarded him the Légion d’Honneur; he was the subject of a doting documentary, Philip Roth: Unmasked; and for his eightieth birthday he was given an all-star tribute in Newark where Jonathan Lethem, Edna O’Brien and Hermione Lee, among others, held his genius up to the jewelled light with a series appreciation later collected in Philip Roth at Eighty: A Celebration (a Library of America special publication). A year later, comity breaking out all over, Roth was offered and accepted an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary, which the Forward headlined: ‘philip roth, onceoutcast, joins jewish fold with jewish theological seminary honour’. As Roth said to a friend: ‘All that’s missing now is the Gloria Steinem Award from the National Organisation for Women and the cherished Kakutani Prize.’ The Kakutani Prize consists of a clunk on the head, so he was better off without it. It was the Nobel he craved, and if Leaving a Doll’s House did capsize his chances, perhaps Bloom did him an unwitting favour. Receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature may have been the best thing that never happened to him, preventing his work from becoming overly sanctified, platitudinised, boringly universalised. No danger of that now, as the bonfires blaze.”

(…)

“As for his disgraced Boswell, Blake Bailey, his life, career, reputation and name have been rat-holed at record speed. He and his story will serve as a case study for some future literary autopsist. I opposed the campaign to cancel further printings of Philip Roth: The Biography on the democratic principle that if I was able to buy and read the book, which has substantial merits despite its disfigurement, it’s only fair that everybody else is; that’s now moot, at least in the US. Norton’s decision to permanently deep-six The Biography and make a sizeable donation to sexual abuse organisations was declared a victory by most commentators and decried by a smaller number as Woke Capitalism caving to the social justice mob, a culture clash that will keep the hearties of the opinion pages, Twitterverse and Substack Nation busy sharpening their certitudes for the next volley of javelin throws.”

Read the review here.

Substantial merits, that’s a polite death sentence.

After having read this amusing, funny, sharp essay my desire to read to read the biography has been further minimized (although I do think that Norton’s decision was mainly cowardly damage control) but interestingly enough my longing to go back to Roth’s work is lukewarm at best.

Maybe I’ll read ‘My Life as a Man’.

“When She was Good,” made a better impression on me when I read it, I must have been 18, than ‘dun-coloured, slow-drip realism,’ but Wolcott’s genius is that he manages to praise and kill in 6000 words both the biographer and his subject.