Philip Roth’s (1933 – 2018) novels are highly autobiographical. His ex-wives and former girlfriends also wrote books about the American author. As an interested reader, you think you know all there is to know before you start reading the recently published biography. Yet Philip Roth, the biography is an astonishing, at times even bewildering pageturner. This is not only due to the controversial subject, but also to the talent of the biographer. Once Blake Bailey gets going, he writes as if he were holding Philip Roth’s sharp pen in his own hands.
This life story runs to about a thousand pages but captivates from start to finish. After reading the biography, you want to reread the novels immediately through brighter glasses. Bailey does not describe a saint’s life; his biography is a well-documented and credible portrait of a writer who dedicated his life largely to the service of literature. The biography takes ample time for the lead-up to Roth’s literary breakthrough. This gives a better understanding of why Roth wrote as he did, but also why his relationship with women was often so complicated.
Thinking about successful writers, you tend to forget that they spent years, sometimes decades, searching for their own voice. While Roth toiled, not earning a penny from his work, his wife Maggie Martinson took out her frustrations on him. He had married this woman, who had been married before and had left her two children behind, in 1959. It is a miracle that Roth was able to write at all during this long period of constant arguments about trivial matters. Not only did Maggie drive him mad on a daily basis, it turned out that she had lured him into the marriage under false pretences. She had given a pregnant woman money in exchange for some urine samples so that, when tested positive, she could prove that she was expecting Roth’s child.
It is amazing that the writer allowed himself to be held hostage for so long in this suffocating marriage. Bailey explains that Roth had been given a great sense of responsibility by his parents. According to the biographer, a sense of honour also played a role: a man should at least be able to keep his own family under control. Roth regularly fantasised about killing his wife. It turned out not to be necessary; in 1968 she died in an accident. When Roth took a taxi to the mortuary to identify her body, the driver asked, ‘Are you celebrating something? You’ve been whistling the whole journey!’
When this unpleasant period was over, his friends saw him flourish again. In company, Philip Roth was a pacesetter, telling anecdotes and jokes with the timing of a stand-up comedian. A fellow writer gave him the golden advice: ‘Just start writing the way you tell us those beautiful stories’.
From that moment he changed his writing course radically. Roth let go of the self-imposed requirement that he should work in a tough and thoughtful manner. His subject remained the same: growing up in a Jewish family in Newark. But the new tone gave his music a totally different nature: Alexander Portnoy’s narrative voice is brutal, shameless, but above all witty.
The novel was so successful that ‘Portnoy’ long outstripped Roth’s other work. Roth had become controversial, but progressive Americans considered him a hero. His sudden popularity made him welcome even in the highest circles. His entertaining presence did the rest. Women adored him and a chain of affairs followed. His girlfriends were certainly not off the street, even Jackie Kennedy invited him to her flat after she was widowed.
For Roth, authorship always came first. In his eyes, fiction towered over other art forms. He was never happy with film adaptations of his work, if he bothered to look at them at all.
Not all of his books were well received. Portnoy’s Complaint may have been a smash hit, but reactions to the titles that followed were sparse and his new work sold poorly. Roth, however, refused to conform to literary fashion and only wrote the books he felt he had to write. In The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001), sex as a motive force still plays a role, but now embedded in adult life with all its complications. Roth was not only a child of his time in his craving for freedom and unrestraint, but also in the male-female relationships in his work.
Roth owes his current status largely to the American novels he wrote during the Indian Summer of his life. American Pastoral (1997) deals with the social unrest at the time of the Vietnam War. The Human Stain (2000) examines the increasing sensitivity to expressions of racism. In The Plot Against America, Roth develops the scenario that in 1936 not Franklin D. Roosevelt would have been elected president, but Charles Lindbergh (an ex-flyer), who had Nazi sympathies. When Donald Trump won the election, this book became a bestseller again. In his last novel, too, Roth had foresight. Nemesis (2010) describes the frightening start of a polio epidemic. These books, in which Roth illuminates America from various angles and contrasts its beauty, resilience, optimism and idealism with its absurdity, perversity, vindictiveness and repugnance, are still surprisingly topical.
In 2012, Roth decided to stop writing because his deteriorating health no longer allowed it. Next to his computer, he pasted the text: ‘The battle is over’.
In the time that remained, he talked a lot with his chosen biographer Blake Bailey. Roth’s regularly quoted narrative voice makes this lively book even tastier, more personal and funnier. Bailey, however, remained on his guard, checking all facts, gossip and accusations with those still living and otherwise with their next of kin. It is a pity that several women did not give perrmission to be mentioned by their real names, even though they played an important role in Roth’s life.
At the end of his back pain tormented life, Roth realised that his work oriented lifestyle meant that his last days would be lonely. As he grew older, he was better able to be friendly with women. Friends said that Roth was much more vulnerable in private than how he presented himself to the outside world.
The same can be said about his religious views. Roth had grown up in a family that participated in Jewish traditions, but no longer wholeheartedly. The realisation that his family had escaped the horrors of the Nazis further alienated the writer from tradition and faith. In public, Roth called himself a proud and seemingly unquestioning atheist. But friend Jack Miles confided that in happy moments, but also in periods of illness, he sometimes prayed.
Sooner or later, people around Roth recognised themselves in one of the characters in his novels. This strengthened their suspicion that Roth regarded them mainly as work material. Roth himself went nuts at the thought of someone saying something untrue about him. If a journalist asked him to check the text after an interview, he would rewrite the entire conversation. After their divorce, actress Claire Bloom, his second wife, wrote Leaving a Doll’s House (1996) in which she portrayed her ex-husband as a misogynistic narcissist. In public, Roth reacted light-heartedly to the book, but intimates said that the one-sided accusations of the embittered actress actually ruined the rest of his life. Many people believed Bloom, and her memoirs did Roth’s reputation no favours.
In 2016, Philip Roth had a chance to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, the most important literary prize went to Bob Dylan. When journalists called Roth for a reaction, the writer said with unmistakable humour: ‘It’s fine, but next time let (folk singers) Peter, Paul & Mary win it’.
The majority of Roth’s estate went to the Newark Public Library. The library where Roth had learned to love books as a child was threatened with closure. In addition to millions of dollars, Roth donated his four thousand books, his writing tables and his reading chairs to the library.
Even with a thousand pages, Bailey’s biography is not complete. Roth’s oeuvre, for example, is sparsely represented. One of the many photos in the book shows Roth in what appears to be an animated conversation with writer and essayist Zadie Smith (1975). How well did she know Roth and what did she think of him? Worldwide, views on how men and women should interact have changed quite a bit, and Smith’s opinion matters. Bailey could have said more about this.
Zadie Smith, for example, pointed to the power of his work in The New Yorker after Roth’s death in 2018: ‘Roth taught me that literature is not a moral beauty contest. He stayed away from political issues but wrote about intimate, uncomfortable truths.’ Smith was aware of the author’s blind spots and possible prejudices. But she added: ‘Unlike many writers, he did not aspire to perfect vision. He knew that to be an impossibility.’
Hannah Ahrendt’s (1904 – 1975) name is mentioned a few times; Bailey describes Roth’s admiration for the German-American Jewish philosopher and describes that Roth and Ahrendt are buried near each other in the cemetery of Bard College. Hannah Arendt, who wrote about ‘the banality of evil’ on the occasion of the Adolph Eichmann trial, was, like Roth, accused of Jewish self-hatred. Bailey does not tell that the two corresponded on a regular basis and visited each other at least once. For this we have to turn to Ira Nadel, who was rejected by Roth, but who later this year will publish the biography Philip Roth, A Counterlife.
Blake Bailey wrote a breathtaking, revealing, entertaining and sometimes shocking biography, but the final word has not yet been said about Roth and the significance of his work. Fortunately not.
Blake Bailey: Philip Roth, The Biography, April 2021, 912 pages, Vintage Publishing