Yahoo News Philip Roth The Biography by Blake Bailey review
Philip Roth
(Cape)Philip Roth, who was born in 1933 and died in 2018, admired Flaubert’s maxim for a writer: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work”.
However, as Blake Bailey’s biography illustrates, Roth’s life, like his work, alternated between extremes. He was a witty and sociable libertine who slept with many women; but he was also a monkish recluse who, from the early 1970s onwards, spent large parts of the year in rural New England, extremely disciplined in the time he dedicated to his writing.
Bailey - who has written biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson - was appointed by Roth as his biographer in 2012. He has interviewed a countless number of people, and offers in this hefty tome a fascinating account of a writing career that produced 31 books.
“Roth’s evolution as a writer”, Bailey writes, “was outstanding in its versatility” - he mentions the “deft satire” of Goodbye Columbus, the “outlandish farce” of Portnoy’s Complaint, “the elaborate metafictional artifice of The Counterlife and Operation Shylock”, and the essentially tragic American Trilogy, starting with the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral.
Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, and ‘Philip Roth’ were all characters in his novels that bore some resemblance to their author. But the character he most identified with, according to this biography, was not the erudite and introspective Zuckerman. It was Mickey Sabbath, the vitally shameless and transgressive protagonist of his novel Sabbath’s Theater. Roth’s work zigzagged between his obligation to be a Good Jewish Boy - the child of an upwardly mobile family in the Newark suburb of Weequahic - and his resistance to orthodoxy and inhibition.
This “divided self” - as Martin Amis says of Roth - perhaps explains his harrowing first marriage to Maggie Martinson. They met in 1956, when he moved to Chicago to become a college instructor after his stint in the navy, and married in 1959.
Before their marriage, Maggie faked a pregnancy by persuading a pregnant woman to give her some of her urine, so she could use it in hospital to prove she was pregnant. Roth thought that having a child at 26 would be detrimental to his career as a writer. (Never mind the fact that John Updike, his contemporary, had four children by the time he was 28).
Roth was insisting on his desire for independence in encouraging her to have an abortion; but he also showed his sense of responsibility in offering marriage to appease her: “I had married her because I believed I had seriously wounded her in a horrible abortion”.
Describing the wedding to a friend seven years later, Roth said he was trying to earn “the award for the Nicest Jewish Boy Award of the century”. He wanted to be free and unconstrained by obligation on one side - but the values of his Jewish and American upbringing pushed him in the opposite direction. The fact that Maggie was never pregnant - which he didn’t find out until after they had already separated - made him view his decision to marry her with added cynicism. They divorced in 1963 and she was killed in a car crash in 1968.
His more well-known, later marriage to actress Claire Bloom was also characterised by tension and bitterness. Anna Steiger, Bloom’s daughter, did not get along with Roth. After 14 years of living together - in London, New York, and Connecticut - Roth agreed to marry Bloom in 1990, forlornly hoping this would release him from Anna’s presence. Their marriage lasted five years. Bloom’s unfavourable portrayal of Roth in her memoir, Leaving A Doll’s House, aroused a similar level of negative publicity he had experienced before with Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, but was always perplexed by. Perhaps one of the reasons he felt a close affinity to Kafka was because Roth wanted to be properly understood, but instead often felt maligned and misrepresented. In this vein, Bailey writes that he considered calling his American Trilogy ‘Blindsided’ - actions simply happen to his protagonists, their sense of control over their own lives has been shown to be illusory.
Roth faces the prospect of being cancelled by today’s mandarins. As a college teacher, he slept with many of his students. He was dating women who were in their 20s when he was in his 70s. But Roth was cancelled many times during his life - for his alleged misogyny and anti-Semitism. His novel, The Human Stain, was among other things a meditation on the sanctimonious nature of elite American cultural institutions like universities and the media.
Being censured would have annoyed him, but ultimately what would really trouble him, as it would any ambitious writer, is if people stopped reading his work. Being cancelled doesn’t necessarily consign someone to obscurity. But then again: how many people under 30 still read Bellow and Updike?
The greatest tension is, of course, between his work and his life. In a 1993 BBC documentary, Roth says: “As a writer I’m free and, as it were, unburdened by allegiances that mean a great deal to me in my life”. But in a letter to his friend Jack Miles in October 2014, presented in this biography, a retired 81-year-old Roth says he’s finally happy: “the tyranny of writing and the tyranny of sex - overthrown”. The two things he most associated with freedom were, in the end, presented as tyrannies.
Despite the magnificent verbal fluency of his novels, Roth was never truly unburdened in his writing; he was passionately engaged in the comic and tragic dimensions of life. We might be tempted to see his work as over-strong prescription glasses: texts that magnified his personal experiences to a terrifying sharpness.
Bailey’s utterly engrossing biography, however, shows Roth led a life just as strange and intense as his fictionalised alter egos. That’s why he could never free himself from it - until he stopped writing altogether.
He retired from fiction writing in 2009, and died in 2018; he was free for only 9 years, after over fifty years of conceiving a bravura body of work that, to use a Kafka line favoured by Zuckerman, “bite and sting” his readers.
Philip Roth The Biography by Blake Bailey (Cape, £30)
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