A Biography and Roth's Most Experimental Work to Date

The first half of 2021 saw the publication of two biographies of roth, each named for its subject. Oxford University Press published Ira Nadel's Philip Roth: A Counterlife in early March, and W. W. Norton released Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey about a month later. These two books' lives, if they can be called that, have been eventful in ways that broach issues of fact, fiction, authorship, perceived truth, and the host of other issues that animate much of Roth's own work. Nadel, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, has been publishing on Roth for ten years, drawing the litigious attention of Roth himself and as a result losing access to much archived material and gaining the hostility of the estate (Bailey 754-55).¹ Bailey, however, worked at Roth's behest and under his direction, pleasing his subject enough to have earned the bequeathal of the prized Eames chair. Accusations of sexual misconduct, of degrees ranging from so-called grooming to forced sexual encounters, beset Bailey shortly after the book's publication and accompanying glowing reviews, profiles, and notices in the New York Times and elsewhere. Norton subsequently dropped the title from its catalog, although as of September 2021, new copies remain available from many retailers. As in many of Roth's works, stories obscure demarcations of author and subject, truth and falsehood, text and life, in ways that threaten to overtake the reader.

Even to confine attention to the texts themselves presents some difficulty in that the biographers proffer vastly different notions of the task of biography. Nadel describes his book as "an effort to explore the 'in-there' and penetrate the fortress of Roth's protective self, to peer over the rampart to see the multifaceted person, and to uncover some of the secrets" (xv). The epigraph, spoken by Philip Roth "to his biographer," is the closest Bailey's work comes to stating its aims (and, probably inadvertently, its problems): "I don't want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting." Where Nadel conceives of the biography as an attempt to understand its subject's true, rather than professed, thoughts, Bailey has, before the beginning of the main text, abdicated control to Roth and eschewed any concern other than making him appear interesting, a subjective and vague term. (That the command is to make him interesting, rather than present him as he was or, quoting Roth's own motto, to let the repellent in, seems significant.)

Nonetheless, the same evaluative criteria, based on a personal sense of what constitutes a good biography, will be applied to both books. A biography ought to portray the events of its subject's life with understanding without either defending him or condemning him, which necessitates the establishment of critical distance from the subject. The biographer ought to act the sideman, allowing the subject to occupy the attention of the reader; anything that calls attention to the biographer rather than the material under consideration is inappropriate. A rigorous epistemology must be in place, demanding proof at every turn and excluding from the text supposition, conjecture, assumption, false equivalency, and all other manner of faulty thinking. A literary biography should also include information of interest to literary artists and researchers alike: comparisons of drafts, remarks on the subject's working process, accounts of the subject's reading, details about literary influences, and so on.

Philip Roth poses a daunting challenge to biographers. Nearly all his published works were autobiographical to some extent, yet disparities between writer and written stymie any attempt to draw neat equivalences. He continually experimented with authorship, truth, deception, attribution, memory, representation, and identity, confounding most attempts to analyze. Roth was also keenly invested in fostering a certain perception of himself by the public, meaning that few, if any, of his remarks, even in private, can be taken as products of some genuine, unperformed...