UK Edition
Review
Blake Bailey's terrific Philip Roth biography digs up the true stories behind his novels
This nuanced biography is kinder to the American novelist than he was to himself
Many of the stories in Blake Bailey’s terrific new biography of Philip Roth will seem familiar to fans – we heard them first in his novels. “Yes, I know there’s a difference between characters and authors,” Irving Howe, his one-time champion and eventual critic, wrote. “But I also know that grown-ups should not pretend that it’s quite the difference they tell their students it is.”
This is how Roth’s father described him: “Philip was an all-American boy who loved baseball.” Bright, but not top of the class, he attended the local state university then transferred to the private Bucknell after he ran into a “hapless” former classmate who went there, and showed him a photo of his beautiful “shiksa” (non-Jewish) girlfriend. At Bucknell, Roth’s own transformation began. He wrote for the campus humour magazine and finally had the distance from his parents to pursue his other main interest: women.
People had started to notice the tall, good-looking, funny Jewish guy, whose ambition seemed to feed off his successes, and Bailey’s biography gives you an incredibly detailed sense of the way a writer’s career trades on his personality, but also colonises it. Roth wrote his first novel, Goodbye, Columbus (1960), in about a month while teaching at the University of Chicago. It was a critical hit, but followed by a couple of drifting, dutiful books, which sold decreasingly well and left him wondering what next.
Part of the difficulty came from an unhappy early marriage to Maggie Martinson, an older woman, divorced, with two difficult kids – and Roth kept trying to find a way to write himself out of this relationship. He promised to marry her when she faked a pregnancy test by asking a stranger in a park to piss in a pot for her, the kind of improbable true story that fiction has a hard time making plausible. Later he remarked to Saul Bellow: “I kept being virtuous, and virtuous in ways that were destroying me. And when I let the repellent in, I found that I was alive on my own terms.”
The repellent, in this case, turned into Portnoy’s Complaint, his long comic riff on the masturbation fantasies and sexual hang-ups of a nice Jewish boy who can’t escape his mother-fixation. A few months before publication, Maggie died in a car accident, driving home from a party with another man. Despite their bitter separation, Roth took over the funeral arrangements, though the first person he called was his lawyer to make sure her death meant they were legally divorced. Then the novel came out, and Roth, as Byron once put it, awoke one morning and found himself famous.
After that, his life followed a predictable pattern, more books, more lovers, occasional periods of in-tense medical crisis. When he finally married again, to the actress Claire Bloom, it was at the tail end of a complicated relationship that had started to turn sour. Accounts of breakups tend to make everyone look bad, though in this case it’s not always easy to tell which facts are disputed – the anger ran too deep for facts. Roth obsessed over Bloom’s memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, especially over the charge of misogyny.
Bailey handles these difficult passages with real skill, relying as much as possible on the testimony of friends (many of them sympathetic to Roth), but underneath the surface neutrality of the biographer, you also get the sense of judgments being formed. Roth’s own favourite among his novels was Sabbath’s Theater, in which the tension between the nice Jewish boy and the man who wants to outgrow him is gone: Roth has liberated himself. But because there’s no tension, there isn’t much of a story either, just a litany of unpleasant behaviour. Roth himself said that Mickey was the closest thing to a self-portrait he ever wrote. But that doesn’t seem true either, and Bailey’s biography is much more nuanced – as Roth himself tended to be in his other work.
For one thing, he could be a wonderful friend. When the writer Emmanuel Dongala tried to escape from civil war in the Republic of Congo, Roth sorted out a teaching job for him and visas for most of his family – but the US consulate refused to let his oldest daughter come, as a security against their seeking permanent asylum. So Roth wrote a letter to Clinton, explaining their predicament, and then reacted instantly when a chance encounter gave him an opportunity to put it directly in the president’s hands. The Dongalas were reunited.
There are many stories like this in the book. There are also many stories of a different kind. Roth used to call one of his lovers so that he could masturbate on the phone within her earshot, then hang up. Sometimes he would ring back afterward to say: “How are you?” He made a pass at Bloom’s daughter’s friend and seems to have been surprised by the fuss it caused.
Does any of this change my opinion of the work? Maybe a little. Roth once explained that until The Plot Against America he had never written about his family as they really were – “good, hard-working, responsible” – because it was “boring”. Much of his later reputation rests on the American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain) in which he widened the scope of his fiction to show how the personal is just the plaything of large-scale political and cultural forces you have no control over – “an idea,” Bailey notes, “that served Roth well when assessing his own culpability in respect to certain personal debacles”.
He told one of his first biographers, Ross Miller, that “Maxine Groffsky was ‘key’ to understanding his early years as a writer and a man”. Groffsky was the model for Brenda Patimkin, the nice Jewish girl in Goodbye, Columbus, whom the hero almost asks to marry him; instead, he tries to claim her by persuading her to get a diaphragm. When her mother finds it, they break up. The novel launched his career, but Roth later came to resent its popularity. As Bailey remarks, “for many years he would often be informed, wistfully, by critics and everyday readers alike, that he’d never quite ‘fulfilled the promise’ of his first book”.
Philip Roth is published by Jonathan Cape at £30. To order your copy for £25 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop