Sacked, sued, accused of sexual abuse: the tortuous history of Philip Roth and his biographers

The first major biographical work on Philip Roth portrayed one of America’s greatest novelists as a borderline-sociopathic philanderer. It was hardly an impartial book but it certainly had a claim to insider knowledge. The author was Roth’s estranged wife, the actress Claire Bloom.

The publication of Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House in 1996 galvanised Roth into launching a search for an official biographer: somebody who would give readers the facts of Roth’s life from the horse’s mouth rather than that of his former stablemate.

As Roth later explained, if he had failed to appoint an official biographer there was a danger that somebody else would come along and fill the vacuum, writing a biography without consulting him and taking Bloom’s “serious and libelous distortions of reality and her numerous significant omissions as a starting point”. Late in his life he recalled: “I thought: ‘Someone’s gotta correct this story, or this is gonna be the story.’ And if I had dropped dead that year, that would have been the story.”

Which begs the question: why, if Roth was so desperate to set the record straight in 1996, have we had to wait until April 2021 for the publication of Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography - nearly three years after Roth’s death? The answer lies in a tangle of legal wrangles and fallings-out between Roth and his prospective biographers, as a result of his overbearing attempts to control the narrative of his life story.

And the saga of the Life of Roth is far from over: just as the biography has broken the surface after a quarter of a century’s effort to see the light of day, it looks like it’s going to be sucked back into the depths. Blake Bailey’s book received glowing reviews when it was published earlier this month - Cynthia Ozick, the 93-year-old doyenne of American letters, called it a “narrative masterwork” - and it shot on to the New York Times bestseller list; but less than a month later it is no longer possible to buy a copy in the US, either as a physical book or an e-book.

Before Blake Bailey made his reputation as an outstanding literary biographer with his lives of Richard Yates and John Cheever, he was a high-school teacher, and in the past fortnight he has been publicly accused of grooming and assaulting female pupils; at least one has accused him of rape.

Bailey denies any wrongdoing, but he has been dropped by his literary agent and by his publisher, WW Norton & Co, which is destroying unsold copies of his book. (A spokesperson for the book’s UK publisher, Jonathan Cape, has said that there are currently no plans to withdraw the book here but the company is “assessing the situation closely”.)

It is a horrible story, but it has its comic aspect. One can almost imagine the ghost of Roth haunting people who read Bloom’s book 25 years ago, whispering in their ears and telling them to head to the bookstore to get his side of the story at last, only for them to return home empty-handed.

Of course, this is hardly a unique instance of the publication of a literary biography being stymied: I recommend Ian Hamilton’s book In Search of JD Salinger, an account of his doomed attempt to write the life of another US literary lion, to see how complicated a business biography can be. But even so, the Roth biography seems unusually ill-starred.

But perhaps it was inevitable from the moment Roth conceived the idea of a biography. Here was a man who was determined, in his own phrase, to “let the repellent in” when he was writing fiction; to draw on his own worst excesses when he was creating his characters and to dare the reader to take an interest in, and even sympathise with, appalling people unapologetically presented. At the same time he didn’t want his own faults to be unapologetically presented; he needed a biographer who would offer the reader all the mitigating circumstances.

These uncomplementary impulses - his compulsion to prize (and even cultivate) his own failings as the chief inspiration for his fiction, and his need not to be defined by them in the eyes of posterity - meant that the publication of his biography was never going to be a smooth process.

One of the reasons the biography has been so eagerly awaited is that Roth has drawn so heavily on himself for his characters; to the extent that Martin Amis once begged him in a review to remember that “there are … people in the world other than middle-class Jewish Professors of English Literature” (as Roth then was). Many readers are keen to know just how far the parallels stretch between Roth and Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist who is a key character in several of his books. Some of the novels even feature a character called Philip Roth; one (Operation Shylock) has two Philip Roths. You can see why so many readers over the years have been keen to ask: Will the real Philip Roth please stand up?

Roth did address his own life directly in his 1988 book The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, but the ambiguity suggested by the subtitle was borne out by some of the contradictions of the text, which included extracts from correspondence between Roth and the fictional Zuckerman, among other metafictional tricks.

Certainly the version of Roth presented in that book did not prepare readers for the figure who emerged from Claire Bloom’s book in 1996. In some ways he seemed to have undersold himself in The Facts, presenting little evidence of the charming, generous side to his character that Bloom revealed she had fallen in love with. But the surly, selfish Roth of The Facts also failed to represent Roth at his worst, if Bloom’s account of his almost demented cruelty is to be believed.

Roth seems to have been insanely jealous of Bloom’s close relationship with her teenage daughter Anna (from her previous marriage to the Hollywood actor Rod Steiger); he would complain about Bloom coming to bed “still warm from snuggling Anna’s body” as if the girl were a rival lover. Meanwhile he aggressively pursued one of Anna’s friends for a sexual relationship, and after she turned him down he would be gratuitously rude to her whenever he encountered her.

When Anna was 18 he made Bloom choose between them, resulting in Anna being obliged to move out. Bloom only realised how badly she was being manipulated when she read the manuscript of one of his novels in which the hero, Philip, mocks the stupidity of his dull wife, Claire, while indulging in a series of intricately described sexual escapades with nubile women in the marital home. After Bloom came to her senses and left him, Roth repeatedly demanded that she repay every penny he had ever spent on her; at one point he claimed to be seeking a divorce settlement of $62 billion.

At first Roth intended to mount his own written defence, writing a 300-page book entitled Notes for My Biographer, in which he examined and rebutted every one of the accusations Bloom had made against him. He spent $85,000 to have a law firm make sure the book was legally watertight, but in the event decided not to publish it after friends advised him it would be received as a petty act of bullying.

And so he hit on the idea of finding a biographer instead: somebody who would present Roth’s version of what went on in the marriage in the course of a larger narrative, thus escaping the charge of targeting a mean-spirited attack at Bloom. And who better to write a biography that Roth had control over than his best friend, Ross Miller?

Well, almost anybody, it turned out. Miller - a literature professor, and the nephew of Arthur Miller - had once prevented a depressed Roth from throwing himself off a tall building in Chicago; Miller also owed him a good deal because, as Bailey’s biography puts it, “Roth had given his friend shelter in his studio when Miller was ‘emboldened’ by Roth’s example to leave his own wife”. Roth didn’t think much of his writing style - he said privately that Miller’s prose was “no jeweled and nuanced thing” - but thought he could be assured of having Miller onside.

However, when Miller submitted a proposal for the biography to Roth’s agent, Andrew Wylie, Roth was furious with the focus on his sex life - “as though he were writing my biography for serialisation in Hustler magazine”, he fumed. At one point Miller described the priapic Roth as “living by his dick” in the 1960s, and, according to Bailey, Roth denounced Miller in Wylie’s office, angrily pointing out that “his dick hadn’t written more than 20 books”.

The urgent scheme to launch a counter-attack on Bloom’s book had come to nothing. Nevertheless a few years later, Roth did consent to allow Miller to resume work on the biography; however, they fell out again after Miller became editor of the Library of America edition of Roth’s novels and Roth complained that he was doing a sloppy job.

Miller, in Bailey’s words, went rogue. “This man is not your friend,” Roth’s cousin Florence told him after Miller had described Roth as “predatory” and “misogynist” in the course of interviewing her. Another interviewee reported that Miller had spent most of their session ranting about Roth instead of asking questions. Roth noted in his journal: “I conclude from this that Ross is in a hostilely rivalrous relationship with me … because of his work for Volume Three of the LOA series being criticized and rejected by me.”

Eventually he came to an agreement with Miller to terminate the project, and Miller gave him the recordings of all the interviews he had carried out. Roth was shocked by the evidence of Miller’s “mean, insatiably vilifying spirit” and wrote another never-published little volume about the whole affair, called Notes on a Slander-Monger. “I don’t even think Gitta Sereny’s moral assessment of Albert Speer is as bleak as Ross’s of me,” he said.

One reason Roth endured this difficult relationship for so long was the lack of a suitable alternative biographer. Many people were interested but did not want the job on Roth’s terms: for example, the Stanford academic Steven Zipperstein, who decided that he would prefer to write an unauthorised biography.

The eminent British biographer Dame Hermione Lee, an old friend of Roth’s, did agree to take on the job at one point, but had so many other commitments that Roth became impatient. The journalist Mark Oppenheimer, in a recent article in The New York Times, also quotes “a writer close to Roth” as saying that Dame Hermione’s political views eventually counted against her: “He did not want to be remembered throughout posterity as a person who didn’t like women. And he thought that that was going to happen if he had a feminist biographer.”

Another favoured candidate was his old friend Judith Thurman, whom he referred to for decades as “my biographer-to-be”. Thurman, however, was aware that Roth would have too much control over the project: as Blake Bailey observed in an interview with The Los Angeles Times earlier this year, “Judith never had any illusions about what a steaming pile of [crap] that proposition was. Only Ross could be bamboozled that way.”

With those biographers who wanted to go ahead without his co-operation, Roth was ruthless. When the critic Ira Nadel was preparing his Critical Companion to Philip Roth, Roth got hold of a proof copy and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers’ fees to force Nadel to revise the biographical information. (Nadel had to delete a sentence about the ending of one of Roth’s romantic relationships; it had read: “With intimacy increasing, his anxieties over being emotionally engulfed by a woman caused him to withdraw.”)

Nadel subsequently secured a contract for an unauthorised “full-scale biography”, only for Roth to inform him that he had no permission to quote from his works and that his friends and associates would not assist Nadel in any way. Now, with Roth out of the way, Nadel has finally just published a biography, called Philip Roth: A Counterlife; having been overshadowed by Bailey’s book, it now looks like becoming the default alternative for Roth-watchers.

So how did Bailey succeed as authorised biographer where others failed? In the biography, he recounts the moment when Roth rang him up out of the blue in 2012 to discuss the idea. Roth had greatly admired Bailey’s biography of John Cheever, not least because Bailey, while being honest about his subject’s many flaws, was not in the least judgemental. “Cheever is laid out on his ass in my book, but [he] remains essentially a sympathetic character,” Bailey told The New York Times. “If you tell the whole truth about a person, their humanity comes through. Philip believed that would be true for him.”

Bailey explained his arrangement with Roth to The Los Angeles Times: “Essentially what [Roth] was trying to do with Ross was write his own biography by proxy. My arrangement with Philip is the same arrangement I made with the estates of my three previous subjects, that I have complete independence. He has to provide to me any pertinent documents that I request. He has to make himself available for interviews, he has to encourage his friends, his lovers, etc., to cooperate with me, in exchange for which he gets to vet my manuscript for factual accuracy only.”

And yet, not everybody thinks that Bailey achieved enough of an independent stance in his biography. In a review of Bailey’s book in The New Republic - published before the allegations of Bailey’s misconduct became common knowledge - the critic Laura Marsh complained that Bailey failed to challenge Roth’s presentation of himself as a man hard done by because his pesky wives kept getting in the way of his sleeping around.

She is particularly critical of Bailey’s treatment of Roth’s first wife, Margaret: “Like an adoring wingman who thinks his friend can do better, Bailey expresses his concern that ‘an unemployed, thirty-year-old … former secretary and waitress’ was ‘an unlikely consort for such a handsome, promising young man,’ and notes the abundance of ‘gorgeous young women’ whom Roth ‘longed to flirt with, if not for Maggie’s hawkish eye’.”

Among numerous other criticisms, Marsh also finds Bailey too trusting of Roth’s account of the circumstances of that marriage. Roth’s version is that he married Maggie because he felt guilt at forcing her to have an abortion - only for it to have turned out to be a trick on Maggie’s part, with her buying a pregnant stranger’s urine so that she could fake a positive pregnancy test and make Roth agree to marry her if she had the child aborted. As Marsh points out, Roth’s guilt had not been in evidence when he made her have an abortion on a previous occasion, nor again when he made her have another one after they were married.

The implication is that Bailey grew too close to Roth in the six years between his being commissioned to write the book and Roth’s death in 2018. One does get that impression reading the Acknowledgements in Bailey’s book, where he writes about Roth as “a person towards whom it was hard not to feel tenderly”. He reminisces lyrically about their time together talking about Roth's life: poring over “a photo album devoted to his girlfriends over the years”; even listening to “each other’s muffled streams” when one or other of them has gone for a loo break.

Bailey was present at Roth’s deathbed, and received a charming gift in his will: an Eames chair with an ottoman that Roth had christened “Nicole’s seat” because Nicole Kidman had sat there to discuss her role in the film of Roth’s novel The Human Stain. (Jacqueline Susann once said she’d love to meet Philip Roth but wouldn’t want to shake his hand, a reference to his endless accounts of masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint; I bet she wouldn’t have wanted to sit in that chair either).

Still, there is always something strange about the intimacy between biographer and subject; it can happen even if the subject is long dead (witness Andrew Wilson, in his excellent biography of Patricia Highsmith, describing how he once tried on her dressing gown). In the end, a biographer is unlikely to stay neutral about a subject, and will end up either loving or hating them.

If Bailey, despite his protestations of his own savviness, fell for Roth’s charm and became his mouthpiece, that doesn’t mean his book is a write-off. Readers should simply treat it as Roth’s side of the story - and that is well worth hearing, even if it’s only the partial truth.

And the book is not just the fruit of Bailey’s many hours of conversation with Roth; it also draws on many unpublished letters and manuscripts, including the Notes for My Biographer and Notes on a Slander-Monger mentioned above. And it appears to be the case, under the terms of Roth’s will, that this material was kept for the eyes of his official biographer only; Bailey has said that he has to return it to Roth’s executors, and it may all be destroyed.

Bailey’s book, in other words, is a fund of material that will never be made available anywhere else: so whatever the rights and wrongs of a publisher withdrawing a book because of accusations about the behaviour of the author, readers are going to be deprived of many unique insights into one of the greatest artists of his generation.

And yet in a way it’s an appropriate ending to the saga. One lesson Roth’s fiction teaches us is that life is too messy to be easily categorised and explained, and one can’t suppose he ever really thought that a whole human life could be encompassed within the confines of a biography, however long, scrupulous and impartial. And then of course, for an author who specialised in dark comedy, there’s something appropriate about the story of his Life - if not his life - being one of endless jet-black farce.