Roth
The recent ethical chaos surrounding the revelation of Blake Bailey’s past — the decision by Norton to remove his biography of Philip Roth from print, never mind the investment made, and to donate an equivalent amount to organizations that deal with sexual abuse — exposes several prominent features of our current cultural landscape.
For starters, we see right away how corporate publishing can, or thinks it can, orchestrate outcomes, what Joni Mitchell in another context called the “star-making machinery.” It would be very hard for a book to fail with an advance profile in the New Yorker by David Remnick, an interview in the New York Times Magazine by Mark Oppenheimer, and a front-page review in the Times Book Review by Cynthia Ozick, not to mention the inevitable lead reviews in most every major newspaper. An innocent bystander, I was feeling the advance publicity surge two weeks or more ahead of the pub. date.
One might object that the scheduled review was independent, that no one could predict what Cynthia Ozick would say, but I’m quite confident, schooled as I now am in large-scale behind-the-scenes perfidy, that the whole publishing juggernaut was ‘banking’ on that review, and that executives would not have chanced a pan. There was surely Opo research done to confirm Ozick’s basic take on Roth, testing the level of her enthusiasm. Ozick is commonly known to have been a personal friend of the writer, and has herself written about him. Of course her review would be positive. The only question was whether it would offer the desired high superlatives. It did.
The extent of the machinations is clear. Corporate capitalism 101. But then, just as the book had been shipped and was being released, the stories about Bailey’s predatory past broke. Several accusers stepped forth and told of unwanted advances, of being groomed for intimacy while still underage, and, most damning, of a rape at the home of the Times’ lead books reviewer, and subsequent squelching of the accusation.
Now we have to pay attention to the reaction. Within a few days of that revelation, everything changed. A series of articles, most of them less review than commentary, appeared. It was the cluster effect, and it was driven by a distancing impulse, as well as the desire to be on the right side of a public scandal. There was, of course, sincere outrage as well. Many of these pieces looked to draw lines between Bailey’s past, his revealed psychology, and Roth’s decision to take him on as the one to do his portrait. Roth has a documented history of taking vengeful actions against those who he felt had crossed him, and Bailey (so these articles proposed) was willing to follow Roth’s dictates and set straight the record of his relationships with women.
Interesting here was the speed of the reversal and how quickly the picture changed from orchestrated adulation to vituperative dismissal, first of Bailey, the chief offender, and then, by implied association, Roth himself. A 180-degree reversal of both Roth’s plan and Norton’s. This happened on several levels, and these underscore a good deal about our cultural attitudes.
To get the full picture, we need to remark on the role of social media in all this. Twitter and Facebook are, as we know, our court of public opinion, and the energies of ostracism equal the energies of hype. The platforms, at least among liberal users, are highly responsive to any content that may be assessed in terms of its political correctness. In practice they are an accelerator such as we’ve never seen before, exerting enormous effects by way of numbers as well as near instantaneity. These platforms have huge influence on the press, both in terms of establishing the climate within which opinion circulates, and at the same time amplifying and disseminating that opinion.
In the case of Roth/Bailey, we witness the collision between corporate bottom-line thinking and public opinion. And public opinion has carried the day. Because the larger long-term impact of reader sensitivities on that bottom line far outweighs any profit gains in the next few quarters. Just as corporations work hard on their branding, so they live in fear of the re-branding that might affect the loyalties of their consumer base. They may even try to make their profit-based decisions seem evidence of moral concern, where there is really none to be found.
As for Roth — the writer, I mean — in the light of all this media noise, I feel obliged to question where I stand. Has this recent barrage of press, exorbitant praise first and mainly inflamed reaction after, caused me to reconsider how I view the man as a writer?
No. Not really.
My reading — and writing about — Roth’s history goes back many years. I don’t vouch for the chronology here, but it goes something like this: early and great admiration of Goodbye Columbus and later Portnoy’s Complaint.
I’m sure I’ve named the latter as the funniest book by an American — the voice, as compelling as Holden Caulfield’s. Then what? All those short novels of the Ghost Writer ilk — I snapped those right up, counted them as ‘fun’ reading. A few gaps, and then came the great trilogy: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. There were quite a few others later, and I mostly kept up.
As a reviewer I gave a rave to Patrimony, Roth's memoir of his father’s last years; I responded tepidly to Matrimony, the account of his relationship with Claire Bloom; and I offered great praise, later, for The Human Stain. A few years ago, I wrote an essay on his announcement that he was done with writing.
I’ll concede right off that there are more than a few weak links in the lengthy chain of Roth’s oeuvre, but I’ll also say, gratefully, that he has helped shape a whole epoch of American writing with the best of his books. I cannot subtract a talent like Roth from our American consciousness, even as I can agree with the dominant critiques of his treatment of women. There is no getting around various vindictive and caricaturist presentations.
As for what he ‘gets,’ he gets youth, ambition, the myriad weaves of family struggle; he gets class, rage, shame and entrapment, and the epic post-war generational transition; he gets mothers and sons and fathers and sons; old age, bodily decline, and he gets humor. That is, he looks into the human arrangement and finds the laughs. Not the easy kind, but the dig-down visceral kind. Against all his shortcomings I set his literary variousness and indefatigable, if maybe desperate, drive.
We are living in baby/bathwater times, and I want to keep the baby in the tub. I believe, at the same time, that serious and contentious debate should be a big part of our ongoing struggle for self-definition. As a subject of such debate, Roth — the writer — might offer one of the best test cases of all.
Sven Birkerts was for many years the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has reviewed widely and is the author of ten books, including The Gutenberg Elegies and The Art of Time in Memoir. His new book, an appreciation of Nabokov's Speak, Memory will be out in December. He co-edits the journal AGNI at Boston University and lives in Arlington, MA.