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In the Philip Roth biography space race that culminated in April, it initially seemed Ira Nadel’s book (Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford University Press, 568 pages), having been started first, might be Sputnik; Blake Bailey’s bigger, more glamorous tome the moon shot (Philip Roth: The Biography, WW Norton, 960 pages). As Roth’s anointed official biographer, Bailey had keys to the inner sanctum, which included the author’s extensive private archive, some or all of which was originally supposed to be burned once his “definitive” biography was published (hence the subtitle, which calls it not “A” but “The Biography”). Indeed, as Nadel seemed to languish in lonely orbit, Bailey basked in mostly glowing coverage in high-profile outlets. Until, that is, the last week in April, when Bailey went supernova – in the bad way, after allegations of sexual assault, including rape, surfaced against him. Bailey’s publisher ceased shipment, promotion and further printings of the book. His agent dumped him.
That his chosen biographer, not Roth, would get cancelled for mistreatment of women is an irony that few, except perhaps Bailey’s accusers, saw coming. For all the charges of misogyny, Roth’s attacks on women seem to have been largely limited to his tongue and pen. It’s possible he’ll actually benefit from the comparison to his would-be Boswell; though to make that comparison, most will now have to read Nadel’s book.
Both biographies take a comparable approach, particularly in their early parts. Inspirations for characters and plot points are duly noted, as are the places where fiction and reality diverge, though neither author treats the novels entirely as memoirs-in-disguise. These factual similarities suggest that much of the author’s life was documented outside of Bailey’s Roth trove – in various archives, and in Roth’s own copious writings. In their acknowledgments, Nadel and Bailey thank some of the same librarians, and it’s hard not to imagine the awkward moments. Did their hands graze in the Library of Congress cafeteria while reaching for the same bowl of Jell-O?
The subtitle of Nadel’s book, a nod to Roth’s 1986 novel The Counterlife, is also an attempt to weaponize Roth’s own definition of the term as “one’s own anti-myth.” That said, Nadel’s promise “to go behind the curtain, the mask, and roadblocks that Roth repeatedly put up to protect his real life,” is primarily fulfilled through armchair psychologizing (Nadel teaches English at UBC). He labels Roth’s accusations of abandonment against his second wife, Claire Bloom, for example, “a characteristic borderline personality ploy,” though Roth didn’t have a BPD diagnosis. There are frequent references to Roth’s “control” issues, which Nadel knows about firsthand, Roth having successfully sued him to rewrite a line in an essay about Roth’s fear of intimacy with women – an incident only Bailey mentions.
Nadel also names a few people, mostly girlfriends, that Bailey alludes to pseudonymously, apparently at the women’s requests – a gesture of respect that feels ironic in light of recent events: publishing executive Valentina Rice used a pseudonym when she sent her rape allegations to Bailey’s publisher and The New York Times.
The excellence of Roth’s work has often been used as a shield against his personal transgressions. But because neither of these books is, understandably, a work of literary criticism, both end up bringing Roth’s troublesome personality and relationships to the fore. As far as the misogyny charges go, both try to tread a middle line by sticking to facts instead of passing judgment. Bailey, whose take will forever be seen through the lens of his own conceivably worse transgressions, offsets the calamitous marriages; the litany of endless, overlapping affairs with young women, including his students (again, Bailey’s neutrality takes on a more sinister cast, some ex-middle-school students having accused him of “grooming” them), by taking inventory of the female intellectuals and writers who stuck by Roth; the exes who showed up at his deathbed, not to gloat or dance, but to mourn. This sometimes feels like a “some of my best friends are Black”-type defence.
Nadel, for his part, suggests Roth was drawn to “needy” women “because, like his father, he possessed a deep urge to help” and that he married his first wife, Maggie, out of a “saviour complex.” When things inevitably went south, Roth lashed back through fiction. It was after Bloom published her “revenge memoir,” Nadel notes that “a series of dead or disappeared wives began to appear or reappear in [Roth’s] work.” (Though they were married 17 years, Bailey’s book inexplicably has no photo of Bloom; Nadel’s has one.)
The problem with the misogyny debate may be semantic. Roth comes off less as a global woman-hater than an immature, perpetual grievance-nurser. Take sex and marriage out of the mix, and his vitriol skews more gender-neutral. It’s hard to imagine any self-respecting misogynist asking a woman to be his official biographer as Roth did, before settling on Bailey (who approached Roth). After firing his first choice, Roth had asked the celebrated biographer Hermione Lee, who declined because she was writing about Tom Stoppard. His final choice having backfired so spectacularly, Roth, from his grave, is surely ruing that fact, and cursing Tom Stoppard as well.
By blending facts with excerpts from the author’s fiction, Alex Christofi treads, in his “reconstructed memoir” of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life, Bloomsbury, 256 pages), where most biographers, including Roth’s, don’t dare. That may sound audacious, even dubious, but Christofi has approached his task logically and seamlessly, and the result is an utterly charming, lively and original work that reads like a novel itself – perhaps because Christofi is a novelist. As the title suggests, his focus is the Russian author’s love life, though it takes about half the book to arrive there: Dostoevsky only got into the relationship game in his thirties, after being released from the Siberian labour camp where he served four years for treason.
Physically, Dostoevsky wasn’t what you’d call a catch. Grey in pallor, he was reportedly covered in moles and “scrofulous spots.” He suffered from debilitating hemorrhoids. His first epileptic seizure, a massive one, happened on his wedding night to his first wife, Maria. After Maria died, he took up with the beautiful but self-involved Polina. But the best was yet to come: Dostoevsky’s great love was his second, and last wife, Anna.
Dostoevsky’s gambling addiction is a persistent theme. Barely a page goes by where he’s not pawning a watch, wedding ring, or winter coat, then running off to the roulette tables. In this, and most other things, Christofi is gently funny, a case in point being his description of Dostoevsky’s honeymoon: “Fyodor and Anna would wake up late, not simply because they were newlyweds but because they no longer had any way of telling the time; Fyodor’s watch was in the pawnshop in Homburg.”
Christofi writes their courtship like a rom-com meet-cute. Dostoevsky originally hired Anna to be his stenographer: Under gambling-induced duress, he’d signed a contract to produce a novel with an impossible deadline. If he failed, the next nine years of his work would go unremunerated, and his publisher let him know he was betting against him. But perhaps the novel could be squeezed out if dictated? The first day Anna shows up she catches Dostoevsky, humiliatingly, in slippers with his shirt unbuttoned. But together, they make the deadline – on Fyodor’s birthday! With two hours to spare! – love is discovered, Crime and Punishment makes Dostoevsky a literary sensation, four children are produced, and happiness complete, at least for a bit. Dostoevsky died 14 years later, at 59.
The affection everywhere apparent in Christofi’s book is nowhere to be found in Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, Richard Bradford’s biography of thriller-writer Patricia Highsmith. And with good reason: When it comes to misanthropy and antisemitism, Highsmith makes Philip Roth look like Barney the Dinosaur. (Highsmith dubbed the Holocaust the “Semicaust” because, in her view, it only got half the job done). She predatorially and serially exploited her lovers to create fodder for her fiction. Her personal proclivities were disturbing and bizarre. She became obsessed with snails after witnessing their mating, and once released a gaggle of them from her purse at a dinner party, to the horror of her fellow guests. Bradford’s book, however, is marred by what feels like an undue fixation on Highsmith’s sexual orientation – he repeatedly uses the term “lesbianism,” with its hints of prurience and Victorian pathologizing. And while a biographer needn’t love their subject, Bradford’s distaste for his is so palpable, you wonder why he took it on. Though he calls a few of the novels “genius,” Bradford, unlike Roth’s defenders, considers just as many if not more to be garbage. As the catalogue of atrocious behaviour expands, it feels like Bradford, too, has released something nasty, and left us to wallow in the slime.
You might expect, based on its title and cover, Gail Crowther’s biography of two important figures in mid-century American poetry to be full of breezy, Mad Men-era repartee (Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, Gallery Books, 304 pages). And you’d be wrong. Not just because Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s martini-fuelled get-togethers at the Ritz were so short lived – they’d repair there after attending Robert Lowell’s Boston University poetry seminar in 1959, where they met – but because what they actually discussed is mostly a source of conjecture. (Suicide was one known topic.) When Plath moved to England later that year, the women never saw each other again, though they did write the occasional letter.
What is of interest is Crowther’s account of Plath and Sexton’s strangely parallel lives. Both came of age in stifling, pre-second-wave-feminist America, where their work was often mocked or ignored by (mainly) male critics. Both had marriages plagued with violence and infidelity, confusingly intense relationships with their mothers, and both died by suicide (Sexton in her mother’s fur coat, while clutching a martini). Despite some clunky writing, Crowther convincingly argues that Plath and Sexton were ahead of their time, that both were rebels in their own unique way. Contrary to other assessments, she also believes there was nothing “unique or doomed-genius-woman-writer about their deaths.” The poets’ “bitter rivalry,” played up on the dust jacket, seems ultimately to have been less professional than existential, not to mention morbidly one-sided. When news of Plath’s 1963 suicide reached her, Crowther writes, Sexton “immediately felt a sort of envy. She told her therapist that she felt Plath had stolen something that was hers – that death was hers.”
Five new literary biographies examine the lives of writers including Philip Roth, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath - The Globe and Mail
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