When Philip Roth died in 2018 at age 85, all eyes turned to Blake Bailey, his appointed biographer who’d been hard at work on a Roth biography already for several years. Roth fans such as myself looked forward to getting the full story on this titan of American letters, one we’d certainly waited long enough for. Bailey, whose 2009 bio of John Cheever had been a bestseller and Pulitzer finalist, seemed the perfect Boswell for America’s greatest 20th century chronicler. That he had been hand-picked for the job by the master himself was the icing on the cake. 

“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me,” Roth told Bailey in an early session. “Just make me interesting.”

Clearly, Roth knew what he was in for on this walk down memory lane, which would include, on the upside, his massive critical and commercial success as a writer. On the downside, a rather messy personal life, public feuds, and his ugly divorce from actress Claire Bloom, to whom he was married from 1990 to 1995, a marriage few had thought was a good idea. Gore Vidal, a close friend of Bloom, had expressly warned her, “Leave Portnoy alone.” A year after their divorce, Bloom published her side of the story in her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House, which portrayed Roth as a cranky, neurotic solipsist (not surprising for a writer), and a less-than-ideal husband. This did lasting damage to Roth’s public rep, something Roth never fully recovered from. (READ MORE: My Discovery of Philip Roth) 

“I don’t want to comment on libels,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2010 when the reporter asked point-blank about Bloom’s claims.

Roth had been a controversial writer almost since day one. His second novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), which painted an angsty, irreverent portrait of Jewish-American middle-class life, became one of the great novels of the 1960s and established the primary themes he would work with for the rest of his life: Sex, Family, and Jewish identity. Roth’s 1979 book, “The Ghost Writer,” the first of his nine Nathan Zuckerman novels, finds its writer-protagonist, obviously based on Roth, involved with a woman he believes to be Anne Frank. Yes, that Anne Frank, who appears to have survived the war. When Zuck pens a snarky story involving Jewish characters, he gets a letter from a local judge questioning the decision: “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?” … “Why in a story with a Jewish background must there be (a) adultery; (b) incessant fighting within a family over money; (c) warped human behavior in general?” and “Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?” Art imitating life, and life, art. One of the hallmark features of Roth’s style. Discerning what’s real and what’s invented is a tough call.

Like Zuckerman, Roth’s tendency to write stories ripped from real life did not always endear. Claire Bloom was not amused when she read the manuscript for his 1990 novel Deception and found it to be a largely true-to-life account of their marriage featuring a married couple named none other than Philip and Claire. He changed the Claire character’s name at her request, though the character “Philip” remained. After their divorce, the former Mrs. Roth would feature again in his 1998 novel “I Married a Communist.” Amid the war of words, Roth considered publishing a book-length refutation of Bloom’s “Leaving a Doll’s House,” which he maintained was full of false claims. He said, she said. Whom to believe? Neither, quite honestly, as any divorce lawyer will tell you. There’s always His Side, Her Side, and the Truth, which lay somewhere outside the sworn versions. Neither party is to be instantly, wholly believed.

Eventually Roth would can the novelist act and say, in effect, it’s all true, echoing James Michener, whose reply, when pressed to assign himself a genre, would say simply, “I write books.” Which is just as well.

Claire Bloom’s portrait of her time as Mrs. Philip Roth played right into the hands of Roth’s feminist critics, who’d long ago written him off as a malignant, woman-hating narcissist. And Roth with several decades of published works under his belt, had given them ample ammunition to use against him, a dangerous proposition in a time of increasing wokeness and thought-policing. 

In his 2000 novel “The Human Stain,” Roth seemed to predict his own fate. “The Human Stain” is the story of an aging classics professor who’s fired from his job after a student falsely reported him for using a racial slur in class. The book, later made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, reads like a modern day “The Scarlet Letter” and was based on a similar incident that Roth said had happened to a friend of his. “The Human Stain” makes clear Roth’s discomfort with the prevailing moralism and what he liked to call “the persecuting spirit” of America, which remained as active and potent a factor in the age of Monica Lewinsky as it had been during the witch trials of the 1690s. 

Though a Democrat, and later on, anti-Trump, Roth was a free thinker, a free spirit who believed in free speech, and he did not like political correctness. Roth seems to have been particularly alarmed by the so-called MeToo movement. As the movement felled one public figure after another, Roth, who had his own worries about how the movement might impact him personally, laid out his reservations in an email to a friend: “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured,” Roth wrote. “I have nothing but sympathy for their pain and their need for justice. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is publicized accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment. I see the accused denied the right of habeas corpus, the right to face and examine his accuser, and the right to defend himself in anything resembling a genuine judicial setting, where careful distinctions might be able to be drawn as to the severity of the reported crime.” (READ MORE: Roth, et al.)

In the last interview of his life, published in the New York Times on January 16, 2018, Roth defended his work: “Men enveloped by sexual temptation is one of the aspects of men’s lives that I’ve written about in some of my books. Men responsive to the insistent call of sexual pleasure, beset by shameful desires and the undauntedness of obsessive lusts, beguiled even by the lure of the taboo.”

Me Too

While Roth’s death allowed him to narrowly escape the hangman’s noose, his biographer Blake Bailey would not be so lucky. Almost as soon as Philip Roth: The Biography hit the bestseller list in April 2021, multiple women came forward accusing Bailey of sexual misconduct in his capacity as a middle-school English teacher in New Orleans and, later, as a visiting professor at Old Dominion. One accuser claimed that Blake had used classroom discussions of Lolita to create a sexualized atmosphere. Another, who was not a minor, claimed she had met Bailey for a drink in New Orleans then gone up to his hotel room where he raped her. There were other claims, too, involving intense flirting, dancing, and a hot tub.

Bailey flatly denied the charges and maintained he had never done anything illegal, but his denials did not help him. Just three weeks after it published Philip Roth: The Biography, Norton withdrew the book from circulation and cancelled all future shipments. 

And just like that, the most anticipated book of the decade was erased. 

Art Imitates Life

The whole thing reads like a plot right out of Roth’s own novels. Like many fans, I disagreed with Norton’s decision to kill the bio, believing it wrong to deprive the public of a work of laudable scholarship over personal matters that, true or untrue, had nothing to do with the biography of an important public figure. Even more I saw it as an obvious, concerted effort to spoil someone else’s moment of glory, with the bombshell allegations timed for maximum impact, a literary hit job that would take out Blake Bailey and the dreaded Philip Roth simultaneously. Two birds with one stone. 

Equally troubling to me was that a New York publishing house willfully participated in an attack on one of its own writers, betraying both their artist and their profession without hesitation.

This is the state of publishing in the 21st century. Caveat scriptor.

The story would get even stranger from here. Just three weeks after his banishment from Norton, the Roth biography was picked up by Skyhorse, a distributor owned by Simon & Schuster, who maintains a stated goal of publishing from across the ideological spectrum and has published books by Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Alex Jones and other deplorables. Skyhorse agreed to publish the book in paperback, e-book and audiobook forms. The media and the liberal blogosphere widely lampooned Skyhorse’s decision. “Shocking absolutely no one,” sneered Literary Hub, “Skyhorse is set to republish Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth biography.” 

The howls grew louder the next summer when Skyhorse announced that Blake Bailey had written a memoir of his trial by fire titled Repellent: Philip Roth, #MeToo, and Me, which they would publish in 2023. 

But 2023 has come and gone, and the book, best I can tell, remains nowhere available for purchase, even online. Exactly why is a matter of debate among bookworms. One theory is that Simon & Schuster, which owns Skyhorse, nixed the publishing of Repellent due to the misconduct allegations and/or possibly because Philip Roth’s estate had taken issue with Roth’s name being written so largely into Blake’s memoir, which could have presented legal problems. Which begs the question: If Skyhorse and its masters at Simon & Schuster won’t touch Blake Bailey, why have they published books by … Alex Jones? (READ MORE: Cancel Culture Trickles Down: An Up-Close Look)

Who knows. Nothing makes sense anymore in our increasingly Robespierrean republic. But one thing is for sure: if these folks are the guardians of our literature, we are in serious trouble as a culture. In a time when woke purity is the expectation for all writers, it will be only a matter of time before no one is published, save for the select few wokesters who manage to get their work past the censors. Anyone who’s not woke, or just lived a less-than-perfect life, which is most of us, is tossed along with their work onto the pyres. This is pure McCarthyism and it must be stopped. 

Whatever else, the Roth-Bailey fracas demonstrates that for all of the left’s screaming about supposed book-banning that they, too, ban books. Any book or writer they don’t like is removed from the shelves. And they don’t just ban the book. They want the writer ruined. Humiliated. Bankrupted. The Persecuting Spirit that so fascinated and bedeviled Roth, and of which he so often spoke in his work, is still very much with us, and haunts freedom’s land again just as it always has. We have yet to exorcise it.

Meanwhile, I still love Philip Roth. Whatever mistakes he made in his life as a man will have no bearing on my judgments of him as a writer. He will never be cancelled from my bookshelf.