"Philip Roth: The Biography" by Blake Bailey

The first thing you notice about Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey is the size of the book – more than 800 pages of biography. Add the acknowledgements, the footnotes, and the index, and you have almost 900 pages. If there was ever meant to be a definitive biography of the American author of 31 works, including Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, this is it.  

That it is the authorized biography by Roth himself, giving Bailey access to files, archives, letters, and friends’ interviews, also helps explain the breadth of the book. Bailey covers Roth’s life, and especially his publishing life, in detail. The fact that Bailey keeps the story interesting and engaging is due to both the biographer’s skill and Roth himself. 

 

Published earlier this year, Philip Roth received widespread and enormous critical praise – until accusations of sexual harassment, assault, and impropriety were leveled against Bailey (including via The New York Times). Eventually, the controversy led the publisher, W.W. Norton, to announce it was stopping the shipping of the book. Bailey had just run smack into cancel culture. At last report, no criminal charges had been filed against Bailey. The author has denied the accusations.

 

The biography tells Roth’s story – and it is indeed Roth’s story. That said, it is also a factual and objective story. The Philip Roth in these pages is the Philip Roth who was a major literary figure in American letters for more than half a century, winner of both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. And it is the Philip Roth, the flawed man who made bad marriages and was unfaithful to his wives. He moved in literary circles, and at times the biography reads almost like a who‘s who in American literature. People like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Styron, George Plimpton, Wallace Stegner, Bennett Cerf, John Updike, Francine du Plessix Gray, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, and many others move through the story. So do celebrities like Claire Bloom, Roth’s second wife, and Mia Farrow, Roth’s close friend.

 

Blake Bailey

To read the story of Philip Roth is to read the story of American literature in the second half of the 20^th century. And Roth’s importance can’t be underestimated. He broke literary taboos. He influenced countless writers. He helped shape the course of literary culture for two generations. And Bailey more than does justice to that story, describing each of Roth’s works and how they were received both critically and popularly. 

 

The biography also covers the influence of Roth’s Jewish-American roots and family. Many of his novels were about Jewish-American characters, and his work more than once offended Jewish readers and religious figures. Roth considered himself an atheist and was not observant in the Jewish faith. He also visited Israel several times and met with leading political and cultural figures in the country. He was also close to his family and especially his older brother.

 

Bailey has published biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He’s received numerous literary awards and recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American academy of Arts and Letters, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and others. He lives in Virginia. 

 

In short, Philip Roth is a masterful biography, and Bailey has accomplished likely even more than Roth himself would have hoped for. The Roth who emerges here is a complex and complicated man, capable of both spite and extreme generosity and well aware of his failures and shortcomings. 

"The House of Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne - Still a Fascinating Story

I first read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) 50 years ago. I recently reread it and discovered it was nothing like what I remembered, or what I thought I remembered. Superficially, the book tells the story of a woman in Puritan Boston who gives birth out of wedlock, is shunned and condemned by her fellow citizens, and thumbs her nose at them by embroidering a scarlet letter “A” on her dress. 

The novel is actually much more substantive – the story of a woman of rather independent mind caught between the opposing demands of her lover and those of her husband. It’s an exploration of guilt, love, steadfastness, loyalty, and redemption. 

I wondered if the same thing would be true of Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables, which I first and last read about that same 50 years ago. What I remembered was that it was a ghost story of sorts, not as wild as an Edgar Allen Poe story but in that vein. I reread it last month, and I discovered that memory misled me even more here than with The Scarlet Letter.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Hawthorne in 1848.

The Teacher in the Turban: The Year I Discovered the Realists

My junior year in high school (1967-68) was, perhaps like all years, a crazy time to be 16 years old. Those nine months included starvation in the Biafran region of Nigeria; the deaths of three astronauts in a test launch at Cape Kennedy; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We went to see movies like “The Graduate,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “In the Heat of the Night,” and the Beatles were upended their own music and rock music in general with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

This was the high school year for American history and American literature. American history included a mandatory six-week section on communism; the required text was Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover. My history teacher was a maverick; rather than read what others said communism was, somehow she got grudging approval for my class to read a large chunk of Das Kapital by Karl Marx. It was actually a brilliant move; we learned that, if Marx was any indication, communism was flat-out boring. Who wanted that?

It was junior English that left the most lasting mark on me. Our teacher, Mrs. Prince, was new to the school, an all-boys public high school. She was tall and rather broad-shouldered and wore her hair in a beehive. And she was a presence. She had a loud voice and talked as much with her hands and arms as she did with her mouth. She wore bright colors, including the occasional turban. 

The first day of class, she announced that the greatest work in American literature was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, published the year before. Now, we may have been 16-year-old boys, but even we knew that was something of a ridiculous statement.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Painting: New York, oil on canvas by George Bellows (1911).

“The Confident Years: 1885-1915” by Van Wyck Brooks

My junior year in high school included a course in American literature, paired with the required course of American history. My teacher was a rather flamboyant character, who talked in exclamation points and believed that Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was one of the greatest works of literature of the 20^th century.

Well, no. I was 16 at the time, and even I knew better.

But she was a good teacher, and she loved the subject she taught. And what I remember most was the readings and the course projects we had to do. My poetry project was on Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, and it remains a favorite to this day.

Willa Cather in 1912

My fiction project was a two-parter. The entire class had to write about the Realists as a group – Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and others. And then we had a separate paper on one specific author – an assignment which required we read at least three of the author’s works. I chose Willa Cather, and read Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers, My Antonia, and Shadows on the Rock.

It was delightful but not quite a surprise (I expected it and would have been surprised otherwise) to find Willa Cather in The Confident Years: 1885-1915 by literary historian Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963). Published in 1952, it was the last of a series of five books in his “Finders and Makers: The History of the Writer in America.” The first four were The World of Washington Irving; The Flowering of New England; The Times of Melville and Whitman; and New England Indian Summer (see below for my posts on each of them). The Flowering of New England won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1936.

While his general theme can be seen in all of his works, it is in this last volume in his series (although not the last book he wrote; he was quite prolific) where it becomes explicit. And it was this: that the years from 1885 to 1915 were the last in which there was an English / colonial / pioneer / American cultural substructure. It was changing, but there was still enough cultural consensus that people knew what was meant by a phrase like “American literature.” The United States would still have a literature, and we might call it American, but the consensus was gone.

A number of prominent critics disagreed with him, and Brooks grew increasingly unpopular in literary criticism circles from the late 1940s on. Fifty years after his death, one can argue that he was more on target than his critics after all. There is no longer an American literature, at least as it would have been understood a century ago.

Brooks tells a great story. We read about Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who published Maggie, A Girl of the Streets in 1893 to almost no notice, and two years later published The Red Badge of Courage, which was a sensation and made Crane famous overnight. According to Brooks, Crane was the bridge between Mark Twain and the writers who followed, and the bridge between Emily Dickinson and the poets who followed.

Stephen Crane in 1896

The Confident Years also emphasizes the importance of William Dean Howells (1837-1920), novelist and editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Howells promoted or heavily influenced such writers and poets as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thorstein Veblen, Frank Norris, Robert Frost, and Hamlin Garland, and convinced Twain to write for The Atlantic.

Brooks covers scores of other writers as well, including Kate Chopin, Upton Sinclair, H.L. Mencken, T.S. Eliot, and Booth Tarkington. He describes Tarkington as “the prince of popular novelists (who) was never taken seriously, -- in critical circles, he salt below the salt, -- in spite of a brilliant satirical gift that rivalled Sinclair Lewis’s and a feeling like Scott Fitzgerald’s for the glamour of youth.”

William Dean Howells

The Confident Years acknowledges that underscoring the very idea of American literature was a faith in human goodness. “It was precisely in this faith,” Brooks writes, “that America came into existence, affirming the capacity of men to govern themselves, and the main body of American tradition, as literature expressed it, exhibited this faith to the beginning of the first world war.”

That faith in human goodness, as admirable and inspiring as we might find it, couldn’t survive two world wars, the Holocaust, and a host of other atrocities that accompanied the 20^th century and continue into the 21^st.

Painting: New York, oil on canvas by George Bellows (1911); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Related:

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Van Wyck Brooks and “The Flowering of New England”

“The Times of Melville and Whitman”

Van Wyck Brooks’ New England Summer

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott, and History

Van Wyck Brooks: A Tale of Two Publications

“The Ordeal of Mark Twain”

Van Wyck Brooks and American Literature

“An Autobiography” by Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Life of Emerson”

“An Autobiography” by Van Wyck Brooks

It doesn’t seem like a traditional autobiography at all, this An Autobiography by Van Wyck Brooks (1886 – 1963), this literary historian who had so much to do with the shaping of our understanding of American literature from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is more a memoir, a memoir packed with recognizable names from American literature and culture, people whom Brooks knew extremely well or at least well.

Walter Lippmann. Sinclair Lewis. John Steinbeck. Carl Sandburg. Padraic Colum. F. Scott Fitzgerald., Ernest Hemingway. Maxwell Perkins. Robert Frost. Amy Lowell. Ezra Pound. Theodore Dreiser. Sherwood Anderson. E.E. Cummings. William Carlos Williams. Marianne Moore. Lewis Mumford. T.S. Eliot. And many, many more.

Brooks includes some of his own biographical information, but not as much as might be expected. And for a good reason: his life was the literature he read, studies, and wrote so voluminously about.

When Brooks was at Harvard in the early 1900s, he says there was a sense that America had a past literature generation, a past national literature, but that it was much better than the generation he was living in. That sense of loss, however, would, within a few years, give way to the flowering of an American literature that was not foreseen, a literature that would include the poetry of Frost and Eliot and the fiction of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, and more.

After college graduation, Brooks worked at Doubleday – thanks to connections of Maxwell Perkins, and then goes to California, where he serves as the secretary to the president of Stanford. He is married there, and he and his wife soon travel to London, where he meets Walter Lippmann and first hears of his plans for a new magazine called The New Republic.

He returns to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, and what is already forming in his mind is a series pf works that would become the many books he wrote about writers in America.

Van Wyck Brooks

He moves to Westport, Connecticut, in 1920, and he stayed there for 20 years. His circle of friends and neighbors included Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald and Frost. He becomes the literary editor of a magazine called The Freeman, a forerunner of the libertarian magazine of the the same name, and worked there with Dos Passos. Nearby was another literary magazine, The Dial, that published the poetry of Cummings Moore, and Williams. Brooks would edit and published articles by such authors as Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck.

He also edited Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, and defended Sandburg against on number of critical attacks that dogged the writer and poet for much of his life. Sandburg, Brooks said, was “one of those yea-sayers and lovers of life who were suspected and disliked by the smaller, more intense spirits of the coming generation.” Those same spirits would eventually target Brooks as well.

Two parts of the autobiography were published during Brooks’ lifetime; the third was edited by his lifelong friend John Hall Wheelock after Brooks’ death and published as a complete work in 1965. Wheelock wrote the foreword; editor Malcolm Cowley wrote the introduction.

Brooks is largely forgotten today; his style of writing and his themes are largely ignored by most critics and literary historians today (which is not necessarily an insult to Brooks). But he was one of the key people who shaped a national literary consciousness in the 20^th century, and his autobiography helps to explain how that happened.

Related:

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott, and History

Van Wyck Brooks and The Flowering of New England

Van Wyck Brooks: A Tale of Two Publications

“The Times of Melville and Whitman”

“The Ordeal of Mark Twain”

Van Wyck Brooks and American Literature

Top iIllustration: Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks by Frances O’Brien, University of Arizona Museum of Art.