The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘The Ghost Writer’

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

The author Philip Roth, who died in 2018, was not sure whether he wanted to be the subject of a biography. In the end, he decided that he wanted to be known and understood.His search for a biographer was long and fraught — Mr. Roth parted ways with two, courted one and sued another — before he settled on Blake Bailey, one of the great chroniclers of America’s literary lives.Today on The Sunday Read, the journey of rendering a writer whose life was equal parts discipline and exuberance.This story was written by Mark Oppenheimer and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Back in February, I was in Portsmouth, Virginia, at the home of literary biographer Blake Bailey. After we had dinner, I asked him if I could see the papers. He thought about it for a second, and then he said, sure. So he took me up to his third floor, where I saw these built-in filing cabinets. And inside the cabinets, hundreds of manila envelopes with thousands of white pages inside them. Notebooks, manuscripts, letters. These were the papers of Philip Roth. I couldn't help but ask Bailey, can I hold them?

And when he gave me some of the pages to hold, what I thought was, I might be the last new person to even see these papers. Blake Bailey had just written Philip Roth's biography, and now that he was done, many of these papers would be destroyed at Roth's own request. My name is Mark Oppenheimer, and I write for the New York Times Magazine. Blake Bailey spent six years with the Roth papers. He read and reread Roth's 31 books. He called all of Roth's friends, family, acquaintances. It almost hurts to imagine the effort of piecing together another writer's life.

But this is what Bailey does. He writes big, definitive biographies of major American writers, like Richard Yates, John Cheever, and now Roth. Philip Roth was a literary superstar for what seemed like forever, from his debut back when Eisenhower was president, right up to his death three years ago. He was also one of the last celebrity writers. People cared about his private life.

And his protagonists looked and acted a lot like Roth himself. Oversexed bachelors, secular Jews, neurotic intellectuals from New Jersey. Yet his entire life, Roth denied that his fiction was about him. He worried that his legacy would be wrapped up in his fictional characters. So he tried to control that legacy. He wanted a biographer, but he couldn't decide on the right one. He even fired a couple. Philip Roth was looking for a writer who would understand his version of the truth. So here's my story, The Ghost Writer, read by Eduardo Ballerini.

This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. Philip Roth, who stopped writing in 2010 and died eight years later at age 85, was not sure if he wanted to be the subject of a biography. He was the narrator of his story. King of Zitzfleisch, Roth sat at his desk, banging out his legacy 340 days a year, starting in his early 20s, returning in over 30 books to protagonists who resembled him.

A son of Newark, secular Jew, younger brother and childless bachelor, free to indulge his ego and appetites in a country without pogroms. In two senses, his legacy would be the writing. He never had children, so books would be all that would survive him. And his life was there, between all those covers. He insisted that his work Not be read as autobiography But Roth made a career Out of doppelgangers

And authorial stand-ins An ongoing game of hide-and-seek With readers In the 1993 novel Operation Shylock A character named Philip Roth Travels to Israel To confront a look-alike

Named Philip Roth Who peddles Middle East peace plans while pretending to be the real Roth. He brackets his 1988 memoirs, The Facts, one of his few works of ostensible nonfiction, with letters to and from Nathan Zuckerman, his fictional alter ego. When embarking on The Facts, he wrote that he was trying memoir because he was tired of the makeup and the false whiskers and the wig of fiction, an implicit confession that he was always lurking just beneath his characters. In the end, Roth decided on a biography, because he wanted to be known.

His fiction courted misunderstanding, but he was wounded when misunderstood. Though living in rural Connecticut got him tagged as a recluse, Roth was a compulsive connector, always pressing himself on people, seducing them. After his death, the novelist Nicole Kraus wrote of the sincerity and absorption with which he listened, calling him the most generous audience one could hope to have. listened, calling him the most generous audience one could hope to have. In a group, he was a cut-up, a mimic, a gentle teaser, a raconteur, the embodiment of what Zadie Smith, another friend in his old age,

called literature's Rothian spirit, so full of people and stories and laughter and history and sex and fury. Here was a famous controversialist who needed to be liked, or, failing that, to be right. He had scores to settle with ex-wives and, not incidentally, an ex-biographer. By 2012, when Roth gave Blake Bailey access to his papers, friends, little black book, and innermost thoughts, Roth had parted ways with two previous biographers, courted another, and threatened to sue a third.

But Bailey, who had appealed to Roth with a sympathetic ear and a brazen request for the job, persuaded the aging author. On April 6th, W.W. Norton is publishing Philip Roth, The Biography. It is the fourth biography

of an American writer by Bailey, a former public school teacher who has become one of the great chroniclers of this country's literary lives. In 2003, he published A Tragic Honesty, the Life and Work of Richard Yates, which helped earn the author of Revolutionary Road the fame that eluded him during a long, poor, drunken life. Six years later, Bailey returned with a biography of another mid-century drunk of gargantuan talent, John Cheever. When Bailey met Roth, he had just finished work

on his biography of the Lost Weekend author Charles Jackson, whose aptly titled 1994 novel drew on his personal knowledge of blackout alcoholism. Early in their courtship, Roth asked Bailey, Do you ever write about people who aren't constantly drunk or dead? Bailey replied, You would be my first. In the literary world, authorized and unauthorized are both terms of opprobrium.

An authorized biography, written with the cooperation of the subject or her estate, is presumed to be cozy and flattering. An unauthorized biography, gossipy and salacious. Bailey's books are authorized. People use authorized as a disparaging label, meaning that you're under the thumb of the subject or the estate, Bailey told me. That was not my agreement.

Bailey insisted on the same terms he gave the Yates and Cheever families. He would need free and complete access to Roth, his papers, all of Roth's friends and family, and anyone else, even potentially unsympathetic people. Roth agreed. His cooperation had the last gasp urgency of one who had the end in sight. But it was not without an air of seduction. His cooperation had the last gasp urgency of one who had the end in sight. But it was not without an air of seduction.

When wooing lovers, friends, and colleagues, his strategy was to alternate between cruelty and abundant kindness. With Bailey, Roth flashed his gentle side, becoming as forthcoming with Bailey as he'd been withholding with other would-be biographers. For the last six years of his life, he answered all questions, often with multi-page letters, constantly called Bailey, and handed over documents

that his literary executors may never permit anybody else to see. Roth knew what kind of biography he wanted, and after fighting other collaborators for years, he smothered Bailey with attention, charmed him, and offered the warmth reserved for intimates. He played easy to get, hoping to get something in return. His version of the truth. In February, I visited Bailey at his house in the historic district of Portsmouth, Virginia,

a quick walk from the banks of the Elizabeth River, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. We sat in his living room, eating pizza and talking at a COVID-safe distance. The Wes Anderson collection, Matt Zoller Seitz's richly illustrated book about the movie director's work,

sat on the coffee table. Bailey's house had an Anderson-esque dishevelment and analog feel. There were books everywhere and no TV in sight. In the room behind me sat a baby grand piano, which Bailey plays after many a hard day of writing. Bailey, his wife, and their 16-year-old daughter share their house with a beagle and a cat that was nowhere to be seen.

After dinner, I swiveled around in one of Roth's old Eames chairs, which Bailey had inherited. The chair's ottoman was known as Nicole's seat, as in Kidman, a close friend who sat there when she visited Roth. When I asked to see the Roth papers, Bailey took me to the third floor, where he opened the cabinets lining the wall outside his study. I saw hundreds of manila folders stuffed with archival material. Bailey must turn the papers over to Roth's literary executors, Andrew Wiley, his agent, and Julia Gollier,

a lover and then a close friend, who may or may not destroy them. Bailey also had copies of documents held at Princeton University, where they were open to the public until, in 2019, the archive was closed and the description of its contents taken off the web at Wiley's behest.

Beholding six years of accumulated research into one man's life is like coming upon a finished jigsaw puzzle covering a ballroom floor. Awesome, but it hurts to imagine the effort. Researching a writer's life is slow work, a mix of shoe leather reporting and endless archival research. Bailey read most of Roth's books multiple times, hundreds of hours labor. You have to be able to cold call people, as if you're trying to sell insurance, Bailey said.

I can do the social persona, and I can enjoy it, but I'm just as happy not talking to another living soul for weeks at a time. That is a good combination for a biographer. Bailey's archivist tendencies have resulted in a book that is exhaustive in its attention to the details of Roth's life. Everything from the drudgery of his army service in the mid-1950s, to his disastrous marriages, to his struggle with mental illness. The book is often sympathetic, presenting Roth as a figure who lived a life of equal parts discipline, the famed work routine that treated writing as a miracle

hewed out of monkish labor, and exuberance. He enjoys one tryst with Eva Gardner and rejects another with Jackie Kennedy. We are thrust into the minutiae of the writer's finances, feuds, and psychoanalysis. The figure that emerges is a man capable of great kindness, irrational grudges, and casual cruelty. There aren't many writers like Bailey in American culture, where literary biography is an anemic tradition.

To the best of anyone's knowledge, Rachel Donatio wrote in the Times Book Review in 2007, no biography was underway for Cormac McCarthy, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Tony Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, or John Updike. Since then, only Updike has been the subject of a major biography. Besides Bailey and a handful of others, like Roth's friend Judith Thurman, biographer of Isaac Dinesen and Collette, few Americans do great work in this genre. In Britain, by contrast,

writers like Claire Tomlin, biographer of Dickens, Michael Holroyd, biographer of Shaw, and Hermione Lee, biographer of Wolfe, are widely praised. Britons care about their writers in a blessedly prurient way, and they want to read about their lives. When in 1994 Martin Amis left his agent for a newer, flashier one, Andrew Wiley, incidentally, the British tabloids swarmed. The sex life, or lack thereof, of the poet Philip Larkin was of national concern. In the United States, by contrast, Roth is one of few writers whose lives have excited a high level of gossip. What do you know of Jonathan Franzen's private

life? Laurie Moore's. We take our writers seriously, which means elevating their work above their lives. It is not surprising then that it would fall to a failed novelist to tell our national literary biographical story. Born in Oklahoma in 1963, Bailey aspired to an acting career, until as a 16-year-old on his way to audition for the Matt Dillon movie Tex, he read The Great Gatsby. By the time he arrived, he had decided that acting seemed a pretty silly ambition. He flubbed the audition.

After graduating from Tulane, Bailey eventually landed a job teaching middle school in New Orleans, tried his hand at fiction, and discovered an admiration for Frederick Exley. I was feeling, Bailey writes in his 2014 memoirs, The Splendid

Things We Planned, a keen affinity for Exley, with his alcoholism, his morbid interest in sports, his contempt for the workaday world, the whole narcissistic juvenile world. He wanted to be Richard Yates. Not right about Richard Yates, his first agent Elizabeth Kaplan told me. But his only success had been with non-fiction, most notably a Spy Magazine article about how the Revlon tycoon Ron Perlman's wife at the time terrorized her home contractors. Write me a proposal, he recalled Kaplan telling him, about something that interests you intensely. What really interested me at that moment in time was Richard Yates.

In 1999, Bailey found Yates' middle daughter, Monica, who liked that Bailey wasn't an academic. She held professors responsible for her father's ignominy. She cooperated with Bailey, and he got a book deal. As it happened, Revolutionary Road was already scheduled to be reissued in April 2000, and Bailey's publisher wanted his biography to benefit from what it hoped would be a Yates resurgence. I signed the contract in late January 2001, and I was given until March 15, 2002 to research and write the book, Bailey said. For the next fourteen months,

I spent every waking hour, except when I was eating or defecating, doing Yeats. A Tragic Honesty, the Life and Work of Richard Yeats, was published in July 2003. As Yeats climbed out of the grave and into the literary canon, Bailey's biography was lauded for finding the narrative tension in the writing life, which in Yeats's case involved living alone in poverty, smoking and typing all day, then knocking off for the bar. The book became a finalist for that year's National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Bailey was a schoolteacher no more. After the critic Janet Maslin raved about the Yeats biography in the Times,

her husband, the writer Benjamin Cheever, took Bailey to dinner and asked if he might want to write about his father, John. Bailey said yes, and the Cheever biography was published in 2009. Roth, who was about to publish his final novel and despairing of finding yet another biographer, read it admiringly. I think Philip chose Blake

because he had read Blake's Life of Cheever and thought it was superb, said Benjamin Taylor, Roth's close friend, one of his medical proxies, and the author of Here We Are, My Friendship with Philip Roth. I remember his saying to me, after reading the Cheever book, he doesn't judge his protagonist. He just lets him perform, behave, misbehave, whatever he chooses to do. But there's no moralistic overlay. And he said, that is the kind of moral latitude I need in a biography. Or as Bailey put it, Cheever is laid out on his ass in my book, but Cheever remains essentially a sympathetic character. Roth hoped for a similar alchemy. If you tell the whole truth about a person,

their humanity comes through, Bailey said. Philip believed that would be true for him. In 1996, Roth's ex-wife, the English actress Claire Bloom, published Leaving a Doll's House. The memoir includes a fairly nuanced account of a romance gone bad, with enough blame to go around, but critics and readers concluded that Roth was a gaslighting, emotionally abusive partner. His first response was to write Notes for My Biographer, a book-length reply that he sold to the publisher Houghton Mifflin. His next move was to find a biographer. I thought, someone's got to correct this story, or this is going to be the story, he later told Bailey. Roth first asked Ross Miller,

an English professor at the University of Connecticut and a close friend who had read drafts of his books in progress and edited the Library of America edition of his collected works. Poorly, in Roth's estimation, Roth tried to ghostwrite material for which Miller was responsible. Roth wanted a flattering book, and he hoped Miller would make up in loyalty what he lacked in brilliance. But according to Roth, Miller was only intermittently engaged,

and by the time Roth took him off the case for good in 2009, he had apparently interviewed only eleven of Roth's acquaintances. When Roth listened to tapes of the interviews, he was so horrified by what he considered Miller's inept technique that he wrote another defensive manuscript, a never-published attack on Miller he called Notes on a Slandermonger. a never-published attack on Miller he called Notes on a Slandermonger. Their friendship ended bitterly, and Roth railed against Miller to his last day. Miller declined to comment. When I asked Wiley if the estate would sue Miller for talking to me, he said, I really don't want to go into that. But it is not an unreasonable fear.

In 2011, Roth paid over $60,000 in lawyers' fees to force Ira Nadel, an American academic who now teaches in Canada, to delete one sentence, which said that Roth had anxieties about being emotionally engulfed by a woman, referring to the longtime girlfriend who was the basis for Drenka, the sexually liberated mistress in Sabbath's Theatre, from his critical companion to Philip Roth. Nadel was planning a biography, and Wiley informed him that he could not quote from Roth's work, and that nobody close to Roth would ever cooperate with him. Sick of Miller and contemptuous of Nadel, whose own Roth biography paints him as terrified of intimacy and was published last month, Roth kept up the hunt.

He talked with a Stanford professor, Stephen Zipperstein, who says he decided against writing an authorized biography, though he is now writing his own Roth biography. In 2010, he engaged Hermione Lee, the biographer of Wolfe and Wharton,

but he soon regretted that choice. It grated on him that she could not start until finishing her book on Penelope Fitzgerald, though she had been upfront about that obligation. And there was something else. He did not want to be remembered throughout posterity as a person who didn't like women, a writer close to Roth told me. And he thought that that was going to happen if he had a feminist biographer. In 2012, while Lee thought she and Roth were still betrothed, Bailey emailed Roth after learning from the writer James Atlas, another of Roth's ex-friends, that Roth and

Miller were kaput. Atlas seems not to have known about the arrangement with Lee, who would not speak with me, saying that her head is full of Tom Stoppard now. From the time he heard Roth might be looking for a biographer, Bailey wanted the job. It was the ideal confluence, he said, of Roth's availability and his admiring Roth's work enormously and from a very young age. Roth invited Bailey to his New York apartment, then for a second meeting at his Connecticut house. New York apartment, then for a second meeting at his Connecticut house. On the Upper West Side, Roth asked Bailey why a Gentile from Oklahoma should write his biography. Bailey had a swift rejoinder. I'm not a bisexual alcoholic with an ancient Puritan lineage, but I managed to write a biography of John Cheever. Roth was pleased with his new man. He had already cancelled publication of Notes for My Biographer

and asked friends to return their copies. Bailey got a copy of that manuscript, along with Notes on a Slandermonger and much more. Eighteen months after the biography is published, Bailey must return everything to the Roth estate, according to their agreement. Julia Gollier, the co-executor, told me that when the papers come back, the co-executor,

told me that when the papers come back, she and Wiley will decide, based on their understanding of Roth's wishes, what to destroy and what to add to the Roth archives at the Library of Congress. When I asked about notes for my biographer and notes on a slander monger, in effect Roth's two unpublished books, she said,

there is a good chance we will destroy them. Andrew and I will decide when the time comes. Forty-eight passages in Bailey's Philip Roth, The Biography, are sourced to notes from my biographer. They tend to deal with criticisms from Claire Bloom. Many of the passages are anodyne, and some are complimentary. Roth believed his ex-wife was a natural writer, for example. Only eighteen passages are sourced to Notes on a Slandermonker.

The unseen manuscripts may not be explosive, but they are surely of interest, dealing as they do with what might be seen as the two great divorces of Roth's life, after the end of his early first marriage, his splits from Bloom and Miller. And it's unclear what other copies of these manuscripts exist. When I asked Roth's friend Claudia Roth Pierpont, author of Roth Unbound, a writer in his books, 2013,

if she had one, she seemed to squirm. There are copies around. I do not. Copies of these documents live in Bailey's cabinet, for now, and a copy of Slandermonger is locked up at Princeton, part of Benjamin Taylor's collection of Roth papers, which he sold to the university in 2018. The following year, Wiley got the university to close the papers, and Taylor himself was unsure when, or if, Princeton would reopen the archive.

A Princeton spokesman said the university was in ongoing discussions with Roth representatives. Neither Wiley nor the Roth estate's lawyer, Pearly H. Grimes Jr., would comment. It seems Roth's life force has outlived his life, cajoling and coercing from the grave. He molders, but those in his orbit keep respecting his wishes, or maintaining respectful silences. For Roth scholars, there will always be the nagging frustration that one man alone got to see the full Roth oeuvre, the unpublished writings, as well as what lives on in bookstores. Its access, raged Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown professor whose book,

The Philip Roth We Don't Know, Sex, Race, and Autobiography, will be published in September. Full access to the papers, and then they'd be burned. That would be a shame. Miller was an important early reader on Roth's novels

of the 1980s and 90s, and given how much of the public perception of Roth as a misogynist turned on Bloom's book of the 1980s and 90s, and given how much of the public perception of Roth as a misogynist turned on Bloom's book, it feels as if that jury will be hung forever. Bailey is also the only man

to have read a 101-page remembrance written for Bailey by the woman on whom Roth based Drenka. Bailey was only permitted to read the remembrance in her presence. She wouldn't even let me

take it to the bathroom, Bailey said. He has no idea what the woman, who was Roth's partner longer than anyone else, including his wives, will do with her manuscript, which describes a somewhat darker figure than Drenka's lover, Mickey Sabbath. The sex in Sabbath was larky fun, Bailey wrote to me, whereas her retelling was all about Philip, say, expecting her to listen while he jerked off on the phone in London and she sat there in Connecticut with patients waiting outside the door of her physical therapy office. The Roth who emerges from Bailey's research could be callous to friends, enemies, and lovers alike. He blithely used other people's lives as material for his books.

When they objected, as the novelist and devoted mentee Alan Lulchuk did, Roth was unrepentant. He was a maestro of fallings out. With Lulchuk, Atlas, and of course, Miller, he could be emotionally demanding, and his sense of entitlement overwhelmed his compassion for others. He acted as a needy man-child. He often demanded that Bloom spend time with him at the expense of her teenage daughter, Anna. Rather than face his shortcomings, he clung to a myopic perspective on the friction he helped cause, referring to Anna in correspondence as a great pain in the ass, without acknowledging his role in the family conflict.

This version of Roth, a man of robust sexual appetite, a searing sense of victimhood, unrelenting fury, and a limited capacity for empathy, does seem reminiscent of his most insatiable characters. Portnoy, Zuckerman, and Sabbath come to mind. While Roth was not writing autobiography, it seems true that he mined his own shortcomings for, and processed his turbulent life through, fiction, intent on unfurling his own limitations in the only way he knew how, in the only language he possessed. Knowing that Bailey would write about all of this,

Roth hardly resisted. One of the few rows he and Bailey had was over the granting of a pseudonym to the model for Drenka. Roth felt that she had maligned him in conversations with Bloom and Bailey, and he did not want her to hide behind anonymity in the biography. I reminded Philip that he was not in a position to make such demands, Bailey said, and we put it behind us. Could it have been that, as a writer, he knew what was needed? That if his great fear was being forgotten, and that is the great fear of all writers, he had to be interesting rather than simply admirable. He got to be remembered as a man, hilarious, mercurial, genuinely kind, but fickle and mean-spirited too. A man

rather than an inert legacy. Parts of it would have mortified him, of course, Bailey told me. But finally, he would have recognized that his ideal could only be realized if he wrote the biography himself. Which, of course,

in a better world, was exactly what he wanted. Bye.