1. Fittingly, Philip Roth is posthumously entangled in several overlapping scandals about free speech. Equally fittingly, they are an outgrowth of Roth's characteristic attempt to have extreme control the narrative of his life & the inevitably blowback this produced.
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2. I don't think it's sufficiently appreciated how Roth made to engineer a biography that he hoped would vindicate him against the portrait given by his ex-wife Claire Bloom in her memoir.
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3. The broad story is Roth wanted a sock puppet official biographer who would voice his side of the story. The first sock puppet (Ross Miller) passive-aggressively resisted & so Roth settled on Blake Bailey. Whose bio overshadowed by sexual assault accusation. Hubris & nemesis.
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4. The Bailey book was dropped by original publisher but now picked up by another house, Skyhorse. I'm okay with that: it's a very bad book (partisan, gossipy, unliterary) but if people want to read it, let them. It'll eventually be forgotten.
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5. But there's another speech scandal which isn't getting much attention. Roth gave Bailey as authorized biographer access to all sorts of private material (including 2 unpublished Roth memoirs) which will now be destroyed. That's a real slap in the face to literary scholarship
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Because Roth was a freakizoid who wanted to control the narrative.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
He learned from the best.pic.twitter.com/lOt2NP0faZ
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