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 Roth gave Bailey as authorized biographer access to all sorts of private material (including 2 unpublished Roth memoirs) which will now be destroyed.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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6. The Bailey book is tainted now. It can't stand and won't stand as any sort of definitive biography (itself a dubious concept). The Philip Roth Society is rightly demanding that Roth's papers not be destroyed and be open to future scholars.
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7. I sat down with my friend
@ejessicajohnson to talk about the Roth scandal(s), the need to control narrative, the limits of fact checking & the fallibility of memory. I think this podcast is pretty interesting even if you don't care about Philip Roth!https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-philip-roth-control-freak?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twitter …2 replies 3 retweets 20 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @HeerJeet @ejessicajohnson
I'm envisioning an 1950s Atlas Comics zombie story in which Blake Bailey, with Roth's dead rotting hands around his throat, hears "You...had...one...job!" before we fade out. FWIW, Bailey's dysfunctional family memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned, is quite good.
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The Roth thing is a horror story!
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