If he were alive today Philip Roth he would have turned ninety (he was born on March 19, 1933). He died in May 2018 at the age of eighty-five, leaving behind almost thirty books (novels, essays, autobiographies and short stories), fanatical readers but also opponents, mostly from the field of feminism. Shortly before his death, Roth commissioned Blake Bailey (who had a very successful biography of the great John Cheever under his belt) to write biography from. In the spring of 2021, an “official” (authorized) biography was released by WW Norton & Company (see on “Let Evil In”, “K”, 9.5.21). The scandal erupted almost immediately: Bailey was accused of rape and harassment by former students (he was a high school teacher in the 90s). Shortly thereafter, the biography was withdrawn and republished by the smaller Skyhorse Publishing. For critics who considered Roth an extreme sexist, not only as author but also as a man, it was something like a divine test.

However, another biography of Roth was released a few months later, this time by Ira Nadel, biographer of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, and Leon Uris. This is an “unofficial” biography of Roth, for which the biographer never received any “permission” from the author, and with “bad tongues” saying that Roth took the outcasts out of circulation, while allegedly persuading his friends not to talk to Neidel. This is true? I called Ira Neidel and he told me about all this, about Roth and his work.

If anything separates the two biographies, it is that Bailey is limited to purely biographical aspects, largely leaving the work unattended, while Naidel, on the contrary, strives for a more “critical” biography, for how life can illuminate the letter. It is no coincidence that book it is called Philip Roth: The Opposite Life (Oxford University Press, 2021), Philip Roth: The Opposite Life, an oblique reference to Roth’s novel of the same name, but mostly a nod to its main purpose: to look beyond the myth. . Naidel, who is ten years younger than Roth, is also Jewish, also from Newark, Roth’s birthplace, and has a keen interest in contemporary American Jewish writers. “To understand Roth, you have to read Bellow,” he tells me over the phone. “Their relationship could be the subject of a separate biographical study. There are hundreds of letters between them, many of which have not been studied. Roth, being much younger, was in awe of him. But there was some competition between them. Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Roth did not. In fact, Bellow gave him a top hat, which he wore to an awards ceremony in Stockholm. The mouth kept it as a talisman.”

“We must be able to see beyond the myth—or beyond the demon, depending on how one sees the Roth. I tried to be a little more aggressive than Blake’s biography. He was hired by Roth, he was his official biographer. I, as an outsider, had the privilege of taking some liberties. My goal was not to destroy the author, but the myth and public figure that Roth had been building so insistently and, I would say, anxiously from the very beginning of his career.

– In fact. There was something academic about his early writings, those that followed Columbus. He taught at universities and loved it. He loved his students and loved to tell people about Henry James, about Melville, about European writers. I think the university side overshadowed the author. When he decided to write fiction in which his own experience was placed like a mirror, he found his voice. I think he needed to tell himself that it was “ok” to confess. The Tailor has this structure: the whole book is a psychoanalytic session between its hero and his therapist. It was considered something of a rebellion against Jewish tradition, which could not stand such self-mocking and confessional speech. In 1969, when American literature was testing its limits, its freedoms, its morality, it sold millions of copies. This is the Burroughs era, Gore Vidal. So in a sense, The Tailor was not entirely new. And yet they treated it that way.

This rumor is a little exaggerated. He never tried to stop me. Blake also contributed to this misunderstanding. About a dozen years ago I wrote a kind of reading guide about Roth’s work and life (cf. Critical Companion to Philip Roth, ed. Facts on File, 2011). I don’t know how it happened, but he managed to get the book’s typescript and react negatively to the paragraph about Claire Bloom, his ex-wife. Everything connected with Bloom was forbidden for Roth. Through a lawyer, I was asked to edit this particular paragraph. I didn’t mind seeing it with my editor, but then Roth’s agents found out that I was preparing a long biography of the author, which was true. It was then explained to me that if I really wanted to continue, I had to know that this would be a biography that would not get Roth’s approval. I just moved on. This is all. It is not true that Blake said that I had many rejections from Roth’s friends and associates. Everyone spoke to me. But so be it. I met Roth himself twice, but did not interview him.

– I’m glad you said that. The main reason I wrote this book was to explore the relationship between work and life. To show habits, behaviors and how they manifest themselves in writing. Roth loved secrets. And, of course, he believed that people always betrayed him. Looking closely, every decade there was someone he thought was a traitor. First, he was betrayed by his first wife. She lied to him about her pregnancy. Then there was Claire Bloom. And others, and others. A dark point is the extent to which Roth also felt some kind of betrayal from his mother when he was young. It was something he was unlikely to admit to publicly, but there is something interesting about it.

“They told me that if I really wanted to continue, I had to know that this was going to be a biography that wouldn’t get Roth’s approval. I just moved on.”

– Yes, to some extent also because of #MeToo. Another critical biography of Georgetown University professor Jacques Berlinblau has been released, titled The Philip Roth We Don’t Know. She is extremely aggressive about Roth’s so-called misogyny. Note that this book had already been written before the Bailey scandal broke.

– What the biography can show is what I call “origin”: what is the origin of Roth’s obsessions in this matter. How his obsession with American history began in his later writings. The concept of startups is very important. How changes occur in the writer’s life and how they pass into his work, a biography can illuminate.

– It happened again. Mark Sohrer began writing his famous biography of Sinclair Lewis, and by the time he finished it, he hated it. The difference with Atlas is that in his case, Bellow was still alive. I met with James several times. He is a very serious critic and scholar. After completing the biography, he became more critical of Bellow. Bellow realized this and began to distance himself to the point where they almost became enemies. Roth’s role in this rivalry is interesting: he encouraged Atlas to write a biography. He knew him well. When the book comes out, Roth hates it. And he starts a campaign for a new biography of Bellow and suggests that Zachary Linder write a new biography, and what comes out is a meticulously detailed, to the point of exaggeration, biography, but without a trace of criticism or analysis. I’m not interested in what he wore in Stockholm, I’m interested to know what Bellow thought, how he felt when he received the Nobel Prize. And you won’t know that from Linder’s biography. But that’s exactly what Roth wanted. You see it in Bailey too. You learn a lot of useless details, but you are left without any depth. Bailey has one goal: to portray Roth as something of a hero. I am interested in its contradictions and cracks. He was a very angry person. Where did this anger come from?

– Yes, right. I have mixed feelings about this book.

– The Ghost Writer. And secondly, “I married a communist.” The figure of the father in American Romance is also magnificent.

“Perhaps because there is a contradictory relationship between the person and the work. On the one hand, he lived as a hermit, and on the other hand, having gone to New York, he wanted to be revered and deified. He gained great fame when he met Claire Bloom. Their life together in London was widely publicized along with other celebrities at premieres with Pinter. And he liked it. Be a celebrity. But he wanted to hide in Connecticut and go unnoticed. He had an internal conflict about this. Celebrity vs hermit. He needed isolation to write.

All books by Philip Roth in Greek are published by Polis.