Roth’s Reckoning
Blake Bailey wrote about misogynists for years. The establishment never even stopped to think he was one.
In early 2014, I had started shopping around a few chapters of a memoir, when a fresh-faced agent turned up in my Inbox wanting to represent me. Not knowing the literary world back then, I agreed. Followed by the signing papers came a suggestion to read The Splendid Things We Planned by Blake Bailey.
Wanting to please my agent, I bought a copy and settled down to the story of the Oklahoma-bred Bailey and his nuclear family, comprised of an obtuse, yet well-meaning lawyer, a self-serving and neglectful German mother and a degenerate older brother, whom Bailey both despised and adored. Bailey’s writing was unsparing. He found little compassion for his family, especially his brother, Scott Bailey, and made himself out to be the darkly comic anti-hero of the book — the one who got out of Oklahoma and made something of his life, if at the expense of everyone else. Bailey’s book nonetheless became a critical success and a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.
By now, if you live in or just circle the literary world, you will have heard about Blake Bailey, the disgraced biographer of depressive, abusive and chauvinistic men such as Richard Yates, John Cheever and most recently, Philip Roth. Perhaps it was the biographically adverse Roth who should have been the most discriminating when it came to picking the chronicler of his checkered life, and might have read The Splendid Things We Planned — or asked around about him. Roth, unfortunately, did not. Perhaps, Norton, the publisher of the Roth biography, should have heeded the warnings of several women who objected to publication of Bailey’s work long before he made the spotlight. Unfortunately, it didn’t. And now, in the past week, booksellers, critics and readers must contend with a literary scandal so lurid, it makes Bailey’s late brother look angelic compared to him. “You’re gonna be just like me,” a drunken Scott (Bailey) predicted, as recounted in The Splendid Things We Planned. “You’re gonna be worse.”
I found The Splendid Things We Planned bleak and incredibly sad — the opposite of its publisher’s characterization (“darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother”), but I thought it presented a good opportunity for a story for one of our home state’s papers and contacted Bailey. We met for a drink on a warm March day in Greenwich Village, a few hours before the 2014 National Book Critics’ ceremony. Bailey fit the profile of a typical Southern gentleman: preppy, charming and ever doting on his wife and young daughter, if not a bit strained when interacting with others. “To Adrian, a fellow sufferer. Good luck with your own memoir,” Bailey wrote on my copy.
When it came down to asking the hard questions about his deceased brother and estranged family, however, he grew cagey. When the article finally ran, Bailey was not pleased and told my editor so. At that point, I experienced the boorish, exhaustive, condescending and even ruthless Bailey, who disputed any fact that might blemish his reputation.
Looking back on my own experience with Bailey now, however, I find it pathetic and darkly funny. Darkly funny because I could hardly believe he considered an article about him in a tiny Oklahoma newspaper potentially ruinous when he had trashed his entire family in a book. Pathetic, because Bailey was so deluded by his own esteem that he failed to abide by that tired but true bromide about people in glass houses not throwing stones.
We can all speculate for hours about the reasons Bailey has chosen to chronicle the lives of some of the most well-read and most morally circumspect authors of the twentieth century. Maybe he identified with all of these men, as flawed as they were and the depths to which most of them hated their lives. “If the prerequisite of any great writer’s life is an unhappy childhood, then Richard Yates was especially blessed,” Bailey wrote in the first chapter of his book, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates.
Maybe Bailey had found a medium in which to channel his own fascination and ultimate degradation of women. “At the Iowa Workshop, the 61-year-old Cheever positively accosted colleagues to let them know that the night before he had a nosebleed and orgasm at the same time! With a 22-year-old girl!” Bailey wrote in Cheever: A Life, his 2009 biography of the writer. Maybe Bailey just simply went for the genre that would gain him the most acclaim, figuring that laudatory remarks from every major publication in the United States and the UK would shield him from past indiscretions. As recently as a month ago, David Remnick, the New Yorker editor and FoR (Friend of Roth) praised Bailey’s biography, writing that “Although Roth would not have enjoyed some of the tumult that will now attend its publication, he might have admired his biographer’s industry… The man who emerges is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others, then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language, devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of fiction.” Remnick noted that both he and Bailey attended Roth’s burial “in a small graveyard on the campus of Bard College, in upstate New York,” as if both were somehow anointed. When the allegations about Bailey came out, however, he let Alexandra Schwartz do the talking.
The problem with all of this navel gazing, however, is that it only adds intrigue, and therefore, publicity to Bailey’s book, which only begets and empowers the perpetuation of men like Yates, Cheever, Roth and now Bailey, in the literary world. The literary teeth gnashing and brow-beating also serves to further drown out the voices of the women who come forward to levy legitimate charges against them. It’s an exceptional — and disturbing — fact that after his ex-wife Claire Bloom wrote Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, which was mostly about her relationship with Roth, he wrote a nearly 300-page rebuttal Notes for my Biographer, which would have been published, had friends not stopped Roth. This was noted in Remnick’s review. Bloom’s book is ranked #25, 629 on Amazon, while Bailey’s book is #209 overall, #1 in author biographies. In response to accusations of sexual grooming his eighth-grade students at Lusher School in New Orleans, Bailey has taken a play from his patron, Roth, using his personal attorney to tell the New Orleans Times-Picayune “It is absurd to suggest that he was grooming students for anticipated encounters as adults many years later. The allegations in your email are false, hurtful descriptions of conduct between adults. Mr. Bailey has never treated a woman inappropriately and has never forced himself on a woman.” Bailey had previously written emails to women with whom he had questionable (at best) sexual encounters. “Whatever the rumor mill says, I had sex with no minors or students who were my students at the time,” Bailey wrote in one. ““For what it’s worth, you weren’t in 8th grade when the night in question occurred; you were in your 20s and I was in my 30s (just)…”
The #MeToo movement has brought forward very important stories about the abusive treatment of women, or at best, the coarseness and acrimony toward them. But the patriarchy remains alive and well. Unfortunately, #MeToo is often perceived as a cudgel by which women brow-beat men for all their desires and missteps. However, the literary world seems to be the one area in which #MeToo has not applied — until (maybe) now. One must look no further than the treatment given to serious books by men about their lives and relationships and compare it to the reduction of books by women about their lives and their relationships to “chick-lit”. Perhaps a new genre could be created to encapsulate books by authors like Blake Bailey: “chauvo-bio” or “misog-memoir” or simply “aggro-prose”. At least then, we would all be warned about the perils that could lie ahead.
Following all the turmoil in this last round of “bad boys revealed”, however, another solution is warranted. And that solution is to cast off the Roths, the Cheevers, the Baileys of the world in favor of publication of serious women’s literary, journalistic and biographic work. Rather than yet another tiresome account of (Ernest) Hemingway, (David) Foster-Wallace or (William) Faulkner, how about a fifth or sixth biography of George Eliot, Anaïs Nin or Dorothy Parker? They don’t all have to be puritan. Rather than finding the next Jonathan Safran Foer, how about agents look for a modern talent that could be the next Susan Sontag? (Lena Dunham doesn’t count.) Finally, in a world in which 71.7 percent of the biographies surveyed by Slate in 2015 were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors, urge the gate-keepers to put all literary work on a level playing field, with the same promotion, the same perks and the same adulation — after of course, an extensive buying spree of work by women in order to finally dilute the voices of so many toxic men.
Sadly, despite the number of women coming forward, there are those who are using two different arguments: a) that Bailey is being tried in the court of public opinion, of b) that we should not forsake the man’s work with his personal life. It’s an argument that Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, made on his blog, Desire and Fate. “In effect, … what both the Story Factory (Bailey’s literary agency) and Norton (Bailey’s publisher) have done is retroactively impose a morals clause on their respective agreements with Bailey,” Rieff has written. “Instead, we are entering a Woke version of the Victorian Age, or post-Hays Code Hollywood, in which censorship will be the norm, not the exception.”
In reality, it’s probably only a matter of time before Bailey publishes again. Maybe another memoir coming clean about his exploits and his time in treatment for sexual addiction? Perhaps a heart-wrenching account of his destroyed relationships with his wife and teenage daughter… At the same time, knowing Bailey and his work, this tome would also include resentment toward his publishing protectors for dropping him faster than one can say “Land Ho” — the title of Bailey’s first chapter on Roth.
