Blake Bailey may have achieved what half a century’s worth of outraged rabbis and feminist literary critics could not: the cancellation of Philip Roth.
One year ago this week, Bailey, the media-caressed biographer, was engulfed in a variety of #MeToo scandals. Roth, his famed and recently deceased subject, has since then been almost completely ignored by those high-toned cultural places (e.g., The New Yorker, The New York Times) where his name had been a virtual watermark for decades. Roth’s influential friends, seemingly perched on every major Opinion or Arts page, opine about his art far less. “Nobody wants to touch Roth right now,” a journalist confided in me. Her warning was issued shortly after numerous allegations of rape surfaced against Bailey, author of Philip Roth:The Biography (Bailey has denied the allegations).
Is Roth’s legacy undergoing cancellation by association? Will it be destroyed by a Lit-world mess that, in Jo Livingstone’s words, “has tendrils reaching into every level of media and publishing.” Those tendrils, I would add, kept tenaciously wrapping themselves around The New York Times. This would be the same New York Times whose editorial board recently bemoaned “a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.”
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That Roth has endured a proxy cancellation, I concede, is possible. Ironic too! He annointed Bailey to provide posterity with the “correct” version of his life. He even deputized him to be the last reader of a tranche of sensitive materials which were then to be burned, scholars be damned! (Roth had little use for scholars, at least those who were averse to conflicts of interest). Bailey was just the last in a long line of well-platformed chums, confidants, and lovers whom Roth authorized to explain him to the world at large.
If Bailey’s alleged misdeeds did in fact besmirch Roth’s good (?) name, it’s still possible the author might stage a comeback. The reality or finality of “cancellation” is unproven. When established artists infuriate a given community—David Chappelle and Kathy Griffin come to mind—they often rebound as their diehard fans rally around them. Whether Roth’s literary afterlife will resemble the steady confetti drop of adulation he experienced during his earthly existence is an open question.
My view is that regardless of the Bailey affair, there are reasons to doubt that Roth’s commercial future is rosy and that more confetti drops lie ahead (and above). Even during Roth’s lifetime the trends suggested otherwise. And this is why we should be careful when using the C word.
To begin with, the audience for serious fiction is dwindling. In 2004, Roth himself predicted that in “20 or 25 years” people won’t read novels at all. “The book,” he sighed in 2009, “can’t compete with the screen.” By 2014 he concluded that literature will soon be consumed by only “a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry.” This augurs badly for Roth as it does for all writers of demanding fiction.
So does the plight of the college English major, currently undergoing something of an extinction event. Fiction’s eventual end-users (i.e., readers) are assembled and equipped with literary sensitivities in undergraduate lecture halls. More and more, the students in those classrooms are studying STEM not Stendahl, E-Commerce not Ellison, Machine Translation not Morrison.
Even if and when Roth pops up on a few syllabi, his long-term prospects appear dim. In my recent study of the #MeToo movement, I noted that today’s undergraduates are not “vibing” with the priapic, sexed-up, bad boys who strutted across Roth’s pages. Nor are they connecting with the procession of broken, beautiful female protagonists who loved them.
There are, of course, exceptions. But after decades of teaching his fiction, I find this generation uniquely impervious to Roth’s pervy charms. His core constituency is composed of mostly white liberals who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. One needn’t consult actuarial tables to understand why this demographic will not sustain his sales for much longer.
True, there are other ways that perished writers can outlive their perishing audiences. A flatlining reputation may suddenly be reanimated by a cinematic adaptation. Then again, this “Dr. Zhivago Effect,” might not apply here. Unlike Boris Pasternak, many Roth novels were rendered into movies while he was alive. Nearly all of them were flops, commercially and critically.
A writer can also perdure beyond the grave through course adoptions. If Edgar Allan Poe and George Orwell are well known today, it is because students read them in high school. Unfortunately, in this political environment—where even Art Speigelman’s Maus is being censored—Roth is a non-starter. I can predict with certainty that Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater will never be taught in any American high school during my lifetime.
One of Roth’s novels, actually, might have appeal in a post-COVID world trying to process the experience of a plague. Nemesis, his PG-rated dirge about the polio epidemic, could be assigned in AP English. On second thought, its disease-afflicted, God-cursing hero, is something of a proto New-Atheist, so maybe not.
None of this bodes well for Roth’s future sales. Nor does his past sales record. Among the most fascinating revelations in Ira Nadel’s scholarly biography, Philip Roth: A Counterlife, was that after the 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint, “Roth never earned back his advances.” His literary renown outpaced his commercial performance. This leads us to wonder about the role the aforementioned media influencers played in ginning-up his celebrity.
Still, I believe Roth gifted us with some sublime novels (e.g., The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, The Counterlife, The Facts, Indignation). They teem with provocative ideas about the self, what a self is, and how malleable it may be. These themes, I have noticed, do resonate with Gen Zers–a generation exploring the manifold possibilities of the self’s “fluidity.” It’s up to the very scholars Roth often disparaged to persuade them that such ideas merit their scrutiny.
Yet as regards “cancellation,” Roth’s case (among others) recommends prudence; less sensational explanations for his looming obscurity are possible. Maybe his beloved art form was already in commercial decline. Maybe he had already achieved peak popularity. Maybe his renown had been inflated by the very media outlets who now despair over “cancel culture.” Maybe what The New York Times called America’s “free speech problem” is related to the manner in which some voices in this country have been elevated, while others have been marginalized. Maybe it’s our obligation to look for more complex narratives behind any charge of silencing or censorship.
Jacques Berlinerblau (@Berlinerblau; Jberlinerblau.com) is a professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. He has taught Philip Roth’s fiction for three decades. His most recent books are The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography (University of Virginia Press) and Secularism: The Basics (Routledge).
