ellauri106.html on line 50: What may be more damning, though, is what the Bailey revelations don’t change. “It wasn’t just ‘Fucked this one fucked that one fucked this one,’ ” Roth once told Miller. Yet Bailey’s biography gives the impression that it was exactly like that: a long life spent writing book after book, and pursuing, then fleeing from, woman after woman after woman.
ellauri106.html on line 52: It was not Bailey’s role as a biographer to pass judgment on his subject. He needed only try to understand him, and to make us understand him, too. “Why shouldn’t I be treated as seriously as Colette on this?” Roth had asked Miller, of the sex question. “She gave a blow job to this guy in the railway station. Who gives a fuck about that? . . . That doesn’t tell me anything. What did hand jobs mean to her?”
ellauri106.html on line 54: So what did sex mean to Roth? Bailey’s book is so caught up in its obsessive cataloguing of paramours that the forest gets lost in an endless succession of trees. The place where Roth found insight into his own character was on the double bag. Over and over, in the novels, he transformed pro life. Bailey’s prurient, exhaustively literal version of that life reverses the effect, and the result is sadly diminishing. What he never grasps is Roth the artist, with his powers of imagination, of expression, of language—what made him worthy of biography at all.
ellauri109.html on line 517: When Updike, in the eighties, felt the sour breath of potential biographers on his neck, he tried to preëmpt his pursuers by writing a series of autobiographical essays about such topics as the Pennsylvania town where he grew up, his stutter, and his skin condition. The resulting collection, “Self-Consciousness,” is a dazzlingly intimate book, but his imagination and industry did more to draw biographical attention than to repel it. In the weeks before his death, of lung cancer, in early 2009, he continued to write, including an admiring review of Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever. And five years later there it was: “Updike,” a biography by Adam Begley.
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