ellauri106.html on line 46: Philip Roth has not had much luck with biographers. Late in his life, furiously aggrieved after the failure of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the publication of Bloom’s incendiary memoir of their years together, he asked a close friend, Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, to take on the task. Roth sent Miller lists of family members and friends he wanted to be interviewed, along with the questions that he felt should be asked. (“Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?”) It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Roth had wanted Miller to refute a familiar charge, “this whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit!” that he felt flattened his long erotic history into one false accusation. But Miller came to his own conclusion. “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip,” he told a cousin of Roth’s. (Sandy was Roth’s older brother.) “They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”
ellauri106.html on line 126: A committed atheist, Philip Roth feared only one form of posthumous punishment: being trapped for all eternity in a hostile biography. In 2007, Roth, echoing a similar quip from Oscar Wilde, said, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Roth’s had already been the subject of a harsh and unforgiving portrait in Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), the memoirs of his former wife, the actor Claire Bloom. As John Updike noted in The New York Review of Books, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” This crisp summary ended Roth’s friendship with Updike, even after Updike made clear he was recapping Bloom’s book and not affirming its accuracy.
ellauri106.html on line 128: In a private note about Bloom’s book, Roth asserted, “Another writer my age awaiting a biography and awaiting death (which is worse?) might not care. I do.” Roth put enormous efforts into finding a biographer who could contest Bloom’s account. His first choice was the academic Ross Miller, but the novelist had a falling out with his biographer as the would-be James Boswell resisted the imperious dictates of the modern Dr. Johnson. Roth ended up describing his relationship with Miller as “my third bad marriage.” After unsuccessfully trying to rope in friends such as Hermione Lee and Judith Thurman to tell his life story, Roth settled on Blake Bailey, the author of highly regarded biographies of troubled male American writers, notably Richard Yates and John Cheever.
ellauri106.html on line 130: Given long-standing feminist arguments that Roth is a misogynist—not to mention the portrait in Bloom’s memoirs—it was inevitable that any Roth biography would spark arguments about gender politics. What was surprising is that the debate would center around the biographer more than Roth. In the wake of the biography’s release, Bailey has been accused of shocking acts. Four former students from the elite New Orleans high school where he’d taught during the 1990s came forward to complain that he had groomed them as minors and sexually pursued them as adults. One of these women claimed he raped her. Another former student came forward with an allegation of attempted rape when she was an adult. Finally, Valentina Rice, a New York publishing executive, told The New York Times that Bailey raped her in 2015. Bailey strenuously denies all these allegations.
ellauri106.html on line 263: He was wedded to long-time partner Claire Bloom from 1990 to 1995. Roth and Bloom’s five-year marriage ended in divorce in 1995.
ellauri106.html on line 386: A committed atheist, Philip Roth feared only one form of posthumous punishment: being trapped for all eternity in a hostile biography. In 2007, Roth, echoing a similar quip from Oscar Wilde, said, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Roth’s had already been the subject of a harsh and unforgiving portrait in Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), the memoirs of his former wife, the actor Claire Bloom. As John Updike noted in The New York Review of Books, “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” This crisp summary ended Roth’s friendship with Updike, even after Updike made clear he was recapping Bloom’s book and not affirming its accuracy.
ellauri106.html on line 388: In a private note about Bloom’s book, Roth asserted, “Another writer my age awaiting a biography and awaiting death (which is worse?) might not care. I do.” Roth put enormous efforts into finding a biographer who could contest Bloom’s account. His first choice was the academic Ross Miller, but the novelist had a falling out with his biographer as the would-be James Boswell resisted the imperious dictates of the modern Dr. Johnson. Roth ended up describing his relationship with Miller as “my third bad marriage.” After unsuccessfully trying to rope in friends such as Hermione Lee and Judith Thurman to tell his life story, Roth settled on Blake Bailey, the author of highly regarded biographies of troubled male American writers, notably Richard Yates and John Cheever.
ellauri106.html on line 390: Given long-standing feminist arguments that Roth is a misogynist—not to mention the portrait in Bloom’s memoirs—it was inevitable that any Roth biography would spark arguments about gender politics. What was surprising is that the debate would center around the biographer more than Roth. In the wake of the biography’s release, Bailey has been accused of shocking acts. Four former students from the elite New Orleans high school where he’d taught during the 1990s came forward to complain that he had groomed them as minors and sexually pursued them as adults. One of these women claimed he raped her. Another former student came forward with an allegation of attempted rape when she was an adult. Finally, Valentina Rice, a New York publishing executive, told The New York Times that Bailey raped her in 2015. Bailey strenuously denies all these allegations.
ellauri106.html on line 624: Roth’s ex-wife, Claire Bloom, wrote about their relationship in her memoir, Leaving A Doll’s House, 25 years ago. You could also read Roth’s not-exactly-contrite reaction to Bloom’s complaints, his 1998 novel, I Married A Communist, in which the protagonist’s vicious wife was clearly based on Bloom.
ellauri109.html on line 567: Roth and Bloom divorced, miserably, in 1995. A year later, Bloom published a memoir, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” in which Roth was depicted as brilliant and initially attentive to the demands of her career, but also as unpredictable, unfaithful, remote, and, at times, horribly unkind, not least about Bloom’s devotion to her grown daughter. The book quoted incensed faxes that Roth sent Bloom at the end of their union, demanding that she pay sixty-two billion dollars for failing to honor their prenuptial agreement, and another bill for the “five or six hundred hours” that he had spent going over her lines with her.
ellauri109.html on line 571: In his fury and his hunger for retribution, Roth produced “Notes for My Biographer,” an obsessive, almost page-by-page rebuttal of Bloom’s memoir: “Adultery makes numerous bad marriages bearable and holds them together and in some cases can make the adulterer a far more decent husband or wife than . . . the domestic situation warrants. (See Madame Bovary for a pitiless critique of this phenomenon.)” Only at the last minute was Roth persuaded by friends and advisers not to publish the diatribe, but he could never put either of his marriages behind him for good. He was similarly incapable of setting aside much smaller grievances. As Benjamin Taylor, one of his closest late-in-life friends, put it in “Here We Are,” a loving, yet knowing, memoir, “The appetite for vengeance was insatiable. Philip could not get enough of getting even.”
ellauri109.html on line 609: At the University of Pennsylvania, a friend and colleague—acting, the friend admits, almost as a “pimp”—helped Roth fill the last seats in his oversubscribed classes with particularly attractive undergraduates. Roth’s treatment of a young woman named Felicity (a pseudonym), a friend and house guest of Claire Bloom’s daughter, is particularly disturbing. Roth made a sexual overture to Felicity, which she rebuffed; the next morning, he left her an irate note accusing her of “sexual hysteria.” When Bloom wrote about the incident in her memoir, Roth answered in his unpublished “Notes” with a sense of affront rather than penitence: “This is what people are. This is what people do. . . . Hate me for what I am, not for what I’m not.”
ellauri272.html on line 418: Bloom wrote: “Ammons’s poetry does for me what Stevens’s did earlier, and the High Romantics [Bloom’s term for William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron] before that; it helps me to live my miserable life.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 349: Bloom was born in 1930 to a poor Orthodox Jewish household in the East Bronx, one of five children. He lost faith early in the Jewish God when he accidentally stumbled on the poetry of Hart Crane. He fell in love with Crane’s enthusiasm for life, his belief in the possibility of ecstatic pleasure, and his overall exuberance. This was in stark contrast to Bloom’s childhood, which he confesses was a lonely time.
xxx/ellauri225.html on line 359: But Bloom’s insights don’t resonate deeply. He is too obsessed with comparing and contrasting, rather than allowing his responses to touch us deeply. He repeats his theory that poets always wrestle with the work of the poets that have come before them, either unconsciously or consciously, and then struggle to find their own voice in reaction to what has come before. There is something anti-transformative about his assertions, often tangled up with incomprehensible jargon.
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