Among the social issues that have become prominent over the last few months, especially in the wake of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, have been those relating to crime and punishments, policing and penology. Such terms as “mass incarceration,” “the new Jim Crow,” “defunding the police,” and many others have become part of a common vocabulary by no means limited to activists of the progressive movement. But I have also been bemused by developments in the literary world. Literary intellectuals have played a huge role in shaping public attitudes, at least elite public attitudes, on such questions. For example a little book published by Victor Hugo in 1829 (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) has been credited with starting the long, slow eradication of the practice of capital punishment in many parts of the world. There now seem to be new developments on this front.
In 1981 a career criminal named Jack Abbott published a very successful book entitled In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. The “beast” of the title was a metaphor for the machinery of incarceration that in one form or another had controlled most of the thirty-seven years of Abbott’s miserable life up until that point. The crimes that had put Abbott in prison were numerous and varied, but once incarcerated he had put a capstone atop them by murdering another inmate. His literary career was most unusual. He had been discovered, aided, promoted, and sponsored by the literary superstar Norman Mailer. Abbott had learned that Mailer was working on his own extraordinary account of crime and punishment, the book that became The Executioner’s Song. This is his genre-bending true crime journovel about Gary Gilmore, a murderer with a profile strikingly similar to Abbott’s. Both men were incarcerated in Utah, and Gilmore would become the first American to suffer capital punishment after the supreme court reinstated it after a legal hiatus. Abbott had written to Mailer to tell him that he (Abbott) would be a better source about the actual gritty circumstances of prison life than Gilmore himself. Mailer went for this, adopted him as a kind of demi-monde protegé, engaged in correspondence with him, worked for his early release, and played a major role in the publication of his letters. Six weeks after being paroled, and the very night before a review of In the Belly of the Beast appeared in the New York Times, Abbott stabbed a young man to death at a Greenwich Village eatery: a review to die for, so to speak.
Abbott’s groupies naturally included some Hollywood celebrities, notably Susan Sarandon. The aggrandizement of authorial criminals and thugs by the cultural elites has its own history, part of which I have touched upon in one of my books.* I called it “chain-gang chic” in imitation of Tom Wolfe’s wonderful title Radical Chic of 1971, an account of Leonard Bernstein’s famous fête for the Black Panthers. Jack Abbott was a brutal sociopath and a proven menace to society, but his gratuitous snuffing out of a promising young life received a strangely muted condemnation among the intelligentsia. The post-homicidal reviews did have more reservations about the writing. On the whole people seemed more inclined to criticize Mailer. So far as I know, Abbott suffered no reproof from his publisher, Random House. Only a successful wrongful death suit by his victim’s family kept the killer from profiting handsomely from the book’s healthy sales.
Mailer died at eighty-four. Philip Roth was ten years younger than Mailer and died at eighty-five, thus extending the rarely acknowledged New Jersey dominance of American letters by a whole decade. It is now Roth who has become obliquely central, so to speak, to the cultural crisis of literary criminality.
Not that there is the slightest suggestion that Philip Roth did anything criminal. He was a really great writer and, some of his friends continue to maintain against mountains of plausible published evidence, also an amiable chap. I never met the man. We have no criminal statutes against vanity or self-regard, or none should scape whipping; but one may still regard his near obsession with his reputational legacy as extreme. No one is more likely to be aware of the importance of the big literary biography than a big New York writer, and Roth was the biggest. His strategy was to select a biographer to his liking, and to privilege this person with exclusive access to a mammoth archive of carefully preserved documents, many of them unique, and to make himself available for innumerable lengthy interviews with this person alone. The resulting book would necessarily have an unchallengeable depth and authority.
A biography of such a major literary figure achieved under such circumstances had a very good chance of bringing its author both fame and fortune. One supposes that many a writer would have liked to toss their hat into the ring. In the end the person graced with the assignment was Blake Bailey, a one-time schoolteacher and seasoned literary biographer of high reputation. Published by Norton, Bailey’s door-stopper sized Philip Roth appeared to the generally expected high praise a few months ago. According to Cynthia Ozick in a lead review for the Times book supplement, it is a “a narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny.” I haven’t read the book—but, Wow!
Yet with the buzz about the book, the trouble started. Me Too for Bailey too. Women came forward—that is the canonical somber phrase—women came forward to accuse the biographer of sexual misbehavior in days of yore. This was not trivial stuff, especially as some of it related to his time as a teacher of young girls. But so far as I know none of the charges came supported by contemporary police reports. Bailey has denied all accusations vehemently and categorically. He remains entitled to a theoretical and high-minded presumption of innocence; but this is one of the circumstances in which fireless smoke is rare. Norton, the publishers of the book, nearly a guaranteed best-seller and money-maker, did something extraordinary. They withdrew all support for it, cancelled plans for future print runs, and announced the title would go out of print. It makes me feel better about their merely having remaindered two of my own titles!
This is a remarkable cultural development. So far as I know no reader of Plutarch, Seutonius, Vasari, Casanova, or Boswell had implied definite moral requirements for a biographer. Probably a good thing, too. Remember that Jack Abbott stabbed a man to death on the eve of a glowing Times review that his publisher, Random House, happily used to boost the sales of his book. By rights this should have nothing to do with the reputation of Philip Roth, who has been dead for three years. Not too much happens “by rights” these days. I don’t know whether “sex-obsessed” is a fair characterization of Roth’s fiction, but he sure put fellatio on the literary map. Many of the charges of swinishness raised against him—and they are many—relate to alleged misogyny and sexual boorishness. One of the chief hostile witnesses, if I can call her that, is his long-time girlfriend and short-time wife, the actress Claire Bloom. Concerning Roth’s attitudes toward women and behavior with them, her memoir of their marriage is pretty devastating and unfortunately very convincing. The sea of troubles that has swept over his biographer is also plashing up over the memory of the dead author. Nasty as it is, the suspicion that Roth may have chosen his biographer partly in the knowledge, belief, or hope that a like-minded masculist would have a more indulgent attitude toward certain recurrent patterns of his life than would the neo-Puritans has been aired. To fret about what one’s biographer will say is a rarefied worry reserved for those few expectant of biographies. To them we may cite the noble opinion of Cicero: fame is the shadow cast by virtue. But as literary biographies get longer and longer, I would hope that a reader’s stamina in slogging on to page seven hundred might be regarded a sufficient demand. Conducting a preliminary moral investigation of the biographer’s biography can surely be left to the realm of supererogation.
*The Anti-Communist Manifestos, pp. 149-150.
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