Blake Bailey’s fall from grace was precipitous. After years of trying, he had finally made it. Yes, he had written a memoir and well-received biographies of American literary titans Richard Yates, John Cheever and Charles Jackson. Yes, he had won a few prizes and been a finalist for more. But in 2012 he had landed a big deal with a big publisher to write a big book on a big name. And when it was published in April 2021, Philip Roth: The Biography was instantly lauded and went straight onto the bestseller lists. Bailey had made it. Cynthia Ozick called it a “narrative masterwork.” The New Yorker considered it “industrious, rigorous, uncowed.” The Guardian reported it was “beautifully written.”
Some — your reviewer among them — were not so taken with the book; and New York Times and New Republic critics Parul Sehgal and Laura Marsh made especially forceful critiques of how it documented Roth’s notorious relations with women. Some of the evidence — Roth’s spectacularly failed marriages, chronic infidelity and limited range of women characters — was already well-known. But the biography’s account of seedier relations, including Roth’s sleeping with university students whom a colleague procured and vetted for him, were aggravated by the way Bailey chose to depict them.
His description of Maggie Martinson, Roth’s first wife, for example, cited Roth’s grotesque references to her “withered and discoloured” vagina; his account of their marriage was akin to a fable in which a promising young man is entrapped and almost brought undone by an all-devouring harpy. Even Roth, in The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), had been wary of caricaturing and damning Martinson in this way. Yet Bailey, tacitly endorsing the idea that Martinson was a sociopath, saw the worst in her every action and presented her untimely death in a car accident as a relief for all involved. For Bailey’s critics, instances like these were reason to liken him to “an adoring wingman who thinks his friend [Roth] can do better,” as Marsh said, and to portray his biography an apologia for its subject, as Sehgal said.
Coming at the height of the #MeToo storm, the biography of someone like Roth was always destined to attract lightning. Yet soon Bailey too was being struck by bolts from above. First came the reports that he had slept with women who had been students at the middle school at which he was a teacher. Then followed allegations he had groomed those students for those future affairs, and that he had raped one of them.
Yet more serious was the claim that Bailey had sexually assaulted a woman in 2015 and then, when she complained to his publisher, emailed her to deny he had ever had nonconsensual sex with anyone. In that email, he promised to defend his reputation and invoked his wife and daughter in an appeal for her to desist from any future accusations: “Such an accusation, even untrue, would destroy them.”
When reports of that exchange were published, the effect was immediate. Bailey’s marriage collapsed. His literary agent dropped him. Writers who had puffed the biography turned on it. Friends and acquaintances disowned him. W.W. Norton pulled the biography from the shelves and announced a six-figure donation to organisations for victims of sexual assault and harassment. Philip Roth: The Biography had not even been out for a month.
“Boom,” writes Bailey, “… and there I was, as smouldering and bewildered as Wile E. Coyote after his latest Acme contraption has backfired.”
And then came another bolt whose zig-zagging charge runs through Canceled Lives, Bailey’s newly published account of this whole affair: his father was dying.
This new book’s journey to publication has been fraught. Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Canceled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.
Making much of Burck Bailey’s reputation as one of Oklahoma’s finest lawyers, Bailey positions his father as a distant figure whom he could never satisfy. When Bailey presented his father with a copy of his Richard Yates biography, Burck replied mockingly, “Your two-and-a-half inches of posterity.” When he called to tell his father the book had been well reviewed in the New York Times he was put firmly in his place: “The Harper’s review wasn’t so good.”
This habitual disapproval, which included a decade-long estrangement, dissipates as Burck’s mortality becomes clear and Bailey’s disgrace begins. “I’m not sure how I go on from here,” Bailey writes to his father on the day the Roth biography was withdrawn. “I want you to know that I am here for you,” Burck replies. “Stay strong, be brave, aim high. Tomorrow will be different than today. Time will help. I love you.”
Soon Bailey comes to see much of himself in his father: in voice and in looks they are nearly identical. They shared an inability to save Bailey’s brother Scott, whose drug addiction and suicide was the subject of Bailey’s 2014 memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned. On matters of sex, meanwhile, they are cut from the same cloth. As Bailey puts it, understatedly, “Burck and I also had a certain degree of lechery in common.”
Bailey doesn’t wholly regard his own infidelity as a gift from his father, but he doesn’t disclaim it either. As depicted here, father and son bond over sexual escapades and their consequences. As a teenager, Bailey plays wingman — his term — for his father by distracting the son of a woman Burck is trying to sleep with. Introducing his son to his latest mistress on the street, Burck winks at him; later, he tells Bailey how that woman would signal it was time for a tryst in the office by flashing him in the corridor. “Now, I call that fun,” Bailey writes.
This over-familiar, rather icky dynamic has a passing resemblance to the apparent relationship between Bailey and Roth (though Bailey denies feeling any filial bond). As Bailey recounted in 2019, Roth had been sceptical that a gentile from Oklahoma could possibly write about a Jewish American man. In their initial meeting, however, they leafed through a photograph album of Roth’s girlfriends and Bailey mentioned the “just wow” looks of actress Ali MacGraw, who had starred in the film adaptation of Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus. Roth remarked that he once had the opportunity to date MacGraw.
“My God, man,” Bailey exclaimed, immediately, “why didn’t you?”
“Okay,” Roth replied, “you’re hired.”
For Bailey, the exchange vindicated his view that a biographer should not take “too prim or judgmental of a view.” Yet the exchange also seems to have cemented a dynamic in which Bailey was a rapt audience for his subject: someone who would marvel at Roth’s prowess on the page and with women; someone who would write, seemingly seriously, even about the privilege of listening to Roth take a piss.
Bailey doesn’t draw out or identify such a connection; if anything, Canceled Lives avoids engaging with criticisms of the Roth biography. The aversion is unfortunate. Bailey mentions that his wife encouraged him to be clearer in the manuscript about his disapproval of Roth’s behaviour, especially the procuring and vetting of university students. If the advice was wasted — “Well, it was a different time to be sure,” Bailey wrote in the biography — the issue is worth reflecting on: should biographers make their disapproval of a subject’s behaviour explicit? Can they let the behaviour speak for itself?
Bailey also avoids any sense of the context of his disgrace. He writes not at all about the #MeToo movement and doesn’t mention (beyond Roth) men whose professional and personal lives foundered after public allegations of sexual harassment. Canceled Lives includes as an appendix a PEN America press release criticising W.W. Norton’s withdrawal of the Roth biography, yet there is no exploration of what that decision suggests about censorship, commerce and art. The title invokes cancel culture yet says little to nothing about it except what it is like to be “cancelled.”
Instead, Bailey attempts to rebut the allegations levelled at him in April 2021. He admits to cheating on his wife and being a wretch of a husband. He admits to flings with former students — one when she was seventeen — but stresses they were consensual and legal. He points out that he has not been charged with any crime. He denies any suggestion he was grooming his students for future relationships and devotes pages to rebutting the allegations of sexual assault. Some of it is convincing; some of it is not as resounding as he might have thought. At other points, such as when he denies even having known what “grooming” was, his obliviousness to power dynamics and the impressionability of adolescents reads as wilful blindness.
Bailey is undoubtedly deeply aggrieved by what happened to him. The pages that describe his sudden fall from grace are suffused with a bewildered naivety as he grapples for some process by which it can be slowed, arrested and reversed. There is also an overwhelming, if impotent, anger. He finds friends turning on him despite what he tells them is the truth. Unable to face the news coverage, he commissions a friend to keep tabs on developments and hires a lawyer to handle the media and any legal issues. He casts about for a literary agent who can reassure skittish European publishers. He thinks, for a time, that the whole affair might blow over. “Blake,” one friend finally levels with him, “the life you knew is over. Forever. The sooner you accept that, the better.”
Bailey’s “cancellation” almost certainly felt absolute, devastating and never-ending. But it has been dissipating ever since it began. Skyhorse — an imprint of Simon & Schuster that “maintains a firm stance against censorship and aims to provide a full spectrum of political, theological, cultural, and philosophical viewpoints” — arrived in May 2021 to buy the publishing rights to the Roth biography and swiftly put it back on the shelves. It also struck a deal with Bailey for Repellent/Cancelled Lives. A friend set Bailey up with ghost-writing work. Another set him up in a spare garage. And now, some four years on, Bailey is at work on another book, a biography of the writer James Salter. •
Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me
Blake Bailey | Skyhorse Publishing | US$28.99 | 192 pages
