The Ghostwriter

“Where’s the Semen?” Such was the provocative question headline posed by Jesse Tisch in this magazine’s review of the then-forthcoming Philip Roth: The Biography. The biographer in question was Blake Bailey, who had honed his writer-writing-about-writers skills by penning biographies of the writers Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Charles Jackson. Bailey had extensively interviewed Roth and had exclusive access to the Roth archives. The gargantuan 880-page biography that resulted seemed appropriate for a writer as prolific as Roth, who wrote 31 books over the course of his decades-long career.

As rave reviews poured in, the biography seemed to provide a surprisingly demure finale to the life of a writer so often embroiled in controversy. As Tisch noted, when Roth staged his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman’s funeral in his novel The Counterlife, one mourner complained about how sanitized the funeral was: “Here is a writer who broke taboos, fucked around, indiscreet, stepped outside that stuff deliberately, and they bury him like Neil Simon—Simonize our filthy, self-afflicted Zuck!”

What happened next, though, sounded like the universe’s cruel, sardonic response to Tisch’s question—or the synopsis of an unpublished fourth-wall-breaking Roth novel: “A famously polemical novelist named Philip Roth, who, after realizing that his time on Earth was running low, finds a biographer named Blake Bailey—a goy from Oklahoma—to immortalize him in writing. But right after the biography is published to great fanfare, Bailey is accused by a few former students of his time teaching eighth-grade English of ‘grooming’ them—with one accuser even saying that he assigned Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—and later forcing them into sex when they met with him years later as adults.”

As it turned out, Bailey’s biography had mentioned how Roth himself also had sex with his students and was often mired in accusations of misogynistic behavior. The ensuing controversy, which led Bailey’s publisher to cut ties and stop the presses, is a tale of scandal in the age of #MeToo, when readers wonder how much art imitates life, life imitates art, and artists imitate each other. Indeed, such a plot sounds right up there with Roth classics like Operation Shylock and The Human Stain—except that it actually transpired. When I read Tisch’s otherwise excellent review in preparation for this review, I couldn’t help but cringe at how differently the essay reads now.

After four years of wandering in exile, Bailey is back with his recently released memoir Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me. The memoir was published by Skyhorse Publishing, an outfit with a reputation for releasing books from risqué authors, among them Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing, multiple books by current U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Matthew Davis’ picaresque Let Me Try Again; the latter I reviewed a few months ago for this magazine.

While Bailey’s new book is called Canceled Lives, the content is less a cri de coeur against cancel culture or a rehashing of his own cancellation than it is an intimate look at his family—especially at his father, Burck, an accomplished trial lawyer who argued multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. While Bailey does devote a few sections of the memoir to telling his side of the story by discussing and denying the allegations, Bailey knows that, unlike his father, he is a biographer and not a lawyer. While Burck’s strength lay in his ability to argue one side of an accusation, Bailey’s strength lies in his ability to capture people’s lives on the page: to make a word worth a thousand pictures. This ability, which earned him the role of Roth’s official biographer, shines through in the memoir.

The central theme of Canceled Lives is its portrayal of death. Bailey chronicles the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who struggled with drug addiction and crime throughout the years before committing suicide in jail in his thirties. Bailey somewhat shockingly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favor,” because now the family could remember Scott as his delightful younger self and not as what he ended up becoming. Bailey discusses witnessing the final moments of Philip Roth, who had no wife or children, with his former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed instead. As Bailey observed Roth’s final breaths, he thought of his own complex relationship with the man with whom he had forged a complicated relationship, which Bailey describes as not quite exactly like a father-son relationship, but also not like any other biographer-subject relationship that he had ever known. At Roth’s funeral, which was as low-key as Zuckerman’s, Bailey betrayed his “goyish fecklessness” when he “bungled the one traditional Jewish aspect of the funeral” —shoveling spade after spade of dirt into Roth’s grave until he had to be silently reminded that it was someone else’s turn.

There is relatively little of Roth in the flesh here. Bailey doesn’t discuss conversations he had with Roth while Roth was still alive, because of disclosure limitations put on Bailey by the Roth estate. This means this memoir doesn’t feature much about the emotional connection he had with Roth while he was still alive or how their working relationship functioned.

The memoir’s two major deaths are therefore his father’s death and his own social death following his cancellation, which occurred within months of each other. Bailey was always trying to live up to Burck’s long shadow: When Bailey showed Burck his finished first book, a 671-page biography of Richard Yates, Burck mocked it as “two and half inches of posterity.” Philip Roth: The Biography was supposed to finally make his father proud before Burck shuffled off this mortal coil. A few days after the biography finally came out, there was “a flash, and it was over.” Bailey had failed his father again.

While Burck had emailed Bailey a few hours after the allegations were publicized, declaring that he still loved his son, Bailey knew that he was out of chances to finally make his father proud. Several intimate chapters narrate Burck’s slow struggle with cancer, and Burck eventually succumbed a few months after his son’s scandal.

The accusations against Bailey also ended up calling Roth’s legacy into question: Did Roth choose Bailey as his biographer because they were two misogynists yukking it up in private over their mistreatment of women? How much of the biography was Bailey running cover for Roth—and, in turn, for himself? What’s with all these terrible men in the literary world?

Bad behavior aside, what struck me the most about this memoir is how it centers a perspective that is increasingly rare in the literary world: namely, that of the male writer, whether accused of wrongdoing by anyone or not. Today, there is a virtual embargo on male writers—a wall that shows no signs of lifting. A recent article in Compact by Jacob Savage showed that in the contemporary mainstream American publishing industry, young white men have been almost completely shut out of writing about male experiences, and young non-white men are kept on tight leashes. Popular novels centering relationships (platonic and otherwise) between men, such as Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, are now the domain of female writers. Even romances between gay men are typically penned by straight women for other straight women, romances that caricature gay men as soft, sensitive, artsy types instead of depicting the full range of gay male experiences as experienced by men themselves.

For all the publishing industry’s emphasis on diversity and representation, I doubt that I, a Gen Z male, can walk into a bookstore and find anything in the new releases section that even comes close to what Roth wrote decades ago. Seen in his early days as a minority writer who brought a “diverse” perspective to American letters, Roth routinely tested the bounds of gentile civility with his candid yet scandalous depictions of American Jewish life while upsetting many fellow Jews with his frank depictions of Jewish sexuality and vulgarity. What has always impressed me about this performance was that Roth seemed to honestly not care what either the goyim or his fellow Jews thought; he ignored the mobs that wanted to cancel him and just kept hammering away at his typewriter. Like the IRA of the same name, I knew I could invest in Roth and be richly rewarded. I didn’t have to be Jewish or born in the 1930s or from New Jersey to know that this guy Philip got it—the travails and triumphs of immigrants assimilating to American culture, the shattering of the “model minority” image by airing out the group’s dirty laundry, life at the intersection of being young and male, the erotic aspects of household objects.

So it is with Bailey. He just sat down and wrote about his father and Philip Roth, seemingly unaware that Roth has been banished to the dustbin of “dead white men” who now live, well, canceled lives, with the accusations against Bailey only squeezing icing (I don’t have to say what color) on the poisoned cake.

The flurry of op-eds after the accusations arose all tried parsing how much Bailey, Roth, and Roth’s fictional characters had in common—framing them all, of course, as incorrigible misogynists. While reading Bailey’s memoir, I wondered if he saw parallels between his own life and the plots of a few of Roth’s novels about becoming undone. In I Married A Communist, a radio star has his career ruined in Red Scare-era America when his wife, Eve, writes a tell-all memoir revealing her husband’s Communist past. (The first woman to publicly accuse Bailey was also named Eve.) In The Human Stain, a professor is canceled over a misinterpreted remark, and it is later revealed that he was in a relationship with a much younger woman—just one of the many older-man-younger-woman relationships strewn throughout Roth’s bibliography. And there he was, Blake Bailey, the semen-soaked star of Roth’s posthumous 32nd book, Canceled Lives.

Did male writers in the past write things that would be considered misogynistic today? They did, because art imitates life, and attitudes toward gender relations were different then, just as attitudes will be different 50 or 100 years from now. Roth’s legacy—which is now permanently bound to Bailey’s like a DNA double helix with Y-chromosomal alleles—looked different before the accusations and will look different a century into the future.

My generation, which imagines itself to have the final say on such things, is more politically polarized by gender than any generation to have ever existed. We grew up in an age where the “liberation” offered by the sexual revolution—a subject that was at the forefront of Roth’s works—has only resulted in vast disillusionment, spawning dystopian slang like situationship and breadcrumbing. Accusations like the ones made against Bailey are more commonly tried in the court of social media opinion than in actual courtrooms, leading to the triumph of tribalism over truth.

So what will all these would-be scandals ultimately mean for Roth’s reputation, and the intertwined reputation of his lonely biographer? The logic of progressivism inherently views all legacies as ephemeral, with all historical figures forced to live up to standards that they could never know would come into existence. As a result, there are no more gods. One day, perhaps, “canceled lives” will simply refer to all dead people.

However common, Bailey’s social death would undoubtedly have appealed to his subject, as material. As a writer friend told Bailey, “Blake, the life you knew is over. Forever. The sooner you accept that, the better.” As is common with people whose lives are over, Bailey ends up becoming a ghost. An old friend helps Bailey pay the bills by getting him a job as a literal ghostwriter. When Bailey runs into old friends and acquaintances at large events, like weddings, he sees their knowing bemusement: “Everybody Knows—that’s a given—but of course, they fix smiles on their faces and try to act like they haven’t seen a ghost.”

Speaking of ghosts, there is one scene in the memoir where, a year before the Roth biography’s publication, Bailey had a dream where he felt alone in a crowd and saw Philip Roth’s ghostlike apparition, “dead but oddly corporeal,” and ran and cried in Roth’s gigantic arms until Roth finally put him down and shambled away. Even though Roth did not personally believe in an afterlife, he apparently did find a way to live on as a ghost—perhaps white and vaporous like semen. And so, Roth lives on uncanceled, in the lives of his many readers, who will define and reshape his legacy in the centuries to come.