"Can men write about women?" And the fool expects an answer."
Heinrich Heine
"Roth possessed a verbal brilliance and breadth
probably unsurpassed by any American novelist in the postwar period. He could
be enormously, subversively funny. He mocked many sacred cows and poured cold
water on many national myths. His treatment of his own foibles and those of his
friends and lovers were often unsparing".
David Walsh
"In some quarters, 'misogynist' is now a word used
almost as laxly as was 'Communist' by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and
for very like the same purpose."
Philip Roth
To tell the truth, is very difficult, and young people
are rarely capable of it.
Leo Tolstoy
Thomas Carlyle complained once that during the writing of
his study of Oliver Cromwell, he had been required to "drag out the Lord
Protector from under a mountain of dead dogs". With Philip Roth being dead
only two years I feel the same must be required of him.
The last two years have seen an outpouring of vitriol
against Roth. This has increased with the recent release of several
biographies. The most important one of these biographies is one by Blake
Bailey.[1]Since
I have not read this 900-page book, I will not comment on it but will later.
This article is about the hysterical response from the book reviewer Leo Robson.
Although not all of the book reviews needlessly attack
Roth, the majority highlight that we live in a time, according to the writer
David Walsh that contains "widespread historical ignorance and cultural
debasement". In Roth's case, the manufactured controversy is a product of
this environment. It must be said that in the latest reviews of Bailey's
biography, some preposterous things have been written accusing the novelist of
misunderstanding or being hostile to women and having sexual failings.[2]
This new collection of reviews have a commonality about
them. All of them seem to advocate a new form of Puritanism and want to return
to a period when writers were censored and their books burnt.
As Walsh writes, "What irks a good number of the
commentators is the fact that the late novelist had no use, generally speaking,
for the obsession with identity politics, the brand of fraudulent and
reactionary postmodern "leftism" that has proliferated on American
campuses and elsewhere over the past 40 years or so. Roth treated several
female academics and other such types rather roughly in his books, suggesting
that behind their aggressive "feminism" lay a good number of hidden
factors, including psychological insecurity, personal ambition and avarice. His
instinctive hostility was entirely appropriate".[3]
Perhaps the vilest and worthless attack on Roth comes
from Leo Robson, whose review of Bailey book reaches new heights of hysterics
and manufactured controversy. He writes, "He reports without comment the
BBC's bananas contention that Roth was 'arguably the best writer not to have
won the Nobel Prize since Tolstoy', as well as the maybe even sillier claim
made by Roth's friend Benjamin Taylor that his work is 'built to outlast
whatever unforeseeable chances and changes await us and our descendants'.
Quoting postmortem hyperbole is always a tempting recourse for the exhausted
biographer bidding farewell, but by loading his epilogue with the encomia of
the novelist's most ardent fans, not exactly absent from the rest of the book,
Bailey dodges a far more pressing duty, to explain why Philip Roth –
nostalgist, American chauvinist, spouter of 'amazingly tasteless' opinions,
serial seducer of students, and, latterly and not unrelatedly, a critic of
#MeToo – has outlasted the changes already upon us".
Like all critics of Roth, Robson hates the fact that Roth
had the temerity to attack the #MeToo movement. David Walsh correctly attacked this
movement whose ostensible aim "is to combat sexual harassment and assault,
i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive,
regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous
denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due
process—give the lie to the campaign's "progressive" claims. Such
methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and
one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social
inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great
social and political issues of the day".
Robson does have a track record of hating Roth.His review
of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth-By Benjamin Taylor was not too
flattering. His latest review of Blake Bailey's biography of Roth should have
been sent back to him by the editors, and have been asked to do better.
The first thing that strikes you of Robson's article is
the title which has a question mark. I am unsure if the editor at Literary Review
magazine choose this or Robson himself. Either way, it is a pretty stupid thing
to do because any objective criteria would show Roth to be one the greatest writers
of the 20th century.
Also, the low level of Robson's article is shocking, but
even more shocking is the fact that Literary Review printed in that form in the
first place. Take this quote, "But even as Roth settled into the role of
grumbling grand old man, he remained more than ever the entitled child, in
permanent need of soothing, powerless to resist a tempting treat or keep a
tantrum at bay. 'Tell him to grow up,' Nicole Kidman, who played Faunia in the
film adaptation of The Human Stain, is reported to have said on learning that
Roth was annoyed about a date that went awry. I mean, what is that about. It is
just childish gossip. Who cares.
Robson is right about one thing that Roth was a product
of his environment. The monkey finally typed a sentence. It is not Roth's fault
that he grew up in the early part of the 20th century. He did not
choose the conditions, but he achieved artistic greatness despite all the
political handicaps he faced.
As Walsh said, "Roth grew up during the Cold War,
and the limitations of American intellectual life during that epoch also helped
shape him, as much as he may have cursed and even kicked against its confines".
The great Marxist writer Leon Trotsky put it even better "There
would be no art without human physiology because there would be no human beings
at all, but that does not mean art can simply be explained by human physiology.
Between that physiology and artwork, as Marxists understand, lies a complex
system of transmitting mechanisms in which there are individual,
species-particular and, above all, social elements. The sexual-physiological
foundation of humanity changes very slowly, its social relations more rapidly.
Artists find material for their art primarily in their social environment and
in alterations in the social environment. Otherwise, there would be no change
in art over time, and "people would continue from generation to generation
to be content with the poetry of the Bible, or of the old Greeks".[4]
To conclude, it is only fitting to end with the words by
David Walsh, who has intelligently commented on Roth's work when he "wrote
"I'm less and less convinced that one ought to judge an artist primarily
or even substantially by the social views he or she espouses. A great many
factors go into the formation of such views, many of them outside the control
of the individual artist. But the artist does have responsibility for the
honesty and integrity of his or her approach to life and art, for the continual
reworking of themes and language or materials, for the maintenance of that
level of dissatisfaction and restlessness, transmitted to a reader, that
contributes to giving a work meaning and value. I am moved by Roth's efforts.
Roth's best novels will endure".[5]If
Mr Robson wants to reply to this article, my website is free for him to reply.
I wait with bated breath.
[1] Philip Roth: The Biography
Hardcover – 8 April 2021 Blake Bailey
[2] David walsh -https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/18/roth-j18.html
[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/18/roth-j18.html
[4] Leon Trotsky - Culture and
Socialism - 1927
[5] See Walsh’s collected
writings- The Sky Between the Leaves: Film Reviews, Essays and Interviews 1992
- 2012 Paperback – 22 Nov. 2013 Mehring books
