Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey review – definitive life of a literary great in thrall to his libido

From the troubled marriages to the breakthroughs that led to Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral… a beautifully written book by Roth’s chosen biographer

In response to that staple biographer’s question, “when were you happiest?”, Philip Roth tended to think of his first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, when he was free to pursue his persistent “Byronic dream” of “bibliography by day, women by night”. In the six decades that followed, as Blake Bailey’s compulsively readable life of the novelist reveals, this idealised schedule was generally compromised one way or another, to Roth’s frequent frustration and sometime derangement. In Chicago and subsequently during his two-year national service beginning at Fort Dix, he had regular visits from his first obsessive lover, Maxine Groffsky, and he reminisced fondly to Bailey how on meeting, they would always tear each other’s clothes off at the door. “I haven’t done that in a while,” Roth mused, aged 79. “I take them off nicely, I hang them up, I get into bed and I read. And I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed tearing the clothes off.” That late-life liberation from desire is 900 pages in the making.

The two great and lasting traumas of Roth’s life were his marriages. He came to believe he had been trapped into both of them. First by Margaret Martinson, a waitress five years his senior, whom he had initially seduced as a “test” to see if he could charm a “shiksa blonde” and who Bailey later describes, through Roth’s eyes, as “a bitter, impoverished, sexually undesirable divorcee”. Martinson tricked him into a terrible union with false claims that she was pregnant, backed up with a sample of urine bought for $3 from an expectant mother in a homeless shelter, and threats of suicide if Roth should ever leave her. The second perceived “entrapment” was with the actor Claire Bloom, with whom Roth spent nearly 20 years from 1975, years that she documented in her brutally critical memoir of his role in their drama, Leaving a Doll’s House.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2P6Sasa