In his time, Bloom was a kingmaker among poets and fiction writers, who knew all too well that their places on the greasy pole of posterity would be somewhat determined by whether or not he saw fit to include them in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his definitive list of lasting books that was a New York Times best-seller in 1994. John Updike, whose oeuvre was even more stupendous than Bloom’s, might have regretted calling Bloom’s writing “torturous” when he saw that his only canonical book, according to Bloom, was The Witches of Eastwick — and so much for his Rabbit tetralogy, hundreds and hundreds of other novels, short stories, poems, essays, and never mind his face on the cover of TIME magazine when Couples was published in 1968. Philip Roth, on the other hand, made a point of engaging Bloom in a friendly correspondence while the latter was working on his list for the Canon, and was rewarded with no fewer than six mentions. 

However, by the time Roth’s biographer (me) got in touch with Bloom via email — asking for an interview at Roth’s urging — the number had dwindled to two: “Philip and I have been out of touch for many years now,” Bloom replied to me in 2013. “I continue to regard American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater as canonical works of the American imagination. But I believe I have nothing personal to communicate besides my high critical regard for his work, and that is on record.” This was signed “With Regret.” I thought I sniffed a hint of pettishness in this, and was unsurprised to learn, while reading The Man Who Read Everything, that he had indeed taken Roth’s later indifference to heart and considered him “very self-centered.” 

Bloom himself was no slouch in the self-centered department, having beaten an uncommonly arduous path from his humble beginnings as a young Talmudist in The Bronx. “There aren’t any reviews of my Yeats, and I guess I’d better not expect any,” he wrote in 1970 to the poet A. R. Ammons, one of the eight recipients of Bloom’s letters who make up the eight sections of the book. “A number of people have told me it is just too difficult to read, which is discouraging. I’m fated to remain an unknown critic.” Anyone who’s plugged away in this line of work knows the same feeling of Sisyphean futility and, after all, Yeats was Bloom’s fifth cumbrous study of English Romanticism, the field he’d intended to till in those days. Eventually, though, all of Western literature became his bailiwick — a massiveness that he alone, perhaps, could undertake: a “monster” of reading, Bloom could swallow books like so many gumdrops and tell you whatever you needed to know about them. And given that he really couldn’t help himself — he lived to read and write or talk about whatever he read — his freakish gifts were lavishly, at last, rewarded in the marketplace: in 2002, he became the last academic in history to get a seven-figure advance for a book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

Bloom’s latter-day notoriety — as a critic, I mean, not as a would-be lothario — was somewhat due to the main thesis of The Western Canon: namely, that some books are better than others, and a lot of the better kind are written by dead white males. (For what it’s worth, Bloom also believed that Elizabeth Bishop, say, was the best poet of her generation, and Anne Carson the best of hers.) “Shakespeare is God,” he declared, to the dismay of those who thought that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kafka, et al., were to be mined for evidence of historical oppression against women, minorities, and other marginalized people, and that aesthetic merit was mostly a canard promoted by “hegemonic” oppressors. 

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Happily, at the height of his fame, Bloom could afford to address an audience of literate amateurs who simply wanted to know what they should read during their little spans on earth, versus English majors (a dwindling cohort) fixated on race, class, and gender. “What are now called ‘Departments of English,’” Bloom wrote in The Western Canon, “will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies,’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.” Even Bloom, of course, couldn’t have foreseen the further ravages of smart phones, AI, etc., on what used to be called The Examined Life (whereas Roth stopped writing novels, in part, because he thought reading literary fiction was about to become as “cultic” as reading Latin poetry). But in the meantime, Bloom made a point of distancing himself from the Yale English Department; his later title as Sterling Professor of the Humanities made him, as The New York Times put it, “a department unto himself.” 

In her introduction to The Man Who Read Everything, editor Heather Cass White points out that Bloom’s transcendent self-assurance was derived in part from his hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.” Evidence of Bloom’s oracular certitude is found on every page of this book, whether he’s telling Ammons that John Ashbery’s first and fourth books of poetry are wonderful but his second and third not so much, or telling Ashbery himself that his poem “Collective Dawns” is “marvelous,” but “Wooden Buildings” is only, well, “good enough” — and so on. “Good enough” was about as damning as the gentle sage allowed himself to be. “The Wilson is good enough,” he remarked to Ursula K. Le Guin, who’d rashly mentioned that she was curling up in bed with Emily Wilson’s new Odyssey translation. “The [Robert] Fitzgerald catches the original somewhat better.” Of course, it went without saying that Bloom had read the original in Homeric Greek, along with all the reputable English versions thereof. 

When it came to his signature conviction, the so-called anxiety of influence — which, said The New York Times, “has something to upset everyone” — Bloom was prepared to go to the mat with even his most formidable detractors. Over time he would elaborate the idea in various ways, at forest-slaughtering length, but the gist was that a poet’s work is naturally influenced by the work of eminent precursors, and the anxious struggle to form one’s own vision — and thus ensure lasting fame — is Oedipal in nature and hence, implicitly, between men. “If you mean influence in the literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one,” the great Northrop Frye replied in 1969, when Bloom first tried running the idea by his revered mentor, “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament.” One senses a faint bemusement on Frye’s part, even a wish to change the subject, and when Bloom insisted to Frye that “influence anxiety was not an affect in a person, but the relation of one literary work to another,” Bloom’s “heroic precursor stopped listening,” as Bloom himself pointed out many years later (an anxious relation between works? I mean to say, what? Frye might have wondered).

And therein lay perhaps the main problem with Bloom as a writer and thinker: he was damnably hard to understand. “This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read,” a flummoxed C. S. Lewis wrote in 1962, when taxed to review the young Bloom’s The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Bloom himself was quite aware of the problem — “sometimes I wonder why I write such odd things” — but he, at least, knew what he meant to say, and by God he was going to say it, especially to those he considered peers. Explaining to his friend and Yale colleague John Hollander why he’d adopted “crossings” as a term for poetic “ratios, tropes, defenses” and whatnot, Bloom wrote: “I base it on Augustine’s calling post-lapsarian language the ‘region of unlikeness’ and on the Aristotelian-Ciceronian topica, ‘places’ not ‘commonplaces’ (cf. Curtius, etc.) they became or even memory-places (cf. Simonides) …” It goes on like that, and may be perfectly true for all I know, but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head, as Bertie Wooster would have it. 

But of course, Bloom’s correspondents were largely intellectuals almost as fond of esoterica as he; indeed, Bloom might have met his match in the poet James Merrill, whose masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), was largely informed by 20 years of sessions at a Ouija board with his partner David Jackson, and whose narrators from the spirit world included W. H. Auden, no less. Reading Bloom’s Talmudic reflections on certain aspects of Merrill’s work — “I don’t think that an actual zelem (your astral body or other self) or an actual maggid (other self as ‘instructor’) makes for strong poetry” — I couldn’t help thinking Merrill had found a kindred soul, if a rather too bumptious one. When Bloom went so far as to suggest that Merrill plump for lowercase versus uppercase letters in some instances, Merrill replied a little sternly that “the Authors were in Eternity, and his role was faithfully to take dictation.” Fair enough. 

For the lay reader, it can get a little wearying, but the title reminds us that these are the Literary letters of Harold Bloom, and not what he might have written or said to certain of his comelier grad students. Still, I found myself wishing he’d go to Disney World or something, and almost wept with gratitude when he paused in his Laputan musings to complain about his diet (he struggled with his weight): “I’m trying to make it each 24 hours on a steak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water, and cigars.” Such a rare glimpse of the personal was for the benefit of arguably his dearest friend, Ammons, whom Bloom wrote avidly throughout his life. White, the editor, wisely chooses a single 18-month slice of their vast correspondence, shortly after their first meeting — when “their emotional and intellectual engagement was at its peak” — the better to conform to her overall method of arranging Bloom’s letters into roughly chronological chapters that each contain most or all of his correspondence with a given poet or colleague, usually because Bloom was in the process of writing a paper about that person’s work and wanted to air his thoughts and gather information. 

For the most part, Bloom used his superpowers for good rather than ill, exhorting his favorite poets to live up to their indubitable genius: “I don’t want you giving anyone, including yourself, the impression that you consider yourself anything less than a very great poet,” he wrote Alvin Feinman, whose first and only book of poetry Bloom had helped publish via Oxford University Press. While Bloom was certainly capable of taking even the greatest poets down a peg or two (“good enough”), one gets the impression that his hyperbolic praise was both heartfelt and an impulse to give pleasure to people whose efforts, let’s face it, are pretty thankless on the whole. “With Miss Bishop gone, you have for me no living peer,” he wrote Ashbery, “—Red [Robert Penn] Warren, Archie Ammons, Jimmy Merrill have written permanent poems, but I would say now that poetically we are in the age of Ashbery, as once it was of Hart Crane or of Stevens.” Bloom’s advocacy was perhaps a poet’s best shot at a kind of slender immortality, so one can imagine Ashbery’s almost broken gratitude (“I feel singularly honored …”), very much in keeping with the mutually fawning tone of these letters. 

Love of the work, for Bloom, usually meant love of the author, and no wonder he took it so hard when Roth (for one) stopped returning his letters. “I was deeply in love with Archie Ammons,” he told his friend’s biographer, Roger Gilbert, and we have no cause to doubt it. Bloom tended to sign letters to Ammons and others — once the initial formality had worn off — with “Love” and even “Love and Homage,” and he was generally effusive in his use of endearments. He and Hollander liked to address each other with some variant of “Foo Foo” (“Dearest Foofy”), while favorite students, male and female, were often called “child” and startled with a kiss on top of their heads. The younger poet Henri Cole, whom Bloom found especially promising, met Bloom in person exactly twice in his life; that first time, he’d arrived for Bloom’s 80th birthday and stuck out his hand, whereupon Bloom pulled him close and pressed Cole’s head to his chest. “Noble bard,” Bloom began a long answering-machine message that Cole transcribed for this book, “it is Harold Bloom, calling from New Haven at about twenty of one on … what’s today, child?” A page or so of warm, well-considered praise follows — “I love both you and your poetry …” — until the machine cuts Bloom off mid-paean. 

Of course, the line between darling man and lech is a dicey business, especially in academia, and Bloom seemed to become more and more heedless as his fame grew, even finding a little humor in his own raffishness — referring to himself as Bloomstaff, say, in tribute to one of his favorite Shakespearian rogues. In 1990, GQ published an article, “Bloom in Love,” that described in mortifying detail (a tandem bubble bath, etc.) the dalliances he’d allegedly pursued with students throughout his long, long marriage to the stoical Jeanne Gould. At the time, Bloom was still fairly bullet-proof and could afford to shrug off the exposé as “a disgusting piece of character assassination.” He was just as categorical in 2004, when the feminist author Naomi Wolf claimed that he’d groped her thigh 20 years earlier. The Yale Daily News described the “veritable media frenzy” that ensued, but Bloom got off easy; 10 or 15 years later he might have been burned in effigy, if not chased through the streets of New Haven by a mob bristling with torches and pitchforks. 

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And so a chastened Bloom became all the more devoted to the Life of the Mind. “Like our ancestors,” he’d written Hollander in 1975, “we must study, we must ponder, and then we do the best we can” (he was a great fan of italics) “when we write and teach.… We live in the mind — as [Wallace] Stevens said.” Such a life has its homely pleasures, but it’s a lonely business at the best of times and became even more so, for Bloom, as the people he considered “close friends” such as Ashbery, Ammons, and Merrill — whom, we know from this book, he hardly ever saw in person — died off one by one. 

He would never meet his final and most engaging correspondent in The Man Who Read Everything, Le Guin, who was six months older and just as lonely. “May we use first names?” she shyly inquired when they first got in touch. “I’d like that.” After a two-month flurry of delighted emails, Le Guin mentioned that she’d “run out of steam” after an hour and a half of teaching the day before; she died of a heart attack five days later, and Bloom’s own death came the following year. Let the happy few who read these letters remember him as the embodiment of an ardent brand of bookishness that has passed, and less so for his all-too-human failings, which are common enough (alas) in any age.

I think the spirit of this writing got inside them as they read and soon their own thoughts were infused with it, so that their internal monologues took on the rhythms and diction and authorial attitudes of William Faulkner. From this they came to believe themselves worthy of the great endeavour, to write at the William Faulkner level, because, simply in thinking their private thoughts, they already were writing like William Faulkner. Bits of their experience already were being milled into Faulknerian sentences, with which they would sometimes narrate their lives to themselves more generally, in paragraphs.

I was not in their heads and so I can’t absolutely confirm that this is how Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo came to want to write their great novels, but both of them began to write seriously very soon after they began to read seriously, which suggests I’m onto something. And anyway, I was in my own head when the thing I describe happened to me. Like them, I read very little as a boy. I was physically restless and mentally scrambled, and also the third of six loud children born in an eight-year span to my poor mother. I lacked the cognitive and bodily inclination to read for pleasure, as well as a quiet place where I might try it, until I was done with college.

Or almost done. I was in my final term, student-teaching at a rural high school in Michigan, bored on a warm Sunday in a tiny village roughly 80 miles from both my home town and my college town, when I cracked open my gigantic literature anthology and began to read a short novel wedged, somehow in its entirety, amid the hundreds of poems and stories also gathered into the fat book. Yes, I was an English teacher at that country school, and an English major at my undistinguished university, and I’d liked the fiction I read for my classes, but not enough to read the stuff in my free time — until I opened my Anthology of American Literature, randomly as I remember, at the first page of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.

Unlike the novels of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Delillo, Roth’s fiction is not distinguished by self-consciously daring and luxuriant prose. What Goodbye, Columbus offered instead, to a reader like me, was voice, attitude, the funny and haughty and brainy commentary of its young narrator, Neil Klugman. Before I had even finished this little novel, my thoughts were taking a Neil Klugman or Philip Roth sort of form. I was describing things as they might. Of course I desired Brenda Patimkin right away. I also started wishing I was Jewish. And, almost immediately, I started wanting this new activity I was performing in my head, this mental making of Rothian sentences, to define me in some larger sense. I thought it should. From what I could tell I was really good at it. Reading Philip Roth I thought, I can do that.

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In other words, before I’d even finished the first “literary” novel I’d ever found myself reading merely because I liked it, I started thinking I could be a novelist. I don’t relate this to compare myself with McCarthy and DeLillo, but rather to illustrate how far down the ladder of literary talent this tendency can be found. I suspect that, for certain readers, perhaps especially reluctant or belated ones, the thrill of discovering a love of serious and stylish fiction translates very quickly into a sort of literary will to power.

It might be by accident or obligation that the type of person I speak of becomes a reader, opening a book because there’s simply nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, or dutifully doing the reading for a university course, but then continuing as an avid reader because reading now fuels his uplifting hubris about writing, because that one book he stumbled on got the stylish sentences going in his head. This sent him after other books that might do the same thing.

You’ll notice that I dropped the coy neutrality and started using masculine pronouns just then. The particular reader-writer, the “type of person” I’m referring to in all this, is a male type of person. I’m dealing in gender stereotypes here. This is a risky and suspicious activity, I know, but these stereotypes are so consistently affirmed in both my reading and my personal experience that I feel I can use them as a sort of crude literary sociology. And these stereotypes are consistent with a phenomenon that comes up a lot when people talk about literature and publishing, the fact that men read very little fiction anymore, and, when it comes to the publishing category called “literary fiction”, they read almost none. Some gloomy ironies attend this fact, which I’ll go into below.

In my gender stereotypology, the woman fiction writer has been reading her whole life. She read easily and prodigiously as a girl, consuming and then producing stories that grew in sophistication as she herself grew older. Thanks to her fast and effortless reading, she developed a capacious feel for the arc of character, the full span of narrative time, the novel as a single experience, a single order. Her mature writing serves these broader elements. It is thus less showy than that of her male counterparts, more story- than style-oriented. By contrast the male reader-writer in my scheme came to reading as McCarthy and Delillo did, fairly late, perhaps after finding reading unpleasant or difficult when he tried it as a boy. His reading, when it did begin in earnest, was spurred by encounters with novels written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.

This style aspect is key. The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief — like the laddish riffing of Martin Amis and that early Philip Roth, or Delillo’s droll tabulating, his deadpan dropping of synecdochal nouns, an uncanny comic method whose influence is obvious and everywhere among lesser (male) writers. Perhaps consciously but at least subconsciously, our reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion, and also — in rough consonance with Harold Bloom’s famous theory — as a quest to commit a few Oedipal murders, to transcend and thus kill his literary influences with an even more daring, more excellent, more distinctive style.

There are of course exceptions to these gender stereotypes in current fiction. For example the best, most intoxicating novel I read in the last year was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which — with its supersaturated prose and Bunyanesque heroine, a polymathic giantess who rules a surprisingly sexy medieval convent — calls to mind male novelists like David Foster Wallace and John Barth more than any prominent female novelist I can think of. By contrast, Jonathan Franzen’s intricate, stylistically modest family sagas code as fairly female in my scheme.

Still, despite their imprecision and offensiveness, these stereotypes have real descriptive value. Indeed, much feminist criticism of toxic and laughable masculinity in the worlds of writing and publishing seems to assume some version of them. The partly justified, often philistine, and increasingly pointless mockery of male literary striving that became popular in the 2010s — exemplified by the “Guy in Your MFA Program” Twitter account and subsequent book, and their many imitators — leans on and propagates categories that resemble mine, even as its adherents would surely repudiate my gender stereotyping on grounds that it’s gender stereotyping.

But I’m less concerned with the exalted strata inhabited by Lauren Groff and Jonathan Franzen, who don’t have elderly neighbours and helpful loved-ones suggesting that they “self-publish”, than with the lower levels where most male reader-writers read and write. Shouldn’t the final collapse of literary reading among other men be something of a bummer to them? Shouldn’t the idea that their potential audience has largely disappeared kill their desire to keep writing?

In these times of hegemonic psychotherapy, many educators and functionaries would answer “No! Of course not!” Writing is fundamentally a mode of self-expression, they believe. It should be an end in itself, its own reward. Teachers of writing, at every level from primary schools to MFA programs, often base their writing pedagogy on this assumption, implying or even stating that the point or goal of writing is “finding your voice”, which means that a writing effort could be considered successful if it resulted in this bit of therapeutic self-discovery and nothing else. But the male reader-writer wants something very different from this. He’s on a quest to kill his Oedipal fathers. He writes because he thinks he is, or might be, uniquely excellent at writing. His standard for success in a writing effort is having it read by people who agree that it and he are excellent. For him the truly therapeutic outcome is not him finding his voice but other people finding his voice, and then declaring in newspapers and magazines and end-of-year award ceremonies that it is the best voice.

But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.

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This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.

As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.

Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.

Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.

I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.

Interest in Roth was universal. It was understood that my interview with him, conducted in his midtown Manhattan apartment, could have been published, perhaps, in the New Yorker, or the New York Times, or Harpers. Yet, Philip granted this interview to me — a friendly acquaintance rather than, at the time, a friend — for the inaugural issue of the Ontario Review, which my husband Raymond Smith assembled, with my assistance, in 1974. What a gift, from Philip!

Today, the East Eighties near the Metropolitan Museum is a residential Manhattan neighbourhood where townhouses might sell for $50 million. At the time, Philip’s (rented) apartment was certainly attractive, with high ceilings, views of a leafy street, floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases. Most distinctly I remember the melancholy Kafka photograph, identical to the one I had taped to a wall of my room as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, and the striking artwork by Philip Guston, whose “KKK” paintings would soon be as controversial as Roth’s work.

On a bulletin board in Roth’s study are a few fan letters, including an enthusiastic tribute from Anthony Burgess, and a cartoon, probably from The New Yorker, that shows a middle-aged librarian screaming to an assistant, as flames rage around them in a library: “Don’t bother with Philip Roth! Save Galsworthy!”

What follows is an abridged version of the conversation we had.

***

JCO: Your first book, Goodbye, Columbus, won the most distinguished American literary honour — the National Book Award — in 1960; you were 27 years old at that time. A few years later, your third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, achieved a critical and popular success — and notoriety. That must have altered your personal life, and your awareness of yourself as a writer with a great deal of public “influence”.

Do you believe that your sense of having experienced life, its ironies and depths, has been at all intensified by your public reputation? Have you come to know more because of your fame? Or has the experience of enduring the bizarre projections of others been at times more than you can reasonably handle?

ROTH: My public reputation — as distinguished from the reputation of my work — is something I try to have as little to do with as I can. Outside of print I happen to lead virtually no public life at all. I don’t consider this a sacrifice, since I never much wanted one. Nor have I the temperament for it — in part this accounts for why I went into fiction-writing (and not acting, which interested me for a while in college) and why writing in a room by myself is practically my whole life. I enjoy solitude the way some people I know enjoy parties.

I take no pleasure at all in being a creature of fantasy in the minds of those who don’t know me — which is largely what the “fame” you’re talking about consists of. As a writer I want to be recognised for what I consider good in my writing — which is something different from being recognised on the street or by the head waiter.

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Since parties are to “bizarre projections” what the swamp is to the malaria mosquito, I by and large don’t go to them. I generally don’t give interviews to journalists, not even into tape-recorders; it seems pointless. Whatever one says is invariably reduced to 15 words, wrenched from context, and as often as not appears in print sounding like a translation from Chinese, unidiomatic Chinese. Anything about my work I want anybody else to know, or want to figure out for myself, I write down.

Almost the whole of my life in public takes place in a classroom — I teach one semester of each year. My public reputation sometimes accompanies me now into the classroom, but usually after the first few weeks, when the students have observed that I have neither exposed myself or set up a stall and attempted to interest them in purchasing my latest book, whatever anxieties or illusions about me they may have had begin to recede, and I am largely allowed to be a literature professor instead of Famous.

I have to talk about the books I’m reading — if I don’t my reading tends to get away from me and becomes relatively useless — and as it has turned out, a college classroom containing half a dozen smart undergraduates is one of the few places I have found in my travels where it is possible to have a coherent conversation about a book for more than three minutes at a stretch. And if it is not always brilliant conversation, it is at least responsible — which is to say, one, we have all actually read the book under discussion and even thought a little about it, and two, since the students are not privy to the latest information about the author and his wife, or his agent’s wife, or his agent’s wife’s lover’s agent, we are usually able to go an astonishing one hundred and ten consecutive minutes sticking to the subject at hand.

So: by keeping to the way of life that’s always served me best, I have been able by and large to cut myself loose from “the destiny of ‘Philip Roth’”. He goes his way and I go mine, and to tell you the truth, the less I hear about him the better.

JCO: Since you have become fairly well-established (I hesitate to use that unpleasant word “successful”), have less-established writers tried to use you, to manipulate you into endorsing their work? Do you feel you have received any especially unfair or inaccurate critical treatment? I am also interested in whether you have come to feel more communal now than you did when you were beginning as a writer.

ROTH: No, I haven’t felt nor have I been “manipulated” into endorsing the work of less-established writers. I don’t like to give the kind of “endorsements” that publishers prefer for advertising or promotion purposes — not because I’m shy about my enthusiasms, but because I can’t say in 15 or 20 words what I find special or noteworthy about a book. Generally, if I particularly like something I’ve read, I write to the writer directly. At times, however, when I’ve been especially taken by an aspect of some writer’s work which it seems likely is going to be overlooked or neglected, I’ve tried to help by writing longish paragraphs for the writer’s hard-cover publishers, who always promise to use the “endorsement” in its entirety. So far, they always have, though eventually — since it’s a fallen world we live in — what started out as 75 words of critical appreciation seems to wind up on the paperback edition cover as a two-word cry of marquee ecstasy: “Best damn!” “Not since!” and so forth.

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James Joyce's divine comedy

By Terry Eagleton

In 1972, Esquire, for a feature they were planning, asked four “older writers” (as they called them), Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leslie Fiedler, Mark Schorer and myself, each to write a brief essay about a writer under 35 he admired. I chose Alan Lelchuk, whom I’d met when we were both guests over a long stretch at Yaddo, and whose novel American Mischief I’d read in manuscript. I restricted myself to a somewhat close analysis of the book, which, though it hardly consisted of unqualified praise, nonetheless caused some consternation among the Secret Police. One prominent newspaper reviewer wrote in his column something to the effect that “you would have to understand the Byzantine politics of the New York literary world” to be able to figure out why I had written my 1,500-word essay, which he described as “a blurb”. It didn’t occur to him that somebody whose life’s-work is writing fiction might simply be interested in what a “younger” writer was trying to do, and when given the opportunity, had chosen to talk about his interest in print. But then that one might have an analytical, rather than a political purpose, is invariably beyond the comprehension of those who protect us Americans against subversive conspiracies.

In recent years I’ve run into somewhat more of this kind of “manipulation” — malicious hallucination mixed with childish naivete and disguised as Inside Dope — from marginal “literary” journalists (“the lice of literature,” as Dickens called them) than from working writers, young or established. In fact, I don’t think there’s been a time since graduate school when genuine literary fellowship has been such a valuable and necessary part of my life. Fortunately I’ve almost always had at least one writer I could talk to turn up wherever I happened to be teaching or living; novelists are as a group the most interesting readers of novels that I have yet to come across.

In a sharp and elegantly angry little essay called “Reviewing”, Virginia Woolf once suggested that book journalism ought to be abolished (because 95% of it was worthless) and that the serious critics who do reviewing ought to put themselves out to hire to the novelists, who happen actually to have a strong interest in knowing what an honest and intelligent reader thinks about their work. For a fee the critic — to be called perhaps a “consultant, expositor or expounder” — would meet privately and with some formality with the writer, and “for an hour,” writes Virginia Woolf, “the consultant would speak honestly and openly, because the fear of affecting sales and of hurting feelings would be removed. Privacy would lessen the shop-window temptation to cut a figure, to pay off scores.”

How sensible and human! It surely would have seemed to me worth $100 to sit for an hour with Edmund Wilson and hear everything he had to say about a book of mine — nor would I have objected to paying to hear whatever Virginia Woolf might have had to say to me about Portnoy’s Complaint. Nobody minds swallowing his medicine, if it is prescribed by a real doctor. One of the nicer side-effects of this system is that since nobody wants to throw away his hard-earned money, most of the quacks and the incompetents would be driven out of business.

Until this arrangement becomes the custom, I’ll continue to look to a few writers whom I admire also as readers, to help mitigate my own feelings of isolation. “A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, because of your having understood the book.” Melville to Hawthorne, in a letter about Moby Dick. Just the sort of professional intimacy and trust that is signalled by this simple outpouring of gratitude from one isolated writer to another seems to me the best thing we have to give one another.

As for “especially unfair critical treatment” — of course my blood has been drawn, my anger roused, my feelings hurt, my patience tried, and in the end, I have wound up enraged most of all with myself, for allowing blood to be drawn, anger aroused, feelings hurt, patience tried. When the “unfair critical treatment” has been associated with charges just too serious to ignore — accusations against me, say, of “anti-semitism” — then, rather than fuming to myself, I have answered the criticism at length and in public. Otherwise, I fume and forget it; and keep forgetting it, until actually — miracle of miracles — I do forget it.

JCO: Was it you who wrote about a boy who turned into a girl? How would that strike you, as a nightmare possibility? Could you — can you — comprehend, by any extension of your imagination or your unconscious, a life as a woman? A writing life as a woman? I know this is speculative, but had you the choice, would you have wanted to live your life as a man, or as a woman (you could also check “other”!)?

ROTH: Both. Like the hero-heroine of Orlando. That is, sequentially (if you can arrange it) rather than simultaneously. It wouldn’t be much different from what it’s like now, if I wasn’t able to measure the one life against the other. It would also be interesting not to be Jewish, after having spent a lifetime as a Jew. Arthur Miller imagines just the reverse of this as “a nightmare possibility” in Focus, where an anti-semite is suddenly taken by the world for the very thing he hates. But I’m not talking about mistaken identity or skin-deep conversions, but magically becoming totally the other, all the while retaining knowledge of what it was to have been one’s original self, wearing one’s original badges of identity.

In the early Sixties I wrote a not un-funny (though not very good) one-act play called Buried Again, about a dead Jewish man who when given the chance to be reincarnated as a goy, refuses and is consigned forthwith to oblivion. I understand perfectly how he felt, though if in the netherworld I am myself presented with this particular choice, I doubt that I will act similarly. I know this will produce a great outcry in Commentary, but, alas, I shall have to learn to live with that the second time around as I did the first.

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

Sherwood Anderson wrote “The Man Who Turned Into a Woman”, one of the most beautifully sensuous stories I’ve ever read, where the boy at one point sees himself in a barroom mirror as a girl, but I doubt if that’s the piece of fiction your question is referring to. Anyway, it wasn’t me who wrote about such a sexual transformation, unless you’re thinking of My Life as a Man, where the hero puts on his wife’s undergarments one day, but just, as it were, to take a sex break.

Of course, I have written frequently about women, some of whom I identified with strongly and, as it were, imagined myself into, while I was working. In Letting Go there’s Martha Reganhart and Libby Herz; in When She Was Good, Lucy Nelson and her mother; and in My Life as a Man, Maureen Tarnopol and Susan McCall. However much or little I am able to extend my imagination to “comprehend . . . life as a woman” is demonstrated in those books.

I never did much with the girl in Goodbye, Columbus, which seems to me apprentice-work and rather weak on character invention all around. Maybe I didn’t get very far with her because she was cast as a pretty imperturbable type, a girl who knew how to get what she wanted and to take care of herself, and as it happened, that didn’t arouse my imagination much.

Besides, the more I saw of young women who had flown the family nest, the less imperturbable they seemed. Beginning with Letting Go, where I began to write about female vulnerability, and to see this vulnerability not only as it determined the lives of the women — who felt it frequently at the very centre of their being — but the men to whom they looked for love and support, the women became characters my imagination could take hold of and enlarge upon. How this vulnerability shapes their relations with men (each vulnerable, to be sure, in the style of his gender) is really at the heart of whatever story I’ve told about these seven woman characters.

JCO: In parts of Portnoy’s Complaint, Our Gang, The Breast, and most recently in your baseball extravaganza, The Great American Novel, you seem to be celebrating the sheer playfulness of the artist, an almost egoless condition in which, to use Thomas Mann’s phrase, irony glances on all sides. There is a Sufi saying to the effect that the universe is “endless play and endless illusion”; at the same time, most of us experience it as deadly serious — and so we feel the need, indeed we cannot not feel the need, to be “moral” in our writing.

Having been intensely “moral” in Letting Go and When She Was Good, and in much of My Life as a Man, and even in such a marvellously demonic work as the novella “On The Air”, do you think your fascination with comedy is only a reaction against this other aspect of your personality, or is it something permanent? Do you anticipate (but no: you could not) some violent pendulum-swing back to what you were years ago, in terms of your commitment to “serious” and even Jamesian writing?

ROTH: Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends; they are the ones I take walks with in the country at the end of the day. Other people on country roads have dogs for companions, I have them. I am also on friendly terms with Deadly Playfulness, Playful Playfulness, Serious Playfulness, Serious Seriousness, and Sheer Sheerness. From the last, however, I get nothing; he just wrings my heart and leaves me speechless.

I don’t know whether the works you call “comedies” are so “egoless”. Isn’t there really more “sheer” self in the ostentatious display and assertiveness of The Great American Novel than in a book like Letting Go, say, where a devoted effort at self-removal and self-obliteration is necessary for the kind of investigation of self that goes on there? I think that the “comedies” may actually be the most ego-ridden of the lot; at least they aren’t exercises in self-abasement.

What made writing The Great American Novel such a pleasure for me was precisely the self-assertion that it entailed — or, if there is such a thing, self-pageantry. (Or will “showing off” do?) At any rate, all sorts of impulses that I might once have put down as excessive or frivolous or exhibitionistic, I allowed to surface and proceed to their destination. When the censor in me rose responsibly in his robes to say “Now look here, don’t you think that’s just a little too—” I would reply, from beneath the baseball cap I often wore when writing that book, “Precisely why it stays! Down in front!”

The idea was to see what would emerge if everything that was “a little too” at first glance was permitted to go all the way. I understood that a disaster might ensue (some have informed me that indeed it did) but I tried to put my faith in the fun that I was having. Writing as pleasure. Enough to make Flaubert spin in his grave! When manic inspiration flagged, I took trips up to Cooperstown and stayed there for a few days at a stretch, wandering around by myself in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. I held Babe Ruth’s tattered little glove in my own hand, and watched the movie version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine, as attentive and worshipful as a Catholic at Lourdes.

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By Michel Houellebecq

Admittedly, I was bolstered along the way with a certain amount of good old-fashioned modernist épater-ing. Whenever, in uncertain moments, I wondered what “they” would make of all this horseplay, I would answer my doubts with a cryptic “Fuck them”. It was only fitting that when The Great American Novel appeared, “they,” for the most part, said: “And fuck you too, bud.”

Right now, nothing is cooking; at least none of the aromas have as yet reached me. For the moment this isn’t distressing; I feel (again, for the moment) as though I’ve reached a natural break of sorts in my work, nothing nagging to be finished, nothing as yet pressing to be begun — only bits and pieces, fragmentary obsessions, bobbing into view, then sinking, for now, out of sight.

Book ideas usually have come at me with all the appearance of pure accident or chance, though by the time I am done I can see that what has taken shape was actually spawned, in a very determined way, by the interplay between my previous fiction, recent undigested personal history, the circumstances of my immediate, everyday life, and the books I’ve been reading and teaching.

The continuously shifting relationship of these elements of experience brings my subject into focus, and then the self-conscious literary brooding that occupies most of my waking hours eventually suggests to me the means by which to take hold of the material. I use “brooding” only to describe what this activity apparently looks like; inside, actually, I am feeling very Sufi-sticated indeed.

***

Roth reads two newspapers a day and watches television news-broadcasts frequently; at the time of my visit, he was, like nearly every New Yorker I encountered, obsessed with the intricacies and continuing revelations of the Washington political scandals. A cynic once said that no one would ever go bankrupt underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and so too it is probable that no one will ever go far wrong underestimating the intellectual and moral character of the typical American politician. But years ago, Roth raised the question: How can American writers, especially satirists, keep pace with ordinary reality in our time?

The serious writer, of course, chooses to concentrate upon intensely private, personal experiences, in which larger social or political events may be reflected, but kept at a distance (as they are in our own lives); the novel is a work of craftsmanship, an art, which makes it a more permanent and valuable phenomenon than the daily newspaper.

My Life as a Man is in many ways the antithesis of Roth’s more “public”, extroverted works, in that it concentrates upon the comically grotesque experiences of a man who, in his early twenties, was tricked into marrying a woman he did not love. It can be read on at least two levels — as a very funny, self-conscious, utterly uninhibited confession of the kind men rarely make (one continually thinks, How can Roth say such things in what will surely be read as an autobiographical work?), and as an experimental novel, in which the author is consciously “writing” a series of stories, chapters, analyses, and summaries, some of which are the desperate fictional constructions of his hero, Peter Tarnopol.

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Philip Roth's carnival of desire

By Boyd Tonkin

Tarnopol is a writer, highly praised, at the start of what should be a fine career, yet his marriage to an impossible woman named Maureen seems to be destroying him: out of his frantic misery come attempts at fiction, attempts at transforming his life into art, which are ultimately abandoned in favour of what Roth calls “My True Story”.

The novel is experimental, also, in its constant questioning of the basic assumptions of literature, and in its hero’s exasperated, humiliated recognition that whatever “art” is, his personal life does not resemble it in the slightest. Arguing, fighting, weeping, enduring an impossible but interminable relationship with his wife — who will not grant him a divorce — the young Tarnopol sees that he is not a character in a serious novel at all, but in a kind of soap opera. At one point Maureen herself is imagined as saying: “You want subtlety, read The Golden Bowl. This is life, bozo, not high art.”

My Life as a Man makes the point, as Portnoy’s Complaint does also, that being a “man” is difficult, if not impossible: one can be reduced to a child, a little boy, by the manipulations of other people. In Roth, the nemesis is usually a woman, as it is usually a paternal figure in Kafka, but both Roth and Kafka deal with endlessly analytical heroes who believe themselves constantly on trial and constantly failing, unable to live up to standards of adulthood that seem to come easily to other people.

Maureen, the Terrible Female, is killed in an automobile crash which she might have caused, in a moment of anger, and so Peter Tarnopol is “free”. Or should be free. He is, at least, no longer married. But at the novel’s conclusion he is beginning to realise that Maureen may be more of an obsession to him now that she is dead, than when she was living; and in any case, he is still himself: “This me who is me being me and none other!”

***

A version of this piece first appeared on Joyce’s Substack.

I wonder if the elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, had similar drills. I wonder if the teachers there, like my sister, worried about what they would do if they had to barricade the door. I wonder if the fourth graders in Texas had time to pick up their staplers and notebooks and lunch boxes to defend themselves from an 18-year-old armed to the teeth before he slaughtered them in their classroom.

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the US so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just ten days after ten people were killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. So far, at least 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

I read these headlines and I think about how people grow accustomed to horrific things. How, not so long ago, people watched other people get hanged, drawn and quartered in the public square. They watched beheadings. They participated in honour killings. I think about things that, in other times, in other places, perhaps seemed perfectly normal to the people who witnessed them — and that still remain normal in parts of the world today.

We look at such practices from our civilised perch and wonder how human beings ever did this to one another. How did they witness such barbarism and still have the appetite for dinner? How do we?

How have we normalised the fact that innocent people in America can step onto a subway car or go to a grocery store or a synagogue or a church or a concert or a baseball game or a party or a car show or to work and maybe they will just be gunned down? How have we become accustomed to — let’s call it what it is — child sacrifice?

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Buffalo and the myth of racist America

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics. A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.

But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again. As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.

The profiles of America’s mass shooters don’t fit into a straightforward political box. The 18-year-old who massacred elderly black New Yorkers at the grocery store in Buffalo earlier this month was driven by white supremacy and evil conspiracies such as the Great Replacement. The shooter the next day, who targeted a Taiwanese Church in Laguna Woods, California, was Chinese. The recent shooting in Dallas, at a Korean spa, was carried out by a young black man. The mass murderer in Uvalde, another 18-year-old, is Hispanic.

And the victims of the new crime wave fit no single profile. They include a young Eagle Scout in Philadelphia. A 24-year-old UCLA graduate student stabbed to death while working at a furniture store. An Afghan refugee who had worked as an interpreter for the US army who was shot to death while resting in his car between Uber shifts. It’s the 70-year-old nurse murdered at the bus stop on the way to work. The 19-year-old Burger King cashier robbed at gunpoint — and then killed after handing over the money. It’s the eight-year-old boy shot outside of Chicago. A pregnant woman who was shot to death just after arriving home from her baby shower.

Sixteen cities, including Philadelphia, Austin, Jackson, Columbus, Baton Rouge, New Haven and Portland, saw record high homicide rates in 2021. In the nation’s capital, more people under the age of 50 were gunned down than died from Covid.

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By T.A. Frank

You don’t need to be told what you already know: that mentally ill people getting their hands on guns to commit mass murder this easily is deranged and wrong. Accepting this as normal has nothing to do with respecting the Second Amendment. You don’t need another writer pointing out that this doesn’t really happen in other places and maybe the fact that America has more guns than any other nation on Earth has something to do with it. There’s nothing well-regulated about Salvador Ramos, though it appears he bought those assault rifles legally on his 18th birthday. There’s simply no world in which our founders would look at inner-city gun violence and these sick teenagers in suburban schools and say this was their intention.

Gun rights activists will argue that other countries have guns and that murderers don’t need guns to kill and that some of the cities and states with the strictest gun laws in the country have the highest rates of violent crime and that people kill people guns don’t kill people and that anyway good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. (Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer reportedly fired at the shooter. They couldn’t stop him.)

Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently: the social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties — and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands — has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages it was possible to ignore or compartmentalise. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look — and it is impossible to unsee it.

A version of this article first appeared on Bari’s Substack.

Until recently, legitimate reasons to suppress books had been diminishing: obscenity or blasphemy had disappeared. They appear to be increasing again, and expanding out of the realm of the law. I don’t think we should worry about books that are withdrawn because they cross, or prove to have crossed, some legal barrier. When, this year, Alice Sebold’s rape memoir Lucky was withdrawn, it was because the man she accused, and who was convicted on the testimony she then adapted for publication, was shown to have been innocent. That would always have happened, long before the phrase “cancel culture” was coined.

But a more ominous loss was Blake Bailey’s life of the novelist Philip Roth. The American moralising critics had been gunning for Roth himself for some time, on the grounds of supposed misogyny, both in his books and in his real-life relationships with women. Fortunately, the greatest American novelist of the last 60 years is, as yet, out of their reach. Bailey himself was an easier target. He was the author of magnificent lives of John Cheever and Richard Yates, and the Roth biography was magisterial — but too forgiving in tone. And so allegations of sexual harassment, assault and even rape against the biographer were hauled up. Although not yet proved, and apparently not the subject of legal proceedings, they were enough for Bailey to be dropped by his agent and American publisher.

Is it ever acceptable for a legally unobjectionable book to be cancelled, simply because an influential group dislikes its ideas or its author? This is a question that has plagued the publishing industry this year, and will continue to plague it.

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Alice Sebold's empty apology

By Philip Hensher

A temporarily successful cancellation was of the journalist Julie Burchill’s polemic on wokeness. It is fair to say that if you agree to publish Julie Burchill, you should know what you’re signing up to. The ride will be exhilarating, but sometimes bumpy. This apparently came as news to Little, Brown. Burchill got into an argument on Twitter with a younger, Muslim journalist. During the exchange, Burchill raised a historically verified fact about the age of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and made energetically tactless descriptions about the man the religion venerates. In March, she had to pay damages for defamation. Although this had no bearing on the contents of the book Little, Brown had signed up, they said that she had “crossed the line” and they would not publish it.

Like many writers, I’ve had to admit defamation in the past. 20 years ago, you would have been considered dangerously insane to have suggested that Harper Collins drop my next novel because I’d been rude about a lady artist in the Spectator. Fortunately, there are still some who think this way. Burchill’s book was picked up by a small press, and those who agree with her, or indeed those who, like me, very much enjoy disagreeing with her, can buy her book on the Woke Trials from Academica Press for £24.95.

If you can find a bookshop stocking it, that is — one underrated feature of cancel culture is that quite ordinary booksellers took to announcing in principled tones that they would not sell work they disagreed with. Two reasonable but sceptical books on trans issues by Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock were, it was suggested, having difficulty being displayed or even stocked by shops. I doubt it did the authors any harm. Amazon was not to be budged.

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By Julie Burchill

What is behind these attempts to remove individual books from circulation? And why does publishing, even for a moment, indulge the protesters who want to make the memoirs of, say, a senior member of a conservative US administration like Mike Pence unpublishable? Why are they, or the accusers of Blake Bailey, not told to go away or, if they are within the publishing industry, to find another area to work in?

Some of the scenes that have taken place are unarguably risible. The Canadian polemicist Jordan Peterson has a devoted following for his conservative hard-work-and-self-respect talks and essays. Robust prescriptions of Canadian Protestantism aren’t to everybody’s taste. The New York Times amusingly described him as the “custodian of the patriarchy”, not reflecting that the patriarchy might not need one. When Penguin Random House announced plans to publish his new book, protesters within the Canadian office forced them to hold what was described as an “emotional” meeting. One junior employee explained that publishing the book would “negatively affect their non-binary friend”. PRH went ahead, perhaps foreseeing the difficulties in consulting all the non-binary friends of junior employees about proposed signings and publications.

There are, then, reasons to be hopeful. There has been little attempt to cancel, rather than criticise, writers of the past. VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are still in print; Dickens, widely arraigned for his treatment of his wife, remains a stalwart of the classics lists. The revelation that people who have voted for the Conservative Party have, in the past, written good novels is not yet the universal object of horror. Even the dropping of very controversial current day authors has created opportunities: the American publisher Skyhorse snapped up Bailey’s book, as it had the Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the hitherto blameless comic writers Garrison Keillor and Woody Allen, after similar campaigns against their supposed inappropriate behaviour.

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The direction of travel, however, is clear. We may be living in an age of transition, like the 1840s, when the liberal and relaxed means of expression of the previous age were snuffed out by a fervent and self-righteous rigidity. Mozart’s Così fan Tutte was dropped because it failed to draw an acceptable moral conclusion about marriage. Philip Roth’s novels may suffer the same fate. Will we who came to intellectual maturity in the Eighties and Nineties come to be stared at in the street, like the aged Thomas De Quincey, still off his face in staid 1850s Edinburgh? Well, we shall find out.

This is not a development proved or disproved by individual cases, and when campaigns of cancellation are waged against the million-selling Jordan Peterson, publishers have good reasons not to give way. Junior staff of publishers have been upset about working on J.K. Rowling’s books — she has committed the crime, among other things, of defending lesbians who have said that they don’t want to have sex with anyone with a penis. There are other junior staff to be hired, if that’s how they feel. For the moment.

Rather, we will know the truth of the development in years to come, when we can only guess at the careers that didn’t take place, and the opinions in society which, however widespread and ordinary, were deemed unpublishable. Even now, it is impossible to imagine that a novel, however brilliantly witty, could now be published by a good publisher if it made any jokes at the expense of a minority. And it may be that publishers, in a state of anxiety about offending, are pre-emptively walking away from very large parts of society.

I spoke to a couple of British editors recently who said, to their mild surprise, that they had no immediate plans to publish any novel by a man; to confirm this possible tendency, I am currently judging a new prize for novels of any sort, in which 49 out of the submitted 56 are by women. Whether publishers are turning away from half the human race, or that half of the human race is abandoning a way of life there’s no money in and nothing but disapproval to be expected, is arguable. The final result of an undeniable culture of cancellation is a terrible impoverishment of diversity, of fruitful debate, of the exploration and expression of different lives, different points of view, different ways of living in the world. That matters.

For many critics — sometimes, admittedly, for Roth himself — that retort seems to account for Roth’s presence on the planet. He’s here for the girls. The erotic and emotional melodrama that fills the work, and fuelled the life, of the novelist from the Jewish suburbs of Newark, New Jersey enthralled, titillated and outraged readers from his 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus, through the epochal scandal of Portnoy’s Complaint a decade later, to the farewell verdicts after his death, aged 85, in May 2018. Hardly unjust, you might think, for an author who as a University of Chicago student in the mid-1950s had defined his ideal life as “bibliography by day, women by night”. Yet dreams, like deeds, have consequences. In 2014 he could lament after “thirty-one books of a writing career… the truly indelible mark that I made is as a dirty writer”.

Inevitably, the “dirty writer” and his tangled web of relationships has come to the fore in responses to the monumental authorised life produced — a mere three year’s after its subject’s passing — by Blake Bailey. True, it would take a heart of stone and brain of silicon to read Philip Roth: The Biography and not be swept up into the 24/7 floorshow-cum-car crash of the writer’s sexual life, from the two catastrophic marriages (to waitress-secretary Maggie Martinson and English actress Claire Bloom), through stormy long-haul affairs to passing dalliances with partners who stretch from Texan lasses who need to ask him “What’s fascism?” to Ava Gardner herself. With Jackie Kennedy, things never quite worked out, even though the widowed First Lady did apparently try.

Bailey’s narrative supplies bulging boxes of evidence for both prosecution and defence. Should the priapic titan from Newark go to “feminist prison” (“you serve twenty years to life,” he kvetched to co-offender Saul Bellow) or be remembered as at least (so he put it to Alison Lurie) “not just a shit (when I am being one) but an interesting and intelligent shit”? A shit he could certainly be, whether in the Strindberg-like horrors, both inflicted and endured, of his marriage to Bloom or the casual predations of his later-life pick-ups. You cheer for the dames who fought back, like the prospect he cruised in a Connecticut bar and blithely advised to read his spectacularly filthy (and deeply accomplished) 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater. When she then stood him up, he rang: “‘You are never to call me again,’ she said, and hung up.” That’s the spirit.

The best defence, perhaps, lies in Bailey’s roster of distinguished women whom Roth (genuinely) befriended and supported, from Lurie herself to Edna O’Brien, Hermione Lee, Mia Farrow — he even furnished the disaffected teenage Ronan with a reading list — and Zadie Smith. In her inaugural Philip Roth Lecture at Newark Public Library (to which he donated all his books), Smith cut to the core of Roth’s emancipatory, taboo-busting power. “I stole Portnoy’s liberties long ago,” Smith said. “He is part of the reason, when I write, that I do not try to create positive black role models for my black readers, and more generally have no interest in conjuring ideal humans for my readers to emulate”. Even in 1959, some Jewish readers of his early stories found in them a shanda fur die goyim — shaming ammunition for gentiles. Roth’s shamelessness printed a ticket to freedom for his heirs.

Faced with this career-long carnival of unruly desire, it sounds bizarre to switch attention from gender politics to geopolitics — the sort of soporific stunt pulled by the blockhead professors he loved to guy. Even sex, though, takes place in time. Yet Bailey’s supremely readable chronicle opens out into the world beyond the bedroom arenas where Roth’s gladiatorial couplings unfold. As Bailey suggests, Roth and his male literary peers came to maturity in a post-Second World War United States coming to terms with its role as a consumer cornucopia at home and global superpower abroad. Born in 1933, in the darkest hour of the Depression, he grew up in the belly of a strong young beast. America’s new hegemony showered at least some of its citizens with unimagined goodies, and bestrode the Cold War stage like an adolescent colossus. He and his high-achieving coevals were children of the long boom that saw US GDP soar from $243 billion in 1947 to $2.8 trillion in 1980.

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The fruits of plenty were unevenly spread. But this age of gold shone on striving millions – many, like Roth, the offspring of fairly recent immigrant families — as median household incomes rose (in real, inflation-adjusted terms) from $34,710 in 1954 to $62,153 in 1973. Despite the Vietnam imbroglio, racial unrest in the cities and youth revolt, US unemployment dropped to a historic low of 3.4 per cent just as Roth published Portnoy in 1969. The suburban plenty whose seamy side Roth unpicked reflected in miniature the zenith of US affluence and authority. If you want to understand why a serious literary novelist (albeit one with a satirical, scurrilous side) could hit such peaks of fame, look at the annual figures for the award of US first degrees. They shot up from 136,000 in 1945 to 1,094,000 in 1990, with a hike from 520,000 t0 840,000 between 1965 and 1970 alone.

Wealthier, better educated, better informed — as seriously written city and regional newspapers still competed with the TV networks — this new mass public amplified Roth’s voice, and his glory. The paperback of Portnoy sold 3.5 million within five years.

At least until his late-career reflorescence, Roth was aware that he stuck to the narrow patch he knew. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole,” he said. Reading Bailey, though, you grasp that this seemingly narrow shaft — Newark, Jewish suburbia, upward mobility, male sexual hubris and nemesis, American success and its discontents, time, age and mortality — contains not just of bedrooms, but boardrooms and war-rooms. In 1997, the masterly American Pastoral marked Roth’s second coming as a full-fledged historical novelist of epic, not just domestic, scope. Its narrator, Roth’s regular alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, reflects that the tragic hero “Swede” Levov must have been “baffled” by the question: “How had he become history’s plaything”. Even as they yearn, strive and plot, with the next lay, the next game, the next raise in view, Roth’s heroes remain history’s playthings.

He thought of calling the great turn-of the-21st-century trilogy that began with American Pastoral and continued with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain “Blindsided”. Its aghast protagonists find themselves ambushed and felled by unforeseen outcomes of the postwar American Dream of prosperity, progress and self-realisation. As early as his baseball fable The Great American Novel in 1973, Roth understood that he was telling mythic stories about the rise and fall of a superpower — not just the ups and downs of little guys. Baseball might serve, he said, as “a means to dramatise the struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality”.

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For writers, birth dates matter. Always in Roth’s sight lay the just-senior writers who had experienced the Second World War as young adults: Norman Mailer who served in the Pacific; Gore Vidal, a naval officer; Roth’s idol Saul Bellow, a Merchant Marine volunteer; or Joseph Heller, a B-25 bombardier. In contrast, he and 1930s-born contemporaries such as John Updike and Don DeLillo were (Bailey argues) “abstemious children of the Depression”. They eschewed grand gestures, “kept their noses to the grindstone”, and maximised their productivity. Not every one of these Depression wunderkinder stood an equal chance. Toni Morrison, born in 1931, only published her first novel in 1970 — however, her job as a New York fiction editor had to a degree lowered the formidable obstacles arising from her race and sex.

Roth was a compartmentaliser. His proneness to excess applied strictly in the bedroom. In a taste-defying metaphor, he compared the male sexual adventurers of the early Sixties to the GIs who vanquished Nazism: “I sometimes think of my generation of men as the first wave of determined D-Day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore”. With sex, Roth went over the top. Otherwise, he maintained his work-rate at a punishingly high level, like any harassed postwar corporate executive. Friends and lovers comment on his “monkish habits”, especially after he bought (cash down, $110,000) a farmhouse in Warren, Connecticut and shut himself away — girlfriends excepted — for seasons on end. He dubbed it “The Fiction Factory”.

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From their fiction factories, Roth and his Depression-born buddies delivered the goods: year after year, book after book, high-minded rivals to the suited stiffs at IBM, Standard Oil or Chrysler. (Roth, with his 31 volumes, even envied Updike his “fucking fluency”.) The kid from Newark, whose adored father Herman had served the Metropolitan Life insurance company for 36 years, adhered to a thoroughly bourgeois model of hard graft. His progress traces an all-American postwar gradient of social mobility, professional attainment, career milestones and late-life plaudits. “We’re hicks,” Roth said of his group, “It’s just because we’re such hicks that we’ve all become so sophisticated.” Ascent meant vindication, too. In Herman Roth’s day, Bailey reveals, a Jew could not hope to advance beyond branch manager at Met Life.

His son Philip rose along with Mad Men America, in an age of aspiration, reward and newly-bestowed entitlement – an entitlement that Roth drew on in the currency of sex. The money came in handy, too. His advances and fees soon skyrocketed. In 1968, Roth reckoned his income as $827,000 — more than $6 million today. Slacker times (relatively) ensued, but by 1989 his new agent Andrew Wylie could strike a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster for $1.8 million. In the heyday of corporate America, this was high literature as big business. Roth gave much of the dosh away: charitably, to exes, girlfriends, chums, or family; and, commercially, to the myriad doctors and hospitals who treated his chronic back pain and worsening heart conditions. That he could earn it in the first place shows how America’s postwar high tide lifted even the toughest, rudest critic of the puritan and philistine mainstream.

But all good things — and bad things — come to end. (After an 80th birthday gala hosted by Edna O’Brien, Roth wrote that “the meaning of life is that it stops”.) Decline, private and public, shadows his later fiction, often given burnt-out, strife-torn form in the recession-wrecked city of Newark. And with that geopolitical fall came the discredit and opprobrium that now attached to the kind of cocksure strutting that Roth the man (not Roth the novelist) had sometimes indulged. Shame once more dogged his heels, above all after Claire Bloom published her damning memoir Leaving a Doll’s House. One TV show, unimprovably, dubbed it “her thermonuclear dish-all”. Bailey draws on Roth’s unpublished “295-page rebuttal” of her accusations. Yes, 295-page.

Roth might deplore “this media eagerness to find culpability in matters large and small”. But it wasn’t just personal. The toppling of alpha male entitlement, literary and otherwise, partnered the eclipse of the alpha superpower as Cold War “victory” failed to stop the rot. Not for nothing did Roth call one of his final, frail novellas The Humbling. At least his gifts remained undimmed when it came to fantasy solutions for the American fix that wore a MAGA cap. In 2004, he spookily modelled the lure of Trumpish populism in the historical dystopia of The Plot Against America. When the real thing came along, he called the orange one a “massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac”. Even Nixon got off lighter.

In recent times, the reputation of Roth, Mailer, Updike et al has come to resemble a sort of crumbling rustbelt in itself. Their more modest American (and British) successors tend to play nicely, move in packs and — above all — stay in their appointed lanes. The upshot is a more wholesome if less ambitious literary scene — more Brooklyn artisan bakery than some flaming, roaring, polluting steel plant in Pennsylvania (or New Jersey). Bailey’s mammoth testament may, or may not, push the graph of Roth stock up a little. In any case, his biography shows that it took, not a village, but a clumsily confident behemoth of a victorious nation, to raise these wayward, favoured children. These flawed literary giants could grow so tall because a one-off confluence of historical forces nourished them. Their empire has now toppled. How are China’s best-known novelists behaving in private? We might soon need to know.