on American literary biography, etc.

Dear friends,

I haven’t yet read Blake Bailey’s door-stopper biography of Philip Roth, except for the excerpt in New York magazine in which we learn that Roth had a habit of pulling a Louis CK on one of his longtime girlfriends, all but forcing her to listen to him conduct one-sided phone sex while she was busy at work. Not surprisingly, a lot of the coverage has focused on salacious details like these, of which there appears to be no shortage.

But Mark Oppenheimer’s feature on Bailey in the New York Times Magazine (in itself an event: when was the last time a biographer other than Robert Caro was the subject of a big magazine profile?) takes both Bailey and the book very seriously. The piece is catnip for biographers—highly recommended reading. Oppenheimer outlines Bailey’s process in detail, describing the “multipage letters” and lengthy phone calls he regularly received from Roth, the vintage Eames chair Bailey inherited from his subject (named “Nicole’s seat” after Nicole Kidman, who liked to sit on it when she visited the author), and the wall’s worth of filing cabinets stuffed with hundreds of manila folders. “Beholding six years of accumulated research into one man’s life is like coming upon a finished jigsaw puzzle covering a ballroom floor: awesome, but it hurts to imagine the effort,” Oppenheimer writes. No one could accuse him of lacking in appreciation for the biographer’s work.

So I was surprised to see Oppenheimer dismiss American literary biography as an “anemic tradition.” He quotes a piece Rachel Donadio wrote for the Times Book Review in 2007 (about Bailey’s predecessor as Roth’s biographer, Ross Miller), in which she notes that—“to the best of anyone’s knowledge” (biography can be something of a secretive process)—no biography was then under way for “Cormac McCarthy, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie or John Updike.” It’s an idiosyncratic list of important American writers, to be sure, which 14 years later begs to be updated. But Oppenheimer quotes it uncritically, noting that since then, “only Updike has been the subject of a major biography,” by Adam Begley. (I’ve heard that one of Doctorow is also in the works.) He continues: “Besides Bailey and a handful of others—like Roth’s friend Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette—few Americans do great work in this genre,” comparing us unfavorably to British writers such as Claire Tomalin, Michael Holroyd, and Hermione Lee.

Well.  Don’t get me wrong—I admire Judith Thurman immensely. But since 1999, when her book about Colette appeared, a huge cohort of biographers doing important work on American writers has emerged. Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, the authors with whom Roth is most often associated, each have comprehensive biographies. So do Ralph Ellison (by Arnold Rampersad), Norman Mailer (J. Michael Lennon), Jack Kerouac (Ann Charters, Paul Maher), David Foster Wallace (D.T. Max), and even the reclusive J.D. Salinger (Kenneth Slawenski). 

To be honest, though, the real action is elsewhere, and it has been for a long time. In the first part of her sentence, which Oppenheimer doesn’t quote, Donadio notes the recent appearance of biographies of Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice Walker. These books were part of an explosion in women’s literary biography that began in 1970 with Nancy Mitford’s Zelda and shows no sign of stopping. A brief scan of just my own shelves reveals Jean Strouse on Alice James; Stacy Schiff on Vera Nabokov; Carla Kaplan and Valerie Boyd on Zora Neale Hurston; Brenda Wineapple on Emily Dickinson; Janet Malcolm on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Anne Heller on Ayn Rand; Caroline Fraser on Laura Ingalls Wilder; Linda Leavell on Marianne Moore; Megan Marshall on Elizabeth Bishop; Imani Perry on Lorraine Hansberry; Casey Cep on Harper Lee; Maggie Doherty’s group biography of Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, and Tillie Olsen, among others; and, last fall, Heather Clark’s magisterial, conclusive biography of Sylvia Plath.

These books by and about women writers, dynamic in form and eye-opening in content, are quietly, steadily remaking the American literary canon as we thought we knew it. It’s a shame to see them—us—overlooked.

***
Speaking of which: I’ll be teaching another course about Shirley Jackson “at” the 92St Y (on Zoom). This time we’ll focus on Jackson’s short stories, for two sessions: May 19 and May 26. Sign up here.

All best,

Ruth

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House