I’m finished now, for a while at least, with what I’ll call my Roth trilogy. I read the mammoth biography by Blake Bailey, then reread Roth’s controversial, Portnoy’s Complaint, and just completed the memoir by his biographer called The Splendid Things We Planned.
And I am very glad that I read these in this sequence or I might not have read the biography at all.
If you read my blog, you know that I thought the Roth biography was a very good one. Dispassionate, well written, and it allowed the reader to form an opinion of Roth without framing his life to reflect the biographer’s agenda. I came away not liking Philip Roth a whole lot, but feeling as if I knew him.
Shortly after the book was published, Bailey came under a great deal of criticism. The minor criticism was that he had glossed over what critics believed was Roth’s misogyny. The major criticism came from people who know or knew Bailey and claimed he, Bailey, was a sexual predator. I read somewhere that a woman said she had been raped by him. Others contended that he wooed his students when he was a teacher priming them for sexual activity after they graduated. The number of critics grew. The publisher decided to stop selling the book. In recent days another publisher has agreed to distribute the biography.
I typically, and I think healthily, like to suspend judgment of individuals until the evidence is complete. Bailey has emphatically denied the charges against him. Before screaming “son of a bitch” I like to make sure an alleged perp is a perp. Besides I think one has to be careful about making a distinction between an author and an author’s book. From what I understand Picasso was no saint and neither was Einstein. Shall we burn all of the former’s paintings, and purge all of Einstein’s scientific contributions. Mozart, judging by the portrayal in Amadeus, was immature and not averse to acting out his sexual urges. Should we stop listening to Mozart?
Regardless of my thoughts on whether Bailey’s biography of Roth should be banished (I do not think so) I wanted to read Bailey’s own memoir and find out more about an author who has written several acclaimed biographies and has been recently so pilloried.
The Splendid Things We Planned is about Bailey’s family, but centers on Blake’s older brother Scott. I did not like the memoir. I thought the book was inaccurately (and annoyingly) titled, pretentiously written, and depicts Bailey himself unattractively. Had I read this book first I might not have wanted to read the Roth biography because I would have thought it too would be pretentiously written (it was not) and I would have been inclined to wonder if the author was capable of maturely writing about Roth dispassionately.
Blake’s only brother, Scott, was the ne’er do well of ne’er do wells. The cream of the crop of selfish, inconsiderate, crude, irresponsible behavior. Think of the most irresponsible string of behavior that your parents had to endure. Multiply by 50, and there is Scott. Not exaggerating. Repeatedly drove drunk and wrecked his cars. Could not hold a job. Dropped out of every school his parents tried to get him into. Called his mother, who despite it all supported him, the vilest of names. Did not destroy his parents’ marriage—though he did not help their relationship—but he aimed to destroy his father’s second marriage. Just a bad egg.
The title of the book is a lyric from the song “Yesterday When We Were Young”. The song refers to the various foolish things we all do when young which makes it difficult for us to realize our dreams down the road. We all who shoot straight with ourselves can identify. But Scott is in a different category. He did not wistfully look at his life and muse about how things might have been different. His life was a serial calamity. So the title does not work and, to me at least, suggests that Scott is in the category of all who do foolish things. He is not. I hope and believe he is in a league with very few members.
As opposed to the Roth biography, this memoir uses a slew of highfalutin vocabulary words which are just unnecessary and, it seems to me, intended to show off. I have a decent set of words in my reservoir, and good Lord, I had to stop every few pages in this book to look up this and that. And when I looked up the unfamiliar words, I often found that the word just did not fit the context. And sometimes the words were used incorrectly. It was interesting that Bailey refers, a number of times, to the Fred Exley book, A Fan’s Notes. I loved A Fan’s Notes—Exley also uses sophisticated language, but most of the time in his case, the words—when you look them up seem to fit. (As an aside, A Fan’s Notes is a good example of a book that, if you published on the basis of an author’s behavior and character, would never have seen daylight).
Compared to his brother, Blake Bailey is a saint. But compared to Scott the most miserable wretch you know is not so bad. To be fair to the author, he does not gloss over his own immature behavior. He is, absolutely, a better person—even when he was irresponsible as he was—than was Scott. But I just didn’t like the guy. He took too long to stop being a nogoodnik himself. Sure, it must have been very difficult to be Scott’s brother, but Bailey the younger, did his fair share of taking and quitting jobs, drinking excessively, creating havoc for his father, and just being irresponsible.
After I read the Roth biography I kind of liked Bailey, certainly respected him for writing such a long book with detail that was not, except in just a few sections, too much. I was impressed with how familiar he was with all of Roth’s work, not just superficially either. But the young adult judging from the memoir was not the kind of guy I would want to befriend.
Do I recommend The Splendid Things We Planned? Not if you are vacillating about whether to start a family. Maybe if you want to read about how someone, the brother Scott, can selfishly destroy or at least severely damage the lives of others. And maybe if you want to get a better sense of the author of the Roth biography.
No comments:
Post a Comment