If the Author Is a Bad Person, Does That Change Anything?
Last week news broke that Blake Bailey, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, had been accused of sexual crimes and that his publisher, W. W. Norton, would halt promotion of the book. I had just reviewed it. Bailey’s transmogrification didn’t change my basic opinion of his work—not because it’s that good, but because it’s that bad. However, the scandal did help explain the nature of its badness.
The questions raised by the Bailey affair are timely and timeless. Obviously, if he raped women and groomed students for sex, as he is alleged to have done, he deserves no sympathy. But if an artist is a bad person, should that change the way? Arguably, no. A book has an existence apart from its author, a truism that is extra true in the case of biography. When the biographer turns out to be a contemptible human being, his subject comes under suspicion too: What drew the biographer to and not someone else? We owe it to to be fair-minded.
