The idea that there is some Real Marilyn — some living, breathing person hiding within the iconography — has been reliably deployed since Monroe’s own heyday. Indeed, it was a magician’s trick used in her first interview with Life magazine, published in 1952 a pivotal year in her career.

Monroe was at this point an emerging star, widely admired for her roles in All About Eve (1950) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). However, her fledgling career had been nearly derailed by the revelations that she had posed for nude photos in her former life as a model; the photographer Tom Kelley had flogged the images to a calendar for a quick buck without her agreement. So the 20th Century Fox executives decided on a radical PR strategy: Marilyn would admit the whole affair, saying she needed the money to pay rent.

On the magazine’s cover — the first of six in a 10-year span — Marilyn backs up against the wall, eyes nearly shut, lips parted; she looks like you’re about to drunkenly kiss her at a party, like she’s not realized her ruched top is slipping down her shoulders. The promise is the same as in modern-day celebrity content: revelation, exposure, intimacy.

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In the interview itself, Marilyn is scolded for having “posed for calendar art when she was broke”. By way of illustration, the article reproduces the nude in full color. The captions contain an in-joke: above the nude is a black-and-white image of “Marilyn clothed”; “her taste in music is distinctly highbrow”, the copy snorts. Below, a big black arrow points to “Marilyn unclothed”. Not so highbrow then, were you Miss Mortenson? The reader is satisfied. They get to be titillated by the nudes; they also maintain their moral high ground; and they get to laugh at Monroe’s pretensions. They’ve got an eyeful of the Real Marilyn, in spite of all her airs and graces. Meanwhile, Monroe has swerved the scandal and saved her career. The interview was also the source of her best-known quip, a gag about wearing only Chanel No 5 to bed.

So this “sturdy blonde named Marilyn Monroe”, as the Life profile calls her, was already mastering a public-private Dance of the Seven Veils, a sort of PR striptease which is by now baked into the grammar of female celebrity. Her publicity coup was no doubt familiar to Kris Jenner, the momager of Kim Kardashian, who was alleged to have leaked her own daughter’s sex tape; half a century later, in 2007, the effect was precisely the same. But latter-day celebrities are Marilyn’s heirs, whether explicitly or not. In 2022 Kardashian wore Monroe’s “Happy birthday, Mr President” dress to the Met Gala, the subject of much indignation from Marilyn-watchers. In 1985, Madonna channeled the Monroe of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in her Material Girl music video; later she would adopt a punkier version of Monroe’s peroxide crop. Both women were the subject of erotic taboo, closely watched by the press in every romantic clinch — often in a way that overshadowed their work. Madonna said of Monroe that she “became an adjective”; as such her persona could be put on and taken off, a shibboleth for “Hollywood”, “sexiness”, or “blonde”.

These same signals are used today by Sabrina Carpenter, who winks at the Fifties as another blonde, corseted coquette. Carpenter has built a brand on the kind of breathy euphemism that made Marilyn so irresistible; the difference is that today, we credit celebrities like her with being in on the joke. On film and in the media, Marilyn often seemed to be surprised by her own outrageous sex appeal; in reality it was carefully curated and her apparent unworldliness was just as much of a construct. But then, the whole business of celebrity was far less complicated in the Fifties. Public personas could be utterly managed and exposure was mediated through agents. In the age of social media, celebrities cannot be as perfect as Marilyn: they are overexposed and multidimensional; they are real. After #MeToo, we are more comfortable with stars who appear to “own” their sexiness; Marilyn’s status as object rather than subject makes us uneasy.

What does it mean to know her, then? For Andy Warhol, Monroe was all surface, all abstraction. This was his contention when he copied a promotional image of Monroe from the 1953 film Niagara dozens of times via silkscreen; he began this series immediately after her death in August 1962. Marilyn’s image was seen spiraling into chaotic replication; the garish Marilyns parodied her virality by making her seem to metastasize, over and over, in freakish copies. The pictures became self-propelling objects. This is not a woman but a meme, Warhol is saying, and the only way we can see her is through the process of imitation.

Marilyn has proved an irresistible subject for writers, too — in the years after her death, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, everybody worth their salt had a piece of Marilyn. She was pitched as the ultimate postmodern quandary, or as a case study in sexist scopophilia; framed as a dejected victim of men or a winking puppetmaster in her own defilement. Each writer draws out of Marilyn a sweeping theory about mass media, or feminism, or sex, often taking these readings to onanistic excess. Sarah Churchwell knocked the wind out of the often-nonsense biographies in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), most of them amounting to precisely the sort of pseudointellectualism Marilyn herself was mocked for during her Actor’s Studio era, or when she claimed to enjoy Dostoevsky. Nevertheless, more than 20 years after Churchwell put all this to bed, the Real Marilyns keep coming. Sometimes the revenants come in the form of literary figments, and sometimes real people — Jasmine Chiswell, or “the TikTok Marilyn Monroe“, makes a living out of impersonating her; she lives in Marilyn’s former home in Burbank, twirling and pouting and selling beauty products. The house is haunted, she says, by Marilyn’s ghost; the real ghoul is closer to home.

The obsession with the “realness” of Marilyn Monroe is always voyeuristic. It always involves prurient study of her marriages; of sex and rape; of the Hollywood casting couch which by all accounts was her means of introduction to studio life. She once said she didn’t “want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiacal”. So you can only imagine how she’d feel about this posthumous literary meta-eroticization. Her body has continued to be mined for tantalizing lumps of “real” ever since her death.

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The specific weirdness of Marilyn Monroe is her fame’s incomparable afterlife. Even as more and more people claim to find the Real Her, the memory of the woman has faded. I’d bet that most Zoomers don’t know what Monroe’s voice sounded like. I wonder how many have even seen Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch. The oddity is that the search for the “real” Marilyn only intensifies as the real Marilyn recedes.

The hunt for the real Marilyn Monroe is part prurience, part catharsis. She is a pseudo-religious icon of a Hollywood heyday; but her status as icon jars with the vulnerable, ordinary, troubled woman who must have lived beneath. Her young, lonely death at 36 from barbiturate poisoning at the age of makes us uncomfortable; her secret pain, the miscarriages and violations, her asylum-bound mother and runaway father all leave a gauzy guilt over her pristine image. But if we don’t see her as real, this protects us from this guilt. In this sense she is more Anne Boleyn than Lady Diana, a historical curiosity rather than a woman in our time. Every biopic, every book, every exhibition is a failed excavation attempt — be under no delusions about that. The search is endless because Marilyn’s image was designed for endless reproduction.

As such, she slips through our fingers. Are we even sure there is a real woman beneath the white gown, beauty spot and fluttering eyes? This too-famous figure squats awkwardly between person and symbol, a category error. Every new attempt to pin her down peels back another layer; every new attempt merely produces a different copy. Really, all these retrospectives are a sort of land-grab: everyone wants Real Marilyn for himself.

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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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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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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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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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.

That the industry had a diversity problem was impossible to argue with: “an analysis” of the gender makeup of the New York Times list shows how heavily it once skewed male — and how, in the last decade, a massive push to diversify publishing has enjoyed no small amount of success.

But God help any writer bold enough to say so.

When James Patterson noted in an interview last month that older white men weren’t getting writing jobs as easily as they used to, outrage ensued. After being savaged for a week online and in the media, Patterson apologised (not that this mollified his critics). This week, Joyce Carol Oates kicked the same hornet’s nest, writing on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested”. This state of affairs, she added, was “heartbreaking for writers”, particularly those with the self-awareness to be duly aware of “their own privilege”. But the response from within the literary community was not sadness, but fury.

The outpouring of replies were split between people who argued that Oates’s assertion was false and people who argued that it was true but not heartbreaking, and in fact a real and unmitigated good. And then there were the people who argued both of these things simultaneously, sometimes even within the same breath. For whatever reason, this type of self-refuting argument is particularly ubiquitous on Twitter; the fallacy, which some have termed The Law of Salutary Contradiction, is best summed up as: “this isn’t happening, and also it’s good that it’s happening”. One representative reply read: “I am a literary agent. This is not so. And why ever would we invest our hopes in the continued success of white men in an industry which persists in shutting out queer and BIPOC authors?!”

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Is it happening? With more than one extremely high-profile person flat-out accusing Oates of lying, it’s worth surveying the statistics. This is only an informal snapshot of the data, but one that still tells a story: of the 100 most recent debut book deals listed on Publisher’s Marketplace, 83 went to women. Of the remaining 17, 12 went to white men — ten of whom appear to be under the age of 40, and thus young by literary standards. It’s not a total shutout, of course, but it’s also not parity. And the same trend can be observed in terms of not just who’s published, but who’s celebrated; for instance, of the 13 books on the Booker longlist, released this week, three are by white men, none of whom are under 45 (one is the oldest ever recipient of a Booker nomination).

Of course, there are additional layers of data here that could surface additional meaning: how big the deal, what genre the book, whether the author had previously published as a poet or essayist or journalist. And of course, those who get book deals have always represented only the tiniest fraction of aspiring novelists: if the uphill battle for young white men is marginally steeper now, it was plenty steep before.

But when Oates’s agent friend reported that, “he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers”, it’s hardly far-fetched to think he was telling the truth — if not literally, then directionally, in the sense that an exasperated parent might report that they cannot get their toddler to put his shoes on. “I can’t get editors to look at these books” is a cultural observation, not a statistical one. It’s about the vibes, the gossip, the buzz, the discourse, the things that agents hear from editors and authors hear from agents. It’s about an industry veteran’s general sense of which way the wind is blowing. And on that front, when it comes to debut authors getting book deals, it is certainly blowing more favourably in the direction of non-white non-straight non-men.

Suggested reading

The paranoia driving office politics

By Kat Rosenfield

Frankly, it would be weird if it were otherwise. From the moment that diversity became an industry cause, it enjoyed widespread, vocal support. In 2014, sparked by the revelation that white authors and characters absolutely dominated the YA marketplace, the We Need Diverse Books movement was born — and since then it has only gathered steam. Pitching contests were established for marginalised writers. Literary media pivoted to focus heavily on those writers. Submission guidelines were updated to explicitly ask for work from queer, gender-nonconforming writers of colour. Publishers announced that they were committed to diversifying their lists. Editors announced their intention to buy more books by marginalised writers. Agents publicly bemoaned how sick they were of reading submissions by white guys.

All of these sentiments were expressed vehemently, repeatedly, and in public, and all of them seemed to convey a consensus truth: an individual white man might still do okay in publishing, but categorically? White men were over, the rules had changed, and the anecdotal evidence seemed to support this. Did you hear about the guy whose book was yanked back on the eve of submission when his agent realised that his racial identity didn’t match the race of his protagonist? Or the white poet who couldn’t get published until he adopted a female Chinese pseudonym and won accolades — at least until he was found out?

The truth is, even if the data didn’t bear out the substance of Oates’s tweet, publishing culture matters when it comes to aspiring authors hoping to get a shot. Back when the problem was a lack of diverse books, it was known that the dearth of minority authors was at least in part a problem of preemptive discouragement: many promising writers, expecting the door to be slammed in their face, simply didn’t bother trying to get through at all. And yet, among those who advocated hardest for diverse books, it’s all but verboten to suggest that the movement has gained any meaningful ground, cultural or otherwise.

Suggested reading

The twilight of identity politics

By Park Macdougald

Why, after all this progress, do publishing’s gatekeepers resist any suggestion that diversification has been a success? It’s a paradox of the moment that a person is supposed to want this sort of change, demand it even, but also fly into a frothing rage at the notion that the desired change might in fact be happening. Maybe it’s that the survival of any progressive movement requires that you continually shift the goalposts, lest your organisation problem-solve its way into obsolescence. Maybe it’s a sense that however much has been accomplished, there’s work yet to be done. Or maybe it’s just the cognitive dissonance that always accompanies initiatives like this: everyone wants to say they’re hiring for diversity, but nobody wants to be seen as a diversity hire.

Or maybe the problem is that even a diverse publishing world will still never be fair — because this game has never been just about identity, or talent, but about timing, and resources, and pure dumb luck. If young white men aren’t the hottest commodity right now, it’s not just because publishers have convinced themselves it’s a moral imperative not to hire them; it’s because the industry follows the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist of the moment is deeply invested in identity. The debut novels bought in 2022 thus far are not just overwhelmingly written by women, but overwhelmingly focused on race, gender, sexuality, or class.

Is this annoying? Maybe. But is it more annoying than the state of play ten years ago, when publishers were falling all over themselves to find the next sexually-charged teen dystopian-fantasy series about a merman and a werewolf fighting over a girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful? Well, that’s a matter of taste. And like all literary trends, this one won’t last forever. Eventually, some new, attention-arresting thing will come on the scene, and the identitarian reckoning of 2020 will be yesterday’s news. Whenever that happens, and whatever it is, a handful of lucky writers will get swept up by the cresting wave of the zeitgeist and carried to glorious high ground, while everyone else looks on and makes grumbling noises.