Mark Oppenheimer in N Y TIMES:
In 2011, Roth paid over $60,000 in
lawyers’ fees to force Ira Nadel, an American academic who now teaches in
Canada, to delete one sentence — which said that Roth had “anxieties about
being emotionally engulfed by a woman,” referring to the longtime girlfriend
who was the basis for Drenka, the sexually liberated mistress in “Sabbath’s
Theater” — from his “Critical Companion to Philip Roth.” Nadel was planning a
biography, and Wylie informed him that he could not quote from Roth’s work, and
that nobody close to Roth would ever cooperate with him.
Sick of Miller and contemptuous of Nadel — whose own Roth biography paints him as terrified of intimacy and was published last month — Roth kept up the hunt.
Only 2 reviewers of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE realized that it was a book about biography, not just a book about Melville.
Parker on Ira Nadel in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE
In the Preface I envisioned biographies as seated at a great dining hall of biographies. As for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY, I saw “it as sitting across the room from theory-envying and theory-driven unruly, eccentric stepcousins once or twice removed like Ira Bruce Nadel’s Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (1984)” . . . .
Then later a long discussion which begins this way at the start of the endnotes:
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