Letter to TLS--I see it at the top of the Letters page, September 17, 2021. They used 2 short columns so I did not see it at first glance.

  It's nice. You know you are alive still when the TLS prints one of your letters.

         In the September 3, 2021 TLS Alison Kelly praises Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife as “an analysis in both the psychological and literary senses.” Nadel had “conducted wide-ranging primary research over many years.” Now, “drawing particularly revealing insights from his subject’s personal correspondence, Nadel feels qualified to diagnose psychological conditions such as ‘the savior complex’, ‘the escape artist’, 'his Judaic sense of moral obligation’ and, most sweepingly, ‘the Roth problem.’” Nadel’s “deep understanding of Roth’s entire body of work” enables “him to offer elegant critical readings of both major and minor texts, and to psychoanalyze Roth indirectly, through the writing, in particular through his fictional characters.”

         In my 2012 Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative (499-500) I wrestled with Nadel’s declaration in his 1984 Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form that “the biographer is akin more to the creative writer than the historian.” I quoted Victoria Glendinning’s outrage in “Lies and Silences” in The Troubled Face of Biography (1988): “Nadel . . . asks: ‘To what extent is fact necessary in a biography? To what extent does it hinder the artistic and literary impulse of the biographer? To what degree does the biographer alter fact to fit his theme and pattern?’ His view is that the biographer has every right to change facts in order to make a psychological or artistic point. This makes me shiver.”

         Since Alison Kelly says Nadel’s “scholarly” book is based on long and wide primary research, she owes us to confront his apparent repudiation of his 1984 position on creative biography. As it is, Kelly’s bland endorsement of Nadel “makes me shiver.”

Hershel Parker

Morro Bay, CA