Cancel Culture is Destroying America

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1:34Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:17Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci, joined today by my co-host. My co-host today is my great friend and former professor, Saul Gittleman, the former provost of Tufts. And so, Saul, it's great to have you on as my co-host. And we are joined by our guest, Blake Bailey. Now, Blake is a bestselling author. He's got a new book out called Canceled Lives, My Father, My Scandal, and Me. And this is a great segue, if you don't mind, Blake, because Saul and I interviewed you for your book about Philip Roth, who is somebody that I studied under Saul's tutelage just about 40 years ago in Saul's class.

3:03I think it was called Introduction to Yiddish Literature. And Saul had written a book called From Shtetl to Suburbia, which is still on my bookshelf here in my office here, Blake. But it's great to have you back. So before we get into the book and your other work. Tell us a little bit about your background, and then we're going to get into a very deeply personal book called Canceled Lives. Yes. First of all, thank you very much for having me. And it's good to see you guys again. Four years ago, my Philip Roth biography was published. I was Philip's only authorized biographer. I spent a lot of time with Philip for the six years before he died.

3:49And the book did quite well when it was first published. Cynthia Ozick, of all people, called it a narrative masterwork on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and it debuted at number 12 on the nonfiction bestseller list, which is pretty rare for a 900-page literary biography. But people were angry about certain revelations about Philip Roth in that book. And there was a lot of media stuff about canceling Philip Roth. Then there were a couple of reviews, most notably Laura Marsh's in The New Republic and Pearl Siegel's in The Daily New York Times. that were quite harsh and accused me of being sympathetic and even complicitous with Philip Roth's bad behavior, with his alleged philandering and misogyny and so forth.

4:59Long story short, that led to people digging around in my private life and some stuff got out. some of it true, some of it absolutely untrue. And before I knew it, I was roundly canceled. My publisher W.W. Norton pulled the Philobroth biography, had it pulped. It has since been reissued in various editions by Skyhorse and Skyhorse is the publisher of the book under discussion that's just been published, Canceled Lives. So I'm going to let you take over for a second. The book is awesome. I know we both went through the book, but why don't you start with some of your questions? Me? Okay. Let me start out with a few statements, if I may.

5:47Blake is arguably the finest American literary biographer of the 21st century. I don't think there's anybody writing in the English language in this country who, on the basis of the books that he's written so far, on Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, the Roth biography, and the James Salter one that come. That corpus puts him ahead of James Atlas and probably also Harold Bloom. I mean, when you're talking about literary biography, by this time, right, as you look back over the last 25, 30 years, Blake is in a class by himself. He is arguably the best American biographer, literary biography in the world.

6:39So I think that I came to that point after just reading all of the Rothhoek and then the four other biographers, aggressively superb. He's an excellent researcher, meticulous scholar. The awards that he was nominated for are not gratuitous. He is arguably the best we've got writing in the English language. uh also i after watching reading about the episode what happened with him and the bull roth biography i am totally opposed to any cancellations at all i think cancellation was simply a bad idea when it happened it continues to be a bad idea and i have only a certain tolerance for despicable geniuses we were talking before we went online i i really don't like Richard Wagner as a human being, and I don't even like his music, but you have to give him the right that he's been enormously influential, and I'm not going to cancel him.

7:37You're not going to sandblast Thomas Jefferson's face off Mount Rushmore. Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder, Sally Hemings, the whole sordid case of him sleeping with his slave women, that's fact, and that's history and it's not going to go away. It's evidence, but still we're going to honor him. D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, scurrilous work, The Klansman, terribly racist movie, arguably one of the great American movies. You cannot live to understand American film without understanding Birth of a Nation. Leni Riefenstahl, a Nazi monster woman, a woman of such despicable influence, was a genius.

8:21So you can't study Nazi film, you can't study 20th century German film without dealing with the phenomena of Lady Ribeson. And you could add Ezra Pound, you could add T.S. Eliot, vicious anti-Semites, nasty guys, swine, if you want. They were literary geniuses and shouldn't be canceled. That's simply a fact. And so cancellation is intellectually dishonest. Even if you are a monster, even if you are a rotten human being, you do not cancel literature. You don't cancel Blake Bailey. Having said all of that, there were times that I wish I hadn't read Cancel's Lives. There were a couple of moments there that for me were dicey.

9:10And as I said to Anthony, we were talking before we went online, for all my students, You pay for four and you get the next 40 free. Once a student, always a student. And Tony, Anthony will be nothing for me for the rest of my life, I'm getting to the end of it, except a student. He will always be a student. I'll always be teaching him. And I always will keep a certain measure of distance between us. From your own mouth, the things you said in Canceled Lives about those seventh and eighth grade students that you were teaching, those women, that you never got them into your bed until after they had graduated and they were much older.

9:54I still can't buy that. That's not, for me, as a lifelong teacher, acceptable behavior. I agree. Having said that, that's all I need to say. I believe your work should be permanently in the books and never canceled. And yet you made a couple of ethical moves that bother me. They are meant to be disturbing and they're meant to bother you. My aim in writing this book was not to whitewash my conduct. It was to clarify what I did and what I did not do. And you did help me understand why you chose the subjects you chose, the writers that you, Roy, you go toward people with problems. I do indeed. We all have them.

10:47What I wanted to clarify in the book was that I indulged in some bad behavior. And I did sleep with some former students, generally a long time after they were my students. I have never in my They're no longer your students. And I, yes, I understand that. But for what it's worth, because I was accused of sleeping with my students while they were my students, I was accused initially of assaulting eighth grade girls. OK, I have taught students as young as 11 and as old as 98. Norton Girald. and unlike Philip Roth I never laid a glove on anybody while they were my student usually this I accepted none of their charges by the way years years later when these were no longer legal minors and it was consensual what I wanted to deny in this book vehemently was I did nothing vicious or illegal.

12:00I was accused of rape by two people, and I try to reasonably and non-invidiously address those accusations in the book, say exactly what happened. I think non-titillatingly, too. You know, I'm very clinical and I think objective about my descriptions of what actually happened with those people. So, you know, I mean, it's again, it's one thing to be a philanderer who sleeps around on a wife that in my case, I adored and respected and break my daughter's heart. I did those things, but I did nothing vicious or illegal. I did not rape anybody. I accept that. Except my complete description, except if you had listened to me earlier.

12:56Very dosed. I hope, though, you found my book to be contrived about what I did. But I don't think you understood your own fault, at least in that context. As I said again to Anthony, once you're my student, you're always my student. And when you said, when I read in Cancer Lives, I did not sleep with them until they were a consenting adult. I can't accept that. That's only my own abuse, my own. You're not a mind. I, you know, I emphatically describe it as such in the book. I will not accept somebody's description of you as a semen-soaked star of Rod's three-second book. No, you were just, you let yourself get at it.

13:44It's a brilliant piece. And I was actually rather pleased by it because, you know, look, this is important. When I first tried to respond to my scandal in the summer of 2022, OK, I published this book's predecessor, a previous version of this book called Repellent. And it was also about my scandal. and when I tried to publish that book, it was quashed by the Philip Roth estate for reasons that we needn't go into and that I'm not allowed to go into, but it was quashed. But when its Amazon page first appeared, it immediately blew up into a big media story. Everyone said, can you believe it? Blake Bailey, this detestable scumbag is presuming to defend himself.

14:37And I was astonished. You know, the people seemed angrier by my impulse to defend myself than they'd been by what I was accused of in the first place. because what they want you to do is, you know, put on your sackcloth and ashes and wander off into the desert and get pecked by birds. And I'm not going to do that because, again, I did nothing illegal and I did nothing that I think is truly vicious. And yes, you know, I mean, I think the Philip Roth book and my other books deserve to exist, you know. Oh, Picasso. Good to Thou Tse. Well, you mentioned these are odious people. They did odious Alice Munro, for God's sake.

15:38But they are magnificent writers. And I'm going to keep looking at Guernica and I'm going to keep reading this. That's where I've come from. I'm going to keep reading.

15:50But the ones that always got me were Yates. Not Yates. Yates was anti-Semite, too. But Elliott and Pound. They should have both taken out and shot, particularly Ezra Pound after World War II. But the American literary world couldn't do that. Instead, they declared him insane, put him in St. Elizabeth's madhouse in Washington, D.C., and then let him out. after whatever orials they did we won the the bowling bowling prize oh you're probably that goes back to italy and the first thing he did was do the fascist salute he never changed well pound never change anyway so so this book the the you know this book i tried to publish in 2022 was was greeted with total outrage and for answer lives years later the culture has changed somewhat because this time I have been met with contemptuous silence.

16:46And you'll be on. I'm sorry, Saul. The canceled movement partially is responsible for us getting Donald Trump. Yeah, I agree. Went too far. Yeah, no, he's moving the pendulum swing the other way. Too far. No question. Yeah. And I didn't know what to expect when, you know, when I when I faced the publication of this book. What I will say is that I would never make a public statement to the effect that these women are what what they say about their rape accusations are unambiguously false. And here's why. I would never put myself out like that because, you know, I mean, it's inviting, you know, a mob of torches and pitchforks on my lawn.

17:47were the only way you could have escaped the only way you could have escaped out the back no no if you had gotten earlier on in your life those two little Donald ducks that are on your shoulder the angel and the devil if the angel had prevailed then you wouldn't be in these pickles right now we all saw and live and learn my point is is that you know I put myself out there because I'm telling the truth and it's not a self-flattering version of the truth. I did some bad things as you have roundly established. It's very rare. It's very real. It's very raw and it's very honest. And I think the reason why we wanted to have you back on is that to Saul's point, we got to stop canceling people.

18:39I accept I have flaws in my personality too, Blake. I'm not sitting here, you know, what did Jesus say, right? Throw the first stone if you've not sinned. I'm not a perfect person. And Saul, believe me, knows more than one of my flaws, which I've shared with him. I mean, I, you know, and I've made my mistakes politically. I've made my mistakes professionally and personally. I guess the thing that Saul's getting at, and I guess the reason I wanted to have you back on, is where do you go from here? What is the lesson? When you close that book, okay, you're a great author, you're a phenomenal writer, and you're writing to a reader.

19:18What is the lesson that you want the reader? The reader is closing the book, and they've just learned something. Which, what, Canceled Lives? It Canceled Lives. What do you want that lesson to be from Canceled Lives?

19:33Well, I mean, had I to do it all over again, you know, at one point in the book, I examined my behavior. Most of this behavior was 20 plus years ago. And that doesn't excuse it. But I look back on that person that I was and I simply don't understand what the hell I was doing. You know, I was deeply unhappy for various reasons. My brother had just killed himself in jail. And my Yates book, which was a critical success, was about to come out. And meanwhile, my publisher kept passing on all my subsequent book proposals. So I felt like, you know, all this hard work was for nothing. And I engaged in in some bad behavior, which I would never, ever, ever repeat.

20:30have been the nonstop ass stomping that I have gotten over the past four years and given my own evolving sense of right and wrong. That said, you know, my literary biographies, Philip Roth, John Sheever, Richard Yates and Charles Jackson, all these people were extremely flawed human beings. That's what I got mostly also out of Canceled Lives. How do you found these people? You know, Philip Roth, when he taught at Penn in the 70s, he would have his friend Joel Canero, who was the dean. And, you know, when Philip's oversubscribed class, when someone would, you know, would try to get off the waiting list and get into Philip's oversubscribed class, they would have to go through Joel Canero.

21:23And Joel Canaro would vet these people, these women for comeliness and susceptibility at Philip's behest. I never did that. You know, that's why people were calling for Roth to be canceled after my biography was published. and you know i mean my point is there is a vast discrepancy between someone's uh public face and what's going on in their private life anthony have you read plot against america yes and also saw the movie in fact you may remember this you recommended that book to me it's got to be 20 years ago yeah And it came true. I mean, if there was only one person per. I mean, the Lindbergh story is the Trump story.

22:16Yeah. But I didn't know what to expect from this book. And as far as as Trump is concerned, you know, when he was reelected, I thought, well, this this this can go this can go either way. I mean, a man who has been civilly convicted of sexual misconduct is as has been reelected president of the United States amid many other alleged misdeeds. either that means the culture is changing, not necessarily for the better, but it may also mean that there's going to be this all the more virulent backlash against me as, you know, for my past sexual misbehavior. Again, for the most part, the response has been a contemptuous silence.

23:18The publicity I've done for this book has consisted of a wonderful interview on the Brett Easton Ellis podcast, almost three hours long review, and the now defunct, I think my review killed it, New York Journal of Books, not to be confused with the New York Review of Books, a piece in Tablet, a piece in Unheard, and a couple of other minor... I don't think your legacy. So I'm thrilled to be here and to be able to say my piece. I'm sorry, Saul. Go ahead. I don't think your legacy is going to be canceled lines. Your legacy is going to be your biographies. You are a brilliant biographer. Your autobiography, I don't need to know all of that about your family.

24:00I don't need to know all of that about you. I can tell you privately and right to your face now, you should have comported yourself differently. But when it comes to finding the right biographer to put together a literary biography, you and James Atlas, I thought, were in the same class. But you are prolific. You're just the best that we have in the nation. And you cannot be canceled. Well, Saul, that's very, very generous. But I do need to sell a few copies of Cancelled Live. So help me out. That's problematic. Well, as a writer, if I don't. It's problematic. You write about you write about. Which, by the way, I think is a good book.

24:50It has the virtue of brevity. It's not going to take up a lot of your time. And it is absolutely truthful from beginning to end. And look, I'm going to say something generationally, Blake, because you and I are from the same vintage. Yep. And Saul is probably from our dad's generation. So for me, having five children that range in age from 32 to seven, I think your book is worthwhile because Saul is right. His generation doesn't want to hear all that detail. But the generation that you're talking to that's younger than Saul's probably wants to hear that detail. Again, I'm not saying that it's right or wrong, but I think that there's messages in the book.

25:36and what I got from the book was, I think that you are contrite in the book, but what I got from the book though is a cautionary tale about boundaries. And my boundaries have been flawed in the past and Saul knows I grew up with a very tough dad. He was a blue collar worker, beat the living daylights out of me and my brother and it manifested itself in different ways, which I've tried to curb some of my excesses as well. But what I got out of the book was, you are out of control with your boundaries exactly you've reined it in and this is a cautionary tale for people to think about their lives where they may be overstepping a boundary somewhere reined it in you're going to live a more prosperous more healthy more mentally aware more self-aware life i think that was the message of the book and so i'm i'm proud to have you on And I agree with Saul about your writing.

26:34I think the Philip, you know, he read the others. I have to confess to you, I didn't. I've read Canceled Lives, and I read the Philip Roth book cover to cover. I was influenced to do that by Saul because he introduced me to Philip Roth, who was masturbating in his baseball glove. Like they can literally, right, pour noise complaint. You know what I mean? So I'm like, baseball glove. Right. And by the way, he describes the semen is smelling like buttermilk and Clorox. And this is something I read 40 years ago. But you can't remember. That's why he was our greatest living novelist. Yeah. So so so to me, this is I guess what I would say to you, go forward, sir, in your life and write and go forward in your life.

27:22And you're always welcome on this podcast with your books because we are bibliophiles on this podcast. And I, you know, Saul is is right in what he's saying. But I'm also think that you did the right thing by writing the book because, yeah, it's not that to stop the canceling. Right. Trump is too far of a pendulum going back the other way. I'm hoping we can get to the middle part of the swing. The trouble is that both sides of that pendulum, Trump and the anti-Trumps, are both cancelers. They both want to cancel. That's the irony of it. That's not the First Amendment. It's not what America, it's what America used to be.

28:03It was always that way. I mean, I remember growing up with a band in Boston. We've always done that. We've always canceled people. And we have to stop. Pornography, that's something else. But the stuff that Blake is writing, that has to be part of the American canon. Well, look, what is at the heart of Cancelled Lives is the same basic theme that's present in my biographies, which, again, is sort of the vast difference between a person's public image and their private lives. Can I talk a little bit about why my father features so large in this book? The subtitle is My Father, My Scandal, and Me.

28:51My father, Burke Saul, I think you two are pretty much exact contemporaries. You're 91. My father would have been 91. He died seven months after my scandal blew up, and the sheer dizzying horror of what happened to me hastened his death. The reason my father is particularly germane to this story, he was regarded within his profession as a kind of real life Atticus Finch. He was the best trial lawyer Oklahoma has ever produced. You know, I mean, say your relativistic things about Oklahoma, but still, he was prosy. He was as decent as Atticus Finch, at least in the movie. Pardon me? Do you think he was as decent as Greg?

29:47I'm coming to that. My father was, apart from his abilities as a litigator, was foremost known as a paragon of ethical conduct, of graciousness, of wit and courtesy within the profession. He won an ethics award. That's what he's primarily known for, is being an ethical paragon within his profession. However, Saul, in his private life, my father was very freewheeling, very philandering. My parents had an open marriage. My mother was no slouch. I would come home. There would be a drag queen singing torch songs. There would be drugs, etc. So you'll agree there was a great thing through, you know, and open marriages.

30:43You've got children that you're responsible for. Right. I may be a Puritan. You know, I'm a Puritan. I am a Jewish Puritan. Once you have children, you are going to be responsible for a great deal of other people's lives. and you philandering, drugs, all that stuff. Keep it out of it. Well, this is why. You wrote very effectively. And I didn't like him that much. You didn't like my father in the book? No, I get it. There were times when I said, don't do that. Your deportment stinks. Well, my father changed. And he divorced my mother. He remarried a woman who I did not get along with. And he became much more puritanical in his private life.

31:33Again, he was always a lovely man in his public conduct. And you can't sham that altogether. It wasn't a sham. He's a lovely guy. If you met him, you would likely adore him. The only way I met him is through your writing. But it is possible, again, to be sexually wayward, Saul, and to be a person of the highest ethical ideals otherwise. That was my fault. As long as you're not involving other people, particularly your children. There you go. And I'd like to think if my daughter were here, she would tell you that as a father, I mean, this is why all this was so shocking to her. I mean, it almost destroyed her, as you can imagine, because she never saw any of this in my paternal conduct.