"Ghost Readers": The Roth Society after Roth

Abstract

"Ghost Readers"The Roth Society after Roth Matthew Shipe (bio) The email came in, as all the best emails do, toward the end of my office hours as I was getting ready to pack up for the day. Unless a paper deadline is approaching, my office hours tend to be quiet, a time when I should be getting work done, but that I usually spend going down various social media rabbit holes and scouring my office for something to eat. So, when the words "Lube Productions" popped up in my inbox I was intrigued. The opening was similarly promising: a simple, unadorned "Hi there." The message was direct: the good folks at Lube Productions were in the process of making a documentary on the history of masturbation and they wanted to know if I would participate. For a moment, I was apprehensive about what I had done exactly to get on Lube Productions' radar. I was, after all, named "Mr. Citizenship" of my high school class; this would not be a good look. It wasn't until the third paragraph that Philip Roth was mentioned and the reason for their request became a bit more clear. As President of the Roth Society, I felt that I had to accept this invitation. I thought of the sequence in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) where Nathan Zuckerman, having consumed far too many pills and too much vodka, pretends to be his nemesis, the literary critic Milton Appel, when traveling on a plane back to visit Chicago, where he had gone to graduate school. Zuckerman recasts the disapproving Appel as the proud publisher of a pornographic magazine named Lickety Split and goes on a wonderfully funny rant defending his fictional pornographic magazine to the horror of the person sitting next to him on the plane. This interview could be fun, I thought, and the sheer number of jokes it could engender was too enticing to pass up. (My office on campus has no windows—this seemed only appropriate for the department's newly minted Masturbation Studies expert.) That night, I responded saying that I would be happy to participate and mentally prepared for my close-up. My mother would be so proud. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, I never heard back from Lube Productions (and, if they happen to read this essay, I'm still game). Such encounters, however, are part of the pleasure of being president of the Philip Roth Society, [End Page 84] and I find myself smiling when my involvement with the society begins to resemble something that Roth would have invented for one of his novels. In the years that I've been president, I find things like this happen with a bit more frequency. I recall a recent interview with an Italian journalist in the aftermath of the Blake Bailey scandal. It was sometime in year two of the pandemic, and I was on parental leave with our daughter, Hallie, and hadn't left the house or even showered in what felt like weeks. Over the fuzzy Zoom connection, I could see the journalist sitting near the oceanfront drinking a glass of wine and describing what sounded like an amazing evening of eating seafood, drinking good wine, and walking on the beach. The interviewer quizzed me on the Bailey scandal and how it had affected Roth's reputation. He was also very interested by the accusation in the Bailey book that when Roth was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he had given prettier female students priority when deciding who would get in off the wait list.1 "It is wrong to let the prettier girls in first, no? Yes? No? How would you respond?" I wasn't sure to how to reply—yes, it's wrong, but I was unsure if "yes" would accurately convey my meaning. Was "no" the correct answer? Help! I tried to respond but felt myself very distracted, and the view of the Mediterranean that I could spy in the background reminded me I had barely left the confines of my house in something like twenty months. I had never felt so grubby (or jealous) in my life, and I'm still...