‘If Blake Bailey, Philip Roth’s biographer, is credibly accused of rape and attempted rape, let him be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But why punish the rest of us? Don’t prevent me from reading a biography that no less a writer than Cynthia Ozick has labeled a “narrative masterwork”’, Terry Pristin, a former reporter for TheNew York Times, wrote in a letter that was published in that newspaper on April 22.

The counterargument would be that certain misdemeanors and crimes, and for that reason certain transgressors, escape the law, and that we are therefore forced to take things into our own hands.

Here is an example of a woman who navigated the thin line between going to the police and forever staying silent, from an article by Alexandra Schwartz that was published in The New Yorker on April 23.

‘[Valentina] Rice confided in a friend; as is exceedingly common in such situations, she did not involve the police. Three years later, encouraged by the #MeToo movement, Rice e-mailed the president of Norton, Julia A. Reidhead, from a pseudonymous address. “I have not felt able to report this to the police but feel I have to do something and tell someone in the interests of protecting other women,” she wrote. “I understand that you would need to confirm this allegation which I am prepared to do, if you can assure me of my anonymity even if it is likely Mr. Bailey will know exactly who I am.”’

This strategy is fully understandable, although it raises the question of what would have happened to Blake Bailey had he not written a bestselling biography. Most likely, nothing would have happened to him. We are equal under the law, at least in principle, but the kangaroo court works differently.

The slogan ‘believe the victim’ appears sensible at face value. Who doesn’t want to be believed, especially when you are being wronged? But if it was really that simple, we might as well get rid of lawyers, judges and jurors—a prosecutor would suffice.

It’s entirely possible that Blake Bailey is guilty of everything that he is accused of, but that doesn’t mean that we would automatically know the right punishment for his crimes.

Alexandra Schwartz rightly noted that publisher W.W. Norton, who has stopped shipping and promoting the book and later declared it out of print (though on Amazon the book is still available for 24 dollars), was merely concerned with damage control. But what may be damage control for the publisher can be a form of punishment for the biographer.

Should we conclude that Blake Bailey has been condemned to self-publishing and to being a pariah in certain circles, for the rest of his life? I don’t mean to say that I’m opposed to this sentence. But when the prime focus is to establish whether someone is guilty, without much in the matter of truth-finding, justice starts to lose its moral ground.

A punishment should not be harsh or cruel, it should offer the defendant hope and the prospect of a return to normalcy, especially in this case, where the defendant is accused of behavior that’s far from a capital offense. I understand that the thirst for revenge is immense, but I side with Abel Herzberg, a Dutch writer and concentration camp survivor, who wrote that punishment is always a defeat, for all parties involved.

Being a thief, a murderer or a rapist in and of itself does not affect someone’s ability to write an excellent novel or biography. I’m not in favor of the idea that in order to be published, in order to be heard, you need to have a clean record.

A clean record may increase an author’s merit, but I hope that people who claim that they love literature are primarily concerned with a text’s quality, which does not depend on respectable behavior that adheres to our contemporary norms.

In 2012, Alex Ross published a piece in The New Yorker with the headline ‘The Case for Wagner in Israel’. He asserted that there is more to Wagner than what comes to the mind of the average layman: bombast and anti-Semitism. 

On the one hand the fact that Wagner could not be played in Israel for decades (despite some futile attempts) is understandable, but on the other hand it is rather silly. I know that Bailey is not Wagner, that the US is not Israel, and that the crimes of which Wagner has been accused are different from Bailey’s alleged crimes. But the essence is the same: just like there is no point in trying to appreciate Wagner’s music while contemplating his antisemitic rantings, you cannot read Bailey and at the same time contemplate what he may have done to women.

Leo Tolstoy was not the best husband nor the best father, to say the least. According to today’s standards he might be called a misogynist. Some might argue that this has impacted Tolstoy’s connection with his readers, and that this has rendered him unreadable. That (and the prosecution of the dead more generally) seems rather absurd to me; the castration of literature for the sake of a totally abstract and almost religious idea of justice.

I don’t mean to defend Blake Bailey, and the accusations leveled against him should be taken seriously. But we should be careful and consider how seriously we should take accusations outside the realm of the law. This difficult question merits debate. I don’t believe that society benefits from the presence of masses of self-appointed judges and jurors, who condemn the accused based on their gut feelings. But I sometimes understand where the desire of these judges and jurors originates.

The pursuit of the idea that literature can only be produced by decent, more or less impeccable, liberal human beings is absurd, probably immoral and ultimately a death sentence for literature.

And although capitalism can be ugly, moral capitalism is even worse.

Let us be open to the possibility that even a criminal can possess talents with which he can enlighten the world. To deny the accused this possibility, to claim that a bond between the reader and the writer can only exist when the writer is untarnished, has very little to do with justice. Such thinking is far from progressive, it is merely a symptom of cultural mysophobia.

Of course, one could argue that our culture (long before the pandemic) has become a culture of mysophobia.