Francine Prose was supposed to interview Blake Bailey, who has just published a hefty and admiring biography of Philip Roth, but the interview was called off because uh oh.

This was the first I’d heard about what the email termed the “recent developments surrounding Blake Bailey”. But it took just two key strokes to learn that several women have come forward with extremely disturbing allegations about the biographer. These range from accounts of reckless behavior with female students he’d taught in a New Orleans junior high school (dirty jokes, encouraging girls to write about their sex lives) to more recent and highly believable accusations of rape. No charges have been made. Bailey has denied all allegations. His publisher has cancelled a second 10,000-copy printing of the book and halted its distribution, ending all publicity and promotional events.

… Bailey’s refusal to censure (or even express a twinge of disapproval) of Roth’s odious mistreatment of many of his lovers was interpreted by other critics as a sign of moral failure or complicity. The devastating way in which Roth broke up with one woman who adored him – telling her to leave his house keys on her way out – is no more than a punchline that ends one of Bailey’s chapters. But even the less admiring reviews were, as they say, ink, and Philip Roth: The Biography was already appearing on several bestseller lists before the dream publication imploded.

Most of the time misogyny is not a problem, but once in a blue moon it will put a kink in the plans.

Prose found the biography entertaining, but…

But even as I tried to read it uncritically, for entertainment, certain sentences jumped out at me, details that seemed unnecessary, excessive, prurient or simply strange. The odd claim that childbirth had withered Roth’s first wife’s vagina; the suggestion that Roth was more excited about having dinner with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, both important writers, when he learned that their daughter was home from Yale; the description of Roth’s particular sexual acts with women mentioned by name….

Bailey describes Roth’s firing of an earlier biographer, Ross Miller, who thought Roth was a misogynist. And much of the recent publicity has surrounded the care with which Roth chose the more simpatico Bailey – whose previous books included biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever – to write his life. In light of the allegations against Bailey, and his neutral responses to Roth at his worst, one can’t help thinking: they found each other.

But Prose goes on to question the slamming of the door on Bailey.

Meanwhile there is a parallel narrative to the one about two guys with serious problems with women. And that is the story of Bailey’s book having been pulled from circulation. It’s all perfectly legal, thanks to a clause that is now standard in many publishing contracts, added over the objections of the Authors Guild and many writers and agents. Such provisions – the so-called morals clause – permit publishers to terminate a contract and even demand the return of an advance if the author is accused of “immoral, illegal, or publicly condemned behavior”. The idea is to protect the publisher in cases like Bailey’s, but the slippery slope is obvious. It’s easy to imagine the Twitter storm of unproven rumors destroying years of work. And how can we ask publishers to be our arbiters, to distinguish the moral from the immoral? Plenty of books have been written and published by politicians with blood on their hands.

I find that paragraph unpleasantly ironic, given that she joined the people who objected when PEN America gave an award to Charlie Hebdo after the slaughter. I’ve admired several of her novels but I did not admire her actions then.