Philip Roth Goes Public With Fact Check of Wikipedia

September 7, 2012, 5:38 pm

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Philip Roth has written an open letter to Wikipedia that goes on for nearly as long as some of the celebrated author's recent short novels. The letter appeared on Page-Turner, the books blog of The New Yorker magazine, and in it Mr. Roth adamantly denies that his novel “The Human Stain” was based on the life of Anatole Broyard, a longtime cultural critic for The Times.

The novel concerns the fate of Coleman Silk, an African-American professor who presents himself as white and Jewish throughout his academic career. The Wikipedia entry for the novel cites several reviews that surmise Silk was based on Mr. Broyard, who, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written, “was born black and became white, and his story is compounded of equal parts pragmatism and principle.”

Mr. Roth says the book was actually based on “an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years.”

In his letter, Mr. Roth dismisses the conjecture about Mr. Broyard, saying it is “not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip - there is no truth in it at all.” (It's not the first time Mr. Roth has denied the interpretation.) Mr. Roth says he wrote to Wikipedia directly about the issue and got back a note from a site administrator: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

At Page-Turner, Mr. Roth offers a stylish recitation of all the things he doesn't know about Mr. Broyard, which reads, in small part:

“I never took a meal with Broyard, never went with him to a bar or a ballgame or a dinner party or a restaurant, never saw him at a party I might have attended back in the sixties when I was living in Manhattan and on rare occasions socialized at a party. I never watched a movie or played cards with him or showed up at a single literary event with him as either a participant or a spectator. As far as I know, we did not live anywhere in the vicinity of each other during the ten or so years in the late fifties and the sixties when I was living and writing in New York and he was a book reviewer and cultural critic for the New York Times. I never ran into him accidentally in the street, though once - as best I can remember, in the nineteen-eighties - we did come upon each other in the Madison Avenue men's store Paul Stuart, where I was purchasing shoes for myself.”

Later in the piece, though, Mr. Roth describes another social encounter with Mr. Broyard that occurred in 1958, and says someone that day mentioned to him a rumor about Mr. Bro yard's race.

References to the Broyard-based theories remain in the Wikipedia entry, but the page has been revised to include Mr. Roth's claims and the imbroglio has spurred a discussion about protocol among site users.