JOSEPH EPSTEIN
IN HIS 1928 ESSAY “THE CRITIC WHO DOES NOT EXIST,” Edmund Wilson asks a question that was pleading to be asked: “How is it possible for our reviewing to remain so puerile?” He then offers this:
When a new book of American poetry or a novel or other work of belles lettres appears, one gets the impression that it is simply given to almost any well-intentioned (but not even necessarily literate) person who happens to present himself; and this person then describes in a review his emotions upon reading the book.
If that was true in 1928, it’s much truer now. The average reviewer’s idea of literary comment is summary flanked by quotation, interspersed with how the book made him feel, as if his feelings have anything at all to do with the artistic success or failure of what he’s read. Where the novel is concerned, part of the problem is that so many publications harness other novelists to do the reviewing. They must go this route for the obvious reason that we currently suffer from a lack of Edmund Wilsons, but one can’t get around the fact that many “creative writers” don’t know the first thing about the critical mind. They preside over literary comment much the way they preside over their MFA writing classes: with hand-holding and saccharine equanimity, with a kind of artistic egalitarianism, and the usual workshop lingo: “I couldn’t sympathize with the narrator” or “the plot feels unrealistic to me.” That won’t do. Criticism is personal and passionate, the product of severe erudition, or it is impotent and dull, the product of mere opinion.
For more than five decades, since he started his career at the New Leader in 1962, Joseph Epstein has been one of our most valuable alternatives to puerile and invertebrate reviews. He is a smasher of hype and entrenched pieties among the literati, an arbiter with a bloodstained yardstick, a literary and personal essayist serious about his convictions and his comedy. You’ve probably heard the slander that says criticism can’t rise to the level of art, that critics are hamstrung artists. Don’t be bothered by the falsity of that view—be bored by the inanity of it. With Ruskin and Arnold and Wilde, Epstein is a shining example of how essay writing and criticism aspire to equal footing with imaginative literature.
Author of twenty-four books—including his newest, A Literary Education, an assortment of previously uncollected essays spanning 1969 to 2013—Epstein illustrates the necessary difference between disposition and argument and never confuses rhetoric with logic or rationalization with reasoning. By turns cantankerous and comedic, traditional and irreverent, damning and praising, he writes sentences you want to remember. And that, in the last analysis, is the only measure of a writer.
Here’s Virginia Woolf in her 1939 essay “Reviewing”: “Undoubtedly in the nineteenth century the reviewer was a formidable insect; he had considerable power . . . upon the public taste. He could hurt the author; he could persuade the public to buy or to refrain from buying.” A formidable insect with the potency of persuasion: from the outset that’s precisely the program to which Epstein aspired—an arthropod sting or bite that would soon swell and prove resistant to any available balm. For Epstein, the critic of abiding literary values and aesthetic sensibility has an obligation to help influence the reception of a book, a duty to punish efforts that transgress against originality and vigor, and to laud efforts that, in their language and vision and architecture, aspire to greatness.
In “Reviewing and Being Reviewed,” Epstein admits that “the attraction of reviewing books for me has indeed been the chance it offers to correct taste,” and he then quickly confesses that the chance remains rather outside. He writes of the necessity of a critic’s “temperamental equipment” and “a controlled anger aroused by breaches in literary justice. When bad writers are praised and good writers neglected or misunderstood, he should feel personally offended.” Only a front-lines idealist—an idealist of actuality, as he once phrased it—speaks of literary justice, and the critic who is incensed to fury is the critic who cares deeply about the integrity of literature and culture. The critics and essayists of supreme worth are always those who are steadfast in taking up unpopular causes and unbothered by the possibility of being pecked at or slandered for their principles.
The illusion among so many reviewers is that talking about imaginative literature is a lot like talking about life, that one requires only a little life experience to judge a book properly. But to talk about imaginative literature is to talk about art—artifice and architecture, the liturgical and the linguistic—and Epstein writes about books not as someone who has lived fully, but rather as someone who has read fully. He doesn’t make the tyro’s error of confusing art for life, even though he understands that art enhances, enriches, enlarges life. His essays are troves of literary reference and allusion, maps between centuries, countries, genres. Or as he himself puts it, writing in the third person in the introduction to his collection Life Sentences: “He is heavily—though he hopes not irritatingly—quotatious.” The quotatious ones are the only ones for me; remember La Rochefoucauld’s counsel: “To try to be wise all on one’s own is sheer folly.”
Epstein’s literary assertions can be muscular introductions to those writers you don’t know well and also a whole new sheen on those writers you do. Here’s an illustrative bit from Life Sentences, in a piece on one of his heroes:
What for Montaigne needs to be in harmony are opinions and morals, work and life. What his extraordinary exercise in self-analysis and self-portraiture is in the end about is the disciplining of the moral faculties through rigorous and profound introspection, so that such harmonious order prevails. No artist effectively teaches morality; the best he can hope to do is teach what morality is about. This Montaigne does supremely.
Here’s another, from the title essay of Life Sentences, a loving tribute to Joseph Conrad that begins with both Conrad and Henry James:
In the work of each writer, plot never supersedes artistic purpose and artistic purpose is never separated from moral vision. James invoked one to be a person on whom nothing was lost and, what comes close to the same thing, Conrad affirmed that, in the moral realm, ignorance is no excuse. James loved complication, and Conrad seemed unable to avoid it.
Plot never supersedes artistic purpose and artistic purpose is never separated from moral vision: there’s your working definition of the difference between serious work and commercial work. In “The Literary Life Today,” Epstein quotes Cyril Connolly: “The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.”
Epstein’s first collection was published in 1979, “familiar essays” called Familiar Territory, written in the tradition of William Hazlitt during Epstein’s early days as editor of The American Scholar, a tenure he held for twenty-four years. In the preface, he points out that “the familiar essayist lives, and takes his professional sustenance, in the everyday flow of things. Familiar is his style and familiar, too, is the territory he writes about.” The necessary ingredient for any familiar essayist? A point of view, because “everyone has opinions . . . but not everyone has a point of view: a standpoint, a perspective, from which to view the world going on about him.”
In the Montaigne essay Epstein is more to the point: “To write a personal book, it is best to have a personality—and, to go along with it, the impersonality required by the highest art to set it out properly.” His work has attitude and personality and style, yes, but it also has something important to say, and that’s the pivotal distinction between Epstein and many others. What’s more, his wit won’t be oppressed—he once coined the term “Barthelmystically,” in reference to the fabulistic fiction of Donald Barthelme—and one finds in him the always welcome marriage of earnestness and levity: “Edmund Wilson was the sort of person who could get into a cab in Manhattan and tell the driver to take him to Cape Cod,” or this, about a rheumatoid sentence by Stanley Fish: “Take three metaphors, mix gently, sprinkle lightly with abstraction, and serve awkwardly.”
Familiar Territory is indicative of Epstein’s six books of familiar essays: you will find cogent views of de Tocqueville alongside an appreciation of jokes—Epstein adores jokes, Jewish jokes especially—then a consideration of professor-student sex abutting an homage to the personal library. In A Literary Education you will find “Prozac, with Knife,” a meditation on plastic surgery that effortlessly finds its way to W. C. Fields, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and a relevant passage in Henry James. Who but Epstein could write about boredom with such élan, or about old age with such sprightly resolve? In Essays in Biography, you will have your pick of personalities to see exalted or demolished, from George Washington and Adlai Stevenson and Susan Sontag to Alfred Kinsey and Joe DiMaggio and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Who but Epstein could say of Michael Jordan that not only was the great man the equal of Balanchine but also, with a straight face, dub him “the reincarnation of Achilles, but without the sulking and without the heel”? (Epstein is a lifelong Chicagoan, and several of his most fulfilling personal essays focus on his boyhood there.)
All writers should have the obligation to be interested, but as Paul Fussell contended, critics especially have an obligation to be interesting. Here’s Fussell in his funny essay called “Being Reviewed: The A.B.M. and Its Theory”:
Authors of some rhetorical sophistication know that a reviewer has an obligation that goes beyond deposing accurately and justly on the contents and value of the book in hand: he has an obligation to be interesting, which means, variously, funny, dramatic, significant, outraged, or winning. The reviewer is writing an essay, and the book in question is only one element of his material. No editor wants to publish a dull review, no matter how just.
Lots of editors don’t seem to mind publishing dull reviews. The art critic Harold Rosenberg once quipped: “No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.” A career enemy of dullness and dullards, Epstein has much to say about the intention and criteria of criticism. In “Reviewing and Being Reviewed,” he lambastes the widespread brand of literary comment that demonstrates “no intellectual precision, no originality of thought or even of phrasing,” comment that excels at “merely tossing off opinions, and the thing about opinions is that . . . one is as good as another.” And here’s where he jibes with Fussell: “Of course the best reviews are not reviews at all but the carefully considered criticisms and, one hopes, appreciations of those men and women whose literary intelligence one truly respects.” The best reviews will also be
the product of an interesting mind thinking about a book. But there is more to it than that. A reviewer has certain obligations to the book he’s reviewing and to his own readers: he must report what the book is saying; he must make a judgment about how well the author gets it said; and he must determine if what has been said was worth saying in the first place. Not to be dull, not to be fearful.
It might sound curious that one of Epstein’s admonitions to the critic is “not to be fearful,” since the job description doesn’t exactly match that of firefighter. His meaning applies to the business of publishing, a business in which the reviewer has become a kind of glorified blurbist, a marketer whose mission of appraisal is to be a pal to publishing by publishing praise of his pals, or people he wants as pals. This phenomenon derives partly from the mutual-support ethos of MFA programs and writers’ conferences and organizations in which no scribe should question another scribe too insistently, and certainly not question his literary merit or his choice to become a writer when he’s clearly better suited for something else. To abrade an inferior writer’s work is to risk slander and marginalization, to damage one’s own publishing prospects—to be seen as a bad guy.
But there are no bad guys or good guys in literature. There are wrong guys and right guys, guys who write well and guys who don’t. Still, many think it prudent to ease into a slavish conformity, to embrace a reluctance to judge, a refusal to distinguish precious metals from all the useless ore. Epstein observed this phenomena as long ago as 1982, in an essay called “Matthew Arnold and the Resistance,” which, not incidentally, was right about the time American MFA programs began replicating like so many bacteria: “Criticism,” he wrote, “has increasingly become an arm of cultural publicity.” That arm of cultural publicity now includes the ceaseless yawp of social media, where, like everything else, literary comment is bandied about unchecked.
Epstein perceived his role to be that of cultural arbiter long before our current age in which everyone’s a writer without having done the necessary and long-term labor in order to become one. Some books are better than others, and if you care about the distinction, if you understand that the distinction matters a great deal, then you must summon the equipment to show how. In Rebecca West’s response to Hugh Walpole’s complaint of her unfavorable views toward him, she spoke of “the duty of a critic to point out the fallaciousness of the method and vision of a writer who was being swallowed whole by the British public.” West’s use of “duty,” like Fussell’s of “obligation,” means an intellectual and moral duty to uphold the virtues of the well-made, to eschew the shoddy and lame, and that’s immensely important for the serious critic when the obligation of many others is to their own shameless advancement.
Here’s Epstein in “Piece Work: Writing the Essay”:
One remarks upon an unappreciated writer here, lets the air out of an inflated reputation there, combats a literary tendency one finds pernicious, or calls to the fore an essential but neglected tradition—none of this . . . is trivial work. Done well it is important in and of itself; gathered together, it can add up to something of significance.
In his introduction to Partial Payments, Epstein insists that the literary essay “is the most sensible way to go about expressing our devotion to literature,” and in “Reviewing and Being Reviewed,” he offers this: “In reviewing a book one likes to think . . . that one is in a serious conversation about the shape and fate of culture, itself a most serious thing.” For the literary individual, it is the most serious thing.
Of all the names that appear repeatedly in Epstein’s work—Montaigne, Santayana, Beerbohm, Henry James, Edmund Wilson, Willa Cather, V. S. Naipaul—there’s one that appears most often and always with a grin: H. L. Mencken. Epstein has written two essays on Mencken, one a celebration of his shimmering relevance, and the other a bracing apologia when Mencken was accused of anti-Semitism in 1989 after his Diary was published to a predictable riot of self-righteousness. (Epstein once defended T. S. Eliot, too, against charges that he was an anti-Semite—a tough task, but he tackled it.)
In his 1921 essay “Footnote on Criticism,” Mencken declares that the motive of the true critic
is not the motive of the pedagogue, but the motive of the artist. It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world.
An articulate noise in the world: in “Piece Work: Writing the Essay,” Epstein suggests that the critic “wishes to leave the stamp of his personality on the page—and, with great good luck, who knows, on the age.”
Here are two paragraphs from Mencken, worth quoting at length because I bet Epstein has them tacked to the wall above his desk:
The curse of all the arts, indeed, is the fact that they are constantly invaded by persons who are not artists at all—persons whose yearnings to express their ideas and feelings is unaccompanied by the slightest capacity for charming expression—in brief, persons with absolutely nothing to say.
This is particularly true of the art of letters, which interposes very few technical obstacles to the vanity and garrulity of such invaders. An effort to teach them to write better is an effort wasted, as every editor discovers for himself; they are as incapable of it as they are of jumping over the moon. The only sort of criticism that can deal with them to any profit is the sort that employs them frankly as laboratory animals.
It actually gets nastier from there, if you can believe it. Mencken called for “the revival of acrimony in criticism—the renaissance of the doctrine that esthetic [sic] matters are important.” Why are aesthetic matters important? Because without a commitment to the beauty of form, to the depth and dynamism of language, no one who has cultivated the combo of intellect and taste will care about what the writer wants to say.
“Literature,” Mencken wrote, “always thrives best, in fact, in an atmosphere of hearty strife.” In “H. L. Mencken for Grownups,” Epstein writes: “The pleasure in reading Mencken came in witnessing a man lashing out so handsomely, bashing away with an exuberance I did not even know was allowed in literature till encountering him.” In “Mencken on Trial,” he writes that Mencken attained his dazzling effects “through an alchemical distillation of superior craft, delicious wit, and utter courageousness of opinion.” Epstein’s own gospel of “hearty strife” reads this way, from “Reviewing and Being Reviewed”:
Along with possessing at least a modicum of anger, a good book reviewer ought not to show too much generosity. While always hopeful of discovering real talent—both for the new and the different and for work of a traditional kind—and ready to encourage it with measured praise, the book reviewer must at the same time always be skeptical. Dubiety ought to be his normal condition. Books, unlike criminals, are best judged guilty until proven innocent—for innocent, in this context, read without falsity, fudging, or flagrant flaw.
As with any critic who writes often and with insistence, there’s much to quarrel with in Epstein, verdicts that the ultimate arbiter, Time, will no doubt overturn: verdicts on Harold Bloom, on Updike, on Philip Roth, among others. There’s always been the touch of the Leavisite in Epstein: tell him what books you read and he’ll tell you who you are, where your moral coordinates lie. In the introduction to Plausible Prejudices, he writes, “The reason I have so often come to say no when presented with the work of a particular novelist or tendency in contemporary literature is love for literature itself.” Epstein was once accused by another critic of being “penurious with praise,” and in some circles he’s reputed to be a fusty codger hungry for combat, but he can write with touching sensitivity, even tenderness, about so sad and squalid a figure as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he’s eager to extol writers when they meet his critical criteria, when they combine an uncommon wisdom with a style that probes, prances, pirouettes. (In a nice construction, he once named style “the preservative of literature.”)
Referring to his own models, to Macaulay, Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, and Goethe, Mencken maintains that “they were first-rate artists. They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true,” because “nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.” Mencken also wrote that “the true aim of the critic is certainly not to make converts. He must know that very few of the persons who are susceptible to conversion are worth converting.” In one of his several pieces on Edmund Wilson, Epstein argues that “criticism lives or dies by the persuasiveness of the critic, a persuasiveness based largely on his confidence and the strength of his assertions.” In an essay on Arnold, he argues that “literary sensibility weighs in more heavily than correct opinion in a critic,” and that’s all one can hope for from our best critical minds: that they remain loyal to their own erudition, that they never betray their literary barometer, that they are dauntless in clarifying the difference between what works and what doesn’t.
Take Epstein’s five most popular books—Ambition, Snobbery, Envy, Friendship, and Gossip—and add them to his first, Divorced in America, from 1974, and you’ll see that he’s been one of our indispensable diagnosticians of all the madness in American social life. Read Epstein’s twenty-four volumes in toto and it will occur to you that he’s also been one of our most urgent bulwarks against booklessness, against the extinction of the literary life, a life lived for and through the magnifying, clarifying lens of literature. Across the decades he’s written repeatedly about the necessity of what he calls “a literary point of view,” an aperture that allows in all the light of living, that permits us to apprehend and appreciate the many forces at work and play in the world.
Wide and deep readers of literature have the privilege of a multihued perception, of experiencing life with a fullness and profundity that nonreaders will never know. “Not to read,” Epstein once said, “is to risk barbarizing oneself.” Committed readers are granted access to world-altering intimations of wisdom, to the fierce bellows of intellect and emotion, and to the mystical allure of beauty—access they might otherwise have little hope of ever achieving.
—The New Criterion, MAY 2014