Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Critics

  The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin

  Figures

  Novel or Nothing: Lionel Trilling

  The Lastingness of Saul Bellow

  “Please, Stories Are Stories”: Bernard Malamud

  W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y

  Fanatics

  Transcending the Kafkaesque

  Nobility Eclipsed

  Monsters

  Writers, Visible and Invisible

  Out from Xanadu

  The Rhapsodist

  Souls

  “I Write Because I Hate”: William Gass

  Love and Levity at Auschwitz: Martin Amis

  An Empty Coffin: H. G. Adler

  Permissions Credits

  Read More from Cynthia Ozick

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Cynthia Ozick

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ozick, Cynthia, author.

  Title: Critics, monsters, fanatics, and other literary essays / Cynthia Ozick.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037560 | ISBN 9780544703711 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544703698 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH : Criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General.

  Classification: LCC PN81.095 2016 | DDC 801/.95—dc 23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037560

  Essays in this book originally appeared, in different form, in the following: “Out from Xanadu,” “I Write Because I Hate,” “Please, Stories Are Stories,” “An Empty Coffin,” and “The Rhapsodist,” in the New York Times Book Review; “Writers, Visible and Invisible” in PEN Magazine and Standpoint (UK); “The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin” in Harper’s Magazine; “W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y” in the Paris Review Online; and “The Lastingness of Saul Bellow,” “Nobility Eclipsed,” “Transcending the Kafkaesque,” “Love and Levity at Auschwitz,” and “Novel or Nothing” in the New Republic.

  Permissions credits appear on page 213.

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  v1.0616

  For

  L. W.,

  inspiriter

  Authors are partial to their Wit, ’tis true.

  But are not Criticks to their Judgment too?

  . . . Those monsters, Criticks!

  —ALEXANDER POPE,

  “An Essay on Criticism,” 1711

  Critics

  George Orwell and Edmund Wilson are emblematic names that have come down to us from the still ticking heart of the twentieth century—literary names that carry meaning. Speak of Orwell, and what reverberates is monitory: Animal Farm and 1984, each a forceful parable of totalitarian oppression. But Orwell was also renowned as a sonorous essayist, one who is nowadays not much read beyond the campus, where “Shooting an Elephant” is a mainstay of the college anthologies. Except for Animal Farm, his fiction fails to attract ongoing notice—least of all Keep the Aspidistra Flying, long ago interred among the forgotten social novels of the 1930s. And apart from Orwell specialists, who now reads The Road to Wigan Pier? Yet Big Brother and Newspeak and memory hole are so ingrained in the common idiom that for many it hardly seems necessary to trouble to turn the already familiar pages of 1984. None of this matters; what counts is the echo of Orwell’s name and the bleakness it evokes: dread; deception; injustice; anomie; soullessness. Orwell has become Orwellian.

  Edmund Wilson germinates no parallel verbal progeny: Wilsonian, if it suggests anything, characterizes the policies of an American president. We have no single term—no summarizing atmospheric word—for America’s preeminent critic, who has no peer and may never be surpassed. He encompassed worlds: he wrote on the Iroquois, on an ancient Hebrew religious sect, on Russian philology, on the French Symbolists, on the evolution of radical political movements from Robespierre to the Bolsheviks, on the Civil War; he wrote on Canada and on Haiti, on citizenship and taxation, on movies and theater, on poets and novelists, on historical figures and on his contemporaries. He also wrote—critically—on literary criticism.

  In 1928, in an acerbic and dismissive essay titled “The Critic Who Does Not Exist,” he complained of the lack of serious literary criticism in the United States. “A work of art,” he said, “is not a set of ideas or an exercise of technique, or even a combination of both. But I am strongly disposed to believe that our contemporary writing would benefit by a genuine literary criticism that should deal expertly with ideas and art. . . . In a sense, it can probably be said that no such creature exists as a full-time literary critic—that is, a writer who is at once first-rate and nothing but a literary critic.” Wilson, of course, was that creature, and today there are a number of first-rate writers of criticism who are at work full-time; but are there enough to make what can be called an expansive literary culture?

  If we isolate only one decade of the many Wilson dominated—the 1920s, say—the extent and variety of his perceptions and preoccupations astonish. It is as if Wilson were not one critic but scores of critics, all working separately in their respective specialties. His “All-Star Literary Vaudeville” is an essay that ranges over dozens of writers, most of them durably familiar to their posterity—Dreiser, Mencken, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson—though some, like Carl Van Vechten and Joseph Hergesheimer, today seem no more visible than distant ghosts. Between 1924 and 1928 alone, Wilson rounded up his reflections on Houdini, Poe, dialect and slang, e. e. cummings, Woodrow Wilson’s years at Princeton, Ring Lardner, Eugene O’Neill, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Byron’s mistresses, subjects such as “the humility of common sense” and “the trouble with American comedy,” John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry James, Upton Sinclair, a Prohibition-era speakeasy; and much more, all in seamlessly lucid prose.

  It should be understood—it should be trumpeted—that not one of these essays is dated. Not one is infected by staleness. Wilson’s achievement rises beyond reviewing, giving the news, assessing his time. Read him now and see the lineaments of a civilization; he reproduces nothing less. The critic has become a historian.

  And here is the shock of it. Wilson stands as a kind of symbol—far more than a literary model to aspire to. He is what current lingo, falling into the tedium of overuse, terms an “icon,” the embodiment of an indissoluble fame. And like Orwell, whose repute—whose meaning—is similarly enduring, he is not read. Admired, honored, influential, legendary; rumored, but not read. Which brings us, alarmingly, to the Orwellian: the dying of the imagination through the invisibility of the past. As for the uses of criticism by the denizens of the present moment: envisioning society whole by way of the contemplation of its parts, the delicate along with the tumultuous, the weighty together with the trifling, is how a culture can learn to imagine its own face.

  Without the critics, incoherence.

  The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin

  “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote more than one hundred yea
rs ago, “human character changed.” The phrase has come down to us mockingly, notoriously, but also with the truth-like endurance of a maxim. By a change in human character, Woolf meant modernism, and by modernism she meant the kind of overt self-consciousness that identifies and interrogates its own motions and motives. Set forth in “Character in Fiction,” an essay arguing for innovation in the novel, it was an aesthetic rather than an essentialist proposition. The change​—​a new dispensation of premise and utterance—had been wickedly heralded two years before, on an August afternoon in 1908, when Lytton Strachey happened to notice a stain on Woolf’s sister’s skirt. “Semen?” Strachey inquired, as definitively as the final squeal of a hinge: a door flung shut for the last time. Behind that door lurked the muzzled premodern, and before it swarmed what modernism has long since made of us (and postmodernism even more so): harriers of the hour, soothsayers and pulse-takers, augurs and dowsers, examiners of entrails. Literary entrails especially: many are the stains subject to writerly divination.

  And so it was that on or about April 1996, Jonathan Franzen published a manifesto on the situation of the contemporary novelist (with himself as chief specimen and proof text), and the character of bookish querulousness changed. What had been muttered mutely in cenacles and bars erupted uninhibitedly in print, as flagrante delicto as any old spot of early-twentieth-century semen. The Corrections, Franzen’s ambitious and celebrated literary bestseller, had not yet appeared; he was still a mostly obscure fiction writer whose two previous novels, though praised by reviewers, had slid into the usual quicksand of forgotten books. When a little-known writer undertakes a manifesto—a statement, after all, of sober purpose and principle—it is likely also to be a cri de coeur, and its reasoned argument will derive from the intimate wounds of autobiography. “I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead,” Franzen said of his first novel, “was sixty reviews in a vacuum.” Even sixty reviews, he made plain, was not sufficient: it was not equivalent to a public event, attention was not being paid, certainly not in the coin of genuine Fame, and the vacuum in question was the airlessness of writer’s depression.

  It was a brave stand, then, to issue a manifesto in the form of a turbulent confluence of introspective memoir and cultural analysis; nor was it a career move, despite its publication in a major magazine. Literary essays are generally well beneath popular notice, and Franzen’s piece, though pumped up by anecdote (“When I got off the phone, I couldn’t stop laughing”) and political apocalypse (“the United States seemed to me . . . terminally out of touch with reality”), aroused its expected flurry among the literati, but was overlooked by Oprah. It took The Corrections to catch the eye, and then the ire, of television’s latter-day publishing goddess, and Franzen’s fame was confirmed. Retrospectively, if the success of The Corrections had not catapulted Franzen into precisely those precincts of the literary stratosphere he had so ringingly and publicly coveted, his declaration might have disintegrated, like all other articles of passing faith, into a half-remembered bleat.

  This has not happened—partly because Franzen continues as a noted writerly presence, and partly because his observations of nearly twenty years ago have failed to escape the transience of mere personal complaint. There were many such ventings, embedded in irritating and by now obsolete trivia, to wit: “. . . even as I was sanctifying the reading of literature, I was becoming so depressed that I could do little after dinner but flop in front of the TV. Even without cable, I could always find something delicious: Phillies and Padres, Eagles and Bengals, M*A*S*H, Cheers, Homicide.” Still more grumbling followed, about the discouraging fate of a second novel: “But the result was the same: another report card with A’s and B’s from the reviewers who had replaced the teachers whose approval, when I was younger, I had both craved and taken no satisfaction from; decent sales; and the deafening silence of irrelevance”—all this as if private grievance could rise to societal position-taking. Yet the deafening silence of irrelevance was, finally, the undergirding of Franzen’s point: that the common culture has undermined the novelist’s traditional role as news-bringer. Novelists, he said, “do feel a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day, and they now confront a culture in which almost all the issues are burned out almost all of the time.” They are burned out by the proliferating, instantaneous, and superior technological sources of what Franzen calls “social instruction.”

  His subject, in short, was the decline of reading in an electronic age when scores of plots, shocks, titillations, and unfolding dramatic disclosures, shot out daily by the reality machines of radio, television, the Internet, endlessly evolving apps, and the journalist’s confiding up-to-the-nanosecond cell phone and Twitter appear to supply all the storytelling seductions anyone might thirst after. Franzen was hardly the first writer to notice this; he acknowledged that Philip Roth, three decades earlier, was already despairing of the novel’s viability in the face of mad actuality’s pervasive power. Franzen’s thesis was not fresh, but neither was it stale. What was new was his linking the question of public literacy with marketplace lust, with—in an idiom Norman Podhoretz made famous nearly forty years ago—Making It. Having confessed to a blatant desire for success (“the dirty little secret”), Podhoretz was roundly excoriated, so much so that if flogging had been legal, the reigning literary-intellectual tribe of that period would have come after him with a forest of cat-o’-nine-tails. It was a time, moreover, when the publication of a serious literary novel was an exuberant communal event; only recall how The Naked and the Dead, or The Adventures of Augie March, was received. And it was a time, paradoxically, when serious writers looked down on the wider publishing marketplace and were sedulously detached from it: “popular” novelists were scorned. No one spoke of the decline of reading because it had not yet occurred.

  All that is nowadays extinct. Ambition, even of the kind termed naked, no longer invites elitist denunciation. Writers who define themselves by the loftiest standards of literary art are happy to be counted as popular; the lucky ones gratefully, not to say covetously, accept the high advances that signify the hope for a six-digit readership. But fifty years ago, Lionel Trilling, the paramount critic of the American midcentury, inveighed against the democratic wider audience, and the “big advertising appropriation” that accompanied it, as corrupting forces—even as he worshiped Hemingway, who had the largest readership of any serious novelist then writing. In an essay titled “The Function of the Little Magazine” (referring to the literary quarterlies that once occupied the pinnacle of intellectual prestige), Trilling recommended, and extolled, the most ideal readership of all, no matter how closed or small or invisible or abstract or imaginary. “The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections,” he insisted. “He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie.”

  A coterie! Spiritual ancestors! Posterity! Such martyred satisfactions are a long way from Franzen’s appetite, or the appetite of his contemporaries. Trilling demanded a self-denying purity; purity for the sake of a higher purity. Franzen, more pragmatic and businesslike, talks numbers. “The educated single New Yorker who in 1945 read twenty-five serious novels in a year today has time for maybe five,” he writes. “That hard core is a very small prize to be divided among a very large number of working novelists,” and he tots up the few who, back in 1996, “actually hit the charts”: “Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News has sold nearly a million copies in the last two years; the hardcover literary best-seller The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy, came in on the Publishers Weekly annual best-seller list.” (Up there in Paradise, among his spiritual ancestors, one can hear Trilling’s fastidious sighs.) By now, Franzen has caught up with, or perhaps surpassed, those impressive sales figures of twenty years ago. And if Trilling cannot be Franzen’s spiritual ancestor (he once tried out the purity path, he tells us), it is because our world has lef
t reticence behind: a reticence that, for Franzen, has come to resemble “an estrangement from humanity.” He calls it that; but what he means is being “known,” and escape from the confinements of a small readership, and finally that desirable state, or trait, that goes by the name of “accessibility.” All the same, the terminology of publishing success has grown softer with the years. Instead of the brash Making It, there is the melancholy worry over the silence of irrelevance. Almost no one, least of all Franzen, is asking for invisible, unheard coteries.

  Yet in October of 2005 Trilling (or his proselytizing shade) made an unexpected comeback, in the form of an answering manifesto that challenged Franzen’s. Under a gaudy banner—“Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” slyly subtitled “A Correction”—Ben Marcus, Franzen’s dedicated antagonist, undertook, Trilling-like, to prescribe the nature of his ideal reader. Marcus’s reader was not Franzen’s. Franzen had identified the born reader as a “social isolate” in childhood, an insight supplied to him by a practicing sociologist. Marcus’s own definition was derived from the fairy realm of elixirs and transmutations. “A writer might be forgiven,” he said, “for wishing to slip readers enhancements to their Wernicke’s areas [the segment of the human brain responsible for language], doses of a potion that might turn them into fierce little reading machines, devourers of new syntax, fluent interpreters of the most lyrical complex grammar, so that the more difficult kind of sense writing might strive to make could find its appropriate Turing machine, and would be revealed to the reader with the delicacy the writer intended. . . . But these enhancements to Wernicke’s areas in fact already exist, and they’re called books.”