Fame & Folly Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR CYNTHIA OZICK’s

  FAME & FOLLY

  “[Ozick’s arguments] twist and turn, digress, slow down and speed up, surprise with sudden illuminations.… She likes to spin and sparkle.… Insight, feeling, and the writer’s art come together.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Pulse-quickening … impassioned … a Roman candle of well-turned phrases.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Brilliant and beguiling.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Her essays invite our admiration even as they challenge us to talk back.”

  —Newsweek

  “No one turns a phrase the way [Ozick] does, blending the perfect verve of Henry James with the wisecracking mournfulness of Jewish New York … note-perfect.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  ALSO BY CYNTHIA OZICK

  Trust

  The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories

  Bloodshed and Three Novellas

  Levitation: Five Fictions

  Art & Ardor: Essays

  The Cannibal Galaxy

  The Messiah of Stockholm

  Metaphor & Memory: Essays

  The Shawl

  CYNTHIA OZICK

  FAME & FOLLY

  Cynthia Ozick’s essays, novels, and short stories have won numerous prizes and awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Straus Living Award, four O. Henry First Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been translated into most major languages. She lives in Westchester County, New York, and recently ventured into playwriting with an adaptation of her own The Shawl.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Cynthia Ozick

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  Most of the essays in this collection were originally published in American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Commentary, The New Criterion, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and The Washington Post Book Review.

  “Alfred Chester’s Wig,” “Rushdie in the Louvre,” and “The Break” were chosen for Best American Essays 1993, 1994, and 1995.

  “Annals of the Temple” is a chapter from the forthcoming A Century of Arts and Letters, a history of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to be published by Columbia University Press.

  Owing to limitations of space, all permissions to reprint previously published material can be found on this page–this page.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ozick, Cynthia.

  Fame & folly: essays / by Cynthia Ozick. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. American literature—History and criticism.

  2. English literature—History and criticism. I. Title.

  PS121.096 1996

  810.9—dc20 95-44429

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80790-8

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  For Rachel (again),

  for Alex,

  and for Samuel Joseph

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1. T. S. ELIOT AT 101: “THE MAN WHO SUFFERS AND THE MIND WHICH CREATES”

  2. ALFRED CHESTER’S WIG: IMAGES STANDING FAST

  3. OUR KINSMAN, MR. TROLLOPE

  4. WHAT HENRY JAMES KNEW

  5. ISAAC BABEL AND THE IDENTITY QUESTION

  6. GEORGE STEINER AND THE ERRATA OF HISTORY

  7. MARK TWAIN’S VIENNA

  8. SAUL BELLOW’S BROADWAY

  9. RUSHDIE IN THE LOUVRE

  10. OF CHRISTIAN HEROISM

  11. EXISTING THINGS

  12. THE BREAK

  13. OLD HAND AS NOVICE

  14. SEYMOUR: HOMAGE TO A BIBLIOPHILE

  15. HELPING T. S. ELIOT WRITE BETTER (NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY)

  l6. AGAINST MODERNITY: ANNALS OF THE TEMPLE, 1918–1927

  17. “IT TAKES A GREAT DEAL OF HISTORY TO PRODUCE A LITTLE LITERATURE”

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  The impartial Law enrolled a name

  For my especial use:

  My rights in it would rest the same

  Whether I puffed it into fame

  Or sank it in abuse.

  —Robert Graves, “My Name and I”

  “NO PREFACES,” someone admonished me long ago, and he may have been right, though I’m not exactly sure how or why. Is it because of what the lawyers say: res ipsa loquitur—whatever the thing is, let it speak for itself? Or because prefaces and introductions can be mistaken for a summary of a book’s contents, or, worse yet, for a writer’s credo—either one of which is guaranteed to irritate, the capsule for being superfluous, the credo for being grandiose?

  So that is why this collection of mostly literary pieces comes without an introduction (which is usually one more essay pretending not to be) and without a preface (pretty much the same thing as an introduction). I hope “Foreword” will suggest something a lot more modest—at any rate, nothing so tyrannical as a Procrustean bed, to which a volume’s wandering touchstones must be made to conform. (That notorious Greek bed, by the way, turns up in Jewish legend, too: it’s precisely the kind of hospitality the burghers of Sodom are said to have offered their guests, and is probably the real meaning of sodomy.)

  The point, then, of these words positioned before all the other words herein (and written afterward, it goes without saying) is only to muse a little on the title of this book. And I trust the point won’t be too pointed, and will allow some leeway for a drizzle of uncertainty; it may be that Robert Graves, in the epigraph above, has done all the musing necessary on the subject of fame and folly. “My name will take less thought for me,” he concludes in a later stanza, “In worlds of men I cannot see, / Than ever I for him.” The assumption is the persistence of the poet’s fame—that it will be known to posterity—whether or not it is connected with (damaged by) folly. Graves may have been too sanguine about the fate of his repute; for some (though not for me), especially for those who are a generation or two distant, he has already passed into that immense and glorious company of the Ephemeral. No noteworthy wickedness attaches to him; unlike some other poets even more illustrious, and more durable, Graves never labored toward sinking his name in abuse.

  The list of famous literary figures in our famously rotten century who have been associated with one sort of folly or another is long enough without him. And yet certain of their names outlive, and outshine, their folly. Ezra Pound was incontrovertibly insane, but the form his madness chose (he might have gone harmlessly chasing butterflies, or posed as a Chinese sage) is a lasting stain on civilization. Posterity—that means us—appears to overlook the stain. Heidegger as philosopher outlives and outshines Heidegger as dedicated Nazi. T. S. Eliot (who takes my concentrated gaze in these pages) is less remembered for bigotry and an attraction to fascism than for his position as modernist poet-prophet. And not all of this amnesia—very little, in fact—is owed to what we may be tempted to call whitewash. Isaac Babel, murdered by the iron-hearted utopian regime he had himself subscribed to, began by carrying the whitewash in his own pail. More recently, a prominent writer of the former German Democratic Republic, celebrated by the Wes
t as a “dissident,” did, after all, know what she was doing when she informed for the secret police.

  There is the folly from within and the folly from without. The difference is sometimes hard to see. Even the clarity of Salman Rushdie’s condition—a terrorist threat by external forces whose aims are plainly and fanatically extra-literary—is blurred by his earlier record of silence concerning any Middle Eastern terror that claimed to be “anti-imperialist.” But such ironies are not to be relished by anyone; chiefly, I forbid them to myself. That stone-throwers may themselves occasionally vacation in glass houses is disappointing but unsurprising. Mark Twain, scourge of human folly, excoriator of bigots and their canards, himself committed an essay (I discuss it here) that reproduces some malicious old canards. It hurts, but never mind: he remains the radiant Mark Twain—a bit blemished. And Rushdie, heroic and combative in his denunciation of terror, has left all blemish behind.

  Locally, there has for some time been an effort to sideline writers—including a Nobel luminary—who are known for a (largely private) resistance to whatever segment of the political spectrum currently prevails among dominant intellectuals. (And some intellectuals are more equal than others, as any writers’ powwow-for-a-cause will demonstrate.) A literary periodical, for instance, will choose to ignore a writer’s work, no matter how distinguished, even when the work itself has no political coloration. An audience at a literary conference, expressing its ideological solidarity, will lustily hiss and boo; or else, more subtly, it is the moderator who will suppress any disagreement. All this would seem to conform to the American principle of the (rough) play of ideas, and violates nothing; but the result is a certain “atmosphere.” The consecration of a particular political impulse or pattern, unkindly and uniformly imposed, can engender its own fame-derived folly, though of a minor sort: the snubs of the sanctified.

  Internal folly—of the kind that involves itself with fame—is stronger and stranger than fatwa or heritable malice or the lighting of what Saul Bellow calls “the ideological fuse.” Think of Henry James’s nervous breakdown (to use our own lingo for it) in the face of a raucous humiliation he had never before experienced: the exalted man of letters, the very Master, getting hooted off a stage. Indignity was a wound too horrible to bear—and why was that, given James’s self-recognition and the clear interior resplendence of his powers? This amazing Jamesian plot (recounted in this volume) is mainly hidden in a corner of biography, a secret folly scarcely able to breathe its little fog on the great bright mirror, and armor, of James’s renown.

  Trollope’s folly, the story goes, lay in his confessing in his Autobiography that he wrote for productivity, like a businessman, with his timepiece on his table. Though Trollope belongs with the permanent enchanting few (he educates domestically in the manner of Jane Austen, and in a worldly sense in the manner of Balzac), he has been a diminished figure ever since—except in the unbiased regions of literary truth. But didn’t he bring it on himself, according to the legend at least, through needless arithmetical public bragging, so many words per hour?

  By contrast, and to arrive at the proportionally lesser: my friend Chester’s folly, all of his own making, succeeded in submerging altogether the upward flight of his reputation; it’s likely you wouldn’t have suspected his existence if not for my own mournful memoir (it looms ahead), and the mournful memoirs of a handful of others. But who, and what, isn’t transitory, fleeting, perishable?

  —An explosion. Ah, I hear you! “Don’t,” you’re exploding, “please don’t start on all that, the decay of civilizations, the vanishing of empires, where now are the scribes of Sumer and the snows of yesteryear—all that stuff. Besides,” you’re saying, “God knows fame isn’t by any measure a literary subject, so why does it matter? Listen,” you’re saying, “it’s folly that’s really interesting. Forget the fame part. Concentrate on the folly.”

  I’ve done that, I think. With an exception here and there: a bit of homage when needed.

  September 1995

  T. S. ELIOT AT 101

  “The Man Who Suffers and the Mind Which Creates”

  THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, poet and preëminent modernist, was born one hundred and one years ago.* His centennial in 1988 was suitably marked by commemorative reporting, literary celebrations in New York and London, and the publication of a couple of lavishly reviewed volumes: a new biography and a collection of the poet’s youthful letters. Probably not much more could have been done to distinguish the occasion; still, there was something subdued and bloodless, even superannuated, about these memorial stirrings. They had the quality of a slightly tedious reunion of aging alumni, mostly spiritless by now, spurred to animation by old exultation recollected in tranquility. The only really fresh excitement took place in London, where representatives of the usually docile community of British Jews, including at least one prominent publisher, condemned Eliot for antisemitism and protested the public fuss. Elsewhere, the moment passed modestly, hardly noticed at all by the bookish young—who, whether absorbed by recondite theorizing in the academy, or scampering after newfangled writing careers, have long had their wagons hitched to other stars.

  In the early Seventies it was still possible to uncover, here and there, a tenacious English department offering a vestigial graduate seminar given over to the study of Eliot. But by the close of the Eighties, only “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appears to have survived the indifference of the schools—two or three pages in the anthologies, a fleeting assignment for high school seniors and college freshmen. “Prufrock,” and “Prufrock” alone, is what the latest generations know—barely know: not “The Hollow Men,” not “La Figlia che Piange,” not “Ash-Wednesday,” not even The Waste Land. Never Four Quartets. And the mammoth prophetic presence of T. S. Eliot himself—that immortal sovereign rock—the latest generations do not know at all.

  To anyone who was an undergraduate in the Forties and Fifties (and possibly even into the first years of the Sixties), all that is inconceivable—as if a part of the horizon had crumbled away. When, four decades ago, in a literary period that resembled eternity, T. S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature, he seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon—or like the New Criticism itself, the vanished movement Eliot once magisterially dominated. It was a time that, for the literary young, mixed authority with innovation: authority was innovation, an idea that reads now, in the wake of the anti-establishment Sixties, like the simplest contradiction. But modernism then was an absolute ruler—it had no effective intellectual competition and had routed all its predecessors; and it was modernism that famously carried the “new.”

  The new—as embodied in Eliot—was difficult, preoccupied by parody and pastiche, exactingly allusive and complex, saturated in manifold ironies and inflections, composed of “layers,” and pointedly inaccessible to anybody expecting run-of-the-mill coherence. The doors to Eliot’s poetry were not easily opened. His lines and themes were not readily understood. But the young who flung themselves through those portals were lured by unfamiliar enchantments and bound by pleasurable ribbons of ennui. “April is the cruel-lest month,” Eliot’s voice, with its sepulchral cadences, came spiralling out of 78 r.p.m. phonographs, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire …” That toney British accent—flat, precise, steady, unemotive, surprisingly high-pitched, bleakly passive—coiled through awed English departments and worshipful dormitories, rooms where the walls had pin-up Picassos, and Pound and Eliot and Ulysses and Proust shouldered one another higgledy-piggledy in the rapt late-adolescent breast. The voice was, like the poet himself, nearly sacerdotal, impersonal, winding and winding across the country’s campuses like a spool of blank robotic woe. “Shantih shantih shantih,” “not with a bang but a whimper,” “an old man in a dry month,” “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”—these were the devout chants of the literarily passionate in the Forties and Fifties, wh
o in their own first verses piously copied Eliot’s tone: its restraint, gravity, mystery; its invasive remoteness and immobilized disjointed despair.

  There was rapture in that despair. Wordsworth’s nostalgic cry over the start of the French Revolution—“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”—belongs no doubt to every new generation; youth’s heaven lies in its quitting, or sometimes spiting, the past, with or without a historical crisis. And though Eliot’s impress—the bliss he evoked—had little to do with political rupture, it was revolutionary enough in its own way. The young who gave homage to Eliot were engaged in a self-contradictory double maneuver: they were willingly authoritarian even as they jubilantly rebelled. On the one hand, taking on the puzzlements of modernism, they were out to tear down the Wordsworthian tradition itself, and on the other they were ready to fall on their knees to a god. A god, moreover, who despised free-thinking, democracy, and secularism: the very conditions of anti-authoritarianism.

  How T. S. Eliot became that god—or, to put it less extravagantly, how he became a commanding literary figure who had no successful rivals and whose formulations were in fact revered—is almost as mysterious a proposition as how, in the flash of half a lifetime, an immutable majesty was dismantled, an immutable glory dissipated. It is almost impossible nowadays to imagine such authority accruing to a poet. No writer today—Nobel winner or no—holds it or can hold it. The four* most recent American Nobel laureates in literature—Czeslaw Milosz, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Joseph Brodsky (three of whom, though citizens of long standing, do not write primarily in English)—are much honored, but they are not looked to for manifestos or pronouncements, and their comments are not studied as if by a haruspex. They are as far from being cultural dictators as they are from filling football stadiums.