A sharp pen that too often drips with acid
In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage
By Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin, 410 pp., $26
In 1997, after 22 years as editor of The American Scholar, the journal of Phi Beta Kappa, Joseph Epstein was fired. He was sacked, he believes, by professorial partisans of feminism, black history, and gay and lesbian studies, subjects conspicuous by their absence in his magazine. And, now, in retirement, Epstein is "ready to settle for being known as a good writer by thoughtful people."
But he is not prepared to go gently into that good night. At 70, he writes, his craft has not appreciably diminished, his intellectual arrogance has grown, and he's become "comfortably rear guard." "In a Cardboard Belt!," his 10th collection of essays, is vintage Epstein: elegantly written, charming, candid, curmudgeonly, mordant, and, alas, malicious.
The charming curmudgeon struts his stuff in an octet of autobiographical essays. In "Goodbye, Mr. Chipstein," a retrospective on his career as a creative writing teacher at Northwestern University, Epstein concludes that he helped good students become a little better, but did nothing for the mediocre and the uninterested. The feeble "intellectual voltage" in some classes reminds him of W. H. Auden's definition of a professor as a person "who talks in other people's sleep." Nonetheless, Epstein does not succumb to clichés about students growing dumb and dumber. The principal difference between then and now, Epstein writes, is that students no longer seem embarrassed by their ignorance. Prematurely mature, Epstein has always had "a fun problem." He'd rather write than travel, promising to visit India and Pakistan when the two nations rejoin the British Empire. And, these essays reveal, he's suspicious of emotional display. Epstein never sought the approval of his father, an importer of costume jewelry, who stopped listening as he aged and wrote 2,700 unpublished pages "that bordered on the commonplace." Happily, Mr. and Mrs. Epstein left Joseph alone, without creating any doubt that he could count on them. For him, the freedom to go his own way was "the greatest gift of all."
The literary essays in this book reveal more about their author than they do about the writers he profiles. The point of literature and literary analysis, he suggests, is the cultivation of a sensibility that can derive pleasure in "watching language beautifully manipulated." Literature, these days, often gets lost in interpretation. Like Auden, Epstein believes in "the baffle of being," the impenetrable mystery of existence. He shares the view of Isaac Bashevis Singer that the drama of a scientific understanding of the universe cannot compete with the drama of an uncertain salvation, which teaches that every action matters. Great artists, he believes, create characters who are exceptions and prove no rule. Epstein objects to "relentless profundity." He is skeptical of explanations because they require abstractions, which lead, inevitably, to clichés. And contemptuous of feminism, Freudianism, French theorists, and most things to the left of the right.
To most contemporary critics, these views are, indeed rear guard. Epstein does, at times, verge on the anti-intellectual. Feeling abandoned by his peers, he seeks support from early 20th-century writers who share his sensibility. He admires Paul Valéry, who cared more for precision than profundity, distrusted politics because it produces polemics, derided metaphysics as "astrology with words," and disdained vague concepts, especially "Class Struggle" and "The Oedipus Complex."
An animus for Freud animates many of Epstein's essays. In combination, Emerson and Freud "yield a gasbag with a dirty mind." Max Beerbohm, Epstein gloats, took "ten deftly aimed words" - "A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?" - to reduce to rubble a "highly fallacious" school of thought. And he insists that Auden's dalliance with Freud must have been "intellectual window-shopping on the Rodeo Drive of ideas."
Epstein's Freudian slaps serve as sparring practice for his "Savage" essays. It's hard to read them without wincing. His targets - Mortimer Adler, George Steiner, Harold Bloom, Edmund Wilson - don't really need to be taken down. And his one-liners serve only to reduce Epstein to a sort of literary Don Rickles. Adler, he feels compelled to tell us, was "not an idiot but a clown-savant" who "did not suffer subtlety gladly" and lavished "sycophantic attention" on the rich. Adler deserves to spend eternity listening to a "severe and humorless dolphin with an IQ much higher than his own."
Edmund Wilson did not know how to drive a car, type, handle money, or be affectionate with his children. "He was instead a bald, pudgy little man with a drinking problem, a nearly perpetual erection, and a mean streak." And, oh yes, he's overrated as a critic. Harold Bloom - surprise! - looks "as if he were poured into his clothes and forgot to say when." With tastes running to "the hot-blooded, long-winded, and apocalyptic," Bloom is an "academic Dionysian, calling for higher fires, more dancing girls, music, and wine, all from an endowed chair."
If Bloom "came off any more ex cathedra in his judgments, he'd be pope," Epstein concludes, like an empty teapot telling a kettle it's out of steam. It's too bad. Because Epstein isn't out of steam, not when he's a somewhat detached, self-deprecatory observer of contemporary culture, in touch with his better angels - who know you don't have to be cruel to be critical.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. 