#11: I can hear the static you make from here
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one horror, one boredom, and one glory. This is the eleventh one.
Boredom. I’m almost done with my encyclopedia article on Cynthia Ozick, which should have been a pretty short and simple task, but it's taken way longer than I thought it would, probably because (as I've discovered) I don't like her writing. There are a few central things I dislike about her ideas and approaches, which I’ll tell you about, and then there’s also just her writing. It’s like she chooses the least interesting words, all the time. There is absolutely no, zero, sense of place in any of her fiction. Her novels and short stories take place all over the world—Stockholm, Paris, Miami, New York City. But any them could be set where any of the others are. There’s no feeling of being there. Each book is staged in a philosophical, dire, dour blank. There are all these situations and issues—in “Envy, or Yiddish in America,” a bitter Yiddish-language poet lurks around the margins of literary society, trying to achieve fame; in The Cannibal Galaxy, a principal lives his life according to the precepts of the strict “Dual Curriculum” he has instituted at his school; in Trust, a young woman is subject to the whims and secrets of her larger-than-life mother. But none of the specifics of those situations ever create a feeling. Maybe Ozick could be compared with Lore Segal or Grace Paley, because she uses Jewish characters to think about secular American life. But Segal’s and Paley’s fictions are awash in feeling—sense of place, sense of human life and culture, grief, joy, and, like, boredom, horror, and glory.
Horror. Ozick has a habit, in interviews and especially in essays, of making superstrong proclamations that she confusingly reverses without admitting she’s reversed them. I think you can do this without anyone saying anything if you keep mentioning you’re friends with Harold Bloom. She complains bitterly (like the guy in “Envy, or Yiddish in America”) about how no one’s paying attention. But she has benefited greatly from that lack of attention. Take, for example, this moment from her Paris Review interview. Her interviews often begin with her railing against interviews, and she does that here; she adds that any information about writers’ lives is irrelevant. “It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!” The interviewer, in what seems to me to be good faith, takes her up on this: let’s look at a sentence from one of your books, then, and see what we can find out about you as a writer.
INTERVIEWER: We can start with the opening sentence of The Cannibal Galaxy: “The Principal of the Edmond Fleg Primary School was originally (in a manner of speaking) a Frenchman, Paris-born—but whenever he quoted his long-dead father and mother, he quoted them in Yiddish.”
OZICK: There is a piece of autobiography in that sentence. It may need a parenthetical explanation. I was taking a course with Lionel Trilling and wrote a paper for him with an opening sentence that contained a parenthesis. He returned the paper with a wounding reprimand: “Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence.” Ever since then, I’ve made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence. Years later, Trilling was cordial and very kind to me, and I felt redeemed, though it took two decades to earn his approval. But you can see how the sentence you’ve chosen for this crafty experiment may not be to the purpose—there’s too much secret mischief in it.
INTERVIEWER: What else does it reveal?
OZICK: Nothing.
Okay, then why did you say that a single sentence is so important? I thought, at first, that she was suggesting something about how style or word choice or something is ultimately more revelatory than the details of one’s life. But no! apparently the idea is that a punctuation choice might reveal a decades-long gripe with Lionel Trilling (even though—very important—he actually he did end up thinking she’s awesome).
There are dozens of examples of this type of thing. Ozick's 1982 essay “The Lesson of the Master,” is about how she over-identified with Henry James in her twenties. She writes that “the lesson of the Master is a double one: choose ordinary human entanglement, and life; or choose Art, and give up the vitality of life’s passions and panics and endurances.” Ozick deeply regrets her early years of reverence to the ideal of Art: “The trouble was that I was listening to the Lesson of the Master at the wrong time, paying powerful and excessive attention at the wrong time; and this cost me my youth.” She ultimately concludes, by reading Leon Edel’s beautiful bio, that James actually was a young person once himself, with all the confusion, unknowing, and time-wasting that comes along with being a young person, so he wasn’t all that devoted to Art anyway.
So she takes us through this whole rigamarole, and then I see, in a one-page essay in Metaphor and Memory titled “Pear Tree and Polar Bear: A Word on Life and Art,” published in 1989: “As for life, I don’t like it. I notice no ‘interplay of life and art.’ Life is that which—pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially—interrupts.”
Did she change her mind? Go back to being a devotee of this imagined life-hating James? I have no idea. Her arguments contradict each other, double back on themselves, and fall apart. Also: the pear tree essay does that classic Joan Didion trick of presenting some words not in the service of but instead of saying an idea. That list of adverbs, “pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially,” is pretty nice, but it adds specificity in the wrong place, distracting from the question that I ask when I read the previous sentence: “I notice no ‘interplay of life and art.’” This is the thing that needs expanding on, not the specific ways that life “interrupts.” If life interrupts art, isn’t that an interplay between the two? And if not, why not? In what way are these two things so separate? Are they opposites? And again, wouldn’t them being opposites be a kind of interplay? And if not, why not? Tell me!
Glory. There is an ideological question that critics and Ozick herself claim underlies all her writing. She says that it is wrong to write fiction, because that’s the creation of idols, and Jewish law says you’re not supposed to make idols because you’re stepping on God’s toes when you do that. In her characteristic way, she asserts, over the decades, that she no longer cares about this, but then she’ll bring it up again as the central issue in her fiction. It’s clear for many reasons already that I’m not the right reader for her—and here’s another reason: this isn’t something I would ever care about. However, I’ve certainly read, enjoyed, and learned from plenty of religious writers. They made me care. Kierkegaard: he shows you his agony! With Ozick, I would never know that this idols/not idols question haunts her writing. Mentioning it in every interview and many essays feels like a way to add heft to her work that isn’t there in the first place. It artificially raises the stakes.
Leah Garret has a stealthily devastating essay in Studies in Jewish American Literature (2005) about “Envy, or Yiddish in American” and an Ozick essay, “A New Yiddish,” which is sort of an accompaniment to "Envy." Garret writes,
Ozick is making a bold proclamation: the ‘Old Yiddish’ writers as she showed in "Envy" were overrated, and even the American Jewish English writers, as she shows in her essays, are a generation not worthy to be remembered. So, one wonders, who will create this new language, this new Jewish writing, this one and only legitimate literature? According to Ozick it is her; she will redeem Jewish writing and create the New Yiddish. She states this outright: "But who will invent this language, where will it be born? My answer is that I am speaking it now, you are hearing it now, this is the sound of its spoken prose."
Jean Rhys, whose novels are delightful, said (maybe she didn’t say it, I just saw it on tumblr once), “All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake.” Ozick’s attitude toward what she’s doing--as Garret so aptly describes it--stands in utter opposition to this Rhysian philosophy. Feeding the lake doesn’t matter; you need to be one of the rivers, or even the lake itself. The stakes are skyscraper high: figure out what God wants, make a new language, change literature forever, or you suck. And yet, when someone does scale those heights (who isn’t her), it doesn’t count. She pooh-poohs I.B. Singer; she dismisses Beloved in a single clause as “tale of slavery and its aftermath” (“Envy,” much?!?); she says nobody reads Norman Mailer. Who could write well with this attitude? And what drudgery to read writing that comes from this attitude.
Don’t worry, I didn’t say any of this in my encyclopedia article.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: Here is a poem I wrote by inhabiting “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” I wrote it nine years ago and it was published in Zocalo Public Square this week. I think I’ll write about rejection in a newsletter soon.
Unrecommended: You know.