Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

by Cynthia Ozick

  This star-crossed operetta, however, has no satisfactory coda, and what, after all, is there to choose between Halkin and Regelson? Despite the serpent’s tooth of disrespect, both were enmeshed in the great ancestral Judaic chain of word and idea. Halkin held the scepter of influence, while the often impoverished Regelson toiled in journalism for bread—but who today in America, beyond a minuscule handful of specialists (two, perhaps three?) reads the American Hebraists? What does it matter if a spangled recognition enthroned Halkin, or that Regelson knew himself to be self-made in the Hebrew image of William Blake? Neither weighs in an America given to erasure of a noble literary passage it has no tongue to name.

  Then who is to blame? We are: we have no Hebrew. But who, or what, really, is this culpable “we”? An admission: inescapably, the educated American mentality, insofar as it desires to further self-understanding—and the educated American-Jewish mentality even more so. The Hebrew Bible has long been the world’s possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership, and may not be denied the intimacy of their spiritual claim. Yet spirit is that numinous essence that flies above history, inhabiting the moment’s exquisite experience: it is common to all peoples, hence native to none. History, in contrast, is linked to heritage, and heritage—preeminently its expression in language—is what most particularly defines a civilization. So when Alter responded to Robinson’s reticent “I have no Hebrew” with his quickly assertive “Well, I have,” it was certainly as a translator in confident command of superior skills—but not only. It was also, irresistibly, a cry of kinship, and, even more powerfully, an appeal to deep memory. Implicit in Alter’s signal “have” is the condition of the have-nots: an absence of even minimal Hebrew literacy in a population unique among the nations of the West in the authenticity of its biblical attachment.

  Then who killed Hebrew in America?

  I did, with my little bit of Hebrew, so little as to be equivalent to none. I knew Abraham Regelson as the affectionate uncle who gave me a 1910 British edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories (with a gilt elephant and an Indian swastika on the cover); and I recall a postcard sent from 1930s Tel Aviv: a picture of a white building with an X marked over one window. “Here lives Bialik,” my uncle wrote to his very young niece (who was innocent of the wonder of it). “And did you once see Shelley plain?” asks Edna St. Vincent Millay. I did not truly see my uncle plain until now, long after his death, when Mintz brought home to me “the poet’s virtuosity: his encyclopedic mastery of the historical lexicon of the Hebrew language, his erudition in classical sources, and, most of all, his ability to take the language not just as given but to invent and proliferate provocative new words and dazzling constructions.” Seductive gates these, through which I may not pass, forbidden by the bound feet of ignorance. This is the uncle I did not know, and could not know, and will never know. And though a single slender generation divides us, the civilizational gap between us reveals an abyss of loss. If the American Hebraists are in eclipse, it is because we, who might have been their successors (as the Puritans were their visionary precursors), have turned out to be incurious illiterates. Like some intelligent subspecies, we gaze at the letters—should we even recognize them for what they are—and cannot see their meaning.

  Monsters

  In the universe of critics, essayists, biographers, publishers, journalists, bloggers, and so on, only the poets and a few chosen novelists are privileged to think of themselves as monsters. When Rilke advises aspiring young poets to “confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you,” he is recommending poetry as a kind of martyrdom, or the loss of it as a call to suicide. And when Flaubert, observing an ordinary family enjoying a fine afternoon, reflects, “Ils sont dans le vrai”—it is they who live in reality—he is recognizing, perhaps wistfully, the condition of the writer as a deformed outlier. “I detest my fellow beings,” he once admitted, “and do not feel that I am their fellow at all.” Seeming to fall into contradiction, Flaubert also wrote in favor of the habits of the middling bourgeoisie: “Be regular and orderly in your life,” he said, “so that you may be fierce and original in your work”—but this was plainly a tribute to ferocity, not to regularity. Byron as England’s literary bad boy; Tolstoy abandoning Sonya, his wife and lifelong amanuensis; George Eliot, flouter of the received moral will; the Beat poets, all of them stoned: generation after generation, the image of the writer’s rebellious flight from the commonplace holds.

  The writer as a figure apart, the writer as unfrocked monk—Tolstoy for the sake of ascetic godliness, Kafka for the sake of the enigma of guilt and punishment, Flaubert for the sake of le mot juste, Rilke for the sake of the most extreme of admonitions: You must change your life. But also: Keats and Blake and Wordsworth and the Beats and Emily Dickinson for the sake of exaltation. Put it that the Romantic era still whispers, and even old lost Dionysus distantly cries out. Rare is the writer who chooses to be seen as a proper citizen, though a few, like Thomas Mann or Henry James or John Cheever, will act out a long-lasting practiced façade—until time and happenstance come to reveal the furies below; or, as in Death in Venice, the writer himself discloses his hidden doppelgänger.

  Yet apart from the fata morgana of fame, which bewitches nearly all beginning writers, biographers and critics are helpless to name the buried motive of any writer. Not that on occasion the thorn that spurs can’t be readily evident—because it is scarcely buried at all: social grievance, for instance. Think of the strange trajectory of Tillie Olsen, who, while thwarted early on by what she felt to be the devouring constraints of motherhood and money, bravely wrote, even so, stories decrying those constraints—the most lauded of which is “Tell Me a Riddle,” a blow against domesticity and custom. In 1962, when those former obligations were well in the past, and she was already acclaimed a feminist hero, she published Silences, her final work, a cri de coeur that addressed writing “aborted, deferred, denied.” “I have had special need,” she wrote, “to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me.” But rewarded afterward with close to five decades of personal freedom, affectionate celebrity, and public honors, she repeatedly lamented those old, unhappy, and (she emphasized) unjust times—and never again sat down to write anew. She lived to ninety-four.

  Mostly, though, the secret engine that stirs into life a driven and unappeasable hunger to write cannot be prized out by assessing the writer’s background or experience or temperament. Biography on the trail of clues is useless and misleading. What in E. M. Forster’s life can account for the echo in the Marabar Caves? What in the complex narrative of Conrad’s change of country and language can unriddle the origin of the secret sharer? Who can uncover the source of Malamud’s Jewbird? Such signs and omens are the work of unnatural divination. The critic may parse and parse: a futility. Easy enough to find surface motivation in the psychologist’s shelf of elixirs, those vials of reasonable cause and effect. But the writer’s need is subterranean, unfathomable, subversive, and O, reason not the need!

  Rabbi Leo Baeck, meanwhile, citing both Hegel and Kant, calls for reason as necessity, reason defined as “an essential part of that honesty man owes to himself: the test of criticism.” Presumably he means self-criticism, the practice of restraint and moderation, the reserved and steady posture of the good citizen.

  Monsters in their rapture elude such tests. They know themselves to be visionaries carried off by some innate force to the fields of Arcadia, or else to the banks of Alph, the sacred river; or even, with Persephone, to a gloomy enchanted underworld. So much, then, for what can be glimpsed through the usual magic casements: let the poets be poets. But what of the sober-minded critics, who (see above) parse and parse, who are thinkers, exegetes, rationalists, close kin to historians and biographers, guardians and guarantors of humanism? The nearest that Samuel Johnson, the English-speaking world’s most formidable critic,
ever came to an expression of exaltation is his observation that “happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.” Such arithmetic weightiness, ringing with materialist authority though it may be, will never waken Orpheus.

  A radically different authority, so rare as to be prodigious, is borne by a critic who, surprisingly, claims Dr. Johnson as precursor and mentor, and whose contemporary stature is not far from Johnsonian. He is, moreover, his own Boswell, taking note of his every thought and impulse, and when he utters “I,” it is out of openness and intimacy:

  Samuel Johnson spoke of our “hunger of imagination,” and conceded that Shakespeare alone assuaged that dangerous prevalence. Perhaps Shakespeare helped Johnson avoid madness, a function that has served for me whenever I waver in my own perilous balance.

  Yet Harold Bloom (“so rare as to be prodigious” has already disclosed this critic’s identity) wields another, even more powerful, key to his “I”: the self that surrenders to the oracular, the self that willingly submits to submersion in ecstasy. Whatever it is that poets of the Orphic (or call it mystical) variety experience, Bloom too experiences, or longs to. In this he is like no other critic: why then, since he knows in his marrow what poets know, and long ago uncovered this knowledge as poets do, in childhood, is he not a poet? He tells us why he is not:

  I have been rereading Moby-Dick since I fell in love with the book in 1940, a boy of ten enthralled with Hart Crane, Whitman, William Blake, Shakespeare. Moby-Dick made a fifth with The Bridge, Song of Myself, Blake’s The Four Zoas, and King Lear, a visionary company that transformed a changeling child into an exegetical enthusiast adept at appreciation rather than a poet. A superstitious soul, then and now, I feared being devoured by ravenous daemons if I crossed the line into creation.

  Other little boys of ten, a few perhaps even destined to become critics themselves, were, in 1940, reading the Hardy Boys series, while little girls of ten with similarly conscious literary pinings were likely, in that era of innocent childhood, to be besotted with Jo March. But should anyone doubt that a word-struck child of ten can be susceptible to the exaltations of Hart Crane’s image-mobbed lines, or that the boy Bloom was already a Childe Harold, a Byronic literary pilgrim “glimmering through the dream of things that were,” then let such a doubter recall an earlier unearthly infant: John Stuart Mill, who, having been taught Greek at three, by the age of eight had mastered the Anabasis, all of Herodotus, the six dialogues of Plato, and much more. And Mill, like Bloom, never “crossed the line into creativity,” at least not of the Xanadu kind. Erudition, however voluminous, is not poetry. Enthusiasm, however exultingly heart-stunned, is not poetry. But who would wish to exclude either the rationalist philosopher or the rhapsodic critic from the genus monster?

  “A poet,” Bloom writes of Whitman, “who equates his soul with the fourfold metaphor of night, death, the mother, and the sea is thinking figuratively as fiercely as did the Hermeticists and the Kabbalists.” To this he adds poignantly, “At eighty-four, I lie awake at night, after a first sleep, and murmur Crane, Whitman, Shakespeare to myself, seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.” These are the yearning yet inflamed intimations not of a poet, but of a lover—a critic who has fallen in love with incantation as a conduit to the Elysian horizon luringly beyond his reach. And like any monster gazing past the rest of us, he stares alone.

  Writers, Visible and Invisible

  Writers’ invisibility has little to do with Fame, just as Fame has little to do with Literature. (Fame merits its capital F for its fickleness, Literature its capital L for its lastingness.) Thespians, celebrities, and politicians, whose appetite for bottomless draughts of public acclaim, much of it manufactured, is beyond any normal measure, may feed hotly on Fame—but Fame is always a product of the present culture: topical and variable, hence ephemeral. Writers are made otherwise. What writers prize is simpler, quieter, and more enduring than clamorous Fame: it is recognition. Fame, by and large, is an accountant’s category, tallied in amazonian sales. Recognition, hushed and inherent in the silence of the page, is a reader’s category: its stealth is its wealth.

  And recognition itself can be fragile, a light too easily shuttered. Recall Henry James’s lamentation over his culminating New York Edition, with its considered revisions and invaluable prefaces: the mammoth work of a lifetime unheralded, unread, unsold. That all this came to be munificently reversed is of no moment: the denizens of Parnassus are deaf to after-the-fact earthly notice; belatedness does them no good. Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer—lauded, feted, bemedaled—plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure? Already Norman Mailer is a distant unregretted noise, and William Styron a mote in the middle distance (a phrase the nearly forgotten Max Beerbohm applied to the fading Henry James). As for poor befuddled mystical Jack Kerouac and declamatory fiddle-strumming mystical Allen Ginsberg, both are diminished to Documents of an Era: the stale turf of social historians and excitable professors of cultural studies.

  Yet these eruptions of sudden mufflings and posthumous silences must be ranked entirely apart from the forced muteness of living writers who work in minority languages, away from the klieg lights of the lingua franca, and whose oeuvres linger too often untranslated. The invisibility of recently dead writers is one thing, and can even, in certain cases (I would be pleased to name a few), bring relief; but the invisibility of the living is a different matter altogether, crucial to literary continuity. Political shunning—of writers who are made invisible, and also inaudible, by repressive design—results in what might be called public invisibility, rooted in external circumstance: the thuggish prejudices of gangsters who run rotted regimes, the vengeful prejudices of corrupt academics who propose intellectual boycotts, the shallow prejudices of the publishing lords of the currently dominant languages, and finally (reductio ad absurdum!) the ideologically narrow prejudices of some magazine editors. All these are rampant and scandalous and undermining. But what of an intrinsic, delicate, and far more ubiquitous private invisibility?

  Vladimir Nabokov was once an invisible writer suffering from three of these unhappy conditions: the public, the private, the linguistic. As an émigré fleeing the Bolshevik upheavals, and later as a refugee from the Nazis, he escaped the twentieth century’s two great tyrannies. And as an émigré writing in Russian in Berlin and Paris, he remained invisible to nearly all but his exiled compatriots. Only on his arrival in America did the marginalizing term “émigré” begin to vanish, replaced first by the notion of citizen, and ultimately by American writer—since it was in America that the invisible became invincible. But Brian Boyd, in Nabokov: The American Years, his intimate yet panoramic biography, recounts the difficulty of invisible ink turning visible—not only in the protracted struggle for the publication of Lolita, but in the most liberal of literary journals. It was the otherwise audacious New Yorker of the 1950s that rejected a chapter of Pnin, the novel chronicling Nabokov’s helplessly charming and self-parodying alter ego, “because,” according to Boyd, “Nabokov refused to remove references—all historically accurate—to the regime of Lenin and Stalin.” (The phrases in question included “medieval tortures in a Soviet jail,” “Bolshevik dictatorship,” and “hopeless injustice,” characterizations that the editors apparently regarded either as excessive or as outright falsehoods.) Certainly the politically expelled chapter did not languish in invisibility for very long; and as for Lolita, decades after its electrifying and enduring triumph, it burst out once again, dazzlingly, in the title of Azar Nafisi’s widely admired memoir linking Lolita’s fate to the ruthless mullahs of Tehran. (Still, even today, even in New York, one can find a distinguished liberal journal willing to make a political pariah of a writer: an instance of ordinarily visible ink rendered punitively invisible.)

  And here at last is the crux and the paradox: writers are hidden being
s. You have never met one—or, if you should ever believe you are seeing a writer, or having an argument with a writer, or listening to a talk by a writer, then you can be sure it is all a mistake. Inevitably, we are returned to Henry James, who long ago unriddled the conundrum of writers’ invisibility. In a story called “The Private Life,” Clare Vawdrey, a writer burdened by one of those peculiar Jamesian names (rhyming perhaps not accidentally with “tawdry”), is visible everywhere in every conceivable social situation. He is always available for a conversation or a stroll, always accessible, always pleasantly anecdotal, never remote or preoccupied. He has a light-minded bourgeois affability: “He talks, he circulates,” James’s narrator informs us, “he’s awfully popular, he flirts with you.” His work, as it happens, is the very opposite of his visible character: it is steeped in unalloyed greatness. One evening, while Vawdrey is loitering outdoors on a terrace, exchanging banalities with a companion, the narrator steals into Vawdrey’s room—only to discover him seated at his writing table in the dark, feverishly driving his pen. Since it is physically impossible for a material body to be in two places simultaneously, the narrator concludes that the social Vawdrey is a phantom, while the writer working in the dark is the real Vawdrey. “One is the genius,” he explains, “the other’s the bourgeois, and it’s only the bourgeois whom we personally know.”