The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

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  There is no long row of novels: they once existed in Trilling's fantasy; they may dimly glimmer in ours. Still, in the shoreless precincts of the essays one can hear the call, desolate but urgent, of the thinker and the teacher—and never mind that behind the scenes he disowned teaching. He may have despaired of his students, but not of ideas. What he was after, in the classroom and in the world, was the "power of supposing that ideas are real"; he was persuaded that only an "intense and ambivalent sense of history" could fuel that power. He condemned fashionable self-consciousness and self-pity, which he identified as false virtue and light resolve. He eschewed softness. He saw through "the political awareness that is not aware, the social consciousness which hates full consciousness, the moral earnestness which is moral luxury." He saw through his own time, and perhaps through ours.

  Then is it possible, after all, that it is not Lionel Trilling who is buried and lost, but rather ourselves, we who relinquish his austere searchings for the sake of angry academic piddlings and ephemeral public trivia?

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  An inexorable postscript. Any mention of Trilling's name today instantly elicits the recognition that he was the first Jew appointed to Columbia University's permanent English faculty—as if this were the only significant relic of an eminent career. Trilling's triumph erupted on the heels of a humiliating dismissal; he had been fired on the ground that he was a Jew and a Marxist. Attempting to fight back, he secured painful interviews with the men who had ejected him; it was for his own good, they told him, he would not fit in. In desperation he sent a copy of his dissertation to Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia's president. Butler chose merit over bigotry—but the harsh peril of this history left Trilling wary ever after. The young writer who was drawn to the Menorah Journal for its intellectual and literary standards rose to be the edgy critic who later denigrated that journal as "sterile." He was concerned with reputation and how to achieve it—how to avoid eclipse. It was lasting fame he had in mind. "I know of no writer in English," he insisted, "who has added a micromillimeter to his stature by 'realizing his Jewishness,' although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness." Trilling wrote these words in 1944, when the German ovens were at full blast and European Jewish consciousness was, in the most literal sense, unrealized. He was then thirty-nine; his stature was already assured. He could not have imagined that he would come to be remembered largely, if not chiefly, as Columbia's first Jew.

  Tradition and (or versus) the Jewish Writer

  WHAT IS A JEWISH BOOK? A narrow definition—but also conceptually the widest—would chiefly include the Torah and the Talmud (the Hebrew Bible and the ocean of ethically transformative commentaries), and all other texts that strive to unriddle the Job-like vagaries of the human heart while urging it toward the moral life. A Jewish book is liturgy, ethics, philosophy, ontology. A Jewish book speaks of the attempt to create a world in the image of God while never presuming to image God. A Jewish book, whether it is Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, written in the twelfth century, or Joseph Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith, written in the twentieth, derives ultimately from the radical commandment in Leviticus, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and from the still more radical imperative of the Sh'ma, the Unitary Credo.

  AJewish book is didactic. It is dedicated to the promotion of virtue attained through study. It summons obligation. It presupposes a Creator and His handiwork. Is what is popularly termed the Jewish-American novel (if in fact there exists such an entity today) likely to be a Jewish book?

  I think not; indeed, I hope not. If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall. It is commonly understood (never mind the bigots' immemorial canards) that to be a Jew is to be a good citizen, to be socially responsible, to be charitable, to feel pity, to be principled, to stand against outrage. To be a novelist is to be the opposite—to seize unrestraint and freedom, even demonic freedom, imagination with its reins cut loose. The term "Jewish writer" ought to be an oxymoron. That may be why novelists born Jewish, yet drawn wholly to the wild side—Norman Mailer, for instance—are not altogether wrong when they decline to be counted among Jewish writers.

  What we want from novels is not what we want from the transcendent liturgies of the synagogue. The light a genuine novel gives out is struck off by the nightmare calculations of art: story, language (language especially), irony, comedy, the crooked lanes of desire and deceit.

  The late Irving Howe defined the American Jewish novel (it had not yet become the Jewish-American novel) exclusively by its subject matter. And the Jewish novel's only viable subject matter, he insisted, was the great crisis of immigration and its aftermath; when that was played out, as it inevitably would be, the hands of Jewish writers would hang empty. But the complexities of immigration and the conflicts between older and newer generations are hardly confined to Jews, and Willa Cather's immigrant Bohemians had already made claim to that territory: so Howe's self-imploding definition was mistaken from the start.

  Still, he was right to predict an absence of Jewish subject matter in America. The profoundly Jewish themes of our time derive from Europe (the effect of the mass murder of one-third of the world's Jewish population) and from the restitution of historic Jewish sovereignty in Israel (the twentieth century's most revolutionary event, which only Philip Roth, among noted writers of fiction, has had the wit to touch on). All other subject matter in the so-called Jewish-American novel is, well, American, written in the American language, telling American stories.

  Multiculturalism, which is far more zealously activist than old-fashioned live-and-let-live pluralism, likes to manufacture "ethnic" fiction. (Ethnic: a sociologists' misnomer, producing fake and demeaning splintering. The word is Greek in origin, and refers to pagans—i.e., to persons neither Jewish nor Christian.) In recent decades, almost all anthologies of fiction, in order to be "inclusive," have occasionally harvested weak prose. This practice, steeped in societal good will, results in ill will toward literature. Background, however individuated, is not the same as literature. The signal Jewish luminaries of American literature today continue to be Saul Bellow and Philip Roth; no Jewish writer of their generation or the next matches them. Yet their engine and their genius have been toward the making of literature, not the expression of background. If background is powerfully there, it is because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer shrewdly put it, every writer needs to have an address. Isaac Babel had his ebullient Odessa gangsters, but also his stories of pogrom. Sholem Aleichem's shtetl terrors are masked as comedy, Singer's as demonology. Kafka's dread—the Jewish dread of the denial of the right to exist—wears the counterfeit name of justice.

  But address means more than geography; it means being addressed by a literary tradition in one's own language, meaning the particular history secreted in the very syllables of language. Why else do we speak of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy as Russian writers, and of Jane Austen and Dickens and George Eliot as English writers, and of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez as South American writers, and so on? There is an element of instinctive coloration in being Russian, English, Argentinian, Colombian that emerges in the hidden turns of a work of literature.

  And what is true of national perception and nuance is true of religious perception and nuance (even if one has given up religious identity). In this sense, John Updike is a Christian writer, V. S. Naipaul a Hindu writer, Salman Rushdie a Muslim writer. It is self-evident that any writer's subject matter will emerge from that writer's preoccupations; all writers are saturated, to one degree or another, in origins, in history. And for everyone alive in the century we have left behind, the cataclysm of murder and atrocity that we call the Holocaust is inescapable and indelible, and inevitably marks—stains—our moral nature; it is an event that excludes no one.

  And yet no writer should be expected to be a moral champion or a representative of "identity." That way lies tract and sermon and polemic, or, worse ye
t, syrup. When a thesis or a framework—any kind of prescriptiveness or tendentiousness—is imposed on the writing of fiction, imagination flies out the door, and with it the freedom and volatility and irresponsibility that imagination both confers and commands. Writers as essayists, or polemicists, or pundits, may take on the concerns of a collectivity when they are moved to; but writers of fiction ought to be unwilling to stand for anything other than Story, however deeply they may be attached to a tradition. Tradition, to be sure, suggests a collectivity and a history, and invokes a kind of principled awareness; it carries with it a shade of teacherliness, of obligation.

  But tradition is useful to the writer only insofar as the writer is unconscious of its use; only insofar as it is invisible and inaudible; only insofar as the writer breathes it in with the air; only insofar as principled awareness and teacherliness are absent; only insofar as the writer is deaf to the pressure of the collectivity. What could be more treacherous to the genuine nature of the literary impulse than to mistake the writer for a communal leader, or for the sober avatar of a glorious heritage? No writer is trustworthy or steady enough for that. The aims of imaginative writers are the aims of fiction. Not of community service or communal expectation.

  Writers are responsible only to the comely shape of a sentence, and to the unfettered imagination, which sometimes leads to wild places via wild routes. At the same time one must reserve one's respect for writers who do not remain ignorant of history (a condition equal to autolobotomy), who do not choose to run after trivia, who recognize that ideas are emotions, and that emotions are ideas; and that this is what we mean when we speak of the insights of art.

  Henry James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel

  ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was assassinated, I wrote the last words of Trust, my first novel. I had begun it while still in my twenties, and finished it seven years later. In actuality there had been two "first" novels before then—the earlier one never completed, though it had already accumulated three hundred thousand words. I had planned it as a "philosophical" fiction; in graduate school I had come under the influence of Eliseo Vivas, at the time a well-known professor of philosophy, and with his character and views in mind, I named my protagonist Rafael Caritas. His antagonist, as I conceived it (the metaphysical versus the pragmatic), was a man of the type of Sidney Hook, a legendary figure in my undergraduate days at New York University: in my aborted novel he was called Seymour Karp. It never occurred to me—I learned it painfully years afterward—that it might be perilous to import real persons into fiction. My idea was to confront Passion with Reason. Of course I sided with Passion (I was twenty-two), which explained why a stanza from one of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" supplied the title: Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. ("For Mercy has a human heart,/Pity a human face,/And Love, the human form divine,/And Peace, the human dress.")

  Rafael Caritas consumed years before he, or I, ran out of philosophical steam. Vivas's devotion to what he termed Neo-Thomism had befuddled me; so did his lectures on Aristode's Nicomachean Ethics. What was even more confounding, though, was his fury at the Nuremberg trials. The men in the dock were wicked beyond wicked, he raged—but the Allied tribunal was wicked too: it stood for victors' justice. Then what should be done with these murderous miscreants? Punish them, Vivas said, according to a practice not unknown in certain parts of his native South America: bury each man up to his neck in earth, and send riders at a gallop to trample the exposed heads. It was an argument worthy of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Vivas, even when he was jovially avuncular, as he sometimes was, intimidated me: his black hair, slicked back, gleamed like shoe polish; his foreign rasp had a demonic twist; his classroom manner was a roar. Rafael Caritas was far tamer.

  Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love was slowly proceeding (though without the horsemen), pullulating with new characters I could hardly fathom or control. No resolution was anywhere in sight when I came, one afternoon, on a seductive announcement in one of the serious literary quarterlies. A publisher was soliciting short novels. Short! The word—the idea—captivated. Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love was winding on and on, like a Möbius strip: where was its end? As a kind of interim project, I set out to write a short novel. It turned out to be a long one. It turned out to be Trust.

  But Trust too wound on and on. All around me writers of my generation were publishing; I was not. I held it as an article of faith that if you had not attained print by twenty-five, you were inexorably marked by a scarlet F—for Folly, for Futility, for Failure. It was a wretched and envious time. I knew a writer my own age, as confident as he was industrious, who had recently completed a novel in six weeks. I was determined to emulate his feat. I threw the already massive Trust into a drawer and started a fresh manuscript—my second "first" novel; in a month and a half it was done. It had exhausted me, but I was also relieved and elated: I had finally finished a novel. It disappeared decades ago—lost, I believe, in the dust of a London publisher's cellar. A carbon copy (how obsolete these words are!) may be languishing in my own cellar, but I have never troubled to look for it; dead is dead. And the speedy writer I was mimicking—or hoping to rival—never published that or any other novel.

  Three years elapsed between the completion of Trust and its appearance in print. I filled the void by writing short stories and teaching freshman composition to engineering students; but mainly I was waiting. The editor who had accepted my manuscript explained that he would soon supply "suggestions." Secretly I dreaded these—I had labored over every syllable for all those seven years—but I was wedded to diffidence and gratitude, and clearly my unpublished condition was subordinate to the editor's will, and certainly to his more pressing preoccupations. As it happened, I had acquired an agent along the way—an agent just starting out, living obscurely in a Manhattan basement. He had read a poem of mine in a literary journal, had discovered that a novel was "in progress," and offered to represent me. It was in a letter to him, after six months had passed and no suggestions were forthcoming, that I complained of the editor's silence. "I see you have clay feet," the agent wrote back, reprimanding me for untoward impatience. Another twelve months followed, and still no word from the editor. At last I made an anguished appeal, and was rewarded with a reply. He was working, the editor said, on an important book by a professor at Harvard (his name was Henry Kissinger); nevertheless he would set aside half an hour for me. He hadn't been neglectful of my manuscript, he assured me—on the contrary, for an entire year he had been compiling a long list of notes for the improvement of my novel.

  The publisher's offices struck me as industrial—so many elevators, so many corridors, so many mazes and cubicles. I found the cubicle I had been directed to and looked in. There sat the editor, with a typewriter on an open leaf beside him; there on a big littered desk lay the familiar box containing my manuscript. I watched him insert a sheet of yellow paper into the machine and begin to type. "Come in," he said, seeing me hesitant in the doorway. I continued to watch him type, and all at once understood that there was no long list of notes; there had never been any notes at all; he was at that moment conjuring a handful of impromptu comments out of the air. For this I had been kept in a vise of anxiety for a year and a half.

  Not long afterward, the editor, a young man still in his thirties, fell dead of a heart attack on the tennis court. Another editor took his place, and quickly put before me the first hundred pages of Trust, scribbled all over in red pencil. The famous suggestions! A meek petitioner facing power, I knew by now that I must succumb—I must please the new editor, or lose the chance of publication. My decision was instant. I declined every stroke of his red pencil. I believed in Art; I believed, above all, in the autonomy of Art; and for the sake of this sacral conviction I chose my novel's oblivion. Better oblivion than an alien fingerprint! To my astonishment, the new editor agreed to publish Trust exactly as I had written it. His name was David Segal, and like the editor who had hoodwinked me, he too died young. As for the hoodwinker,
I long refused the ameliorative de mortuis nil nisi bonum: of the dead let nothing bad be said. Yet David Segal, as long as he lived, was wont to dismiss the good I repeatedly said of him: "You think I'm a great editor," he accused me, "because I never edited you."

  Why did I believe in Art, and in the autonomy of Art, and in the sacred character of the dedicated writer? All this derived, in part, from ambition—a species of ambition that itself derived from the last trickles of the nineteenth century leaching into the twentieth. The nineteenth century did not stop abruptly in the year 1901, with the death of Queen Victoria, or the assassination of President McKinley, or the formulation of the quantum theory, or the inauguration of Picasso's Blue Period. In mores especially, the nineteenth century lingered on—even through the modernist eruptions of the twenties—into the thirties and forties, and into a portion of the fifties. In the forties song sheets could still be bought in stationery shops, and patterns for sewing dresses at home were still on sale in department stores. Secretaries wore felt hats to the office, and the rare women executives wore them in the office. Little girls were reading the social archaisms of the Bobbsey Twins series, and boys were immersed in the plucky if antiquated adventures of the Hardy Boys. Tabloids published one-page daily fictions called "short shorts"; big-circulation magazines unfailingly published stories. And literary ambition earnestly divided high from low, serious from popular, fiction from journalism, and novelists from the general run of mankind. (Nor was "mankind" regarded as gender-biased.) Literary writers frowned on commercial success as the antithesis of artistic probity. T. S. Eliot (despite the vastness of his own success) was the archbishop of High Art, that immaculate altar, and in his vatic wake Lionel Trilling was similarly pained by the juxtaposition of literature and money (his worship of Hemingway notwithstanding). Bohemianism meant living apart, living for art, despising Babbittry.