{"id":70109,"date":"2019-05-17T17:05:13","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T15:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=70109"},"modified":"2019-05-06T12:04:06","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T10:04:06","slug":"17-05-41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=70109","title":{"rendered":"Cynthia Ozick\u2019s Long Crusade"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Cynthia Ozick\u2019s Long Crusade<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Giles Harvey<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1978, the literary critic Harold Bloom was invited to take part in \u201can amiable discussion of the rival claims of Judaism and the aesthetic\u201d at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. His interlocutor was to be Cynthia Ozick, the author, at the time, of three well-reviewed but not-much-read works of fiction. Bloom, who had never met Ozick but rated her novellas \u201cEnvy; or, Yiddish in America\u201d and \u201cUsurpation (Other People\u2019s Stories)\u201d as \u201cunequaled in her generation,\u201d agreed to participate with the understanding that neither of them was to read from a prepared text.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the night in question, however, Bloom arrived at the venue to find Ozick, a short, compact woman of 50 with whitening hair and round spectacles, brandishing an \u201cenormous\u201d typescript. \u201cThis splendid lady sandbagged me,\u201d Bloom said in a recent phone conversation, with the lofty, ungrudging admiration of an old general recalling an opposite number\u2019s surprise attack at some long-ago battle. Flummoxed, he asked if they had not made an agreement. Ozick, Bloom recollects, said, \u201cWhen you are dealing with the devil, you must be prepared to do anything!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was not aware,\u201d Bloom said, \u201cthat I was His Satanic Majesty.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, you\u2019re beautiful,\u201d his diminutive opponent replied, \u201cbut I\u2019m going to destroy you!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the course of the evening, in front of a boisterous capacity crowd, Ozick proceeded to do just that. Bloom, already a figure of titanic reputation, was then in the process of rolling out his agonistic theory of poetic lineage, in books like \u201cThe Anxiety of Influence\u201d (1973) and \u201cKabbalah and Criticism\u201d (1975). By his reckoning, great poets are those who evade a feeling of belatedness \u2014 that there is, and can be, nothing new under the sun \u2014 by creatively misreading their mighty predecessors whose influence would otherwise be stifling. Because, for Bloom, the history of English poetry since the Renaissance consists of this \u201cperverse, willful revisionism,\u201d with each generation strenuously remaking its forebears, the \u201cmeaning of a poem can only be another one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ozick was having none of this. Her text from the evening does not survive, but we can discern its outlines in an essay she published in Commentary the following year. Bloom\u2019s conception of poetry as a self-enclosed system that referred to nothing but itself, she charged, was a form of idolatry. The very idea of belatedness, so central to Bloom\u2019s theory, was, in Ozick\u2019s view, anathema to the Jewish tradition, according to which there were no latecomers. This was the meaning of the words in the Passover Haggadah, \u201cWe ourselves went out from Egypt,\u201d and the midrash that states, \u201cAll generations stood together at Sinai.\u201d In Jewish thought, there is \u201cno power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator.\u201d The idol-maker, by contrast, \u201chopes to compete with the Creator, and schemes to invent a substitute for the Creator.\u201d In short, her adversary had violated the Second Commandment, and must be punished.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe beat the crap out of him,\u201d Gordon Lish, who as the fiction editor of Esquire had published several of Ozick\u2019s short stories, told me. \u201cShe cleaned his plow.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ozick, who is now 88 (\u201cpiano keys,\u201d as she sprightfully said when I congratulated her on her recent birthday), has not ceased from the mental fight in the intervening years. She remains a crusader, a missionary or, as she recently put it to me, \u201ca fanatic\u201d in the cause of literature. With one hand she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including \u201cThe Shawl\u201d (1989) and \u201cThe Puttermesser Papers\u201d (1997); with the other she has produced a prose brick of lit crit, essay after essay on subjects ranging from the Book of Job and Gershom Scholem to Helen Keller and Susan Sontag. You could furnish a room with the prizes she has won, and yet the embrace of a wide readership and extraliterary fame has proved elusive; and no wonder. Public demand for the exacting insights of practitioner-critics, never high, has been in steady decline for a good while now.<\/span><\/p>\n

This, at any rate, is the contention of her new book, \u201cCritics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays,\u201d which comes out in July. It is Ozick\u2019s seventh volume of criticism in three decades and is written out of a sense of cultural emergency, of alarm and anguish at \u201cthe dying of the imagination through the invisibility of the past.\u201d Ozick came of age at the century\u2019s midpoint, during the heyday of the New York Intellectuals, the group of largely Jewish writers and thinkers who, possessed by left-wing politics and a belief in the primacy of literature as a tool for comprehending self and society, \u201crefused to be refused\u201d by a WASP-dominated cultural establishment. The book bristles with recollections of this time \u2014 when \u201cthe publication of a serious literary novel was an exuberant communal event\u201d \u2014 and portraits of its leading figures, among them Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Lionel Trilling.<\/span><\/p>\n

All that, Ozick believes, is now defunct. The readers are disappearing, casualties of television and the internet \u2014 or, in the case of American undergraduates, of \u201cegotism and moralizing, politicized self-righteousness.\u201d Trilling, once an epoch-defining mind, is now \u201cso reduced as to have become a joke to certain young critics who favor flippancy and lightness.\u201d Lest it be said that these are the typical accents of literary octogenarianism, we ought to remember that Ozick has always<\/em> sounded like this. Ours, we are told, in \u201cArt and Ardor\u201d (1983) is \u201can era in which the notion of belles-lettres is profoundly dead.\u201d These are not fashionable opinions; and indeed, it may testify to the soundness of Ozick\u2019s bleak assessment that she herself, one of the last great exemplars of the values whose eclipse she laments, is now so underrecognized.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a falling off was there!\u201d can sometimes seem like the only thing she has to say to the present, and yet she lives not so much in the past as out of time altogether. She stands at a kind of belletristic Sinai, alongside all the other literary generations. \u201cThere are, in fact, no \u2018generations,\u2019\u2009\u201d she has written, \u201cexcept in the biological sense. There are only categories and crises of temperament,\u201d which \u201ccrisscross and defy and deny chronology.\u201d It is this sense of timelessness that makes reading her so thrilling, especially in our compulsively up-to-the-minute era. Literature, her work announces above the contemporary din, is a zone of radical freedom \u2014 perhaps the only one we have left.<\/span><\/p>\n

recommended by: Leon Rozenbaum<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Like her characters,<\/strong> a sorry gaggle of pallid shut-ins and thwarted fantasists, Ozick doesn\u2019t get out much. She has spoken of her aversion to stages and of her impatience with what Henry James, her lifelong inspirator, called \u201cthe twaddle of mere graciousness.\u201d She writes at night, for years at the Sears, Roebuck desk she has owned since childhood, measuring her existence \u201cin sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail.\u201d When I first wrote to her to propose this article, she responded with a detailed message about her unsuitability. As far as she could tell, her life was altogether devoid of public action, public interest. \u201cI once wrote that I\u2019d flown cross-country, solo, from the Westchester County airport to the Rocky Mountains in a single-engine 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee,\u201d she added promisingly. \u201cBut that was a lie.\u201d Her last public reading, she said, took place more than six years ago, and nowadays she didn\u2019t venture beyond the local supermarket. There was an admirable humility to all this, but also, perhaps, a certain frostiness, a desire to be left alone to get on with her sentence making. Of life, she once wrote: \u201cI dislike it. I notice no \u2018interplay of life and art.\u2019 Life is that which \u2014 pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially \u2014 interrupts.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was, then, with some trepidation that I recently traveled to the bedroom community of New Rochelle, in Westchester County, where Ozick and her husband, Bernard Hallote, a retired lawyer, have lived since the mid-1960s. Ozick had agreed to talk, but would she spend the interview resenting my very presence? I was, after all, an emissary from life, the interrupter. Would she pounce on some unwittingly idolatrous remark of mine and eviscerate me as she had done Bloom? Or was I in for the kind of treatment that Norman Mailer received at a notoriously fractious debate about feminism at New York City\u2019s Town Hall in 1971, where Ozick, rising from her seat in the audience during the Q. and A. session<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, asked the author of \u201cThe Prisoner of Sex\u201d (apropos of his remark that \u201cA good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls\u201d): \u201cMr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ozick in \u201cTown Bloody Hall,\u201d a documentary on the debate between Norman Mailer and a group of feminists in 1971.CreditFilm still from Pennebaker Hegedus Films<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

My mood was considerably improved, however, by the taxi driver, a paunchy man in a white golfing visor and orange-tinted sunglasses, whom I met at the train station.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe old lady?\u201d he said when I gave him Ozick\u2019s address.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c … yes,\u201d I said uncertainly.<\/span><\/p>\n

It turned out that he had been ferrying Ozick and her husband around New Rochelle for years. He spoke warmly of their conversations and made them sound almost like old friends<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s getting on,\u201d he said fondly, \u201cbut she\u2019s still got all her marbles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Encouraged, I asked him if he\u2019d read any of her books.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe writes books<\/em>?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So Ozick was unknown, unread, even in her own backyard.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, she\u2019s written a few,\u201d I said. In fact, I added, she had a new one coming out soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere you go,\u201d he said, with a little cluck of satisfaction. \u201cStill got all her marbles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
New Rochelle is only a short drive from Pelham Bay, the Bronx neighborhood where Ozick grew up. Her parents were Russian Jews who fled the old country to escape the pervasive anti-Semitism that overtook the empire at the turn of the 20th century. They owned a drugstore, Park View Pharmacy, which Ozick repeatedly evokes in her writing as a place of Edenic security and contentment. The rest of the neighborhood was less benign. At the local public school, Ozick was taunted as a \u201cChrist killer\u201d when she refused to sing Christmas carols in assembly. Her father tutored her in Hebrew and Russian, though she told me that her knowledge of the former is poor and that, of the latter, only one phrase remains: \u201cYa khochu morozhenoye.<\/em>\u201d (\u201cI want ice cream.\u201d)<\/span><\/span>
\nIn an unpublished letter to Saul Bellow from the late 1980s that Ozick shared with me, she quotes some of Bellow\u2019s words back to him: \u201cAs the son of immigrant parents, I recognized at an early age that I was called upon to decide for myself to what extent my Jewish origins … were to be allowed to determine the course of my life. I did not mean to be wholly dependent on history and culture. Full dependency must mean that I was done for.\u201d Then Ozick writes: \u201cIt\u2019s otherwise for me. I keep wanting to become my mother and father … and as I get older, I\u2019m shocked now and again by the discovery of the music of their brains in my brain. … I\u2019m not a runaway.\u201d It made me think of her essay on Kafka from the new book, in which Ozick castigates John Updike for claiming that the author of \u201cThe Metamorphosis\u201d transcends his \u201cJewish parochialism.\u201d Such a view, she writes, \u201cdiminishes and disfigures\u201d Kafka, whose feelings of ethnic marginality were, in her estimate, the source of his genius. This is true of Ozick herself: Her Jewishness is definitional without being delimiting. Quite the opposite.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Certainly it is impossible to understand Ozick\u2019s pessimism, and its relevance to our current moment, without appreciating the essential Jewishness of her critique. To be a Jew, her work insists, is to recognize the tenuousness of cultural transmission. \u201cAll the World Wants the Jews Dead,\u201d as the searing title of her 1974 essay has it, and the Jews, to be sure, have not made it this far by taking continuity for granted. The extraordinary dynamism of Ozick\u2019s thinking and writing derives from the conviction that thinking and writing, the study of certain sacred texts, are not merely ends in themselves but matters of survival.<\/span><\/div>\n

\n<\/span>\u201cAnd the language was lost, murdered,\u201d she writes in \u201cEnvy; or, Yiddish in America,\u201d from \u201cThe Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories\u201d (1971). \u201cThe language \u2014 a museum. Of what other language can it be said that it died a sudden and definite death, in a given decade, on a given piece of soil?\u201d These are the thoughts of the novella\u2019s protagonist, Edelshtein, a widowed, childless, untranslated Yiddish-language poet of Russian birth who ekes out a livelihood giving talks on his mother tongue \u2014 his mamaloshen \u2014 at synagogues and community centers in the New York metropolitan area. It is tempting to see in Edelshtein\u2019s tragicomic day-to-day efforts on behalf of Yiddish a bitter self-parody of Ozick the practitioner-critic, Ozick the elegist of a vanished cultural past.<\/span>
\n\u201cNever occurred to me,\u201d Ozick said when I asked if she had at any time considered moving further afield. \u201cIn fact, there used to be a nice old stone out in the yard that I thought would be my gravestone. Though of course it may be illegal to be buried in your own yard.\u201d<\/span>We were sitting at the dining-room table, on which she\u2019d laid out tea and a plate of madeleines \u2014 this being proper, she suggested, for a literary conversation. Elfin, soft-spoken, plainly dressed in a black blouse and a long black skirt (with white sneakers peeping out from beneath the hem), Ozick was an affable and attentive presence. She has precise silver-gray bangs and wears thick rectangular glasses; thin, clear creases (\u201csmile-ruts,\u201d she calls them) run from the corners of her nose to the sides of her wide, thin-lipped mouth. Her in-person voice is high, brittle, lilting, with traces of the Bronx (\u201cthe vowels hang on,\u201d as she has said): pretty well the opposite of the emphatic and authoritative voice on the page. When I broke off a corner of a madeleine and dipped it in my tea, Ozick shivered and clasped her elbows in her hands, as though to ward off some more violent paroxysm. \u201cYou\u2019re doing exactly the right thing!\u201d she said. \u201cJust what Proust did! Oh, it\u2019s so perfect what you\u2019ve just done! It moves<\/em> me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My apprehension had evaporated the moment I arrived. Ozick\u2019s extreme congeniality took me by surprise, though perhaps it shouldn\u2019t have: All writers live under an assumed identity. Later, in an email, Ozick questioned Bloom\u2019s account of the evening at the Jewish Museum, even as she acknowledged his formidable powers of recall, and said she couldn\u2019t imagine herself ever speaking to him so brashly. They have become friends (Bloom\u2019s recent book, \u201cThe Daemon Knows,\u201d is enthusiastically reviewed in the new collection) and occasionally chat on the phone.<\/span><\/p>\n

For college, Ozick traveled only as far as the other end of the 6 line. She attended New York University, in Greenwich Village, the center of bohemianism, but says she spent most of her undergraduate career in the basement of the library. \u201cSuch a strange, lonely time,\u201d she recalled. \u201cOther students were meeting people and going to classes and having a social life, and there I was all by myself reading Milton\u2019s Latin poems, with a dictionary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was to her parents\u2019 house that Ozick returned in the early 1950s, after completing a master\u2019s degree at Ohio State University. She spent her 20s and a good part of her 30s immured in her childhood bedroom, writing a never-to-be-published novel called, after a line from Blake, \u201cMercy, Pity, Peace, and Love\u201d \u2014 or \u201cMippel,\u201d as she refers to it. (\u201cThe Mippel on which I sucked for so long\u201d). \u201cI was ashamed of my life, and I lived only to read and write,\u201d Ozick has said of these years. Meanwhile, her contemporaries were getting on, publishing second and third novels, building reputations.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was mired in envy,\u201d Ozick told me, nervously fondling a napkin and smoothing and resmoothing the checkered burgundy tablecloth. \u201cI think there is such a difference in the entire life span of a writer when there is early recognition. Once you\u2019ve been through isolation and obscurity and seeing your generation flourish, I think that remains your mind-set forever.\u201d Her first novel, \u201cTrust,\u201d was finally published in 1966, when Ozick was 37, and she has labored steadily in her vocation since then; \u201cCritics, Monsters, Fanatics\u201d is her 18th book. Were these, and the raft of plaudits and prizes they received, any consolation for her youthful struggles? \u201cI haven\u2019t done enough,\u201d she said, speaking of her fiction, which, she made it clear, she derives more satisfaction from than her essays. (She is currently at work on a new batch of short stories.) \u201cI haven\u2019t done enough,\u201d she said again, more slowly, as though talking to herself. \u201cI wanted to do more.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n