Cynthia Ozick is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction
and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle
Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker
International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes and,
in 2012, her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for
Fiction. She was born in 1928 and currently lives in New York.
Novels
Trust (1966)
The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)
The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)
The Puttermesser Papers (1997)
Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)
(published in the United Kingdom in 2005 as The Bear Boy)
Foreign Bodies (2010)
Shorter fiction
The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)
Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)
Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)
Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969)
The Shawl (1989)
Collected Stories (2007)
Dictation: A Quartet (2008)
Essay collections
All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)
Art and Ardor (1983)
Metaphor & Memory (1989)
What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)
Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)
Quarrel & Quandary (2000)
The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016)
Letters of Intent (2016)
Drama
Blue Light (1994)
Miscellaneous
A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)
Fistfuls of Masterpieces (1982)
Metaphor & Memory
CYNTHIA
OZICK
Metaphor & Memory
ESSAYS
First published in the United States in 1991 by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Published in e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Cynthia Ozick, 2017
The moral right of Cynthia Ozick to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 110 7
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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www.atlantic-books.co.uk
FOR
YUDEL AND GNESHA
Contents
Forewarning
Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success
William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness
Italo Calvino: Bringing Stories to Their Senses
The Sister Melons of J. M. Coetzee
Primo Levi’s Suicide Note
What Drives Saul Bellow
Henry James’s Unborn Child
Emerging Dreiser
George Steiner’s Either/Or
O Spilling Rapture! O Happy Stoup!
A Short Note on “Chekhovian”
Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters
Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character
On Permission to Write
The Seam of the Snail
Pear Tree and Polar Bear: A Word on Life and Art
Washington Square, 1946
The Function of the Small Press
Of Basilisks and Barometzes
The Apprentice’s Pillar
The Muse, Postmodern and Homeless
North
The Shock of Teapots
The Question of Our Speech: The Return to Aural Culture
Sholem Aleichem’s Revolution
A Translator’s Monologue
S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion
Bialik’s Hint
Ruth
Metaphor and Memory
Forewarning
Here is a late learning: a fiction writer who also writes essays is looking for trouble. While stories and novels under the eye of a good reader are permitted to bask in the light of the free imagination, essays are held to a sterner standard. No good reader of fiction will suppose that a character’s ideas and emotions are consistently, necessarily, inevitably, the writer’s ideas and emotions; but most good readers of essays unfailingly trust the veracity of non-narrative prose. A story is known to reflect in its “attitudes” the concrete particularities of its invention; every story is its own idiosyncratic occasion, and each occasion governs tone, point of view, conclusion. A story, in brief, is regarded as an ad hoc contrivance, and if it is called as witness, it is in the court of the conditional, the subjective, the provisional, even the lyrical.
An essay, by contrast, is almost always hauled before the most sobersided court of all, presided over by judges who will scrutinize the evidence for true belief: absolute and permanent congruence of the writer and what is on the page. An essay is rarely seen to be a bewitched contraption in the way of a story. An essayist is generally assumed to be a reliable witness, sermonizer, lecturer, polemicist, persuader, historian, advocate: a committed intelligence, a single-minded truth-speaker.
But when a writer writes both stories and essays, something else can happen: the essays will too often be forced into a tailoring job for which they were never intended. The essays, like chalk marks, are used to take the measure of the stories. The essays become the stories’ interpreters: their clues, or cues, or concordances, as if the premises of the essays were incontrovertibly the premises of the stories as well. As if the stories were “illustrations” of the essays; as if the essays expressed the ideational (or even at times the ideological) matrix of the stories.
All these notions are, I am afraid, plain foolishness. They imagine that there is a commanding difference between essays and stories, and that the difference is pure: essays are “honest” and stories are made up. The reality is otherwise: all good stories are honest and most good essays are not. Stories, when they succeed as stories, tend to be honest even when they concern themselves with fraudulence, or especially then (Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych comes instantly to mind); stories are moods—illuminations—that last in their original form. A new story will hardly contradict a prior one: each has worked for, and argued, its own embodiment, its own consummation. Stories are understood to represent desire, or conviction, at its most mercurial. Originality, in fiction, means mercurial. Nobody wants all the stories a writer produces to resemble one another, to conform to a predictable line. The truth of one story is not implicated in the truth of the next.
But essays are expected to take a “position,” to show a consistency of temperament, a stability of viewpoint. Essays are expected to make the writer’s case. Sometimes, of course, they do; I feel fairly sure the book reviews in this volume incorporate judgments that time and temper will not seriously alter. Yet most essays, like stories, are not designed to stand still in this way. A story is a hypothesis, a tryout of human n
ature under the impingement of certain given materials; so is an essay. After which, the mind moves on. Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo.
Or, to put it more stringently: an essay, like a story or a novel, is a fiction. A fiction, by definition, is that which is made up in response to an excited imagination. What is fictitious about the essay is that it is pretending not to be made up—so that reading an essay may be more dangerous than reading a story. This very foreword, for instance, may count as a little essay: ought it to be trusted? (Remember the Cretan captured by Greeks. Questioned, he replied: “All Cretans are liars.” Was this a truthful confession, or only another sample of a Cretan lying? After all, even Tolstoy, whom we think of as the quintessential novelist, was a kind of Cretan. First he wrote Anna Karenina; then he wrote “What Is Art?”—condemning the writing of novels. Which Tolstoy should we believe?)
The point is not that essays are untrustworthy. Obviously, an essay will fail if it is not intellectually coherent, if it does not strike you as authentic (ideas must be earned, not merely learned), if it is not felt to be reliably truth-telling. An essay must show all these indispensable signs of consonance and conscience—but only for the duration of its reading, or a bit longer. If its “authenticity” is compelled to last much beyond that, the reader will be tying the writer down by small stakes and long strings, like Gulliver; and no essayist (except maybe a Gibbon or a Montaigne—certainly no contemporary essayist) is as big as that. In other words, if a writer of stories is also a writer of essays, the essays ought not to be seized as a rod to beat the writer’s stories with; or as a frame into which to squeeze the writer’s stories; or, collectively, as a “philosophy” into which to pen the writer’s outlook.
Does all this mean that virtually no essay can have an enduring probity? Well, if a story can be empowered with constancy and incorruptibility, so can an essay; but only in the same way, contingent on its immanent logic or marrow-song. No story, and no essay, has the practical capacity to act itself out in the world; or ought to. All the same, if it seems that I am denying plausible truth-telling to the essays in this book, or that I don’t want them to represent me, it isn’t so: each, little or long, was pressed out in a mania of (ad hoc, occasional, circumstantial) conviction: the juncture—as in any fiction—of predicament and nerve. The essays herein do represent me: didn’t I tackle them, shouldn’t I “take responsibility” for them, whatever unease (or even alienation) they may cause me afterward? What I am repudiating, though, is the inference that a handful of essays is equal to a Weltanschauung; that an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction—a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet.
CO.
April 17, 1988
Metaphor & Memory
Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success
I first came on a paperback reprint of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise when I was already in my despairing middle thirties. Though I had been writing steadily and obsessively since the age of twenty-two, I was still mainly unpublished: a handful of poems, a couple of short stories, a single essay, and all in quirky little magazines printed, it seemed, in invisible ink. Connolly’s stringent dissertation on the anatomy of failure had a morbid attraction for me: it was like looking up one’s disease in the Merck Manual—I knew the symptoms, and it was a wound I was interested in. One day I urgently pressed my copy of Connolly on another failed writer a whole decade younger than myself; we were both teaching freshman composition at the time. He promised to read it; instead he hurried off into analysis and gay pride. I never saw the book again. My ex-colleague has, so far, never published. Enemies of Promise went out of print.
After that, I remembered it chiefly as a dictionary of low spirits; even as a secret autobiography. Over the years one of its interior titles—“The Charlock’s Shade”—stayed with me, a mysterious phrase giving off old mournful fumes: the marsh gas writers inhale when they are not getting published, when they begin to accept themselves as having been passed by, when envy’s pinch is constant and certain, when the lurch of humiliation learns to precede the predictable rebuff. Writers who publish early and regularly not only are spared these hollow desolations, but acquire habits of strength and self-confidence. Henry James, George Sand, Balzac, Mann: these amazingly prolific presences achieved as much as they did not simply because they began young, but because they were permitted to begin young. James in America started off with book reviews; so, in London, did Virginia Woolf.
But in my despairing thirties it was hardly these colossi of literary history I was fixed on. All around me writers five years older and five years younger were having their second and third novels published, establishing their idiosyncratic and intractable voices, and flourishing, sometimes with the left hand, this and that indomitable essay: Mailer’s “The White Negro,” Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” Roth’s “Writing American Fiction,” Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” Styron’s reply to the critics of Nat Turner, and so on. John Updike, the paramount American instance of early publication, conquered The New Yorker in his twenties, undertaking even then the body of reviewing that nowadays rivals the amplitude and weight and attentiveness of Edmund Wilson’s. At about the same time, in the New Rochelle Public Library, I pulled down from a high shelf of the New Books section a first volume of stories called By the North Gate. The author was an unknown writer ten years my junior; not long afterward, the name Joyce Carol Oates accelerated into a ubiquitous force. A good while before that, in college, I had known someone who knew Truman Capote; and Capote had published in magazines before he was twenty.
In short, these were the Famous of my generation, and could be read, and read about, and mulled over, and discussed. They were—or anyhow they embodied, they were shot through with—the Issues; and meanwhile I was a suffering onlooker, shut out. I could not even say that I was being ignored—to be ignored you have first to be published. A hundred periodicals, both renowned and “little,” sent me packing. An editor who later went to Hollywood to write Superman led me into his Esquire cubicle to turn back a piece of fiction with the hard-hearted charm of indifference; he looked like someone’s baby brother. Another day I stood on the threshold of the office of the New York Review of Books, a diffident inquirer of thirty-five, and was shooed away by a word thrown out from a distant desk; I had come to ask for a review to write. Partisan, Kenyon, Sewanee, American Scholar, Quarterly Review, Furioso, dozens of others, declined my submissions. An editor of a small Michigan periodical, a poet, wrote to remark that I “had yet to find a voice.” In New York, a respected reader at a well-known publishing house, having in hand three quarters of my novel, said it wouldn’t do, and rocked me into a paralysis of hopelessness lasting nearly a year. And all the while I was getting older and older. Envy of the published ate at me; so did the shame of so much nibbling defeat. Twenty years of print-lust, muscular ambition, driving inquisitiveness, and all the rest, were lost in the hurt crawl away from the locked door. I wrote, and read, and filled volumes of Woolworth diaries with the outcry of failure—the failure to enter the gates of one’s own literary generation, the anguish of exclusion from its argument and tone, its experience and evolution. It wasn’t that I altogether doubted my “powers” (though often enough I did, profoundly, stung by disgrace); I saw them, whatever they were, scorned, disparaged, set outside the pale of welcome. I was ashamed of my life, and I lived only to read and write. I lived for nothing else; I had no other “goals,” “motivations,” “interests”—these shallownesses pointing to what the babblers of the hour call psychological health. Nor was it raw Fame I was after; I was not deluded that publishing a first novel at twenty-five, as Mann had done, would guarantee a Buddenbrooks.
What I wanted was access to the narrowest possibilities of my own time and prime; I wanted to bore a chink. I wanted a sliver of the apron of a literary platform. I wanted to use what I was, to be w
hat I was born to be— not to have a “career,” but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer. I was a haunted punctuator, possessed stylist, sorter of ideas, burrower into history, philosophy, criticism; I wrote midnight poetry into the morning light; I burnished the sentences of my prose so that each might stand, I said (with the arrogance of the desperately humiliated), for twenty years. And no one would publish me.
For this predicament, it was clear, I needed not an anodyne, but salt— merciless salt. Connolly not only supplied the salt, he opened the wounds, gave names to their mouths, and rubbed in the salt. He analyzed—or so it appeared—all the venoms of failure. He spoke, in a kind of metaphoric delirium borrowed from Crabbe, of “the blighted rye,” “the slimy mallow,” “the wither’d ears”—all those hideous signs of poison and decomposition from which the suffocated writer, kept from the oxygen of the age, deprived of print, slowly dies. There was no victory crow to be had from reading Connolly. If he provoked any sound at all, it was the dry cough that comes with panic at the dawn’s early light.
This, at least, is how, all these years, I have kept Enemies of Promise in my head: as a mop and sop for the long, long bleeding, the intellectual slights, the disgraced imagination, the locked doors, the enervating growths of the literary swamp, the dry cough of abandonment. The rest I seem to have forgotten, or never to have noticed at all, and now that the book is once again on the scene, and again in paperback, I observe that it is a tripartite volume, and that, distracted by what I believed to be its diagnostic powers, I missed two thirds of its substance. What I once saw as a pillar of salt turns out to be, in fact, a puff of spun sugar. And this is not because I have “gotten over” the pounding of denigration and rejection; I have never properly recuperated from them, and on their account resent the white hairs of middle age with a spitefulness and absurdity appropriate only to the hungry young.
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