The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  Many idioms are seen, if they are tested by grammar or logic, not to say what they are nevertheless well understood to mean. Fastidious people point out the sin, and easy-going people, who are more numerous, take little notice and go on committing it. Then the fastidious people, if they are foolish, talk of ignorance and solecism, and are laughed at as pedants; or if they are wise, say no more about it and wait. The indefensibles, however sturdy, may not prove to be immortal, and anyway there are much more profitable ways of spending time than baiting them.

  Of the two revisions of Modern English Usage, Gowers’s, published in 1965, 32 years after Fowler’s death, is in every way a pleasing supplement to the book, eliminating some overly technical material, adding such new entries as “Worsened Words” and “Abstractitus,” but, as Gowers allowed, ”chary of making any substantial alterations except for the purpose of bringing [Fowler] up to date.” The book was revised a second time in 1996 by R. W. Burchfield, himself earlier the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. “Fowler’s name remains on the title page,” Burchfield wrote in the preface to his edition, “even though his book has been largely rewritten in this third edition.” Sad to report, Burchfield broadened, modernized, streamlined, and along the way essentially destroyed a dazzling book by turning it into a merely useful one.

  Those who love language, who view its deployment in speech and in writing as a craft requiring artful care, will continue to rely upon and cherish the original, charming book that is Modern English Usage and its irretrievably idiosyncratic author—a masterpiece of personal lexicography in a field dominated by the dull and impersonal.

  As a Driven Leaf

  (2015)

  A high percentage of the best historical novels have been written with the classical world as background. One thinks of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, John Williams’s Augustus, Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, and those of Mary Renault’s novels set in ancient Greece. Milton Steinberg’s As a Driven Leaf (1939) is another splendid historical novel, this one set in second century Jerusalem and Antioch, one generation after the destruction of the Jewish Temple (ce 70) and during the rise and suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt under the Roman rule of the Emperor Trajan.

  The author of As a Driven Leaf was the rabbi at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, where he was famous for his learning and the power of his sermons. A student of the legendary philosopher Morris R. Cohen and for a time the disciple of the rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Steinberg, who died in 1950 at the age of 46, left behind two nonfiction books—The Making of the Modern Jew (1934) and Basic Judaism (1947)—still read in our day. A second, unfinished novel, The Prophet’s Wife, was published posthumously in 2010.

  As a Driven Leaf—the title comes from Job 13: 24-25: “Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face . . . / Will Thou harass a driven leaf?”—is a book with something like a cult following. The novelist Chaim Potok remembered how exhilarated he felt, as an adolescent in an Orthodox yeshiva, to find a book that so powerfully captured his own youthful religious turmoil. The other day someone told me that his brother-in-law, after reading the novel 20 or so years ago, decided to go to rabbinical school.

  Ambitious in scope, the theme of As a Driven Leaf is the conflict between reason and revelation, science and faith that faces Elisha ben Abuyah, Steinberg’s protagonist. Handsome, highly intelligent, born to wealth, Elisha is brought up under the guidance of a Greek tutor. When Elisha’s father dies, an uncle, orthodox in his Jewish belief, takes responsibility for the boy’s upbringing and sends him off to be educated by a learned rabbi, a man whose saintly simplicity and wisdom win Elisha’s heart and set him on the path of Jewish learning. He becomes one of the most promising young rabbis of the age, rising to become a member of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court composed of the most learned men in Judea.

  Elisha ben Abuyah was a historical character, a Jewish apostate, about whom not all that much is known. He is said to have lapsed into hedonism, replaced Jewish ethics with pagan aesthetics, and betrayed the Jews to the Romans during the Bar Kochba rebellion. With great novelistic skill, Steinberg fleshes out the bare bones of information we have on Elisha ben Abuyah, breathes life into him and into the large cast of characters he encounters in the novel, and gives his story impressive dramatic unity.

  In the novel, Elisha contracts a disappointing marriage to a woman of crabbed and conventional views whose miscarriage prevents her from having children. He finds succor in the home of a disciple, whose two young children later die of plague. “It is not in our power,” a dictum of the Jewish sages runs, “to explain either the happiness of the wicked nor the suffering of the righteous.” The death of these children turns Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah’s mind to doubt, and to searching for answers to the world’s mysteries outside the realm of Torah and Jewish learning.

  Greek learning is where this search soon leads. A crucial book for Elisha is the geometry of Euclid, in which he discovers what Jewish learning cannot deliver: cold axiomatic proofs set out through a series of indisputable propositions. As Elisha puts it later in the novel, favoring Greek learning over Jewish learning: “Their success, I am convinced, followed from the fact that they started from the foundations. We, on the contrary, have always tried to bolster a pre-established case.” Elisha ben Abuyah’s intellectual wandering ends in apostasy and eventually with his excommunication from the rabbinate.

  The first part of As a Driven Leaf is set in Judea; the second, in Antioch in Syria. In Antioch, Elisha’s search for certainty takes him further afield—to study Gnosticism, the arguments of the agnostics, the doctrines of the Cynics. Steinberg was learned in Greek and Latin, and steeped in ancient history, and the detailed settings of his novel have a clinching convincingness. In Roman Antioch, Elisha encounters the barbarity of the Roman slave markets, the bloodiness of the gladiatorial arena, where his fellow Jews are put to death at the command of the cruel Roman praetorian prefect, Marcus Tineius Rufus. Elisha’s own past reverence for the Pax Romana is wiped out as he sees, “with such fearful clarity, that no society, no matter how great the achievements of its scholars, can be an instrument of human redemption if it despises justice and mercy.”

  Like the Old Testament God, Steinberg puts Elisha through arduous tests: the temptation of adultery, the seductions of intellectual vanity, and more. Elisha comes to self-knowledge, but the secrets of the universe remain withheld from him. He feels his error in hoping for certainty in life, in abandoning his people and his religion out of intellectual hubris, when he also comes to realize that important truths do not await at the end of a syllogism. Faith and reason, he finally grasps, need not stand opposed. “On the contrary,” he tells his old disciple,

  salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion. . . . It is not certainty that one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for.

  In his spiritual wanderings Elisha has gone too far, and can never again accept the authority of his old religion. At the novel’s close, his search continues. “Older, sadder, wiser, I go seeking now, through faith and reason combined, the answer to this baffling pageant which is the world, and the little byplay which has been my life.”

  One imagines that in writing As a Driven Leaf Milton Steinberg was writing about his own intellectual conflict over the issue—faith or reason, and in what proportions?—that remains fundamental to thoughtful people to this day. The tension that this conflict stirs in a first-class mind in his novel is compelling, and the incisive portrait of the man caught up in it is what gives As a Driven Leaf its standing as a masterpiece.

  Joseph and His Brothers

  (2012)

  Anyone with the least literary pretensions has read one or another work by Thomas Mann. Some will have read Buddenbrooks, his saga about a Baltic German mercantile family as its energy peter
s out; others The Magic Mountain, that most philosophical of novels and one set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Switzerland. One is likely to have encountered the novella Death in Venice or Tonio Kroger, Mario the Magician, or one or another of his many splendid short stories. But not many people, I suspect, will have read Mann’s tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, a 1,207-page work of rich and rewarding complexity.

  I, a man of extravagant literary pretensions, had not myself read it until only recently. Fifteen or so years ago, I made a run at it, but hit the wall roughly at page 60. What goaded me to take another shot at it was discovering a clean copy on sale at a nearby used-book store. What I discovered is a true masterpiece, but one of a most extraordinary kind. Not the least unusual thing about it is that in this vastly ambitious work Thomas Mann chose to tell a story that everyone already knows.

  The story of course is the Old Testament account of Jacob, son of Isaac, brother of Esau, and his twelve sons, and of the most impressive of those sons, Joseph, who goes on to become Pharaoh’s principal administrator, his Grand Vizier, during the seven fat and seven lean years visited upon Egypt. The best of all excellent Old Testament stories, a story of overweening vanity, betrayal, reunion, and forgiveness, the biblical version of the Joseph story is used by Mann as in effect an outline, which he filled in, fleshed out, and re-told with the masterly narrative power of the great novelist that he was.

  In the Old Testament, for example, in a mere half page we are told that Potiphar’s wife, enamored of Joseph’s good looks, attempts to seduce him, Joseph refuses, she then falsely accuses him of attempted rape, and he is sent off to prison. Mann, or his narrator, claims to be “horrified at the briefness and curtness of the original account” in the Bible. In Mann’s version, eighty or so pages are spent on the incident, with Potiphar’s wife’s beauty, cosmetics, handmaidens, seduction methods, and much else described in intricate and perfectly persuasive detail. Where Old Testament provides statement of fact, Mann provides heightened and detailed drama.

  Thomas Mann took sixteen years to complete Joseph and His Brothers. (James Joyce took seven to write Ulysses, and suggested that readers should take the same length of time to read it.) The years were the tumultuous ones between 1926 and 1942—the time of world-wide depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Nazism forced Mann and his family into exile, first in Europe, then in the United States. But he pressed on with his novel. In early 1930, he traveled to the Middle East where, as he put it, “with my physical eyes I saw the Nile country from the Delta up (or down) to Nubia and the memorable places of the Holy Land. . .” This book, during these difficult years, was “the undertaking that alone vouchsafed the continuity of my life.”

  Tour de force, an astonishing feat, is what Joseph and His Brothers is, nothing less. This is a book in which an artist, through scholarship and above all through imagination, has worked his way back through time and insinuated himself into the culture of the Biblical Jews and the more elaborately exotic culture of the ancient Egyptians. Mann, ever the ironist, at one point early in the book writes: “I do not conceal from myself the difficulty of writing about people who do not precisely know who they are.”

  Joseph and His Brothers is studded with exquisite touches. Laban, Jacob’s exploiting father-in-law, is described as possessing “the hands of a having man.” Of Jacob’s love for Rachel, Mann writes: “Such is love, when it is complete: feeling and lust together, tenderness and desire.” Apropos of Jacob’s agedness, he writes of “the touching if unattractive misshapenness of old age.” Potiphar’s wife, distraught by her passion for Joseph, loses her appetite and is barely able to eat “a bird’s liver and a little vegetable.” Mann’s description of Rachel’s labor in giving birth to Joseph is so well done as to leave one exhausted.

  Past and present are interwoven throughout this novel. “Men saw through each other in that distant day,” Mann writes, “as well as in this.” Recurrence is a leitmotif that plays through the book. “For we move in the footsteps of others, and all life is but the pouring of the present into the forms of the myth,” he notes. Through the novel, Joseph is aware that his is a role in an already written script—a script written by God—and it is this that gives him the courage to carry on: “For let a man once have the idea that God has special plans for him, which he must further by his aid, and he will pluck up his heart and strain his understanding to get the better of all things and be their master. . .” The woman Tamar, who in the disguise of a prostitute allows herself to become pregnant by Joseph’s brother Judah, does so because she, too, wants to be inscribed forever in the history of this important family.

  One could compose a dazzling little anthology of aphorisms from Joseph and His Brothers. “It takes understanding to sin; yes, at bottom, all spirit is nothing else than understanding of sin.” And: “We fail to realize the indivisibility of the world when we think of religion and politics as fundamentally separate fields. . . .” Yet again: “No, the agonies of love are set apart; no one has ever repented having suffered them.” And finally: “Man, then, was a result of God’s curiosity about himself.”

  In another of the book’s aphorisms, Mann writes: “Indeed resolution and patience are probably the same thing.” How often must that sentiment, over the sixteen difficult years he spent composing this grand prose epic, have occurred to Thomas Mann himself. At the end of his foreword to the single-volume publication of his tetralogy, Mann wonders if his novel “will perhaps be numbered among the great books?” He cannot know, of course, but as the son of a tradesman he does know that, of the products of human hands, only quality endows them with endurance. “The song of Joseph is good, solid work,” Mann writes, “done out of that fellow feeling for which mankind has always been sensitively receptive. A measure of durability is, I think, inherent in it.” He was correct. In Joseph and His Brothers he created a masterpiece, which is to say, a work built to last.

  Life and Fate

  (2007)

  No people have been put to the tests of suffering the way Russians have. They have never known anything approaching decent government. Czars or commissars, their leaders have always treated them as if they were a conquered nation. Even now, after the fall of communism, things for them remain impressively dreary. I not long ago asked a formidable expert on Russia whom we were supposed to root for among those contending for power in the country. With only thieves, thugs, and former KGB men seeking leadership, he replied, there is no one to root for. Business, in other words, as usual.

  Literature has been the only, if of course vastly insufficient, Russian compensation. The barbarity of the nation’s conditions has, somehow, produced a great literature studded with magnificent literary subjects. From Pushkin through Solzhenitsyn—with Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Mandelstam, Babel, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and many others in between—great Russian novelists and poets have never been in short supply.

  One Russian writer who until only recently slipped through my own net is Vasily Grossman (1904–1964), author of a novel called Life and Fate, which was written under the direct influence of War and Peace. The first I had heard of this book was six or so months ago from my friend Frederic Raphael, the English novelist and screenwriter, a man never given to overstatement. “It’s a masterpiece,” he said, and, upon investigation, this assessment turns out to be precisely correct.

  Grossman was born in Berdichev, in the Ukraine, near Kiev and the scene of one of the first large massacres of Jews before Babi Yar, the infamous mass execution of Jews outside Kiev. A chemist by training, he worked as a mining engineer, and then, following his instincts and talent, became a writer. During World War II, he covered—was “embedded with” we should say today—the Russian army on its eastern front. His dispatches for the publication known in English as Red Army were widely read, but nowhere more intensely than by Stalin, who, knowing Grossman had too much integrity to turn hack, was said to have been extremely wary of his ar
dor for truth-telling.

  Like Isaac Babel, author of the Red Cavalry stories, Grossman was a Jewish writer with more of a taste than a physique for the military life. As a journalist, he indulged this taste by educating himself on all aspects of weaponry, strategy, and tactics. He wrote about the great battle of Stalingrad and then followed the German army in its retreat, reporting on the extermination camps of Majdanek and Treblinka, arriving with the Soviet army in Berlin. He was unblinking in his accounts of war’s devastation and horror, and turned in the most significant account of the bloodiest battle of the 20th century, the attack upon and defense of Stalingrad, which cost 27 million Russian soldiers and civilians and four million troops of the Wehrmacht.

  That battle of Stalingrad is at the center of Life and Fate. Grossman said that the only book he read—which he read twice—during his time as a journalist was War and Peace. The parallel between Napoleon’s attack on Russia through Borodino and Hitler’s attack on Russia through Stalingrad is obvious. In each, the fate of Europe was at stake; in both battles the losses, but especially those incurred by the Russians, were unprecedented. On each occasion, against all odds, Russia emerged victorious.

  To attempt a novel modeled on War and Peace is easy; to write one that is unembarrassing by comparison is not. Far from embarrassing, Life and Fate is one of the great novels of the 20th century. The book has more than 150 characters, panoramically representing almost all strains of Russian life during the nightmarish Stalin years; various plots and subplots are neatly interwoven with detailed descriptions of battles and penetrating excursuses on totalitarianism, on the history of the persecution of the Jews (“anti-Semitism,” Grossman writes, “is . . . an expression of lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms”), on the evolution of morality and kindness. The novel is rich in apercus. Viktor Shtrum, one of its central characters, is an experimental physicist who claims that “the value of science is the happiness it brings to people,” but he also holds that “science today should be entrusted to men of spiritual understanding, to prophets and saints. But instead it’s left to chess players and scientists.”