The good books
Everyone loves a hero, especially if he’s dead. The heroes of Cynthia Ozick’s new collection of essays are all gone. Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud — this is the frieze of critics, novelists and cultural commentators from the mid-20th century that Ozick celebrates. They represented the urban and the urbane in literature, an idea of reading that was ethically and socially redemptive: that high culture affirmed the freedom of the self, assimilated the alien, and fostered what Trilling himself had called “the liberal imagination.”
As Ozick puts it, what Trilling came to stand for was “a scrupulously perceptive and sinuously shaded interpretation of the moral life as expressed in the literature of the West.” Throughout her chapters, we see Ozick matching this blend of scrupulous perception and sinuous shading.
Ozick’s book is both a guide to and a praise of the mid-20th century, largely New York literary sensibility. In that sensibility, she finds an ideal of what a critic should be. Not a reviewer, not a college professor, not a theorist, a critic emerges from these pages as someone who uses the close formal analysis of literary language to find something socially, even spiritually, uplifting in the act of reading.
She cherishes the memory of an exchange, for example, between the novelist Marilynne Robinson and the translator Robert Alter over the Psalms. “The Bible, even now” she writes, “remains a commanding thread in the American language,” and “it is that thread, or call it a bright ribbon of feeling, that animates Robinson as she confronts Alter’s rendering of Psalm 30.”
Here is Ozick’s real genius. She transforms one metaphor into another — the thread becomes the bright ribbon of feeling. In that transformation, she makes a historical point (the Bible is important) into an aesthetic one (it is important because it generates our shared response to beauty).
Literary criticism for Ozick (as for Trilling and his marbled peers) has this vital social purpose. It argues for morality and beauty in the same breath; it creates a canon of the great and valued; and it does both in a style that masters the language of life.
There are no heroes without villains, and Ozick gives short space to those whom she deems mere plaster casts of literature.
“Academic critics with advanced degrees ... are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multisyllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since ... they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.”
English professor bashing has been the sport of kings ever since the Indiana University professor Martin Wright Sampson lamented, in 1895, that departments were spending too much time on “biography, literary history, grammar, [and] etymology.” As an academic critic, I have long been marinating with a group of colleagues famous for their bad prose and good eyewear. And yet many of the critics Ozick praises hold distinguished teaching positions in university departments. Trilling himself (though Ozick makes much of his own anxiety about it) taught at Columbia for decades. Robert Alter has been an ornament to Berkeley for nearly half a century. William Gass, another favorite, marked Washington University with what Ozick calls his “daringly scathing and ... assertively fecund” language and ideas.
And she singles out Louis Menand, James Wood, Dana Goia, Helen Vendler and Michael Gorra, all of whom hold teaching positions. Even Geoffrey Hartman, the late doyen of Yale criticism, gets an approving nod.
The point is not that academic departments remain full of incomprehensible deconstructionists (they don’t anymore), or that they are relentlessly “postcolonial” (very few are). The point is that the goal of a good deal of academic literary study of the past two generations has been precisely to dismantle the canon (largely white, largely male, largely East Coast) that Ozick celebrates.
But more than that, reading Ozick’s elegance, wit and sublime confidence makes me realize that these are the qualities that academic criticism sorely lacks. It often remains confrontational, angry, guilttripping and self-regarding. It is far more a matter of affect than of argument, I think, that turns most people off from literature professors. Some are good and some are not. So too, with many modern novelists — a crop Ozick dismisses as “vernal aspirants who crowd the horizon with their addictive clamor.”
Ozick should be permitted her biases. She is a product of her time and place — a time and place that treasured finely honed gifts of reading and the ability to turn cultural history into a bright ribbon of feeling. People like me will love this book. But then, I still miss a view of the Hudson.