The Golden Jugglers

On Wednesday, I started reading Joseph Epstein’s latest collection, In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, or rather I started rereading it, because I first encountered most of the contents as they appeared in such periodicals as The New Criterion and The Weekly Standard. Epstein – garrulous, formidably bookish, delicately cynical, ever witty, with a penchant for puns – is the uncle I think I deserved. His ongoing existence – he recently turned 70 and, of course, writes about it – is a rare solace.

I turned first to “The Max Beerbohm Cult.” It was Epstein who inspired me to read Beerbohm several years ago. I neglected him out ignorance and credulity. Somewhere I had gleaned the stupid impression that Beerbohm was a decadent, flea-weight aesthete. Then I read And Even Now and Seven Men (with particular delight in “Enoch Soames”) and my foolishness was undeniable. Epstein quotes Beerbohm’s humble assessment of his artistic gift: “Some people are born to lift heavy weights. Some are born to juggle with golden balls.” About which Epstein comments:

“He added that the latter were very much in the minority in England then, and, of course, now. But when haven’t they been? The golden jugglers are the ones with wit, the ability to pierce pretension, and the calm detachment to mock large ideas and salvationist schemes. They eschew anger and love small perfections. They go in for handsome gestures (Beerbohm refused to accept a fee for speaking about his recently dead friend Desmond MacCarthy over the BBC), have wide sympathies, and understand that a complex point of view is worth more than any number of opinions.”

What a fine testimonial to Beerbohm and a concise recipe for any interesting and decent human being. Some hours after reading this I learned that Wednesday was William Blake’s 250th birthday. I remembered a conversation I had five years ago with the professor, a London native, who oversaw my senior thesis on Henry James. We bemoaned the severely hobbled literacy of so many English professors and the corruption of the discipline by trendy politics. Speaking of her own department, she said, “They all go in for Blake, that wind bag. I much prefer Keats.”

I, too, prefer Keats, but seemingly contradictory literary tastes are perfectly acceptable in my book. On most occasions, Blake is bombastic, one of literature’s great cranks, and much of his current vogue is driven by politics, not by appreciation of his literary worth. Eric Ormsby, in a piece published Wednesday in the New York Sun, puts it pithily:

“And yet, perhaps the most impressive aspect of Blake’s greatness is that, for all his newfound respectability, he still seems as crazy as ever.”

In his “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” Blake blends nursery rhymes with visionary ferocity, and some of the results are sublime. Who isn’t moved by a performance of “Jerusalem?” But Blake’s prophetic books (“Vala, or the Four Zoas”) read like a weird, tedious hybrid of science fiction and the Book of Mormon. In Beerbohm’s terms, Blake was lifting heavy weights, while Beerbohm was content to juggle golden balls. Fortunately, for me a reader, Blake and Beerbohm are not mutually exclusive choices. I can read Blake at his best, when I choose, and leave the rest, though my preference is for Beerbohm. Here’s how Epstein articulates that preference and, by the way, paints a surreptitious self-portrait:

“The combination of common sense and whimsy that were his special literary blend continues to work its magic. All is presented in a calm and unfaltering style of what I think of as formal intimacy; if he ever wrote a flawed sentence, I have not come across it.”

Who can decently ask more of any writer? No ranting, no pretentiousness, no self-indulgence. In “Laughter,” the final essay in And Even Now, Beerbohm, with great candor and charm, spells out his peculiar attractiveness as a golden juggler:

“Come to me in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you like a father, even like a lawyer. I’ll be hanged if I haven’t a certain mellow wisdom. But if you are by way of weaving theories on some one who will luminously confirm or powerfully rend them, I must, with a hang-dog air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than any other. This is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one that I can make head or tail of.”