Edgy Enthusiast

One is always gratefully surprised by evidence of intelligence, wit and culture in the pages of a newspaper. Long gone are the days when H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell and Murray Kempton -- newspapermen, yes, but literary men as well – practiced their craft in the dailies. Their books stand on my shelves. They wrote for a mass audience, yes, or at least for publications aimed at the masses, but in prose that was nuanced, funny, allusive and that, especially in Kempton’s case, easily transcended today’s stylistic lockstep of subject (preferably “I”)-verb-object, with a pop-culture reference thrown in to hook the cretins. Unlike so many journalists today, steeped in self-perpetuating cynicism, they didn’t treat readers as backward fifth-graders.

Neither does Ron Rosenbaum, longtime columnist for the New York Observer. His subjects are often so refreshingly arcane, so literate and literary, so dependent on a fund of knowledge deemed “elitist” by the fashionably egalitarian, that his long-running column, “The Edgy Enthusiast,” constitutes a miracle of loyalty on the part of his newspaper. Some of his work is available online but I would suggest a visit to the library or book dealer to locate, in particular, The Secret Parts of Fortune, a generous helping of his journalism from the Observer and other publications. In it are pieces devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Helen Vendler and John Keats, Lucretius (in which Rosenbaum begins studying Latin in middle age), Murray Kempton (whom Rosenbaum called “the best writer of prose in America”), and Shakespeare, as well as a brief and memorable detour into Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy. I am emphasizing his purely literary pieces but Rosenbaum is also good on politics, crime, even celebrities (Bob Dylan, Roseanne Cash, Jack Nicholson).

What returned me to Rosenbaum was my recent reimmersion in Hart Crane. In 1997, Rosenbaum wrote a piece titled “Hart Crane’s Hieroglyphs: The Unmentionable Truth” – a title which does not, mercifully, refer to Crane’s homosexuality. When was the last time you read an explication of a poem as cryptic as “At Melville’s Tomb” – or any poem, for that matter -- in a newspaper? Rosenbaum adores Crane and lives up to his columnar persona, “The Edgy Enthusiast,” right from the first paragraph:

“The lost language of Crane: I love the sound of that phrase (its resonance indebted to the David Leavitt novel title). I’m speaking of the lost language of Hart Crane, to my mind the great American poet of the twentieth century, inventor of a unique ecstatic poetic language that is at once maddeningly elusive and crazily exhilarating, a language I can’t always decipher but one that always speaks to me, a haunting, cryptic poetic rhetoric, a supremely literate glossolalia, a speaking-in-tongues that registers on levels of intelligibility both deeper and more elevated than quotidian speech.”

Even if you have never read Crane’s work, don’t you want to dive in headfirst to share in some of Rosenbaum’s enthusiasm? While you’re at it, find Explaining Hitler, Rosenbaum’s idiosyncratic look at attempts by historians, philosophers, biographers and others to understand the Nazi leader, and Those Who Forget the Past, a collection of essays examining the recent resurgence of anti-semitism, much of it coming from the political left. The book is edited by Rosenbaum and contains a brilliant afterword by Cynthia Ozick.