'A Chance of Becoming a Bit Smarter'

Axios Press has sent me bound galleys of Joseph Epstein’s Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits, scheduled for publication in October. It is his seventeenth collection of essays and occasional pieces, and his fifth from Axios in eight years. The Menckenesque title gives it away. At age eighty-three, Epstein remains our most entertaining, wide-ranging, industrious, learned practitioner of both familiar and critical essays. In his hands, the distinction between the two forms is hardly worthy of notice. Like most of the best essayists, he is a utility player, broadly curious and  competent. His interest in books and his fellow humans has never dimmed. Sadly, Epstein, that most congenial of men, has come to look like what Ishmael calls, speaking of the Pequod’s crew, an “isolato.” The essay is nearly moribund, as Epstein suggests in his introduction:

“. . . I often feel that my kind of writing is coming at what might be the end of a long and distinguished line, one that begins with Plutarch, moves along to Montaigne, Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Thomas Macaulay, Max Beerbohm, and George Orwell – the line of the general, often biographical essay.”

The essay is the chummiest of forms. The writer invites you into his softly lit study, gestures for you to be seated and begins the conversation. His graciousness implies respect. You, among all readers, will appreciate what he has to say. He doesn’t rant or insult your values or intelligence, and would never presume to tell you what to think or do. He may have read more than you, and certainly writes better, but you are his valued companion, if not always his equal. As Hazlitt writes in “The Fight”:

“[W]e agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

Here is how Epstein begins “Milt Rosenberg” (2018):

  

“Five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday, from 1973 to 2012, Milton Rosenberg elevated AM radio and the cultural tone generally in Chicago. Milt Rosenberg died on January 9 at the age of 92. His two-hour talk show was nothing if not anomalous. A University of Chicago professor, his academic specialty was social psychology, though it seems strange to use the word ‘specialty’ in connection with Milt Rosenberg, who may have been the world’s greatest paid dilettante.”

Before reading Epstein’s essay, originally published in the late, lamented Weekly Standard, I had never heard of Rosenberg. Like Hazlitt on boxing, a subject about which I know little and have even less interest, Epstein on Rosenberg is compelling through sheer charm of voice. That final phrase, “the world’s greatest paid dilettante,” cinches it. A good writer can make any subject interesting – even tennis. “Big Bill Tilden” (2016) is a review of a recent biography of the tennis star undone by scandal. At least it begins as a review, but soon turns into a meditation on, among other things, fame, sexual waywardness, the fleetingness of athletic prowess, and biography itself. Apropos of that last point, Epstein writes in the Tilden piece: “Lives, at least those deserving of biographies, require interpretation. Sometimes even an incorrect interpretation is better  than no interpretation at all.”

That stands as a credo for one of Epstein’s strengths. A life is more than a collection of vital stats. What follows is a sampler of interpretations by Epstein of various lives, often intermingled with literary judgment, all drawn from essays collected in Gallimaufry.

On Proust: “Marcel Proust, who began life as a snob, soon became the great anatomist and equally great contemner of snobbery.”

On Vasily Grossman and an act of kindness he recounts in a story: “Only a certain kind of writer can bring such truth home to his readers through the vividly persuasive examples enacted by his characters—only a great writer, which is what Vasily Grossman was.”

On Joseph Roth and his great novel The Radetzky March: “No better introduction, for the student of literature or of history, is available for  an understanding of the Austro-Habsburg Empire than this splendid novel, written by a small Galician Jew, who came of age in its shadow, grieved over its demise, and owes to it his permanent place in the august, millennia-long enterprise known with a capital L as Literature.”  

Epstein speculates that one of the reasons the essay remains on life supports as a form is the ubiquity of what he politely calls “partisan political interests.” We might more precisely call the discourse du jour self-righteous and usually pissed-off demagoguery. The Manichaean impulse is not favorable to a literature of charm, wit, gentle irony and nuance. Epstein writes in the introduction:

“In so heatedly political an atmosphere as ours, one cannot avoid engaging with politics, at least not entirely. Still, as a man without a theory of government, or strong opinions on foreign policy, or much in the way of knowledge about economics, I continue to prefer to believe that I am only political enough to protect myself from the politics of others.”

A funny, apolitical essayist with a pleasing prose style, a weakness for the Master, Henry James, and a well-earned reputation for saying precisely what he thinks is unlikely to stir the masses in 2021, but as Epstein writes in one of his finest essays, “The Bookish Life” (2018):

     

“Reading may not be the same as conversation, but reading the right books, the best books, puts us in the company of men and women more intelligent than ourselves. Only by keeping company with those smarter than ourselves, in books or in persons, do we have a chance of becoming a bit smarter.”