'Well Educated and Glad of the Fact'

“[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this immersion into literature part of his or her own life, so that the experience of books has been integral with the experience of life and therefore strongly influences his or her general point of view.”

That’s a true and generous definition, one that distinguishes the literary man or woman from the book collector and the devoted reader of science fiction or thrillers. There’s nothing wrong with those related bookish species, and they may overlap with the literary types as defined by Joseph Epstein above. The distinction is not rooted in snobbery; rather, it’s a matter of the centrality of books – books judged serious by generations of readers – in one’s life. I have difficulty separating what I’ve learned from books from what experience  has taught me. This suggests I look at life as an opportunity to learn something useful, lasting and profound, and that would in general be correct. I won’t waste time picking apart what Montaigne taught me and what I acquired from being a father or a newspaper reporter. I think of them as different parts of a single curriculum.

The Epstein passage is drawn from his introduction to Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life (1993), one of the three Epstein collections I bought on Saturday from Kaboom Books. The others are With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995) and Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999). That brings to twenty-five the number of Epstein titles on my shelves. I didn’t realize until I was back home and seated at my desk that all three volumes had been signed by Epstein.

I especially value Pertinent Players because of the writers he takes on, including Italo Svevo, William Hazlitt, Henry James, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Baring. This impulse, this taste in writers, partially defines that increasingly rare literary man or woman. We want to know what gifted readers have made of our favorite writers. Epstein quotes with approval from Baring’s "High-Brows and Low-Brows" (Lost Lectures: Or, the Fruits of Experience, 1932):

“I mean by the good high-brow the man who is well educated and glad of the fact without thrusting it down other people's throats, who, without being ashamed of his knowledge, his intellectual or artistic superiority, or his gifts and aptitudes, does not use them as a rod to beat others with, and does not think that because he is the fortunate possessor of certain rare gifts or talents, he is therefore a better or a more useful man: such is the good high-brow. . . . My point is that the more of these there are the better for the nation, the better for all of us. When there shall be no more of them, it will mean the extinction of our civilisation.”