Authors: Cynthia Ozick
If I began these reflections in curmudgeonly resentment of the virtual annihilation of what Henry James knew—of the demise of the literary essay—it is only to press for its rescue and reclamation. Poetry and the novel will continue to go their own way, and we can be reasonably confident that they will take care of themselves. But the literary essay needs and merits defense: defense and more—celebrants, revivification through performance. One way or another, the literary essay is connected to the self-conscious progression of a culture, whereas the essay’s flashy successor—the article, or “piece”—is in every instance a pusher of Now, a shaker-off of whatever requires study or patience, or what
used to be called, without prejudice, ambition. The essayist’s ambition is no more and no less than that awareness of indebtedness I spoke of a moment ago—indebtedness to history, scholarship, literature, the acutest nuances of language.
Is this what is meant by “elitism”? Perhaps. I think of it as work, if work is construed (as it ought to be) as “the passion for exactitude and sublimity.” The latter phrase I borrow from a young essayist in London—my daughter’s age exactly—who, because of a driven Parnassian ardor and because he is still in his twenties, has, I trust, the future of belles-lettres secreted in his fountain pen. In the newest literary generation, the one most assailed by the journalist’s credo of Now, it is a thing worth marveling at: this determination to subdue, with exactitude and sublimity, the passionless trivia of our time.
*
I know a European writer of genius, in love with his language, whose bad luck it was to have been born just in time to suffer two consecutive tyrannies. It is a wonder that this writer lived past childhood. At the age of five, under Hitler, he was torn from his home and shipped to a concentration camp. Having survived that, he was spiritually and intellectually crushed by the extremes of Communist rule, including a mindless and vicious censorship. Currently, after the fall of the dictator, and having emigrated to America, he is being vilified in the press of his native land for having exposed one of its national heroes as a programmatic antisemite. After so much brutalization by the country of his birth, it would be difficult to expect him to identify himself as a patriot. But that is what he is. He is a patriot of his mother-tongue, and daily feels the estrangement of exile.
Pro patria dulce mori!
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
American Academy of Arts and Letters:
Excerpts from unpublished letters and documents from the Hamlin Garland file. Hamlin Garland papers. The poem “Genius” by Archer Milton Huntington. Archives of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.
Black Sparrow Press:
Excerpts from “The Foot” by Alfred Chester, copyright © 1970 by Alfred Chester, from
Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953–1966;
excerpts from “Letter from the Wandering Jew” by Alfred Chester, copyright © 1971 by Alfred Chester, from
Looking for Genet: Literary Essays & Reviews
. Reprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Press.
The Detroit News:
“No Head for Howells’ Hat” by H. L. Mencken (
The Detroit News
, November 23, 1924). Reprinted by permission of
The Detroit News
.
Harcourt Brace & Company
and
Faber and Faber Limited:
Excerpts from
The Waste Land
, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Gerontion,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” and “Ash-Wednesday” from
Collected Poems 1909–1962
by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot; excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from
Four Quartets
by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot, copyright renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights outside the United States administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London, from
The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot
. Excerpts of three letters from
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898–1922
, Volume One, edited by Valerie Eliot, copyright © 1988 by SET Copyrights Limited. Rights outside the United States administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited.
Harvard University Press:
Excerpts from letters from
Henry James: Selected Letters
, edited by Leon Edel, copyright © 1974, 1975, 1980, 1984, 1987 by Leon Edel and Alexander R. James. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.
The James Estate:
Excerpt from William James letter to his sister, copyright © 1980 by The Estate of William James; excerpts from Alice James diary entries, copyright © 1980, 1996 by the James Family. Reprinted by permission of Bay James, Literary Executor, on behalf of The James Estate.
The Jerusalem Post:
Excerpts from Yad Vashem article by Mordechai Paldiel. Reprinted by permission of
The Jerusalem Post
.
William Morris Agency, Inc.:
Excerpts from
Henry James: A Life
by Leon Edel (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), copyright © 1985 by Leon Edel. Reprinted by permission of the William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.
Oxford University Press:
Excerpt from
Complete Notebooks of Henry James
, edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Oxford University Press
and
Carcanet Press Limited:
Excerpts from “My Name and I” from Collected Poems 1975 by Robert Graves, copyright © 1975 by Robert Graves. Rights outside the United States administered by Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press and Carcanet Press Limited.
Viking Penguin:
Excerpts from
Seize
the
Day
by Saul Bellow, copyright © 1956, 1974, copyright renewed 1984 by Saul Bellow. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Yale University Press:
Excerpts from
Isaac Babel: 1920 Diary
, edited by Carol J. Avins, translated by H. T. Willetts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.