NARCISSUS LEAVES THE POOL: Familiar Essays
By Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $25
A former editor of the journal The American Scholar and a teacher of English literature and writing at Northwestern University, Joseph Epstein has over the years acquired some fame as an essayist. As he suggests in the author’s note to this volume (his sixth collection), his essays may now be read in retrospect as a kind of dispersed and unfolding autobiography. Although (as he hastens to inform us) Epstein has been compared to the 16th Century French essayist Montaigne, he is better compared to the 18th Century English essayists (Addison, Steele) who filled the pages of the booming gazettes and small magazines of that witty and talkative period. Like these writers, Epstein possesses an elegant style and a conversational tone; his topics in this latest book range from the whimsical (as in the delightful essay “The Art of the Nap”) to the grave (see his powerful and vivid meditation on his heart surgery, “Taking the Bypass”). Whether he’s addressing the perils of aging, Gershwin’s popular genius, the phenomenon of name-dropping or the petty irritations of life in the so-called information age, Epstein’s wry, literary, melancholic persona animates his fluent sentences.
What we get in this collection is a portrait of the essayist as an aging Midwestern Anglophile. Epstein ruthlessly scrutinizes his body in the title essay, observing his “old-guy elbows whose skin is dry, wrinkled, and reddish” as well as his “drooping buttocks.” (Drooping buttocks! What would Henry James say?!) Although this book traces Epstein’s passage to a “new stage in life” (“the day darkens, the grave yawns”), he emerges less a Narcissus renouncing his self-love than a witty, amiable, occasionally depressive Nestor who, like Homer’s digressive Greek elder, recounts his foibles and fondnesses to a sympathetic audience.
These essays all appeared in literary journals and magazines–The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker–and they all assume an implicit contract with the reader: that he or she should be literate in that high-middlebrow way that good colleges used to make Americans literate. There are still enough of these readers around to sustain Epstein’s project. Epstein is writing for a known and narrow audience, one he has carved out over decades of writing, editing, teaching and lecturing; but it is also true, and a tribute to Epstein’s accessible style, that a new reader can walk easily into any of his essays and emerge feeling well and companionably conducted.
One senses throughout these essays a tension between Epstein the homespun Jewish-American raconteur and Epstein the refined Anglophilic man of letters–a tension he nicely explores in the essay “Anglophilia, American style.” Epstein still feels keenly the largely defunct cultural embarrassment of U.S. writers before what used to be the mother country; he also bears the trace of the Midwestern youth’s idealization of the big intellectual guns out East and across the Atlantic. In a characteristic aside, Epstein–a resident of Evanston–announces: “I read the daily national edition of the New York Times. (I probably should but don’t read the Chicago Tribune, the largest paper in the city in which I live.)” There is something willfully archaic about Epstein’s cultural commitments, his fervent homages to Henry James and Marcel Proust, his praise of such critical and literary luminaries of the late ’50s as Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and F.R. Leavis. The barbarians are at the gates, and have been since the ’60s, according to Epstein, and rather than rage at the dying of the light, he nostalgically watches the slow extinguishing of the gentleman’s club that was Culture. There could be worse elegists. Whether this phenomenon is worth elegizing is a wholly other matter, and for this reader at least, Epstein’s essays have failed to make the case or even to sustain the cause.
Even as Epstein’s cultural commentary threatens to turn lugubrious, his self-deprecating turns of mind and phrase usually save him from predictability and bathos–two threats always hovering around such a project. Epstein’s essays unfold in many ways, all artful. He is a sly weaver of the many strands the essay form encourages its practitioners to gather: the telling anecdote, the relevant quotation, the ironical aside, the digression, the elaboration, the apercu, the well-timed clincher. In a moment of astute self-diagnosis, Epstein remarks: “My talent is to unfurl slightly oblique observations in sentences that, if properly spun, sometimes yield a small surprise. I operate at the level of the sentence” (“What’s in It for the Talent?”). A lover of the subtleties and weirdnesses of language, he launches some essays with a meditation on a single phrase. “Ticked to the Min,” for example, begins thus: “Ticked to the max, kids say, or at least used to say, a nice shorthand phrase meaning mad as hell, angry to the highest power, gorge risen to its utmost height.” From this explication of youth-culture vernacular Epstein moves on to an exemplary anecdote: how he was “ticked to the min”–“the max” being a threshold he has renounced–by an argyle-socks-wearing first violinist of the Brandenburg Ensemble. From there we’re off on a tour with the mildly ticked Epstein, who manages to poke fun at, even as he displays, his own irritability.
Of particular interest to Chicago readers will be Epstein’s several remarks on his hometown: his account of urban meanderings with his late friend, University of Chicago professor and social scientist Edward Shils; his various asides about that university (his alma mater) as well as the University of Illinois at Chicago; his casual mentioning of neighborhoods, shops, restaurants. This book will also provide, for those interested in the current temperature of the literary media’s chattering class, a fine reading. It also reveals, perhaps unwittingly, a shift in sensibility within that very class. Epstein is an aspiring eminence of the old literary elites, the remains of which continue to emit a faint glow in the pages of The New York Review of Books. With the advent of mass-media-friendly culture czars like Tina Brown, Epstein’s version of literate culture looks increasingly obsolete, which he of course knows and mourns. Yet one doesn’t have to be a devotee of postmodernism and its attendants–cyberspace, synergy, multinationalism, multiculturalism, etc.–to feel that it’s no bad thing for U.S. culture to look beyond England, Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen.
The genealogy of Epstein’s sensibility may be discerned in his various comments about his fathers, both genetic and intellectual. Epstein says of his own father, born in 1907, that “he was a man particularly marked by the Depression,” a man who offered his adolescent son “homilies about business.” One gathers that Epstein left that decent, pinched father behind, that in his effort to make himself into “an intellectual” (as he calls himself), he gravitated to such imposing figures as Shils, the subject of Epstein’s last piece here, “My Friend Edward.” This essay, clearly intended to be a deeply felt encomium, reads rather peculiarly, presenting the learned Shils as formidable indeed but not so obviously deserving of admiration as Epstein seems to believe. One ultimately concludes about Epstein’s Shils what one concludes about Epstein’s literary heroes: I guess you had to be there.
For those of us who continue to be there, to read James and Proust and Eliot with love and attention, to care about language, its use and its flights, some of Epstein’s essays make for mildly aversive reading. One wants to say, “Yes, but when you invoke the truths of sensibility,’ the higher truths’ of the artist, what precisely are you getting at?” Epstein hates ideology: fair enough, but at times he seems too willing to dispense with ideas themselves. Be wary of those who march under the banner of literature and refuse to specify their own assumptions about its (or any) “truths.” Epstein the writer, the lover of language and the scrutinizer of his heart, is a better essayist than Epstein the savant and critic. One hopes that future collections will find him writing more from the former self than the latter.
