In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage
By Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin, 410 pages, $26
Is it possible to be a happy essayist? Ralph Waldo Emerson, that American rock star of the thoughtful form, is not someone you’d press upon a depressive. “Every man is grave when alone,” he wrote. How about Mary McCarthy or Eudora Welty? Or Joyce Carol Oates? There are many adjectives one might slap on the jackets of their books — Furious! Beautiful! Intense! — but happy is not one of them.
The question comes to mind as Chicago’s own Joseph Epstein has bound and corded his 10th essay collection, an impressive stack of literary lumber for an age when many of America’s esteemed essay-printing publications have been clear cut to make room for new-growth timber like pop culture and political commentary.
At 70 Epstein has entered that sweet spot of a man’s life when such a development disturbs without demoralizing. Bigger concerns — “Big D, and I don’t mean Dallas,” as he writes in the introduction of “In a Cardboard Belt!” — take understandable precedent. “At seventy it is natural to begin to view the world from the sidelines, a glass of wine in hand, watching the younger people do the dances of ambition, competition, lust, and the rest of it.”
So here, in grab-bag form, is Epstein sounding even more valedictory than normal, a little more nostalgic than usual and a little less irritated by the world’s inability to understand and absorb his wisdom. In the end — he doesn’t care. It’s as if approaching older age has given him the freedom to embrace his rough edges.
“In a Cardboard Belt!” contains a number of essays that would normally be called curmudgeonly were they not mostly devoid of the curmudgeon’s secret pleasure in getting a rise out of people. “On the Road Again, Alas,” describes how ill-suited Epstein is to taking a vacation — anywhere, really. “Memoirs of a Cheap and Finicky Glutton” recalls decades of gastrogluttony but finishes on a note of departure. His favorite Chinese restaurant having closed, Epstein chooses to go hungry.
In the era of Viagra, and of Philip Roth novels arriving every two years, America is replete now with men raging against the dying of the light. Though he still sleeps poorly and collects worries as most of us do receipts, Epstein swims against this current. He embraces the winnowing of age, using it in fact the way a middle-age man might do “Seven Steps to Highly Effective Living”: as an organizing tool.
“Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my long-held fantasy of traveling light,” Epstein writes in “Books Won’t Furnish a Room,” an essay on divesting himself of several decades of books he’d not yet read or would never read again. “A fantasy it has always been, for the longer I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown. Neckties, spectacles, fountain pens, wristwatches, tuxedos. . . . I am a man who owns an electric shoe-shining machine.”
As essayists get on in years, their prose tends to grow somewhat disembodied — the way those old American cars of the ’60s and ’70s always seemed to drive on a road paved with cushions. Not so with Epstein. He has always been, first and foremost, a wordsmith, a turner of phrases. If he were a fighter he’d be a great inside work man.
Not surprisingly then, “In a Cardboard Belt!” contains felicities in just about every paragraph. Used-book stores are “those pool halls for the biblomane”; Joseph Mitchell’s compiled journalism was published, Epstein recalls, to “heavy jeroboams of praise”; and, “The feminism in Faculty Towers,” a book on the academy by Elaine Showalter, “is often no more than a tic, which the book’s author by now probably cannot really control.”
Yes, yes, Epstein is still punching, too — sort of. During his days at Northwestern University he was firmly, often fanatically opposed to the cluster of theoretical frameworks, redistributive policies and identity politics that descended on academe and became known as political correctness. Epstein retains this posture, but given the stakes of the game today and the tenor of his jabs, it’s more like watching a man bend down inelegantly to kick a bit of remaining sand in someone’s face.
Surely Epstein should understand why even repeating an anecdote in which he used a British racial epithet puts him on thin ice. Saying that queer theory “could only be perpetuated by adolescent minds” and dedicated “chiefly to the hunting offenses” shows a profound lack of empathy that can only really be called, well, adolescent. Readers of a certain mind have long since had to make their peace with such intellectual pimples on Epstein’s work, because he’s never really going to change and the pleasure of reading him outweighs the sillier, nudnik reaction of punishing him through denying him one’s audience.
After all, there is more than just posture to Epstein’s unwillingness to play well with others, to follow the crowd. His efforts at investigating sacred cows — evident here in pieces on Edmund Wilson and Harold Bloom — often bear bitter, if useful, fruit. One of the book’s tidiest, most enjoyable pieces addresses celebrity, which Epstein defines as something one cultivates or has thrust upon him, while fame is something one deserves.
Epstein has always been good at making such observations, but here he makes them mostly from a cooler, more comfortable remove. The fire has been stoked to a clarifying, rather than an arsonist, rage. In “Is Reading Really at Risk?” an essay on the now-infamous National Endowment for the Arts survey of 2004 that showed sharply dropping reading levels across the board, Epstein points out that it’s foolish for such a survey to ignore non-fiction, as that would mean Jacques Barzun, J. Robert Oppenheimer and George Keenan all would have counted as non-readers.
As good as such pieces are, Epstein is always best when working on something close at hand, when writing of people he knows or used to know, memories of growing up in Chicago. As a personal essayist, Epstein is a rare thing now. He goes deep, but not to the tangled, dark place that makes you think he still needs therapy. He has an early riser’s inherent sunny, brisk disposition. If sentences wore clothes, his could sport a bow tie and manage not to appear ridiculous or infantile.
When Epstein is charting more-familiar waters of literature (such as Marcel Proust), or genres of literature (such as poetry), he is even more enjoyable to read. Few American writers re-create the luxuriant, receptive tone of reading like he does, and almost none can be both vain and humble before literature — the way every smart reader is — and get away with it so frequently.
Age has honed his aphorisms to a stage at which they should be collectible. “[R]eputations for charm do not usually long survive the lives of those who exhibit them,” he writes in a piece on Max Beerbohm. “Glimpse [Paul] Valery’s name on the page,” he writes elsewhere, “and one knows something immensely clarifying, possibly life-altering, awaits.”
For almost 20 books now, Epstein has been content to allow the Great Writers to do the intergalactic transporting. Writers like Valery, Proust and Henry James — these men, his essays seem to say, are the real life changers, the supersonic highfliers.
With “Inside a Cardboard Belt!” Epstein trails as expertly as ever in their wake, collecting and sharing felicitations. That he never attempts to steal their luster and pass it off as his own is a signal that he really is that rare thing, the happy essayist.
It also happens to be the best advertisement for reading possible. It suggests that simply in the doing, this minority pleasure can bring Americans a disproportionate amount of joy, something this collection of essays will surely add to for a few.
———-
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail, to be published in 2008.
