IN A CARDBOARD BELT: ESSAYS PERSONAL, LITERARY, AND SAVAGE
By Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin, $26, 410 pages
REVIEWED BY LARRY THORNBERRY
The essay has a well-deserved association with dullness, especially when we’re forced to recall those dreary exercises our high school English teachers and freshman composition instructors dragged us through. Later contact with honored drudges like Emerson does little to improve our opinion of the form.
But in the hand of its most deft practitioners, the essay can range from entertaining to magic. Many, including this reviewer, consider Joseph Epstein to be the best essayist on active duty today. So the arrival of “In a Cardboard Belt” is a celebration for Mr. Epstein’s loyal readers, and an opportunity for those not acquainted with this erudite, amusing and consistently engaging writer.
“Cardboard” is Mr. Epstein’s 10th and longest collection of essays, and his 20th book. Like most of his previous work these pieces first saw light of day in such publications as Commentary, the Weekly Standard, the New Criterion, the American Scholar (of which Mr. Epstein was editor for 23 years), et al. Subjects range from personal history to literary criticism to various engagements with those mysteries of life that resist parsing through politics or ideology or systems of any sort.
Always serious but never solemn, Mr. Epstein is no dusty don, though he taught writing and literature at Northwestern for 30 years. “Cardboard” includes “Goodbye Mr. Chipstein,” the delightful memoir and send-up of current academe Mr. Epstein punctuated the end of the teaching career with in 2003. In it he chronicles the melancholy transition from art to politics and theory in the teaching of literature.
Ever resistant to trends, Mr. Epstein the teacher eschewed the informal dress and informal manners that swept college classrooms beginning in the late Sixties. He always taught in coat and tie and addressed his students as Mr. or Miss and last name.
“My thought was that if you’re wearing denim and calling your students Chip and Muffy, it might be difficult to ask with a properly serious face what Nietzsche meant when he said God as dead and man faces the abyss.”
Just so. In another demonstration that literary precision and humor need not be in conflict for the acute and playful mind, Mr. Epstein describes Joseph Conrad’s novels as “Henry James for people who like the outdoors.” Funny, and spot on.
Mr. Epstein’s cultured but accessible style, his intellectual precision and his subtle humor are never harnessed to the service of Big Ideas. Partisans of currents “isms” will find little to sustain them here. In fact, it’s Mr. Epstein’s non-polemical, abstraction-free approach that allows him to remind us of the charm and poetry of life, the truly important stuff that falls, in Mr. Epstein’s words, “out of the news cycle.”
Mr. Epstein describes the puzzlement his ism-free approach can cause when a student at the beginning of Mr. Epstein’s Course on Joseph Conrad asked “how ” Conrad was to be read in the course. ” [B] y which she meant what suppositions we were gong to bring to the task; Marxist, structuralist, deconstructionis, multiculturalist, and so forth. I said we were going to try to discover what Joseph Conrad himself meant to convey in his novels and stories, and this ought to keep us sufficiently occupied to fill out a quarter.”
If there were more lit teachers like this, there would be more lit majors. And likely more lit majors who read for pleasure and enlightenment for a lifetime.
There’s much more to “Cardboard” than academic anecdotes. We also get the Epstein slant on not being a lawyer, the narrowing effects of travel, “public” intellectuals, the plague of permanent adolescents, the hollowness of celebrity, the perils and joys of turning 70, why intelligent grownups can’t find movies to go to nowadays and the curious case of the pampered but unhappy academic. Readers can also enjoy a surprisingly un-bitter account of how Mr. Epstein was fired from his post as editor of the American Scholar for being insufficiently politically-correct.
The “Savage” in the subtitle comes from pieces in which Mr. Epstein has some fun, as most readers will, at the expense of some literary public figures Mr. Epstein has pegged as humbugs. He fairly takes the hide off of Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom whose bestsellers, “The Western Canon ,” and “Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human,” Mr. Epstein says, are written in the “strikingly pretentious prose” of an academic who is “accustomed to speaking to his inferiors.”
Mr. Epstein speaks of Bloom as resembling Zero Mostel in his verbal mania but without the amusing punch lines.
“Such laughs as are to be found in Bloom are all unconsciously created on his part.” And, “If he came off any more ex-cathedra in his judgments he’d be pope. He’s all assertion and no proof.”
OK, this may not be “savage,” but it’s enough that most of us would not have to care to have Mr. Epstein on our case. Mortimer Adler, George Steiner and Edmund Wilson get the Epstein treatment too, and come off little better than Bloom.
But the prevailing tone of “Cardboard” is not abuse, as amusing as the few selections of it are. Most of the essays concern and illuminate the “rich and inexhaustibly amusing place” the world is to Joseph Epstein. Rich and amusing is a fair description of Mr. Epstein’s essays as well, a great selection of which readers will find in “Cardboard.”
Larry Thornberry is a writer living in Tampa.
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