'Living Through Radical Change'

Ten years ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael: 

“I have myself long ago put aside any thought about writing an autobiography. . . . When I became, almost without conscious decision, a bookish and a scribbling man, the larger sense of adventure went out of my life, and I was henceforth almost entirely spectatorial in my interests, even in my passions.”

 

Fortunately, Epstein was not under oath when he made his avowal. At age eighty-seven, he has a right to change his mind. The result is Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life (Simon and Schuster, 2024), a brief, charming autobiography that is at the same time an account of the cultural changes, many of them unpleasant, that have occurred during his lifetime. Longtime Epsteinologists will already know the broad outlines of his life (“an American, Chicago born”). Here the average Joe, the homme moyen sensual, is an erudite witness to the dissolution of the West’s cultural values, while remaining true to the book’s title, frequently expressing gratitude for the gifts that the culture has given him. In his introduction he writes:

 

“The underlying theme of my autobiography is living through radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status (I have grand-nieces and -nephews I have never met and am unlikely ever to meet), from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel versus print . . .”

 

Epstein recounts some of the tantrums he inspired, including his politically motivated ousting from The American Scholar, which he edited from 1975 to 1997, and the Wall Street Journal column he wrote in 2020, poking fun at the incoming first lady using the title “Dr.,” though she was neither M.D. nor dentist – the usual academic pomposity. But he also recounts growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Chicago in the twentieth century, blessed with excellent parents. These passages recall some of the episodes in Meyer Levin’s Chicago novel The Old Bunch (1937) and Daniel Fuchs’ Brooklyn novels. Epstein was no child prodigy and his example suggests that the best education is a self-education. He describes teaching at Northwestern for twenty-eight years, his divorce, raising four children single-handedly, a successful second marriage and the death of a son from a drug overdose. Epstein doesn’t linger on the death and expresses no self-pity but the loss subtly colors much of what follows. In 2024, how many Americans can say they’ve never known a drug casualty?

 

Of particular interest to this reader is Epstein’s account of aging. He’s my senior by more than a decade, so I read this part of his book as a scouting report. His interests, he says, are “narrowing” but adds, “Writing still gives me great pleasure.” He remains prolific and praises by name many of his editors. His health is good. He misses friends, including Hilton Kramer, John Gross and Edward Shils. He has lost interest in travel. “What to many people would seem a dull life, mine,” he writes, “I find calmly satisfying.” 

 

Epstein was fortunate to find his true calling early – writing. It suits his temperament. He is the opposite of an “activist,” which accounts for his fondness for such writers as George Santayana and Max Beerbohm. On his final page he writes:

 

“My own role in life has been largely spectatorial [there’s that word again]. I have spent most of my years on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, entertained by the mad swirl of the circus put on by humanity, trying to figure out what is and what is not important in life. I have, from time to time, put down the glass of wine and, in essays, reviews, short stories, written up my findings. Chief among them is that the world, for all its faults, flaws, faux pas, remains an amusing place.”   

 

Along with his autobiography, Simon and Schuster has also published Epstein’s Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays.

 

[The note to Raphael can be found in Where Were We?: the Conversation Continues (St. Augustine’s Press, 2017).]

'Bright Books! the Perspectives to Our Weak Sights'

April is the kindest and cruelest month. 

Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593), Shakespeare (April 23, 1564), Henry Vaughan (April 17, 1621), Daniel Defoe (April 24, 1731), Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737), William Hazlitt (April 10, 1778), Anthony Trollope (April 24, 1815), Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821), Henry James (April 15, 1843), Constantine Cavafy (April 17, 1863), Walter de la Mare (April 25, 1873), Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899), Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906), C.H. Sisson, (April 22, 1914), Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914).

 

And then the deaths: Shakespeare (April 23, 1616), Miguel de Cervantes (April 23, 1616), Henry Vaughan (April 23, 1695), William Cowper (April 25, 1800), William Wordsworth (April 23, 1850), Mark Twain (April 10, 1910), Edwin Arlington Robinson (April 6, 1935), A.E. Housman (April 30, 1936), Willa Cather (April 24, 1947), Flann O’Brien (April 1, 1966), Evelyn Waugh (April 10, 1966), Basil Bunting (April 17, 1985), Ralph Ellison (April 16, 1994), Thom Gunn (April 25, 2004), Saul Bellow (April 5, 2005), Muriel Spark (April 13, 2006).

 

“Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,

The clear projections of discerning lights,

Burning and shining thoughts, man’s posthume day . . .”

 

That’s Henry Vaughan, who was born and died in April, in his poem “To His Books.” Vaughan mentions no writers by name but suggests he has culled his library down to the essential volumes: “But you were all choice flow’rs, all set and drest / By old sage florists, who well knew the best.” In another poem, “On Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library, the Author Being Then in Oxford,” he returns to the familiar trope of authors remaining alive through their books:

 

“They are not dead, but full of blood again;

I mean the sense, and ev’ry line a vein.

Triumph not o'er their dust; whoever looks

In here, shall find their brains all in their books.”

 

My favorite among Vaughan’s poems remains the first one I read more than half a century ago. “The World” begins:

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

       All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

       Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

       And all her train were hurl’d.”

 

I happened on it by way of another book, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). Mystics often lose us with their inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language so they resort to yawping (Whitman), the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be describing a picnic in the park with the folks. His tone is matter-of-fact, methodical, almost journalistic. He does this with impressive regularity, especially in his opening lines, as in “They Are All Gone Into the World of Light!” and “I Walk’d the Other Day.” The effect is of a gifted storyteller who hooks us with his first words. To be convincing, wonder must be made to sound familiar.

 

Give thanks for the kindness. National Poetry Month does little to ease the cruelty.

'Give Him the Darkest Inch Your Shelf Allows'

Its 1,498 pages tip the scales at 3.2 pounds: Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, originally published in 1929. At Kaboom Books I bought the twelfth printing, from 1959. The dustjacket is a little frayed around the edges but the book is otherwise sturdy. It collects the nineteen volumes of verse published by Robinson. 

Sometimes a book is an artifact salvaged from a midden – not the text but its provenance. On the front end  paper is a bookplate from a prior owner, Rabbi Victor Emanuel Reichert. It shows an oil lamp, two lines of Hebrew script, two Stars of David and a tag from Milton: “He that would hope to write well . . . ought himself to be a true poem, that is a composition and pattern of the best and most honorable things.” The page is signed by Reichert, who adds “Ripton, Vermont” and “August 5, 1960.” How this spirit-rich volume ended up in a Houston bookstore, I have no idea.

A brief online search reveals that Reichert (1897-1990) served as rabbi of the Rockdale Avenue Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1938 to 1962 and was a longtime friend of Robert Frost. In 1946 Reichert invited Frost to deliver a sermon, and in 1960 he helped secure Frost an honorary doctorate at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Reichert was awarded honorary doctorates from Middlebury College and the University of Cincinnati, where he served as professor of Biblical literature. A death announcement in a 1991 issue of the Middlebury College magazine describes Reichert as “a spiritual leader of profoundly ecumenical temperament.”

 

Tucked into the book is Reichert’s membership card in the Poetry Society of Vermont, “Dues paid to 10/1/66,” and signed by the treasurer, E. W. Wilcox. With it are two folded pages of typescript. One contains five paragraphs of Robinson biography from Famous Poems and the Little-Known Stories Behind Them (Robert Lewis Woods, 1961). The other is signed by Betty Sander and is a brief thank-you note addressed to Reichert, including: “Ginny Cope tells me Robinson was your favorite before your wife introduced you to Robert Frost. I have never read any of Robinson’s poems, that I can remember, except Mr. Flood’s Party. . . .”

 

Throughout the volume are notes, underlinings and annotations. In 1946, Reichert published Job: Hebrew Text and English Translation. Of particular interest to Reichert in Robinson’s poem are scriptural allusions, including several from the New Testament. On Page 1,328, he marks some lines in Section I of the book-length poem Amaranth (1934): “. . . ‘Since our young friend has pause / And faltered on the wrong road to Damascus, / Having seen too much light, we’ll drink to him, / And to ourselves, and to our new friend Fargo.’” Reichert writes “Paul + Damascus.” Five pages later he identifies a reference to the Good Samaritan.

 

Complicating the book’s history is an inscription on the back end paper, in red ink and a different handwriting: “Meg Chase ‘Islander’ Sept. 24^th, 1965 / A grand introduction to Mr. Robinson.” Left unmarked is Robinson’s early sonnet, “George Crabbe,” including these lines:

 

“Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,

Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,—

But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still

With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.”

'A Twitter of Inconsequent Vitality'

This week I will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after forty-four years on the faculty. He came to the university straight from earning his Ph.D. He’s neither flashy nor hungry for publicity, and I was surprised he agreed to speak with me. He has a reputation for hard work and dependability – not qualities valued as highly as you might think. He seems to ignore academic politics and is widely if quietly respected, even by his colleagues and the administration. Selfless dedication to the job often goes ignored, as Louis MacNeice suggests in “Hidden Ice” (The Earth Compels, 1938), which begins: 

“There are few songs for domesticity

For routine work, money-making or scholarship

Though these are apt for eulogy or tragedy.

 

“And I would praise our adaptability

Who can spend years and years in offices and beds

Every morning twirling the napkin ring,

A twitter of inconsequent vitality.”

 

The theme of unrecognized service, of blindly coming to expect gifts, must have been on MacNeice’s mind at the time. The next poem in The Earth Compels is “Taken for Granted.” The opening stanza:

 

“Taken for granted

    The household orbit in childhood

The punctual sound of the gong

    The round of domestic service.”

'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All'

A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s. I like Vonnegut. A lot of the stuff before that is like a foreign language to me.” I’m reminded of an English professor who told me more than half a century ago that most of her students couldn’t read anything pre-Hemingway. She was the teacher who introduced me to Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote and A Tale of a Tub. My reader is neither bragging nor lamenting. He seems to sense he is missing something – yet another mutation of presentism -- but unlikely to do anything about it. I encouraged him to try some older books and suggested a few titles. I’m not optimistic and it’s not my job to scold.

F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) was an English literary critic probably best known for Style (1955). In the nineteen-thirties, he was an early critic of appeasement with Hitler’s Germany, warning in 1933 that it shouldn’t be permitted to rearm. In 1939 he published Journal Under the Terror, 1938, a diary of the events leading up to the invasion of Poland and the start of the war, along with personal matters including literary reflections. He eviscerates Chamberlain. He reads Froissart and Shakespeare and follows the news. Not just Germany but the show trials in the Soviet Union and the civil war in Spain. On May 8 he writes: “Walked (lest I catch Carlyle’s dyspepsia).” Later in May he writes (and this is what brings to mind my young reader):

  

“And we find it hard to read great books at all; easy to read books or articles about them—neat little reflections of them and on them in the pocket-mirror of some bright contemporary mind. Alice forsakes Wonderland for the Looking-Glass; and our decadence tends to live like the Emperor Domitian, in a gallery of mirrors, catching flies.”

 

To put his distrust of Germany in context, it’s helpful to know Lucas was a veteran of the Great War. He volunteered in October 1914 and served in France in 1915-17 as a lieutenant in the 7th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment. He was at the Somme starting in August 1915 and was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. He returned to the front in January 1917 and was gassed on March 4. In all, Lucas was hospitalized for seventeen months. He finished the war in the Intelligence Corps, questioning German prisoners of war. The past is ever-present – yet another reason to read the “great books,” a phrase I normally avoid but here I’m quoting Lucas.

 

Lucas’ Journal is a sort of prose counterpart to Autumn Journal (1939), the book-length poem Louis MacNeice wrote between August and December 1938, in the year of the Anschluss, the annexation of the Sudetenland, Munich, Kristallnacht. To quote Lucas again:

 

“But above all I think I write , not so much for popularity (I am little likely ever to have it) as for les âmes amies. Life and reading have brought me curious and amusing things that it is natural to wish to share. And one does not know what is in one’s own head (or knows it only untidily), until one has put it down on paper. ‘Writing makes an exact man.’”

'The Things That Pass'

Among the books and magazines for sale in our neighborhood library I found the Winter 1985 issue of The American Scholar, which I bought for a quarter. Joseph Epstein was still the editor. On Page 97 is a poem, “Old Man Sitting in a Shopping Mall,” by a writer whose name was unfamiliar to me, David Bergman: 

“When I was young I gave my love

 to what I thought was permanent:

 God, Beauty or Eternal Truth.

 But now the things that pass take hold

 of my affections, and I'm lost

 in you, my dear, who even now

 are turning into someone else.”

 

In my experience, it’s rare to be taken by surprise by a previously unknown piece of writing, unaccompanied by context, and for it to give immediate pleasure. What struck me was Bergman’s ability to condense a life, or at least what was most important in it, into seven lines. The person in the poem moves from a Keatsian faith in the permanent things  -- “all ye need to know” – to an acceptance of transitoriness. The things that mutate and fade – almost everything – now stir his affection. A lucky old man sitting in that shopping mall -- an appropriately mundane American scene.

 

The forty-year-old credit line in The American Scholar says Bergman “teaches English at Towson State University. His forthcoming volume Cracking the Code won the George Elliston Prize.” A cursory search reveals he was born in 1950 and is still around, is gay and Jewish, and has Parkinson’s disease. In a 2016 Kenyon Review interview, Bergman says:

 

“I have been thinking for a while about the kinds of pleasures that have gone out of style in poetry, including gorgeousness and whimsy. I read poems because they give me pleasure but I think we increasingly teach poems and literature as social documents.”

'And Here the Nothingness Shows Through'

I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day and his best man, Stanley, gives him a jigsaw puzzle as a wedding gift. Oliver dismisses it at first as “childish balderdash” and promptly gets hooked putting it together along with, eventually, a taxi driver, Ollie’s butler, a telegram delivery boy and, of course, Stanley. Oliver’s father-in-law-to-be, Peter Cucumber, played by the great Jimmy Finlayson, shows up, as do the cops. Mayhem ensues. 

Jigsaw puzzles encourage that sort of obsessiveness. I remember this with our sons. We always gave them a puzzle for Christmas (two-thousand pieces in the later days), and there went the rest of the holiday. At the risk of pushing it too far, puzzles are convenient metaphors for life itself. We’re always looking for the missing piece, blah, blah, blah. Stanley finds it in the end but it’s too late. The wedding’s off, the visitors are on their way to jail and Oliver throws Stanley out the door.   

 

Samuel Beckett loved Laurel and Hardy. In them we can see Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, also in bowlers and baggy pants. They make cameo appearances in Watt and Mercier and Camier. In Hugh Kenner’s words: “one of them marvelously incompetent, the other an ineffective man of the world devoted (some of the time) to his friend’s care” (A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973). Kenner goes on:

 

“They journeyed, they undertook quests, they had adventures; their friendship, tested by bouts of exasperation, was never really vulnerable; they seemed not to become older, nor wiser; and in perpetual nervous agitation. Laurel’s nerves occasionally protesting like a baby’s, Hardy soliciting a philosophic calm he could never find leisure to settle into, they coped. Neither was especially competent, but Hardy made a big man’s show of competence. Laurel was defeated by the most trifling requirement.”

 

In “Jigsaw Puzzle” (Olives, 2012), A.E. Stallings basically recounts the plot of Me and My Pal and turns puzzle-making into philosophy:   

 

“First, the four corners,

Then the flat edges.

Assemble the lost borders,

Walk the dizzy ledges,

 

“Hoard one color—try

To make it all connected—

The water and the deep sky

And the sky reflected.

 

“Absences align

And lock shapes into place,

And random forms combine

To make a tree, a face.

 

“Slowly you restore

The fractured world and start

To recreate an afternoon before

It fell apart:

 

“Here is summer, here is blue,

Here two lovers kissing,

And here the nothingness shows through

Where one piece is missing.”