Coming up smarter

P. J. Kavanagh

LIFE SENTENCES by Joseph Epstein W. W. Norton, £17.95, pp. 347 The civilised literary causerie is not dead, it is not even out of fashion. It is alive and kicking in the pages of the New Yorker. Every once in a while Joseph Epstein contributes to that magazine a piece on some author who has tickled his fancy: from Montaigne to Joseph Conrad, to Ken Tynan — the tickle can come from anywhere (or prickle, he doesn't like every- body) — and, as he says, he 'gets his educa- tion in public'. His procedure is surely right: he tackles authors who

until I actually do write about them, I don't always know all that much about. I read up, I think through, I write out, and, the hope is, at the end I am a bit smarter about the sub- ject under study.

In this collection of those pieces, Life Sen- tences, he describes himself in the third person as

a sucker for stylish writing. If there is a republic of letters, he has a weakness for its aesthetic aristocrats . . . His essays on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and the fiction of Robert Musil show he still has a taste for the deflation of literary reputation.

These last are not cruel or 'smart-ass' (as he might say), only blessedly unbedaz7led by stardom. He is capable of good jokes at the expense of writers he admires (`The Endur- ing V. S. Pritchett'). Epstein is worried when Pritchett, who is otherwise clear- eyed, lapses into

the poetic. In one story a man sticks his hands into 'his optimistic pockets' . . . several clerks have 'dejected buttocks', for which perhaps trousers with 'optimistic pockets' ought to be recommended.

His enthusiasms shine; he not only talks of his subjects' writing and quotes reveal- ingly, he also tells of their lives and their circumstances, and successfully leaves us 'a bit smarter about the subject under study'. It is pleasant to learn, for example (Wise, Foolish, Enchanting Lady Mary') that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's father command- ed her to marry 'a gentleman with the won- derfully Wodehousian moniker of Clotworthy Skeffington' (she eloped with Wortley); and his sense of period comes as a blessed relief, it is now so rare. He does not mistake Lady Mary's 18th-century sense of caste for what we would today call snobbery. He suggests the hierarchical pyramid of the time in a few easy phrases:

Gardening with Italian peasants, chattering with innkeepers, befriending women in Turk- ish harems, Lady Mary could be charmingly old shoe, but she always kept nearby a high horse for mounting when it pleased her.

Evidently, Epstein has charm of manner, as well as of matter. He quotes a character in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as say- ing that with some authors you feel you would like to call them up on the tele- phone. Epstein is just such a writer as, in his view, his admired Edmund Wilson (`Bye-bye, Bunny') is decidedly not: `the critical equivalent of a traffic-cop', apt to lecture other writers in print, calling e.e. cummings 'half-baked'. To which cummings riposted by describing Wilson as `the man in the iron necktie'. Thus, in a couple of quotes, Epstein introduces us to a literary spat, and makes me laugh.

He rightly deplores biographical intru- siveness (though he admits he is not above it himself) and only mentions Edmund Wil- son's 'sexual low jinks' because Wilson wrote of them, for some reason: . . scoring in the Princeton Club in his seventies, mounting the old bed in his Talcottville house, in BVDs and his `uncomfortably bristling double garters', with his dentist's wife . . . the least dignified of sexual clowns — the old goat.

Philip Larkin left an order for his journals to be shredded, which Monica Jones obeyed: . send a dozen long-stemmed roses and a note of appreciation to the faithful Miss Jones'. However, despite the indignities, Wilson remains 'the great maitre d' of literature in the 20th century'.

Epstein calls biographical knowledge `that snake in the Garden of Eden of litera- ture' but in the case of Elizabeth Bishop (Never a Bridesmaid') lets the snake out of what we would call the cupboard. Bishop herself 'believed in "closets, closets, and more closets" ', and Epstein is of the opin- ion that knowledge of her troubled life, her lesbianism and 'what is euphemistically called her drinking problem' forces the `I lost my remaining faith when I was clamped during a church service.' reader to look at her quiet and understated poems with a different eye, and a puzzled one. About the drinking he is particularly explicit:

She fought alcohol all her life, and frequently lost. No sedate tippler, when she drank she was a three-sheets-to-the-wind, fall-down- the-stairs, break-your-collar-bone, blue-eyed, hide-the-hair-tonic drunk.

The reason for his vehemence is honesty; he believes that praise of her work has become too automatic. She is good, but not that good; he is engaged in a clean-up operation, even if it does mean dishing the dirt.

Towards Philip Larkin he is fairness itself. (`Mr Larkin Gets a Life'). He wishes that Larkin in his letters had not said some of the things he did say,

because they can only be used against him by people who, along with being impressed by their own virtue, cannot stand too much com- plication in human character.

He points out, truly, 'the strange fact that reading Philip Larkin always does cheer one up'. After all, however you unpeel the irony, Larkin's own recipe for poetry was `to make readers laugh, make them cry, and bring on the dancing girls'.

Larkin chose the comparative obscurity of Hull, whereas in America — and this never ceases to astonish -

the generation of Lowell-Jarrell-Bishop- Schwartz-Berryman-Roethke was not least remarkable in its collective ambition. In their careers — if not in their sad lives — every- thing was calculated . . . they formed a near- perfect daisy-chain of mutual promotion.

It was time that was pointed out; the more you learn of them the more chillingly obvi- ous it becomes.

A 'sucker for stylish writing' would obvi- ously love F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Third Act'): 'his lush, lovely style, style to the highest power . . . style this persuasive is otherwise known as charm.' Inevitably such a quality has made the charmless uneasy, and some have doubted Fitzgerald's intelli- gence in order to level things up a bit. Epstein flicks such begrudgers contemptu- ously away. Fitzgerald 'put his intelligence at the service of imagination. Dumb like a fox, they used to say; Fitzgerald was dumb like a writer.'

However, this lover of style enthrones a comparatively maladroit verbal performer at the top of his pantheon: Theodore Dreiser. This is because of Dreiser's insight into, and sympathy with, the human heart. In Jennie Gerhardt, Epstein believes, Dreis- er performed the near impossible: the por- trait, in Jennie, of 'uncorrupted goodness'. Therefore Epstein stands back before Dreiser — one almost sees him raising his panama — 'in reverent awe'. This depth of seriousness, never advertised, underpinned by his own stylish way with idiomatic American (for which I am a sucker), gives these essays more than a surface glitter; it makes them shine.