Parsing Joe’s Prose

I have been lunching monthly with Joseph Epstein for almost 40 years, so I was particularly delighted to encounter, in this collection of his essays from 1978 to 2023, a description of our first meal together. The conversation, Joe recalled, turned to the cultural "theory" then fashionable in university English departments.

"‘Of course I loathe all that garbage,’ said a young teacher, a new acquaintance, over a Chinese lunch. Here was a sentence that added great flavor to my Mongolian beef and tea. Tea and sympathy is nice, but tea and shared antipathy is even better. But behind shared antipathies even greater sympathies lie."

As I got to know Joe and his brilliant essays—obviously among the best in the language—I began to experience an emotion that Joe has called "the good envy … the kind that encourages dreams and aspiration" instead of the "disappointment and hatred" characterizing bad envy.

It never occurred to me that, as I learned from this collection, Joe himself once experienced the same emotion. In "A Few Kind Words for Envy," he recalls: "What I now envied, with some intensity, was people of my own generation—I was then in my early twenties—who wrote better than I." Long before he reached the age at which I met him, there was no longer any such person, in his own generation or any other.

I wanted to write—not as well as he did, that would clearly never happen—but well enough to command his respect. When about a decade ago, Joe complimented me on my prose style, I felt a rare kind of joy.

Surely, I often thought, there is no improving on Joe’s mastery of the familiar essay. Beginning with basic facts of daily life—hats and cats, hair and care, books and schnooks—such essays reflect on the human condition. They ambush the reader with profundity without ever sounding pompous. If Joe ever gets anywhere near pomposity, he makes fun of himself—gently, of course, because ostentatious self-mockery can itself be a form of boasting. He lights a "Bonfire of My Vanities," as he titles an essay.

Writers are especially inclined to vanity, Joe allows. Making no exception for himself, he reveals his fantasy blurbs: "He is a writer I take very seriously indeed"—T.S. Eliot. "Il est un écrivain exquis"—Marcel Proust. "As with appearance, so with authorship," Joe explains. "My vanity is the vanity of, above all, wishing not to seem vain."

Once, when teaching a Henry James novel with a hero repeatedly described as short, Joe asked the class, "How small, exactly do you think Hyacinth is?" in the expectation that someone would say oh, about five feet, not more than 5’2".

"‘Well, how small, exactly, is he, Miss Palmer?’ I asked, when no one cared to hazard a guess. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose about your size.’ Ah, another magical moment in teaching."

Not included in this collection is Joe’s splendid essay on the most insightful prober of human vanity, the aphorist François-Alexandre-Frédéric, duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, generally known simply as La Rochefoucauld. Joe, too, is a master aphorist, a form demanding not only surprising truths but also consummate economy of means. A wordy aphorism is like a joke with a paragraph-long punchline. Joe treats us to a delicious selection of the genre’s greatest examples, along with some magnificent put-downs that also swiftly deflate pretensions:

Karl Kraus: "No ideas and the ability to express them—that’s a journalist."

Valéry: "Life is a sum of habits disturbed by a few thoughts."

Robert Southey to another writer: "You will be remembered long after Homer is forgot—but not before."

"‘Vegetarianism is harmless enough,’ said Sir Robert Hutchison, a former president of the Royal College of Physicians, ‘though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.’"

"Sandburg was the only poet, said Frost, to gain in translation."

Joe offers a few of his own:

"Few things can more quickly reduce one’s generous estimate of one’s own character than attempting to quit smoking cigarettes."

"Although I appear to live with equanimity under this regime of health fascism, within me, still very much underground, a timid resistance fighter lurks. This is the fellow who, when he learns that a middle-aged man has bitten the dust while jogging, smiles inwardly."

"It was only when I came to know what I hated that I came to love intensely those things that matter most to me in my life."

As it happens, I once wrote a book about aphorisms as a literary/philosophical genre—Joe lent me his handwritten record of his favorites—and so I can affirm, with some confidence, that Joe’s penchant for making himself, rather than others, the target of his curmudgeonly generalizations is unusual. Witticisms and put downs typically target the pomposity of others, but when Joe wants to discuss human foibles he first looks within.

Curmudgeons do not follow the crowd. Joe has often provoked wrath for expressing unfashionable opinions: The Northwestern University English Department, where Joe taught for almost three decades, displayed the pettiness to remove his name from its list of emeritus professors after he pilloried Jill Biden’s insistence on being called "doctor." Some call Joe conservative, but he is really someone who loves to puncture those balloons of foul-smelling hot air floated by the intelligentsia, which, of course, is almost always self-righteously "progressive."

In his essay "Nicely Out of It," Joe delights in the many ways he fails to adopt, or even to know, current fashions. Being with-it was something he gladly did without. "I abandoned with-it-try fairly early in life," he confides, "and hence, for better and worse, dropped out as a serious conformist." His next paragraph begins, characteristically: "I fear an air of put-down has crept into that paragraph, when all I intended was a mild whiff of self-congratulations."

"To wear the clothes, to hum the tunes, to think the thoughts of one’s own time, all perfectly unselfconsciously; to feel utterly at ease in the atmosphere in which one lives, … to be up to the moment, au courant, jollily, joyously with-it—all this is, no doubt about it, a delightful state in which to find oneself," Joe concedes, adding that "I was seventeen when I was last in this state." One fly in this ooze of youthful delight was that it occupied too much time. "I felt under an obligation to know the key politicians as well as the popular songs; to go even to the bad movies; to listen to television talk shows; to glimpse most of the popular magazines, including the women’s magazines, of the day." Joe tired of this endless sampling of garbage when the ’60s arrived, and he never looked back. Why read books simply because others are reading them when one might peruse something much better? Life is too short to spend on John (Irving) or Joan (Didion) when it might be devoted to Anton (Chekhov) and Aleksandr (Solzhenitsyn). "Every book you read," writes Joe aphoristically, "is a book you don’t read, by my reckoning."

Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn recur repeatedly in these essays. One reason for Chekhov, I suppose, is that no one had a better nose for falsity. He respected what the intelligentsia were (and are) inclined to dismiss as "bourgeois." He made no bones about the moral importance of paying one’s debts or working hard, and Joe also devotes some eloquent pages to the joys of hard work. "I have known many moments when work seemed to me a more pleasurable prospect than being with very good friends," Joe confesses. "Once one has acquired skills, it seems a waste not to use them. Strike, I say, when the iron is merely warm."

Work charms best when it appears spontaneous and easy, when it doesn’t feel worked on. Then it conveys the sense of fun. "Good work often involves play, an element of fooling around even while doing serious things," Joe explains. "The most fortunate of all … are those for whom the line between work and play gets rubbed out, for whom work is pleasure and pleasure is in work."

Joe’s prose sparkles because it reads as if he were speaking ex tempore, as if he never had to plan before writing or edit after—and that may well be the case. As a young writer, I especially envied Joe’s ability to get the rhythm of a sentence just right, to slow down or speed up even a celebrated witticism so it was improved in his quotation of it: "‘A cat,’ said Edith Wharton, who all her adult life kept highbred small dogs, ‘is a snake in furs.’"

Solzhenitsyn reappears to exemplify perfect integrity and utter seriousness. "When I was younger, it seemed that giants walked the earth: Churchill, Gandhi, de Gaulle in politics; Matisse, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann in art; Einstein, Fermi, Planck in science," Joe recalls. "The only living figure for whom I feel anything approaching such regard is Solzhenitsyn." Most novelists banish work from their stories, but Solzhenitsyn knew that it is essential to a meaningful life. He showed how even the lowliest tasks can command respect: "One thinks of … prisoner Ivan Denisovich, of his long day’s work under the worst possible conditions of cold, hunger and fear, from which he emerges, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel, with simple and hugely impressive dignity."

When Joe wants to test a theory of art he often applies it to Solzhenitsyn. Freud, who was no stranger to fame,

once said that the artist gives up fame, money, and the love of beautiful women for his art, through which he hopes to win fame, money, and the love of beautiful women. His subject was sublimation, a point on which I have never been quite convinced. Is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, sublimating through his writing? To ask the question is to ridicule it.

Desmond McCarthy claimed that "the mainspring of the initial literary impulse is vanity. … They [writers] wish to assert themselves and impress others … and if they believe otherwise, they deceive themselves." That must be exaggerated, Joe replies. "I doubt it’s true of, say, Chekhov or Solzhenitsyn."

Because Joe and I came to maturity when Freud was regarded as one of history’s greatest exact scientists, it isn’t surprising that Joe often targets him. "Freud says that a man who as a child feels assured of his mother’s love is likely to think himself a conqueror; I say this same conqueror is likely to have a weight problem." For Joe, the problem with Freud’s or Marx’s or other such theories lies primarily in the theoretical impulse itself. Life does not lend itself to abstractions, as all good novelists and some philosophers have known. Joe quotes Nietzsche: "Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste for reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon."

This quotation from Nietzsche occurs in this volume’s last, and most recent, essay, "Taste: What Is It? Who Needs It? How Does One Acquire It?" which also cites Nietzsche’s observation that, to acquire true delicacy of taste, "one has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with the many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbor takes it in his mouth." That advice pertains especially well to the search for shortcuts, like a facile theory or, heaven help us, the vogue not long past for courses in speed reading. "Speed reading?" Joe asks. "I’d as soon take a course in speed-eating or speed-lovemaking. … ‘A real page-turner,’ people say of certain novels or biographies. I prefer to read books that are page-stoppers, that cause me to stop and contemplate a striking idea, an elegant phrase, an admirably constructed sentence." Speed is for those who would rush blindly past life’s "rich ambiguity."

All too often, Joe observes, those with high culture exhibit bad taste. The elite will never understand how readily they are seduced by the false and tasteless. Ultimately, Joe’s book concludes, to achieve good taste, "no program … is needed. Good taste is instead to be had, more simply, by invoking one’s better instincts, putting other people’s feelings on a par with one’s own, being generous in one’s impulses, kindly with everyone, above all never hurting or humiliating others. Social sensitivity, generosity, kindliness, gentleness in all one’s dealings—here, surely, are the ingredients, the ultimate prescription, for the best of all good taste."

Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays
by Joseph Epstein
Simon & Schuster, 464 pp., $20.99 (paperback)

Gary Saul Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University and author, most recently, of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard).

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