The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays
Lilla, Mark
F o r nearly ten years now Joseph Epstein has published a regular essay in the American Scholar, that remarkable quarterly he edits for the Phi Beta Kappa society. You will not have noticed his...
...There is no better way to shut up someone from Scarsdale than to tell him you come from Detroit, or Cleveland, or Milwaukee (since no one comes from Brooklyn anymore...
...And what a fine writing man he is...
...White, and James Thurber...
...The one burden Epstein does not mention is Chicago itself...
...In "Bookless in Gaza" he asks, "if there is a Heaven, will it contain books...
...Offer good only in the continental U.S.A...
...A longer and much funnier account of this game was given in the next Aristides column--without attribution...
...Thanks, Aristides...
...Most of them are difficult to render out of context...
...Half the reason to read Aristides is to savor (or crib) his motsjustes and those he collects from others...
...But only in rereading this latest collection have I realized what rare and valuable gifts Epstein has, and how unfortunate it is that the essays are not more widely read and appreciated...
...After all, 140 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...
...Monimbo, the new best-selling novel by Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave, is based on the idea that Cuba's secret services are resourceful enough to operate a guns-anddrugs racket between Florida and Colombia and to provoke race riots in Miami and New York...
...EXCLUSIVE...
...He should first and foremost be comfortable with his own learning...
...Perhaps some day they will be used as names in an intellectual trivia game--let's call it Doctorate...
...This pleases him...
...Beginning with reflections on a recent conversation or postcard received, Epstein knits and purls his anecdotes, selectively dropping the appropriate aphorism (by Santayana, La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Karl Kraus, Yogi Berra), concluding with his serious punch line buried in a clever little joke...
...How might we characterize these "familiar essays...
...Some have wondered whether the Aristides essay belongs in the front of a serious periodical, with serious pieces by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Richard Rorty, and Hilton Kramer, and Jacques Barzun, and E.D...
...Epstein's work is all the more remarkable coming as it does from someone known to attend faculty meetings...
...I assume it was for reasons of plume and not of guerre that he originally picked up the nom...
...to my knowledge he has never used his space to write about the pressing problems of nuclear strategy, surrogate motherhood, post-structural semiotic film criticism, or the Decline of Western Culture (DWC...
...His writing has the same composite quality, though here I would put him in more flattering Yankee company: Mark Twain (the essayis0, H.L...
...preciate it you have to believe the Soviets are capable of manipulating the Western media...
...guilt from not reading enough books...
...Laing: If you answered incorrectly, return to another year as teaching assistant at Eastern Illinois University...
...Either he lets his exile from the East Coast turn him into a defensive, tedious borem"actuaUy, the restaurants are quite good here,", "the museum is one of the best in the world," "the symphony is one of the best in the country' '--or he becomes a self-assertive bully who never lets you forget how hard-boiled he really is...
...P15 , N.Y., N.Y...
...guilt from reading too many books...
...Mencken (the serious), Ring Lardner, E.B...
...Here, between the PAGE ONE covers of one Originally published fascinating book, is at $35.00 all the news that NOW $9.95 was fit to print on the front pages of "The Newspaper of Record" during the turbulent years from 1920 to 1983--reproduced exactly as when they first appeared...
...he must publish in magazines that print words like "simplistic...
...Date Signature _9 Barnes & Noble Bookstores, llIC...
...And he should love books-all books...
...He bravely admits of a pleasant, comfortable upbringing (in"The Crime of a Happy Childhood"), and complains of no extraordinary barriers or burdens in his professional life...
...if he had he might have been known to family and friends as Jerry Derrida...
...What terrible youthful trauma must have induced such powerful denial...
...The object is to have not read more books than anyone else (without, of course, embarrassing yourself too much...
...Paragraphs like this are good intellectual hygiene...
...When I finally met him, I told him how it is played: Several intellectuals sit in a circle and, _9 one by one, admit to having not read various famous writers--Fielding, Keats, Schopenhauer, you name it...
...Only available at this low price from BOOKSTORES, INC...
...It was, I like to think, an Epsteinesque situation...
...the blurbist misses all that is distinctly American in these essays...
...I am perfectly able to believe that what with all the technology we and our allies have been selling them since Armand Hammer's first trip to Moscow in the early 1920s, plus what they've been able to steal, the Soviets, despite sixty years of scientific mediocrity, may well develop and deploy, if they have not done so already, doomsday weapons as fearsome as the ones described in Death Beam...
...He loves the city because it is home, the way Mencken loved his Baltimore--though in "You Take Manhattan" Epstein confesses to an ambivalence about Gotham that the Sage would never admit...
...how to stop buying so many books...
...Please rush me._._copies of PAGEONE at your special sale price of $9.95 (plus $1.25 shipping and insurance each...
...Just recently I had been cowed into thinking I could no longer call myself an educated man unless I finally boned up on the work of the French literary deconstructionists, especially of Jacques Derrida...
...We have come to distrust the cozy, knowing style Thurber and White popularized in the old New Yorker...
...You can relive the best and worst of times--courtesy of The New York Times--in PAGE ONE...
...Like many loyal readers of the American Scholar I turn first to Aristides when the issue arrives, expecting to be amused and charmed...
...residents please add sales tax...
...God pity the Chicago writer (and painter, and scholar), and God save us from him...
...The concerns of the bookish are Epstein's concerns: how to write a book preface...
...it seems I had cribbed the game from him, and how dare I pass along...
...the politicization of that magazine has made the firstperson plural seem downright sinister ("We were talking to two Sandinista friends in Maine last weekend...
...He concludes that it will, but in hell "there will be no actual books, but SEA POWER OF LAND OF THE RISING SUN SHATTERED IN BATTLE Experience History As It Happened...
...Close enough, but Mark Lilla is Executive Editor o f the Public Interest...
...With its more than 300 oversized I l "(10ý88 x 12ý89 pages, this revised and updated edition of PAGE ONE is terrific for casual browsing and indispensable as a reference...
...h/s clever story (without attribution) to a well-known writer...
...The essayist also has a tough go of it in this age of the professor...
...He should be learned without being ostentatious, intellectually earnest without being tortured or pedantic, skeptical without being cynical...
...Even these comparisons don't quite fit because Epstein is writing essays in less hospitable times...
...he is, you might say, our leading psychoanalyst of it...
...AVAILABLE BY MAIL ORDER ONLY Name Address City State Z i p _ _ ,..,Check One E3Payment enclosed [~VISA ~Charge this purchase to: E3MasterCard Account# Exp...
...The games intellectuals play with themselves are his stuff: the neuroses, anxieties, overcompensations, denials...
...i I 126 Fifth Ave., Dept...
...If there are Epsteinesque situations, there are also Epsteinisms...
...You will not have noticed his name on the cover or contents page, though, since he chooses to write under the nom de plume "Aristides" (a.k.a., "the Just...
...An ideal gift...
...American intellectuals can take anything but being out-proled, and the grandmasters of this sport are Chicagoans...
...In the essay on cliches he speaks of: the ephemeral veritists, those philosophers who sail in on a phrase--Norman O. Brown ("polymorphous perverse"), Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message"), Herbert Marcuse ("repressive toleration")---and sail out again...
...As for The Spike, the first novel by de Borchgrave and Moss, to apRoger Kaplan is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator, This World, Commentary, and other publications...
...Hirsch...
...Now, you can experience that dramatic moment, and hundreds more just as memorable...
...Now much as I can believe all three plots, I should confess at the outset that these books are so poorly written that I would not be surprised if I am the only one who can...
...Quelle differdnce (sic...
...is there life outside books, and if so, where can we read about it...
...10011 101158311...
...Death Beam, a recent novel by Robert Moss, hinges on the possibility that the Soviets have the capacity to develop and deploy a "giant neutron bomb" and moreover can--nearly--convince us, through the clever use of double agents, that our situation is much safer than is in fact the case...
...30.Day Money.Back Guarantee THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 39 Joseph Epstein was born and educated in Chicago, and today lives a short distance from where he grew up...
...on the Mariel boat-lift, an event Americans naively referred to as the "freedom flotilla...
...The Cubans have agents working for them in unlikely places and have sent hit-men and provocateurs to the U.S...
...This is not to say Epstein is immune to the contemporary intellectual angst...
...In his musings on face, Epstein confesses that his own mug has at various times been compared to those of Sal Mineo, Ken Berry, Walter Kaufmann, and Lee Harvey Oswald...
...I always am...
...and N.J...
...He is at his wicked best on the academy...
...He was not amused...
...The subjects of his essays are not of the moment...
...I had just begun when I read Epstein's essay on names, in which he writes, "Jacques Derrida is fortunate in not having been named Gerald or Jerome...
...important event on Thursday, October 25, 1944...
...PAGE ONE is more than just a collection of headlines--it's a priceless document, a chronicle of the events and people that have altered and illuminated our time...
...how many books to read at once...
...It was, in fact, The Spike that popularized the term "disinformation," although the book was concerned more with journalists susceptible to blackmail and bribes than with the real thing, disinformation, which has to do with misleading your opponent about the significance of realities you cannot conceal...
...What should the ideal American Scholar reader be like...
...The conspiracy is helped along by Americans with leftist sympathies, as well as by dedicated Communist agents...
...Instead, each essay is devoted to an eternal human concern: books, the mail, cliches ("The Ephemeral Verities"), faces, names ("Onomastics, You and Me is Quits"), vulgarity, movies, memory, pens, juggling, childhood, generalizations...
...Perhaps this is why under his stewardship the American Scholar has become one of our leading intellectual quarterlies: Epstein knows how the new academic barbarism can snuff out good writing, and is determined to use his pen and editorial pencil to keep the civilized essay alive...
...He is, as one of his own hapless students might put it in a term paper, extremely sui generis in his own individual way...
...Having nearly been quoted in print for the very first time, and feeling cocky in knowing where Epstein got the story, I cleverly arranged a conversation so I could drop this impressive tidbit on one of my colleagues...
...If you answered correctly, take credit for two master's degree courses, and apply to Columbia...
...But American Scholar works in a way other literary quarterlies do not precisely because Joseph Epstein the editor is also his own ideal reader, and Aristides the writer simply presents the private musings of that reader...
...Answer: the English psychiatrist R.D...
...There would be no editor without that ideal reader...
...But Joseph Epstein wears his Chicago lightly...
...Now how am I supposed to read seriously a book about l'lcriture by a guy named Jerry...
...I am willing to believe that the Soviets have bought and blackmailed Western journalists from time to time, have practiced the classical techniques of disinformation and made use of forgeries and other vile below-the-belt tricks...
...Bullying other intellectuals is so easy in America...
...Knowing this I thought Epstein might like to learn about my recent discovery of the "shame game...
...We all want education and success, and we are all ashamed to have either...
...Epstein is a writing man, not a fighting man...
...These are revealing psychological admissions...
...Pick a question card: "Who in the late 1960's said that in an insane society the most truly sane person was a schizophrenic...
...Epstein isn't Mencken (he would be the first to say), though they do share a rootedness that is reflected in balance, sobriety, and wit--qualities one can easily lose in the transfer station that is New York...
...So we cultivate and preserve our proletarian roots--real or imagined--and use them to beat up our bourgeois betters...
...The dust jacket puts Epstein "in a tradition that has come down to us through such writers as Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, and George OrweU...
...Why not"simplistic a l , " or "simplisticatory," or "simplisticalistic...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
