What Are We to Do with What We Know?The Din in the Head: Essays by Cynthia OzickReview by: Ed MinusThe Sewanee Review, Vol. 116, No. 3 (Summer, 2008), pp. lxii-lxivPublished by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27507665 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 12:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSewanee Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.13 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:15:42 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CURRENT BOOKS IN REVIEW

memoirs buttress his little history of little magazines, an

enduring item for

anyone interested in this complicated subject.

Later, after being the literary editor of the New Republic (1969-73),

Whittemore would found and edit still another periodical, Delos (1988-92). Of course during the forty-odd years he was actively involved in editing periodicals he was also deeply

com

mitted to the academy, teaching not

only at Carleton but also at the Uni

versity of Maryland for long periods and elsewhere on an occasional basis,

including the University of the South. In addition to a considerable volume

of poetry, he was writing a great deal

of prose, forging various books of

biography, including a life of William Carlos Williams (Houghton Mifflin); Pure Lives: The Early Biographers;

Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern

Biography (both published by Johns Hopkins); and Six Literary Lives

(University of Missouri Press). His considerable achievement in

literary

biography is more than enough for most critics and scholars to establish

an academic specialty or field.

Throughout this long period of

regular accomplishment Whittemore s

fortunes have abruptly gone up and

down with astonishing regularity and often with no

rhyme or reason. He

has weathered vicissitudes almost

too painful to recount, especially the

death of a son. His critics have waxed

and waned about his various books. It

is a good thing that Reed Whittemore doesn't take anything with utmost

seriousness, especially himself. In this

long and engaging book he is often not on center stage, and he usually appears in the third person, not the

first, as is de rigueur in the Age of the

hii

Self. Whittemore has been self

effacing and almost selfless as he has contributed mightily to the Republic of Letters for nearly

seven decades.

Against the Grain limns that record of honorable achievement. It

can be read in many ways, especially for the people such as Angleton and

Mizener as well as Richard Eberhart, Howard Nemerov, Ezra Pound, Allen

T?te, and W. C. Williams who play

important roles; as a history of literary

life in the United States from 1939 to the present; as the autobiography of

a writer accomplished in biography; and so on. As Whittemore s life passes in review against the background of

literary life in general during his time, we stand and salute this veteran of

World War II and of many literary skirmishes and battles since.

?G. C.

"WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH WHAT WE KNOW?"

The Din in the Head: Essays by Cynthia Ozick (Mariner Books, 2007. 256 pages. Illustrated. $14.95 pb)

In "She: Portrait of the Essay as a

Warm Body" (in her Quarrel & Quan dary, 2000) Cynthia Ozick gives her

aphoristic inclinations free rein: "The

essay is not meant for the barricades.

It is a stroll through someone's mazy mind. . . . The genuine essay may be

the most self-centered (the politer word would be subjective) arena for human thought ever devised"; "Rage and revenge, I think, belong to fiction.

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.13 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:15:42 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CURRENT BOOKS IN REVIEW

The essay is cooler than that"; "An I

essay is a fireside thing, not a confla

gration or a safari."

In her new collection of essays Ozick strolls coolly through her own well-furnished mind, explor

ing, elucidating, celebrating, and

only occasionally pausing to roast

a styrofoam marshmallow. It is a

slimmer volume than her earlier

collections: about the same number

of essays but ranging in length from a

page and a half in extravagant praise of Rudyard Kipling ("he writes the I most inventive, the most idiosyn cratic, the most scrupulously surreal

English sentences of his century") to

twenty-five pages on Robert Alters

"historically astounding" translation of

The Five Books of Moses. By contrast "T. S. Eliot at 101" (in Fame b- Folly) runs to just under fifty pages. But I do not mean to imply that The Din in the Head is Ozick light; on the contrary it is Ozick distilled.

The title of the book is also the title of one of the shorter and slighter essays?and

not a felicitous choice

in either case. (I suspect the heavy hand of a tone-deaf editor here and

perhaps also in the inept choice of a Magritte painting for the cover.) It would have been easy enough to continue the alliterative titles,

especially since the foreword, a

tribute to Susan Sontag, is titled "On Discord and Desire," which Ozick feels may name "a unitary wave run

ning through these pages." But there

is another perhaps more pervasive

and pertinent theme than discord and desire. It is spelled

out in the second

essay, "Young Tolstoy: An Apostle of Desire." Turgenev "declared The

Cossacks to be a masterpiece; and so

it remains, validated by permanence.

Then what are we to do with what we know? How are we to regard Tolstoy,

who, though steeped in principles of compassion, turned away from

what he knew." What he knew is that the Cossacks were not simply heroic

warriors but genocidal monsters

capable of methodical and cold blooded carnage. "In a

single year, between 1648 and 1649 . . . Cossacks

murdered three hundred thousand

Jews, a number not exceeded" until

three hundred years later.

Similar questions crop up in far

less horrific contexts throughout the collection. How, for example,

are we

to reconcile John Updike's family portraits "inscribed in ice" and the

"orgasmic shudders" of his hot search

for God? How are we to dissociate Saul Bellow's fictional Ravelstein from Saul Bellow's dear friend Allan Bloom? If we have read Sylvia Plath's

journals, how are we to keep their

banalities, their egocentricities, their

envy and spite and ruthless ambition

from infecting our reading of the

poems? And for Ozick of course, as for many others, myself included,

there is always Henry James: "What are we to think of the secret suscep tibilities of the novelist who sets this tale of tragic desertion [ Washington Square] in the weedy-smelling ailan

thus streets of his own childhood, and

in the country he himself deserted?" Ozick's answers to these ques

tions are all of a piece. She invokes

most fundamentally "the idea of the

sovereign integrity of story." She finds

Updike's integrity as both storyteller and stylist immaculate, more immacu

late than his or anybody else's life.

Even in the case of romans ? clef "the

author's life is nobody's business," even when the author himself turns

Ixiii

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.13 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:15:42 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CURRENT BOOKS IN REVIEW

the key in the lock: "An author s

extraliterary utterance (blunt informa

tion), prenovel or

postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch

the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then

a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea." Similarly "to look for the poems in the life?in the sense of cause-and-effect?is

not merely a tedium; it is a fool's

errand." Delmore Schwartz's "stories, like many of the poems, are dreams

without responsibilities. They are their own cause, their own

authority, their own

unreasoning reason."

I have given, up to this point, the

misleading impression that Ozick deals only with writers of fiction and

poetry. That is not the case in this col

lection or in its four predecessors. The

Din in the Head includes essays on Helen Keller, Lionel Trilling, Joseph Lelyveld, and, most

impressively, most instructively (for me), Gershom Scholem, the German-born Zionist

whose "tremendous intuition" for

Judaism (his phrase) led him to repu diate not only Germany but Europe as well. He became fast friends with the Hebrew novelist and Nobel laureate

S. Y. Agnon and with Walter Benja min. Both Scholem and Benjamin "were out to recreate intellectual

history?Benjamin with the uncer

tainty of his genius, wavering from

subject to subject, Scholem with the

certainty of his, leaping with scholarly ferocity into the hitherto untouchable cauldron of Jewish mysticism." In

1923, at the age of twenty-six and

having completed his dissertation summa cum laude, Scholem set out

for Palestine. He arrived in Jerusalem

Ixiv

with six hundred volumes of Kab balistic literature, and by 1925 he was the first professor of Jewish mysti cism at the newly founded Hebrew

University of Jerusalem. "He wrote

in a Hebrew that rivaled his native German in literary quality. He read Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Aramaic.

His English was fluent and polished." His magnum opus, Sabbatai Sevi: The

Mystical Messiah, "is a consummate

history of a seventeenth-century

mes

siah figure." It is a book that Ozick considers "enormously suggestive of

the origins of Christianity." His earlier

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism "is the standard introductory work."

Scholem's letters (to Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Martin Buber, Han

nah Arendt, and many others) "show

a man exactly where he wanted to be,

and conscious of exactly why." A final apposite paradox: each of

Ozick's collections of essays contains

pieces and passages that are straight

forwardly autobiographical, and yet those pages do not bring me into the companionable presence of the

woman herself as satisfyingly as do the ostensibly less personal essays in

which I hear only her calm clear voice and her thoughtful, incisive, occasion

ally annihilating observations. Perhaps it is not immoderate to say that she

sounds like a woman who knows

exactly where she wants to be and is

conscious of exactly why.

?Ed Minus

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.13 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:15:42 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions