Cynthia Ozick - Our Man in Boston

Writing About Writers • Creative Criticism 101

J.C. Hallman, editor of an inspired anthology, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (Tin House), has already exhibited a commendable ambidexterity with his nonfiction (soon to be a useless descriptor) tome The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America’s Religious Fringe, a companionable investigation of the chess culture (The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game), and a collection of short fiction (The Hospital for Bad Poets).

The anthology he has assembled of about 30 essays features an all-star list of writers (living and dead)—such as Frank O’Connor, William Gass, Wallace Stegner, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, Dagoberto Gilb, Seamus Heaney, Susan Sontag, James Wood, E.B. White, Hermann Hesse, Cynthia Ozick, Geoff Dyer, Charles D’Ambrosio, Alan de Botton, Sven Birkerts, and Oscar Wilde—discussing the work of other literary greats, including Marcel Proust, J.D. Salinger, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Malcolm Lowry, T.S. Eliot, Anton Chekhov, Robert Lowell, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, Truman Capote, and John Steinbeck. My favorites are Ozick’s declawing of Capote and Gilb’s homage to McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy and Blood Meridien. But really, this volume is just overflowing with delightful prose and thinking.

Beyond the brilliant writing about outstanding writers is Hallman’s astute brief for so-called Creative Criticism. People who know what I am talking about include The Quarterly Conversation:

Quite plainly, we were taken aback by how precisely the author had laid out our own aspirations for criticism in this magazine. The piece, in our humble opinion, points toward an educated, unpretentious form of literary critique that serves both literature and the everyday reader. When people want to know what we’re looking for in this magazine, we’ll point them to Hallman’s essay and those he has collected in the book it prefaces.

—Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 18, 2009

» Read an excerpt from The Story About the Story.

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Reading • More on Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson, who recently published a novel, Cost, with noteworthy blurbs and which received good notices and appreciative reviews, is a skilled literary fiction practitioner whose compact body of work includes two previous novels, three story collections, and a biography of painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

None other than Robert Stone, whom I nominate as the greatest living American writer (with all due respect to Philip Roth) opines:

Roxana Robinson is surely one of the most graceful stylists and psychologically perceptive writers working…Cost approaches the subject of drugs’ impact from an original and very significant angle. This book shows further the extent of Robinson’s insights into the whirl, the generational ironies at work, and desperate indulgences to which we turn in our confusion. Cost is an important timely book that furthers insight into our preset fortunes and dilemmas.

As frequently happens as a consequence of America’s literary abundance, I had never read a word by Ms. Robinson. And as happens twice or thrice a year, the Bryn Mawr Bookstore in North Cambridge was having its half-price sale—where wonderful books of all stripes were sold for criminally low prices. Thus I acquired Asking for Love, a 1996 story collection by Robinson (as well as Cynthia Ozick’s Levitation: Five Fictions).

The interesting thing about story collections is that even as the publishers claim that they don’t sell, they persist in publishing them and even more importantly there are lots of literary fiction types (you know who you are) who are argue that many writers’ best works are in short form. Well, if this is some of Roxana Robinson’s best work, she certainly has something to be proud of, as the 14 stories presented starting with the title story are prose gems. I am very pleased to have made their and her acquaintance.

Additionally, Robinson has succumbed to the tempting opportunity offered by the internet and offers up a journal of miscellany at her web site. This is as close you can come to getting something for nothing as I can tell. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 11, 2008

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Reading • What Cynthia Ozick’s Been Reading

Cynthia Ozick responds to my inquiry about her recent literary encounters:

Two electrician-boys were here yesterday, installing robust new wiring for an air conditioner, and keeping me from my desk; so I wandered lonely as a cloud along some lately unvisited shelves, and happened on a book that had been loitering there, unread, for 40 or 50 years (the same 40 or 50 years this house has survived without artificial cooling, taking Mother Nature as she comes, naked and unmitigated): it was The Holy Sinner, by Thomas Mann. A second-hand volume (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951, first edition) that was apparently once in a lending library, where it had been stamped as follows:

20¢ FOR 1ST 3 DAYS

5¢ EA. ADD. DAY

(And I’ve had it all these years for free!)

The Holy Sinner is a jape, a fairy tale, a poem, a dream, a maze of half-invented mock-medieval tongues. Here is Mann’s note: “This story is based in the main on the verse epos “Gregorious vom Stein” by the Middle High German poet Hartmann von Aue (c. 1165-1210) who took his legend of chivalry from the French.” But never mind origins, and come instead to unholy substance: brother-and-sister incest; the fruit of this sin a child set out to sea in a tiny bark to be rescued on a remote island and reared by rude fisherfolk and learned monks; the child grown up to marry his mother, sire daughters, and become Pope! Jollity and bliss and marveling—especially the jollity and bliss and marveling that cavorts in the language of the telling. The translator is H.T. Lowe-Porter, whose words are Thomas Mann (did he ever write in any language other than this tricky, sly, imbricated, laughing English?) and whose ingenuities are as magical as any magical story will allow.

I read this book all day yesterday (at the close of which—the day and the book—cold air blew in). —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 7, 2008

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Sunday, March 21, 2010