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Readers discover critics' darling, Cynthia Ozick
BY: BEN NAPARSTEK Special to the CJN
Last year, at age 77, Cynthia Ozick completed her first book tour. Despite ranking alongside Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer as one of the giants of contemporary Jewish-American letters, her often-archaic prose, ridged with literary and biblical allusions, hasn't endeared her to the general reading public.
“There has been a disconnect between the reviews and the readership,” says Ozick by phone from New York. “People have called me a ‘writer's writer,' which I suppose equals ‘interesting but obscure.'”
She was surprised to be a hit on the interview circuit. “I never thought I had a gift to be a stand-up comic. I'm reminded of a story by Somerset Maugham, “Jane,” about an awkward, ill-dressed, country cousin, coming into a very sophisticated, urban, glittering society. She becomes an enormous social success. It's not understood, because she has no gift other than saying exactly what she means. In this hypocritical, strange, over-effete society, hearing somebody speak the plain truth is startling and causes laughter.”
The publication of Ozick's Collected Stories, after her nomination for last year's Man Booker international award for an author's lifetime achievement, suggests that her international celebrity is growing. The book pulls together her three collections of short stories: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976) and Levitation: Five Fictions (1982). “They are long stories, almost novellas, but there aren't all that many of them. It is a little shocking to me to see that there are so few.”
In “The Pagan Rabbi,” which Ozick regards as her best story, a rabbi violates covenant by worshipping nature, ultimately making love to a tree. “I remember I was writing about the dryad, and I thought, ‘How could a dryad have speech?' When it came to me that she would speak in fragrance and that she would address the olfactory nerve, I remember having this enormously transcendent feeling of revelation.”
But Ozick is no believer in mysticism: “I laugh when people read these stories about dryads and women on the prow of the ship and other things and say, ‘Oh, she believes in mysticism.' Mysticism purports to be able to penetrate into the nature and mind and will of the creator. It arrogates to humankind what humankind cannot possibly attain. I repudiate mysticism in life, but certainly not in the writing of fiction, of which it is the imaginative lifeblood.”
“I don't trust my essays,” she admits. “They don't tell permanent truths in the way that fiction does. My essays haunt me because people use them as a yardstick for my fiction. I resent that. That's like writing a review and describing the looks of the writer. It's irrelevant.”
Her short story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” which portrays the in-fighting of Yiddish poets in post-war America, stemmed from Ozick's childhood observations of the society of her uncle, the Hebrew poet Abraham Regelson, “who is now completely in eclipse.”
“I saw the competitiveness of a very small group of poets who were so marginal to the society at large. When the story was published, I was enormously attacked in the Yiddish press because I had transmuted it into the struggle of the Yiddish poets. I was compared to the commissars of Moscow and Warsaw.”
Her short story “Virility” satirizes the sexism of literary critics, charting the critical celebration of a male poet, whose work is derided when it is found to have been written by a woman. Ozick wrote the story to avenge herself on reviewers. “These were days when a reviewer reviewing Jane Doe would never say ‘Doe' (but) ‘Ms Doe.' But if it was John Doe, the reviewer would say ‘Doe.' I've noticed with this last round of reviews, it (use of Ms.) has returned. That is really extraordinarily appalling. It's probably the decline of feminism.”
The Holocaust is mostly distant from these stories, reflecting Ozick's oft-stated opposition to fiction about the Shoah. She was an adolescent, living in the Bronx, during the Holocaust. While her older brother was off in the army, Ozick was immersed in Virgil and the Romantic poets. “I am nonplussed by how blissful I was in the very hour when my teenaged Jewish counterparts in Europe were being incinerated.”
At age 22, Ozick set to work on a 400,000-word “philosophical novel,” Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love (“M.P.P.L.” or “Mipple” for short). Ozick intended the Jamesian saga, which set Passion against Reason, to be her magnum opus. Yet the manuscript grew increasingly unwieldy, and after seven years she finally abandoned it, though an eight-page extract survived as the short story “The Butterfly and the Traffic Light.”
Despite having never again matched her early ambition, Ozick remains a fierce defender of high art: “There used to be a high-brow, middle-brow and no-brow,” she relates. “That hierarchy is now absolutely erased. It makes it difficult for seriousness to be understood, welcomed and appreciated.”
“There has been a disconnect between the reviews and the readership,” says Ozick by phone from New York. “People have called me a ‘writer's writer,' which I suppose equals ‘interesting but obscure.'”
She was surprised to be a hit on the interview circuit. “I never thought I had a gift to be a stand-up comic. I'm reminded of a story by Somerset Maugham, “Jane,” about an awkward, ill-dressed, country cousin, coming into a very sophisticated, urban, glittering society. She becomes an enormous social success. It's not understood, because she has no gift other than saying exactly what she means. In this hypocritical, strange, over-effete society, hearing somebody speak the plain truth is startling and causes laughter.”
The publication of Ozick's Collected Stories, after her nomination for last year's Man Booker international award for an author's lifetime achievement, suggests that her international celebrity is growing. The book pulls together her three collections of short stories: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976) and Levitation: Five Fictions (1982). “They are long stories, almost novellas, but there aren't all that many of them. It is a little shocking to me to see that there are so few.”
In “The Pagan Rabbi,” which Ozick regards as her best story, a rabbi violates covenant by worshipping nature, ultimately making love to a tree. “I remember I was writing about the dryad, and I thought, ‘How could a dryad have speech?' When it came to me that she would speak in fragrance and that she would address the olfactory nerve, I remember having this enormously transcendent feeling of revelation.”
But Ozick is no believer in mysticism: “I laugh when people read these stories about dryads and women on the prow of the ship and other things and say, ‘Oh, she believes in mysticism.' Mysticism purports to be able to penetrate into the nature and mind and will of the creator. It arrogates to humankind what humankind cannot possibly attain. I repudiate mysticism in life, but certainly not in the writing of fiction, of which it is the imaginative lifeblood.”
“I don't trust my essays,” she admits. “They don't tell permanent truths in the way that fiction does. My essays haunt me because people use them as a yardstick for my fiction. I resent that. That's like writing a review and describing the looks of the writer. It's irrelevant.”
Her short story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” which portrays the in-fighting of Yiddish poets in post-war America, stemmed from Ozick's childhood observations of the society of her uncle, the Hebrew poet Abraham Regelson, “who is now completely in eclipse.”
“I saw the competitiveness of a very small group of poets who were so marginal to the society at large. When the story was published, I was enormously attacked in the Yiddish press because I had transmuted it into the struggle of the Yiddish poets. I was compared to the commissars of Moscow and Warsaw.”
Her short story “Virility” satirizes the sexism of literary critics, charting the critical celebration of a male poet, whose work is derided when it is found to have been written by a woman. Ozick wrote the story to avenge herself on reviewers. “These were days when a reviewer reviewing Jane Doe would never say ‘Doe' (but) ‘Ms Doe.' But if it was John Doe, the reviewer would say ‘Doe.' I've noticed with this last round of reviews, it (use of Ms.) has returned. That is really extraordinarily appalling. It's probably the decline of feminism.”
The Holocaust is mostly distant from these stories, reflecting Ozick's oft-stated opposition to fiction about the Shoah. She was an adolescent, living in the Bronx, during the Holocaust. While her older brother was off in the army, Ozick was immersed in Virgil and the Romantic poets. “I am nonplussed by how blissful I was in the very hour when my teenaged Jewish counterparts in Europe were being incinerated.”
At age 22, Ozick set to work on a 400,000-word “philosophical novel,” Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love (“M.P.P.L.” or “Mipple” for short). Ozick intended the Jamesian saga, which set Passion against Reason, to be her magnum opus. Yet the manuscript grew increasingly unwieldy, and after seven years she finally abandoned it, though an eight-page extract survived as the short story “The Butterfly and the Traffic Light.”
Despite having never again matched her early ambition, Ozick remains a fierce defender of high art: “There used to be a high-brow, middle-brow and no-brow,” she relates. “That hierarchy is now absolutely erased. It makes it difficult for seriousness to be understood, welcomed and appreciated.”
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