Society's Smiling Skeptic: Joseph Epstein

In an e-mail dispatched to me some years ago, a sour Marxist colleague wrote that there are no ideas in Joseph Epstein's work. But of course there are, I replied. To which my colleague, with typical Marxist logic, shot back a synecdoche suggesting a certain body part was the whole of my being and calling into question that body part's IQ. With that pathetic riposte our e-mail correspondence ended. Lucky me.

I was reminded of this absurd exchange recently as I reread Epstein's five books on the social mores of Americans: Ambition (1980), Snobbery (2002), Envy (2003), Friendship (2006), and Gossip (2011). Taken together, these books constitute a unique achievement in American literature—the most extended look by an essayist, a man of letters rather than a sociologist, at how Americans behave socially—multiple X-rays of the human longing for recognition. H. L. Mencken, one of Epstein's heroes, would be pleased.

As for Epstein not being a purveyor of ideas, my colleague had a small handle on the wrong end of a half-truth. Familiar and critical essayists are not typically known for purveying ideas; instead they reflect on others' ideas in the light of experience. Given that Marxism in its every eruption around the globe has led to poverty, famine, torture, and state-sponsored murder (estimates of deaths range from forty million to two hundred and fifty million), my colleague would have been better off engaging in reflection on his own ideas.

In place of grand concepts that lead to miserable results, Epstein provides readers with something much more desirable: penetrating examinations into what makes us tick as human beings in the company of other human beings, delivered with razor-sharp wit, hilarious stories, brilliant metaphors, and sentences that could dance with Fred Astaire. At times there is even poignance. All of which left my sour correspondent with his thumb up his synecdoche staring blankly at mere words.

None of this should come as a surprise. Once Epstein escaped the straitjacketed social-issues reporting he did for the New Leader in 1959 and the early 60s—dreary pieces about segregation in the South and presidential vote fraud (and an equally dreary piece about urban renewal for Harper's)—he found his voice and style and began to become the writer we know today. That witty skeptical persona is present as early as his first pieces in the New Republic, for which he began writing in 1964 when he was twenty-seven years old.

But the subject matter—the amused and amusing self amongst other selves—and the mode—the familiar essay—did not come onto the published page until 1975, when, at thirty-eight, Epstein got the luckiest break of his professional life—the editorship of the American Scholar, partly through the influence of Hilton Kramer. As editor he felt free for the first time to ignore editors' wishes and write familiar essays of his own choosing—and did so, ninety-two of them, under the pen name Aristides the Just. His guides in these familiar essays were the self-seeing of Montaigne, the pithy cynicism of La Rochefoucauld, the contentious honesty of William Hazlitt, the good-humored wit of Max Beerbohm, the sensible judgment of Edmund Wilson, the bemused skepticism of H. L. Mencken, the wise wit of Edward Shils, and the outrageous fun of W. C. Fields. The least common denominator here is skepticism—an aversion to the facile and the phony. For the next twenty-three years the American Scholar was the best literary magazine in America—in part because of the Aristides essays, but also in part because of the astonishingly good pieces Epstein selected for each issue.

In these Aristides essays Epstein discovered the seeds of four of his books. Reading Snobbery one remembers "What Is Vulgar?," "Your Basic Language Snob," "A Nice Little Knack for Name-Dropping," "They Said You Was High Class," and bits and pieces from many other essays. Reading Envy one sees a direct line back to "A Few Kind Words for Envy." Reading Friendship one is reminded of "A Former...