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  • An Honest and Perspicacious Writer
  • George Core
A Literary Education and Other Essays by Joseph Epstein (Axios Press, 2014. 500 pages. $24)

Joseph Epstein’s last book of essays in 2012 was devoted to biography, and I read it with great relish, as I have read all his books—nonfiction and fiction. The collection under review contains nearly forty essays and is his twenty-fourth book. He has written on everything from Fred Astaire to Alexis de Tocqueville, from envy and snobbery to divorce and ambition. He is a superb literary critic, short-story writer, and a lively sociologist who casts a wide net.

No one, as has been said countless times, is as good an essayist as Mr. Epstein, which is to say as original, witty, amusing, learned, and engaging. He seems able to write well on virtually anything—such as the strange antics of life at Northwestern University (everything from sexual demonstrations, to a new form of bad manners called the “shout down,” used to intimidate alleged fascists, to professors regularly sleeping with their students), life in the U.S. Army, [End Page lix] cosmetic surgery, boredom, lower education, Holocaust denial, science fiction, third-rate writers, Spielberg vs. Shakespeare, the teaching of English, the death of the liberal arts, various literary magazines (from the TLS to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker), and such intellectual figures as Walter Cronkite (no intellectual, as Epstein makes plain) and Hilton Kramer.

“Cronkite,” Epstein acidly observes, “took the news too straight; he admired American politicians too much; whereas Huntley and Brinkley, and Brinkley, especially, tends to review them and politics generally in a more Menckenesque light—that is, as a carnival … of bunkum.” Hilton Kramer, in contrast to Cronkite, had a great mind and was exceedingly articulate; he was one of the great public intellectuals of our time. Here is how Epstein concludes his tribute to Kramer: “He loathed the crude intrusions of racial and sexual politics in the arts, and had no hesitation in explaining why in public and in a forthright way. Vaunting the shoddy in literature and in visual art he considered no mere venial sin. He paid culture the respect of taking it with the utmost seriousness. … He is irreplaceable.” In other words he was the polar opposite of Uncle Walter Cronkite, a vapid commentator on the public scene, who flummoxed most of the United States for years.

The pieces in this book under the heading of style include “My Fair Language,” “Heavy Sentences,” “The Personal Essay: Form of Discovery,” and “English as It Is Taught.” In “Heavy Sentences” Epstein praises F. L. Lucas while dismantling the pompous Stanley Fish’s pompous new book, How to Write a Sentence. Epstein is especially good on diction and devastating on clichés, popular misusages, and other forms of tired language. On the personal essay, he concludes: it “is actual, palpable, real. … In writing the essay,” he continues, “one tests one’s feelings, instincts, and thoughts in the crucible of composition.” I hope that one day Mr. Epstein collects his essays about writing, since he is one of the best prose stylists of our time. [End Page lx]

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