“What are we to do with What We Know?”
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In “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body” (in her Quarrel & Quandary, 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. [End Page lxii] The essay is cooler than that”; “An essay is a fireside thing, not a conflagration or a safari.”
In her new collection of essays Ozick strolls coolly through her own well-furnished mind, exploring, 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 most inventive, the most idiosyncratic, the most scrupulously surreal English sentences of his century”) to twenty-five pages on Robert Alter’s “historically astounding” translation of The Five Books of Moses. By contrast “T. S. Eliot at 101” (in Fame & 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 running 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 susceptibilities 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 questions 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 immaculate than his or anybody else’s life. Even in the case of romans à clef “the author’s life is nobody’s business,” even when the author himself turns [End Page lxiii] the key in the lock: “An author’s extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and...
