Foreign Bodies: A Pentimento

Globalization is this century's operative word. Barraged with worldwide news and views from such exotic and often dangerous locations as Southeast Asia, Brazil, Nepal, West Africa, New Zealand, Egypt, Israel, and Afghanistan, young American university students seem to have abandoned Paris and the traditional Cook's tour of historical Europe; now in search of public service and new experiences, they flock to Far and Near Eastern, South American, and African locales for postgraduate education in non-Western cultures. Yet despite this trend, in the last few years there has been a surprising renewal of interest in that old magnet for Americans: Paris. Perhaps the decline of high culture and romance in our cyber lives today is what draws writers and filmmakers to that traditional French icon of glamour, sexual sophistication, intellect, and art. To name just a few: David McCullough's prizewinning The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris; Graham Robb's An Adventure History of Paris; Stacy Schiff's Benjamin Franklin in Paris; Paula McLain's The Paris Wife (fiction); Julie Powell's Julie and Julia (fiction and film set in Paris); Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris; the Academy Award-winning French film The Artist; and the blockbuster exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, The Stein Collection (Gertrude and family). But perhaps most unexpected of all is Cynthia Ozick's novel Foreign Bodies, a counterintuitive variation on Henry James's classic Americans in Paris tale, The Ambassadors.

How and why Cynthia Ozick wrote her dark retrospect of the Paris of mid-twentieth-century Europe is the subject of this essay. The answer to the how and why will require consideration of relevant biographical and cultural details: Ozick's unusual youthful worship of the work of Henry James; her postgraduate education in the English literature departments of mid-twentieth-century America; the emergence of her literary predecessors, the Jewish American creative writers and critics of the 1940s and '50s; her own James-influenced first published novel; the novel's critical failure, leading to her decision to break free from James's power; Ozick's subsequent autodidactic immersion in Jewish texts and traditions effectuating a metamorphosis in her own writing; her critical success in the American literary world; and finally, in 2010, at the crest of her brilliant career, a return to her first love, Henry James, whom she had never truly abandoned.

Arguably the great lady of American Jewish literature, Cynthia Ozick is famous for rejecting almost every sobriquet attached to her name. She has categorically denied such specifications as American-Jewish, Jewish-American, Jewish, woman, whenever these have been applied to the one word she never has denied: writer. And yet . . . she is the quintessential Jewish woman writer in America who writes about Jewish ideas, about American life, about feminism in both Jewish and American culture but who had an early and long-held ambivalent enthrallment with Henry James, that archetypal elitist male American writer. Despite her polite demurrers, Ozick's readers are left to secretly object to her objections and to ponder what caused her early fascination with James, a non-Jew not innocent of an aversion to immigrant Jews. Not that she hasn't flat out told us. Ozick famously has written that she wasted the first ten years of her life learning the "Lesson of the Master" (a reference to James's story of that name), which she mistook to simply mean choose "Art" over "Life," rather than "choose ordinary human entanglement and live; or choose Art, and give up the vitality of life's passions and panics and endurances" (Lesson 292). In her devotion to her "Master," Ozick "confesses that she kept on her writing table "a copy of The Ambassadors as a kind of talisman" (Din 137). Her main point, however, is that in her youthful obsession with the sublime art of the mature Jamesian prose style, she misheard the profound "lesson of the master" and she took it to mean "Become a Master" (the title of Leon Edel's fourth and last biographical volume of James is The Master) and naively thought she could and would do that at the very start...