Gallimaufry

From The Bookish Life (2018)

Joseph Epstein explains how to read and why.

The village idiot of the shtetl of Frampol was offered the job of waiting at the village gates to greet the arrival of the Messiah. “The pay isn’t great,” he was told, “but the work is steady.” The same might be said about the conditions of the bookish life: low pay but steady work. By the bookish life, I mean a life in which the reading of books has a central, even a dominating, place. I recall some years ago a politician whose name is now as lost to me as it is to history who listed reading among his hobbies, along with fly-fishing and jogging. Reading happens to be my hobby, too, along with peristalsis and respiration.

Like the man—the fellow with the name Solomon, writing under the pen name Ecclesiastes—said, “Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” So many books are there in the world that no one can get around to even all the best among them, and hence no one can claim to be truly well-read. Some people are merely better-read than others. Nobody has read, or can read, everything, and by everything I include only the good, the beautiful, the important books.

The first question is “How can one tell which books qualify as good, beautiful, important?” In an essay of 1978 called “On Reading Books: A Barbarian’s Cogitations,” Alexander Gerschenkron, a Harvard economist of wide learning, set out three criteria: A good book must be interesting, memorable, and rereadable. This is as sensible as it is unhelpful. How can one know if a book is interesting until one has read it; memorable until time has or has not lodged it in one’s memory; rereadable until the decades pass and one feels the need to read it again and enjoys it all the more on doing so?

Not much help, either, is likely to be found in various lists of the world’s best books. In 1771 a man named Robert Skipwith, later to be Thomas Jefferson’s wife’s brother-in-law, asked Jefferson to compile for him a list of indispensable books. Jefferson obliged with a list of 148 titles, mostly Greek and Roman classics, and some intensely practical treatises, among them a book on horse-hoeing husbandry. The Guardian not long ago published a list of the world’s one hundred best nonfiction books in English, and while nearly every one seemed eminently worthy, one could just as easily add another hundred books that should have been on such a list, and this does not include all the world’s splendid works of fiction, drama, and poetry, and not merely in English alone. In 1960, Clifton Fadiman, then a notable literary critic, produced a work called The Lifetime Reading Plan, a work of 378 pages, which I have chosen never to read, lest it take up the time I might devote to a better book.

Such lists reveal a yearning for a direct route to wisdom. Brace yourself for the bad news: None is available. If one wanted to establish expertise in a restricted field—economics, say, or art history, or botany—such a list might be useful. But for the road to acquiring the body of unspecialized knowledge that sometimes goes by the name of general culture, sometimes known as the pursuit of wisdom, no map, no blueprint, no plan, no shortcut exists, nor, as I hope to make plain, could it.

Bookish, which sounds a bit like Jewish, is the word I use to describe lives that are dominated by books. I grew up in a home proudly Jewish but not in the least bookish. I don’t believe we even had a dictionary in our apartment during the years I was growing up. The only books I can recall are a few volumes of a small-format, dun-colored, red-trimmed Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia that my father acquired through newspaper subscription. Both my parents were well-spoken, my paternal grandfather in Montreal published three books in Hebrew whose cost was underwritten by my father, and my mother was a near genius in her accurate judgment of other people, but reading books takes time, and neither of my parents found time for them.

As a young boy, I didn’t find much time for books, either. Sports were all that interested me, and sports took up all four seasons of the year. I read only the sports pages in the Chicago Daily News, and I read lots of comic books, including classic comic books, which were useful for giving book reports in school. The first book that genuinely lit my fire—no surprise here, it was a sports book—was John R. Tunis’s All-American. So enamored was I of the novel that I took out my first library card so that I could read the rest of Tunis’s sports novels.

The next four years I spent as an entirely uninterested high school student. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, a few essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, all offered as part of the required school curriculum, none of them so much as laid a glove on me. Willa Cather, a writer I have come to admire as the greatest twentieth-century American novelist, chose not to allow any of her novels put into what she called “school editions,” lest young students, having to read her under the duress of school assignments, never return to her books when they were truly ready for them. She was no dope, Miss Cather.

Only after I had departed high school did books begin to interest me, and then only in my second year of college, when I transferred from the University of Illinois to the University of Chicago. Among the most beneficial departures from standard college fare at the University of Chicago was the brilliant idea of eliminating textbooks from undergraduate study. This meant that instead of reading, in a thick textbook, “In his Politics Aristotle held . . . ,” or “In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud argued . . .” or “In On Liberty John Stuart Mill asserted . . . ,” students read the Politics, Civilization and Its Discontents, On Liberty, and a good deal else. Not only read them, but, if they were like me, became excited by them. Heady stuff, all this, for a nineteen-year-old semi-literate who, on first encountering their names, was uncertain how to pronounce Proust or Thucydides.

Along with giving me a firsthand acquaintance with some of the great philosophers, historians, novelists, and poets of the Western world, the elimination of that dreary, baggy-pants middleman called the textbook gave me the confidence that I could read the most serious of books. Somehow it also gave me a rough sense of what is serious in the way of reading and what is not. Anyone who has read a hundred pages of Herodotus senses that it is probably a mistake—that is, a waste of your finite and therefore severely limited time on earth—to read a six-hundred-page biography of Bobby Kennedy, unless, that is, you can find one written by Xenophon.

From Close Shaves (2018)

The story goes that the head writer on The Simpsons television show walked into a meeting one morning, two small bandaids on the same cheek, another on his neck under his chin. “What kind of a country is this?” he exclaimed. “They can kill all the Kennedys, but they can’t make a decent razor blade.” A fine touch of anarchic humor, that, but with a low truth quotient.

My friend Edward Shils once asked the historian R. H. Tawney, author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, if over his long lifetime he had noted any progress. “Yes,” replied Professor Tawney, “in the deportment of dogs. Dogs are much better behaved today than when I was a boy.” If I were asked the same question, my reply would be, “Yes, in gym shoes and in the manufacture of razor blades.”

I am not old enough to have known anyone who, death-defyingly, daily shaved with a straight razor, though over the years I have had two professional shaves administered to me with that fierce weapon. My father shaved with a single-blade “safety razor,” as they were called, often singing the British music hall song “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” as he did so. As a small boy, some mornings I would sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch him as he applied shaving cream out of a jar and wielded the blade, frequently running the razor under the tap and knocking it lightly against the sink to clear off the extra cream that had gathered on it. This was a manly rite, if ever there was one, and I was mildly impatient for the day when I might take part in it on my own.

That day was a touch slow in coming. On the hirsute front, I matured more slowly than some of my friends, a few of whom began shaving as early as 15. When I noted friends and acquaintances whose cheeks and chins began spouting hair earlier than mine, I felt a blip of envy. If there had been Rogaine for the face, I’d have dashed out to buy it. (Riddle: What do you get when you combine Rogaine with Viagra? Answer: Don King.) I had to wait until 19 or so before I needed to shave.

When my beard did finally arrive, it turned out to be a fairly strong one—too strong for me to use an electric razor. Of the two leading razors and blades then on the market, Gillette and Schick, I went for Gillette, in part because, a good liberal in those days, I had heard that Schick, whoever he was, backed the John Birch Society. Shaving cream now came in spray cans, and men went in for aftershave colognes of various kinds, Brut and Old Spice chief among them.

For many men shaving is a burden, and they tend to knock off shaving on weekends and holidays. I happen to enjoy shaving, view it as part of my regular hygiene, like the sound of the razor scraping against my cheeks and neck, feel cleaner, fresher, revived after having shaved. In recent years I have taken to shaving in the shower, without aid of a mirror, using soap instead of shaving cream, trimming the hair growing up to my sideburns in the bathroom mirror afterwards. While doing so, I have been known to do a turn on Petula Clark’s “Don’t Sleep in the Subway, Darling,” changing the lyric to “Don’t shave in the shower, Darling.”

From Edward Remembered (2019)

Without you, Heaven would be too dull to bear, And Hell would not be Hell if you are there.
John Sparrow, epitaph for Maurice Bowra

I miss my friend Edward Shils, as I miss many other now dead friends. But these others are dead for me in a way that Edward isn’t quite. He seems never to have left me, and I can write about him today in a way I couldn’t when he died—being enabled, by the passage of time, in the phrase of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to “name names” in a way that wasn’t possible then.

An academic of renown in his own time who passed away in 1995 at the age of 85, Edward published four volumes of essays and papers, a book on civility, another on tradition, a selection of portraits of George Simmel, does not convey anything like the full force of his extraordinary
personality—a personality that was an amalgam of Samuel Johnson and H. L. Mencken with a strong strain of Jewish wit, Yiddish-isms included.

In his will, Edward left me two Jacob Epstein busts—Epstein’s great bust of Joseph Conrad and his self-portrait—that sit in our dining room and a twenty-six volume collection of the essays of William Hazlitt; and to my wife he left a set of elegant Wedgwood dishes—blue and white, trimmed in gold—that we invariably refer to as “the Edward dishes.” I often think of his remarks on various subjects. Along with recalling amusing things he had said, I occasionally find myself imagining things he might have said. A number of years ago, for example, when at the Ravinia Music Festival I noticed Edward’s and my lawyer Martin Cohn and his wife walking down to their expensive seats, she wearing a wide-brimmed summer hat, and I thought, channeling Edward, “Marty Cohn is the kind of Jew who buys an extra seat at a concert for his wife’s hat.”

Soon after his death, I had a call from the obituarist of the London Times, who, checking his facts, asked, “He came from railroad money, did he not?” No, he distinctly did not. Edward’s father, a Jewish Eastern European immigrant, was a cigar-maker, a man who sat at a bench in Philadelphia and rolled cigars for a living. Other people thought Edward was English. In World War II, he was seconded to the British Army, and because of his proficiency with German was charged with interviewing prisoners of war. That led to a job at the London School of Economics. Later he become a fellow at Kings College, Cambridge, subsequently moving on to become an honorary fellow at Peterhouse at the same university.

By that point, he had acquired not so much an English as a mid-Atlantic accent, which was highlighted by his adoption of a slightly anachronistic vocabulary. He said “district” instead of “neighborhood”; he might call a woman’s dress a “frock”; I had him remove the word “wireless” from an essay he wrote for the American Scholar, when I was that magazine’s editor, and replace it with “radio.” So far as I know, he owned no leisure clothes, never appearing outside his apartment without hat, suit, tie, and walking stick.

The phrase “reinvented himself” doesn’t apply to Edward. Rather, he had an idea of what a serious person should look, speak, and be like, and through force of will he, more than approximated, became that person. He also internationalized himself. During the 1950s, he spent large swatches of time in India. He knew German academic life from the inside, and Isaiah Berlin, R. H. Tawney, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and most of the other leading English intellectuals and scholars of his time were personal acquaintances, in some instances friends.

He was cosmopolitan, which is to say knowledgeable about and at ease in many countries. He introduced me, usually through an invitation to meals, to a number of international scholars: Leszak Kolakowski, Arnaldo Momigliano, Francois Furet among them. After a lunch with Furet, he asked me what I thought of the man. I said that I found him most impressive, but with a slight touch of the furtive about him. “What do you expect?” Edward replied. “He’s a Corsican.”

The teenage Edward Shils went to the then all-boys Central High School in Philadelphia, and thence to the University of Pennsylvania, concentrating on French literature and reading his polymathic way through the library. “My teachers would ask for 20-page papers,” he once told me of his student days, “and I would present them with 80-page ones. It could not have been easy for them.” Edward had no advanced degrees. “Ph.D.,” he once reminded me, “stands of course for Piled Higher and Deeper.”

Early in his adult life, while living in Chicago, Edward went to work on a project led by Louis Wirth, a well-established University of Chicago social scientist. Wirth arranged a job for him in the then famous Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, and there he stayed. The University of Chicago became the center of Edward’s intellectual life. He spent roughly eight of every twelve months there, the other four usually in England. His own attitude toward the school was mixed. As Churchill viewed democracy as the best of all poor forms of government, so Edward viewed Chicago as the best of all deeply flawed American universities.

He pretended not to understand why people would depart it to go off to Harvard, Yale, Princeton. He of course knew they were drawn there by the magnet of Ivy League snobbery.