1 The Last Reader in the Whole World
All things come to an end. The history of reading begins in the shadows: clay tablets in Mesopotamia; finger-marks on cave walls. How this history ends is more obscure. But it will end. Consult any literary periodical, and you’ll see that the demise of reading is prophesied daily. I can’t live without reading, and perhaps neither can you. Humanity, however, can survive without it. After all, we’ve lived with less.
Let us imagine, then, that in ten thousand years, or sooner, an anointed person will be born: The Last Reader in the Whole World.
Picture her in a red blanket with golden braid, cooing in a crib, straining against her swaddling, sulking in her mother’s arms. She is a demanding infant. Day and night she bucks and writhes, venting anguish at her condition. Her cries are deep, guttural, rising from the earth.
Her exhausted parents find that only one thing will pacify her: stories, words; words woven like a blanket to protect and hold her; words woven artfully, like the red blanket with golden braid, to beautify her precarious existence. So her parents, themselves among the last readers to exist, submit to her need. They haul books to the cradle and let her teethe on the spines. They read to her the stories of their people, replacing her sad howl of inarticulacy with a stream of words.
As she grows up, the girl comes to understand that she is the last of her kind ever to be, the last to know literature and its enlargements. Possibly she lives in a high-tech world of glistening virtuality in which the written word has fallen into disuse. Maybe she lives in a world of cataclysm and devastation, of bombed-out classrooms and libraries toppled into the ocean. Whatever the cause, she is The Last, the endpoint of a vast tradition.
Her predicament, while strange, is strangely familiar. It recapitulates, in extreme form, the problems of modernism: artists severed from their audiences, doubtful about the future of their art, unsure of their way forward, obliged to reckon with a tradition they cannot imitate or return to.
In considering how she should act, The Last Reader will do what she always does: she’ll read. With time, she’ll come to the modernists. With luck, she’ll find an unusual writer whose voice on the page is that of a modernist out of time: an American writer named Cynthia Ozick. I say “luck,” because if I could send The Last Reader a single emissary, someone who could help her interpret and make sense of her position, I would send Ozick.
Cynthia Ozick? The writer who describes herself in interviews as “unknown, totally obscure” and judges that her work will “quickly fall into posthumous eclipse”? Who predicts, in a fantastical meditation on literary ambition, that she will “not survive even as ‘minor’”? Cynthia Ozick as our ambassador for the lonely reader of the future? Yes, the one and only. In Ozick’s body of work, the dilemmas The Last Reader faces are handled with disarming frankness and intensity. The immensity of the literary past, the vanishing of the literary future, the pleasure and anguish of a mind cultivated in isolation: all these problems are explored in a corpus of astonishing style and vision.
In her pugilistic essay “The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin,” Ozick issues an italicized warning: “the readers are going away.” Going, going, gone: the audience for “the serious literary novel has gone the way of the typewriter and the telephone booth and fedoras and stockings with seams.” (Even an observer as discerning as Ozick couldn’t have predicted the resurgence of the fedora.) Ozick published these words in 2007. But the problem of disappearing readers has concerned her for far longer. In an unpublished 1983 letter, she reflects on “the brief life-span of mass reading,” which she dates from “the British Poor Laws of 1832 … until 1949, when television entered the home”: a paltry 117 years. She adds, reassuringly: “The earth will one day fall into the sun, and it won’t matter that Shakespeare lived.”
Sometimes, I think Ozick is The Last Reader, that her soul belongs in the nineteenth century, that she’s touched by literature in a way that’s no longer possible. Born in 1928, six days before Shirley Temple, she came of age in an era of little magazines, humanities enrollments swollen by the G. I. Bill, and mass-market paperbacks of literary classics. The modernists were in living memory. Lionel Trilling (from whom she took a course at Columbia) was a national sage. T. S. Eliot was, in 1956, capable of filling a football stadium, gathering some 14,000 people for a lecture on “The Frontiers of Criticism” at the University of Minnesota. Literature had not yet lost its capital L.
Today, Ozick may be among the last voices for whom literature is everything, who can genuinely say with Kafka, “I am made of literature and nothing else.” Steeped in tradition, besotted by Henry James, she is easily taken as conservative, a relic. Her attacks on the avant-garde are at times undisguised. “What is today called ‘experimental’ writing,” she pronounces in one essay, “is unreadable.” She habitually presents herself as a nostalgist for the nineteenth century. Some of her aesthetic judgments would have seemed stodgy a century ago. Her sense of what films can achieve, for example, is colored by a reactionary purism: when a work of cinema succeeds, she contends, it does so usually because of its “resemblance to paintings or engravings … Where film is most art, it is least a novelty.”
Yet like her chosen master Henry James, Ozick is closer to the experimental and the new than is often supposed. Her essays are filled with baroque, twisting sentences, evocative phrase-making, bold counterfactuals, sly self-disclosure, and stunning feats of defamiliarization. This is a writer who offers a memoir-in-miniature of herself as a “human snail”; who fantasizes about a surgery cleaving a “blood-slice” through her older and younger self; whose response to feminism, a piece titled “The Hole / Birth Catalogue,” begins by imagining a woman “expelling an infant out of her hole via powerful involuntary muscular contractions” and ends by recounting a letter from a madman.
Ozick presents herself as a remnant of a lost world, a holdover from a time before our own sub-literary era, “an era when the notion of belles-lettres is profoundly dead.” Yet even as her essays declare literature dead, they revivify it through voice and style. The signature paradox of her work is the integration of pious reverence for the literary past with gleeful experiment of the kind that seems forward-looking despite its author’s preoccupations.
It is because of Ozick’s example that I believe that The Last Reader will do more than read. She will also write. And her writing will be experimental in cast and tone, a burrowing into language and its intricacies. Even if she writes only to please herself.
2 In the Ozick Archives
Ozick is an ambidextrous writer, unusually adept with both fiction and essay. Her career, the critic Giles Harvey remarks, runs along two tracks, like hands floating, and occasionally crossing, on a piano:
With one hand she has written some of the strangest, most intellectually daring and morally intelligent fiction of recent times, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997); with the other she has produced a prose brick of lit crit, essay after essay on subjects ranging from the Book of Job and Gershom Scholem to Helen Keller and Susan Sontag.
An Everyman’s Library collection of her work, published in March, salutes this doublehandedness. The collection adopts its title, In a Yellow Wood, from Robert Frost’s poem about two roads diverging, and it takes the unusual step of including both stories and essays, reflecting Ozick’s lifetime of travel along “two prose-ridden roads.”
But when, this spring, I traveled to New Haven to look at Ozick’s archives, I had only one hand.
Do I mean this symbolically — the narrow scholar confronting the capacious belletrist? No, the impairment was literal.
The week before the research trip, I’d unwisely accepted an invitation to go skiing. On the mountain, I found myself in a practice area surrounded by bewilderingly athletic children. Around me, Prada-wearing toddlers flipped and spun, whirling like corkscrews, while I, a man in my thirties, cursed, flailed, gasped, slipped, and took pratfall after shuddering pratfall.
Fortified at lunch by a beer and a pep talk, I decided to try a beginner’s run, a long, gently inclined slope snaking lazily down the mountain. At last, I found my confidence. For several exhilarating minutes I traced a sine-curve through the powder, tensing my quads, leaning into the delicate turns. And then: a patch of ice; a bulging tree root; the ground twisting under me. My skis flew off, landing like toothpicks in the snow ten yards away. For a moment I lay mangled on the mountain, the breath knocked out of me. Around me the sounds of the slope continued without interruption, the scrape and whisper of skis, the cawing of birds, the rustle of wind in the trees. My mouth was filled with snow. I closed my eyes and saw a deep red blooming across my eyelids. As I inhaled, I understood that the red was pain.
So it was that I arrived at Yale a few days later trussed up in a sling. A sighing librarian heaved box after box to my table as I hovered uselessly. Researchers seated one to a table in the basement room coughed and rustled papers. One man, gaunt and bearded, stared with lunatic intensity down at his table, bracing his temples, no papers in sight; he would remain in that position for the next four hours.
Ozick’s archive is exceptionally large: 330 boxes, 176 dedicated to correspondence alone. As I fumbled with the folders, I thought about the vastness of Ozick’s corpus, the long shelf of published novels and essays, the papery bulk of manuscripts, drafts, and letters, enough to fill a cellar from floor to ceiling. Two hands would hardly suffice for such production, I decided; surely you needed six or ten, the spiraling limbs of a Hindu deity, each hand gripping a pen.
Then I came across this letter:
I am, alas, not one of those writers who can write things with the left hand while the right hand is engaged in something else. Writing doesn’t come lightly or easily for me. It is a suffering, a pressure, a torment. There is no writing that is “small” or “quick,” that can be, as people say, “tossed off.” Everything becomes for me a gargantuan labor.
Ozick addresses these words to an editor whose request for an article she declines (“You know I would do anything you asked me to. Only ask me to jump off the Empire State Building for you! I will do it … But this small article of, as you say, four or five pages…”). Many writers speak of their work as agonizing, harrowing, exhausting, but in Ozick the theme of the artist as exemplary sufferer is expounded with remarkable vividness. “The work of a writer is wrung out of flesh and blood to a degree that no other work exacts,” she writes in a 1971 letter admonishing a rabbi who has stiffed her out of a speaking fee. “Did the waitresses go unpaid, did the floor-sweeper go without recompense, did the electric bill slide into neglect?” she asks. No: “it is the writer, and only the writer, who is considered infinitely exploitable.”
Even the un-exploited writer faces threats of injury and deformation because of the consuming and exacting nature of their work. In an interview with The Paris Review, Ozick summarizes her professional formation thusly:
What I did, a child crazed by literature, was to go like an eremite into a cavern and spin; I imagined that I would emerge with a masterpiece. Instead I emerged as an unnatural writing-beast … There I was, at twenty-five, reading eighteen hours a day, novels, philosophy, criticism, poetry, Jewish history, Gibbon … I read and read and it made me some kind of monster. I’m still that monster.
Her exquisite short essay “The Seam of the Snail” imagines her writing as effluence from a wound:
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail’s secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.
As I read on, turning pages with one hand, my own feelings of woundedness and limitation came to seem less like impediments, more like the inevitable baseline condition from which literary creation arises. For while a published corpus shows a writer at her most polished and perfect, an archive is a record of mundanity, proof that transcendent minds suffer from headaches, get pestered by tenure committees, and sleep through lunch. Such is “the condition of most writing,” Ozick says in a letter to Philip Roth: “muffled inside a writhing living sac.” In her letters she often complains of colds and runny noses; she gets out of jury duty by citing irritable bowel syndrome.
For a voice to rise from the body takes sustained will, and the painstaking nature of Ozick’s composition is evident from her manuscript drafts. On any given piece of lined paper, the long rows of tiny looping handwriting are obscured by a storm of revision. On the first page of what would become her novella Dictation, for example, there is not a single line without some emendation; nearly the entire page is crossed through or X-ed out.
Her correspondence, by contrast, seems irrepressibly fluent, a trove of aperçus, playful banter, philosophical meditations, and strong opinions. The letters reflect a range of moods. She can be cantankerous. She drafts a letter to the mayor of her hometown to complain about teenage boys — “adolescent barbarians” — playing street hockey under her “work-window,” interrupting her labors with their “whoops and bellows” and “wild-animal commotion.” “I cannot work in New Rochelle,” she declares; “no intellectual can … I am a prisoner of the barbarians.” She describes Vivian Gornick as “a nice Jewish girl who’s gone to Cairo to write a pro-Arab, anti-Israel book, having been brainwashed by an Egyptian lover in California,” though she later recommends Gornick’s anthology Woman in Sexist Society as “sociological and factual.” She can be partisan. She votes against Edward Said’s candidacy for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and nominates her uncle, the Israeli poet Abraham Regelson, for the Nobel Prize.
She is often gentle and affectionate, even with strangers. In response to a fan letter, she writes, “Your little blue yet bright note made me feel intensely lucky in having found an Ideal Reader, of whom every writer dreams.” Elsewhere, there are flashes of anger, and it’s unclear whether the act of writing exorcises her rage or inflames it. Suspecting the editor of a short-story anthology of seeking to include her work merely to satisfy a gender “quota,” she offers to send him a menstrual smear “which you could then print and photograph in True Full Color.” She trades poisonous letters with the socialist Jewish writer Richard Elman, a dispute that climaxes in a volley about rich and poor Jews. “You have a hell of a nerve writing me about the neighborhoods where rich Jews live,” she blazes. “I am one generation out of Hlusk, where there were no sidewalks and my mother and father as children (my father till he was 21) sank into the mud up to their knees … Oh, you stiff-hearted ideological bastard!”
Other letters have a mystical flavor, bearing the imprint of nocturnal reverie or dream. Some of these are dated “middle of the night,” and in others she speaks of writing “woozily” at 3:30 in the morning. While dismissive of the “cookie-cutter” thinking that supposedly reigns in academia, she exchanges many letters with scholars, ruminating on literature, language, Jewish history, and the nature of God.
The letters are captivating, and an ample selection would merit publication. Yet as I returned to the archive day after day (each morning noting the gaunt man at the table opposite, cradling his head in his hands while staring at an empty table), I felt rising in me a skepticism about the archive as an institution, or at least about its centrality to the academic study of literature.
Increasingly, literary scholars have come to believe that the encounter with the archive is where new knowledge is made. Graduate students in literature are frequently expected to devote long periods to archival research, much like anthropologists-in-training sent off for fieldwork. And they’re asked to love it: scores of books and articles meditate on the sensual pleasures of handling old paper, or the spiritual pleasures of communing with the dead. Everywhere “the archive” is invoked almost mystically as a site of oppression or liberation, a yawning amorphous abstract entity about which scholars are supposed to speak in solemn tones.
Maybe it’s just my rotten luck. Some researchers need only tiptoe into an archive to make grand discoveries — a damning business letter, an unknown novel manuscript, the brown tooth of a Founding Father wrapped in a twist of paper. I only ever find doctors’ notes and shopping lists.
Nevertheless, this archival enthrallment seems to me an attempt to claim the legitimacy of historians while mis-stating the kind of knowledge that literary criticism produces. Theories that endow the archive with a scrim of romance align suspiciously well with the professional incentives of academia, with its hunger for novelty and its perpetual drive for ever-narrower monopolies of expertise. But is that mist rising from the archive a huge cloudy symbol of high romance? Or a cloud of dust? The romance of the archive risks installing the ephemeral above the major. And it risks diminishing literary criticism into a niche province of cultural history. Criticism is about insight and interpretation, not fact-finding. An author’s archive turns up details, anecdotes, the stuff of biography. But its real value for the critic, as opposed to the historian or biographer, lies in the mind-meld it can intensify between writer and reader.
In Ozick’s case, the letters are most interesting when least biographical, most memorable when they approach the status of fiction-in-miniature or essay-in-embryo. Nearly every page offers surprising turns of phrase (as when she comforts a dejected writer by saying that most editors think “books are potatoes”). And there are bursts of imaginative whimsy, experimental in the manner of, say, Emily Dickinson. In a 1973 letter, she muses, “It would be nice to be a Stone … To talk Stone-talk about Stone-things!” (Dickinson: “How happy is the little Stone / That rambles in the Road alone / And doesn’t care about Careers…”) Elsewhere, turning down an offered editorial position, Ozick writes:
I would not be good for your masthead because you would have a Nobody on it, and your masthead would not be good for me because it would make me look like a Somebody, and if anybody wants to go on making up stories they’d better not go around pretending to be a Somebody, because one of the things you need to make up stories with is your pristine Nobodyhood…
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
These flourishes are among the most distinctive moments in the letters. But they don’t point us back to the life. They point us toward her published writings, and especially to her essays, where her experimental tendencies — the voice-play, the metaphysical elasticity, the Nabokovian lilt and spin of language — achieve their fullest expression.
3 The Marrow of a Mind
Scholars have written many histories and taxonomies of the essay as a literary form, conventionally beginning with Montaigne’s discovery of metaphysical insight in such subjects as smells and thumbs and sleep, alighting thereafter on the great eighteenth-century English periodicals, and culminating with the essay’s strange status in our century — a literary period in which some of our most acclaimed fiction has virtually dispensed with plot and character to become perplexingly, sometimes irritatingly, essayistic.
Ozick, tasked with contemplating the essay, does something else. She imagines her — the essay — as a woman glimpsed in a doorway, “moody, fickle, given on a whim to changing her clothes, or the subject.” The difference between the scholarly taxonomies and Ozick’s “portrait of the essay as a warm body” exemplifies what the literary essay can do. An essay is not a tract or polemic or dictate or work of scholarship. It is, as in Ozick’s “portrait,” a reverie, a chance, “a stroll through someone’s mazy mind.” The essay’s strength resides in its capacity to meander. “No one is freer than the essayist,” Ozick judges, “free to leap out in any direction, to hop from thought to thought.”
This imaginative liberty, however, is less vivid than it once was, because the literary essay “has left the common culture.” It is increasingly displaced by the “article,” by quick blasts of text designed to be inhaled rather than pondered. For Ozick, the essay embodies thought, while the article offers a cheap, hurried simulacrum of it: “The essay reflects on its predecessors, and spirals organically out of a context, like a green twig from a living branch. The article rushes on, amnesiac, despising the meditative, reveling in gossip and polemics, a courtier of the moment.” The article’s speed may seem like an advantage, but it comes at a price. “Articles swindle almost by nature,” she warns, “because superficiality is a swindle.”
The essay’s diminution is, of course, part of a larger story: a retreat from reading so sweeping that Ozick deems it a return to an “aural culture.” In the age of Dickens, as Ozick tells it, people of all walks of life would regularly undertake a stupendous cognitive act: “the silent physiological translation of letters into sounds, the leaping eye encoding.” Mass reading had the enormous virtue of conferring “the greatest complexity on the greatest number.” Now, she says, reading is once again “the province of an elite class,” while the culture at large has returned to “the pre-literate status of face-to-face speech”:
In 1930 the so-called shopgirl, with her pulp romance, is habitually engaged in this electrifying webwork of eye and mind. In 1980 she reverts, via electronics, to the simple speaking face.
The problem with an aural culture, in Ozick’s verdict, is that it is a “culture of theater.” Aesthetic objects designed to be seen and heard, rather than read, tend to be “broader, brighter, larger, louder, simpler, less intimate, more insistent — more theatrical — than any page of any book.” In other words, the Times Square-ification of culture. Behind this suspicion of theatricality there lingers the famous scene, invoked in several of Ozick’s essays, of Henry James’s “descent into failure and public humiliation,” when after the opening of his 1895 play Guy Domville the august author was boorishly booed offstage.
And yet: Ozick’s essays are, in their quiet eye-encoding way, flagrantly, deliciously, exhilaratingly, maddeningly theatrical. The experience of reading may be cognitively and phenomenologically distinct from watching a movie or going to a play. But between the covers of a book, an author performs as a theater troupe of one. Ozick knows this. The writer, she says, “acts all the roles, wears all the costumes, and dreams all the scenery.”
Across her essays Ozick assumes a proliferation of personae, flitting among masks, costumes, identities. Here she is a snail with “tiny twin horns,” there a conjoined twin demanding a severance from her double. Best Actress goes to Ozick as a heartsick lover who, at a friend’s wedding, falls so intensely in love with the bridegroom that when she receives a postcard from the happy honeymooning couple, she painstakingly traces over his handwriting in lustrous pencil until “each of the letters bore on the its back the graphite coat I had slowly, slowly laid over it.” But she is also Best Actor, for her performance, in another essay, as Henry James: “Even without close examination, you could see the light glancing off my pate; you could see my heavy chin, my watch chain, my walking stick, my tender paunch.”
“Coiled in the bottom-most pit of every driven writer,” Ozick affirms, “is an impersonator — protean, volatile, restless and relentless.” The writer, invisible yet omnipresent, is more chameleonic than any actor, capable of entering “a sex not her own” or “the leg of a mosquito.”
This adventurous self-plasticity is just one of the essays’ boundary-collapsing features. Her literary criticism presses on the genre’s conventions, drawing on fictive techniques to depict the private lives of the authors under discussion. Ozick escorts us, for example, into Edith Wharton’s bed, where she claims Wharton’s “real life” took place. “Visualize the bed,” Ozick instructs: “she used a writing board.” In bed, free from her corset, Wharton wrote her novels, dropping page after page on the floor for her secretary to pick up. Ozick’s reconstruction of Virginia Woolf is more intimate and more shocking. She imagines Woolf in the throes of madness, howling and clawing her attendants. Leonard Woolf, she notes, was a Jew who married into “the finest stratum in England,” and this was “a birthright he paid for by spooning porridge between Virginia Woolf’s resisting lips.” Elsewhere we find bold literary-historical counterfactuals, such as the suggestion that had Anne Frank lived, she would have become a famous writer nonetheless, perhaps in the vein of Nadine Gordimer.
Ozick’s handling of holy texts claims similar imaginative license. Ozick has long been aware of a tension between religious duty and aesthetic pleasure. In her early short story “The Pagan Rabbi,” a rabbi falls in love with a dryad, and the dryad reveals to him the nature of his soul. His soul, we learn, takes the shape of an old man trudging along a dusty road, bent under a bag stuffed with books: “He reads the Law and breathes the dust and doesn’t see the flowers.” The story takes as its epigraph a prohibition on distracted delight from the Mishnah:
Rabbi Jacob said: “He who is walking along and studying, but then breaks off to remark, ‘How lovely is that tree!” or ‘How beautiful is that fallow field!’ — Scripture regards such a one as having hurt his own being.”
But when Ozick plays the rabbi, as she does in her essay “Ruth,” she fills her text with flowers. There are no flowers in the Book of Ruth, only sheaves of barley. But Ozick insists: “The flowers are there all the same, even if the text doesn’t show them.” She rapturously catalogues the flowers of her childhood, “violets, lilacs, roses, daisies, dandelions, black-eyed Susans, tiger lilies, pansies.” She invokes Tolstoy’s descriptions of ox-eye daisies and bright blue cornflowers to fill in the flora that the Bible’s tale of grain-gleaning supposedly leaves out. Revising Scripture, she arrives at a rapprochement between the lessons of the Torah and the demands of a luxuriant aestheticism. This is not ordinary biblical criticism.
Indeed, in Ozick’s essays, there’s little that’s ordinary. Even the category of “the ordinary” becomes, for her, a “riddle.” Subjecting everyday experience to scrutiny has been a special concern of the literary essay ever since Montaigne trained his attention on thumbs and noses and “the custom of wearing clothing.” But for Ozick, the ordinary is something that’s “extraordinarily dangerous to notice,” dangerous because when we notice the ordinary, we tend to sanctify it, “making the Ordinary into the Extraordinary.” Rejoicing in ordinariness, Ozick warns, promotes a slide into idolatry, directing reverence toward “the tree instead of God, the rapture-bringing horizon instead of God.”
We are so warned: and yet a signature feature of her essays is the exaltation of the ordinary via juxtaposition to the cosmic. Thus in “Existing Things” the mica glistening in the pavement invites wonder about everything in existence, until we are led from the humble glinting flakes in the sidewalk to Micah the prophet. In “The Shock of Teapots,” a stone glimpsed in Stockholm conjures an image of the entire planet, “girdled” and “stone-speckled,” a whirling celestial body that is, in turn, compressed into “the marvelous globe of the human eye.” And in “The Ladle” a kitchen utensil “made of commonplace stainless steel” becomes the Little Dipper of the night sky. Ozick’s ladle dips deeper, deeper, until it morphs into a “cosmic receptacle” that “dips down, down, down into memory and imagination, into the bottomlessness of the word,” scooping up everything that art and science and philosophy and poetry have ever known.
Ozick will sometimes speak of literary creation as intrinsically experimental. “Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo,” she advises in a “Forewarning” to the essay collection Metaphor & Memory. In her essay “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” she writes: “Every new sentence, every new fragment of imaginative literature born into the world, is a heart-in-the-mouth experiment, and for its writer a profound chanciness.” With equal ardor, however, she professes a disdain for the new, and she compares “experimental” writing unfavorably with work that recognizably extends what has come before. “I have no interest in ‘the new,’” she writes in her short statement of principle “Pear Tree and Polar Bear.” “The secrets that engage me — that sweep me away — are generally secrets of inheritance, how the pear seed becomes a pear tree, for instance, rather than a polar bear.” Against rupture and metamorphosis Ozick consistently elevates continuity and tradition.
This coincidence of experimentalism and fealty to the past poses a riddle for interpreters of Ozick’s work. Critics have generally responded by de-emphasizing her experimental qualities, casting her instead as sage, scholar, guardian of tradition, and Jamesian acolyte. Ozick’s own statements on literary novelty sometimes muddy the matter, as when, in “Innovation and Redemption,” she attempts a shaky distinction between the experimental and the innovative, claiming the experimental derives solely from method, while the innovative “imagines something we have never experienced before.”
A better answer comes from the end of her panoramic essay “T. S. Eliot at 101,” when she reflects on why a poem like “The Waste Land” could not be written today. “The Waste Land,” dense with allusion, is a modernist monument veined like marble with crisscrossing connections to the past. It relies for its power on an awareness of history as both a resource and a problem. That relation to history has been obliterated:
because we seem content to live without contemplation of our formal beginnings, a poem like “The Waste Land,” mourning the loss of an integral tradition, is for us inconceivable. For the modernists, the center notoriously did not hold; for us (whatever we are), there is no recollection of a center, and nothing to miss, let alone mourn … Ironic allusiveness — Eliot’s inspired borrowing — is out of the question: there is nothing in stock to allude to.
Or: without tradition, there is no experiment. To be severed from the past means there is nothing to rupture, nothing to alter, nothing from which to diverge. There is no “new” without the “old.” Championing literary tradition is, on this view, a way of keeping alive the conditions of possibility for authentic experiment. The literature of the future depends on the literature of the past.
4 “I’ve Been Wondering, Mr. Mailer”
I’m aware that the Cynthia Ozick I’ve been describing may not resemble the author as she is commonly known or depicted. My Cynthia Ozick is not the bespectacled Jewish intellectual who lives in New Rochelle, drinks tea, and turned 97 this year. My Cynthia Ozick exists only on the page, in the twist and vibration of sentences sculpted by the mortal scribe.
There is yet another Cynthia Ozick, one who lives in neither printed type nor mortal flesh but pixels and video clips. And it is this incarnation that has, in recent years, in certain circles, become iconic.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably seen the clip I’m referring to. The 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall captures a debate on women’s liberation held in 1971, in Manhattan, pitting Norman Mailer against a panel of feminist thinkers. The starriest figures of the 1970s New York literati were in attendance that night; and it’s Ozick, asking a question from the floor, who scores the film’s most perceptible hit against macho Mailer.
Ozick begins by filleting the mythic pretensions of Mailer’s anti-feminist book Prisoner of Sex, then recently published. “The women here, and particularly Miss Sontag, have been talking in terms of, uh, justice, which is the basis of civilization,” Ozick says. But “a sacerdotal sexual transcendentalist priest like Mr. Mailer,” who preaches a return to the primal religion of the phallus, naturally has other concerns in view.
All this is prelude to her devastating one-liner. “This question, I have been fantasizing it for many, many years,” she says. “This is my moment to live out a fantasy. Mr. Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself you said, quote, ‘A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.’”
“For years and years, I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?”
The auditorium howls with laughter.
It’s a moment worth celebrating, a snapshot of her erudition, daring, and verbal inventiveness. But it’s worth asking: why is this clip what so many envision when they think of her?
Town Bloody Hall is a period piece: everything from the writers’ outfits to the cadences of their speech to the gender politics being debated encapsulates a certain 1970s American literary milieu, very New York, very Jewish, an era in which serious writers could win serious fame.
Ozick’s skewering of Mailer may be a time capsule, but it aligns uncannily well with today’s digital-capitalist logic of virality. It’s short and sweet, just two minutes long. It’s capable of circulating, and being enjoyed, when stripped of its context. The storyline — smart women feuding with a crusty male author — is easy to pick up, whether or not you’ve read any of the writers involved. It offers the emotional engagement that fan culture seeks and rewards (one version of the clip, on YouTube, is titled “I Love Cynthia Ozick”). It’s conflictual, an elevated precursor to the reality TV-style draggings, clapbacks, and takedowns that now saturate our media and politics. In short, it’s good content.
Ozick’s essays celebrate her reading, the many years spent in that yellow-wallpapered room poring over James and Tolstoy and Gibbon and Jewish philosophy. The Town Hall clip celebrates her “reading” — “reading” here in the sense of a witty takedown. She doesn’t just read Mailer; she reads him.
I am not saying that “my” Ozick — the aesthetic experimentalist, playful and powerful in her writing — is the only true one, or that the Town Hall clip is misleading or false. What I’m saying is that privileging two minutes of video over thousands of pages of prose is a way of taking her less seriously.
For there is another way.
Let us think again of The Last Reader, her embroidered blanket, her rich or ruined world far in the future. Imagine that she is now a woman walking alone at nightfall, passing in and out of the glow cast by the moon’s single pale and frozen eye.
She comes to a heavy door of insulated steel. With a creak and heave and sharp downward push on the handle, she slips inside and, quick as a flash, shuts the door behind her.
In the secret room, books are everywhere. Faint markings on their spines indicate that they once belonged to the library of a university that no longer exists. Our Last Reader drifts among the stacks, searching the climate-controlled cache for — well, for something, something that will speak to her. She does not know in advance what she seeks. She trusts only that the right book will announce itself.
Among Ozick’s papers, in the archive, is an unpublished essay from 1962 entitled “The Born Reader — Why Does He Read?” It is accompanied by a rejection letter from a literary magazine that has long since folded.
“The genuine, the born, reader is divinely driven,” Ozick writes. “He roams libraries with greed and stealth, turning over a hundred volumes … How can he, almost unerringly, know which book is his destiny? Ask, rather, how the beasts know which creatures are allotted to them for prey.”
And so, through destiny or chance, The Last Reader takes in her hands a small volume called The Puttermesser Papers, a book with a heroine whose vision of paradise is an eternity of reading (“anthropology, zoology, physical chemistry, philosophy … all of Balzac, all of Dickens, all of Turgenev and Dostoevsky … The Magic Mountain and the whole Faerie Queene and every line of The Ring and the Book”), and whose vision of love is evening after evening spent reading George Eliot aloud together.
From there, The Last Reader passes on to The Messiah of Stockholm. Stockholm may, by then, have been engulfed by the water. As for the Messiah, he has not yet (some say) arrived. Nevertheless, she reads. She learns of a vision that appears in the mind like a burnished egg; of a procession of idols; of a living book with “several hundred winglike sails … freckled all over with inky markings,” a book that gives birth to a single small bird that soars from the mass of ink and paper clutching in its beak a strand of dried hay.
Empires rise and fall; languages vanish; monuments crumble into dust. Yet so long as there are readers, there is survival, the communion of minds across the ages.
That is a future for Cynthia Ozick: the future she deserves.