Recently, in an idle moment, I stumbled on a superb piece by Joseph Epstein, “Joan Didion From the Couch,” which reminded me of how the engineering of reputations in the literary world often betrays not only what ought to be our appraisal of objective merit but the delight in good work that sets most good authors on the road to authorship in the first place. Of the inflated reputation that Joan Didion (1934–2021) still enjoys, Epstein is unsparing. “Toward the end of her life, Joan Didion achieved something close to celebrity status,” he writes.
A documentary film, The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, was released in 2017. In it Didion holds forth about . . . herself, chiefly. After her death, an auction of her furniture, household goods, and photographs of herself fetched prices resembling those attained by the goods sold at auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: 23 monogrammed linen napkins for $14,000, 13 blank notebooks for $11,000, and so on. Photographs of Didion appear on the covers of nearly all her books, showing a woman of the slightly boyish type the French call gamine. She is usually holding a cigarette, often inside of or in front of her yellow Corvette Stingray. Didion was barely five feet and weighed less than 100 pounds. Time, as we know, can be a cruel sculptor, and it was hard on her, leaving her in her later years afflicted with Parkinson’s. In one of the few attacks on her, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison described Didion as resembling “a neurasthenic Cher.”
The critic in Epstein has a good word for the book that brought Didion to national attention—Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1967), a wry portrait of California’s depraved drug culture in the mid-1960s, regarding it as an example of how she was “at her best when she insinuated herself into her subject.” He is less laudatory of the book for which she is best known, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), in which she recounted her experience of the death of her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter’s illness. For Epstein, Didion was at her worst when writing of herself. Why?
Overlooked by all the praise are the neuroses that sit at the center of the Didion persona and pervade much of her writing. She suffered migraines; she was anorexic; she had breakdowns; she had neuropathy and later shingles; she had a drinking problem (at the close of Slouching Toward Bethlehem, she allows that when researching her work on the book’s lead essay, she was herself “out of her head on gin and speed”); she was terrified of snakes; and over all lay a thick veil of depression. Hilton Als, who admired Didion above all for her writing on gender and race, refers to her “romance with despair.” Evelyn McDonnell says that “in Didion’s world, every silver lining has a cloud.” Zadie Smith writes that “the overarching theme of her work was decline—of our politics, the environment, truth, intellectualism.”
For Epstein, who grew up in a petite bourgeois Chicago where despair of this variety was simply not an option, such spiritual sloth could only have a disreputable ring. Far from explicating hopelessness, Epstein writes, “Joan Didion wallows in it.” Indeed, it became her stock in trade. She had found a theme tailor-made to win the applause of what William Hazlitt famously dubbed “the spirit of the age,” and she milked it for all it was worth. “To this day,” Epstein dryly observes, “one hears of people giving grieving friends The Year of Magical Thinking in aid of their consolation.”
Morbid sentimentality, then, and a concomitant sequacity on the part of careerist reviewers, account for Didion’s vogue more than any objective literary merit. Like many fashionable writers, Didion is paid attention to for everything but her writing. The conclusion with which Epstein ends his skewering of this unhappy woman and her lugubrious musings is characteristically barbed:
Didion was one of the first writers to rise to prominence under the reign of the triumphant therapeutic age. One can admire her writing only if one lives by the main tenets of that age. Among these are the confessional as the main mode of truth, vulnerability and fragility and despair as central to the human condition, self-esteem and personal happiness ranking higher in value than honor, courage, or generosity of spirit. All this is at the heart of Joan Didion’s writing and explains why she is admired by so many and is of so little interest to me.
What sets the writer in Epstein apart is that he has never fallen for the darlings of the Zeitgeist. He has always taken a sardonic view of such cossetted creatures. The young can scarcely know how towering Elizabeth Bishop’s reputation once was, for example, but surely Epstein is right to question whether her work ever merited it. The poet Dana Gioia might claim that “The quiet exactitude of her work showed that emotions didn’t have to be screamed to be genuine,” but the registration of emotion, however exact, does not itself make for good poetry. The late Harvard critic Helen Vendler was the most ardent keeper of the Bishop flame, insisting that, for the poet, the “charm and interest of life was that it was as it is; she believed in no religion, no afterlife, no external sanctions or morality”—all commendable sentiments in the realms of wokery. Epstein begged to differ. “Precise description has its own morality; some might argue, its own theology: God, it has been said, is in the details,” the essayist wrote in a piece entitled “Elizabeth Bishop: Never a Bridesmaid” from his Life Sentences: Literary Essays (1997).
But without a larger vision than Elizabeth Bishop was able to acquire, major literature may not be possible. Certainly, it prevented her from ever producing those large philosophical poems—”The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Waste Land,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time“—that are at the center of every major poetical corpus in our century. Critics have tried to inflate the importance of such poems of Miss Bishop’s as “The Moose” or “Filling Station” (with its ending line, “Somebody loves us all”), turning them into theologico-philosophical statements. They are lovely poems—good, nice, really quite swell poems—but they just cannot carry the weight of critical significance assigned to them.
Instead of joining his contemporaries in touting the fashionably vapid, Epstein has always remained true to the voices of the great writers whose books turned him into the discriminating reader we encounter so frequently in his literary criticism. It also enabled him to see the ruinous effect that the academy has had on the writing of poetry. In his groundbreaking essay, “Who Killed Poetry?”, which appeared in Commentary in 1988, he nailed what continues to make our contemporary poetry, with few exceptions, so unreadably bad:
The entire enterprise of poetic creation seems threatened by having been taken out of the world, chilled in the classroom, and vastly overproduced by men and women who are licensed to write it by degree if not necessarily by talent or spirit. It was Wallace Stevens who once described poetry as “a pheasant disappearing in the brush.” One gets a darting glint of it every once in a while in the work of the better contemporary poets, but to pretend that that meaty and delectable bird freely walks the land isn’t going to get him out of hiding, not soon, and maybe not ever.
The same unanimity of opinion that obtained in the academy with respect to such reputations as Elizabeth Bishop’s has morphed into the aggressively enforced unanimity of wokery, which continues to debase the university. On this malign development, in his delightful autobiography, Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life, Epstein is suitably mocking. After teaching English for 30 years at Northwestern as a visiting professor, he retired with mixed feelings. His students were bright and obliging enough, but his old employer had succumbed to what he calls “Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity, letters that, put together . . . spell D.I.E.” For the teacher emeritus, “Political correctness rules throughout Northwestern. . . . The school’s fees, owing in part to the top-heavy DIE administrators, are among the highest in the country.” No one will hear such politically incorrect truth-telling from critics of Vendler’s ilk: they are too terrified of the cancel culture. Comically enough, Northwestern eventually cancelled Epstein himself after he questioned the advisability of Jill Biden calling herself “doctor,” an outrage that eventually led the woke police to brand him a misogynist.
In his laugh-aloud-funny memoir, Epstein confirms that he inherited his contempt for the “therapeutic age” from his parents. After his mother came down with liver cancer and had to undergo lacerating chemotherapy, a friend suggested to Epstein that she join a support group. “I could easily imagine my mother’s response to my suggesting she join such a group,” Epstein says: “You feel that if I sit in a room with strangers and listen to their problems and then tell them my own, I will emerge feeling better. Is this what you’re suggesting? Is this the kind of idiot I raised as a son?”
No idiot when it comes to how the woke university disserves its black students, Epstein agrees wholeheartedly with his friend, University of Chicago professor Edward Shils, who recognized, as Epstein says, “that young Black students were wasting the opportunity of higher education to indulge in elaborate accounts of victimhood instead of studying about the great world at large and preparing to integrate themselves successfully into it.” For Epstein, who had the benefit of working in a relatively sane campus environment before the turn of the century, “political correctness and woke ideology generally make the contemporary university uninhabitable for anyone who wishes to think freely.”
In his essay, “Mary McCarthy in Retrospect” (1993), from Life Sentences, the independent thinker in Epstein has a field day revisiting another Didion-like literary idol, whose political pandering grew in direct ratio to the dwindling of her limited literary talents. “So important did correct views on Vietnam come to loom for her,” says Epstein, “that she even judged dead writers on what positions, had they been alive, they might have taken on the war there.” Poor George Orwell failed the test—he was too “anti-Communist”—and was duly struck from McCarthy’s “canon of acceptable writers.”
Here was an early manifestation of the cancelling impulse that now has all our culture by the throat. Epstein’s career has always been trained on ridiculing such impulses, especially their notorious humorlessness. Here he is on why McCarthy and another writer cut from the same cloth managed to secure their undeserved reputations: “The two intellectual women whose careers have had the greatest publicity in America over the past half-century,” Epstein wrote in 1993, “Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, have both been striking-looking: Mary McCarthy on the model of the natural American beauty, Susan Sontag, more academically, on the model of the bohemian graduate-student lover every bookish man feels he ought to have had. If all this sounds unbearably sexist, or plain masculine stupid, do stop a moment to consider whether Miss McCarthy’s or Miss Sontag’s career would have been the same if either had been 4’10,” weighed 165 pounds, had sandy-colored frizzy hair, and wore largish round spectacles.”
After the correspondence of Philip Larkin was published, revealing the Hull poet to have been less than a choir boy when it came to sex and race, Epstein wrote “Mr. Larkin Gets A Life” (1994), in which he says, with a gallantry rare in our censorious time, “I wish Larkin had never said such things because they can only be used against him by people who, along with being impressed with their own virtue, cannot stand too much complication in human character.” John Gross once praised Epstein as a protégé of H. L. Mencken. No, Epstein has always been his own man. Mencken would never have seen Larkin’s sins in the genuinely charitable light in which Epstein does.
In his elegiac piece, “Coming of Age in Chicago” (1969) from his essay collection, A Literary Education (2014), Epstein says of the place where he grew up, “When I look back on it now, it all seems a bit like Damon Runyon, but it was very rich stuff at the time.” The lesson of his hometown was categorical: “at all times and all ways, take particular care to distinguish yourself from the marks, the rubes and the general lot of losers. In Chicago there . . . [are] finally only two classes: winners and losers.” This is where Epstein picked up the shrewdness of his critical intelligence, but it was his wide creative reading that gave him his empathy. At the same time, in addition to shrewdness and empathy, Epstein’s writing carries a moral seriousness, and we can see this in how he continues to bait the cancel culture by defying its rabid anti-Americanism. In his autobiography, he proudly admits that:
As kids we watched war movies, from which we came away proud to be American. Most of us had relatives who had gone off to fight . . . We did not, we could not, look upon the United Sates as a racist, cruelly capitalist, essentially corrupt country in need of revolutionary change. We thought, most of us still think, the United States, for all its flaws, the most interesting, the most generous, the grandest country in the world.
Epstein inherited his independence of mind from his mother, Belle, who, riding her wonderfully well-appointed maroon Cadillac Seville through “restricted” neighborhoods in Chicago—that is, neighborhoods off-limits to Jews—would urge her son not to allow such infra dig bigotry to rattle him: “Who would want to live among such dreary, dull people anyway?” If his mother delighted in driving in fancy cars and sallying forth in mink fur coats—the prerogatives of a wife of a hard-working, well-off, generous husband—her son would delight in the very best writers, whether Montaigne, Henry James, V. S. Pritchett, Joseph Conrad, or Willa Cather.
For so admirable a stylist himself, Epstein is good on the versatility of style that one encounters in the novels and other writings of James. “We Jamesians are not so numerous as all that,” he says in one of his uncollected pieces,
but we are united in our admiration for Henry James, and it is true that we tend to be in the habit, snobbish no doubt, of properly estimating people by their capacity to appreciate the style of the master. In full flight that style can be ironic, comic, penetrating, super-subtle, regal, dazzling. I write “that style,” but, as every Jamesian knows, there are different Henry James styles: the rather straightforward style of Washington Square, “Daisy Miller,” and the early novels and stories; the somewhat denser but still straightforward style of The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima and the other novels of the middle period; and, finally, the more convoluted, circumambulatory style on exhibit in The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Yet a fourth James style is presented in his autobiographies.
One style that Epstein overlooks is the style of the travelogues, which can be exquisitely good. Here, from The American Scene (1905), is James on one of the inmates of the Philadelphia Penitentiary whom he encountered on his visit to his native land after an absence of over 20 years. “I talked for a long time with a charming reprieved murderer,” the novelist writes in that delightfully rococo volume, “whom I half expected, at any moment, to see ring for coffee and cigars; he explained with all urbanity, and with perfect lucidity, the real sense of the appearance against him, but I none the less felt sure that his merit was largely in the refinement wrought in him by so many years of easy club life. He was as natural a subject for commutation as for conviction.”
Epstein’s plug for Joseph Conrad epitomizes not only his critical smarts but his moral acuity. “Despite his own need for belief, his own deeply reserved but quite real hope for a different and better world,” Epstein writes, “Conrad took it as his task as a novelist to show the many ways in which men and women, through their moral blindness . . . make life harder for themselves and even for those they all too ineptly love.” One will never hear this sort of thing in today’s English departments: they are too busy dandling political grievances. And yet its wisdom epitomizes Epstein, who knows that Conrad, for all his awareness of man’s manifold failings, “must have harbored a clear view of human goodness, for how else could be have so intricately known, and so potently portrayed, the manifold ways in which it could be betrayed?” For the life-affirming critic in Epstein, “Conrad’s own career is itself a stellar example of fidelity; to our moral heritage, to the perhaps impossible but nonetheless necessary ideal of civilization, to the fundamental truths we all know and choose to forget.”
Epstein’s memoir is full of good social history. When young Epstein asked his father, a successful importer of costume jewelry, if they could have a Christmas tree and his father said, “No . . . we were Jews and Jews didn’t have Christmas trees,” Epstein thought to himself, “I didn’t get it, but what I did get was that, as a Jew, I was somehow different.” It was only later, as the author says, that he “came to realize that Judaism, along with being one of the world’s oldest religions, was a very superior club, one whose members over the centuries survived the most vicious persecutions, while accounting for some of the world’s most impressive scientific, artistic, and intellectual achievements—a club in which I was more than delighted to be a member.” Elsewhere, he says that the highly elaborate fraternity world of college shed interesting light on the “ambiguous—also ambivalent—Jewish attitude toward the Gentile world,” a world most of whose members hailed from small towns ruled by Protestant mores. “On the one hand, Jews felt excluded from this world; on the other, they were mildly contemptuous of it,” Epstein writes. “A Pi Phi might well be beautiful, but she also figured to be, how should one say, more than a touch unimaginative; a girl to take out on dates, but decidedly not to marry.”
In looking back at Epstein’s work, we can see that he has joined the good writers he emulated in youth not by truckling to the dictates of fashion but by remaining true to his unflaggingly high standards. In his memoir, he confesses: “The splendid tradition of English essayists includes Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Max Beerbohm, Desmond McCarthy and George Orwell, and it would please me to think that any of my essayistic scribblings might have a place in that tradition.” They do. What he says of Pritchett is equally true of himself: “Brick by brick, essay by essay . . . he has over the years built himself a modest yet quite sturdy literary edifice. Writing for a small and probably diminishing audience, he has never lowered his standard or sullied his integrity.”
The only thing that needs amending to this otherwise just analogy would be the size of Epstein’s likely future audience. Far from diminishing, it will only grow. He is a classic, after all, and the audience for classics will always grow. It is the audience for the work of mediocrities that withers away.
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