PARTIAL PAYMENTS
Essays on Writers and Their Lives
Joseph Epstein
New York: Norton, 1989
429 pp., $18.95
It is our fortune--good or bad--to live in a time when almost all art aspires not to the conditions of music, but to the condition of the supermarket. I hasten to add that this is only secondarily a question of selling. The primary consideration is to attract attention, without which no audience, no sale, and often no existence is possible. Works of art past, present, and incipient, are goods; they are given the title of "projects" or "properties," and treated accordingly.
Criticism in such conditions comes very close to the art (and it is an art) of advertising, in a positive or a negative mode. The critic is subject to all the temptations of the advertiser, whether he wishes to share the relatively rare experience of consuming high-quality goods or is inclined to warn the potential customer against something that seems faulty or meretricious. These temptations apply whether the work under discussion is contemporary or, in Samuel Lipman's phrase, part of our artistic capital.
A case in point is Joseph Epstein's new collection of short essays, Partial Payments. He calls these pieces exercises in literary portraiture in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and V.S. Pritchett. The book's epigraph, a quote from G.C. Lichtenberg, implies that these sketches (they are too scant to be called portraits) are meant as payment of Epstein's debts to the subjects. Exactly what the debts are remains uncertain, since Epstein's own writing--at least in the short works I have read--shows very little if any obvious influence of the figures he discusses here, with the possible exception of E.B. White. For me, Epstein is one of the masters of that civilized American tone in prose which is informal without being vulgar and precise without ever becoming tedious. At its best, his style is as lucid and clean as the lines of a Haydn sonata. His stories and autobiographical sketches are as relaxing, comforting, and amusing, and ring as true, as anything I have seen by any writer of his generation working in these forms.
With Partial Payments, however, we are stalking very different territory. This is, as Epstein says, not traditional literary criticism but literary journalism, using glimpses of a writer's life to throw some light on his (or her) work. Such treatment naturally involves a certain amount of judgment on the man. Both of these are awkward matters, because the constraints of journalism--mainly enforced brevity--make for a certain amount of shorthand and superficiality. This restriction sometimes leads Epstein into a species of Sunday newspaper formulae: he throws up concepts like truth, art, meaning, good writing, freedom, and great poems of the age with no clue to the criteria that lie behind these expressions. Nevertheless, he handles most of his twenty subjects sensibly (I will mention a couple of exceptions below) and smoothly and provides a good consumer's tour of the writers ranging in seriousness from the inconsequential and dated S.J. Perelman to the formidable Marguerite Yourcenar. I do not mean that as faint praise. Epstein brings a gentle touch and a deft wit to this material, generally avoiding the deadening sense of routine and entre nous that tends to infect such discussions, even in very good magazines. And
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