Can Ozick Escape Politics?

By JONATHAN GRONER

QUARREL & QUANDARY
Essays
By Cynthia Ozick.
247 pages. Knopf. $25.00.

An essay, Cynthia Ozick tells us in this collection, is "a thing of the imagination." It has "no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance." The ideal essay, from Ozick's perspective, is detached from the world, apolitical, a thing of beauty for its own sake. After all, Ozick makes haste to point out in her introduction, "I resist the political, and am reluctant to take on its spots and stripes."

In an essay on essays included in this book (what an interesting self-referential idea!), Ozick argues that she may not, for example, be intellectually persuaded by the ideology of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a general matter, but that "Emerson—his voice, his language, his music, persuades me." To Ozick, the essay is a literary artifact, a window into the workings of a writer's mind, an opportunity to be seduced and taken in.

This is the standard Ozick sets for herself as an essayist. But the book itself shows how difficult it is for Ozick to live up to this ideal and how strong the tug of political engagement can be. In Quarrel & Quandary, as in her previous anthologies, she succeeds in the immediate and daunting goal of capturing and holding the reader's constant attention. Whether she is writing about Holocaust literature, the strange fate of Anne Frank's diary in the American theater, the cinematic quality of Henry James, or the endless vitality of New York City, her trains of thought stop at unusual stations. Ozick on the Unabomber: "What feels alien to America is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism."

Ozick on the book of Job: "[Job's] new knowledge is this: that a transcendent God denies us a god of our own devising." Ozick on New York: "What Manhattan talks about, obliquely or openly—what it thinks about, whatever the season—is ambition." But Ozick's situation is actually much more complicated than that. It turns out that purity and precision of thought and expression are not enough for her. In another part of this book, Ozick obliquely declares her true literary aspirations. It seems quite clear to me from the essay "Public Intellectuals" that Ozick wishes to be considered a member of that rare species. A public intellectual, she writes, is one who knows "that history is where we swim, that we are in it, that we can't see over or around it, that it is our ineluctable task to grapple with it." Socrates, Isaiah, Maimonides, Voltaire, and Hannah Arendt—quite an assemblage!—were public intellectuals, because they engaged themselves with society. Montaigne, George Eliot, and Lionel Trilling were not, because they stayed resolutely out of politics.

On the evidence provided by this book, it seems to me that it is hard for Ozick to resist the temptation to go "public." The world is too much with her. Evil is a presence in human history, and withdrawal from the public stage is not an option. The whole point of the distinction she makes between public and nonpublic intellectuals is to excoriate E.M. Forster for advocating "art for art's sake" in 1941 as a credo in the face of the oncoming Holocaust. That attitude is morally unacceptable to Ozick; to refuse to challenge Hitler is in effect to be his accomplice.

Similarly, Ozick assails William Styron's Sophie's Choice on the grounds that Styron made the main character of the novel a concentration camp inmate who is a Polish Catholic, not a Jew. The result of this writer's choice is "to dilute and to obscure, and ultimately to expunge, the real nature of the Holocaust," she writes. These are most distinctly not the words of the poet, the "free mind at play" that Ozick presents to us elsewhere as the ideal of the essayist. To the extent that Ozick's politics can be discerned from this collection, they are neither blandly liberal nor conventionally conservative. They are best described as the result of the fierce application of seriousness and cold realism to human events. In contrast, thinkers who are obsessed with "lightness," with the "ephemeral," (some of Ozick's chosen words of disdain) are those who prove themselves "minor in brain and intuition."

Ozick can be infuriating, prickly, thorny, and sometimes prone to self-contradiction. But she is a master of the English sentence. Quarrel & Quandary more than repays a careful reading.