Editors’ Introduction: Cynthia Ozick and the Art of Nonfiction

A 2016 New York Times profile of Cynthia Ozick summarized her career in the following terms:This special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature focuses on Ozick's essays, criticism, reviews, memoiristic pieces, and certain unclassifiable hybrids, fragments, and thought experiments—the productions, as it were, of the other hand. It aims to take the measure of this ambidextrous author through her nonfiction, while keeping in mind the awkwardness of this category for a writer whose essays frequently display a defiant blurring of the fictive and the factual.From her home in New Rochelle, Ozick has over the decades quietly produced one of the major bodies of literary essays in contemporary American letters. Her essays are vivid and mannered productions. Much of their interest resides in the linguistic virtuosity with which Ozick gives voice to attachments and aversions that some readers may find bewilderingly fierce. And then there is her magnificent style—for she is indisputably a stylish writer, and her essays are incomparably artful in tone and execution.For some, a little Ozick goes a long way. The opinions expressed in the essays can turn readers on or off. What certain readers find stimulating, others may find grating. Her obsession with belles lettres, with recondite knowledge, with Henry James; her mournful nostalgia for a bygone age in which literature and the humanities claimed greater centrality; her conservative cultural and Jewish values; her interplay of piety and politics—this array of commitments and obsessions may not be yours. Certain pieces are nakedly combative. The flood of strong opinions issuing from Ozick's pen is, on occasion, diverted into harsh political polemic. Her writing can shade into cruelty, most lamentably in a 2003 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which she declared that "the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread." Such pronouncements make up a small fraction of Ozick's nonfictional corpus but, for some, they mar it.This special issue is dedicated to her substantial contributions to the literary essay. An irony of her essayistic career is that the same intensity and unyieldingness on display in her political writing is, in the main current of her work, the source of significant literary invention.Scholars have rarely considered Ozick's essays as a whole. Some naming of features is therefore in order. The moods in Ozick's essays vary from flippant to ferocious, from charming to coruscating, from capricious and sentimental to comic. What unites them is their intensity. These are essays that grab you by the lapels and make you feel their particular commitments. Notwithstanding her periodic attacks on the vapidity of the professoriate, her critical essays display enormous learning: the fruits of a lifetime of passionate reading. They are at once voluble and precise. Even reviews written as occasional journalism, sculpted at speed against a deadline, are cast in elaborate and electric prose. Her sentences, humming with well-chosen adjectives and striking images, are always aware of cadence and rhythm. Expert rhetorical maneuvers—a battery of questions, exclamations, polemical summations—move her arguments from node to node. And no matter her subject, she brings to it a pugilistic verve that is likely to surprise even the sturdiest of opponents. Gordon Lish, who championed Ozick's work when he was an editor at Esquire, recalls Ozick debating Harold Bloom in 1978, a performance she recapped a year later in an essay. "She beat the crap out of him," Lish said. "She cleaned his plow" (quoted in Harvey 2016). Her reputation for audacity and uncompromising acumen endures.Given the merits of her nonfiction, why has it escaped scholarly attention? One reason may be Ozick herself. She has emphasized, in several interviews, that she sees her fiction as more important and satisfying than her essays. In the foreword to Art he has thrown himself on "the altar of literature" (1987, 7). His procedures for writing reviews are manifestly those of an artist. He composes in a frenzy of inspiration, seeing before him, in his mind's eye, his finished work, picturing it as a polished vessel, a perfect globe. His habits of composition, in fact, closely resemble Ozick's own—reading through the day and writing through the night, plunging, in the silent darkness, into what she calls, in an essay on Kafka, the nocturnal "vortex" of creation (2017, 112). The Puttermesser Papers (1997), published a decade after The Messiah of Stockholm, selects as its heroine not a writer but a reader. And Ozick makes clear that for bibliophilic Puttermesser, nonfiction ranks among life's divine pleasures. Puttermesser dreams of a Garden of Eden where she eats fudge and "reads and reads":Nonfiction, in this rendering, earns a place in paradise alongside the novel.In several of her essays, too, Ozick emerges as a champion of nonfictional literary forms. She celebrates Hazlitt, Montaigne, Thomas De Quincey, and other classic essayists in "She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body." She looks to the essay as a species of imaginative literature, "a stroll through someone's mazy mind" (2000, 182). Another elevation of the literary essay occurs in "'It Takes a Great Deal of History to Produce a Little Literature.'" Lamenting the demise of the "essay" in favor of the shabby "article," Ozick places the literary essay alongside the novel as exemplifying the "nobility of art"—attributing the view, ventriloquially, to Henry James. The literary essay needs defense, she argues, because it "is connected to the self-conscious progression of a culture"; it is the literary mechanism by which we become aware of our indebtedness to the past (2017, 536). Ozick's rousing piece "The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel's Ghostly Twin" makes even larger claims for the importance of criticism in maintaining the vitality of the literary system. Criticism, she holds, provides an "infrastructure" that brings coherence to the literary world. It is the novel's "ghostly twin" (2017, 545, 556). Not only is serious criticism required for the unification and interpretation of a literary culture; it is also capable, she asserts (in an argument reminiscent of Matthew Arnold), of calling such a culture into existence.Ozick is acknowledged in some quarters as a master of the craft of criticism. "For nearly four decades now, Cynthia Ozick has been among the most vigorous critics in the land," William Giraldi noted in 2018 (118). Yet literary-critical circles have been slow to grant her the authority of others of her generation. Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, and other contemporaries have won wide fame for their essays and inspired many imitators. Why not Ozick? One reason is that she is not an easy mentor: eccentric and capricious, she is always unmistakably herself. Another reason is that she is not her own best advocate: in interviews and essays, she can be self-deprecating to a fault, eager to relay her failures, to confess the errors of her ways. Another reason still is that she is a difficult critic to emulate, her sui generis brilliance hard to model oneself on. The critical persona she has fashioned is not, in the main, oriented toward the future, or interested in providing a program that younger critics might adopt. She presents herself, rather, as the last scion of an embattled and beleaguered line. Her reactionary streak makes her a fascinating dissenting voice on the literary scene. But it is a voice that does not ask for followers.To enter Ozick's essays is to enter the sensibility of a person who experiences the world as polarized, as provoking strongly negative or positive emotions and thoughts. There is no shilly-shallying indifference here: it's a world of bouquets and brickbats, of five-star raves and one-star pans. The obliquely autobiographical character of Ozick's criticism ratchets up the intensity further. Ozick's novels and stories are cloistered, immaculate, and artificial. Her fiction sometimes seems as if it bears little reference beyond itself: literature as a (splendid) closed system. Yet her essays and criticism are, by necessity, tethered to reality. They conjure up the authors under discussion with vividness—showing us Henry James stumbling off the stage after being jeered at Guy Domville, or Kafka masticating his fruits and nuts at the family dinner table. And they reveal Ozick's private history of reading, offering a window into the feelings and fixations of the woman holding the pen, whose attachments to the literary figures about whom she writes are complex, emotional, and sometimes inexplicably strong. Some of the most powerful essays are outrightly memoiristic, often in a comic mode. But even her most scholarly productions (considerations of idolatry or the fate of Yiddish literature or the operations of metaphor) feel intimate rather than detached. Much of the thrill of reading Ozick's criticism derives from sensing the personality that bristles behind the polished sentences.The literary landscape has moved on considerably in Ozick's lifetime. Yet even in her earliest essays she is attentive to her old-fashioned ways, to her young fogeyness. The essays cast self-conscious glances at their own flashes of antiquarianism, acknowledging, for instance, that "belles-lettres," the expression that once captured the "feeling for literary culture as a glowing wholeness," already sounds outdated, weak, and pompous by the late 1980s (Ozick 1989, 92). When she has writer's block and wants to daydream over C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, she has to hunt their books down in the neighboring town, which has "a much smaller if more traditionally bookish library" (95). She knows where she belongs. She is not averse to revising herself: she has written of her embarrassed rereading of her "offensively whimsical" take on the 1960s women's movement, and of her sense that feminism, to her, was then a lonely, private passion she was unused to divulging publicly (1983, 261–62).Zoe Heller (2016) compares Ozick's "combative and purposeful" essays to "tracts"—a parallel that suggests the religious fervor with which Ozick pursues her subjects. Like a Victorian sage, Ozick is both critic and moralist. Many of the essays emit a cry of pain at a world in which literature is devalued. The stubbornness of her moral and aesthetic commitments sharpens her criticism, but sometimes renders her essays nakedly ideological or absurdly uncompromising. While this is often true of her polemical writings about Judaism, Israel, and the Holocaust, it is also true of some of her aesthetically oriented essays. Several of her judgments would have seemed stodgy a century ago. She is skeptical, for example, of the art of cinema, claiming that when film succeeds, it does so usually because of its "resemblance to paintings or engravings . . . Where film is most art, it is least a novelty" (2017, 499). And she insists, in "The Din in the Head," that the inner life, the "secret voices in the marrow," can be found only in the novel: the novel and "nowhere else" (2006, 162). The arc of her career bends toward an embrace of antiquarianism.Given her appreciation of the essay as an aesthetic form, her sense of literary criticism as a moral responsibility, and a wealth of firm opinions clamoring for expression in fiercely argued prose, it is no surprise that Ozick developed into one of the literary essay's leading practitioners. Still, it must have been with a winking sense of her own position that she observed in 1987 that "few novelists hazard essays" (1989, 94) and, again, in "She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body" that "true essayists rarely write novels" (2000, 185). Why did she do both? Turning to her assessment of C. P. Snow, the novel-writing scientist, one discovers a partial answer. "He chose to make a monolith out of splinters. Why did he do it? In order to have one unanimity confront another" (1989, 91). In other words: hybridity, the mingling of strategies from fiction and nonfiction, is what the essay in its great plasticity can afford.Hybridity is a key feature of Ozick's essays. Her capacity to combine critical and creative approaches may well be the secret of the essays' longevity and continued relevance. The essays show the benefit of her training in 1950s New Criticism, with its devotion to precise, faithful close readings. Still, their stylish, imaginative leaps owe much to her decades of fictional practice. She vivifies her criticism with an array of fictive techniques. We get precise visual images (Edith Wharton writing in bed without a corset, bent over the writing board, dropping pages on the floor), imaginative speculations about the authors she is writing about (her fictive reconstruction of the marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf), fanciful counterfactuals (her suggestion that had Anne Frank lived, she would have still become a famous writer, perhaps in the line of Nadine Gordimer). As a critic, she intervenes into the literature she writes about with unusual daring. (And, for Ozick, it is almost always literature—rather than painting, or music, or architecture, or film, or dance—that draws her interest.) She grants herself license to imagine her way into the lives of the authors under discussion, as well as to revise the texts she conjures up. Even holy texts are not barred from Ozick's critical impingements. In her essay on the Book of Ruth, she inserts sweet-smelling flowers into a story of grain-gleaning. "The flowers are there all the same," she pronounces, "even if the text doesn't show them" (2017, 251). Similarly, at the level of style, Ozick shows little restraint. She is unafraid of exclamation marks, rhetorical questions, lavish alliteration, and verbal play. Some novelist-critics save their best prose for their fiction. Ozick almost never phones it in; every sentence is lacquered.Ozick has progressively expanded the possibilities of what literary criticism can do. Her nonfictions have enlarged the essay's formal repertoire. The signature paradox of her criticism is her ability to introduce experimental tendencies into essays that exalt tradition, pay reverence to canonical authors, and promote conservative values.The essay, as Denise Gigante puts it, has always been a "protean form" (2014). Ozick's essays, promiscuous in borrowing protocols from fiction, take advantage of the hybridity inherent to this mongrel form. Indeed, the best contemporary essay writing has adopted this method. One scholar of the essay form, Ned Stuckey-French, points out that the twenty-first-century American essay has kicked against the form's soporific associations with "belles-lettres past; composition classrooms; and verifiable truth" (2020, 293) and sought out hybridity (integrating protocols from lyric poetry, for example) to survive and retain relevance. Ozick's reasons for adopting a hybrid approach are different, and her path has involved adapting rather than rejecting belles lettres. But the results are no less exciting. By reinvigorating the essay form with features more often found in fiction, Ozick found a way to respond to the fact that literary culture was no longer a glowing wholeness. Within the confines of her essays, literary culture could be momentarily restored to unity. Here she is describing her essay writing as a hybrid process where fluid creativity surges into insight:To her, writing essays feels like another form of storytelling. For Ozick, this approach to the essay acts as a bridge, a suture, a reparation, a making whole again, a way of shoring a few fragments against ruin. Like C. P. Snow, she makes a monolith out of splinters. That is all that her essays do, and it is everything that matters, she explains:Here, she lifts the veil on her method but remains utterly modest. But it's impossible to miss what she has revealed. Isn't she just this kind of person-of-letters? The one taking on and synthesizing a range of available forms?The timing of this special issue is auspicious. As this volume entered its final stages of preparation, Yale University opened for research an extensive archive of Ozick's papers. The collection includes drafts recording the evolution of many essays and stories, as well as several novels, research materials, notebooks, photographs, and sketchbooks with original drawings by Ozick. It also includes 176 boxes of correspondence. (Future readers may well rank the letter among the literary forms in which Ozick excelled.) This trove of material will no doubt serve as a basis for future discoveries about one of modern American literature's most enigmatic and essential writers.This special issue provides new pathways into her writing. It seeks to spur scholarly consideration of her work, including further inquiry into the nonfictional side of her corpus. The contributors include specialists in Jewish and Jewish American thought and literature, but also scholars of modernism, early modern literature, and transatlantic literary history—an index of the capacious range of issues that Ozick's nonfiction raises.The contributors to this special issue have approached Ozick's nonfictional corpus from a range of critical perspectives: appraising her engagement with Jewish thought, feminism, and aesthetics; mapping the novelistic, counterfactual, and theatrical features of her essays; and elucidating her relationships with prior literary essayists, including Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Lionel Trilling.Three contributors have focused on how Ozick's investment in traditions of rabbinical and religious commentary have colored her essays, in particular her writings on art making and idolatry. In "Ozick's Idols," Joe Moshenska takes as his starting point Ozick's charge that Harold Bloom's literary-critical system amounts to a form of idolatry: the worship of art in place of God. Following Ozick's fascination with idol-making and idol-breaking across her fictional and nonfictional writings, Moshenska shows how she moves from an early vision of the imagination as essentially idolatrous (such that the idea of a "Jewish writer" presents itself as a contradiction in terms, because to write is to erect idols) to a more moderate view in which idolatry is a province of the imagination that, while perilous, can be controlled.Evan Goldstein's essay identifies a similar conflict between Ozick's aestheticism (what she refers to in "Toward a New Yiddish" as the "religion of Art") and her commitment to Jewish thought. His essay considers the residue of aestheticism in Ozick's essays ranging from "Toward a New Yiddish" (1972) to "Tradition and (or Against) the Jewish Writer" (2006), and particularly her relation to Henry James. Goldstein argues that her consistent attachment to modernism challenges notions of Ozick as a polemicist for an anti-aesthetic Jewish ethics. In so doing, he reexamines the question of Ozick's Jewishness and contributes to what Benjamin Schreier characterizes as the non-identitarian project of critical Jewish literary study.Na'amit Sturm Nagel's "The Lord of History in Cynthia Ozick's 'Ruth'" shows Ozick playing the rabbi, adopting techniques of Talmudic interpretation in her rereading of the Book of Ruth. Ozick's retelling of this ancient text unites biblical and familial history, employing overlapping registers of time to escort the story of Ruth into the present. Ozick's approach in "Ruth" is reminiscent, Nagel argues, of transtemporal visions of history developed by Talmudic rabbis, who in their commentaries boldly traverse temporal gaps in order to weave the biblical past into the Jewish present.The next three essays focus on Ozick's debts to prior literary essayists. In "Ozick's Feminism and the Woman Writer," Emily Coit uses Ozick's relationship to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, as well as her late-twentieth-century feminist peers, as a lens through which to assess her gender politics. Coit surveys the key claims of Ozick's polemics against "the woman writer" from the 1970s onward. Dissenting from the concept of the "woman writer" that other feminist critics in this period found crucial, Ozick rejects the relevance of gender for literary authorship. She instead champions notions of human universality, arguing (as Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously claimed) that the mind is "androgynous." How can Ozick defend the particularity of the Jewish writer but also refuse the "woman writer" any particularity at all? Examining Ozick's thinking about sex and gender, this essay explains this apparent contradiction by considering the relationship between her "classical feminism" and her ideas about genius and art making.Bryan Cheyette explores similar issues in "Empowering the Literary Essay: Cynthia Ozick and the Search for Authority," which discerns the salience of gender in Ozick's own essay making. He observes that Ozick characterizes the literary essay as a gendered "secret self" ("She") endowed with powers of persuasion. Although her nonfiction brings in many surrogate father-figures (Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Elie Wiesel, among others), she refashions their paternal legacy and cuts down their towering presence by focusing her essays on their most emasculated moments. She returns to these male authority figures at times when they are unknown, humiliated, impoverished, or otherwise diminished. This diminution, Cheyette contends, enables her to encounter them as equals, to meet them on a level playing field (given her own rejection as a Jewish woman writer in the 1950s and '60s). Yet it is in her didactic essays that she distinguishes herself most markedly from her precursors. Her writing about the Holocaust exposes, for Ozick, the limits of the literary essay's power.In "Between Granite and Rainbow: Woolfian Literary Speculation in Ozick's Nonfiction," Lillian Hingley identifies a characteristic technique in Ozick's criticism: her willingness to imaginatively rewrite the lives of real-life authors, such as Franz Kafka, Anne Frank, and Virginia Woolf. This devising of literary-historical counterfactuals, Hingley argues, has an important precedent in Woolf's own critical writings—as in the appeal to "Shakespeare's sister" in A Room with a View, or Woolf's idea that Jane Austen, had she lived longer, would have developed into a proto-modernist. Whereas Woolf characteristically employed such counterfactuals to redress the historical omission of women writers, Ozick's adoption of this technique targets the suppression of Jewish writers silenced by historical violence.The final three essays consider the major themes in Ozick's nonfiction: failure and success, youth and age, melodrama and imagination, the self and biography, and the challenges posed by different literary forms.Ozick confesses, in one of many essays proclaiming her outsider status among the literati, that as an aspiring but unpublished author she "filled volumes of Woolworth diaries with the outcry of failure." Although critics have often propped up this pose, noting her late entrance onto the literary scene, Charlie Tyson's essay destabilizes it, discovering in Ozick's nonfiction an obsession with youthful literary success. Ozick's "age-sorrow," Tyson argues, expresses a painful alienation from herself. Age-youth rivalry is one of the central fictions to which her essayistic personae cling: a recurring atemporal drama of abjection in which, no matter her real age or success, Ozick is forever clamoring at the gates. This preoccupation with failure is also threaded through Henry James, Jewish history, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where Ozick recognizes the compensations of writing from the margins. Ultimately, Ozick credits failure as fundamental to the making of literature: the shadow-twin of artistic aspiration.Michèle Mendelssohn clarifies such procedures of self-dramatization in "The Melodrama of Cynthia Ozick's Imagination," finding in Ozick's nonfiction a deployment of melodramatic tactics. Ozick is eager to ratchet up her arguments to emotional extremes, to frame literary disputes as matters of good vs. evil. In her attraction to the agonistic and the operatic, to the dramatization of spiritual conflict, Ozick finds a key precursor in Henry James, one of literature's most influential exemplars of what Peter Brooks calls the "melodramatic imagination." Through readings of Ozick's essays on Anne Frank and Henry James, Mendelssohn shows how Ozick relies on melodramatic patterning to achieve her emotional effects. Ozick uses literary and theatrical techniques to make us feel deeply the stakes of literature itself, stakes that, for Ozick, are always moral as well as aesthetic.In the final essay, Susanne Klingenstein considers the demanding theory of literary high art Ozick has developed and tried to live by. The dominant theme of Ozick's early fiction was the arrogance, vanity, idolatry, and maddening ambition driving the creation of art. While Ozick later arrived at a rapprochement between Jewish moral imperatives and art making, she did so by framing her fiction as "midrash, or fictive commentary," texts in need of interpretation. Moreover, she split her writing into fiction and essay, two distinct but complementary genres that differ in their poetics and mode of composition. Ozick's essays comment on the world and mark the passage of time; her fictions are eerily abstract, showing timeless ideas in action. The rift between the two genres, Klingenstein argues, delineates Ozick's theory of art as something that exists outside the social world and must be pursued with merciless intensity.