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In his fourth collection of literary essays, Epstein knowledgeably displays his affinity for the old school of bare-knuckles criticism as practiced by H.L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson. The former editor of the American Scholar is no more afraid of airing personal preferences (or prejudices) in literature's service—from Montaigne to Solzhenitsyn—than Mencken or Wilson were when promoting Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald or deflating overlarge reputations. Dreiser and Fitzgerald are reappraised here, along with John Dos Passos and Ambrose Bierce, and are judged selectively on aesthetics, moral purpose, and charm. Thus, Dreiser is pardoned for writing badly but seriously, Dos Passos for writing overambitiously but inventively, and Fitzgerald for writing self-pityingly but lyrically. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop get off less lightly, with Epstein castigating them as much for muddled personal lives as for poetic weaknesses. By contrast, Philip Larkin gets a sympathetic hearing for posterity, despite charges of alcoholism, misogyny, and bigotry. Epstein's double standard—defending those under attack and vice versa—is most telling in his two essays on that improbable married couple of letters, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. The prickly Wilson proved a repugnant character in his journals, especially the priapic, misanthropic senior citizen of The Sixties, but Epstein still asserts his greatness on the basis of such books as Shores of Light and Patriotic Gore. McCarthy, no less prickly or ambitious than Wilson, instead gets relegated to the merely clever and outdated, though her literary instincts were arguably sharper (especially about their friend Nabokov) and her fiction demonstrably better.
Life Sentences, however unexpectedly and puzzlingly lenient or harsh, at least shows that literature is worth arguing over, and it reminds us that there is much in it to profitably argue about.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN is the author of the best-selling Snobbery and of Friendship , among other books, and was formerly editor of the American Scholar . His work has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper’s Magazine , the Atlantic Monthly , and other magazines. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.
| Introduction | 9 | |
| Acknowledgments | 13 | |
| Reading Montaigne | 17 | |
| C. P. Cavafy, A Poet in History | 37 | |
| The Enduring V. S. Pritchett | 54 | |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald's Third Act | 72 | |
| Wise, Foolish, Enchanting Lady Mary | 89 | |
| Kenneth Tynan, The Unshy Pornographer | 109 | |
| Elizabeth Bishop: Never a Bridesmaid | 128 | |
| Life Sentences, The Art of Joseph Conrad | 151 | |
| The Man Who Wrote Too Much | 171 | |
| Bye-Bye, Bunny | 189 | |
| La Rochefoucauld: Maximum Maximist | 205 | |
| Why Solzhenitsyn Will Not Go Away | 224 | |
| Mr. Larkin Gets a Life | 236 | |
| Mary McCarthy in Retrospect | 255 | |
| Ambrose Bierce, Our Favorite Cynic | 274 | |
| Mistah Lowell - He Dead | 286 | |
| Dreiser's Great Good Girl | 308 | |
| U.S.A. Today | 322 | |
| Sam Lipman at The NEA | 334 |
Overview