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PARTISAN REVIEW
that most mattered to him were as old as the hills on which they were
first posed: Why were we born and why must we die? How can God
allow us to suffer? And perhaps most important of all, why is
humankind often so barbarous, so bloodthirsty?
Art, rather than philosophy and certainly rather than politics, was the
best way to explore such riddles, but only if Singer believed himself in
the grip of a story only he could tell.
In
very different ways, Ozick also
feels that essential grip, even as she also knows the matter is infinitely
more complicated than it probably was for Singer. One wonders which
side Ozick might take on the hypothetical question that so separated
Howe from Singer.
It
is easy to imagine her sharing Howe's moral
stance, just as it is equally easy to imagine her siding with Singer. Or she
might simply duck the issue altogether, claiming that hypotheticals, like
parlor games, don't interest her.
In
1948,
however, there was nothing hypothetical about Pound's
nomination for that year's Bollingen Prize. Not surprisingly, the New
Critic Allen Tate made an eloquent case for poetic accomplishment as
the prize's sole criterion while another committee member, Karl Shapiro,
fairly boiled with indignation. To reward a fascist sympathizerltraitor–
and a vicious anti-Semite in the bargain-was more than Shapiro could
bear, especially since the very poems that Tate so admired contained a
heavy share of Jew baiting. Howe sided with Shapiro, arguing that the
wounds of the Holocaust were too raw, too heart cracking, for him
to
read Pound's anti-Semitic ravings with the disinterest that modernist
writer-critics regarded as a badge of honor. Tate responded
to
the flap
by feeling that his honor had been besmirched, and that chivalry
demanded that he act.
In
George Steiner's memoir,
Errata,
he tells of
being summoned to Tate's apartment and then being asked what the
Jewish position on dueling might be-this because Tate was planning
to
challenge Shapiro to pistols at forty paces.
The conflict between literature and politics still abides, albeit without
the clear prose that once characterized literary debate.
In
this regard,
Ozick's essays are an important counterexample, a way of demonstrat–
ing that passion need not express itself in heavy-water theory or pre–
tentiousness. But it is her fiction that is at issue here, and three examples
are particularly revealing where her practical choices and aesthetic sen–
sibility are concerned. The passages I've chosen cover a relatively early
story ("Envy; or, Yiddish in America,"
1969),
a novel from what might
be called her middle period
(The Canllibal Galaxy,
1983),
and
The
PlIt–
termesser Papers
(1997),
a recent work that cobhles a number of
