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PARTISAN REVIEW
ern canon. What did it mean? What was it? Why did it sound so awk–
ward, so out of tune, so self-conscious, so-one hesitates to say-jejune?
Why did it have the effect of a very young man attempting to talk like the
grownups? And what had become of those grownups anyhow? Why
were they, by and large, no longer on the scene-so little on the scene, in
fact, and so little in anyone's thoughts or vocabulary, that a locution like
"high-art literary tradition" took on the tone of mimicry, of archaism?
Poor Franzen was scolded all around. He was scolded for ingratitude.
He was scolded for elitism. He was scolded for
chutzpah-what
sane
writer would be so unreasonable as to give the cold shoulder to the
powerfully influential Oprah Book Club? Even Harold Bloom scolded
him. Oprah herself didn't scold him-she simply canceled him.
Only a short while before the Franzen brouhaha, Philip Roth pub–
lished a little volume called
Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and
Their Work.
Roth, of course, had long ago passed from the shock–
celebrity, or notoriety, of
Portnoy's Complaint
to innumerable high-art
literary awards, including the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters.
Shop Talk
consists of interviews,
exchanges, reflections on Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klima,
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bruno Schulz, Milan Kundera, Edna O'Brien,
Mary McCarthy, and Bernard Malamud.
It
closes with "Rereading Saul
Bellow," a remarkable essay of homage expressed in an authoritative
prose of matchless literary appetite. A writer of Roth's stature-one of
the shapers of the novel in our time-engaging with ten of the signifi–
cant literary figures of the twentieth century!
Fifty years ago, we can be sure, this would have been taken as an
Event, as a cultural marker, as an occasion for heating up New York's lit–
erary stewpots as much as, or even more than, Franzen's explosive-and
ephemeral-wistfulness. Fifty years ago, the publication of
Shop Talk
would have been the topic of scores of graduate-student warrens and
middle-class dinner parties, of book and gossip columns, of the roiling
cenacles of the envious, ambitious, bookish young. Fifty years ago, the
correspondence with Mary McCarthy alone-in which she asserts that
Roth's appraisal of anti-Semitism in
The Counterlife
"irritated and
offended" her; in which she considers what she terms the "Wailing Wall"
to be "repellent"; in which she wryly adds that she looks forward to
Roth's conversion to Christianity-fifty years ago, these words, had they
been in print, would have engendered cool rebuttals in
Commentary,
and
everywhere else a slew of op-eds, combative or conciliatory. For an anal–
ogy, only recall the storm that greeted Hannah Arendt's
Eichmann in
Jerusalem:
the avalanche of editorials, the tumult of answering essays pro
