The Smooth Art of Saying Nothing Sam Sacks
Over the last few years, Joseph Epstein’s writing has carried some automatic interest because of the public persona he’s cultivated as the literary man turned social critic. This may seem like a presumptuous leap, but in fact Epstein follows a mighty tradition, one founded on the assumption, pleasing to this reviewer, that to know books is to also know people. Samuel Johnson, H.L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson are prime examples of critical juggernauts who took it as a matter of course that opining on books and social trends were complementary jobs. But few people embrace this tradition today, making Epstein, a journalist and critic who has shouldered the duty of attacking hypocrisy and calling out cant, a curious subject for study. What does he stand for? Less than you think.
Two previous books, Envy and Snobbery: The American Version, were popular examinations of social vices. His new release, Friendship: An Expose, though of course directed toward a virtue, is a similar kind of cultural study, informed by Epstein’s observations, experiences, and, we might hope, his values. What is surprising, actually, is the book’s friendliness. Epstein is certainly not always friendly—as a hatchet man and debunker in Commentary and The Wall Street Journal he can be quite rancorous if his subject irritates him enough. But in Friendship, apart from a few by-the-way swipes at Freudianism, Epstein is positively hail-fellow-well-met, an amicable, slightly self-effacing docent on a comprehensive tour of friendship and its many permutations.
There are close friends, Epstein tells us—those who sit in the box seats—and then there are less close friends—those in the grandstand. In either case, “reciprocity is at the heart of friendship,” and one mutual obligation is accepting a friend’s weaknesses—only this can be “a royal pain in the arse.” Epstein’s problem has always been too many friends (he is very “promiscuous” with lunch dates). Even so, “without friendship, make no mistake, we are all lost.” The important revelation, should you have missed it, is that friendship has both pros and cons.
Furthermore, we learn that friendships between women are different than friendships between men, and friendships between a man and a woman are a whole category unto themselves. Sex and friendship? Epstein goes out on a ledge here: they don’t mix. And what about new-fangled technology? Epstein argues email is an expedient means of getting to know and keeping up with a new friend—even if you never meet that friend in the flesh. (Email hasn’t always been around, by the way, which just goes to prove Epstein’s thesis that “the standard of what constitutes a genuine friend has altered,” a thesis you had better not become too attached to since it quickly vanishes from the book.)
Anything grab your interest so far? With an affable, please-everyone charm, Epstein ambles from topic to topic, padding out his ruminations with literary quotes and anecdotes, some of which are recognizable from earlier books and articles, and some of which must have been collected by cross-referencing the word “friendship” in Bartlett’s. There are apothegms from Aristotle and Cicero, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, Paul Valery and—Epstein’s perennial go-to—Alexis de Tocqueville. There are also ample reminiscences of chummy lunches and awkward falling outs (with Saul Bellow for one, believe it or not), of hearty handshakes and ballgames with George Will. The content is so thoroughly inoffensive, the tone so congenial, the prose so light and smooth, that we fly through the pages and only stop when we realize that we are, in fact, skimming, and that we can’t remember the slightest thing from the chapter we supposedly just read.
Read the following sentences and note what makes them alike: “I wonder if my being a Jew hasn’t most affected my choice of friends.” “Perhaps two weeks traveling with another couple in a foreign country would be the real test of a couple friendship.” “Women may be intrinsically more sociable than men.” That’s right, they all express qualified thoughts. This is the breed that appears in every page, if not paragraph, of Friendship. Women may be more sociable, but then again, if you like, they may not be. The subtext is: Who really cares?
It is this noncommittal, appeasing air on the glabrous face of polished prose that leads us to finally recognize that Epstein is practicing the literary equivalent of small talk. “I happen to like small talk,” he writes. “Given a choice, I almost always prefer small to big talk.” This disclosure comes two-thirds into a 250 page book, at which point we’ve already come to the confounding conclusion that Epstein thinks of us as no more than grandstand friends who warrant no “big”—i.e. heartfelt—ideas. Despite the hours we’ve allotted to spend with him, we will never be allowed into his full confidence. What’s worse, having paid for the book, we’re the ones to foot the lunch tab.
We might think that Epstein’s style of badinage would have better effect in a short article—the way passing small talk is better than the kind that lingers on and on—but even this form of criticism is diluted by his expertly smooth art of saying nothing. In a snippy essay in January’s Commentary called “Are Newspapers Doomed?” Epstein complained that newspapers aren’t as good as they were in the old days, and deserve to lose readership to alternative news sources; they are too partisan and pandering, and the arts sections have too many stories on television and Rock ‘n’ Roll. There are few qualifiers in this essay, which gives it a little verve, but at its end Epstein is required to explain, as all social critics eventually must, how he would like things to be instead:
My preference would be for a few serious newspapers to take the high road: to smarten up instead of dumbing down, to honor the principles of integrity and impartiality in their coverage and to become institutions that even those who disagreed with them would have to respect for the reasoned cogency of their editorial positions. I imagine such papers directed by such editors who could choose for me…the serious issues, questions, and problems of the day and, with the aid of intelligence born of concern, give each the emphasis it deserves.
When we read this closely—that is, if we make it through without skimming—we find that beneath the bromides Epstein says that the way for newspapers to improve is to do better work. Or maybe it’s that the way for newspapers to do better work is to improve. (We can imagine newspaper editors slapping their foreheads and exclaiming, “Integrity! Intelligence! Why didn’t we think of those things!”)
Can it be that Epstein is merely one of those prominent men who show up in every generation and criticize the ideas of others while having none of their own? Yet this seems impossible for the single reason that Epstein is a serious reader, a man who loves and is inspired by books. Snobbery, although it too is marred by the same slick and idle patter, is much livelier than Friendship because it dwells more in literature; and where it concerns writers, Epstein does seem to have opinions to which we can gain some traction.
His most revealing piece is another recent Commentary article titled “Forgetting Edmund Wilson,” which is remarkable not for its arguments but for its level of malice. It needs to be understood that as a critic Epstein is likely to feel somewhat in Wilson’s shadow. Here is what he wrote about the man in 1977: “As one reads Edmund Wilson’s letters, one’s understanding of him increases without one’s admiration for his immense achievement diminishing in the least.”
However, something must have changed since then—though not with Wilson, who died in 1972—because the Commentary piece is a performance in invidious idol smashing that a sixteen-year-old would admire. Epstein, who appears to take joy in Wilson’s growing obscurity, sneers at his forerunner for such failings as not writing enough epigrams, overrating James Baldwin, and being “physically repellent” and “a bald, pudgy little man with a drinking problem and a mean streak.” Wilson, Epstein pompously concludes, “was insufficiently impressed by life’s mysteries.” Whether that was the cause of his pudginess is not determined.
But even with these erratic criticisms a door has been opened. It’s clear that what most offends Epstein are Wilson’s journals—his decades of journals in which he notoriously chronicled his sexual affairs in painstaking Ikea-manual detail. Worse, to Epstein’s eyes, Wilson wrote these journals fully intending that they should one day be published.
Wilson kissed and told. He committed the gravest sin that Epstein recognizes: he was indiscreet. Candor in private correspondence is a particular bugbear for Epstein. In Snobbery he repeatedly denigrates Virginia Woolf for things she wrote in her journals and letters, even though she explicitly asked that her papers be burned. What Epstein stands for, it turns out, is probity and correctness. Whether this is out of principle or phobia we can only guess, but in either case it results in a stupendously boring reading experience.
How then, for a man whose lone passions appear to be reticence and chitchat, could he have given Friendship that subtitle, An Expose, unless he was being totally facetious? Exposure, whether in one’s personal life or in one’s books, is anathema to Epstein. Thinking of a friend as a person “to whom to recount disappointments, secrets, troubles little and large” is a sticky contemporary notion symptomatic of Freudianism and the age of therapy. To paraphrase, bearing one’s heart to a friend is something Epstein will have nothing to do with. That Freud invented this practice is, of course, disputable.
In his chapter “Best Friends” Epstein has a look at the friendship between Michel de Montaigne and Etienne de La Boetie, which Montaigne immortally depicted in one of his most powerful essays. Struggling to describe his relationship with La Boetie, Montaigne wrote, “In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.” Epstein is suspicious of this “vaporous” description, and when he runs a “reality check” he finds that Montaigne was idealizing: “no friendship, contra Montaigne, is perfect.”
Well, no, no friendship is perfect. It’s also true that the process of the blending souls is not a physically exact way of describing the phenomenon; and while we’re at it, it’s also true that love is not, technically, a red, red rose. It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that Montaigne was employing poetry to describe the heart of his great friendship, rather than its objective conditions. He was rhapsodizing about his connection with a man he loved, felt passionately for, and wanted to be close to every single day, notwithstanding the imperfections between them.
In fact, Epstein does admit the word “love” into his lexicon—I count it four times in Friendship, although I confess to some skimming. It appears twice where Epstein details his feelings about his best friend, Edward Shils, who died about ten years ago. These pages are actually very moving, and if Epstein had dared to write more than four of them about the friend he loved most in his life, he might have produced a book we could care about.
But what he evidently wants is to get beyond the subject as quickly as possible. The instant he tacks the last period onto that chapter we are met again with the hail-fellow, the glib raconteur, the man who will say in conclusion, “As for what I expect from friends, I mainly expect consideration.” One doesn’t have to be steeped in literature to see the cowardice of this statement. Consideration is what we “mainly” expect from a waiter or a mortuary attendant; it’s the least of what we should hope for in a friend, and the least we should expect ourselves to give in return. And it’s absolutely the lowest demand we should put upon the books we read and write.
Whatever charges one might bring against Edmund Wilson and Virginia Woolf (and, for that matter, Sigmund Freud), when they put pen to paper they did not stint, they did not evade, they did not dilute, and they did not pad out. They laid themselves, mind, body, and soul, on the page, and when we pick up their books we feel like we are spending time with a person we know deeply. That is how it comes to be that we can think of a book as a friend. Because Epstein does cheat and withhold from his readers at every turn—and does so with the bizarre belief that he is superior for it—his is the kind of half-hearted friendship that ought to be ended at once, without qualification.
Sam Sacks is a freelance writer living in Harlem.