In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage
By Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin, 410 pp., $26
In 1997, after 22 years as editor of The American Scholar, the journal of Phi Beta Kappa, Joseph Epstein was fired. He was sacked, he believes, by professorial partisans of feminism, black history, and gay and lesbian studies, subjects conspicuous by their absence in his magazine. And, now, in retirement, Epstein is "ready to settle for being known as a good writer by thoughtful people."
But he is not prepared to go gently into that good night. At 70, he writes, his craft has not appreciably diminished, his intellectual arrogance has grown, and he's become "comfortably rear guard." "In a Cardboard Belt!," his 10th collection of essays, is vintage Epstein: elegantly written, charming, candid, curmudgeonly, mordant, and, alas, malicious.
The charming curmudgeon struts his stuff in an octet of autobiographical essays. In "Goodbye, Mr. Chipstein," a retrospective on his career as a creative writing teacher at Northwestern University, Epstein concludes that he helped good students become a little better, but did nothing for the mediocre and the uninterested. The feeble "intellectual voltage" in some classes reminds him of W. H. Auden's definition of a professor as a person "who talks in other people's sleep." Nonetheless, Epstein does not succumb to clichés about students growing dumb and dumber. The principal difference between then and now, Epstein writes, is that students no longer seem embarrassed by their ignorance. Prematurely mature, Epstein has always had "a fun problem." He'd rather write than travel, promising to visit India and Pakistan when the two nations rejoin the British Empire. And, these essays reveal, he's suspicious of emotional display. Epstein never sought the approval of his father, an importer of costume jewelry, who stopped listening as he aged and wrote 2,700 unpublished pages "that bordered on the commonplace." Happily, Mr. and Mrs. Epstein left Joseph alone, without creating any doubt that he could count on them. For him, the freedom to go his own way was "the greatest gift of all."