Part 64 (2/2)

But the paragraph, though it goes on well beyond this, must be interrupted. It is the start of Tolstoy's Hadji Murad, in Aylmer Maude's translation. (My uncle's poetry was composed rather in this vein.) I interrupt the paragraph for two reasons-first, because of what must appear to be gargantuan hubris: what is a pa.s.sage from Tolstoy, the pinnacle of all novelists, doing here, in these ruminations on an emphatically inconspicuous work by an emphatically unnoticed young writer holed up almost half a century ago in a little house at the farthest margin of the Bronx? It is precisely for the sake of hubris that it is here. Without it, how can I lay out the untamed l.u.s.tful graspingness, the secret tough-hearted avarice, of the old ambition?

More than twenty years ago, in an essay called ”The Lesson of the Master,” I bitterly excoriated that ambition:.

The true Lesson of the Master, then, is, simply, never to venerate what is complete, burnished, whole, in its grand organic flowering or finish-never to look toward the admirable and dazzling end; never to be ravished by the goal; never to wors.h.i.+p ripe Art or the ripened artist; but instead to seek to be young while young, primitive while primitive, ungainly while ungainly-to look for crudeness and rudeness, to husband one's own stupidity or ungenius.

There is this mixup most of us have between ourselves and what we admire or triumphantly cherish. We see this mixup, this mishap, this mishmash, most often in writers: the writer of a new generation ravished by the genius writer of a cla.s.sical generation, who begins to dream herself, or himself, as powerful, vigorous and original-as if being filled up by the genius writer's images, scenes, and stratagems were the same as having the capacity to pull off the identical magic. ...If I were twenty-two now, I would not undertake a cannibalistically ambitious Jamesian novel to begin with; I would look into the eyes of Henry James at twenty-two.... It is not to the Master in his fullness I would give my awed, stricken, desperate fealty, but to the faltering, imperfect, dreaming youth.

All this I now repudiate and recant. There is too much humility in it-and humility is for the aging, not for the young. Obsequiousness at any age is an ugly thing, and ugliest in that early time of youthful hope. At twenty-two one ought to be a literary voluptuary; one ought to cannibalize the world.

Hence my second reason for breaking off a luxuriant Tolstoyan scene. It is because of the contemporary reader's impatience. The old ambition had reflected back to it readers who were equally covetous-but as the old ambition has faded, so has readers' craving: recognizable bookish voluptuaries and print-cannibals are rare. Readers nowadays will hardly tolerate long blocks of print unbroken by dialogue or action, and if there are to be long blocks of print at all, they must be in familiar, speedy, colloquial, undemanding prose. Are cinema and television to blame? In part. Novelists have learned much from visual technology, especially the skill of rapid juxtaposition. But film itself is heir to the more contemplative old ambition: what else is ”panning,” whether of a landscape or a human face? When film is on occasion gazeful, meticulous, attentive to the silent naming of things seen, its debt to the word is keenest.

Then exaltations and panegyrics for the altar and the sibyl! For consciousness of anointment (however mistaken or futile), for self-belief subversive of commerce (or call it arrogance defeated by commerce); and for spectacle, dominion, energy and honor-a glorifying phrase pinched from Trust. It was the novel of my prime; I will never again write with so hubristic a pa.s.sion. It marked the crest of life, the old ambition's deepest bite-before doubt and diffidence set in, and the erosion of confidence, and the diminution of nerve. My loyalty to my first novel continues undiminished. If, in 1966, it gave no pleasure to a reviewer (except for the s.e.x chapter), never mind. For the real right reader I am willing to wait a thousand years!-because it is not so much the novel that takes my praise as that archaic penumbra, that bottomless lordly overbearing ambition of long ago. Ambition as it once was.

Let Enoch Vand, chanting his imperious aphorisms in Chapter 22, speak for the author of Trust in her twenties, and a little beyond:.

To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life.

There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces.

Who squanders talent praises death.

I was never again so heedlessly brave.

CYNTHIA OZICK is one of America's most prominent women of letters. Acclaimed for her many works of fiction and criticism, she is the author, most recently, of the novel Heir to the Glimmering World. Ozick was a finalist for the National Book Award for her novel The Puttermesser Papers, which was named one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her essay collection Quarrel & Quandary received the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many other accolades are a Lannan Foundation Award for fiction and four O. Henry Prizes for the short story. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Westchester County, New York.

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