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Hearing a colleague boast of
'ex-friends' as a putative measure of his intellectual integrity, I thought
how few I had, notwithstanding how provocative my work as both a writer and
an artist has been. Those who came immediately to mind were lovers whom I
disappointed, some of them still angry at me, no doubt justifiably.
(Otherwise, betrayal and disappointing friends is not my style.) Some
ex-friends were colleagues self-consciously on the way up (and perhaps insecure
about their status as well), who thought it opportune to discard previous
acquaintances less upwardly mobile, much as they dumped old clothes. Others
were editors no longer publishing me--people for whom the rituals of
friendship were a prerequisite for getting better work out of me, sometimes
for a lower price (if not nothing). Were there a contest for living writers
having the most ex-friends, I suspect the winners would be abusive magazine
editors long tenured at, say, American Scholar, Commentary, Harper's, and National Review. The book editor, Jason Epstein, might top them all.
All these people I would distinguish from former friends, as I shall call
them--people who have moved away from NYC--and from Enemies, which I have
indeed made, sometimes inadvertently, especially if they envied self-made
success, more often intentionally, nearly always in print (rarely
personally), recalling advice that the composer Milton Babbitt proffered me
forty years ago: 'When I was a young man, I had the good fortune of making
all the right enemies.' When I recently asked Babbitt whom he had in mind
when he told me this, he replied it was the composer Randall Thompson (not
Virgil T.), less than a generation older, who, because he had the composition
chair at Harvard, was more prominent seventy years ago than now. More than
one colleague has envied me for making many of the Right Enemies. Not
everyone can be so shrewdly selective.
A sometime lover who never taught, though she took her doctorate decades ago,
once told me that had I become an academic I would have had many more
ex-friends, not just among those regarding themselves as on the way up, as
the disintegration of tenuous alliances appears to be a disease afflicting
academic turfs. When some of my higher-flying ex-friends become more secure
or decline, how should I respond if they want to befriend me again? Would
they mind my disrespect?
These thoughts came to mine when I read parts of Joseph Epstein's
Friendship: An ExposŽ (2006), because
Epstein had been for many years the chief editor of The American Scholar, which meant that he had long made friends and dropped
them with ease. A glib facility in befriending and defriending came with the
job, so to speak.
The odd thing is that for all his attempts to appear candid Epstein appears
not to know this last truth. On the website Arts & Letters Daily (aldaily.com) I once found a pathetic excerpt from the
book that relates how Epstein was unable to befriend the novelist Ralph
Ellison, even though he published him. What makes this memoir pathetic is
that Epstein the sometime editorial powerhouse never considers the option
occurring to any critical reader--that Ellison, suspicious of false friends
and editorial sycophants, might not have wanted to befriend him. (Arnold
Rampersad reports in his recent biography of Ellison that not even Prof.
Henry Louis Gates, who believes in befriending Everyone Important, 'was never
invited to visit him.')
Epstein reminds me of one book editor who told me how surprised he was,
genuinely surprised, that attractive women published by him rejected his
sexual advances after an alcohol-fueled dinner and another who characterized
a personally popular writer as 'difficult' because butt-kissing the powerful
was not among his acquired skills. Perhaps Ellison knew that butt-kissers
such as Epstein invariably turn out to be less attractive and less friendly
than they initially present themselves to be.
One truth I've learned over the decades is that those with literary
ambitions, but without any talent for strong original work, had better first
get power embedded in a position, preferably tenured, before they disappear.
People especially doubting their capacities for literary excellence know in
their gut that they need power to compensate. That was the implicit theme of
Norman Podhoretz's Making It (1967).
Without the leverages bestowed upon him by the American Jewish Committee, the
publishers of Commentary magazine,
Podhoretz wouldn't have been a writer, let alone a cultural celebrity. (Later
hearing about his memoir titled Ex-Friends, all of whom were prominent writers he had or could have
published, I initially felt relieved Podhoretz never befriended me.)
The most pathetic power-seekers believe that none of the rewards of life
would come to them otherwise--no publications, no lovers, no helpers, no
friends. In their self-assessment, they are, needless to say, probably right.
Bumptious Joseph Epstein puts himself squarely in this class apparently
without realizing it. That's what could make his memoir an unwitting classic
at a level none of his earlier books have attained--a kind of Pale Fire or The Good Soldier that isn't fiction. What this Expose is finally about is the psychological distortions,
especially regarding human relations, that afflict those who desperate for
power.
Respecting the value of honesty, I should mention that twice I asked for a
review copy of this book, as twice did a magazine publishing my reviews; but
no book ever came--not even a letter explaining why. Only the chapter found on
Arts&Letters prompted this review. (Oddly, it has since disappeared from
the website and its self-archives, perhaps in response to an earlier draft of
this review that was passed around, someone embarrassing both Epstein and the
website as he or she thought they were protecting him.)
Believing that people should be fully accountable for their behavior, may we
thus assume that the publisher or its author lacked respect for his book or
me as a reviewer, notwithstanding elite recognitions. Not even power can
overcome the disadvantages generated by those lacking respect for their own
work.
© Richard
Kostelanetz 2007
Richard Kostelanetz welcomes readers' responses. Contact him at
PO Box 444, Prince st., New York, NY USA 10012-0008
www.richardkostelanetz.com
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