Foreign Bodies:

Abstract

Globalization is this century's operative word. Barraged with worldwide news and views from such exotic and often dangerous locations as Southeast Asia, Brazil, Nepal, West Africa, New Zealand, Egypt, Israel, and Afghanistan, young American university students seem to have abandoned Paris and the traditional Cook's tour of historical Europe; now in search of public service and new experiences, they flock to Far and Near Eastern, South American, and African locales for postgraduate education in non-Western cultures. Yet despite this trend, in the last few years there has been a surprising renewal of interest in that old magnet for Americans: Paris. Perhaps the decline of high culture and romance in our cyber lives today is what draws writers and filmmakers to that traditional French icon of glamour, sexual sophistication, intellect, and art. To name just a few: David McCullough's prizewinning The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris; Graham Robb's An Adventure History of Paris; Stacy Schiff's Benjamin Franklin in Paris; Paula McLain's The Paris Wife (fiction); Julie Powell's Julie and Julia (fiction and film set in Paris); Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris; the Academy Award–winning French film The Artist; and the blockbuster exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, The Stein Collection (Gertrude and family). But perhaps most unexpected of all is Cynthia Ozick's novel Foreign Bodies, a counterintuitive variation on Henry James's classic Americans in Paris tale, The Ambassadors.How and why Cynthia Ozick wrote her dark retrospect of the Paris of mid-twentieth-century Europe is the subject of this essay. The answer to the how and why will require consideration of relevant biographical and cultural details: Ozick's unusual youthful worship of the work of Henry James; her postgraduate education in the English literature departments of mid-twentieth-century America; the emergence of her literary predecessors, the Jewish American creative writers and critics of the 1940s and '50s; her own James-influenced first published novel; the novel's critical failure, leading to her decision to break free from James's power; Ozick's subsequent autodidactic immersion in Jewish texts and traditions effectuating a metamorphosis in her own writing; her critical success in the American literary world; and finally, in 2010, at the crest of her brilliant career, a return to her first love, Henry James, whom she had never truly abandoned.Arguably the great lady of American Jewish literature, Cynthia Ozick is famous for rejecting almost every sobriquet attached to her name. She has categorically denied such specifications as American-Jewish, Jewish-American, Jewish, woman, whenever these have been applied to the one word she never has denied: writer. And yet … she is the quintessential Jewish woman writer in America who writes about Jewish ideas, about American life, about feminism in both Jewish and American culture but who had an early and long-held ambivalent enthrallment with Henry James, that archetypal elitist male American writer. Despite her polite demurrers, Ozick's readers are left to secretly object to her objections and to ponder what caused her early fascination with James, a non-Jew not innocent of an aversion to immigrant Jews. Not that she hasn't flat out told us. Ozick famously has written that she wasted the first ten years of her life learning the “Lesson of the Master” (a reference to James's story of that name), which she mistook to simply mean choose “Art” over “Life,” rather than “choose ordinary human entanglement and live; or choose Art, and give up the vitality of life's passions and panics and endurances” (Lesson 292). In her devotion to her “Master,” Ozick “confesses that she kept on her writing table “a copy of The Ambassadors as a kind of talisman” (Din 137). Her main point, however, is that in her youthful obsession with the sublime art of the mature Jamesian prose style, she misheard the profound “lesson of the master” and she took it to mean “Become a Master” (the title of Leon Edel's fourth and last biographical volume of James is The Master) and naively thought she could and would do that at the very start of her career (Lesson 296).Ozick had written a master's thesis called “Parable in Henry James,” in which she “tried to catch up all of James in the net of a single idea.” In a comic self-deprecatory mode, Ozick offers some details of her solitary life: Before that, I lived many months in the black hole of a microfilm cell, transcribing every letter James ever wrote to Mr. Pinker, his London Agent, for a professorial book; but the professor drank, and died, and after thirty years the letters still lie in the dark. All that while I sat cramped in that black bleak microfilm cell, and all that while I was writing that thesis, James was sinking me and despoiling my youth, and I did not know it (Lesson 293–4). Ozick's error—choosing art over life—is undoubtedly an error made by legions of youthful, innocent, aspiring artists, but in 1957 after reading the first volume of Leon Edel's monumental biography of James, the young Cynthia Ozick was startled to discover that “Henry James himself had not always been the elderly bald-headed Henry James!—that he too had once been twenty-two years old.” And so this set her against James. “From that point forward,” she declares, “I was determined to eradicate him and for a long while I succeeded” (Lesson 195). But half a century later, with the publication of Foreign Bodies (2011), there he is again, Henry James redux; revised—but not rejected.Readers who are familiar with Ozick's work may be surprised to discover that the Cynthia Ozick of the twenty-first century was not always the Cynthia Ozick of the new millennium. As she had to discover about Henry James, a young writer first must learn about her craft but also she must “Live!” (Ambassadors 1). And though she has insisted over and over again that she wasted the first ten years of her writing career, the plain truth is that she had not been wasting time; without a shred of doubt, she had been working and developing her considerable gifts. In the clarity of retrospect, it is apparent that the huge 639-page novel Trust (1966) contains signature thematic seeds that would germinate in later works: history, memory, conduct and its consequences, the cost of assimilation, Jews and non-Jews, Hebraism and Hellenism, and especially the Holocaust and its legacy—which fifty years later in Foreign Bodies Ozick labels “Europe's tattoo” (3).The failure of Trust after her seven-year effort (plus three earlier years of apprentice novel writing) ignited Ozick's auto-emancipation from the cult of literary Jamesism and freed her to fashion her own unique idiom. The result was her first collection of short fiction, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. The apparent oxymoron, the pagan/rabbi, of the title story would become a leitmotif in Ozick's subsequent fiction and essays: Hellenism versus Hebraism; idolatry versus conduct; art for its own sake as opposed to or detached from the moral sense of art. Polarity and seeming polarity are hallmarks of Ozick's fiction and essays. Sometimes the polar terms are not contradictory, but rather an acknowledgment of the tension between the two. The title of the first volume of her collected essays, Art and Ardor (1983), plainly declares that it is not art versus ardor but art and ardor. In “The Lesson of the Master,” the penultimate essay in the book, Ozick writes, “The great voices of Art never mean only Art; they also mean Life, they always meant Life, and Henry James, when he evolved into the Master we revere, finally meant nothing else.” (296) Plainly, Cynthia Ozick had grasped the true “Lesson of the Master.” There can be no mistake in Ozick's construal, for James himself, in his preface to The Ambassadors plainly tells us that Lambert Strether's remarks to his young friend little Bilham “contain the essence” of the novel: “Live all you can; it's a mistake not to…. Do what you like as long as you don't make [that mistake]. For it was a mistake. Live, live!” (1).Despite her delayed epiphany, Ozick should not have been so overly hard on her young self. It was not at all surprising that in her youthful graduate school days, mistaking James's lesson, she would become in thrall to the “Master” of the art of English prose. In the late 1940s, English departments in America were dominated by the theories of the New Criticism; boldly opposing the prevailing critical romantic methodology, the new critics embraced an objective theory of art that insisted on the impersonality and autonomy of the work of art. The theory had begun in England in the 1920s with the criticism of I. A. Richards, William Empson, and the American exile T. S. Eliot, who assumed the preeminent role. In the 1930s it was taken up in America and discussed in John Crowe Ransom's enormously influential book of essays, The New Criticism (1941). In the American literary world, Eliot continued in his near-papal role, though the general methodology was soon applied to a whole range of so-called New Critics such as the Southern Agrarians Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, who focused their attention on analysis through the scientific method, through close reading, through explication de texte, and the concept of the impersonal artist. No history, no social context, no politics, no biography, only the autonomous work of art itself. Displacing the old academic primacy of theology, the study of literature had become a quasi-religion itself, the “text” assuming the aura of sanctity.Could this method of analysis have been natural to Cynthia Ozick—even in those days? Probably not. Could it have been at all attractive to a writer who so early in her career would write that the novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment…. The “new” novel, by contrast, is to be taken like a sacrament. It is to be a poem without a history—which is to say an idol. It is not to judge or interpret. It is to be, it is not to allow anything to happen or become. “Happen” implies history, “become” implies idea…. It is to be self sustaining, enclosed, lyrical and magical. (Toward 164–65)But despite the disconnect between Ozick and the prevailing theoretical trends, this was the literary diet that was fed to the young writer in her salad days at New York University and Ohio State. And when she applied the new critical theory of close reading to Henry James, Ozick became intoxicated with his prose, a prose that was “sublime, nuanced, imbricated with a thousand distinctions and observations” (Lesson 293), the style that had made him revered by T. S. Eliot and worshiped in American Letters. But perhaps those very imbrications and distinctions, the complexity of his style, had obscured its meaning.Inevitably, Cynthia Ozick embarked on her self-imposed process of liberation from Henry James and the cult of the New Criticism and, in the process, hoisted James by his own petard. She turned to writing in English about the very objects of James's mocking disdain: Jews—and Jewish languages, Jewish history, Jewish ideas. There had not been many successful Jewish American novelists writing in English during the first decades of the twentieth century; not until the thirties and forties did serious and formally educated American Jewish writers emerge onto the mainstream literary scene. Moreover, even as Ozick was busy liberating herself from Henry James, the members of this slightly older group of first generation Jewish writers and critics were hell bent on liberating themselves from their Eastern European immigrant Jewish past. Many of the Jewish critics publishing in Partisan Review1 steered clear of New Criticism objectivity in favor of an unnatural literary miscegenation: anti-Stalin, pro-Trotsky leftist politics wedded to modernist literature and art. T. S. Eliot and Trotsky, however, did not really comport well under the covers of the same journal, prompting Lionel Trilling, the Partisan Review spokesman for liberal sentiments, to write, “It is in general true that the modern European literature to which we can have an active, reciprocal relationship, which is the right relationship to have, has been written by men who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the tradition of democratic liberalism as we know it. Yeats and Eliot, Proust and Joyce, Lawrence and Gide—these men do not seem to confirm in us the social and political ideals which we hold” (Liberal 286). Almost certainly, Cynthia Ozick read these words and may even have heard them in the class she took at Columbia with Trilling. However she may have felt at the time about his idiosyncratic Marxian politics, we do know what she thought about the literary criticism of the New Critics versus that of the Partisan Review critics. In 1970 she argued that “some of the best critics of that time and afterward, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, were Jews; they did not conform, and put humanity back in again” (Toward 163). Ozick's list is reverse alphabetical, but the order in which names are listed could be interpreted as reflecting that of her admiration for them. Trilling, incidentally, is mainly remembered today (with the exception of Adam Kirsch's valiant attempt to revive him in his new book Why Trilling Matters) as the first Jewish professor of English at Columbia University. True, the Renaissance scholar Joel Spingarn earlier had held a professorship at Columbia from 1899 to 1911, but the position was in comparative literature. His situation was exemplary. Presumably Jews, regarded as being of foreign extraction, were therefore suitable for teaching foreign literature and languages but not for English, which was seen as foreign to them. This attitude held for the Berlin-born and Columbia University–educated writer Ludwig Lewisohn as well.One of the new Jewish writers, Saul Bellow, took on the challenge to this all too common prejudice by comically dramatizing it in his 1947 novel about anti-Semitism, The Victim. Bellow describes a scene in which a young Jewish man named Harkavy has taken his girlfriend to a party given by his Gentile boss (41). The young man and his girlfriend are singing old ballads and spirituals when they are interrupted by a drunk guest named Allbee who asks, “Why do you sing such songs? … You can't sing them.”“Why not, I'd like to know?” said the girl.“Oh, you, too,” said Allbee, with his one cornered smile. “It isn't right for you to sing them. You have to be born to them, it's no use trying to sing them….“Sing a psalm. I don't object to your singing. Sing one of the psalms. I'd love to hear it.”Harkavy responds, “I don't know any psalms.”“Then any Jewish song,” answers Allbee. “Something you've really got feeling for. Sing us the one about the mother.” (40)Jews must not sing these traditional American songs because they would only distort them; in the words of Henry James himself, the neighborhoods of the Lower East Side were “torture rooms of the living idiom”(American Scene 135). With due ironic homage to Henry James, Ozick's book title Foreign Bodies can be easily construed as a sardonic Jamesian epithet for the immigrant Jews—that is, irritants in the body politic that need to be removed. Moreover, out of her acute awareness of the two linguistic extremes—James's cathedrals of sublime phrases, nuances, byways and side streets of distinctions, as against the familiar sounds of the Yiddish- speaking but nonetheless bookish immigrants as they struggled to express themselves in English—Ozick perfected a vigorous prose style that is witty, comic, elegant, powerful, subtle, redolent of Yiddish and perfectly at home in English.Yet despite their many painful rebuffs from the object of their affections, the up-and-coming Jewish writers of the forties and fifties loved America and yearned to be loved back. In their pursuit of acceptance, they ardently wooed America by writing about its literature and publishing in American literary or cultural journals. By the late 1940s the works of Jewish American writers on bookstore shelves and New York Times best-seller lists were front and center. So much so that in the non-Jewish William Styron's Künstlerroman, Sophie's Choice, set in 1947 Brooklyn, the aspiring southern writer Stingo complains, “I saw myself running a pale tenth in a literary track race, coughing on the dust of a pounding fast-footed horde of Bellows and Schwartzes and Levys and Mandelbaums” (139).It is of more than passing interest to note what these first generation American Jews were writing about in midcentury America at precisely the time when the slightly younger Cynthia Ozick was holed up in her “microfilm cell” (Lesson 294). The keynote is sounded by the same Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz mentioned in Stingo's lament. Bellow's entry in 1953 onto the Times best-seller list was The Adventures of Augie March, which famously opens with “I am an American, Chicago born”(3). This phrase (almost too frequently quoted) reveals the ubiquitous psychic angst found in most immigrant and first generation Jewish American literature's insatiable yearning to belong. It may also be Bellow's sharp retort to that painful moment in his prior novel, The Victim, when the Jewish guest is told not to sing traditional American songs.In a short story entitled “America, America,” Delmore Schwartz names his protagonist Shenandoah Fish, surely meaning to echo the ethnic tensions in his own name. Cynthia Ozick has suggested that the two components of his name represent two different styles: “Put it that the poetry is Delmore…. The prose is Schwartz” (Delmore 98). That is indeed a keen and useful distinction, but the two halves of the whole name Delmore Schwartz also suggest the disjunction of aspiration and heritage and the double marginality that plays such a central part in the work of so many Jewish American writers. No longer at home in the European Jewish immigrant culture and not yet fully at home in the American cultural milieu, this generation most often chose America at the expense of Jewish tradition. And though the fiction writers sometimes wrote sympathetically or nostalgically about the immigrant Jews they knew so well, often they wrote out of hostility and, in the case of Bernard Malamud, to universalize them quite out of their particularity. “It's a wonderful thing” says Manischevitz in Malamud's story about the black Jewish Angel Levine, “There are Jews everywhere” (166). But these American born children of Jewish immigrants were so desirous of belonging that they failed to say anything important about the suffering of their fellow Jews in Europe, about the Holocaust, or about the struggle for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, until many years later.Out of her humanity, her moral seriousness, and literary challenge, Ozick instantly chose the very subjects that most of the pioneers of Jewish American writing had avoided. She met head-on the situation of the Jews in Europe and their fate in the Holocaust as early as Trust. Jewish tradition, and Jewish texts, were treasure houses for her literary imagination. By contrast, as Adam Kirsch has commented about Lionel Trilling, among Ozick's most admired critics, “Trilling was too intellectually rigorous to believe that he could be nourished by the legacy of Judaism, when he knew nothing about it” (“Trilling, Babel, and the Rabbis” 42). Indeed, most of the first generation of American Jewish writers (with the exception of Bellow) were virtually ignorant of Judaism; instead, they wrote what they intimately knew about—the sociology and psychology of immigrant Jewish life. Ozick, on the contrary, wrote imaginatively and polemically about Jewish history and thought (“Toward a New Yiddish” 157).As for the important Jewish critics who primarily cohered around Partisan Review, a glance at the focus of their work suggests that they too thought to conquer America with the weapons of intellectual and verbal brilliance. The first sortie in Alfred Kazin's offensive was entitled On Native Grounds: A Study of American Prose Literature from 1890 to the Present (1942). Challenging the revered American historian/literary critic Vernon Parrington, Kazin sought to replace Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought with his own study of the development of American prose literature. He was twenty-seven years old at the time of the publication of On Native Grounds. Determined to stake his claim to America as his “native ground,” ten years later in 1951, Kazin published a moving memoir, A Walker in the City, an eloquent account of his own journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville community of immigrants to the great world of Manhattan and beyond. Three years after the end of World War II, Leslie Fiedler published his shockingly famous Mark Twain essay “Come Back to the Raft Agin' Huck Honey,” in Partisan Review (June 1948). A year later, the Russian-born editor of Partisan Review, Philip Rahv, published a highly influential analysis of American literature; in those days before the advent of political correctness, Rahv titled his essay “Paleface and Redskin” and argued that American writers group themselves around two polar types: “Paleface and Redskin I should like to call the two,” Rahv politely explains, adding that “despite occasional efforts at reconciliation no love is lost between them”(1). It is also worth noting that Rahv implies that he had a key responsibility for the revival of interest in Henry James as well as “the collapse of the resistance to his appeal in some … literary and academic circles”; both, he asserts were largely the result of the publication of his anthology of James's fiction in 1944 (ix). During the early postwar years Irving Howe, the important Partisan Review literary and political public intellectual, published major books on two modern American writers: Sherwood Anderson (1951) and William Faulkner (1952). Later, in his intellectual autobiography A Margin of Hope (1982), Howe claims that although he and the New York critics, with the exception of Alfred Kazin, could not connect with Emerson, he “fell in love with Melville, found points of kinship with Whitman, yielded to Henry James…. (Margin 143). The following year, 1953, saw the appearance of the first volume, Henry James: The Untried Years 1843–1870, of Leon Edel's multivolume biography of James. The subsequent volumes appeared between 1962 and 1972.Finally, of this group comprising the self-named New York Jewish Intellectuals, only Lionel Trilling was a true academic; most of the others found a home in the academy after they had become well-known literary celebrities.2 In fact, Trilling's position at Columbia and his role as public intellectual put him at the nexus of the academy and the general society. Although Trilling had written his Ph.D. dissertation on Matthew Arnold and a book on E. M. Forster (1943), he made his enduring reputation as a leading American critic with his collected essays in The Liberal Imagination (1948), a critical exploration of modern literature and its relationship to liberal thought. The volume opens with a two-part essay titled “Reality in America” (1940 and 1946) in which he takes on the prevailing authority, V. L. Parrington, who Trilling argued “was not a great mind; he was not a precise thinker or, except when measured by the low eminences that were about him, an impressive one”(15). It is in this essay that Trilling skewers Theodore Dreiser's style and thought, writing, “It is much to the point of his intellectual vulgarity that Dreiser's anti-Semitism was not merely a social prejudice but an idea, a way of dealing with difficulties” (28). Most important, especially for its importance to this essay, is Trilling's astute appreciation for Henry James, expressed in his brilliant introduction to a new edition of The Princess Casamassima in 1948. Trilling argues that James's “social observation is of a kind that we must find startlingly prescient when we consider that it was made some sixty years ago.”[The Princess Casamassima] is a novel which has at its very center the assumption that Europe has reached the fullness of its ripeness and is passing over into rottenness, that the peculiarly beautiful light it gives forth is in part the reflection of a glorious past and in part the phosphorescence of a present decay, that it may meet its end by violence and that this is not wholly unjust, although never before has the old sinful continent made so proud and pathetic an assault upon our affection. (67) Lionel Trilling saw a prescience in Henry James that went unobserved by his contemporaries and that explains their resistance to his work—especially his late work. In a letter James wrote to a young friend in 1896, the nature of this prescience is put in plain words: “But I have the imagination of disaster—and see life as ferocious and sinister” (67). “What James saw he saw truly,” Trilling argues: but it was not what the readers of his time were equipped to see. That we are now able to share his vision required the passage of six decades and the events which brought them to a climax. Henry James in the eighties understood what we have painfully learned from our grim glossary of wars and concentration camps, after having seen the state and human nature laid open to our horrified inspection. (67) Undoubtedly Ozick read this as well as the rest of Trilling's stunning introduction and must have been stirred by his assessment of James and of Paris; it is an adumbration of the dark vision in her own novel to come sixty-three years later, Foreign Bodies. She did not choose, however, to do a revision of The Princess Casamassima (1886); she chose to return to her youthful talisman The Ambassadors (1903).Like the pivotal figure in Ozick's Foreign Bodies, Bea Nightingale—a New York City high school English teacher who cannot drive away thoughts of her first love, Leo Coopersmith, her long divorced composer husband and his promised musical masterpiece (his grand piano has remained in her cramped living room as a constant reminder)—neither, it seems, can Cynthia Ozick do away with thoughts of her first love, Henry James, and his great novel The Ambassadors that sat on her desk for ten years as a constant reminder of the “lesson of the master”. Thus returning in 2010 to a work that is neither a rejection nor a revision but a recognition of the vagaries of history, Ozick sets her novel in 1952 in a Paris devastated by the Holocaust and in an America in which the immigrant Jews have moved from occupying the “torture rooms of the living idiom” to luxuriating in the fleshpots of California. She recounts the route from the years of the mass migration of Jews from Europe to New York's Lower East Side—both as fact and metaphor—to the move outward and upward in terms of social mobility, education, and epidemic assimilation.In The Ambassadors, the prototypical American small-town, middle-aged widower Lambert Strether, an affable but inept gentleman, is sent to Paris by his patron and fiancée manqué Mrs. Newsome, the heiress to a fortune made by the manufacture of an unnamed small domestic item. His task is to bring back her son Chad from the lure of Paris and the allure of an older woman, Madame de Vionnet. Mrs. Newsome wants her son to return to Woollett, Massachusetts, to take his place in the family business. When Strether's blandishments fail to change Chad's attachments either to Madame de Vionnet or to Paris, Mrs. Newsome sends a second family posse to discover whether his attachment to Mme. deVionnet is a of a sexual nature and to further urge him to come home. In the case of Strether's failure, he abandons his appointed task when he is astonished to see that Chad has been quite improved by his education in refinement and sophistication during his stay in France as well as by his intimate relationship with his lover Mme. de Vionnet. But most surprising of all is Chad's self-motivated decision to abandon Mme. de Vionnet and return to America. He has just come back from a trip to England where he has learned about the “art of advertising.” “With the right man to work it ‘est une monde,’” Chad enthuses (339). In an anticipation of the close of the 1967 film The Graduate, Newsome will return to Woolett, not to go into plastics but to enter the new world of his time, advertising. The essence of the novel, however, as the author himself has told us, is Strether's great moment of self-revelation: Paris has taught him that life is to be experienced. “Live, live!” he cries out. “Live all you can”(1). His own mistake was not to have lived.Foreign Bodies, Cynthia Ozick's homage to The Ambassadors, was not intended to revise and reject, or simply to modernize, but to go back to the future to account for moral and societal transformation. To this end she creates a counterpart to James's Strether: the middle-aged woman Bea Nightingale (née Nachtigall), born in 1903, exactly the year that The Ambassadors was published, and thus heir to the Victorian codes that still prevailed, who has grown up in the very Jewish immigrant neighborhoods so maligned by Henry James and other paleface and redskin writers. Bea has immigrant parents who run a small hardware store; her father is the stereotypical studious Jew, her mother the harsher, more pragmatic and uncompromising. Bea, a literature-loving high school teacher has directly translated the family name Nachtigall to Nightingale because it was easier for her students to pronounce.3 Her brother Marvin, who has not changed his name, is a Princeton-educated version of the tough brash Sammy Glick of Budd Schulberg's What