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Distant Intimacy

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction by Joseph Epstein.....................ixCorrespondence.....................................1Index..............................................317

Chapter One

Well, we did the common festival, and the common turkey, and all was well; and that's fine for a year, if we live so long. New Year's Eve is going to be an oldsters' dinner party, which is about the pace we can trot at. And so it goes. I am deep in the heart of Flavius Josephus, with notes as fat as the national debt (choose your country, it's still fat), and beginning to see him in manageable form, that of the First Journalist, which takes us all the way to Karl Kraus, Robert Fisk and who knows who. I have two questions. The first: did my quaint lil ole publishers Carcanet send you a copy yet, or indeed so soon, of Ticks and Crosses? If (as I suspect) they did not, I will hie me to the PO with a copy for you this week. The second is tricky (time bomb within) and concerns a book I recommended in the TLS international show-off selection, the correspondence between B.-H. Lévy and Michel Houellebecq, or letters to that effect. Primo, have you seen it by any chance? If not, you might enjoy it, but it ain't over yet, because here's what puts the ouch in the kicker: might there be some fun, not to mention $$$ etc., in a year's (say) correspondence between ... you cannot have guessed. Well, might there? Chicago, Chicago and how cookies do crumble and what if and what about books and writing and coincidences and divergences; something piquant, is there not, in two friends who have never met, who do not need (and seem to have no inclination) to put each other down, compete, or anything, and yet ... Unparallel lines that don't meet and can't wait for infinity. So there you have it: the embarrassment of the year that ain't even begun yet. I think that the correspondence might be something of an autobiographie involontaire and might discover us to ourselves as well as to each other, if that's something either (no, both) of us want. Say, well, er, um and no damage or offence will be done or taken. It's cold here and I am perhaps warming myself up with rubbing hands that should never meet. Basta così. Don't say yes and don't say no and I shall know I have the man I think I have. Busy? Sure I am and sure you are, but isn't there a lot of slack to be cut in this: really we do and really do not know each other. Well, once I press that button this thing will go and nuttin' I can do to stop it. But, seriously, treat this as a joke, unless it makes you laugh. Tout à toi, bonne année,

Freddie

So, dear Freddie, let us begin.

I, too, have nothing to declare – the title of a memoir, I believe, by a Jew-hating Greek named Taki Somethingorotheropopoulos – and even less to confess. As for wives, we seem to have in common – what a weird kink, especially for writers! – loving our wives and not wishing to disgrace or otherwise degrade them, unlike old Edmund Wilson, whose idea of a swell time was describing bonking his various wives in his published journals. I feel as you do about your wife in not wanting to drag my wife Barbara into my scribblings; she has a refinement that naturally turns her away from all publicity. Besides, we both seem to have more Jews than sex in our heads.

On the subject of Jews, though we each have Jewish mothers (also fathers), both born in Chicago – I like to think that, had they met, they would have been friends – your upbringing as a Jew in England strikes me, from published writings of yours and from our past correspondence, as more difficult than mine. My father, born a Canadian, a Montrealer, had memories of Canuck kids tormenting old Jewish men – pulling beards, crying out "sheeny," that sort of delightful stuff – and was himself for always ever after on the qui vive for anti-Semitism. His son, though, had very little of it to deal with in Chicago, probably because the neighborhoods he grew up in and the public schools he went to were at least half populated by Jews. I remember driving through other neighborhoods which my mother instructed me were "restricted"; I'll let you guess from whom. And certain Chicago high schools, attended by German and Swedish working-class kids, had the reputation of having it in for Jews. I was never free of the consciousness of being Jewish, but, for the most part, didn't find this much of a burden. I was myself very little affected, at least directly, from blatant, or even subtle, anti-Semitism.

My sense is that in your much better English schools you stood out as a Jew and were made to feel your Jewishness in a way I never was. As a Jew, you, I suspect, never felt entirely at home in the milieu (the writer Josephine Herbst always pronounced this word "maloo," and so I now always hear it: maloo, as in the American folk-dance song that has the line "skip to maloo, my darling") of Charterhouse and Cambridge. English upper-middle and upper-class antiSemitism is not only subtler but more insidious than the American brand. In America, most – not all, to be sure – anti-Semitism is practiced at the blatant level, and so it allows one to feel easily superior to one's detractors.

I don't mean to strike an invidious note here, but I think between us I am the more Jewish writer. Without Jews to write about, without my deeply Jewish (I do not say Judaic) outlook, I would be out of business. I don't think the same is anything like as true of you, certainly not in your job as a screenwriter or, for the most part, as a novelist. Yet in another sense, you have in recent years turned yourself into a defender if not quite of the faith than of the justice due to the Jews, firing off letters to various editors reminding their writers and reviewers that they have neglected if not overlooked the vicious anti-Semitism lurking in their subjects. I like you in this mode – much admire you in it, in fact.

Jews, Jews, might it be they and not literature (contra Old Ez, another unfriend of our co-religionists) who stay news. I shall try to sound the Jew-note (Chicago had a once-famous jazz club called The Blue Note) less insistently in future. But I did think it made sense to clear the deck – clear the dreck – of this early in the proceedings.

How does the following strike you as a title for our little book: "Dear Freddie, Dear Joe: Chronicle of a Distant Intimacy"?

Jewily yours, Joe

Dear Joe,

How pleased Freud must have been when he heard Charcot's phrase 'c'est toujours la chose génitale', because, of course, as your unashamed – that's a true British term for a Jew who actually says he's a Jew – confession (there's another) revealed, what's really toujours is la chose juive. Which leads to: Did Eliot use a small j for 'the jew is underneath the lot', until he agreed to change it to a capital J, because he was imitating the French use of a minuscule when it came to national denominations? Shall we ever know? Shall we ever care? Christopher Ricks promises that Eliot wasn't an anti-Semite (he didn't have the nerve even to be a bully, one guesses, so Cricks may be right) and Anthony Julius, one of that legion of 'our people' I should just as soon see in the ranks of Tuscany, will...