Joseph Epstein’s and His Readers’ Lucky Literary Life

Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life
By Joseph Epstein
(Free Press, 269 pages, $29.99)

In the introduction to his autobiography, out this month from Free Press (sorry, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay for the book), writer Joseph Epstein apologizes for having the audacity to chronicle his quiet life. He needn’t have.

Those of us, your servant included, who’ve enjoyed Epstein’s insightful and amusing essays and short stories over the decades see no need to justify learning how Joseph Epstein became Joseph Epstein. How a smart-aleck high school kid in Chicago, more interested in sports and impressing girls than in books, became one of the most charming writers of the last half-century and change. A writer William F. Buckley Jr. dubbed “the wittiest writer alive.” (WFB, Jr. certainly knew witty.)

“Over what is now a long life, I did little, saw nothing notably historic, and endured not much out of the ordinary of anguish or trouble or exaltation,” Epstein informs us on page one. Well, our Epstein is having us on a bit here. His life has indeed been quiet. He’s never heroically led men in battle, stopped crime waves, rescued people from burning buildings, set athletic records, starred on the silver screen, or led a political movement. But his intellectual and literary achievements have been quietly extraordinary.

Epstein’s long life — he’s 87 now — began during the butt-end of the Great Depression and has, so far, spanned a world war, the marvelous and atypical 50s, the tantrums and bad clothes of the 60s and 70s, and the current therapeutic and scratchy PC morass we find ourselves tangled in now. He shows no signs of slowing down. He still regularly contributes essays, reviews, and op-ed pieces to the nation’s top publications. Regular readers of the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and National Review needn’t wait too long to encounter the Epstein byline. (I’m pleased to say Epstein’s work has also appeared in The American Spectator.)

“Getting decently paid to express one’s opinions keeps one from being perpetually ticked off or dragged down by the state of the world and the majority of dopes who seem to be in charge of it,” Epstein writes in Lucky Life. Just so.    

For more than half a century, in more than 30 books including witty and amusing essay collections, elegant short stories, and single-subject tomes like Charm, Gossip, and Snobbery, Epstein has parsed the triumphs and peccadilloes, the genius and the idiocies of the most fascinating times of the most fascinating country on the planet.

Epstein is a generalist in the best sense of the word. He will sometimes take on the big issues of the day — deconstructing the therapeutic culture, the politicization of the liberal arts at universities and in book publishing, and child-obsessed, helicopter parents, just to name three. A well-read man with a literary approach to life, Epstein is also a defender of the value and charm of competitive sports, about which he is savvy and voluble.

While he can be serious about serious matters, his default stance and style is an amused and amusing outlook, always readable, and never in a hurry. He can shed light accessibly on Anton Chekhov, Henry James, or Joseph Conrad. (In an antic mood he described Conrad as Henry James for people who like the outdoors. Perfect.)  But he’s more likely to write about more familiar quotidian pleasures and peccadilloes of daily life.

But people who’ve read Epstein, or my reviews of his work that have appeared in this space over the years, already know this. And they likely would enjoy reading of young Epstein’s various rites of passage in a Chicago that was not the free fire zone that it is now, his intellectual awakening in the University of Chicago, his time as a draftee in the peacetime army, his stint as an administrator of one of those federal anti-poverty programs in Arkansas where he learned the limitations of both government and misdirected idealism, his time as a college teacher (without benefit of advanced degree) where he was generally popular with his students but much less so with fellow faculty.

This last could be explained by his essays with titles such as “The Academic Zoo,” “Lower Education,” and “Who Killed the Liberal Arts,” where Epstein tears strips off of our current dumbed-down and highly political universities and the vacuous cultural phantasms they flog. Epstein rarely writes about partisan politics. When he does he makes more sense than those who do it for a living. He doesn’t cotton to labels such as liberal and conservative and doesn’t identify as Democrat or Republican. He says he likes to think of himself as being a member of the select Anti-BS Party. His personal politics, he says, are mainly attempting to protect himself from other people’s politics. (Amen, Brother. In the current political climate, this could be a full-time job.)

Too often autobiographies are an exercise in lily-gilding or score-settling. Not a hint of these here. In his apologetic introduction, Epstein quotes George Orwell as saying that an autobiography “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” Nothing of this in Lucky Life. Perhaps Epstein has nothing disgraceful to declare. Or perhaps, the traditional Epstein, who admits to being behind the times and comfortable being so, still clings to the idea that certain things need not, in fact shouldn’t, be shared with the world, even in an autobiography.

Better not to sign off without dealing with the puzzling title. Epstein considers his life to this point to have been very lucky. But luck, Epstein reminds us, can and often does change without notice. Since 1970, Epstein has not had to go to an office and has been able to spend hours every day reading and then making a living by writing about whatever he’s interested in. In so doing he’s attracted a thoughtful and devoted readership numbering in the thousands. How many thousands, neither Epstein nor I have a clue. (But not as many as his work deserves.) Great good luck I’d call this, both for Epstein and for his readers.

In his introduction,  Epstein wrote: “I hope this autobiography. like a good novel, will remind its readers how unpredictable, various, and wondrously rich life, even and outwardly quiet life, can be.” I found that it does.

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