Literary Attacks

In the second essay in his collection Avenues of History, published in 1952, Lewis Namier offers a fairly brutal critique of meta-historian Arnold Toynbee, but in a very gentlemanly way. Namier and Toynbee had been school colleagues and work colleagues, and he acknowledges that ("disclosure" is nothing new). Certainly he would be careful in how he phrases criticisms of a friend. But the wonderful and truly effective technique of the essay lies in how it places fairly sharp take-downs within a context of overall appreciation and praise for Toynbee's monumental efforts. (Anyone who writes a 12 volume survey of world history deserves a shout-out for sheer hard work.) Because Namier explicates what he sees as Toynbee's significant flaws as either defects of his positive qualities or as internal contradictions, his critique seems grounded, reasonable, and persuasive. There is no blood on the floor when it's over.

Compare Joseph Epstein's vituperations on Mortimer Adler, George Steiner, Harold Bloom, and Edmund Wilson in In a Cardboard Belt! Epstein will not allow his subjects any virtues whatsoever; the closest he gets is grudgingly admitting that Bloom's long-ago first book of poetry criticism was "quite...good" (only to point out that it's all downhill from there). Epstein seems to have gotten quite worked up over the fact that the world-at-large has not recognized that these four men are total scum, so he takes it on himself to serve as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Does he score some points? Sure; he's a "clever writer" (a phrase that Roger Ebert used of himself in an auto-critique). But the essays, apart from being highly unpleasant, are so obviously unbalanced and unfair that they seem completely ineffective and dismissible -- which means that Epstein has really accomplished nothing. He would have done better to start from a position of generosity, as Namier had, and make his points from there; thus positioned, they might have been devastating. But Joseph Epstein is generous with no one but himself. As one perceptive Amazon reviewer, David M. Giltinan, notes:

...[Epstein's] animosity against his targets feels way too personal. For one thing, Adler is a former boss of his, and he doesn't seem to realise that trying to settle scores with a former employer through public attack just makes him (Epstein) look petty...

There are far too many...completely gratuitous...asides, whose characteristic feature, aside from the nastiness, appears to be that they are invariably directed at people who have been more successful than Epstein.

This contrast between Namier and Epstein in manners of attack provides a lesson for all of us who write, whether on the Internet (where score-settling is a culture) or elsewhere.

POSTSCRIPT: A telling moment in Epstein's Edmund Wilson essay comes when he opines that...

...it is difficult to think of memorable phrases or powerful formulations in Wilson's criticism. (An exception is his remarking that "the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.")

How absolutely right that the only line Epstein can think of to approve in Wilson's vast corpus is one exactly in Epstein's own image -- a mere dig, funny, flashy, and unconcerned with being fair, scarcely a "powerful formulation." Epstein looks to other writers for lessons in how to handle his switchblade.