Talking To Myself

There are few things in life that get me more excited than the discovery of a new writer. Now, I read lots of writers, mostly good ones, because I do my research beforehand. But I am not referring here to just your general excellent writer. Here I reference the kind of writer who comes along - or whom one discovers - only once every few years. The kind of writer who, within the first ten pages, you realize is something special. Who, ten pages later, has you wondering how many other books they've written. Who, after still another ten, has filled you with delight.

I have discovered Joseph Epstein. If you are familiar with his work you may be thinking, "well, what took you so long?", for Epstein is now in his seventies and has been publishing since the 1960s. Certainly I had heard of him, and his reputation. But when you are like me, and always have a list of twenty of more books you are dying to read (most of which you secretly know you'll never have time to get to), some books and writers are bound to get lost in the shuffle. Epstein's Friendship: An Expose has been on a list in my wallet for a few years now but I never took the bait. Earlier this week, after having reread Terry Teachout's review of Epstein's latest book In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, and brandishing a Borders Books gift card I received for my birthday, I bit. I'll never regret it.

Epstein, as the title of his latest makes clear, is an essayist - an essayist supreme. I love the format of the short personal essay - ten or twenty pages about a particular subject from the author's unique point of view. I'm not sure anyone does it better than Epstein. You make think the opinion premature when I announce I've read only the introduction plus five of the essays from In a Cardboard Belt!. But those entries are of such high quality and so entertaining - so much fun! - that I can't imagine the rest will be of diminished quality. As I alluded to above, with some writers it is immediately clear that they are perfect at what they do, and Epstein is one of them.

So far I've read Epstein's personal takes on turning seventy, his father, eating out, his career as a teacher, travelling, and his more than thirty years of keeping a journal. The last piece's title is "Talking to Oneself", from which I appropriated this blog post's title. Now, I don't mean to compare myself with Epstein in any way, shape, or form - he is a writer and thinker of genuis, while I am a poor scribbler who has rarely, if ever, had an original thought. It just occurred to me while reading the piece that I myself am keeping a journal of sorts here in my blog so what Epstein has to say about his own daily journal entries has some resonance with me. After speaking of his journal's origination, his goals for it, how it has changed over the years, others who have kept journals and their own opinions about them, he turns to the subject of the reader of these supposedly private thoughts:

But who is the ideal reader of a journal or diary? Harold Nicolson laid it down that "the purely private diary becomes too self-centered and morbid. One should have a remote, but not too remote, audience." Nicolson thought this would be one's (still unborn) great-grandson. Chips Cannon, the Chicago-born English politician, was one of the great snobs of the past century. He adored royalty, and once, overstimulated by having two actual queens in his house, got so drunk he had no memory of the event. "I sometimes wonder why I keep a diary at all," he wrote. "Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or to dazzle my descendants?" Dawn Powell, who had no descendants beyond her retarded son, wrote, "The reason I write is because there is no one to talk to and I might as well build up a completely private life."

In the ideal journal or diary, one is talking to oneself but with the understanding that others are welcome to eavesdrop, after one is dead. Eavesdropping would normally be the last thing one would think one would want, given the ostensibly private nature of journals and diaries. In melodramas, it used always to be a serious violation to read, without their awareness, young women's diaries. Nowadays they try to publish them and as soon as possible.

That last line made me laugh, but then, there are a couple of laughs per page when reading Mr. Epstein. He ends the essay thusly:

Keeping a journal or diary, once begun in earnest, becomes more an addiction than a habit. I cannot now imagine abandoning mine. I continue to scribble each morning, living my life at a second remove, with nothing in it quite real until it has been scrawled out in my increasingly poor handwriting. "When all is said and done," Siegfried Sassoon wrote, "a good life is better than a good diary." No doubt, but please note that Sassoon makes this observation in his diary. You may think this essay has at last come to its conclusion, but it will really only be done tomorrow morning, when, in my journal, I write, "Finished essay on journals and diaries. Am, as usual, uncertain of its quality."

While I understand the uncertainty completely myself, I can assure you that Mr. Epstein has no need to worry about the quality of his own work. He is the genuine article. In have read that Mr. Epstein has nineteen books to his credit, ten of which are collections of essays. I have a lot to look forward to.