The Only Autocrat on the Scene

By SANFORD PINSKER

For more than four decades Cynthia Ozick has published an extraordinary number of extraordinary novels, short stories, and essays. Dictation, a collection of four short stories, is her latest book, and, as such, it provides an occasion for some conversation about her work. Ms. Ozick, hard at work on yet another novel, was kind enough—and patient enough—to do her best with my queries. Interestingly, we conducted the interview via email, which seemed especially appropriate since the characters in “Dictation,” none other than Henry James and Joseph Conrad, have taken to dictating their work to secretaries who peck away on their respective typewriters. Ozick had her own difficulties with word processing, but in the end all her words were recovered, exactly as she had written them.


If the real struggle for serious writing is with the single inchoate sentence, has that struggle gotten easier for you over the decades? Or is making language say properly and precisely what you mean always the same creative struggle?

As Susanne Langer notes in Philosophy in a New Key, the question more than implies or contains the answer: it gives birth to it. And it’s of course always the same struggle; each time one begins again, ab novo, from scratch, on an untried threshold, facing the fearful vacuum ahead. “Experience” is meaningless here. And it’s not so much the “properly and precisely” aspect of language, the saying-what-is-meant, as the empty spaces between the words, where the tone, unuttered and unwritten, breathes. It’s not only the single sentence one has to worry over; it’s the sentence before and the sentence after, and the bridge between, which finds its expression not in language but in the electrical silences between the sentences—so that what looks like a simple passage of prose is really a thicket of held breaths. It’s always hard. It’s always unpredictable.

In a very suggestive footnote to “Dictation,” you tell your readers that the imagination can dare to flout “historical actualities”—such as the fact that the literary critic Leslie Stephen had been dead for nearly 10 years before he appears in your story. Your tone seems to imply that the fictionist can play fast and loose with the facts, if that is what the story in question calls for. I worry because many readers called the work of a young Jewish-American novelist into question when certain facts about the Holocaust were slightly off and the date given for Babel’s death was flat-out wrong. Any comment?

I don’t know the novel you refer to, but my own novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, which touched not directly on the Holocaust but on the years leading up to it, was faulted by a knowledgeable scholar for fudging chronology. Certain facts were slightly off: e.g., I was forcefully reminded that the Nazi book burnings occurred in such-and-such a month, not before, and so on. I defended what was intended to be essentially a collage of events, which, taken all together, intensified the truth of history while never subverting it. The task of a novel—passion—is not the job of a textbook. Still, context is all. In a serious work, conscientiousness about the date of Babel’s death would be a good thing. (Before caviling, though, let’s remember that for a long time there was confusion in the West over exactly when Babel was shot.) But in a jape like “Dictation,” where literary mischief is afoot, how solemn must I be about the date of Virginia Woolf’s father’s demise?

I prefer to leave the name of the young Jewish-American writer “unnamed,” but I can assure you that the book I have in mind is not Heir to the Glimmering World. Moving on, I cannot entirely shake the feeling that, in “Actors,” you are writing about the theater with an insider’s sense of disappointment based on the fate of your own play, “Blue Light.” And given Henry James’ earlier appearance in this collection, were his theatrical disappointments somewhere the background?

“Disappointment”? “Fate,” meaning something dour? The question is under a misapprehension. Every performance of both productions, the first in Sag Harbor, called “Blue Light,” and the second, retitled “The Shawl,” in New York, was sold out; audiences emerged shocked and moved. In New York the theater pleaded for the play to continue beyond its scheduled run; it could not, because Dianne Wiest, who was miraculous as Rosa, the central character, had another commitment. It was a privilege to work with Sidney Lumet as director; for the sake of this play he returned to the theater after an absence of three decades. I had the indelible experience of watching all the elements of a drama cohere.

And “watch” is the watchword: I participated mainly as an intimate observer. I had written the words and defined the theme (Holocaust denial, in the form of a sequel to the novel The Shawl), but the director was both thinker and doer: the autocrat of the thing. Because as a novelist I had come as an outsider, I was praised for my “intelligence,” but treated more as a novice than as a playwright with intrinsic authority. And grateful though I am for those seven intense years, I would not do it again; the reason lies precisely in the fact of those long seven years. How much else, how much more, I might have written! I prefer the autonomy of the novel, where it is I who determine the casting, the lighting, the movement, the timing; where I am the only autocrat on the scene.

As for Henry James, who can claim affinity? Every writer alive on the planet today is a worm under his feet. Or a gnat in his hat.

If memory serves, you once claimed that the imagination is perhaps the only realm where one is totally free—from gender politics, from civic duty, and, yes, from religious obligation. Does this apply with a special force to “At Fumicaro,” a story in which you imagine a Catholic protagonist?

Yes, certainly. (Though I’ve written one story designed as a feminist spoof. Naturally it’s called “Virility.”) But if you look closely, “At Fumicaro” is implicitly a very Jewish story. It sets up “natural” religion, which is always on the side of material incarnation, against an indefinable and unbodied Transcendence. Heinrich Heine once brilliantly remarked that if the stones on the hillside had a god, it would be a stone.

At the beginning of your career as a short story writer you seemed to worry that the fictions can, or do, compete with God, and that, as such, they ought properly give the individual writer pause. Do you still believe that, and, if so, is the condition particularly severe for Jewish writers?

It was always a conceit, no more than a conceit, and therefore I suppose I’ve deserved the consequences. I’ve frequently wished that every copy of the 38-year-old essay that promulgated this notion could be expunged from the face of the earth. Essays ought not, in any case, to be sued as yardsticks or shackles to “explain” a writer’s fiction; but when this idea of “competition with the Creator” is offered as an analysis of the writer’s thought... well, that way lies Sigh and Woe and Despond.