Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life
By Joseph Epstein.
Free Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 304 pages, $29.99.
Reviewed by Chuck Chalberg.
Never? Maybe saying so really is OK, especially when you know that you had little to do with your own good fortune. And Joseph Epstein surely knows that. By the luck of the draw—and in his own estimation—Epstein won the dual lotteries of time and parents before completing his trifecta of “extraordinary good luck” with the near miss that was his University of Chicago education.
Born in 1937, Epstein came of age in “pre-therapeutic” America. Among many other things, that would be an America in which children were not the be-all and end-all of their parents’ lives. A would-be, baseball-playing jock, Epstein can’t recall—or so much as imagine—either parent ever attending one of his youthful games. And instead of regretting their absence, he thanks them for it.
Actually, in many respects, his memoir is little more than a lengthy, but nonetheless delightful, thank you note. That even includes an indirect note of thanks to his local Chicago draft board. Without its “interference,” he might have, “God forbid,” gone to law school, which could have left him holding the winning (?), but not necessarily lucky, ticket to a “life perhaps more prosperous but distinctly less satisfying than the one I have been allowed to lead.”
Not just “have led,” mind you, but “have been allowed to lead.” Once more he strikes a note of thanks.
Of course, all autobiographies require some sort of justification. Epstein’s stated rationale has nothing to do with offering thanks—or settling scores. Nor is he out to satisfy Orwell’s requirement that an autobiography is to be trusted only if it “reveals something disgraceful.” Epstein mentions a few falls from grace here and there. But disgraceful? Not really.
This might have been a highly political book detailing the evolution of a conventional Cold War liberal into the conservative that he is regarded as being (even if he doesn’t label himself as such in these pages). It might have been, but it isn’t. No, this memoir was written simply because Epstein sees his life as “emblematic of the times” and secondly because he sees himself as having acquired the literary skill necessary to “recount that life well.”
Given that nod in the direction of a bit of chest-thumping, the book might have been the account of the making of a writer, perhaps even the evolution of a writer into the marvelous essayist that he is. Once again this might have been the case, but once again it isn’t, although early on Epstein does at least tell us that he never set out to be the writer, editor, teacher, or, yes, the “intellectual” that he became.
In other words, the luck of this young ballplayer had nothing to do with good fortune as it was defined by baseball’s Branch Rickey, who would triumphantly intone that luck was nothing more than the “residue of design.” But the ball-playing “rhumba king” and “wise-guy-wit” of his high school class did become a reader. Not early on, to be sure. (He never saw his mother read a book.) Certainly not in high school, save for eagerly consuming his monthly copy of Sport magazine. And not during his freshman year at the University of Illinois. The classroom bored him “blue.” But high school itself was “paradise,” what with its “gambling, whoring, and smoking.” Especially the gambling. On that near-obligatory, spring-of-the-year senior year trip to Washington, DC, this budding gambler never left the train to see the sights, preferring instead to play cards for money.
Whatever youthful wisdom he acquired might have come from card playing. Otherwise, he credits his parents, who inadvertently bestowed on their son the “freedom to go my own way.” Not that his father was a non-factor. He always set an “example of decency,” and he could even offer occasional advice: “No one is asking you to be an angel in this world, but that doesn’t give you warrant to be a son of a bitch.” Or “for a man, work comes first.”
Now an octogenarian, Epstein is willing to confide that boys always hope to obtain from their fathers something that the latter can’t provide, namely a “painless transfusion of wisdom.” Nonetheless, he apparently did listen to his father, especially the “work comes first” part, even as he has thankfully managed to avoid having to head into an office for virtually the entirety of his working life.
Although the young Epstein never doubted that he would go to college, he almost managed to avoid obtaining a degree. At the time the University of Illinois admitted any state resident with a high school diploma. So why not a rhumba king who was looking forward to little more than frat life? Besides, it was better than getting a job, with or without an office.
“One and done” was not yet part of the lexicon, but one and done was it for gambler Joe at U of I. Arrested for peddling a stolen exam, he retreated home to Chicago. Shortly thereafter, he migrated south once again, this time only as far as the University of Chicago, a place this young Chicagoan had never seen and a school that no one he knew had ever attended.
The University of Chicago was the third leg of the Epstein trifecta of extraordinarily good fortune. While “high seriousness permeated” the place, such gravity had nothing to do with getting a good job, since getting a good job wasn’t what a U of C education was all about. The entire experience put a “deep stamp” on him. It also rapidly—and permanently—altered Epstein’s “values.” Suddenly, and almost without warning, he became a “bibliographical version of a gym rat.” And in the midst of it all there was that “first inkling” that perhaps a young fellow named Joe Epstein might one day become a writer. A lucky fellow indeed to think such thoughts. And lucky us as well.
Finally, we’re ready for the debut of the Joseph Epstein. He reads Sidney Hook and is converted to liberal anti-communism. He publishes his first article anywhere. It’s in The New Leader. More evidence that a serious public intellectual and a serious anti-communist might be about to be born.
But wait. There’s more, much more, undesigned, even undesignable, happenstance. At twenty-three he marries a woman with two children and becomes an instant stepfather. Soon he’s back in Chicago working for his father while moonlighting for the magazine of the country’s Kiwanis clubs. Then he’s the director of an anti-poverty program in Pulaski County, Arkansas.
Along the way, he writes a piece on urban renewal, which marks him as an instant expert on the subject and, therefore, forever distrustful of any and all experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise. Soon thereafter he came to believe “less than wholeheartedly” in any War on Poverty, or in any great society, much less in the Great Society, let alone in that “old rogue LBJ.” At the same time, he came to admire greatly the civil rights warriors, “not least for their physical courage.”
As the sixties persisted, Epstein fathered two sons with his then-wife. Not yet thirty, he was already the father of four. Never happily married, he divorced when his boys were quite young. Luckily, he then found his “life partner.” Or did she find him? In any case, he felt chosen, which “elevated me in my own eyes.”
Even the luckiest of lives cannot be immune from setbacks and tragedies. Epstein’s generally lucky life included the suicide of a son’s girlfriend, followed by the death of that son.
On the other side of the ledger were mentors and friends, including Saul Bellow, Edward Shils, Irving Howe of Dissent, and one Martin Self. The last named was a “lawyer by education,” who never passed the bar exam and whom he met while working for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
When describing Self the autobiographer might well have been capturing a piece of his own self. “Martin had an impressive detachment. If he had a politics, I was never able to determine what they might be. My best guess is that he thought that the most interesting things in life were above and beyond politics, which is of course true.”
Irving Howe contributed to Epstein’s ongoing, but not uninterrupted, string of good luck by helping him secure a teaching post in the English Department of Northwestern University despite his lack of any degree beyond his University of Chicago B.A. As his mother put it at the time, the result was a “job in the neighborhood.”
No doubt such a job came with an office, but one guesses it was a place that Epstein did his best to steer clear of as much as possible, perhaps even at all costs. Such a tactic was consistent with something else that was becoming very “clear” to Joseph Epstein, namely his “penchant for going against the grain of our times.”
Such a line might have served as an excuse for Epstein, at long last, to launch into crucial, if less interesting, matters of politics. Not only does he refuse to do so, but he refuses to explain his reasons for refusing to do so. Instead, he confines his against-the-grainness to his teaching life, his editorial duties with The American Scholar (and his prime goal for that publication of promoting no central idea beyond “upholding the tradition of the liberal arts”), his friends and a neighbor, not to mention his own sense of detachment, a sense which he soon discovered could bring “its own pleasures.”
To be sure, hints abound. Northwestern was—and perhaps still is—a “strange place.” How could it be otherwise, since it’s a school “just on the wrong side of the cutting edge of snobbery.” It’s also just another institution of higher learning where “political correctness rules.” Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—or DEI? Epstein is not a fan, since that trifecta may well “kill the university.” College teaching itself? It comes “closer to being a racket” (while grammar and high school teaching are the “Lord’s work”). The teacher as “guy pal?” Someone other than Mr. Epstein.
The model for his own teaching? He had no one. Therefore, he was left to hope that his own “strong distaste” for boredom would at least serve to remind him that he at least ought to try to keep his students awake.
Encounters with undergraduates? In a course on Henry James, a student asked Epstein how he wanted the novels to be “read.” Would that be for their “Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, (or) whatever?” The reply? Reading them in order to discover James’s meaning should give him “quite enough to do.”
Epstein on academic freedom? Once upon a time, it meant that university teachers were free “to hold whatever political opinions they wished outside the classroom, but it was never the freedom to impose their opinions on their students.” And he didn’t.
All this leaves the neighbor. A decade older than Epstein, one Dee Canby was a faithful Catholic who had told him that death didn’t worry her in the least, since “I know where I am going.” A few years later, while now in hospice, she called to ask Epstein if he would bring her an order of Chinese takeout. Good neighbor that he was, he arrived with the meal to find her awaiting death, but “still cheerful.” As he watched her “tuck in” to her dinner, he felt a “stab of faith envy, (while) wishing I could myself be so confident as she of a pleasing afterlife.”
In the meantime, however, Joseph Epstein will have to suffer his disappointments and regrets in this life. The list is not long, but then how could it be, given his otherwise happy, not to mention lucky, life? Besides, for the time being, he seems quite content to concentrate on counting his blessings and offering his thanks.
Then again, there are at least a few stabs of regret. He never learned to play the piano and never became a “superior” tennis player. He tried but failed to learn Russian and ancient Greek. And worst of all, he never owned a red convertible or dated a ballerina. Horrors of horrors!
Otherwise, Joseph Epstein continues to be content with what has been not just a lucky, but a “largely spectatorial” life. And what has been the “chief finding” of all his spectating? “The world, for all its faults, flaws and faux pas, remains an amusing place.” What else could a lucky fellow think, especially someone who knows that he’s been lucky, even if he doesn’t want to say so?
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Minnesota.
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