Nearing 97, shes almost universally praised, freshly republished, and a world-class emailer.
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Fame is pursued, Cynthia Ozick says.
(Ozick has also written a play.)
She thinks densely and she writes densely, says Lebowitz, whos been reading Ozick since the 70s.
Susan Sontag once said to me, You know, shesreallysmart.
Who else, in denouncing the termwriters writer, would refer to its piously diminishing apostrophe?
A hundred periodicals, both renowned and little, sent me packing, she has written.
It did 19 years after her visit.)
It was also an era when even the highest praise for literary women was often laced with chauvinism.
That, God knows, she is not.
In other ways, the common culture of 50 or 60 years ago doesnt look too bad.
Envision, for instance, an issue ofPeoplein which James Salter interviews Vladimir Nabokov: It appeared in 1975.
Ozick regards interviews, profiles, and book tours warily, even more than most serious writers do.
(Readings, he complained, were dull.)
A pilot in the audience called her out; Ozick wrote an essay forThe Guardianabout her humiliation.
Letters, on the other hand, are hotly alive, the real right thing.
Reading the results, I wondered whether such spontaneous eloquence was possible.
Had Ozick wrought much of the magic in subsequent edits?
(I am honestly afraid that they are the poorest I can do, James wrote.
Especially for the money.)
This is an unused bedroom, with two dressers, and three walls with bookshelves up to the ceiling.
The two dressers have piles of books.
The table has piles of books.
The bed is clear.
The dining room: under the sideboard … boxes of books, only partly hidden.
Its all a wilderness, completely out of control.
(Hallote, who died in 2017, was an attorney.
Ozick is a mother of one their daughter is an archeologist and a grandmother of two.)
If youve ever had an artists eyes fall on you, you know what I mean.
I hadnt; now I did.
But if her eyes were searching, Ozicks manner was ungrand, joyful, confiding.
All literary talk ceased while we took in dessert.
She leaned across me to see to it that Bernie too was digging in.
(Worthy as a pejorative!
A summary of the present culture.)
It was the 1990s, and the culture was becoming steadily less literary while continuing to slag her off.
Onstage with her at aNew Yorkerevent Book Publishing: Dead or Alive?
(Tyler is 83.)
One summer a few years ago …
I was determined to read all of Henry Jamess short stories.
Whether I was able to excavate everything I cant guarantee, but certainly there were very many.
Is my plaint of four decades ago still in force?
It ought not to be.
I have since published enough for what can be deemed visceral sustenance …
The nonagenarian writer should speak only of gratitude and then shut up.
I want to know how Ozick is feeling about a different sort of longevity.
She was in her 60s at the time.
She beats me to the follow-up: Is this horridly bleak?
No, because in the meantime theres the meantime.
The profound jubilation of writing itself when youre carried away by unexpected forces.
Instead I turn to a phrase shed used to describe herself to me: still striving.
Whats the nature of her aspiration?
And then to write another.
