To the Editor:
Joseph Epstein writes that he hasn’t “the faintest idea” whether he was “successful” as a teacher [“Goodbye, Mr. Chipstein,” February]. As one of his students at Northwestern University in the mid-1980’s, perhaps I can give him a clue. Part of his success was that he did not seek above all to be a success—which in undergraduate terms means being modish, comical, and undemanding. He could be hilarious, but his remarks were funny precisely because they were expressions of a distinctive viewpoint and not a bid for the approval of his students. He once warned, for example, that the chief experiences available at the university were “fornication and fashionable ideas.”
That few of his students were moved on the spot to drop either of these pursuits may explain why he is not entirely sure that he was a success. He began teaching at the very moment that “the difficulty that inspired”—Henry James’s phrase for the demands posed by great art, which Mr. Epstein liked to quote—was being abandoned for what he called “the ease that deflates.” The signs of a deflating academic ease were all around: growing tolerance for the ready-made assertion, feelings of superiority to great writers, disdain for style, the substitution of grievance for respect. If Mr. Epstein was less than successful as a teacher, the fault belongs to the age in which he taught. He took his lumps for shaming the devil. I was around when he published in COMMENTARY an expose of a Marxist colleague who thought herself an agitator rather than a scholar [“A Case of Academic Freedom,” September 1986], and I saw how the essay made him a pariah. Later, when one of his bitterest antagonists moved on to another job, Mr. Epstein told me, “I shall miss not talking to him.”
I admired my teacher Joseph Epstein and considered him the best example of the literary life, which he showed was full of intellectual independence, wide curiosity, unremitting labor at the pleasurable task of making words obey you, a healthy skepticism about your own virtue, and a fearlessness in the face of rejection. What he said in class about great writers also applies to him: “They broaden the area of morality. They make moral distinctions seem finer—even when they do not ‘teach.’ ”
D. G. Myers
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas
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To the Editor:
Too bad for Northwestern and its students that Joseph Epstein is turning in his grade book for good. Any professor acute enough to recognize that Joseph Conrad is “Henry James for people who like the outdoors,” and graceful enough to phrase it that way, is miles ahead of the general run of theory-haunted bores hanging out in faculty lounges today.
Mr. Epstein is simply the best American essayist on active duty today, so I hope his byline will continue to appear in COMMENTARY and elsewhere—that he is not taking this retirement business too far. “Say it ain’t so, Joe” has been used in another context, but the sentiment could apply here. I am sure that I am just one of many readers who consider Mr. Epstein’s work one of life’s small pleasures—a pleasure we would be loath to give up.
Larry Thornberry
Tampa, Florida
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To the Editor:
I loathed Joseph Conrad and hated Henry James, but I loved Joseph Epstein’s latest essay—even though it made me feel a little guilty for not being a better student of English literature in college.
Dean Honeycutt
Burke, Virginia
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