“Fame is pursued,” Cynthia Ozick says. “Recognition accrues.” Recognition comes with being read, and for much of her writing life, Ozick, who turns 97 in April, maintained that she wasn’t. Never mind that David Foster Wallace, who selected her work for The Best American Essays 2007, also put her on his list of best living fiction writers. Never mind that Saul Bellow, asked whether he preferred her fiction or her nonfiction, waved the question away: “She’s triple-threat.” (Ozick has also written a play.) Never mind that Fran Lebowitz, when I call her after learning that she’s an Ozick admirer, replies, “As are all sane people.”
With the publication of In a Yellow Wood, a 712-page collection of Ozick’s stories and essays, Everyman’s Library has ruled in favor of the people. Though nowhere near all of her books are represented — she’s published more than 20, including the novels The Messiah of Stockholm, The Cannibal Galaxy, and The Puttermesser Papers — most of the celebrated Ozicks at some point turn up: memoirist (“A Drug Store Eden” is a gorgeous remembrance of her northeast Bronx backyard), fabulist, feminist, observant Jew, unabashed belletrist. “She thinks densely and she writes densely,” says Lebowitz, who’s been reading Ozick since the ’70s. “Susan Sontag once said to me, ‘You know, she’s really smart.’”
Ozick is also really mischievous: Anyone who has enjoyed a YouTube snippet of her 1971 demolition job on Norman Mailer in the documentary Town Bloody Hall will find the same impishness in her prose. She is, among other things, the absolute monarch of the sly adverb. Who else, in denouncing the term writer’s writer, would refer to its “piously diminishing apostrophe”?
The earliest work in the new collection dates from more than half a century ago, when Ozick was still smarting from the years when no one would publish her. “A hundred periodicals, both renowned and ‘little,’ sent me packing,” she has written. “An editor who later went to Hollywood to write Superman led me into his Esquire cubicle to turn back a piece of fiction with the hard-hearted charm of indifference … Another day I stood on the threshold of the office of The New York Review of Books, a diffident inquirer of thirty-five, and was shooed away by a word thrown out from a distant desk; I had come to ask for a review to write.” (In 2008, the Review’s Robert Silvers told me that he’d advised Ozick to send along her work — she has no memory of this — and noted that the paper later published an essay of hers on Henry James, a writer she’s worshiped since she was an adolescent. 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. “As Cynthia Ozick’s ill-fed, unkempt, rumpled and generally undusted husband,” Bernard Hallote wrote to Time in 1966, “I deny your characterization of her—in your otherwise shining review of Trust—as a housewife. That, God knows, she is not.” In other ways, the common culture of 50 or 60 years ago doesn’t look too bad. Envision, for instance, an issue of People in 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. In “An (Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James,” she imagines the novelist interrogating his interrogator: “After you have heard Adelina Patti sing, why should you care to hear the small private voice of the woman?” Though Ozick insists that writers are least themselves when they’re “chatting industriously” on demand, over the years she’s been a good sport in ways she’s come to regret. When she was 76 and promoting her novel Heir to the Glimmering World, a library director pressed her to dream up, on the spot, an adventure tale. (Readings, he complained, were dull.) “Obligingly, though at the time I couldn’t so much as drive a car,” she tells me, “I invented a cross-country trip in a Cessna two-seater.” A pilot in the audience called her out; Ozick wrote an essay for The Guardian about her humiliation. In a 2011 profile, a journalist who had missed the confession gave the lie new life: “Ozick is intrepid; when she was in her sixties she made a solo flight across the U.S.”
Letters, on the other hand, are “hotly alive,” the real right thing. When The Paris Review invited her to participate in its “Writers at Work” series, she insisted on an unusual approach: Her interlocutor sat at one end of a table, asking questions, while she sat at the other, typing replies. Reading the results, I wondered whether such spontaneous eloquence was possible. Had Ozick wrought much of the magic in subsequent edits? Well, I’ve been back and forth with her in email for weeks, and night after night she puts on an airshow in prose — loops, spins, hammerheads. Her response to my lament that Bernard Malamud has disappeared from bookstores is no less virtuosic than In a Yellow Wood’s essay about him: “For Malamud, tragedy, unembellished by irony, is true; suffering is real; speech is visceral, and lives closer to the lining of the lung than to the darting tongue. If he is not read today” — not read enough, I later emphasize — “this may be the cause: we who mock everything, who dismiss raw feeling in favor of the gibe, who value wit over hurt and find the absurd in every sentiment … can it be that we have lost the capacity to know, hence to name, what we see?”
At one point I joke that Ozick’s emails are too good, not unaware that Henry James was once told the same of his dispatches for the New York Tribune. (“I am honestly afraid that they are the poorest I can do,” James wrote. “Especially for the money.”) I ask her about the hand-me-down Sears, Roebuck child’s desk where she’s said she wrote virtually everything, and she volunteers this verbal tour of the house in southern Westchester where she’s lived for more than six decades. “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 living room: another wall of books, and “at the side of the piano, where you can’t see it from the chairs, a heap of books.” The dining room: “under the sideboard … boxes of books, only partly hidden. It’s all a wilderness, completely out of control.” Her computer — “where the main action is” — rests on her parents’ old kitchen table, which is covered with a flannel sheet.
As I picture Ozick at home, it helps that I know her voice — warm, sweet, shockingly girlish. The first time we met, decades ago, I was seated between her and her husband at a PEN dinner. (Hallote, who died in 2017, was an attorney. Ozick is a mother of one — their daughter is an archeologist — and a grandmother of two.) Somebody’s plus-one guest and too shy to speak to her, I was relieved when Hallote, who had winningly old-fashioned manners, drew me out. Then he introduced me to Ozick, who gave me the rest of the evening, asking which writers I loved, telling me whom I must read. First on her list was William H. Gass, and it’s Gass I turn to when I think of the calm intensity of her gaze: “Honesty, concentration, unity of being: these allow, in the artist, the world to be seen—an unimaginable thing to most of us—to fully take in a tree, a tower, a hill, a graceful arm. If you’ve ever had an artist’s eyes fall on you, you know what I mean.” I hadn’t; now I did. But if her eyes were searching, Ozick’s manner was ungrand, joyful, confiding. All literary talk ceased while we took in dessert. She leaned across me to make sure that “Bernie” too was digging in.
The next day Ozick sent me a parcel with a note in the tiniest handwriting: “Herewith, some copies of Southwest Review and Salmagundi: fine periodicals that remain dedicated to writing (as opposed to the widespread scorn for the ‘worthy’). (‘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 a New Yorker event — “Book Publishing: Dead or Alive?” — Leonard Riggio, then-CEO of Barnes & Noble, announced how few copies of The Shawl, her masterpiece about the Holocaust, his stores had sold in the last year. There were also more personal slights: I once watched Christopher Hitchens smirk his way through a Bellow panel on which she was the other headliner, and Silvers and The New York Review ignored book after book of hers, including Quarrel & Quandary (2000), an essay collection that won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Now celebrations of her excellence seem to be cropping up everywhere (including The New York Review, where Cathleen Schine recently declared The Puttermesser Papers possibly “the best book about the city since Robert Caro’s The Power Broker”). These days, Ozick comes in for a different kind of condescension: How can anyone so old be so sublime? “I am murderously ferocious on this matter,” she told the Los Angeles Times shortly before her 92nd birthday. Of a recent New York Times subhead about Anne Tyler — “While many of her contemporaries are playing canasta, she’s releasing her 25th book” — Ozick says, “So now the longevity police are going after the kids!” (Tyler is 83.)
Though I’d promised not to ask her the secret to writing well as she closes in on her centennial, I do, as it turns out, have longevity questions for her. In “Nearing Ninety,” which Ozick selected for The Best American Essays 1998, William Maxwell notes that as a reader he’s grown harder to please. Has she? “One summer a few years ago … I was determined to read all of Henry James’s short stories. Whether I was able to excavate everything I can’t guarantee, but certainly there were very many. And what I discovered was this: Henry James, who, after all, wrote for a living, was a hack!” A formula writer, she means — “plots all built on the same premise and design and trajectory, seemingly fresh if taken one by one — but not when experienced as a flow.” I’m curious, too, about how she views an essay from middle age about her resentment at not being published young. “Is my plaint of four decades ago still in force?” she asks. “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.”
Not yet. I want to know how Ozick is feeling about a different sort of longevity. Writing about herself in the third person, she once despaired of seeing “with a perilous clarity that she will not survive even as ‘minor.’” She was in her 60s at the time. What about now? “When the sun burns out (old writers reflect), even Shakespeare, even Tolstoy, will be void.” She beats me to the follow-up: “Is this horridly bleak? No, because in the meantime there’s the meantime. The profound jubilation of writing itself when you’re carried away by unexpected forces.” And yes, the jubilation of being read: “Discovering that there are readers, however few, is always a genuine astonishment. And more than enough to count as recognition … Three or four is as good, and as gratifying, as a flock.”
On behalf of the flock, I could ask what she’s working on, but most writers resist that question. Instead I turn to a phrase she’d used to describe herself to me: “still striving.” What’s the nature of her aspiration? “Most immediately, to finish the short story that’s begun (and is stuck because its premise is preposterous),” she says. “And then to write another.”