Tough love

CYNTHIA OZICK comes across in public as a somewhat diffident woman, watchful and polite. Public gatherings are not her metier. But get her near a blank sheet of paper and everything changes. From behind the conventional deceit of appearances emerges a brilliant, free-spoken critic engaged with the most vexing artistic issues.

Serious readers know this about Ozick. Author of four previous books of essays -- including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning “Quarrel & Quandary” -- as well as a clutch of literary novels, she has made herself an indispensable presence in our embattled literary scene. Her new collection, “The Din in the Head,” catches her in full polemical stride: The critic takes on a culture muddled by its aesthetic priorities and distracted by “this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static,” the electronic chaos invoked in her title essay.

Ozick is our arch defender of the independent rights and powers of literature, and of the novel in particular. She is old school; her views are clear and her tone brooks no opposition. Open the collection anywhere -- I guarantee it -- and you will feel the bite of her distinctive voice. If you are a reviewer, you will want to quote her.

In an essay on Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein,” which many readers and reviewers took as a portrait of Bellow’s relationship with his old friend Allan Bloom, she writes: “When it comes to novels, the author’s life is nobody’s business. A novel, even when it is autobiographical, is not an autobiography.” And: “Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.” I could keep going -- Ozick’s subtle decisiveness cries out to be heard -- but the point is made: Literature is a world unto itself, except that it bears insistently on this world through the reader’s moral imagination.

A connoisseur of ironies, paradoxes and ambiguities, Ozick reanimates the spirit of Lionel Trilling (she includes a strong essay on Trilling, her former professor, and the fading of his brand of criticism). She too adores the complexities of writers such as Henry James and Tolstoy and she wants to preserve them from the equalizing ideology of postmodernism, which looks to eliminate the high-low culture distinction.

She is strict. Though she admires the verve and intelligence of a writer such as the late Susan Sontag, she cannot abide Sontag’s ‘60s-tinged celebration of the “erotics” of art or her willingness to banish hierarchy. Indeed, Ozick, in a foreword, tunes her critical sensibilities by writing on Sontag’s legacy, observing: “The New York Times remarked that Sontag -- for all that ‘the life of the mind was for her something both rigorous and passionate’ -- could nevertheless link Patti Smith and Nietzsche. Under the old eternity, no one would dream of linking Patti Smith and Nietzsche. Under the new dispensation, the old eternity evaporated, differentiation was dust, high culture was porous and always open to Patti Smith.”

But although Ozick is determined to stand guard over the sovereignty of what used to be called “great works,” her moral impulses have never permitted a quarantine on art for art’s sake. Literature breathes human air. In her 1996 collection, “Fame & Folly,” for example, she cross-examined her great reverence for T.S. Eliot in the light of his published anti-Semitic pronouncements and extracted the gnarly root: “In the end he could not disengage the mind that created from the man who suffered; they were inseparable. But the mind and the man -- the genius and the sufferer -- had contributed, in influence and authority, more than any other mind and man ... to the formation of the most significant aesthetic movement of the twentieth century.” Eliot had to be taken to task: “Looking back over the last forty years, it is now our unsparing obligation to disclaim the reactionary Eliot.” But Ozick had the courage -- and love -- to spare the other.

“The Din in the Head” finds Ozick worrying the same questions of accountability. Assessing the great Isaac Babel, she fastens on the terrible paradox -- that the man who wrote “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place” could have acted as he did. She summons her own iciness, declaring: “[T]his same master of the white bone of truth, this artist of the delicately turned key, was once a shameless propagandist for the Revolution, capable of rabid rote exhortations: ‘Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do!’ ”

If Babel poses the stark contradiction, Tolstoy offers a subtler problem. Ozick is full of praise for his novel “The Cossacks” and its powerful pictorial and narrative energies. But what about this? “In a single year, between 1648 and 1649, under the leadership of Bogdan Chmielnicki, Cossacks murdered three hundred thousand Jews, a number not exceeded until the rise of the genocidal Nazi regime. None of this, it goes without saying, forms the background of Tolstoy’s novel.”

She anticipates the defense, remarking that Tolstoy’s is a love story, adding further that his work is always humane, and yet a reservation persists: “How are we to regard Tolstoy, who, though steeped in principles of compassion, turned away from what he knew?” Her answer is to invoke what she calls “the sovereign integrity of story.” We are not to search the work for Tolstoy’s moral response to what he knew, but for that of his “Cossacks” character, Olenin. And Olenin, served up with artistic integrity, is simply not a man who would have such awareness. Ozick falls back on what I take to be a deliberately hollow cheeriness -- “So come, reader, and never mind!” -- leaving the moral quandary as a kind of disturbance in the air.

She ends the book with a curious piece, an invented interview with her great hero, Henry James. Now it is not private history that she would probe, but the private universe. The interviewer, cast as a persistent sort of feminist, hounds the master about his various portrayals of women, then zeroes in, asking about his friendship with author Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have jumped rather than fallen to her death. She asks James why he was so intent on keeping that relationship secret. James responds: “I had a dread of being, shall we say, ‘linked’ with Miss Woolson. I feared the public charge of an ‘attachment.’ But she was deranged, poor lady.” The interviewer fires back at him: “You decided this only after she jumped out of a window in Venice and killed herself. Until then you regarded her, in your own words, as ‘a deep resource.’ ” This is quite enough. James asks his man to show the woman out; interview, essay and book are concluded.

Ozick is not repudiating her literary mentor, but she cuffs him, and in doing so suggests -- as she does in these engaged and deftly turned essays -- not only that great literature can withstand sharp inquiry from readers but also that such inquiry is vital. Human imperfection is granted, if not necessarily sought out. Questioning it does not impugn the work, which in essence is a bid to transcend, or at least transform, the stuff of its origins.