Luke Ford

I call English Literature professor Sanford Pinsker Friday morning, Dec. 19, 2009.

I was provoked by this essay of his on Jewish literature.

Luke: "Is it OK to make pleasure your primary criteria for reading? Or is that shallow?"

Sanford: "I don’t think so. I.B. Singer once told me he was an entertainer. Not a low-level entertainer, but an entertainer. That’s why he liked to write for children. Children look at a story for pleasure. They didn’t have political or religious agendas. Their agenda was pleasure. When my son sat on Singer’s lap and Singer told him a story, I was worried my son would be bored and run away. He didn’t. He was absolutely captivated by Singer, thank God… What other reason would you read fiction if not for pleasure?"

Luke: "It seems that most of your students derived more pleasure from Chaim Potok than Saul Bellow."

Sanford: "Yeah, well, Singer said, ‘I’m not a low-level entertainer.’ It’s not that Potok is a low-level entertainer, but he’s writing a book {The Chosen) for junior-high or high school kids. I teach in a college. Part of the pleasure is complication and complexity, nuanced levels of language, that’s all part of the richer pleasure. On that level, Potok’s book, which is a page-turner, is not the same level of beans as Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog.’ It’s a more difficult read, but it’s also got deeper pleasures. It’s like saying that when you were a little kid, it gave you pleasure to hear ‘Chopsticks‘ on the piano, but that’s not Mozart, which gives exquisite pleasure."

Luke: "Are there laws for storytelling?"

Sanford: "Yeah. You can’t say because it is fiction that you can make your characters do anything, however implausible. That’s why we have science fiction, I suppose, where characters are not bound by any of the laws of the universe. You have to create characters who are plausible, who seem to us flesh and blood real, bound by the same rules of behavior that we are. You can’t do just anything.

"Singer said that when you write the first sentence of your story, you are a free man. You can make that first sentence anything you want. The second sentence, however, you are less of a free man because it has to make sense in terms of the first sentence. And so forth throughout the whole story. All the sentences have to make sense so that when you get to the end, there can only be one proper last sentence. If you can imagine five, you’ve got a bad short story writer."

Luke: "Do you think the three-act structure is one of those rules?"

Sanford: "It’s one of the conventions. It doesn’t have to be a rule. There are five act plays. There are all kinds of things."

Luke: "Let’s talk about Steve Stern. It seems to me he violates traditional storytelling norms because he’s got too many characters going in different centuries and there’s not a satisfying progression to the story. There’s too much divergent stuff going on. That’s why it is not commercial."

Sanford: "That may be. ‘Angel of Forgetfulness‘ is pretty ambitious with multiple plotting, which is a post-modernist thing, in such a way that it not going to be satisfying for a mass readership, but as you know, I bow to no man with my regard for Steve Stern. He does magical realism and all the folklore stuff as well as anybody. It’s a very Jewish storytelling vein. When you read ‘The North of God‘, it’ll knock your socks off. But he has not had the luck of catching on. He’s caught on with a number of critics and people who give awards such as myself, but he’s not caught on with any kind of mass readership. It’s sad. He soldiers on. He wouldn’t change a whit. Editors have tried to have him change, but he won’t… He loves to write. That’s his greatest joy still with his disappointments."

Luke: "Don’t you think it is inevitable that he will not get mass readers because of this post-modern story technique?"

Sanford: "Well, plenty of post-modern writers get plenty of readers. Jonathan Safran Foer gets plenty of readers. In ‘Everything is Illuminated‘, his mock histories are really funny. I don’t care too much for the guide. It’s overdone shmo. It’s a good one-line joke, but it keeps coming back."

Luke: "Jonathan Safran Foer is like eating cotton candy. It’s easy."

Sanford: "I don’t think so. Candy for the eyes? I don’t think so. I now think that about his wife’s ‘History of Love’. I didn’t always think that. It’s hard to tell the writers who will always survive. It’s hard to whittle down to what’s important. I can think of writers who I thought were going to be pretty terrific and they didn’t pan out. Let’s see what their sixth, seventh and tenth books look like. That’s why Bellow, Roth and Malamud were such delights from the beginning. You could tell they were going to develop into important writers. That’s harder to say about the ones who are more your contemporaries."

Luke: "What made Saul Bellow so great?"

Sanford: "Because he added to our American language and our American literature. ‘Augie March‘ announced itself as a whole new thing for American literature. It rolled in with lots of energy and lots of language not heard before. It put attention on a certain time and place in the immigrant experience. Cynthia Ozick once told me it will take another 500 years to develop another Saul Bellow. This guy with great ambition just came head and shoulders above all other writers who were his contemporaries or immediate predecessors. He out-vaulted them out of sheer ambition, talent and drive and a sense of what Saul wants Saul must go, which didn’t make him a lovely person, but it made him a great artist."

Luke: "How’s Saul Bellow standing up to the test of time? Is he still speaking to the younger generation?"

Sanford: "That’s a real problem. I belong to the generation of critics and writers and teachers who thought Bellow was it! But that has not managed to sustain itself because the academy has not much interest in Saul Bellow. There’s still some. You can still find articles and books written on Bellow. He’s a major writer. But it’s well done from what it used to be at its peak. People don’t teach Saul Bellow. Sometimes they don’t teach him because of his old age crack about the Zulus: Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?’ They took that as racist very quickly. PC helped to pull Bellow down. That wasn’t the only thing. The academy got interested in lots of other voices. Now what kids read in college is an education entirely doomed to irrelevance. By the time they graduate, none of the writers they read as freshmen are going to be around to pay attention to, to love or to hate, they’ll simply be forgotten. That’s sad. I’d still put my money on Saul Bellow in the long haul but this will put a damper on his chances.

"The other Nobel Prize winners, S.Y. Agnon will survive as long as there is Israel. I hope there’s Israel forever. He’s the national writer. But if I had to put down real money, I’d bet on I.B. Singer. His ability to tell stories the whole world seems to love makes him the writer most likely to survive."

Luke: "Why did you devote your life to literature?"

Sanford laughs. "My mother once told my aunt that because I’m a literary critic, maybe six books a week come to me through the mail free. She told my aunt, isn’t that wonderful? My aunt said, ‘He should’ve gone into diamonds.’

"I have no idea why I went into literature except that I always loved stories and I never grew out of it. And I never had a whole lot of interest in diamonds."

Luke: "What was it like being a Jew in the English department as the history of English literature is so soaked in Christianity?"

Sanford: "When I was a graduate student, there were people, even on the committee you had to defend your dissertation in front of, who had no idea who Mendele Mokher Seforim was, had no idea who I.L. Peretz was. Luckily, they let me go and for the most part it was fine. A couple of people told me that if I wanted to study these writers, I should go to Yeshiva University. But not many. Things then were already changing. American-Jewish writers were already an object of great interest by the time I finished my dissertation (1967 at the University of Washington in Seattle).

"In my college department, they let me do what I wanted to do. I never had any trouble."

Luke: "Did you know Edward Alexander?"

Sanford: "I sure did. There are stories I’m not going to tell you about that. Eddie is now a very good friend and he was then as well. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, Eddie was less Jewishly-identifying than he is now. Leave it at that. Like a lot of American Jews. The ’67 War turned him around."

Luke: "What do you think of his books on Jews in the English department?"

Sanford: "Eddie is a voice to the right of Cynthia Ozick. Eddie can be a shrill voice. I don’t share his politics all the way. I’m just glad he’s there. If you wanted to take every English writer who was not anti-Semitic and not read that person’s work, you wouldn’t be reading anything. The point of that would be to deprive yourself, of William Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound… I’m not in the business of depriving myself… Eddie thinks differently about things like that."

Luke: "Dara Horn. Her work seems to use these post-modern story techniques with her characters in different eras that makes it hard to enjoy. What do you think of her story technique?"

Sanford: "Her first book, ‘In the Image‘, is entirely modeled on Hebrew fiction. It is not modeled on the most au courant post-modernist writers.

"Dara grew up in the same New Jersey town, Shorthills, as Jonathan Safran Foer. They went to summer camps for bright Jewish kids. What Dara thinks of Jonathan? I think she thinks he’s an egomaniac. Dara is as centered, as anchored, as lovely a mother of two-and-three-quarters kids as you can imagine. She’s also a really serious Jewish-American writer who knows Yiddish and Hebrew. Very few do.

"Her next book, I’ve read parts of it, is about Jews in the Civil War, entirely unlike her first two books. Very much an A-B-C-D straight narrative. It will be interesting to see if American readers like that more, find it easier to read. It’s going to be about Jews in the Civil War in ways that most Jews don’t know about."

Luke: "Her first two books? Would you say that most readers would find them a pleasurable read or does she violate too many laws of storytelling?"

Sanford: "I don’t know about violating rules because there aren’t rules set down for every single thing you write. You’re sounding like a famous writing teaching who used to tell students that there were ten things that every great story had to have. He had to cross a stream, he had to meet a dwarf, archetypal moments. And depending on how many you got in your story, that would be your grade. If you got seven in, you got a C. If you got nine in, you got an A-. He went through the stories and looked for moments.

"That’s not how you write a story. That’s not how Joseph Conrad wrote ‘Heart of Darkness‘. That’s not how any writer sits down to write a story. There’s not a template you follow. It’s not a pattern you crochet. There can be people interested in magical realism, in distorting narrative, in doing post-modernist things. Most of them unsuccessful. You don’t bring a notion of a straight narrative so readers can easily follow it and say, well, if you do something else, you won’t get a mass readership. ‘Ulysses‘ was a tough book. It has now outsold every book written at the same time. That’s because the academy entirely embraced James Joyce and has been teaching him for a long time. Time had a way on confirming that it is the great modern novel."

Luke: "Pearl Abraham in her novel ‘The Seventh Beggar’ kills off her protagonist 80 pages in. As a reader, I felt like my legs had been chopped out from under me. What did you think of her book?"

Sanford: "That’s a hard book. She was born into a Breslover household. She knows those Rebbe Nachum stories well. What she did was ambitious and maybe foolhardy, boy, she didn’t like it when I said that, attempt to finish one of Nachum’s stories. It’s probably not what she should be doing. She had higher hopes for that novel than were realized. By contrast, people liked her ‘Romance Reader’, her first coming of age, how I left book a lot better."

Luke: "That was a very pleasurable read."

Sanford: "Yes, but it is a very painful book. She shares with Chaim Potok the idea that when you do the Hasidic world, what you’re doing is a story about how you got out of it. That’s Potok again and again. I thought her story was better."

Luke: "It’s conventional storytelling."

Sanford: "Yes, but it’s awfully good. The Beggar’s book is not conventional at all and causes trouble and didn’t do well.
"What you want to encourage, and sometimes let yourself over-praise, books that are trying to do important things, and if they fail, they failed at doing something important. They’ll move the thing along. They’ll push the envelope in good ways. You hope that down the road, your faith in them will be exonerated."

Luke: What do you think of Irving Howe’s famous statement? "That Jewish-American fiction has one subject: the journey from immigration adjustment to mainstream acceptance. And once this subject had been fully explored, Howe argued, serious Jewish-American writers would have no more to say, or to write."

Sanford: "I studied with Irving. I like him very much. Irving, like many of his contemporaries, thought the world would end when he ended. That unfortunately is a function of aging. When I look at what my department of English is doing now, I now say to myself, you’re a person who believes that all will die when you die. Meanwhile, peopl are speeding along the death of literature and literary studies at alarming rates. They take the golden goose and they choke it around the neck for all kinds of what they think of as good reasons — politics, correctness, diversity, multi-culturalism. Meanwhile, the goose is dead on the ground. Irving certainly believed it was over. He’d seen the sweep of it and like DILSEY?, he’d seen the beginning and he’d seen the end.

"But it’s not the end. You can’t say what he said to young American-Jewish writers. They are obviously going to be resentful. How could they not be? He had his day, we want to have our day. We want to write our books and our books are going to be different from the books that formed you. Out of that group that won’t shut up, that will be noisy and scribble, some will survivie and some will not. Amongst Irving’s contemporaries, some survived, and some very brilliant ones, like Delmore Schwartz, are not going to survive. He’s getting crowded out of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Pretty soon he won’t be there at all. That’s sad, but that’s the way it is. There are too many writers, so you drop some. They’re not going to drop Bellow.

"Irving meant to create a stir when he said it and he did. He may even have hoped that there would be people who’d object to what he said."

Luke: "How have you balanced your personal friendships with authors and your obligations to critically review their work?"

Sanford laughs. "Let me put it this way — write a good review and make a new friend. Write a bad review and watch your back. There’s no question that if your friend writes a bad book, you don’t review it. You just pass. Singer wrote some books I didn’t think were very good, so I didn’t review them. Why should I bother? Sometimes, no matter how gentle you think you’re being, any turn of phrase that an author doesn’t like, they can get very resentful and snippy. It doesn’t happen often. In more cases, the writers I’ve reviewed become friends because we have plenty to talk about."

Luke: "Have you lost any friends because of a critical review?"

Sanford: "Not that I can think of off-hand."

Luke: "Would you really link Risa Miller’s Welcome to Heavenly Heights (2003) with Ruhama King’s Seven Blessings (2003), and Naama Goldstein’s The Place Will Comfort You (2004)? I just read all three books and Ruhama King’s is very different."

Sanford: "Aren’t they all books that place emphasis on baal teshuvos (returnees to Orthodox Judaism) and people who become religious and stuff like that?"

Luke: "Yeah."

Sanford: "I was interested in books that could be both critical of Israel and critical of America by people who flew back across the pond in their novels and there weren’t many until [Danit Brown’s ‘Ask for a Convertible’ and Margot Singer’s ‘The Place of Settlement’]."

"Jews are becoming more Jewish. I guess I applaud that. It’s not my generation that’s doing that, but the 20-and-30-year-olds are in large numbers.

"Since I lived with the Hasidim in Crown Heights for a whole semester a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of chance to study and know these people as people. Many of the things said are just baloney. They’re sincere and serious and very nice and warm. I’d emphasize the warm. But this is a younger person’s game. It’s not a game for me. As Irving Howe said, ‘If I was a little older, I’d move to Israel. If I was a little younger, I’d move to Israel. I am what I am. I am staying and watching the New York Ballet.’

"Iriving was very funny. He had to be a little older to go to Israel. You go to Israel to die. Or you’re very young and you go there to build a country. He was not that young. He couldn’t do any of that. Don’t put a shovel in his hand and tell him to dig something. And he was not ready to just sit and read a Talmud blatt (page). He wanted to go to the New York Ballet and he wanted to be part of the literary scene and the Democrat-Socialist scene. There were lots of scenes to be active in. I bet if he had lived 15 more years, he would’ve gone to Israel. His wife was Israeli."

Luke: "Did you make it all the way through ‘Welcome to Heavenly Heights’ and "The Place Will Comfort You’?"

Sanford: "Yeah."

Luke: "You write: ‘Their respective protagonists become religiously observant only after they spend considerable time in Israel.’ Yet, in these two books, the protagonists are already observant before they come to Israel."

Sanford: "I may have dropped a stitch."

"Nathan [Englander] was interesting in not wanting his stories translated into Hebrew because he thought he would get a lot of grief from the Orthodox. It turns out he hasn’t. He hasn’t had a lot of grief from the Orthodox. But he was worried about it."

"Dara Horn, even though her parents don’t speak Yiddish, she speaks Yiddish to her husband. She’s now 31. And her parents can’t understand, that’s why she goes into Yiddish. It’s ironic and charming and strange, because it used to be the other way round. Dara is a frum-from-birth kinda kid. She grew up fully observant and she continues to be."

"The Orthodox world does not encourage you to become a secular writer. It’s bittul Torah (time taken from the study of Torah) to do any of this stuff. You’ve got Talmud, you’ve got Torah, you’ve got plenty to keep your mind occupied. You’ve got Rashi. You don’t need to be writing commentary in fictional magazines like Commentary."

"John Clayton. I admire his short stories. He became a baal teshuva later in life. His dissertation on Saul Bellow was one of the really good early books on Bellow."

Luke: "In books where the protagonist has no transcendent concerns, it seems to flatten the characters. When people have something to believe in, it makes people more interesting to live for something greater than themselves."

Sanford: "That touches on a whole big discussion about Jewish-American literature and what transcendence means and doesn’t mean Jewishly. Characters have to have passions and tensions. If they are flat, we are not interested in them. So, Jewish characters, I suppose, ideally ought to be wrestling with God, not with capitalism or racism or a whole lot of other things. They should wrestle with the most important thing to wrestle with. If you’re a writer like Allen Hoffman, belonging to a small Hasidic sect now living in Israel, some of those early books are very good. Yes, they’re post-modernist but they’re very good. The early novella Kagan’s Superfecta remains for me the best story to read on Yom Kippur."

Luke: "What influence do all these MFAs have on the writing we’re reading?"

Sanford: "They learn a number of valuable things about writing fiction. They are in a group that furthers what they’re doing. In most cases, it is a good thing. Philip Roth was at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which has produced a lot of great writers. Other MFA programs don’t do so bad either. Columbia is another one that is pretty good. I think that on the whole, MFA programs do more good than harm. What’s the harm? So they indulge a kid for a few years. He sits with other kids in their twenties and they write and read stories to each other. That’s not the most harmful thing in the world. I can think of worse things. If you get me started, the MBAs are a lot worse in the world than the MFAs. So they wrote a story that offended somebody. OK. The MBAs have created the mess we’re in."

Luke: "Do you wrestle with God? And if so, what does that mean to you?"

Sanford: "I do my wrestling matches in private. I don’t try to sell tickets. Singer used to say… I’m always going back to Singer. Singer was the most important teacher I had. We spent a lot of time together. Way back in 1967 and I finished my dissertation, and I went back to New York and a friend of mine said, ‘Call him up. He’s a chapter in your book. He’ll be glad to talk to you.’ I called him up and he was glad to have breakfast with me at Steinberg’s Dairy right near his house. We sat there and talked and all he was interested in was how much biographical stuff was in my chapter. I said, ‘Almost nothing.’ He said, ‘Then you have ideas about my fiction.’ I said yeah. He said, ‘Have whatever ideas you want to.’ This was not going to be a very provocative breakfast.

"But then he said to me, ‘What’s your name again?’ I said Pinsker. He said, ‘Yes! I told my wife Elma that I was having breakfast with the son of Pinsker the Poet. I saw a poem in the Reconstructionist magazine about me. Me? They’re writing poems?’

"As a young man, he could never write poems very well. He was terrible. So he went to fiction. He said, ‘This was a lovely poem by Pinsker the Poet.’ I said, ‘I’m the son of Pinsker the Pants Presser. This was my poem. I wrote it.’ He said, ‘You’re Pinsker the Poet? A pisher like you?’

"We became friends and spent a lot of time.

"Singer would say there are certain questions that you never give up asking. Why do we live and why do we die? Why do we suffer? Where is God in all this? Most people give up asking them. They never get answers so they give it up. They balance checkbooks and go on with life.

"People like Singer, and I guess people like myself to a smaller degree, those questions never go away."

Luke: "Do you still write poetry?"

Sanford: "Yes, but now I have new material — grandchildren. You have a whole new wave of stuff you can write about. They’re endlessly fascinating."

Luke: "What do you think of Philip Roth’s enormous productivity over the past decade?"

Sanford: "He was spectacular in the nineties like there was no other spectacular decade by a writer I can think of. Roth, no matter how critical you get, doesn’t write bad paragraphs. He’s like Updike, his contemporary. Whatever you say about a bad Updike book, the writing is usually exquisite. Maybe overly ripe, like overly ripe brie. Roth is phenomenal. I wish he would win a Nobel Prize. It’s not going to happen. The Nobel Prize committee, whatever they’re interested in, they’re not interested in great literature. Everyone laughs at what they pick."