In an Author’s Note to his new collection of essays A Word or Two Before I Go, 75-year-old Arthur Krystal shows why he has become a favorite of mine. He’s smart, entertaining, provocative. A down-to-earth intellectual with an effective strategically placed style of conversational understatement and charm.
And a history of wanting his iconoclastic non-fiction to make a difference in the way we think and act.
Subtitled Essays Then and Now, the collection comprises eleven previously published pieces in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others, most of them appearing in the last few years. It concludes with a quasi-autobiographical short story which, unlike the first-person essays, surprises with a wistful lyricism along with wide-ranging popular and scholarly reminiscences.
“Comes a sense of winding down,” he begins his Author’s Note. One hopes, though, that he will continue to be riled up by ignorance, pretension, and silos of narrow self-interest, “In the age of the Internet,” he says, the so-called “sincere” narrative ‘I’ welcomes us without a qualm into the boudoir or bathroom, sharing thoughts that might have given Goebbels pause.”
Krystal is heir to the familiar or informal essay, a genre going back to William Hazlitt in the early 19th century that reflects an evolving metaphysical and personal rumination on ordinary ideas, playing with them, rethinking them in prose that knows when to slip from complex to colloquial. Krystal’s opening essay, “Fitzgerald and the Jews,” was no doubt prompted by allegations of anti-Semitism in The Great Gatsby and thus perhaps the reason why some schools have dropped this great American novel from curricula. Rather than outright refuting such charges, Krystal gives them historical, cultural, and biographical context, along with brief portraits of Jews Fitzgerald knew well.
Other essays are timely in their subject matter, such as identity politics in “Is Cultural Appropriation Ever Appropriate?” Appalled by the history of racial relations in this country, Krystal is also angered by those who would denigrate and censor literary expression based on what they deem wrong expressions of interest in sex, race, or class. “Politics, whether of the left or the right, he says, should not prevent writers from loosening their imagination. In short, history and literary style should count for more than sociology in reading and appreciating the literary canon.
Also here is a fine critique of a poet who has confused or alienated many – the legendary, inaccessible John Ashbery. Relying on the poet’s own words, Krystal explains why you can both love and dislike Ashbery’s poems, even upbraiding the then-well-known Yale critic Harold Bloom for excessive adulation. And in a sly Yeatsian reference to his own opening line on “winding down,” the essay “Old News: Why We Can’t Tell the Truth about Aging” he looks at the subject of growing older without clichés or sentimentality. Later, two essays celebrate the unlikely but enduring friendship of Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University, and his own warm relationship with Barzun, who lived to be 104. I’m sure Krystal would not object to giving my last line here to Barzun who once said that “a person’s character is known by the concepts he keeps.”
