[In the following review, Filbin delineates the defining characteristics of the essays in Pertinent Players and commends Epstein's approach to literature, finding it timeless and earnest.]

Once upon a time the literary essay was a creature as likely to be found in the sitting rooms of the generally read as in the studies of professors. It was a short, discursive work on a subject, writer, or book which treated life and letters as necessarily bound together, rather than separate and distinct.

The literary essay today is more commonly a theory piece, something that purports to discuss literature but never mentions its name. It now might explore where power lies, or demonstrate how “texts” (as opposed to books) are indeterminate, leaving criticism to disavow the notion of rendering judgment in favor of being subversive or merely controversial.

Joseph Epstein makes it clear where his sympathies lie in the introduction to the latest collection of his work [Pertinent Players]. His personal background, he says, consisted of “acquiring a fair amount of literary history—a history of the lives and conditions of writers and the progress of literary forms and genres. …” The result of this is “a belief in the richness of life … that … will always mock any attempts to schematize it.” He further observes that, “The disadvantage of a literary point of view is that those who seek it—or are stuck with it—give up the notion of ever possessing a small body of mastering ideas that might explain the world for them. (This, of course, has come to seem less a disadvantage as, at the end of the twentieth century, such ideas—among them Marxism, Freudianism, variants of Structuralism—are today, if not totally bankrupt, at least in Chapter Eleven.)”

In the eighteen selections in this volume, Epstein navigates by the longitudes and latitudes of coherence and factual analysis, believing the traditional form of the essay as practiced by the likes of Samuel Johnson and Edmund Wilson to be timeless and in no need of apologists.

Pertinent Players is devoted to particular figures in letters and public life (the fact that they are nearly all men will surely be noted by the author's detractors), and is a pantheon of notables who in Epstein's assessment transcend their own age. If this were a physical place, it would be late Georgian with niches and busts, scrolls and bunting, and vaulted ceilings that would inspire reverence. The admittees are ones he finds interesting or was asked to consider in reviewing books concerning them. (The essays originally appeared in Commentary, The Hudson Review, and The New Criterion.) His subjects fascinate him, he says, for different reasons. In some instances he asks why individuals achieved what they did against the odds, while others failed despite all the predictors of success being in place.

His modus operandi is to be classically expository, interesting, and sympathetic, while posing some question or taking up the cause of a reputation deserving an upgrade from second class. Here Epstein is king of the hill, writing clearly and succinctly, adding to each pound of revelation a dollop of wit.

He opens with a stirring overture; “The Mere Common Sense of Sydney Smith” highlights the English clergyman whose aphorisms amused Dickens, Queen Victoria, and Abraham Lincoln. One of the founders of The Edinburgh Review, he was a satirist and critic whose candor probably cost him the bishopric his worldly ambitions coveted. His striking characteristic for Epstein is the refusal to grumble over the cards dealt: “If my lot be to crawl, I will crawl contentedly; if to fly, I will fly with alacrity; but as long as I can possibly avoid it I will never be unhappy.”

Smith wrote in support of religious toleration, education of the poor without flogging, and much preferred the pleasures of beef, beer, and books to dour religious doctrines. Epstein's treatment of him is affectionate without becoming sentimental; and the same manner is adopted in the closing essay, “Remembering Sidney Hook.” Hook, unusual in being a public philosopher in twentieth-century America, applied rational argument to political and social issues, and had an unshakable commitment to that method when others were too easily swayed by ideologies. Epstein liked Hook for many things, not the least of which was having a sufficient sense of the ridiculous to recall in his memoirs an incident with Bertrand Russell at a Greenwich Village party; while Russell was trying to put the moves on a beautiful woman, Hook pestered him as to whether he still believed in the theory of types.

The most insightful piece is on the life and work of Desmond MacCarthy, a man who was offered membership in the Apostles as a Cambridge undergraduate. He had the early promise of greatness without ever becoming great, but was wise enough as a critic “not to have been interested in the last word; only in having his say.” The result, argues Epstein, is that what some might disparagingly term “familiar criticism” holds up very well even forty years after MacCarthy's death. “The Short Happy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson” is in the same tone, praising a scribbler who spent his limited time on earth in permanent domestic chaos and generally bad health but who nevertheless cranked out estimable prose that won the approval even of Henry James.

“Ben Hecht, the Great Hack Genius” praises the talent who sold himself to Hollywood but never valued money, and who grew up in the Chicago Renaissance where being a newspaperman meant living in the tumultuous human laboratory of “whorehouses and madhouses, courtrooms and poolrooms, hangings and fires, riots and theatricals.” Hecht perhaps comes closest to Epstein's definition of a fascinating writer by virtue of being one “whose failures are more instructive than his successes.” He was in his time a journalist, novelist, poet, movie director, screenwriter, and womanizer. The critic Harry Hansen called Hecht “the Pagliacci of the fire escape,” and Ezra Pound once said he preferred to be an expatriate because, “There is only one intelligent man in the whole United States to talk to—Ben Hecht.”

Amidst all this merriment, Epstein takes up the issue of H. L. Mencken and anti-Semitism in “Mencken On Trial,” an essay which has the pace and structure of an interesting criminal proceeding at the Old Bailey. Epstein allows the case for the prosecution to go forward without interruption. Mencken diary entries about Jews do not sit well, certainly not with Epstein who calls himself “one of those touchy Jews … generally on the lookout for insult, a veritable truffle dog of anti-Semitism.” But in conducting the case for the defense, Epstein points out troubling inconsistencies in the prosecution's evidence. Mencken's feelings about Jews were difficult to fix on a slide for clear viewing. He was a man given to generalizations and so contentious and opinionated that he often contradicted himself. The Mencken who might make a note in his diary about a “young,” “suitable,” “intelligent,” “shrewd” or even “Hollywood” Jew is to Epstein the culture-bound Mencken who democratically mocked all ethnic groups including his own “Krauts.” Mencken's convincing character witness is the passionate farewell column (January 1, 1939) he wrote for the Baltimore Sun titled “The Problem of the Refugees,” which insisted that the United States should shoulder the refugee burden of German Jews, and scolded those “political mountebanks who fill the air with hollow denunciations of Hitler, and yet never lift a hand to help an actual Jew.” With Epstein as counsel for the defense, Mencken gets off with a hung jury if not an outright acquittal.

Other fine selections in this book concern Chamfort, William Hazlitt, Italo Svevo, Maurice Baring, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Carl Sandburg. In all of these Epstein is informed and deliberate, producing boldly drawn portraits that never lapse into caricature.

If Epstein has a fault, it is his tendency to become a casual polemicist by sometimes not taking time to present reasons for what he dislikes. It is never wise for a critic to descend to being a mere curmudgeon. If you are determined to give offense, it seems a better strategy at least to fire your shots at a target rather than simply let the gun discharge into the air. In “Selling Henry James,” Epstein mentions a course in James he once taught, during which, in a discussion about a possible homosexual relationship between characters in the story “The Pupil,” a student “remarked dryly that perhaps there ought to be a statute of limitations on discovering homosexuality in literature.” Epstein quotes the statement approvingly, but does not seem to feel it necessary to explain why it is desirable for a student or critic so amiably to put on the blinkers when confronted with a question of interpretation.

“First Person Singular,” a consideration of several contemporary autobiographies, is marred a bit when Epstein takes Shirley Abbott to task for “feminudging,” which I infer is his pejorative for maintaining a general tone of complaint that women in literature, either as authors represented on the bookshelves, or even as subjects of stories, haven't always fared well. Epstein thinks it a mark of silliness for anyone to go on in this way, no doubt because of his general antipathy toward what he and others operating from the neo-conservative side of the trenches deem the unwarranted balkanization of literature by the new academicians he takes delight in thumping. There is surely much silliness in the remedies some of these cultural warriors propose, but it is unbecoming to a writer of Epstein's intelligence to make statements which imply that literary neglect on account of gender is either a myth, or if true is immaterial. Say it ain't so, Joe.

Epstein's two previous alliterative collections, Plausible Prejudices and Partial Payments, combine with Pertinent Players to create a body of work that I hope continues. Those to his left will continue to pummel him because he writes about “pale males” and is no doubt incorrigibly Eurocentric. But his or anyone's views are his own to hold and justify, and I consider this a point that needs to be writ large: shouldn't a critic have an inalienable right to like any writer he pleases? Advocating one's favorites is only prescription, not proscription. A list of authors well loved is not a canon which condemns others to oblivion.

Joseph Epstein's importance lies in having a willful affection for his subjects that doesn't rise or fall with the fashion. He eschews theories of literature in favor of the practice of literature, and aims to deliver a broader version of truth than the narrowness of specialization permits. And I for one would prefer an essay on man to an essay on one man's pancreas.

Epstein is droll and earnest company, and even if you aren't a member of his particular sect of literature, the tour of its hall of heroes is not to be missed.