Arts and Letters

When speaking of Matthew Josephson (whom nearly everyone who knew him at all, as The New York Times attests, spoke of as Matty) I am necessarily somewhat at odds. We are here to remember him in connection with his notable works. Yet there is also the fact that I have known him since 1916—and my personal memories of him are so many, moody, and poignant, my references to him suffer the embarrassing intrusion of references to us. The whole drift or tenor of my life was radically influenced by the opportunity to associate closely with him during the formative years of our faring-forth. And on going back through his books to write these pages, I became so involved that I was practically immobilized, in a welter of aimless reminiscences.

Some months ago I was interviewed by Mr. David E. Shi, who is writing a biography of Matty. Looking for a way to get out of my personal groove, I thought of writing to ask him whether he had arrived at "some overall impression of Matty's career." That worked. In view of Matty's almost devoted engrossment with such figures as Zola, Rousseau, and Hugo, Mr. Shi proposed as the "unifying" principle of Josephson's career his identification with the concept of "the writer turned public man." I welcomed that as both an accurate formula to start from, and as outside the kind of hypnotic spell I had got into. So let's go on from there.

The distinction, I saw, is complicated by the fact that the cult of "the writer" (as exponent of literature for its own sake) has within itself from the start the makings of its transformation and abandonment. When, in his early book, Portrait of the Artist as American, Matty selects as his ideal type various of our writers whom he classes as "fugitive rather than rebellious," he is explicitly opting for the view of the writer as a species of "outsider." In his later work, Life Among the Surrealists, he expatiates with much anecdotal zest on the ways in which such an attitude can lead to the sense of being "insiders" by being outsiders-together (along with correspondingly unstable shifts in the forming of cliques, coteries, and feuds), an internally related community the nature of which implied vague antithetical relations to an excluded "public" order.

Matty was entranced with this picturesquely intestine realm of fun and fury, which could add up to a considerable Wrangle, within which the public laws of survival were always vaguely operating somehow. At one stage, on the frisky side of this turbulence, Matty chose to sign himself "Will Bray." On rereading his account of his fist-fight with Gorham Munson, I note that he makes it disarmingly unheroic. But he doesn't report, perhaps never even heard, Gorham's solemn pronouncement before the battle to this effect: "It may be that I shall be forced to retract what I said about you. In case I do have to retract, I want it understood in advance that I don't retract a single word." Maybe that super-Surrealist twist should be added to the annals of the period.

Precisely in this autobiographical book, featuring adventurous doings on the "writer" side of things, there emerge adumbrations of the turn to such "public" considerations as finally came to fruition in a work of which the very title was to be in a sense epoch-making, The Robber Barons. This "shadow before" is in the chapter, "Confessions of a 'Wall Street Man,’" telling of wholly nonliterary experiences in a brokerage house during "the Fat Years of the Coolidge Administration." Being back in the United States, and without adequate income as a "writer,'' he made a notable decision:

I would put aside all the agreeable mental furnishings accumulated during years of travel and education… and stake out my claim on the great financial community of New York…. There, we were told, lay the real power in the land, in that community of big industrialists and financiers who seemingly manipulated the entire body politic at will. Even the reputed "wickedness" of the Street gave it a certain glamor in the twenties.

Apparently he took his appreciative notes on our "fugitive" writers while undergoing the ravages of that interregnum. And the change was close to being completed when, in 1927, having become both physically ill and mentally sick of his job as a "customer's man," he left for another trip to Europe, this time not to repeat the improvisings of his earlier literary adventures (for now he "felt somewhat remote from the wars of art" still going on there), but under contract to write a biography of Emile Zola. He says of that biography that his "first thought had been to write an ironic portrait" after the fashion "inspired by Lytton Strachey." But "closer acquaintance with Zola and his work" won him over.

"Malcolm Cowley,'' he says, "in describing my method of writing biography, defined it as that of 'immersion' in each subject I took up. He went so far as to claim that I tended to imitate each character I wrote about, in their bad as in their good traits—which is an amusing exaggeration." In any case, it was surely that gift of "immersion" which won him over so thoroughly when he saw how Zola's methods came to a focus in the Dreyfus Affair, with regard to both personal courage and rhetorical power, though Matty's roots in the aesthetic tradition led him to treat of rhetoric in other terms, mainly as a matter of temperament.

The "immersion" took two quite different forms. There were times when he saturated himself continuously for many months with the accumulation and organization of details bearing upon one figure. Or there was the kind of reporting that is done by interviewing a variety of people from the standpoint of their relation to some timely topic, and "novelistically" attaching to each whatever personal traits are most serviceable for giving the reader a sense of distinguishing them from one another in a crowd. He had that gift from the start, and doubtless his work on Zola helped him develop more expertly his ways of treating each general subject in terms of such fragmentary personalizing. By thus demarcating individuals within a panorama, he could quite effectively construct (in such books as The President Makers, The Politicos, and Infidel in the Temple) what in form amounted to variations on a theme—and in going back over his books I realized how often, even when opening them at random, one can get the drift of an internal development that is interesting in itself, and one can swing into line with it.

Over the years he built up quite a range of contacts with intellectual circles, wheelers and dealers in the marketplaces of politics and finance, and variously suffering men of good will. And he brought that equipment with him whenever he undertook the job of doing our reading for us on some particular subject. He admired hard workers (including crooks, if necessary) and on anything he did for his readers, he worked hard.

He quotes an author who said that "every biography is an autobiography." His work (with its overlap between biography and historical trends) adds up to the self-portrait of a mildly independent (essentially a stay-at-home, "fugitive rather than rebellious") liberal, humanistic writer on the slope of the public man, while never forgetting the kind of shrewdness he learned close-up during his educational interregnum on Wall Street. But though spontaneously, charmingly sociable, he also allowed for a complicating factor that was with him from the start. He tells that in our early years we called ourselves an "Anti-Logrolling Society" because we were a bit rough when rating one another's efforts. He scrupulously kept traces of that tradition alive.

Thus, when my fifth book was published, he wrote, "Five children, and five books—and such excellent children." And later when I asked for advice about a hearing aid, he replied, "What do you want with a hearing aid? You never listen to anybody anyhow."

But that twist in turn had a twist. Matty's way of writing is such that it profits by cliff-hangers, though usually the historical nature of his material is such that the suspense must be established within the reader's foreknowledge of the outcome. Matty's particular autobiographical cliff-hanger concerns his account of a fire which he survived by clinging to a ledge while enduring many third-degree burns, whereas had he let go he'd have been killed in the fall. He does not recall my visit to him in the hospital, but I have relived many times the unforgettably terrifying sight of his suffering.

The point of my story is this: While squirming in pain, he saw the pity and terror in my eyes—and the spirit of the old Anti-Logrolling Society came through. He needled me: "You're a poor excuse for a philosopher."