Getting Personal: Selected Essays

413 Pages·2003·1.527 MB·English

by  Phillip Lopate

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“Lopate is a critic who itches to get at the heart of the matter, often by unconventional
ESSAYS/CRITICISM
means…The writing, in short, works, yielding persistently fresh insights and feelings that
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are grounded in vividly rendered experience.” —The Seattle Times
“Phillip Lopate is the storyteller you sit next to on the bus or the plane, the person with
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whom you’re casually drawn into conversation and the next thing you know three hours t PH I L L I P
have passed and it’s time to part…His is the voice you listen to.” —CNN.COM i
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From the man whose name is virtually synonymous with the contemporary
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personal essay, GETTING PERSONAL is a rich collection that spans Phillip
Lopate’s career as teacher, film critic, son, and husband. Organized in six
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parts these twenty-eight essays stand as an intellectual autobiography,
rooted in his experience as one of America’s most beloved and respected e
L O PAT E
writers, and rendered with characteristic wit, insight, deeply meditative
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candor, and curmudgeonly charm.
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“[Lopate] is always teasing, luring and guiding us with cinematic clarity into a world
of sight and sound…We feel the push and pull of ambition, desire and aging.” n
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
a
l selected writings
“Wise, analytical, reflective, nostalgic, doleful, perplexed, perturbed, and proud…
[Getting Personal] illustrates the wide range and inexhaustible possibilities of the
personal essay.” —THE PLAIN DEALER
selected
writings
“Arranged chronologically, these essays delicately describe the arc of a life, the inven-
tion of a personality, and the discovery of a career…Because of his willingness to expose
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the tender parts of himself, he becomes not simply engaging but endearing.”
—THE BOSTON GLOBE H
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“Consistently charged with a feeling of discovery—a sense of learning on the run that L
suggests Lopate’s been making it up (beautifully) as he’s gone along.” L
—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY I
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The editor of the bestsellersThe Art of the Personal Essayand Writing New York, Phillip
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Lopate is known for his exquisite taste in other’s essays and a revelatory style of his own.
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Currently Professor of English at Hofstra University, he is the author of five works of
nonfiction, two novels, and two books of poems. Lopate lives in Brooklyn, New York, P
with his wife and daughter. A
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other’s essays and a revelatory style of his own.
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Currently Professor of English at Hofstra
Getting Personal
University, Phillip Lopate is the author of five
works of nonfiction, two novels and two books of
poems. He lives in BAroMoEMkBlEyRnO,F NTHeEwPE RYSEoUSrkB,O OwKSitGhRO hUPis
WWW.BASICBOOKS.COM
wife and daughter.
GETTING PERSONAL
ALSO BY PHILLIP LOPATE
(cid:1)
Essays and Non-Fiction
Waterfront
Totally, Tenderly, Tragically
Portrait of My Body
The Art of the Personal Essay (editor)
Against Joie de Vivre
Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis
Being with Children
(cid:1)
Novels
The Rug Merchant
Confessions of Summer
(cid:1)
Poetry
The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open
The Daily Round
(cid:2)
GETTING PERSONAL selected writings
P H I L L I P LO PAT E
Basic Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2003 by Phillip Lopate
All rights reserved.Printed in the United States of America.No part of this book may
be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.For information,address
Basic Books,387 Park Avenue South,New York,NY 10016.
“Introduction”, from THE ART OF THE PERSONAL ESSAY by Phillip Lopate,
copyright © 1994 by Phillip Lopate. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of
Random House,Inc.
“Resistance to the Holocaust”(first appeared in TESTIMONY:Contemporary Writers
Make the Holocaust Personal, edited by David Rosenberg, Times Books, 1989), “The
Movies and Spiritual Life” (first appeared in THE MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY
LIFE, edited by David Rosenberg, Viking, 1991), “Detachment and Passion” (first
appeared in Southwest Review), “Confessions of a Shusher,” “Portrait of My Body”
(first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review),“The Moody Traveler”(first appeared in
The New York Times), “The Dead Father: A Remembrance of Donald Barthelme”
(first appeared in The Threepenny Review),and “The Story of My Father,”from POR-
TRAIT OF MY BODY by Phillip Lopate,Copyright © 1996 by Phillip Lopate. Used
by permission of Doubleday,a division of Random House,Inc.
“Contempt:Story of a Marriage”,from TOTALLY,TENDERLY,TRAGICALLY by
Phillip Lopate,copyright © 1998 by Phillip Lopate. Used by permission of
Doubleday,a division of Random House,Inc.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases
in the United States by corporations,institutions,and other organizations.For more
information,please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books
Group,11 Cambridge Center,Cambridge MA 02142,or call [phone],(800)
255-1514 or e-mail [email protected].
Designed by Jeff Williams
Set in 10.5-point Garamond MT by the Perseus Books Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lopate,Phillip,1943-
Getting personal :selected writings / by Phillip Lopate.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-465-04173-6 (hc.);0-465-04174-4 (pbk.)
I.Title.
PS3562.O66A6 2003
818'.5409--dc21
2003013695
(cid:1)
To my wife Cheryl and my daughter Lily, always

CONTENTS
Introduction ix
(cid:1)
Childhood
1 My Early Days at School 3
2 Willy 7
3 Samson and Delilah and the Kids 25
(cid:1)
Youth
4 The Countess’s Tutor 47
5 Anticipation of La Notte 67
(cid:1)
Early Marriage and Bachelorhood
6 Washington Heights and Inwood 85
7 My Drawer 91
8 Osao 95
9 Never Live Above Your Landlord 119
10 On Shaving a Beard 130
11 Getting a Cat 133
12 Against Joie de Vivre 142
13 The Brunch 157
14 Modern Friendships 159
vii
(cid:1)
viii Contents
(cid:1)
Teaching and Work
15 Hanging Out 169
16 Chekhov for Children 189
17 Suicide of a Schoolteacher 220
(cid:1)
Politics, Religion, Movies, Books, Cities
18 Resistance to the Holocaust 263
19 The Movies and Spiritual Life 280
20 Detachment and Passion 288
21 Contempt: The Story of a Marriage 302
22 Confessions of a Shusher 311
23 Reflections on Subletting 316
(cid:1)
The Style of Middle Age
24 Portrait of My Body 327
25 The Moody Traveler 335
26 The Dead Father 339
27 The Story of My Father 358
28 First Love 397
NOTES TOWARD AN INTRODUCTION
On the Confessional Mode
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ATTRACTED TO the confessional mode in literature and,
with it, the whole dynamic of confidingness, rationalization, unreliable narration,
and self-aggrandizement versus self-disgust. An irresistible title when I was an
undergraduate (and a favorite novel of our set) was James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I ate up Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground,
Gide’s The Immoralist and his autobiographical writings, The Confessions of St.
Augustine,Rousseau’s Confessions,Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno,De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater,Celine,Henry Miller,Kerouac....I eagerly read the work
of the so-called “confessional poets,” such as Ann Sexton, John Berryman, Sylvia
Plath and Robert Lowell, and disagreed with their detractors when they found
something unclean about their self-revealing poems, just as, more recently, I could
not agree with the backlash against the memoir by critics who felt it was too narcis-
sistically self-indulgent.My own view is that,if anything,what is wrong with most
memoirs and autobiographical poems is that they don’t go far enough in their con-
fessions;they myopically fudge the details,the close nitty-gritty of self-observation.
I am endlessly interested in the wormy thoughts and regrets and excuses and expla-
nations that people have for their behavior. “Confessional” is, to me, a descriptive
term,not a derogatory one.(My first novel was called Confessions of Summer.) It was
inevitable that I should be drawn to the personal essay, the form with which I am
now most identified,because of its conversational and confessional attributes.
Honesty has been, for me, the one lodestar to which I never stop aspiring in
print.I don’t say I attain “honesty,”but the very fact that I try to reach it gives my
work, at least in my own eyes, a formal thrust, a dynamic, a topography. I want to
get to the bottom of things.And as a reader,I have always loved that moment when
the writer said something very daring,tore the cover off,told the realtruth,and you
had to gasp.Of course it is necessary to do more than merely confess and strive for
honesty.(What,I wonder? Expanded argument tk.)
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