Cynthia Ozick interviewed

Author Cynthia Ozick goes in search of lost time -- both in fiction and in the real world -- by Heidi Benson (from SF Chronicle):

Blame it on the refrigerator. First, the defroster went kaput. Then it leaked, leaving a sheet of ice where the floor should be.

Author Cynthia Ozick suspected nothing. Just back from Paris, she was fired with inspiration and embroiled in a new work. "I was going on it every day, for hours, all during the summer," she says. "I didn't know if it would be a long story or a novella, but I'd begun to see what Henry James calls 'the figure in the carpet' -- the essential thing. It had been writing itself." All that momentum was derailed in early August, when she slipped on the icy floor and broke her writing arm.

One of the most celebrated figures in American letters, Ozick, 77, has been called "an intellectual paragon," "a literary genius" and even "Jane Austen in the Bronx." Hers is, indelibly, a New Yorker's sensibility. She is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including "The Puttermesser Papers," and four volumes of essays, the most recent of which, "Quarrel & Quandary" (2000) won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Ordered by her doctors not to use her right arm, she tried writing by dictation -- it worked for Henry James -- but to no avail. "I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway," Ozick says.

"What I'm doing a lot of now is sitting in front of the TV and looking at the faces of these deeply unfortunate people," she says, speaking by phone from her home in Westchester County, N.Y., during the height of the crisis in New Orleans last week. "It's as if the southern gulf has turned into Baghdad."

Her empathy for the displaced is not surprising. Lost worlds are key to "Heir to the Glimmering World," a kind of 19th century social novel set in New York at the end of the 1930s. "Everyone in this book is a kind of refugee or runaway," Ozick says.

This spring, "Heir to the Glimmering World" was chosen for "The Today Show's" book club by Ann Patchett (author of "Bel Canto"). "Here we have a heroine to love, a story we can't let go of," Patchett has said. That heroine, Rose Meadows, is an American orphan, just 18. As the novel opens, she enters the home of the Mitwissers for a job interview. She is soon hired as factotum/nanny to this family of German Jewish refugees living in a formerly grand, now dilapidated house in the Bronx. (This semi-rural neighborhood of the Bronx in the '30s, Ozick says, "is the only thing in this book that comes from my own life, that is not imagined or learned.")

In his homeland, Professor Mitwisser was famed for his scholarship. His life was devoted to the study of an ancient Jewish cult that bridged no interpretation of their sacred texts. Finding that his work has no relevance in this new world, Mitwisser is in the process of disintegration. But he has found a patron, with a story just as painful as his own.

The "glimmering world" of the title is the past. "It's not always with us, then it is," Ozick says. "We carry it with us and it goes in and out." At the end of the novel, Rose Meadows leaves the Mitwissers behind. "We don't know what will happen to her," Ozick says. "She has witnessed all kinds of tragedy, all kinds of experience. But she has witnessed the ecstasy of intellectual joy. She has emerged from the house a different person from the young girl who entered."

In the four and a half years Ozick spent writing the novel, she kept interrupting herself by writing essays, which were solicited from various sources. "It's not my preferred way of working, but it happens. I wrote an introduction to an essay on Henry James' 'Washington Square,' and more recently, of Robert Alter's translation of the five books of Moses," she says. "I was glad to do them. I was sorry to do them. You let more than two days go by and you've got something that is cold and you've got to get the motor up again."

Ozick is that rare master of both forms. "I absolutely believe that if you can say it in prose, in exposition, you might as well go write an essay," she says. "In fiction, things should not be said, they should be felt. The two are very, very different because fiction comes out of experience and imagination and essays come from that place where you generate ideas or receive ideas."

In one of her essays -- "The Posthumous Sublime," about the late German writer, W.G. Sebald, published in 2000 -- Ozick writes: "It is art's sacred ancient trick to beautify pain." Art may contain elements of the sacred, but that doesn't mean making it is magic.

Don't accuse Ozick of having fun with language -- though clearly, she does -- or mistake the joy one takes in reading her with her experience of writing. "It's very hard to write. I'm afraid all the time. Some black crow is sitting on my right shoulder saying, 'this is no good' or 'what do you think you're trying to do here?'

"It's the raven," she says, invoking the mascot of another writer who once lived in the Bronx and who might, in a pinch, have called himself gloomy. "Sometimes I wish he'd go back to Poe."