Review: Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein, Distant Intimacy
Sometimes books that fail in their intent are interesting. They’re interesting for all the wrong reasons, but they’re worth a look. Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein’s Distant Intimacy (Raphael and Epstein Distant Intimacy. Friendship in the Age of the Internet. Yale University Press, 2013) is one such book. This is a memoir as much as a conversation. At heart, the two writers are prepping historians and refined readers on what they want known and how they want it known.
It was written from a very straightforward premise. “We can get some income if we email each other for a year and publish it.” The email where the correspondence is proposed is included in the volume and, while the cynical aside about income isn’t maybe the first and foremost reason for the year-long correspondence, it’s an obvious part. This leads to the underlying theme of the correspondence, which on the surface seems to be “We are important people. Let’s talk about this. Also, we may name drop where appropriate.”
If Raphael and Epstein had been lesser writers than they are, then this book would have been entirely intolerable. Other reviews in fact, suggest that it is. It’s not the most comfortable correspondence to read. It does, however have redeeming features.
When I’d read Distant Intimacy, I decided it was time to see the film Darling again. I hated it in my teens, but I am older and wiser now. Or maybe just older. What I found in it made sense of a lot of things. Raphael wrote the script. Darling is all that it is said to be. Some of the flaws of Distant Intimacy turned into a gem of a character study. The main character has so little substance that she dreams throughout most of her major life experiences and fails to understand either herself or the men in her life. In the end, she lives one of the dreams and, of course, it turns out to be hollow.
Raphael and Epstein distil those aspects of their lives they want people to know about. They want us to understand their dream and their vision of themselves. It’s quite possible that this is the whole of their lives and that they belong in Raphael’s film script, but I am a hopeful individual and I doubt it: I don’t think they’re hollow. I do think, however, that they’re posing. I hope they are, for all those cutting words about strangers are much less unhappy if they’re part of a wish to set themselves up as a kind of nouveau Algonquin than if it’s all they have.
The pair start off as a tag team, setting each other up for posts about…themselves (mainly). This means that quite a bit of the email exchange has one reflecting the other or floating on the other’s previous statements. This lends the correspondence an unnaturally even tone.
The differences between them become more interesting when one (normally Epstein) assumes too much shared history and takes the superficial similarities as real. The other becomes defensive (yes, I was in the army; my wife is Jewish even though you don’t seem to know this) and the careful mannerisms fall away somewhat. The writing improves and there is just a touch of narrative tension. Suddenly it’s obvious that this pair of writers could have written something quite different if they’d been less respectful of each other or less worried about appearances.
Distant Intimacy is amusing, in a nasty way. Raphael condescends about Susan Sontag’s condescension, for instance. This makes it very easy to describe the whole book using that form of amused superiority. After all, as I have said, the authors put themselves on show, and are writing with a high level of self-awareness. They name drop. They idea drop. They experience drop. They out-Jewish each other (I rang my mother at one point to tell her “Thank goodness my Jewishness is different to theirs.”). They think about the many blessings they have endured and the many people they despise.
As the letters continue later in the year) the posturing diminishes and the letters become far more interesting. It’s less exhausting to read from this point, too. Raphael (who is generally the leader in the letter-exchange) misses his daughter on her birthday and talks about losing her and this is where the letters really start to be letters. The two writers are still entirely central to their own universe and they still name drop and snark, but from here, they allow their humanity to colour the picture. It isn’t the loss of their children that creates this sense of humanity: it’s a slight change in register signalled by that loss.
A significant component of the exchange of thoughts is a promenade of who they know (hopefully not their friends) and who they read (normally well-dead). I found myself writing acerbic notes about these people, for the somewhat bitter outlook of the two writers is infectious. I found myself feeling guilty about this, and guilty about the occasional negative witticisms I have committed (DC Green – you were right!). The truth is that when one sees this kind of comment piled up like a heap of autumn leaves, one wants to sweep one’s brain clear of the clutter.
Something that struck me throughout my reading was how very different these two men are from me. Of course they’re different: they’re privileged males from a place and time where that privilege makes a big difference. But they’re also Jewish and we ought to have more in common. I’m going to spare you the notes about this, and the long conversation I had with my mother. It is enough to know that we share a religion, but that it informs our lives very differently. I first encountered people with this particular Jewish background when I did my MA in Toronto (not counting having read Philip Roth, for I don’t want to count that) – they invariably made me feel inferior. Epstein says that Jews are disappearing. I like to think that we’re simply avoiding people who make statements like this. Epstein may well have a specific classification and set of characteristics that define a ‘real Jew’ and that many of us do not belong*. He doesn’t explore this, however, but makes the statement and moves on. I would have liked to see him explore this. I would have liked to know why he thinks Jews are disappearing and why he and Raphael consider it so essential to quantify their Jewishness.
Epstein talks about Montaigne and wants to be compared to him. It was during Epstein’s longing to be thought of as Montaigne that I decided to rewatch Darling. I was looking for a parallel to that feeling of a displaced life. Why should Epstein be yearning for this kind of recognition at this stage in his (mostly) eminent career? Because for him the dream of recognition is so very important. When he lives the dream, he may not recognise that he is living it.
While the letters were worth the detour from my normal work and my historian side can find many, many things to use (pity I’m an historian of the wrong period and place) but the bottom line is, mainly because appearances and wit count for so very much with both writers, they’ve created something that leaves me uncomfortable. There are many perfectly delightful writers who I am certain not to spend my life studying, and Raphael and Epstein have added themselves to that list. Their world and their friends and their shared (and possibly artificial) misanthropic outlook make them hard to endure for long.
This correspondence made me think of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Imagine that this is London in the late eighteenth century. Sheridan has just given his days-long speech to Parliament to prove that, although he is a witty and erudite playwright, he’s more than that. The difficulty with this very high level of public posing is that it lays a person’s ego bare, even if one tries to hide it. It’s seldom a good look.
In essence Distant Intimacy demonstrates two small lives. Because both lives have significant public elements, the smallness is a shock. Once their mere humanity is recognised, however, the writers become more interesting and more likeable. They are full of yearning and dreams. They strut and they show who they know. They also, when one reads carefully, admit some astonishing things and demonstrate that their lives are interesting and are imperfect and that the choice of this email correspondence as a vehicle was quite probably a mistake. By the end of the volume they have begun communicating with each other, and started talking to us. Raphael and Epstein show us, in that moment, the book that could have been.
*For the record, Epstein’s grandfather and mine came from the same place and probably left it around the same time and for similar reasons and I’m pretty sure my whole family still exists and the vast majority of us are still Jewish. We’re Australian, though. We may not qualify.
It was written from a very straightforward premise. “We can get some income if we email each other for a year and publish it.” The email where the correspondence is proposed is included in the volume and, while the cynical aside about income isn’t maybe the first and foremost reason for the year-long correspondence, it’s an obvious part. This leads to the underlying theme of the correspondence, which on the surface seems to be “We are important people. Let’s talk about this. Also, we may name drop where appropriate.”
If Raphael and Epstein had been lesser writers than they are, then this book would have been entirely intolerable. Other reviews in fact, suggest that it is. It’s not the most comfortable correspondence to read. It does, however have redeeming features.
When I’d read Distant Intimacy, I decided it was time to see the film Darling again. I hated it in my teens, but I am older and wiser now. Or maybe just older. What I found in it made sense of a lot of things. Raphael wrote the script. Darling is all that it is said to be. Some of the flaws of Distant Intimacy turned into a gem of a character study. The main character has so little substance that she dreams throughout most of her major life experiences and fails to understand either herself or the men in her life. In the end, she lives one of the dreams and, of course, it turns out to be hollow.
Raphael and Epstein distil those aspects of their lives they want people to know about. They want us to understand their dream and their vision of themselves. It’s quite possible that this is the whole of their lives and that they belong in Raphael’s film script, but I am a hopeful individual and I doubt it: I don’t think they’re hollow. I do think, however, that they’re posing. I hope they are, for all those cutting words about strangers are much less unhappy if they’re part of a wish to set themselves up as a kind of nouveau Algonquin than if it’s all they have.
The pair start off as a tag team, setting each other up for posts about…themselves (mainly). This means that quite a bit of the email exchange has one reflecting the other or floating on the other’s previous statements. This lends the correspondence an unnaturally even tone.
The differences between them become more interesting when one (normally Epstein) assumes too much shared history and takes the superficial similarities as real. The other becomes defensive (yes, I was in the army; my wife is Jewish even though you don’t seem to know this) and the careful mannerisms fall away somewhat. The writing improves and there is just a touch of narrative tension. Suddenly it’s obvious that this pair of writers could have written something quite different if they’d been less respectful of each other or less worried about appearances.
Distant Intimacy is amusing, in a nasty way. Raphael condescends about Susan Sontag’s condescension, for instance. This makes it very easy to describe the whole book using that form of amused superiority. After all, as I have said, the authors put themselves on show, and are writing with a high level of self-awareness. They name drop. They idea drop. They experience drop. They out-Jewish each other (I rang my mother at one point to tell her “Thank goodness my Jewishness is different to theirs.”). They think about the many blessings they have endured and the many people they despise.
As the letters continue later in the year) the posturing diminishes and the letters become far more interesting. It’s less exhausting to read from this point, too. Raphael (who is generally the leader in the letter-exchange) misses his daughter on her birthday and talks about losing her and this is where the letters really start to be letters. The two writers are still entirely central to their own universe and they still name drop and snark, but from here, they allow their humanity to colour the picture. It isn’t the loss of their children that creates this sense of humanity: it’s a slight change in register signalled by that loss.
A significant component of the exchange of thoughts is a promenade of who they know (hopefully not their friends) and who they read (normally well-dead). I found myself writing acerbic notes about these people, for the somewhat bitter outlook of the two writers is infectious. I found myself feeling guilty about this, and guilty about the occasional negative witticisms I have committed (DC Green – you were right!). The truth is that when one sees this kind of comment piled up like a heap of autumn leaves, one wants to sweep one’s brain clear of the clutter.
Something that struck me throughout my reading was how very different these two men are from me. Of course they’re different: they’re privileged males from a place and time where that privilege makes a big difference. But they’re also Jewish and we ought to have more in common. I’m going to spare you the notes about this, and the long conversation I had with my mother. It is enough to know that we share a religion, but that it informs our lives very differently. I first encountered people with this particular Jewish background when I did my MA in Toronto (not counting having read Philip Roth, for I don’t want to count that) – they invariably made me feel inferior. Epstein says that Jews are disappearing. I like to think that we’re simply avoiding people who make statements like this. Epstein may well have a specific classification and set of characteristics that define a ‘real Jew’ and that many of us do not belong*. He doesn’t explore this, however, but makes the statement and moves on. I would have liked to see him explore this. I would have liked to know why he thinks Jews are disappearing and why he and Raphael consider it so essential to quantify their Jewishness.
Epstein talks about Montaigne and wants to be compared to him. It was during Epstein’s longing to be thought of as Montaigne that I decided to rewatch Darling. I was looking for a parallel to that feeling of a displaced life. Why should Epstein be yearning for this kind of recognition at this stage in his (mostly) eminent career? Because for him the dream of recognition is so very important. When he lives the dream, he may not recognise that he is living it.
While the letters were worth the detour from my normal work and my historian side can find many, many things to use (pity I’m an historian of the wrong period and place) but the bottom line is, mainly because appearances and wit count for so very much with both writers, they’ve created something that leaves me uncomfortable. There are many perfectly delightful writers who I am certain not to spend my life studying, and Raphael and Epstein have added themselves to that list. Their world and their friends and their shared (and possibly artificial) misanthropic outlook make them hard to endure for long.
This correspondence made me think of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Imagine that this is London in the late eighteenth century. Sheridan has just given his days-long speech to Parliament to prove that, although he is a witty and erudite playwright, he’s more than that. The difficulty with this very high level of public posing is that it lays a person’s ego bare, even if one tries to hide it. It’s seldom a good look.
In essence Distant Intimacy demonstrates two small lives. Because both lives have significant public elements, the smallness is a shock. Once their mere humanity is recognised, however, the writers become more interesting and more likeable. They are full of yearning and dreams. They strut and they show who they know. They also, when one reads carefully, admit some astonishing things and demonstrate that their lives are interesting and are imperfect and that the choice of this email correspondence as a vehicle was quite probably a mistake. By the end of the volume they have begun communicating with each other, and started talking to us. Raphael and Epstein show us, in that moment, the book that could have been.
*For the record, Epstein’s grandfather and mine came from the same place and probably left it around the same time and for similar reasons and I’m pretty sure my whole family still exists and the vast majority of us are still Jewish. We’re Australian, though. We may not qualify.
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