Arthur Krystal defies most of the familiar literary job descriptions and refers to himself with mock-self-deprecation as “just a dabbler, a Sunday painter, nothing more.” We’re tempted to call him a critic, though that title makes him uncomfortable. He seems more like a reader who happens to write. Perhaps he’s a member of the amorphous tribe once known as literary journalists. He mingles the critical and familiar in his essays, a form Dr. Johnson defined as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” We might settle on a long-discarded though once happily claimed title: man of letters. His writing is conversational and winningly non-academic. He’s an amateur in the etymological sense and his latest books are redolent of valediction. Krystal, 76, is simultaneously a throwback and “post-” everything, and mourns the passing of culture while resisting self-pity.
A Word or Two Before I Go is his fifth collection of essays and in it he returns to several of his abiding hobbyhorses, including Jacques Barzun, boxing and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some Unfinished Chaos is Krystal’s first book devoted to a single subject and it often reads like a set of linked essays. No one is likely to read his Fitzgerald biography for the day-to-day details of the novelist’s life, which are thoroughly documented elsewhere. Krystal was drawn to him by The Great Gatsby and the rest of the fiction, but he stuck around for Fitzgerald’s intriguingly complicated and very American character. One of the epigraphs to the biography, borrowed from the novelist himself, succinctly poses Krystal’s approach: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He’s too many people if he’s any good.” Krystal resists reducing Fitzgerald to a tidy thesis and defies the tendency to romanticize his alcoholism and the Jazz Age. He lauds the novelist’s professionalism: “[H]e could barely function without a drink, so when he sat down to write, he exercised a control absent elsewhere in his life.” In Fitzgerald he has found his ideal subject, a writer whose life mingled self-destructiveness, immaturity and a literary gift almost unmatched among American writers of fiction:
“One minute you want to hug Fitzgerald, the next you want to wring his neck, not because he was a moralist who behaved like a swine, or a romantic who behaved like a vulgarian — one can chalk that up to booze and false bravado — but because it’s difficult to know when to trust him.”
Since Montaigne, essays have served as literature’s formless form. Almost anything goes. Krystal, typically, is uneasy with the designation “essayist.” It is, he writes, “too grand and too definitive and yet at the same time restrictive.” Krystal is a storyteller even in his essays. He’s an anecdotalist and, the reader suspects, a novelist manqué (he wrote several as a young man, never published). The first essay in A Word or Two Before I Go, “Fitzgerald and the Jews,” is devoted to Frances Kroll Ring, “a nice Jewish woman from the Bronx,” who worked as the novelist’s secretary and assistant at the end of his life. She died in 2015, 75 years after Fitzgerald. Krystal isn’t out to excuse Fitzgerald’s occasional anti-Jewish remarks or to cancel him as a rabid anti-Semite. Instead, his treatment is nuanced and he recognizes Fitzgerald as a man of his time. In all of his writing, Krystal has a gift for living with human complexity and ambiguity:
“Although Fitzgerald liked to pass himself off as a worldly man, he remained all his life a shaky coalition of contradictory emotions. He was shy, intense, insecure, boastful, eager to please, and eager to be the center of attention. He could behave beautifully one moment and badly the next.”
In temperamental contrast is Jacques Barzun, another category-defier, whom Krystal met as a student at Columbia. They remained friends for 42 years until Barzun’s death in 2012, weeks before his 105th birthday. In “Barzun and Friend,” Krystal traces his own life while recounting much of Barzun’s. “I was his friend,” he writes, “not an acolyte or protégé. It was this disinclination that made me palatable to him.” Krystal edited two collections of his friend’s work. Again, he appreciates the complexities within and between people: “[I]t’s the differences between us, when examined intelligently and assimilated imaginatively, that produce something approaching wisdom … I believe it characterized Barzun’s approach to things.”
Krystal is a cataloger. He likes lists. The final piece in his essay collection is a story. “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?” was published two years ago in The New Yorker. One is tempted to read it as straight autobiography since it has been written by an essayist, but to do so would.d be a mistake. It’s May 2020 and a cultured New Yorker in his seventies relishes the impact of COVID-19 and begins by reviewing his life in a series of one-sentence memories: “He remembered his wife pressing him to read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He read it and was bored. He remembered dropping acid on Martha’s Vineyard and asking everyone who Martha was. No one knew.” The random triviality of the memories and Krystal’s staccato delivery makes the story/essay funny and sad. His nameless narrator asks: “How do you know what you’ve forgotten?” Krystal has repurposed Tolstoy’s story and set it in in contemporary America:
“With nothing to do, he began thinking about suicide. But suicide required planning and he wasn’t up to it. He owned a gun, but he wasn’t about to shoot himself or leap to his death or jump in front of a train, and pills were not foolproof. Then the pandemic hit and he stopped thinking about dying.”
In “Old News,” subtitled “Why We Can’t Tell the Truth About Aging,” Krystal writes about recent books devoted to the science of getting older. On a more interesting level his true subject is mortality. The best line in Krystal’s collection (not counting its title) is found in “Old News”: “A long life is a gift. But I’m not sure we’re going to be grateful for it.” Krystal is a realist. He relishes human contrariety, the untenability of being a human. He takes it for granted and is usually amused. So was Montaigne who observed that human actions “commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.”
Essays, the best ones, serve as a porous membrane between literature and life, however you understand those realms. The “I” is permitted a longer leash, and the essayist can parade everything he knows, from erudition to gossip and confession. Krystal tells us his essays are “animated by a stupid, searching, trying-to-reason ego.” He might have added that his readers are as well. In the Fitzgerald biography he writes:
“There are people who keep tabs on just about everything that happens to them, including their own thoughts. We call such people ‘writers’ — but even among this particular genus, Fitzgerald stands out. His narcissism didn’t shut out the world but engaged it …”
[A Word or Two Before I Go, published on September 12, 2023 by the University of Virginia Press, 139 pages, $24.95 hardcover. Some Unfinished Business, published on September 12, 2023 by the University of Virginia Press, 222 pages, $24.95 hardcover]