One often hears the caterwaul that the harsh new technology of emails has killed the gentle old craft of letter-writing. Joseph Epstein and Frederic Raphael — septuagenarian pen-pals who have never met, the one based in Chicago and the other dividing his year between South Kensington and Périgord — have set out to prove the doomsayers wrong by publishing their email traffic for the year 2009.
Epstein and Raphael start with one disadvantage, perhaps. They have the wit to be great letter-writers, but not the frustration. It is unfulfilled talents or time-wasters, failing to find other means of self-expression, who excel as correspondents. Epstein is an essayist, editor and short-story writer whose earnings from his magazine work, as revealed in his emails, made this reviewer’s eyes goggle with envy. Raphael is the novelist, classicist and Oscar-winning screenwriter from whom superb essays and books are still pouring forth. It is not from men so replete and exuberantly confident that the rueful half-lights of a great letter-writer can be expected.
Epstein and Raphael are bruisers, not bruised. Epstein writes of a good friend whose career fell flat: ‘He was unmemorable, I think, because his writing had no fist: no anger, no attack to it; it was too well-mannered, too quiet, too wanting in point of view.’ This could never be said of the pugnacious, dogmatic, loud-spoken exchanges in Distant Intimacy. Puns, quips, jibes and corny Jewish jokes sustain the pen-pals’ gleeful repartee about publishers, editors, celebrity agents, Hollywood producers, phonies and crooks. Epstein’s character-sketch of Alfred Appel, compiler of a volume called The Annotated Lolita, and a champion bore of monumental egotism, is a jewel of portraiture.
Epstein, in his coruscating Essays in Biography published last year, gave a mordant account of his quondam friend Saul Bellow.
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