From the INTRODUCTION by Cynthia Ozick
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood . . .
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost
What is to be expected when a writer is asked to introduce a sampling of a lifetime’s progression from yearning youth to skeptical old age, and from ink to typewriter to computer, while at the same time zigzagging from fiction to essays and back again? And these two prose-ridden roads: are they less the divergence of separate genres than a unitary mode of metaphysical merging? If the writer’s decision—or, rather, her indecision, her unresisted fate—is that of being one traveler on two roads, does this signify that she will be stuck forever in that autumnally yellow wood? And what, after all, is the meaning of the yellow wood? Does it hint at autobiography half-hidden in the undergrowth?
The ink-bottle years had a longhand intent of their own: the inescapably physical. A fountain pen induces the most acutely felt source of
writing: out of the three fingers gripping its neck, close to the nib, it mainly seeps, but also can gallop. It is conscious of the outermost reach of somatic self-knowledge, even as it denies the nature of body. The silken streaming of ink is kin to how thinking is dreaming. But afterward: nevermore. The muscular reign of the typewriter brought industrial-mechanical noise, and back ache and shoulder strain and wrist tremor. The computer restores something like silence (with a background of tapping like the steady drip of water), but is less efficient than the typewriter, which, unlike the strict separation of a mac, could combine printing with typing—traveling two roads while still one traveler.
I can, if pressed, devise many reasons for the double presence of stories and essays—but they would be inventions, transparent alibis, made-up stories about non-identical twins. In the past, I have too often spoken of Intellect and Imagination, claiming that both are present in each of the two byways, but with differ- ent proportions: more Intellect in essays, more Imagination in fiction. “An essay,” I would say, “begins with something—a sub- ject—already in hand, while fiction is all empty pockets, obliged to search and discover.” True enough, but irrelevant. Essays on occasion grow out of reviews, and reviews are, if you are lucky, solicited by editors at periodicals, whatever their format. Or they are responses to some current eruption in the culture, or an irritant arising from history, or memory, or mood. At bottom, who really knows where essays come from? And fiction is even more elusive: from childhood on, the urge toward Story begins with an inexplicable
feeling, a palpable sensation, an irrepressible desire, a need for a species of wilderness, a naked appetite; and it is always linked to the drive to read, read, read,
so that you will write.
But—for the sake of honesty—where does all this leave ambition? Again in the past, I would distinguish between ambition, which strives for some self-gratifying scepter of power, and aspiration, which I could perhaps disingenuously define (as in the very first sentence of the first paragraph above) as “yearning.” Aspiration is redolent of virtue, and of a kind of gauzy egoless nobility. Ambition is ruthless and machiavellian; it carries clout, it reaches for nothing less forceful than brute fame. Yet there can also be a third face to hungering wishfulness, one that skirts both the ravenous and the rapturous: the hope for recognition. No written work can be regarded as consummated until it attains print—until it admits to its private precincts a public reader- ship, however minuscule it may be. The word itself, concept un- clothed in alphabet, is not enough. Nor is recognition the same as success, or just deserts, or vindication. Veracity must own a name. Sequestered in the yellow wood, Melville will sprout, Emily Dickinson will germinate. Some mute inglorious Milton? Likely not. As a cobbler can’t be called a cobbler without ever having sold a shoe, in the same way a writer can’t claim to be a writer in the absence of assurance that her words may one day come into the hands of a stranger.
And it is from one or another such stranger—happenstance reader or unsparing critic—that I have been given a verdict: in the hierarchy of the kingdom of prose, the essays in this volume, and beyond, are deemed better—more welcoming—than the fiction. But like the forlornly impassioned character in Lionel Trilling’s abandoned mid-century novel, I cling to the cry of
novel or nothing, and to the supremacy of the short story as a corridor to human verity. If the novel has lost its dominance (as the half-forgotten critic Trilling has lost his) in the electronic seas of film and streaming and song, and the short story even more so, how can I gainsay this judgment? In the contest between Make-Believe and an essay declaring itself to be Thought and Idea—and setting aside the quality of the practitioner’s skills, or lack of it—viable Thought will nearly always win, Idea will almost always prosper, and Make-Believe will forever go where it must. If an essay fails to persuade, if its theme rots on the vine, it will vanish, unmourned: because even when it has predecessors, it is tethered to a singularity. But Make-Believe is itself the vine, infinitely fructifying; there will always be a living tale somewhere in the making, if not by one writer, then by another. An essay, then, is canny. It knows things, or purports to know them. A story begins by knowing nothing, and is compelled to unearth its own meaning; it has the uncanny power, besides, to beget newer stories, from Odysseus to Leopold Bloom, from Elizabeth Bennet to Isabel Archer.
All the foregoing touches on the
how of writing. But what of the
why? In an essay bluntly titled “Why I Write,” George Orwell stresses the aesthetic pressure of language, but ties it to citizenly purpose: “What I have most wanted to do . . . is to make political writing into an art.” Of his two most influential novels, and also his most lasting,
Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-four, one is crafted from Aesopian metaphor and the other from dysto- pian futurism, and both are steeped in allegory. Under the same heading, but leaving purposefulness behind, Karl Ove Knausgaard defines why he writes as “the ability to hit upon something inadvertently, to regard it from a position of defenselessless and unknowing.” Joan Didion, in her own reflections on writing (while admitting that she stole her title from George Orwell), speaks of “pictures in my mind.” She tells how they “shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet.” A passiveness, an openness to the unpremeditated. The picture, she concludes, alluding apparently to both fiction and essays, “tells you. You don’t tell it.”
In a probing interview, Rachel Cusk interrogates the mo-tives embedded in her novel
Second Place: “What felt important to me . . . was to sever certain links with reality and to try to . . . destabilize the book from its narrative or linear foundations and to suggest some unreality, some kind of other realm . . . the question of . . . time and linearity felt unbelievably oppressive.” In musing on “one’s own female history,” she searches for a “directionless non-state of non-being, this difficult-to-grasp phase of femininity.” And again: “The question is very, very bound to the whole idea of the female voice and what that is— what it really is.” Her culminating motif comes as a statement of crux. “Character is a very difficult thing to believe in or to assert the existence of in anything other than a very static set of circumstances.”
Defenseless and unknowing. It tells you, you don’t tell it. Some unreality, some kind of other realm.
These are tendrils of the tenets of Story’s credo.
. . .
Copyright © 2025 by Cynthia Ozick; Introduction by the Author. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
