Naomi Lebowitz
Naomi Gordon Lebowitz is a literary philosopher, author, critic, and scholar of American, English, Scandinavian, and continental European literature, as well as a translator of Danish fiction.
Her seven book-length critical studies of authors and thinkers have focused on the difficulties of spiritual and religious passion in the face of modern belief systems. Lebowitz's studies were sometimes eclipsed by the concentration of American academics on deconstructionist theory during the latter decades of the twentieth-century. More recent approaches that value intersectionality and historicism, however, have validated her importance as a scholar, critic, and philosopher.
Lebowitz's acclaimed translation of the Nobel-Prize winning Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan's 1917 novel Lykke-Per was published in 2010. In Lebowitz's "fluent and lucid version", Lucky Per was hailed by James Wood in The New Yorker as a "shattering, sometimes unbearably powerful novel". The first translation into English of the novel, it was republished by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019 in an Everyman's Library edition.
Early years and education
Lebowitz was born Naomi Gordon in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 6, 1932. Her parents were Rabbi Julius Gordon and Mildred Gordon, a teacher. Both parents had Orthodox Jewish forebears. Her father served Shaare Emeth, one of the leading Reform congregations in the United States, guiding it through the Great Depression, World War II, and a move from St. Louis's Central West End to the suburb of University City. Lebowitz's twin sister, Ruth, would also become a critic and scholar.Lebowitz earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College after studying for a year at the Sorbonne. She returned to St. Louis and in 1953 married Harvard Law School graduate and U. S. Army Air Corps veteran Albert Lebowitz, who was ten years her senior, the son of a St. Louis tailor with extended family from Poland and Russia. She then enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis to earn an M.A. in Romance languages in 1955, followed by a Ph.D. in English literature in 1962 with a dissertation about Henry James entitled "Henry James and the Moral Imperative of Relationship".
Academic and teaching career
Lebowitz joined the faculties of the Washington University English and Comparative Literature Departments in 1962, and was honored by the student body for excellence in teaching in 1968. She was the first woman in the English Department to be paid the same salary as male colleagues with comparable credentials. Lebowitz rarely taught the same books more than once and reveled in designing creative syllabi that juxtaposed writers from different traditions in dialogues to be mediated by her student readers. A typical, one-of-a-kind graduate seminar, offered in 1976, brought together six authors writing in four languages under the title "James's Balzac, Conrad's Flaubert, and Kafka's Svevo."Representative of appreciative students over the years was her dissertation advisee Brian Walter, who noted in 2012 that Lebowitz actually designed two new courses each semester — which covered "the full historical, philosophical and cross-cultural foundations of modern narrative."
In her books too Lebowitz approached her literary subjects as figures in a constellation of human endeavor that she arranged to create dialectical discussion. Her wide-ranging scholarly studies frequently reference the work of sixteenth-century philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne. In 1989, Professor Lebowitz was named Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities by Washington University, a position she held until her retirement 11 years later.
Professor emerita and active retirement
In 2000, Lebowitz retired as professor emerita. Remaining active and productive in her retirement, she published a substantial critical article in Scandinavian Studies in 2006. In 2010, at age 78, she completed and saw published what would become an acclaimed translation of the internationally respected eight-volume Danish novel Lucky Per, first published by Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan in 1904. In 2012 the university honored her with a Distinguished Alumni Award. Following the death of Albert Lebowitz in 2016, she continued to study and write at her home in University City, Missouri. The Albert and Naomi Lebowitz Papers, 1962–1996 are held by the Special Collections Library at Washington University in St. Louis.Intellectual associations
Both Naomi and Albert Lebowitz associated professionally and socially with a prominent Washington University literary circle. The circle included poets Howard Nemerov, Mona Van Duyn, and John N. Morris; critic and editor Jarvis Thurston; painter Joan Elkin; novelists and fiction writers William H. Gass and Stanley Elkin; and others. Nemerov immortalized the Lebowitzes and their backyard in his poem "By Al Lebowitz's Pool": "Beside the pool we drink, talk, and are still, / These times of kindness mortality allows."Stanley Elkin based the character "Insight Lady" in his novel The Franchiser on Lebowitz, of whom the novelist said, "Naomi is the world's most intense person. She's very funny. She can be drinking coffee, or jogging or doing anything, but she's always thinking about The Big Stuff. And constantly coming up with these insights.... Through her I know what an intellectual is: an intellectual is one who thinks all the time and puts everything in terms of grand ideas."
Likewise, British novelist Iris Murdoch wrote to Lebowitz, in April 1987: "You are deep, deep, and yes in the highest sense also simple, and so is Al, to whom I send much love." The Lebowitzes' friendship with Murdoch and her husband, Oxford professor and critic John Bayley, began when the latter couple visited St. Louis in 1972. The two women "clearly enjoyed exchanging views on art, literature and politics," shared a resistance to deconstructionist literary theory, and established an extended correspondence that lasted for years. Both were disturbed by the professional ambitions they perceived behind contemporary debates over literary theory: "The whole structuralist scene is such a mess—clever old Derrida , stupid messy critics, each man for himself. Motives, motives," Murdoch wrote to Lebowitz in May 1985.
Publications
''The Imagination of Loving: Henry James's Legacy to the Novel'' (1965)
Lebowitz's first book, an extension of her PhD thesis, drew praise in the journal Nineteenth-Century Fiction for its study of overarching meaning in the fictions of Henry James during an era when most scholars focused on the novelist's technique and local themes. In undertaking "this formidable task," writes Oscar Cargill, Lebowitz finds in James "a moralist with plastic values determined by the quality of the communion between individuals, the highest communion being achieved in the love relationship."''Humanism and the Absurd in the Modern Novel'' (1971)
Lebowitz's second book approached contemporary literary debate by offering "an apology for a humanism that finds its expression mainly in the 'old' form of the modern novel, a form that is generally considered dead or dying because its traditional habitat has vanished." She roots her definition of humanism in the attitudes and observations of Montaigne, because "the humility of his expectation for humanism is the most central quality of his legacy to the novel."Donna Gerstenberger, reviewing for Modern Fiction Studies, sees hope in Lebowitz's view "that the novelist's world need not become the either/or choice between humanism and the absurd which many critics and writers see as the life and death crisis facing the modern novel." The Montaignian humanist, Lebowitz believes, "admits weaknesses and terrors because they are universal; he does not admire them because they are imagined to be unique. We replaces the you or I of the absurdist. Montaigne expects less of mankind than does the absurdist, so he accepts more." Exegeses of novels by Flaubert, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, E. M. Forster, and André Gide support Lebowitz's theory. Her final chapter, "Old Wine in New Bottles," applies her analysis to works by Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, and Samuel Beckett, works by her novelist colleagues at Washington University William H. Gass and Stanley Elkin, and by Italo Svevo, the subject of her next book.
''Italo Svevo'' (1978)
In the first thorough English-language study of Ettore Schmitz,, Lebowitz also produced a sweeping consideration of an era in European literature. Svevo lived in Trieste, within the Habsburg Empire on the edge of Italy, "a city with an Austrian head and an Italian heart." Long neglected as an author, Svevo was later discovered by James Joyce, who tutored him in English and championed him as a father of modern Italian literature for his novel Confessions of Zeno.Lebowitz's interest in Svevo reveals her predilection for locating "personality" or "temperament" in literature while shunning the rigid critical categories that other critics have used in approaching this author. She finds instead that " is open on all sides to every cultural influence that shaped the modern novel—to the self-irony of Austria's literary Jew and to his psychoanalysis; to the Slavic preference for the insulted and the injured; to the cramped dreams of France's post-Napoleonic heroes doomed to live out bourgeois monarchies; to pathologists dissecting the old morality, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Ibsen; to a new Italian fiction waiting for wider recognition...." Svevo, Lebowitz argues, subordinated the outside world to his "amiable temperament" and despite lacking revolutionary attitudes, became "one of the most original writers of modern fiction."
Scholars of Italian and English literature alike praised Lebowitz for her "exciting" and "demanding" approach to Svevo. In World Literature Today, Rosetta d. Piclardi notes that Lebowitz compares Svevo with Montaigne because for both authors "a healthy and creative amateurism... allows them the widest of visions.... Life may be unconquerable chaos, but the unanxious life is not worth living.... This stance is at the root of the comic tension that sustains Svevo's masterpiece." Lebowitz's appreciation of Svevo foreshadows her embrace of "amateurism" as a literary value almost two decades later. But first she would focus on two northern European writers, Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen, who were pre-occupied with the moral and religious questions of their Protestant heritage.