'Our Essayists Have Defected'

At the bottom of a box of odds and ends I found a printout of an essay published more than eighteen years ago at a site called Truthdig. I don’t remember reading it but must have found it interesting. The author is Cristina Nehring (about whom I know nothing else), her the title is “What’s Wrong With the American Essay” and you can still read it online. It’s pure provocation: 

“The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization.”

 

Things have only gotten worse in the subsequent decades. Contemporary essays are characterized principally by the writer’s desire to impress readers with his sensitivity and virtue, usually of a political nature, as though the essay were a form of loyalty oath. Of course, a few first-rate essayists are still at work, still getting published: Cynthia Ozick (age 98), Joseph Epstein (89), Gary Saul Morson (78), Theodore Dalrymple (76), Peter Hitchens (74). All are lineal descendants of the father of essays, Montaigne, whom Nehring goes on to cite:    

 

“Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. ‘Where I have least knowledge,’ said the blithe Montaigne, ‘there do I use my judgment most readily.’ And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read -- and to spar with -- Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.”

 

Well, yes and no. Argument without wit or style is tiresome. It’s at this point that Nehring’s assessment of the essay applies to that endangered species, the blog (a name I still find ugly and amusing). After all, the best blogs are those closest in form to essays, and they are sadly rare. They embody the essay (to try, to attempt) impulse without being "formal" essays. I place “formal” in quotes because since its birth in the sixteenth century (yes, I know there are ancient precursors) , in the sensibility of Montaigne, the essay has remained notoriously slippery, though its mercurial nature is part of its glory and charm. In “On Vanity,” Montaigne writes, “My style and my mind alike wander.”

 

I’ve read first-rate essays disguised as book reviews, travelogues, sermons, op-ed pieces, philosophy, letters, biographies, poems, culinary criticism, medical and scientific texts, dictionary entries, diaries and journals, and passages in novels (see George Eliot). Essay writing is an impulse, the sensibility's mingling of experience and learning, more than a sophomoric screed or polemic.

 

Jacques Barzun reviewed Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne when it was published in 1957. He writes:

 

“Tastes, feelings, instincts, come into play and incite the passion for diversity. Montaigne finds in himself a taste for books, but not for bookishness; he can think and write for weeks or months together without reading. He loves travel and the immediate sensation of things. Truth being his delight, he loathes the life of a courtier. Yet its opposite, the philosopher's, should not be withdrawn or vexatious by design. Philosophy is a gay science, to which the satisfaction of the senses is a proper minister. Money is to buy pleasure, and Montaigne ‘hates poverty as the peer of pain.’ But human condition or no, there are terms on which alone it is it is fitting to live: ‘by right and authority not by permission or as a reward.’”

 

The energizing freedom of the essay, its resistance to formalization and even definition, invites abuse. Just as everyone is certain of his rightness for parenthood, so is everyone convinced he can write an essay. Give the Nehring the last word:

 

“Our essayists have defected, leaving us on our own, with the impression that to traffic in boldness and generality is to be a blowhard or a huckster. The moderation of these triflers is immoderate, and it is only right that readers allow their work to rot in basements.”

 

[You can find Barzun’s article at Isaac Waisberg’s invaluable IWP Books.]

'Those Little Cracklings of Mirth and Folly'

Who is being described and who is doing the describing:

“His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not grovelling; pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. [He] never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour.”

 

A respectable guess as to the identity of the writer whose prose is being assessed might be Daniel Defoe. Perhaps John Bunyan. With a bit of a stretch, even Jonathan Swift or John Dryden. No, it’s the less well-remembered Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and the encomiast is Dr. Johnson in his “Life of Addison.” Addison is best remembered as a pioneering periodical essayist, a precursor to Johnson himself, but he was also a poet, a Member of Parliament and a playwright. Though painfully shy he was a very public man and writer.

 

I came late to Addison, and he was presented to me as one half of a double act, like Laurel or Hardy: Addison and Steele. Together they founded The Spectator in 1711 and the Guardian two years later. Richard Steele had already founded The Tatler in 1609 and Addison became a regular contributor. Here is Addison’s opening paragraph from the May 17, 1712, edition of The Spectator:

 

“I have always preferred Chearfulness to Mirth. The latter, I consider as an Act, the former as an Habit of the Mind. Mirth is short and transient. Chearfulness fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest Transports of Mirth, who are subject to the greatest Depressions of Melancholy: On the contrary, Chearfulness, tho’ it does not give the Mind such an exquisite Gladness, prevents us from falling into any Depths of Sorrow. Mirth is like a Flash of Lightning, that breaks thro a Gloom of Clouds, and glitters for a Moment; Chearfulness keeps up a kind of Day-light in the Mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual Serenity.”

 

The prose is readily understood by most readers. His psychologizing will remind some of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Hamlet’s “I have of late—but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth . . .” Addison's essay is an endorsement of mental health. Those with a capacity for "Chearfulness" -- and mirth -- are likely to be sane. Most nut jobs, cranks and fanatics are humor deficient. Addison concludes:

 

“Such Considerations, which every one should perpetually cherish in his Thoughts, will banish, from us all that secret Heaviness of Heart which unthinking Men are subject to when they lie under no real Affliction, all that Anguish which we may feel from any Evil that actually oppresses us, to which I may likewise add those little Cracklings of Mirth and Folly that are apter to betray Virtue than support it; and establish in us such an even and chearful Temper, as makes us pleasing to our selves, to those with whom we converse, and to him whom we were made to please.”

 

Johnson concludes his “Life of Addison” with a further assessment of the essayist’s prose:

 

“What he attempted, he performed; he is never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetick; he is never rapid, and he never stagnates. His sentences have neither studied amplitude, nor affected brevity: his periods, though not diligently rounded, are voluble and easy. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”

 

Addison was born on today’s date, May 1, in 1672, and died in 1719 at age forty-seven.

'Then ’twas the Roman, Now ’tis I'

“Contempt for the past is an inbuilt feature of modernity, its preoccupation with change and the future, its determination to be new and different, its deep intolerance (in President Obama’s revealing words) of those who stand ‘against the tide of history’.” 

I’ve written before about Nicholas Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. Now I have a copy of the book and have finished reading it. For those of us who read, who value the great books of our precursors, it serves as a tonic, a reminder of what the culture has lost but also what individuals can preserve. The sentence cited above is taken from near the conclusion of the book, the section despairingly titled “For the First Time in History, the Past is ‘Dead and Silent.’”  

 

A quality that distinguishes our age from earlier periods is this drive to extinguish the past. A theme I have often addressed at Anecdotal Evidence is the impossibility of originality. Even those most vehemently stricken with “presentism” are nothing new. Without a million anonymous forebears, they would not exist, nor would we. I’m not convinced it’s possible to write good prose or poetry without reference to some earlier work, consciously or otherwise. Guy Davenport once put it to me more bluntly: every book is a reply to an already existing volume. Tate continues:

 

“The last half-century, with its identity politics and the increasing dominance of a left liberal pensée unique, has further intensified this attitude towards the past as a result of the West’s self-flagellation over its historical record in relation to its former colonial subjects, women, sexual minorities, and other minority groups. Although this has helpfully revised the historical record, it has left us with an image of the past as the site of oppression, discrimination, and trauma and encouraged the idea that one studies or teaches about the past mainly to wag one’s finger at it for the disgraceful ways in which it failed to conform to current liberal values.”

 

Believers in such creeds are characterized by naïveté about human nature. As Evelyn Waugh put it in Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939): “Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.” They also fail to appreciate what is best about our species. One of the authors of Tate’s seven books is Edward Gibbon. In Vol. I, Chap. 3, “Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines” in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he writes: “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Gibbon is describing the reign of Antoninus Pius, emperor of Rome from 138 to 161. He was the adoptive son of Hadrian and in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, who succeeded him as co-emperors. The irony of Gibbon’s bleakly clear-eyed view of human history is that it comes in the context of his praise for Antoninus, one of the “Five Good Emperors.” Here is the context:

 

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Humanity is infinitely more complex than the simple-minded deniers of history would have it. Here are Gibbon’s subsequent sentences: “In private life, he was an amiable, as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed, with moderation, the conveniencies of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.”

 

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet was a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and is famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius’ Astronomicon. Here is Housman’s Poem XXXI from A Shropshire Lad (1896), “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”: “Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.”

'You Delude Yourself'

A reader has sent me yet another lengthy screed about the State of the World and it leaves me as ignorant as I was before reading most of it. I know little about politics and nothing about economics, and I can’t muster the grit to change that situation. The writer seems like a bright, certainly well-educated guy but overly dependent on jury-rigging a grand unified theory of everything, rather like Coleridge in his gaseous phase. I defer to Dr. Johnson in The Rambler for July 9, 1751:

 

“Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind.”

 

Johnson, ever the no-nonsense realist. One of his admirers, Flannery O’Connor, writes on October 26, 1963, my eleventh birthday, to her friend “A.” (Elizabeth “Betty” Hester):

 

“Who do you think you understand? If anybody, you delude yourself. I love a lot of people, understand none of them. This is not perfect love but as much as a finite creature can be capable of.”

 

Systemic lupus erythematosus killed O’Connor nine months later, at the age of thirty-nine. You can find the complete letter in The Habit of Being (ed. Sally Fitzgerald, 1979). O’Connor serves as a literary palate cleanser. Like Johnson, she abhorred nonsense and intellectual pretentiousness.

'A Snapshot Rather Than a Film'

Theodore Dalrymple sees more in the novels of Agatha Christie than I ever could. Of course, I have not read even a sentence of Christie’s prose. I’ve seen several film adaptations of her books but the only one I remember in any detail and with any pleasure is René Clair’s And Then There Were None (1945), mostly because of Barry Fitzgerald. In “Agatha Christie & the Metaphysics of Murder,” Dalrymple conducts an interesting experiment:

“My method would be to take every passage of possible social, psychological, or philosophical interest and deal with it in succession, and decide whether, taken at the end, they amounted to a Weltanschauung, a worldview. This method would not show any development in the author’s ideas, of course: it would be a snapshot rather than a film.”

 

This is not the way I have ever read a novel. Dalrymple, a retired physician, is conducting a literary post-mortem. Not that I have a systematic strategy. I read intuitively, trusting the author’s gifts for plot, character and language will keep me alert and amused – until he doesn’t. Ideas matter less to me than story and people. In my experience, ideas often leave novels stillborn. I don’t recall many of Tolstoy’s thoughts on Napoleon and history but Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova might as well be in the next room.

 

From Christie’s more than eighty novels Dalrymple picks one of the Miss Marple titles, They Do It With Mirrors (1952), which permits him to comment on class, poverty (genteel and otherwise), bohemianism (“Their unconventionality was parasitic on the existence of convention”) and snobbery. See his digression on Occam’s razor. He writes:

“What, then, has replaced gentility in social prestige? There is an obvious answer: money. The advantage of money as the conferrer of prestige is that it is easily measurable and ranked. The person with the most money has the most prestige, all the way down to the person with the least. . . . Where money is the measure of all things, manners and tastes are likely to be less refined than in a society in which social hierarchy unrelated to money persists.”

 

Dalrymple contrasts English and American schools of mystery writing, Christie with Raymond Chandler. The latter I have read and enjoyed in toto but I’m otherwise ignorant of most crime writing. Dalrymple is always lively when he takes on a literary topic. He makes Christie, the bestselling novelist in history, an interesting case but not interesting enough to move me to read her books.

'Of the Mind As Well As the Heart'

“[T]he main furnishings of the cottage were Oakeshott’s books. He had disposed of most of those he considered merely informative and retained a consummately civilized library.” 

Inevitably I asked, “Is my library ‘consummately civilized’?” What does that mean? No junk, no bestsellers, I suppose, though some volumes that are “merely informative” – dictionaries and other reference books. Emphasis on the obvious essentials – Dante, Montaigne, Melville, et al. Books that, in their absence, might diminish the respectability of the remaining volumes. Nothing to be ashamed of. A lifetime’s accumulation of books that made us who we are – that is, reasonably civilized readers.  

 

Josiah Lee Auspitz’s “Michael Oakeshott: 1901-1990” was published in the Summer 1991 issue of The American Scholar. The philosopher had died on December 19, 1990, and Auspitz had attended the funeral in Dorset. The essay begins with an account of that event and goes on to examine Oakeshott’s thought. The passage above continues:

 

“In his later years he took to giving away some of his more cherished volumes, but still there remained shelves upon shelves testifying to years of enjoyment of history and fiction, philosophy and poetry, memoirs and essays, and pleasant hours of browsing in used-book stores. In his last year, he reread the works of one of his favorite Americans, Willa Cather.”

 

I read Oakeshott as a literary writer with an excellent prose style, not a quality often associated with philosophers, professors of political science or academics in general. He is a rare writer able to make even politics interesting, mostly because he isn’t writing strictly about politics. There’s a bigger, more interesting dimension to his work, a literary resonance. The reader is struck by the simplicity and lack of pretension in Oakeshott’s home, as described by Auspitz, and in his work. Such clarity is rare among writers in general. Auspitz writes:

 

“Though a gracefully bookish man, Oakeshott, as a philosopher, put little trust in the printed word. ‘A philosopher is not, as such, a scholar; and philosophy, more often than not, has foundered in learning. There is no book which is indispensable for the study of philosophy. And to speak of a philosopher as ignorant is to commit an ignoratio elenchi [“ignoring refutation” – an irrelevant conclusion]; an historian or a scientist may be ignorant, philosophers merely stupid.”

 

One concludes from reading Auspitz’s profile – and from reading his work -- that Oakeshott was a gentleman of thought: “[W]hen it came to suggesting an apt title, he was like a wise old herbalist dispensing time-tested remedies. If one were working on a problem, he had just the volume to advance one's thinking. If one were going on a trip, he would present the perfect travel memoir of that place. As a houseguest, he would rummage around for hours in used-book stores until he found just the right volumes to leave as a present for each member of the host family.”

 

At the conclusion of his final visit to see Oakeshott, Auspitz writes: “He also put in my hands Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, a memoir of Maine that he joined Willa Cather in admiring. Its words about hospitality applied to Oakeshott as well:

 

“‘Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift, which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest’s pleasure,-- that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten. Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading, and my hostess the golden gift. Sympathy is of the mind as well as the heart.’”

 

[Auspitz also wrote about Oakeshott here.]

'Living in a Ghost Story'

As usual when I visit Kaboom Books I leave with a stack of books I have already read. I’m a reader, not a collector. To find by serendipity a previously unknown book worth reading (which means reading at least twice) is rare in my experience. For many, a book is like a Kleenex – use it once and dispose of it. When I buy one, new or used, I’m virtually guaranteed to read it again. Saturday’s haul: 

Elias Canetti: The Human Province (1973; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Seabury Press, 1978).

 

Elias Canetti: Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes 1954-1971 (1994; trans John Hargraves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

 

I’ve been reading Canetti since my freshman year when I stumbled on his novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) in the library stacks. I have spent the subsequent half-century urging people to read his work, without much success. The same goes for my other purchase: Undertones of War (1929) by the English poet Edmund Blunden. This is the first American edition of his Great War memoir, published by Doubleday, Doran & Co. The dust jacket has fallen apart and someone tucked it into the book. The spine is sturdy and the pages have turned only slightly yellow. It’s a good reading copy of what I judge the finest of all World War I memoirs.

 

By all accounts, Blunden was a gentle, thoughtful, dreamy man, who would name two of his children, John and Clare, after the mad poet John Clare. He saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918 and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

 

While paying for the books, the owner of Kaboom, John Dillman, suggested I read Poilu: the World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 (1978).