'Essayists, Like Poets, Are Born and Not Made'

“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.”

If pressed to name my favorite literary form I would choose the essay, the form without a strict form, seemingly designed for free spirits with brains and emotional depth – “a knowledge of men and of books,” as W.E. Henley puts it above. The most unlikely things can be successful essays – reviews, memoirs, scientific papers, recipes, fiction. The best ones have a point, even an argument or lesson, but never hector or harangue the reader. An essayist confides. Without condescending, he puts his arm around your shoulder and talks softly, turning you into the sole member of his audience, a person worthy of his trust.

 

Sure, Montaigne started it all (except for Plutarch and Seneca), but the English came to perfect it – Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, Chesterton, Beerbohm and the rest. William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) will never be a member of that front rank. He was a poet, lauded in his day, and will always be remembered for a poem my eighth-grade English teacher had us memorize sixty years ago: "Invictus." It’s a natural for recitation, up there with Kipling.

 

The passage at the top is taken from Henley’s “Essays and Essayists” collected in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1892).He writes:

 

“Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable.”

 

Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849. His friend Stevenson, who based the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883) on the one-legged Henley, wrote him a letter from Nebraska on August 23, 1879 -- the poet's thirtieth birthday. Stevenson writes a brief, impromptu essay from Willa Cather's (b. 1873) future turf:

 

“I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.”

'We Have the Long List of Autodidacts'

Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975): 

“The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”

 

This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:

 

“So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”

 

All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that my education was up to me.

 

I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”

 

Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.

'A Kind of Good Humoured Growl'

We like a neat and predictable understanding of our fellows. No surprises. An honest man never lies and an angry man is never forgiving -- convictions rooted in naïveté about human nature, which is willful and contradictory. Few of us even understand our own motives. Here is James Boswell writing of his friend in May 1775: 

“I passed many hours with him on the 17th, of which I find all my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’ It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularity and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily. We may suppose, that the high relish of a state so different from his habitual gloom, produced more than ordinary exertions of that distinguishing faculty of man, which has puzzled philosophers so much to explain.”

 

I can hear the chorus of amateur psychologists: “bipolar.” After all, every human complexity can be “solved” and even “cured.” There’s plenty of precedent for funny men living in “perpetual gloom.” S.J. Perelman nominates himself in everything he ever wrote, including the Marx Brothers scripts. Think of Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce. To paraphrase a very funny and serious man, Kingsley Amis, the opposite of funny is not serious but unfunny. Take this untitled epigram by X.J. Kennedy:

 

“Have I ‘matured’ at last? My blood congeals.

 Have I so soon discarded my ideals?”

 

The humor is in the adolescent defiance of the couplet and the reader's recognition of himself in its lines. And another one, “A Farting Babbler,” also from the Fall 1992 issue of The Classical Outlook:

 

“His gaseous anus, though it give offense,

 Comes closer than his mouth to making sense.”

 

We all know the type, which despite conventional wisdom is not limited to politicians. Fill in the blank. One more, about the incestuous world of writers, especially poets:

 

“Swap got a wildly favorable review

Written, of course, by some kiss-ass he knew

To whose last work he’d suckled up in turn.

Better to marry, said St. Paul, than burn.”

 

Happy birthday, Joe. Kennedy, our funniest serious poet, turns ninety-six today. Boswell continues the passage above from his Life of Johnson like this: “Johnson’s laugh was as remarkable as any circumstance in his manner. It was a kind of good humoured growl. Tom Davies described it drolly enough: ‘He laughs like a rhinoceros.’”

'A Place Remote and Islanded'

“If you will look in on me sometime in the summer of 2026, I may be able to tell you whether my things are going to last.” 

This is Edwin Arlington Robinson at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, writing to a friend on August 20, 1926. In effect he is proposing a fanciful literary experiment, and there was a time when I would have said he was being disingenuous. Of course his best work would survive, I thought, along with Emily Dickinson’s, T.S. Eliot’s and Yvor Winters’. But the culture has moved on and most of us no longer value poetry and other forms of literature as central to our values. We are, in effect, rejecting ourselves and the inheritance that made us. I’ll wager that Robinson is seldom taught in American high schools and universities, apart from "Richard Cory," thanks to Simon and Garfunkel.

 

Like many writers, Robinson’s character mingled thoughtfulness and modesty with egotism. What distinguishes him from most is his determination to remain his own man. No one owns him. In his poems and letters I detect no slavish following of fashion and no rah-rah politics. As a poet, he never raises his voice or turns hectoring. His stance as a solitary, diffident man and artist with, ironically perhaps, a gift for friendship, is likely unique in American literary history. He once told a correspondent: “I never could find any poetry in gathering apples. It is the worst work I know except washing dishes and listening to a debate.” Among his childhood chores in Gardiner, Maine, was picking apples in his family’s orchard.

 

Take one of Robinson’s finest poems, “Isaac and Archibald,” from Captain Craig: A Book of Poems (1902). It reads like a short story (he wrote fiction before writing poetry). Yvor Winters described it as “a kind of New England pastoral and is extraordinarily lovely.” It encourages us to inhabit the lives of four characters – the old men of the title, the narrator and his younger self. This arrangement of sympathetic ties mirrors life and the way we preserve it and transform it in memory. Robinson’s poem is closer to the way a great novelist works – say, Tolstoy or James – than to a typical lyrical poet. Here is Isaac speaking of himself in the third person, as though he were already dead, urging the narrator to remember; the narrator’s act of remembrance as a man of the boy he was; and the boy’s tacit sense that Isaac’s words are important and deserve to be remembered:

 

“’Look at me, my boy,

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after him, try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day. Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me—

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald.’—The words come back

Almost as Isaac must have uttered them,

And there comes with them a dry memory

Of something in my throat that would not move.”

 

Robinson’s imaginative projection into people unlike himself makes our human sympathy possible. Put bluntly, we want to know who these people are, why they do what they do, and why we share so much with them.

 

In February 1896, Robinson writes to his friend Harry De Forest Smith: “Three or four days ago, I took the liberty to borrow Henry James’s The Lesson of the Master and have read it to find that H. J. is a genius. No smaller word will do it for the man, who produced such work as this. Did you read it? If you didn’t, you must. If there is any more of his stuff out there let me know, and I shall try to read it, though I must take a rest for a time.” I savor the notion of reading Henry James’ “stuff.” Winters writes of Robinson in his 1946 monograph devoted to the poet:

 

“[H]is closest spiritual relatives, at least in America, are to be found in the writers of fiction and of history in his generation and the two or three generations preceding. I have called attention to his having certain more or less Jamesian vices as a narrator, but I am thinking now of his virtues: of the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence. In respect to one or another of these qualities, one may find him related to such a mind as that of Henry James, but perhaps more obviously to Edith Wharton and [John Lathrop] Motley and Francis Parkman, and perhaps even at times to Henry Adams. He is, it seems to me, the last great American writer of their tradition, and not the first of a later one; and the fact that he writes verse is incidental . . . . Robinson is more closely comparable to the great masters of prose than to the minor poets.”

 

I think of another Maine native, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), and her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Her narrator observes: “In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”

'Discipline Results in Freedom'

Eccentricity, it appears, is an inheritable trait, like dimples and hemophilia. Take the case of the Sitwells. I know Dame Edith and her brothers, Sir Osbert and Sir Sacheverell, largely by reputation, and they impress me as an eccentric English phenomenon that has never successfully crossed the Atlantic. Dame Edith, the family poet, even published an amusing volume of prose, The English Eccentrics (1933). 

Until recently I knew nothing about their father, Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943), who is clearly responsible for passing along the eccentricity gene. Inevitably, he is identified as an antiquary, a vast sub-category among eccentrics. Sir Harold Acton, no mean eccentric himself, described Sir George as “the strangest old bugger you ever met.” Even Dame Edith and Sir Osbert judged Daddy as the oddest of ducks and not always a pleasant fellow. In her 1965 autobiography Taken Care Of, Dame Edith said of her mother and father: “[T]hey were parents I would not recommend to anybody.” “I doubt,” wrote Sir Osbert of his sister in his five-volume autobiography, “whether any child was ever more mismanaged by her parents.” One of Sir George’s books was titled Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse. In the fourth volume of his autobiography, Laughter in the Next Room (1948), Sir Osbert writes of his father:

 

“The general atmosphere, which was always menacing, the interruptions, the scenes, the surprises, and the ambushes laid, the fussing, the necessity my father felt both for consulting and contradicting me, the economies, the extravagances, all put it beyond possibility to write a line when he was in the house.”

 

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Sir George served as a Conservative politician in the House of Commons. He banned electricity in his house until the nineteen-forties. Visitors were issued candles. His only sustenance late in life was roasted chicken. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography refers to “his active, inventive, but erratic mind,” and quotes Sir George as saying, “I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.”

 

Sir George redesigned the garden at Renishaw Hall, the family seat in Derbyshire. In 1909 he purchased the Castello di Montegufoni, near Florence, restored the building and made it his residence in 1925. That same year he published On the Making of Gardens, republished in 1949. On this date, August 19, in 1951, Marianne Moore – a benign example of American eccentricity -- reviewed the new edition in the New York Times Book Review. She writes:

 

“Poetic implacability was never seen to better advantage than in the style of Sir George Sitwell, in which nicety is barbed with a kind of decorous ferocity, as when he says, ‘Forgery in art is not a crime unless it fails to deceive.’”

 

Moore recognizes the eccentricity of Sir George’s thinking in the garden book: “Sir George Sitwell shows us in this glittering treatise how to look at what we see; his stately observations are applicable to small as well as to great gardens; and throughout, an inescapable lesson is afforded us—that discipline results in freedom.”

 

One way to gauge the liberality of a nation is to examine its treatment of eccentrics, even those who are not themselves liberal-minded. Using that measure, twentieth-century England comes off as an often marvelously tolerant place.

 

[Moore’s review can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]

'What May Save Us Is Conversation'

A friend tells me he and three other men have for a decade met monthly for lunch and conversation. All work or worked in the past for the same government agency in Washington, D.C. Conversation tended toward the traditionally male – politics, sports, health. Inevitably, opinions differed but relations remained amicable until recently. One of the four failed to show up two months in a row. Why? It turns out he was boycotting the lunches because of politics. In a word, Trump. I suspect the same thing is happening all over the country, even within families. As I wrote to my friend: 

“I hate what politics does to people. Or, rather, what people do with politics, making it divisive, using it as a weapon. It could, of course, just as well be religion or baseball. It's beyond my understanding.”

 

People get angry when they want to exercise or recover a sense of power, even among friends and loved ones. Some take differences of opinion very personally. They feel snubbed or dismissed. A psychiatrist, of all people, states an immutable truth in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949):

 

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

 

My reaction to my friend’s situation is a sense of sadness that someone would sacrifice long-standing friendship on something as ultimately inconsequential as politics. People are more important than their opinions. The only way to reach a respectful equilibrium with people holding opinions unlike our own is to talk about it. In a passage from 1944, Michael Oakeshott writes in Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014, Imprint Academic):

 

“We live in an age of dogmatism, which has only to continue in the way it is going, to bring us to a new dark age of enlightenment: what may save us is conversation.”

'A Living Culture Is a Swarm of Moments'

Much on my mind of late has been that victim of literary taxonomy, the “minor” writer. We glibly sentence writers to one of two categories, “major” and “minor,” a sort of Manichean system of classification that leaves little room for the most welcome writer of all – a good one we enjoy reading. For the purposes of defining our terms, who is an unambiguously major writer? To cite the obvious: Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy. Of course, there are plenty of fashion-conscious readers, critics and academics out there who would deny such a status to our trio, while boosting some piddling but au courant mediocrity. Now the tougher decision: who is a minor writer, if we assume that “minor” is not a dismissively qualitative term? Guy Davenport in a 1995 interview comes to our assistance: 

“Minor writers may have charm, a polished finish, and a kind of eccentric attraction. Thomas Love Peacock, Colette, Simenon, Michael Gilbert -- fine fellows and impeccable stylists, but when compared to Tolstoy, Cervantes, Balzac, or Proust, minor. I would place Poe and Borges among the minors, splendid as they are. They are narrow. A Martian could not learn about human nature from either of them.”

 

That final sentence is an interesting fine-tuning of our understanding of “major” writers, if it is not to be simple snobbery. According to Davenport, part of their job is to define what it means to be human. I wouldn’t argue too much with that and would suggest that no writer is minor while we are pleasurably engaged with his work, enjoying it, admiring it, learning from it, sharing it with other readers. Every serious reader would agree that Swift and Chekhov are “major” writers. We are obligated to read them if we wish to be fully literate, conversant with the culture we have inherited. To intentionally not read them is to be ungrateful, a betrayal of what is most important in our tradition.

 

Let me propose a question and not offer a tentative solution. I’ll leave that to you. What are we to make of two excellent writers active during my lifetime whose birthdays we observe today – Janet Lewis (b. 1899) and V.S. Naipaul (b. 1932)? Your answer will say something about what you have and have not read, what you value most in literature, and your definitions of “major” and “minor.”

 

Clive James has a poem titled “To Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of Sydney University: A Report on My Discipline, on the Eve of My Receiving an Honorary Degree, 1999.” James is defining what he does as a literary journalist, a major minor writer, a writerly jack-of-all-trades, not a narrowly defined academic – the usual recipient of an honorary degree. Here are stanzas ten and eleven:

 

“The only problem is, no other kind

Of writer except great’s thought worth attention.

This attitude, in matters of the mind,

To my mind robs us of a whole dimension.

Intelligence just isn’t that refined:

It’s less a distillate than a suspension,

An absinthe we’d knock back in half a minute

Without the cloud of particles within it.

 

“Just so, a living culture is a swarm

Of moments that provide its tang and tingle:

Unless it’s fuelled by every minor form

From dirty joke to advertising jingle

It ends up like Dame Edna’s husband, Norm,

Stiff as a post. I think John Douglas Pringle

Was first to spot our language, at its core,

Owed its élan to how a wharfie swore.”

 

In 1728, Bishop White Kennet reports of Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “I have heard that nothing could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford and hearing the Barge-men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his Sides, and laugh most profusely.”