`The Best Excuse for the Rogues Among Them'

For all the attention devoted to essays in recent years, few superior examples seem to get published. In part, this can be explained by a shortcoming built into the essay form as it has evolved since Montaigne’s day. The phrase “personal essay” has become a synonym for almost any first-person narrative. Montaigne was certainly personal but he was also Montaigne; that is, he possessed a mind of unusual learning, incisiveness and skepticism. When he deploys the first-person singular, you trust you’re getting more than a black hole of egotism. Most of his essayistic progeny have never learned that lesson because, well, self-centered blathering is so damn much fun.

The finest essayists working today are Cynthia Ozick and Theodore Dalrymple. Both use the “I” with discernment and never as the focus of an essay. It’s the writer’s vision we cherish, his or her stance before the world, not the “I” itself, and not even the ostensible subject matter of the essay. I love William Hazlitt’s “The Fight” and A.J. Liebling’s essays in The Sweet Science, and read them repeatedly while having no interest in boxing.

Ozick is known to all thoughtful readers, but the Good Doctor Dalrymple (whose given name is Anthony Daniels, and who is a retired English physician) is less well known, especially on this side of the Atlantic. In some quarters he has been pigeonholed as a political writer, a mouthpiece for a certain brand of fussy conservatism, but in fact his interests and sensibility are far broader and deeper than that. He is among those rare writers, like Montaigne and Samuel Johnson, who can tell us something new about the world and ourselves.

In the Spring 2007 issue of City Journal, Dalrymple characteristically takes on a writer once at the center of our common culture whose reputation and centrality have faded with time and fashion – Arthur Koestler. Dalrymple deems the author of Darkness at Noon “one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language.” I agree, with qualifications, though it hadn’t occurred to me to think so before Dalrymple pointed it out. I came to Koestler (1905-1983) long after he had served time as a Zionist, a Communist, and an anti-Communist, and had morphed into an all-purpose polymath who flirted with, in Dalrymple’s telling, “Indian mysticism, Lamarckian biology, non-reductionist science, and parapsychology.” In other words, by the late 1960s he seemed to have degenerated into a California-style twit. He even dropped acid. For many, that impression became lasting after Koestler and his wife committed suicide together and a posthumous biography revealed Koestler’s unsavory sexual predilections. But there was more to this mercurial intellect from Hungary than flakiness and aberrant sex, and that’s the thrust of Dalrymple’s essay:

“It is precisely because Koestler’s life and work so deeply instantiate the existential dilemmas of our age that he is a fascinating figure, unjustly neglected, and too often dismissed as a sexual psychopath. He was not a naturally good man (far from it), but he was struggling toward the good by the light and authority of his own intellect; unfortunately, as Hume tells us, reason is the slave of the passions, and Koestler was an exceptionally passionate man.”

Another admirable essayist, Clive James, devotes a chapter of Cultural Amnesia to the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (much admired by Dalrymple), who also committed suicide with his wife. As a critic, James is always generous, even empathetic. Writing about Zweig, he helps us understand Koestler and other problematic artists:

“Our lives are enriched by people who create works of art better than their personalities: the best excuse for the rogues among them, and the best reason for our raising the virtuous to the plane of worship.”

Part of a good essayist’s job is to reclaim a piece of the world we thought we understood and were finished with, and to remind us that humans are elusively complicated. We never exhaustively know anyone, even the first-person singular.