`A Bad Style Is an Imperfect Thought'

Almost at random I have chosen two books from those attacked on my nightstand. From The Journal of Jules Renard (edited and translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget), I select two consecutive passages -- again, almost at random -- from August 1898:

“Why should it be more difficult to die, that is, to go from life to death, than it is to be born, that is, to go from death to life?

“There cannot be on the one side form, and on the other, matter. A bad style is an imperfect thought.”

Renard, we note, is fond of epigrammatic concision. We can expect little in the way of arguments mustered, evidence deployed. He doesn’t appear notably cynical, and is comfortable generalizing from particulars. He’s not shy about making grand conclusions. He is, in short, an essayist in miniature.

The second book is Can These Bones Live, by Edward Dahlberg. I signed and dated my copy Aug. 6, 1975, the same summer I first read Renard. Here is one of many passages I marked:

“There are no abstract truths – no Mass Man, no proletariat. There is only Man. When the Pulse has been nailed upon the crossbeams, lo, Reason gives up its viable breath and becomes a wandering ghostly Error. Truth and folly are ever about to expire, so that we, like our beloved Sancho Panza, kneeling at the death bed of Don Quixote, must always be ready to go out to receive the holy communion of cudgels and distaffs for the rebirth of the Pulse.”

Characteristically, the prose is rich and allegorical, almost distractingly so. Dahlberg is a moralist with a prophetic bent. Here, I calibrate him as almost, but not quite, overbearing. Much of his later work is unambiguously overbearing. His books are an acquired taste, and I acquired it 32 years ago. Like Renard, he is an essayist manqué.

I cite this unlikley pair because of a review I found, via Arts & Letters Daily, by a writer new to me, Cristina Nehring, at a site, Truthdig, I visited for the first time on Saturday. Read the whole thing, but in short she lambasts the contemporary American essay for its narcissism, timidity, nostalgia, dullness and general flummery. To which I would add the most damning sin of all – bad prose. Here’s a sample of Nehring:

“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. 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 blog writing. The best blogs, after all, are those closest in form to essays, and they are sadly rare. I cite Renard and Dahlberg because both display the essayist impulse without writing “formal” essays. I place “formal” in quotes because since its birth in the 16th century, in the sensibility of Montaigne, the essay has remained notoriously slippery, though its mercurial elasticity is part of its glory. In “On Vanity,” Montaigne wrote, “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. Philip Roth has penned the best of the latter. In recent years we’ve lost Hubert Butler and Guy Davenport, but Cynthia Ozick and Marilynne Robinson are still working, not to mention an Englishman, Theodore Dalrymple. These are names to place in the honorable succession of Seneca, Montaigne, Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Emerson, Thoreau, Henry James and Orwell.

The 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.”