`They Are the Best I Can Do'

The title on the spine of the slender red volume, upright on the library shelf, caught my distracted attention: The Half-Life of an American Essay[the label with the catalogue number obscured the rest of the word]ist. Not long, I thought. A few years, except for Emerson’s and maybe Mencken’s. Reading the full title didn’t revise my reaction. The author is someone I had not heard of, Arthur Krystal, but I checked out the book after reading his choice of epigraphs, especially the first, from William Hazlitt:

“What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do.”

That’s pulled from “The Indian Jugglers” (1821). The second, which sounds like Yogi Berra, is from Goethe in a common-sensical moment: “Experience is only half of experience.” The title still bothered me as sounding too hip, too self-reflexive and cutely ironic, but the title essay pulled me in:

“Somehow, without ever intending to, I’ve ended up a freelance intellectual. Not quite a man of letters, not really a critic anymore, but a sort of literary mule – a cross between haphazard journalist and restive seminarian. And it’s no fun. Magazines that actually pay for the sort of things I write can be counted on the fingers of a hand that’s encountered a sharp piece of machinery. I write, as it happens, essays with a literary bent, and though there are plenty of small periodicals that welcome such pieces, they pay honorariums of three hundred dollars or less. And since I’m unwilling to write, and probably incapable of writing, about more trendy subjects, I can forget about all the glossy magazines that pay quite well by a writer’s standards.”

We’ve heard that voice before, and it’s Joseph Epstein’s. The subject, too, is familiar -- the writer’s lament, self-pity tempered with wit. Perhaps Krystal should take up blogging, though it doesn’t pay much better. He’s jokey but his thesis is serious: Most essays, long-touted as undergoing a renaissance, are nothing but memoirs in disguise. Referring to his first collection, Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, Krystal writes:

“Bear in mind, these are, once again, literary pieces. None of this `creative non-fiction’ nonsense, which is just a pretentious term for memoiristic writing. Although, commercially speaking, essay writing is a sucker’s game, memoirs remain a draw; and if you’ve had the good fortune – from a writer’s point of view – to have been abused as a child, survived a shipwreck or cancer, spent time in jail, or been addicted to internet porn, your chances of getting published are better than average. Memoirists simply write personal essays – period. Their work is no more creative than any other kind of essay; quite the reverse in fact.”

It’s refreshing to hear truth articulated plainly. Krystal has an instinct for interesting subjects, including Paul Valery (he reviews the Cahiers/Notebooks, as did Epstein) and Raymond Chandler. He has good things to say about A.J. Liebling as a boxing writer, contra Joyce Carol Oates. He has good taste in books and a sense of hope, and those counts for a lot today:

“…I believe in the essay, particularly the literary essay. I believe that in the right hands – those extending from the sleeves of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling and a dozen or so others – the literary essay, although it may begin by addressing books, always ends up being about the interaction of society and culture. And because language and thought are inseparable, I believe that the essay remains the artistic form in which consciousness achieves its fullest expression. All in all, not a bad way to make a living.”

I might add at least Charles Lamb, Henry James, Guy Davenport and Cynthia Ozick to Krystal’s list. And I would second his inclusion of Hazlitt, who writes in the sentences immediately following the ones Krystal uses for an epigraph:

“I endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a subject, and to express it as nearly as I can. Instead of writing on four subjects at a time, it is as much as I can manage to keep the thread of one discourse clear and unentangled. I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, polish my periods: but the one I cannot, and the other I will not do.”