'A Hearty Kind of Present Ear-Kissing Smack'

I think of blog posts as happy minglings of the essay and the personal letter. My favorite form in all of literature, an essay is not a form, at least not in the same sense as a sonnet or villanelle. It defies definition yet we readily identify a good one. I like the second definition of essay Dr. Johnson gives in his Dictionary: “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” An essay is inspired talk, with hems and haws deleted, making it ideal for humor of various strains. Of all people, Tristram Shandy gets in the essayistic spirit: “Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.” 

This is where essay merges into personal letter. An essayist has come to an agreement with his reader. He respects him enough to write well. He writes as a friend, once removed. Intimacy without presumption or hectoring. He assumes his reader will get most of his jokes and follow at least a few of his allusions. His sensibility will suffuse anything an essayist writes, while avoiding the more banal forms of autobiography. If not as a friend, the reader of an essay is to be treated at least as a worthy companion. Here is Charles Lamb in “Distant Correspondents” (The Essays of Elia, 1823):  

 

“Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, sentiment, and puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my fashion, nonseriously.”

 

Lamb’s voice is the polar opposite of earnest or strident. In “Distant Correspondents,” he strives to make an essay as confiding and letter-like as he can, while conceding its impossibility. The essay is written in the form of a letter to “B.F.,” his friend Barron Field (1786-1846), then living in Australia. It is Field who accompanied Lamb and his sister  Mary on their visit to “Mackery End in Hertfordshire.”

 

Philip Lopate has edited The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present, recently published by Pantheon, which I don’t intend to read. Judging from the table of contents, it largely collects old warhorses and tiresomely unreadable dreck, and leaves out at least five American masters of the essay: A.J. Liebling, Jacques Barzun, J.V. Cunningham, Whitney Balliett and Joseph Epstein.

 

About the third topic identified by Lamb as appropriate to a personal letter, he writes: “A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss.”

 

Lamb died on this date, December 27, in 1834 at the age of fifty-nine.