'Only His Felicity with Words'

“Few things are more pleasing than to find what one thinks are one’s idiosyncratic views corroborated by someone whose mind one much admires.” 

I’ve tried to mentally rewrite that sentence, pruning at least one of the one’s (or the someone), but couldn’t do it satisfactorily. Some thoughts are knotty, in the Gordian sense, but our sword isn’t up to the task. I remember reading that J.F. Powers was sweating a sentence in one of his stories. He told an interviewer he had the right words but had trouble finding the right order. As Swift wrote to a divinity student: “Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.”

 

The sentence above is Joseph Epstein’s and is pulled from a twenty-year-old essay later retitled "On the Road Again, Alas" (In a Cardboard Belt!, 2007). I suspect he wrestled with the words before resigning himself to their published arrangement. Epstein is a careful stylist who pays attention to matters of rhythm, logic and precision, without resorting to exhibitionism.

 

At the suggestion of two readers, I borrowed from the library Suppose a Sentence (New York Review Books, 2020), a collection of brief essays by the Irish writer Brian Dillon. I knew the name but hadn’t read him before. He is an awkwardly self-conscious writer. The best essayists give the appearance of self-forgetting, even when writing about themselves. Dillon writes like a nervous graduate student. His choice of epigraphs for the book, by Roland Barthes and Anne Carson, advertise what we as readers are in for: lots of fashionable cultural posturing. The book opens with a two-page-long sentence that begins “Or maybe a short sentence after all, a fragment in fact . . .” Cute. Much name-dropping follows. Sorry to say, Dillon is a dreary writer who may have read a lot but seems not to have lived very much. He offers little evidence of any sense of humor and seems voluntarily trapped in self. This is where postmodernism has brought us. I stopped reading after twenty-three pages. Dillon is not cheery company.

 

In 2018, Epstein reviewed Dillon’s previous book, Essayism, and reprinted his review in Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits (Axios, 2020). He correctly indicts Dillon on charges of “abstraction, opacity, obscurity” – the usual vogueish transgressions. The essay has suffered in recent years, its practitioners turning pretentious, didactic or embarrassingly confessional. Epstein, by diagnosing Dillon as a case study in show-off solipsism, corroborates my “idiosyncratic views.” Epstein celebrates the tradition of “Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Max Beerbohm, George Orwell, in fact the main line or tradition of the essay in English”:

  

“He, the essayist, presents himself unshielded by meter and rhyme, unclothed by the fabrications of dazzling tale telling. The essayist has only his felicity with words, his dedication to truthfulness and above all his point of view—and it is enough. Or at least it has been for the best essayists.”