'The Fascination of the Essay'

Three of the four books I bought on Friday were for other people – a rare act of bookish altruism on my part. But it’s Christmas, and one has obligations. For obvious reasons I can’t mention three of the titles. The fourth was Edward Hoagland’s 1982 essay collection The Tugman’s Passage. In the December 9 post I quoted Guy Davenport recommending Hoagland’s essay on hunting bears in The Courage of Turtles (1970) to Hugh Kenner. That would be “The War in the Woods,” which I then reread. In it, Hoagland interviews a man who was attacked by a grizzly bear in British Columbia and survived. It makes for horrifying reading, and I’ll give just a sample: 

“When a grizzly mauls a man the real destruction it does is with its mouth: in bedside interviews, people who have been bitten have described the cumulatively catastrophic damage inflicted on them by a series of chomps. Even so, in most cases, the man survives; the bear bites near his neck but doesn’t quite get there, leaving him mauled but alive. This bear, likewise, torn between its obvious abhorrence of approaching my informant and the urge to wreak havoc on him, hesitated, bawling and swaying, chopping its jaws.”

 

Now I remember why I fell so hard for Hoagland’s essays (not so much his fiction) about forty years ago, though I haven’t read him much lately. He’s eighty-eight and still, on occasion, writing. His prose has never been froufrou or self-congratulatory. Writers about the natural world tend to get misty-eyed and pantheistic. Hoagland is no nature mystic. Here he describes what the bear-attack survivor remembers most vividly – the smell:

 

“. . . he couldn’t describe it either, except as odious suffocation—violent, vile aversion. It was not like pyorrhea, nor like a garbage pit; it was everything fetid and scarifying and strangling rolled into one disgusting cloud which was more frightening than all the injuries and pain. Hunters call the smell cabbagy and go wild with excitement when they catch a whiff, but he was lying right underneath the mouth, which was its source.”

 

In “What I Think, What I Am” (1976) in The Tugman’s Passage, Hoagland writes of essays:

 

“Because essays are directly concerned with the mind and the mind’s idiosyncrasy, the very freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this branch of literature that does honor to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the essay.”