'The Conversation of Good Minds, Quick Wits'

As good a working definition of the essay -- that literary form without a form, yet never formless -- as I have encountered: 

“What happens in an essay? Someone is thinking out loud in print for the benefit of those he cannot reach with the spoken voice. So the best thing the essay can do is to combine the voice of enlightenment with a truly conversational tone.”

 

We all know the allure of a first-rate conversationalist. He reads his audience. His tone mingles challenge and charm. He doesn’t hector or preach. His timing is superb. (I’m reminded of a jazz quip I heard from the late baritone player Nick Brignola: “So many drummers, so little time.”) His wit is measured and barbed. He knows a lot of things and enjoys sharing them but isn’t pedantic. He’s never a bore. Simply put, you enjoy his company.

 

This week, without planning it, I’ve read or reread a handful of good essays in various styles, online and off, that kept me reading to the end and left a residue of interesting thoughts. Take a 2000 review/essay by Guy Davenport that to my knowledge has never been collected: “A Stereopticon,” devoted to two books about Nabokov the lepidopterist. Davenport performs his lit-crit duties and then concludes:

 

“Shakespeare’s tragedies depend on mistaken identities leading to rash and irreversible actions; his comedies, on disguises leading to happy laughter. Nabokov saw only senseless violence where Shakespeare saw tragedy, only sardonic humor where Shakespeare saw comedy. Aloof and detached, he observed. He had an Olympian interest in human folly, the only truly interesting thing in the universe, and a human, exacting, and finely attentive interest in the universe itself. “

 

Ponder that phrase: “human folly, the only truly interesting thing in the universe.”

 In three brief paragraphs, Rabbi David Wolpe gives us a sentence – a solemn wisecrack, really -- I have already committed to memory: “The Jewish people are a phoenix pursued by arsonists.”

 

And from 273 years ago today, Dr. Johnson’s Rambler essay: “A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.”

 

In a review of a new biography of Osip Mandelstam, Donald Rayfield offers a historical analogy to help us understand the tension between the great Russian poet and his murderous nemesis, Joseph Stalin:

 

“For a Western reader with no experience of totalitarianism, perhaps the best parallels to Mandelstam and Stalin’s relationship lie in the distant past. If we read Sir Walter Raleigh’s poems written in the 1610s in the Tower of London, while King James I of England was deliberating whether to put his death sentence into effect, we get a feeling for the situation in which Mandelstam found himself.”

The passage quoted at the top is from yet another essay, John Simon's 1989 review of Jacques Barzun's The Culture We Deserve (ed. Arthur Krystal, a good essayist). Simon continues:

 

“Not the kind of conversation you hear in locker rooms, at the restaurant table next to yours, or while waiting in line for a movie. But the conversation of good minds, quick wits, lively inquirers, sharp observers, and graceful stylists in the company of their peers.”

 

[See Simon’s The Sheep From the Goats: Selected Literary Essays, also published in 1989. In his introduction he writes: “My position is definitely old-fashioned and may strike some as painfully simple. It is to look at the work and author steadily (as Arnold put it) and try to see it and him or her whole. And to make the examination and evaluation straightforward, informative, and, I hope, entertaining.”]