“Allow me a small confession: It has been some time since I have truly enjoyed an essay in a literary magazine. There are too many essays, and vanishingly few good essayists. There seems to be real confusion about whether style can conceal a fundamental incuriosity, whether sufficiently inventive prose can paper over the refusal to think. (It can’t.)”
In newspaper
lingo, this is what a former editor of mine called “a reader-grabbing lede.” To
begin with, it’s a subject I have a stake in, as reader and writer. If coerced
to name my favorite literary form, the one I most enjoy reading and writing, I
would name the form without form, the essay. Most that I encounter today in
magazines and elsewhere are grindingly predictable, often with titles or headlines
that give it all away. No need to read any further. But bumper stickers are not
essays. Neither are sincerity and stridency.
The author
of the passage quoted above is Matt Dinan, who teaches in the Great Books
Program at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
Speaking of titles, I would have expected of Dinan’s -- “Be Mean: The Case for Truth” -- a self-sermon and sanctimonious
virtue-signaling. It’s quite the opposite:
“Even
accomplished writers don’t seem to recognize what is interesting about their
own thoughts and experiences. A good essay is not merely mental stenography.
And what is more tedious than reading yet another essay that, after lengthy
perseveration, locates one more reason for endorsing the conventional view? How
often are you actually surprised by something you read—even by yet another
hairsplitting ‘case against’ something perfectly worthy or good?”
No form allows
so much opportunity for the sheer adventure of writing. Sure, you can formulate
a thesis (aka “rant”) and try to substantiate it, though my favorite essays are
not of the persuasive variety. Charm, learning, a good ear and a sense of humor, moral
discernment and some understanding of the complexities of human nature are the
essayist’s prerequisites. Also, an interesting mind, and a love of and respect
for words.
It’s not all
dreariness. We have a few good essayists still at work – preeminently, Joseph
Epstein, as well as Cynthia Ozick, Arthur Krystal, Theodore Dalrymple, Peter
Hitchens, Eric Ormsby, Robert Alter and others I’m probably forgetting. And in recent decades we’ve lost some of our best essay practitioners –
Guy Davenport, J.V. Cunningham, Simon Leys, Aldo Buzzi, Whitney Balliett, Dr. Oliver
Sacks, Hubert Butler and the two V.S.’s, Naipaul and Pritchett.
Reading Dr.
Johnson again in preparation for reading Shakespeare again (the late comedies),
I found a passage in his “Preface to Shakespeare” that rather surprisingly applies
to what we look for in good essays:
“Shakespeare’s
plays are not in the rigorous or critical sense either tragedies or comedies,
but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary
nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless
variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the
course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which,
at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying
his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick
of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without
design.”
1 comment:
One of the joys of reading Anecdotal Evidence these many years is the discovery of new writers among the quick and the dead, a number of which are listed here. In elderhood, unless dementia sets in or one's eyes fail-- or need the support of e-reader, as one reader my age commented--books are still a fully accessible pleasure.
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