'Not Merely Mental Stenography'

“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.”