'Our Essayists Have Defected'

At the bottom of a box of odds and ends I found a printout of an essay published more than eighteen years ago at a site called Truthdig. I don’t remember reading it but must have found it interesting. The author is Cristina Nehring (about whom I know nothing else), her the title is “What’s Wrong With the American Essay” and you can still read it online. It’s pure provocation: 

“The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization.”

 

Things have only gotten worse in the subsequent decades. Contemporary essays are characterized principally by the writer’s desire to impress readers with his sensitivity and virtue, usually of a political nature, as though the essay were a form of loyalty oath. Of course, a few first-rate essayists are still at work, still getting published: Cynthia Ozick (age 98), Joseph Epstein (89), Gary Saul Morson (78), Theodore Dalrymple (76), Peter Hitchens (74). All are lineal descendants of the father of essays, Montaigne, whom Nehring goes on to cite:    

 

“Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. ‘Where I have least knowledge,’ said the blithe Montaigne, ‘there do I use my judgment most readily.’ And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read -- and to spar with -- Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.”

 

Well, yes and no. Argument without wit or style is tiresome. It’s at this point that Nehring’s assessment of the essay applies to that endangered species, the blog (a name I still find ugly and amusing). After all, the best blogs are those closest in form to essays, and they are sadly rare. They embody the essay (to try, to attempt) impulse without being "formal" essays. I place “formal” in quotes because since its birth in the sixteenth century (yes, I know there are ancient precursors) , in the sensibility of Montaigne, the essay has remained notoriously slippery, though its mercurial nature is part of its glory and charm. In “On Vanity,” Montaigne writes, “My style and my mind alike wander.”

 

I’ve read first-rate essays disguised as book reviews, travelogues, sermons, op-ed pieces, philosophy, letters, biographies, poems, culinary criticism, medical and scientific texts, dictionary entries, diaries and journals, and passages in novels (see George Eliot). Essay writing is an impulse, the sensibility's mingling of experience and learning, more than a sophomoric screed or polemic.

 

Jacques Barzun reviewed Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne when it was published in 1957. He writes:

 

“Tastes, feelings, instincts, come into play and incite the passion for diversity. Montaigne finds in himself a taste for books, but not for bookishness; he can think and write for weeks or months together without reading. He loves travel and the immediate sensation of things. Truth being his delight, he loathes the life of a courtier. Yet its opposite, the philosopher's, should not be withdrawn or vexatious by design. Philosophy is a gay science, to which the satisfaction of the senses is a proper minister. Money is to buy pleasure, and Montaigne ‘hates poverty as the peer of pain.’ But human condition or no, there are terms on which alone it is it is fitting to live: ‘by right and authority not by permission or as a reward.’”

 

The energizing freedom of the essay, its resistance to formalization and even definition, invites abuse. Just as everyone is certain of his rightness for parenthood, so is everyone convinced he can write an essay. Give the Nehring the last word:

 

“Our essayists have defected, leaving us on our own, with the impression that to traffic in boldness and generality is to be a blowhard or a huckster. The moderation of these triflers is immoderate, and it is only right that readers allow their work to rot in basements.”

 

[You can find Barzun’s article at Isaac Waisberg’s invaluable IWP Books.]