'Can Essays Still Be Written in Our Time?'

Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books introduced me to the work of Erwin Chargaff three years ago. Chargaff was a German-born biochemist who fled Hitler, became an American citizen and did pioneering work with DNA. He was an old-fashioned humanist, broadly read in Western literature. 

Isaac publishes three of Chargaff’s books of more general interest than genetics. Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections (1986) is a collection of thirty-three brief essays about such topics as “Genetic Engineering,” “Death” and “Sex Life of Grammar.” Chargaff had a sense of humor. Montaigne’s name appears as a leitmotif throughout the essays. In his preface Chargaff writes:

 

“Montaigne, the greatest master of latitudinal thinking, roamed widely, if not always profoundly: there was virtually nothing that could not serve him as a hook on which to hang his thoughts, his reminiscences and remarks. His Essays have been greatly admired for nearly four hundred years; whether they still are read widely I do not know.”

 

“Latitudinal thinking” I take to mean open-minded, broadly ranging thought, non-specializing, perhaps more intuitive than rigidly logical – a useful approach for an essayist. In the chapter titled “Amateurs,” Chargaff writes:

 

“Whatever went into [Montaigne’s Essays] had to pass through the prism of one character, one temperament; it is the self of Montaigne that remains the only element of order in that vast collection of memories, experiences, quotations.”

 

That’s an accurate description, one that still defies common sense. It sounds like a recipe for narcissistic drivel, one man talking obsessively about his precious self. Yet the Essays is among the most readable, wise and entertaining books in our tradition. In “Quintessence,” Chargaff tells us “a good essay is the quintessence of good prose" and goes on to rightly identify Montaigne as the progenitor of essays in multiple languages and cultures. In English he starts with the obvious – Bacon, Addison, Steele – and continues:

 

“. . . Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson with his Rambler, Charles Lamb and his contemporary, one of the greatest of all essayists, William Hazlitt. The tradition continues: Sydney Smith and De Quincey, Carlyle, Macaulay and the Edinburgh Review, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Bagehot, Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, and in our days Virginia Woolf and George Orwell.”

 

You can quibble with some of the names but it’s bracing to see someone whose first language was not English celebrate the tradition we effortlessly inherited. Charaff is amusingly pessimistic:

 

“Can essays still be written in our time? I believe they can; they may, in fact, be the only literary form that is not yet worn and exhausted. But are they still being read? Is the kind of reading in which I spent my life still possible? I must confess, I do not know the answer. In the midst of the most murderous century known to history, seers, drunk with visions of a future that I shall be glad to leave to them, have proclaimed the end of the book. It would be interesting to see what else will come to an end.”

 

Chargaff died on this date, June 20, in 2002 age ninety-six.