In keeping with my endorsement on Friday to bring back the use of the good old-fashioned pun, I’d like to make a further push toward all-things-vintage by making the case, in this post, for the well-aged essay.
Recent articles by Adam Kirsch and Philip Lopate point up some of the ways that Philip Larkin’s 1984 pronouncement on the death of the essay, as a literary form, holds true today (aren’t all our best literary and cultural forms––the novel, the lyric poem, the pun, rock and roll, hipsters, hip hop––always dying?). Kirsch’s review in particular offers a litany of evidence that said “extinction” of the essay applies to a new generation of essayists––a list that includes the likes of Davy Rothbart, Sloane Crosley, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. These writers may or may not fully warrant the title of “essayist,” in Kirsch’s assessment, so much as humorist, spinner of tall tales, “soul-baring man-child,” disingenuous fiction-writer.
I’ve been thinking about Kirsch’s article because I’ve recently read Joan Didion’s acclaimed collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem cover-to-cover for the first time. Cover-to-cover isn’t exactly apt; in fact I purchased the audiobook version, which meant I effectively had Diane Keaton “read” the book to me. For weeks now I’ve shared my kitchen space with these two prodigious females of a previous generation, listening to the distinctive lilt of Diane’s voice and Joan’s turns of phrase, as I carry out such mundane tasks as washing dishes or cleaning out the fridge.
Joan Didion
There are so many layers to the experience of this essay collection as “vintage,” as well-aged. Perhaps it turns on what David Ulin takes to be the thread that unifies a thematically diverse range of pieces: that we simply “didn’t know enough”:
As it happens, this is precisely the point of Slouching Towards Bethlehem—both the collection and the long title piece, which recounts the author’s experience in Haight-Ashbury in the weeks and months leading up to the Summer of Love. Published in 1968, this collection of magazine pieces is, on the most basic level, a reaction to its moment. Yet that is no longer where its power resides. Now we are drawn to its peculiar sense of cultural dissolution, which Didion weaves relentlessly through every piece.
In this collection Didion is attuned in particular to the sprawling variety and perplexity of the California landscape; and as Ulin argues in a more general sense, she is “always attuned to the role landscape plays in human agency, to the exigencies and influences of place.” Her coverage of the hollowed-out aspirations of one dysfunctional family in southern California’s Inland Empire; of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in the Carmel Valley; of the newly forming counterculture of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district––whose “center,” on the eve of 1968′s Summer of Love, already, it seems, “was not holding”––these accounts remind me of my own repertoire of strange encounters with the California landscape. They evoke for me all the competing narratives and values and sentiments that landscape has embodied, both the ones I’ve grasped directly and those merely intimated from moments and eras that pre-date me. In the time I’ve spent living and traveling through California’s central coast, in the Los Angeles metropolis and eastward toward the San Bernadino Mountains, in the neighborhoods of San Francisco and Berkeley, I can still see the vestiges and traces, the vague ruins of what Joan was merely starting to see, to ask about, for the first time, some forty-five years ago.
The symptoms and syndromes of cultural dissolution, so discreetly distilled in each of these vintage essays, are scattered more haphazardly across the same geography now, like so much detritus. If Didion’s style, if her observations sound quaint this half-century later, that is at least partially because we’ve acquired a deep-seated amnesia for a time when the promises California seemed to offer weren’t so colored by disillusion, when the phenomena she narrates weren’t already a thing of the past, weren’t already in a state of decomposition. That I am only now visiting these essays as a volume is rendered that much more pointedly derivative in that I am listening to it, read to me by Diane Keaton, on a digital file I downloaded from an internet website called Audible.com.
April 1967, San Francisco, California, USA — Writer Joan Didion stands at the panhandle of Golden Gate Park with a group of hippies during the writing of her article . April 1967. — Image by © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS
Kirsch’s central complaint about the apparent present-day return in popularity of “essays” is that they don’t bear enough resemblance to the best traits of their predecessors. “You do not have to read very far in the work of the new essayists to realize that the resurrection of the essay is in large measure a mirage.” The most enduring essays display a careful focal balance, between the subject being addressed, and the unique positionality in the world of the specific author who is addressing that subject. An essay “could address any subject, exalted or trivial, as long as it displayed the mind of the writer engaged with the world.” These days the balance seems to veer too far in the direction of the writer’s mind, says Kirsch, to the detriment of a clear, inquisitive engagement with something in the world (be it large or small):
The self…has always been at the heart of the literary essay. But the new essay is exclusively about the self, with the world serving only as a foil and an accessory, as a mere staging ground for the projection of the self.
Several writers I’ve read recently indicate the qualities of doubt and uncertainty as key ingredients to the composition of a good essay. Lopate muses,
Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled ‘What do I know?’ and put forth a vision of humanity as mentally wavering and inconstant, the essay has become a meadow inviting contradiction, paradox, irresolution and self-doubt. The essay’s job is to track consciousness; if you are fully aware of your mind you will find your thoughts doubling back, registering little peeps of ambivalence or disbelief.
That ambivalence, Lopate suggests, is the rich soil in which the best essayistic writing can be cultivated. ”It seems important for an essay to spring from confusion,” writes Michelle Orange. “The best ones grapple with some kind of uncertainty and give it shape.”
Among other payoffs, that uncertainty in the process of writing is what leaves space, in the finished product, for passing time to enter into the picture––to allow the essay to say more, to ask more, than it initially did. I think that’s why I like Ulin’s appraisal of the Didion collection so much: even then, it was about the way that “we didn’t know enough”. It was the ways that we didn’t know enough––that Joan, that her readers and her subjects didn’t know enough––that made it all worth writing. That the best essays grapple with and give shape to uncertainty, concludes Michelle Orange, “is another way of saying they should come from a deep need to be written, as all the best stories do.”
If today’s essayists leave you generally wanting for more, if you sense that self-deprecation, self-promotion, sensationalism or self-projection have somehow come to stand in for the critical thinking, discovery, doubt, world-and-self-examination embodied in Montaigne’s inaugural question, “What do I know?”––consider returning to some of the essays of a previous generation. Return to an old favorite, or discover a new-old favorite; judge for yourself what the perspective of time has done to deepen (or cheapen!) the observations and questions of an essayist from a past moment in time. Consider what the effects of time have done to the original piece. Was the essay somehow prescient? Did it record a phenomenon that has overturned completely? Are its observations obsolete, its preoccupations banal? Does it perhaps say more than it possibly could have twenty, forty, ninety-five years ago? Try reading or listening in a new format: add it to your tablet or scrounge up an old first-edition; read in one sitting to the accompaniment of one of your favorite albums; read it aloud to your friends or your grandparents, or have them read it aloud to you.
Here’s a list of recent oldies-but-goodies, some more vintage than others, that I’ve been enjoying lately or plan to enjoy soon (feel free to add to this very partial list with your own favorites in the comments): James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Miller, Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace.
And if you’re not yet ready to give up on today’s emerging essayists, I’ve been hearing great things about Eula Biss (Notes from No Man’s Land) and Michelle Orange (This is Running for Your Life). I haven’t read their new collections myself (they’re next on deck), so feel free to weigh in, if you have, and let me know what you think.
