The Art of the Personal Essay
Edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate
Anchor Books/Doubleday, 777 pages, $30
I think it only fitting that this review begin with the first-person singular, for it is that word-forbidden to historians and academic writers of all kinds, to hard-news journalists and to all those who wish to write with authority-that has activated the personal essay from its very beginnings. Its practitioners write only with the authority of the “I,” explaining themselves to the reader, registering their reactions to the world around them, tentatively making their suggestions for its improvement.
It is the most flexible of forms. It can be the lyric poetry of the prose writer (as it is here for Henry David Thoreau in “Walking”). It can give the novelist a chance to speak in his own voice as a memoirist (as it does Gore Vidal in his obituary tribute to Tennessee Williams in “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self”). It can provide the fallen-away Catholic with a confessional (as it did F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up”). It can do all these things and more because it never tries to do too much. It seeks only to express the “I.”
I suspect that one reason that I have always loved the personal essay as a form is because it is not quite critically respectable. I cannot imagine-though someone, somewhere may successfully contradict me-a major university offering a course in its development. What would be the point? There are no difficulties to it, no chances for interpretation, nothing to deconstruct. There is simply direct statement from the writer to the reader-almost, though not quite, a conversation between them.
But if that university course were ever offered, “The Art of the Personal Essay” would do well for a text. It is admittedly perhaps the only one available today, but its variety and comprehensiveness would surely qualify it as the best available no matter how crowded the field. And Phillip Lopate’s long, intelligent introduction provides all the background one would need.
In that introduction, Lopate looks at the form from several different angles, among them matters of form, style and tone. None better qualified to comment upon them than he, for Lopate himself is a personal essayist of considerable reputation and skill. (He has, in fact, given the title essay of his second essay collection, “Against Joie de Vivre,” a place in this volume, as well he should have done.)
He also offers an outline of the form’s development, for it does have history, after all, and a fairly distinguished one at that. And it also has a pre-history, according to Lopate, which may be traced to classical writers such as Seneca and Plutarch who, in their letters (though not in their formal writings), adopted an easy, personal style that qualifies them as “forerunners.” The text includes examples from each that substantiate, if not quite prove, his claim.
Michel de Montaigne was a classicist of some distinction-Plutarch was a special favorite of his-and he was certainly influenced by Latin writers. Yet Montaigne, whom Lopate calls the fountainhead of the form, was wholly original in his attempt “to put before the public a full verbal portrait of himself.”
This portrait had less to do with Montaigne’s physical being than with his thoughts, his responses to what he read and his explorations of the world around him. And these were always presented modestly as his and only his. He uses the first-person singular frequently and unabashedly in the essays included here-“Of Books,” “Of a Monstrous Child” and “On Some Verses of Virgil.”
This 16th Century Frenchman had far greater influence on the English than he did on the French. Lopate attributes this to the rise in England of newspapers and magazines, which provided an audience and income for essayists, during the 18th and 19th Centuries. And although he is at pains to prove that the personal essays continued in other cultures and languages-he devotes a whole section to such diverse writers (mostly modern) as Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, E.M. Cioran, Natalia Ginzburg and Carlos Fuentes-the form became, by and large, an enterprise of writers in the English language who seemed to realize that their task was as much to entertain as to instruct. It is this entertainment factor that has always made the personal essay critically suspect.
You know the names, of course: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (“The Spectator”), Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Robert Louis Stevenson (a Scotsman, of course)-and in our century Max Beerbohm, G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell. These and a few others are represented by various pieces in the text. But Lopate could have named and included many more. (How, for instance, could he have left out J.B. Priestly?)
He concludes this section on the personal essay in England with Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys,” giving the reader the impression, perhaps, that it may have ended with him. Not so, of course, for it is alive and flourishing there today in the persons of Auberon Waugh, John Osborne (playwright-turned-essayist) and Julie Burchill, to mention just three.
America has had its practitioners of course-Washington Irving and Mark Twain (unrepresented and unmentioned here) and Henry David Thoreau in the 19th Century. But in the first half of the 20th Century the form went into a kind of eclipse here. It survived almost surreptitiously in New Yorker “casual pieces,” book reviews, newspaper columns and a certain sort of subjective travel writing.
But then along came the ’60s and the advent of the New Journalism with its unashamed use of the personal viewpoint, and the personal essay underwent a sudden renewal. The last 200 pages of the book, which present more or less contemporary work, are gratifying to read, for they prove that the first-person singular not only survives but also may ultimately prevail.
So much good work is here-James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” (admittedly written in the ’50s; he hastened the rebirth), Seymour Krim’s “To My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” Edward Hoagland’s “The Courage of Turtles,” Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” Richard Rodriguez’s “Late Victorians” and many, many more-that I can only wonder how Lopate managed to omit any work by Joseph Epstein, perhaps the best and most prolific essayist writing today.
But omissions only underline the great number of possibilities there were to choose from. The personal essay is back, its “I” raised against an age that offers so many assaults upon our individuality.
