On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies

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Also by G. Douglas Atkins The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity (1980) Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (1983)—selected by Choice as “An Outstanding Academic Book” for 1984–85 Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, co-edited with Michael L. Johnson (1985) Quests of Difference: Reading Pope’s Poems (1986) Shakespeare and Deconstruction, co-edited with David M. Bergeron (1988) Contemporary Critical Theory, co-edited with Laura Morrow (1988) Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style (1990) Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing (1992)—selected by Choice as “An Outstanding Academic Book” for 1993–94 Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (2005) Reading Essays: An Invitation (2008) Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot and E.B. White (forthcoming) T.S. Eliot and the Essay (forthcoming)

O  F E Challenging Academic Orthodoxies

G. Douglas Atkins

ON THE FAMILIAR ESSAY

Copyright © G. Douglas Atkins, 2009. All rights reserved. Chapter Three, “Envisioning the Stranger’s Heart,” first appeared in College English, 56.6 (October 1994), 629–41. Copyright 1994 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62000–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atkins, G. Douglas (George Douglas), 1943– On the familiar essay : challenging academic orthodoxies / G. Douglas Atkins. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–62000–1 (alk. paper) 1. Essay. 2. Criticism. I. Title. PN4500.A894 2009 809.4—dc22

2009009540

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my students past and present in English 555 and English 753

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Preface Acknowledgments 1 2

The Observing Self, or Writing Upon Something: The Character, Art, and Distinctiveness of the Familiar Essay On Time, the Familiar, and the Essay

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1 31

3 Envisioning the Stranger’s Heart

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4 E.B. White and the Poetics of Participation

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5 “The Way Life Should Be,” or the Maine-ing of Existence: E.B. White as Familiar Essayist

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6 The Limits of the Familiar: E.B. White and T.S. Eliot

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Toward a Familiar Literary Criticism

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8 Of Swords, Ploughshares, and Pens: The Return of/to Civility, Against Winning, and the Art of Peace

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9 The Essay in the Academy: Between “Literature” and “Creative Writing”

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10 Essaying to Be: Higher Education, the Vocation of Teaching, and the Making of Persons

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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I write here, these words “bred/By reading” (John Dryden, Religio Laici), for a diverse, “miscellaneous” audience. I could not but write in essay form, because of both the breadth and difference of the audience for whom I write and my long-held belief that art requires of its commentary an answerable style. Readers already familiar with the essay, its glories and its opportunities and potential, will, I hope, benefit from these further explorations, extending well beyond the territory mapped in my previous books, Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth, and Reading Essays: An Invitation. Those less familiar or even unfamiliar with essays will find a concerted effort to demonstrate the meaning and the significance, the capacity and the applicability, the dulce and the utile, of this venerable and protean form of writing. To meet and get to know the essay is to like essays, even to want to write them, perhaps once in a while also to write about them, in response and appreciation, affirming life’s newness and joy. My first book on the essay, Estranging the Familiar, published nearly twenty years ago, did not adequately address, I now realize, the relationship between the strange and the familiar, inclined to elevate the former at the expense of the latter. Like so many others in this selfbesotted age, starving for the personal in a culture ever more impersonal, I did not so much overlook the familiar as minimize it, derelict in treating the ordinary, of whose necessity and on whose foundations the extra-ordinary is borne. Thus, I missed the centrality of site and undervalued intersection. The essay here titled “Envisioning the Stranger’s Heart” attempts to correct that imbalance, directly addressing the relation of the familiar and the strange, proposing, in fact, the essay as a form that enables precisely the familiarizing of the strange(r). The familiar essay offers a needed alternative to self-expression and self-aggrandizement. The personal essay is thoroughly modern— its “founder” Michel de Montaigne said to be “our contemporary” (Monroe K. Spears). I sometimes think of it, unfairly to be sure, as smacking of that allegorical Spider in Jonathan Swift’s satire on the

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Ancients versus the Moderns titled The Battle of the Books; there the Spider spins its webs out of its own innards, reliant upon little but the self (in another satire, the better-known A Tale of a Tub, the modern hack-writer, enacts modernism, vowing essentially to “write upon Nothing”). The familiar essay, on the other hand, smacks of Swift’s Bee, which, “by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax.” As much as I prefer the Bee, and believe the familiar the essential form of the essay, I do not mean to disparage the personal (Spiders are another matter altogether). About something other than the self, which nevertheless does the observing (unlike the personal essay, which trains observation on the self), the form of the essay I am considering here, and advocating, treats not only familiar subject matter of direct and immediate interest and relevance to every person qua person, but also readily recognizable, everyday, ordinary situations, feelings, and thoughts—and does so in a manner and style both accessible and hardly strange. The difference between the two major kinds of essay appears in the titles that so often grace the familiar sort, the tiny prepositions “on” and “of” signaling that the essay is about this or that idea or problem or matter and not simply the writer’s life or some slice thereof. The familiar essay allows us to see and appreciate, as I have suggested, the ordinary, and not just the ordinary but also the intersection of the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, experience and meaning, time and timelessness. Confronting the faddish and merely fashionable, and exposing them, the familiar essay does not flaunt its (badly needed and sadly lacking) alternative values; instead, it embodies them. The essay thus “foregrounds” the unworkable and leaves to emerge the practical, the reasonable, and “the way things have been done for a hundred thousand years” (Hilaire Belloc, “The Mowing of a Field”). The familiar essay, therefore, for these and other reasons, stands as a potentially effective pedagogical gift and a cultural opportunity of no mean value. Because essays comprise these chapters, I do not argue for or push a thesis, in the way that monographs do, but rather explore, set out upon a journey of discovery. Rather than proceed in strictly linear or purely logical fashion, or pretend to offer a systematic treatment, I deliberately roam around issues involving the familiar essay. The first chapter is, however, crucial, for in it I attempt to establish differences between the two major subforms of the essay. The next

PREFACE

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chapters explore aspects, features, and capacities of the familiar essay, with particular attention to the form’s moral and religious relations. Next comes a section in which I offer detailed consideration of E.B. White, America’s greatest practitioner of the familiar essay; I focus on White’s treatment of time, the essay’s characteristic subject, and his fundamental concern with living “the good life.” My readings of White may well be the first sustained analyses of his work as essayist, and I take a perhaps surprising approach by reading these essays in comparison with the familiar-critical essays of T.S. Eliot. If justification be needed for bringing together White and Eliot, I might point out, to begin with, that White’s essays share with Walden what he calls “religious feeling without religious images,” and so while White may not exactly beg for comparison with Eliot, he does, perhaps surprisingly enough, invite it. I conclude this section, with a close comparison focusing on the differences between these essayists and the differences that their differences make. I am especially interested, as I have been since Estranging the Familiar nearly two decades ago, in enlivening literary commentary and so explore the positive relations of the critical and the familiar essay, rather immodestly proposing a familiar criticism (different from that personal criticism I had embraced in the earlier book). Critical writing will not improve—become interesting, graceful, or even readable—until it transcends or skirts its merely utilitarian obligation and recognizes itself as a made-thing, not a work of art, necessarily, but writing crafted because the writing itself matters. After exploring the crucial parallels between the essay and criticism, I take up several topics in literary criticism to which the familiar essay relates in essential, and largely unexplored, ways. Finally, I approach close with a series of essays reflecting upon the place of the (familiar) essay in the academy and propose some particular uses for the essay in (post-)modern education, focusing on its arguably unique capacity for “the making of persons.” Here I explore the familiar essay’s way of civility, its inculcation of manners, and its deliberative opposition to violence: art vs. anger. I wrote a couple of decades ago, in my first essay on the essay, of the essayist as “gardening for love.” In a sense, I return here to that beginning and (begin to) know it for the first time.

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These essays, my life, are, indeed, a labor of love—not “labor” either so much as response, in deep gratitude and with heartfelt thanks. I owe specific, special, and long-standing debts to my wife Rebecca, always a champion, not least of me, always supportive and encouraging, never giving less than her all; my daughter Leslie, her husband Craig, and my granddaughter Kate—their love is unconditional, unquestioning, and pure; my son Christopher, his wife Sharon, and my grandson Oliver—their love too is unconditional, unquestioning, and pure; special friends, beloved students past and present, accomplished fellow essayists, who have taught me so much about essaying (to be), including Tod Marshall, Steve Faulkner, Dan Martin, Cara McConnell, Nedra Rogers, Courtney Pigott, Maria Polonchek, Kari Jackson, Katie Savage, Nikk Nelson, Annie McEnroe, Chris Arthur, Geoffrey Hartman, Scott Russell Sanders, Sam Pickering, Lydia Fakundiny, Katie Sears, Brigette Bernagozzi. I also need— and wish—to express special thanks to a remarkably supportive and helpful editorial and production staff at Palgrave Macmillan, notably including Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, and Erin Ivy, the last of whom is a former student, gracious advocate, and special friend. I am very grateful to Patricia Harkin for the meticulous, critical, yet sympathetic reading of the manuscript, which helped me make this a better book. I have been truly blessed. It is time that I gave. I am torn—“conflicted” is the word these days—about mentioning, again, the incident that changed my professional life, and, in more than one important way, my personal life as well: the charges of plagiarism leveled against my first book, thirty years ago, and accepted by a number of influential colleagues within my department and outside the university, charges of which I was eventually and completely cleared (except in the minds of some both here and beyond). Without that bump in the road, which caused more pain and suffering than any reviewer should ever be able to inflict, I would not have taken that fateful detour to the essay, become an essayist,

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or followed Emerson in essaying to be. I am still trying to understand, and to forgive, let alone forget—I still choose, however, not to write the name of the reviewer, a choice echoed by my editors here. As Alexander Pope said in An Essay on Criticism, the goal, the requirement, and the foundation of literary commentary is “Gen’rous Converse.” Perhaps my story will assist authors and reviewers alike in avoiding unfortunate, unnecessary pain and untold and perhaps untellable suffering. Note on sources and citations: Risking the reader’s inconvenience, I have often read, cited, and quoted from first editions, particularly Hilaire Belloc’s Hills and the Sea (which includes “The Mowing of a Field”), E.B. White’s essay on Will Strunk and his essay first published in book form as This Is New York, and T.S. Eliot’s Of Lancelot Andrewes, Ash-Wednesday, Essays Ancient and Modern, and Four Quartets. I believe in the importance of the book as material object and contend that reading Eliot, say, “in the original,” bears riches and satisfaction unavailable to her or him who reads in “textbooks” or other modern mass-produced versions. I thus embody my belief that reading Belloc’s magnificent essay in the 1908 Methuen edition, with its early, undistinguished jacket, instances making the familiar strange enough to be recognized and appreciated.

CH A P T ER

1

The Observing Self, or Writing Upon Something: The Character, Art, and Distinctiveness of the Familiar Essay

Some twenty-five years into “the return of/to the essay,” its resurrection and renaissance after a supposed near-death experience around the middle of the past century, Cristina Nehring has put into words what a number of readers now feel: “What’s wrong with the American essay?” Writing on truthdig, an electronic “progressive journal of news and opinion,” in late 2007, Nehring declares that “the essay is in a bad way.”1 It is not, she claims, “because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized.” Nor is it, she asserts, because “we, as readers . . . [have become] lazier, less interested, less educated.” Her comments were occasioned by the twentieth installment of the successful and influential series Best American Essays, founded by Robert Atwan, who continues to serve as series editor. Those volumes, according to Nehring, languish in the basement of the local library, “where they’ll sit—with zero date stamps—until released gratis one fine Sunday morning to a used bookstore that, in turn, will sell them for a buck to a college student who’ll place them next to his dorm bed and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out. That is the fate of the essay today.” The case made by this writer—not really a supported argument— appears overblown, melodramatic, and driven by both the claim to know and the all-too-familiar rhetoric of crisis. Nehring finally qualifies her position precisely at the moment that she claims to have located the real reason behind a crisis that may, in fact, not be real: “If,” she writes, “the genre is neglected in our day it is first and foremost

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because its authors have lost their nerve. It is because essayists—and their editors, their anthologists and the taste-makers on whom they depend—have lost the courage to address large subjects in a large way” (italics added). The valuable aperçu gets lost in a welter of error and misunderstanding. Contrary to the claim being asserted, the essay is not being neglected; in fact, various evidence exists of its burgeoning, including appearance in periodicals and as books and place in college and university curricula, belated recognition as deserving of a slot alongside poetry, fiction, and drama. Despite the rather blithe assumption, the essay is not a genre, however, but, as I have argued elsewhere, a site: “almost literature” and “almost philosophy” (Eduardo Nicol).2 As to the more reasonable assertion that essayists “have lost the courage to address large subjects in a large way,” a couple of things need be said by way of clarification and qualification. First, as form, the essay is, and has historically been, a modest thing, an indirect thing, proceeding in, through, and by means of the small to the large. It often does not avoid large subjects but in fact takes them on in its characteristically modest manner and undogmatic tone, familiarity with which might have served Cristina Nehring well. Think of G.K. Chesterton’s “A Piece of Chalk,” Hilaire Belloc’s “The Mowing of a Field,” and in particular, Richard Selzer’s “A Worm from My Notebook,” in which, incidentally, he avers that he “coax[es his] students to eschew all great and noble concepts . . . [including] any of the matters that affect society as a whole. There are no ‘great’ subjects for the creative writer; there are only the singular details of a single human life. . . . Always, it is the affliction of one human being that captures the imagination.”3 The point is that you start with—but only start with, not stop with— the small, the particular, the concrete, and the familiar and proceed in, through, and by means of it to the large, the general, even the universal. Georg Lukács made essentially the same point in 1910 in describing “irony” as the essay’s fundamental characteristic (this in a modestly designated “letter” to a “friend”).4 *

* *

The very recent publication of a collection edited by the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb attests to the ever-present need to recall the essay’s capacity for large subjects: The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays. This anthologist observes that “the Victorians did not invent the essay form,” but, she claims, “they did master and perfect it.” She

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cites Leslie Stephen to this effect—he was writing in 1881: “ ‘The present day is not merely favourable to essay-writing but a very paradise for essayists.’ ”5 A frequent contributor to the London Review of Books as well as the New York Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan writes recently and similarly in The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America that “[t]he essay and the long reported piece are forms with the most daunting exemplars in the traditions of both Britain and America, and I argue for the forms, not for myself, when I say we must fight at all costs to uphold their status.”6 So our own time may be at least equally receptive to essay writing as the epochal nineteenth century, even if that essay be a rather different kind, and this is where Cristina Nehring’s diatribe becomes valuable, albeit indirectly, even inadvertently. The essay that has again become popular, in America especially, is the personal essay. The kind that Himmelfarb and O’Hagan extol, and that Nehring wishes to see, is the familiar essay. The terms “personal” and “familiar,” which often morph into “informal” and “formal,” add more mud to waters never clear to begin with. Commentators thus flounder when trying to distinguish. Take, as a notable example, Phillip Lopate struggling in his popular recent anthology The Art of the Personal Essay—there is, so far as I know, no comparable collection devoted to the familiar essay: “The personal essay is a subset of the informal essay,” begins Lopate, himself an essayist.7 He then brings in the well-known A Handbook of Literature, prepared by Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman (revised by Harmon). The strategy is well known. The Handbook, which I practically memorized as a grad student at Virginia in the 1960s, defines the “personal” as “ ‘a kind of informal essay, with an intimate style, some autobiographical content or interest, and an urbane conversational manner.’ ” Lopate admits that this is confusing, a problem deepened and widened when Hibbard and Holman proceed to define the familiar essay as another subset of the informal, which, writes Lopate, “sounds rather like the personal essay.” Indeed, we read in the Handbook, the familiar is “ ‘The more personal, intimate type of informal essay. It deals lightly, often humorously, with personal experiences, opinions, and prejudices, stressing especially the unusual or novel in attitude and having to do with the varied aspects of everyday life.’ ” All this prompts Lopate to resignation and defeat, if not despair—the picture is not pretty: I have never seen a strong distinction drawn in print between the personal essay and the familiar essay; maybe they are identical twins,

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maybe close cousins. The difference, if there is any, is one of nuance, I suspect. The familiar essay values lightness of touch above all else; the personal essay, which need not be light, tends to put the writer’s “I” or idiosyncratic angle more at center stage.8

To be sure, a fine line separates the familiar and the personal essay, but can we not do somewhat better than Lopate manages? *

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To begin with, Lopate’s distinction, such as it is, represents a throwback to notions of the essay and of the essayist still with us. Graham Good has effectively caricatured them in The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay. He links essaying with the notion of belles lettres, which he describes as “an archaism whose use now is entirely dismissive, like the neologism based on it: ‘belletristic.’ ” This, he says, conjures up the image of a middle-aged man in a worn tweed jacket in an armchair smoking a pipe by a fire in his private library in a country house somewhere in southern England, in about 1910, maundering on about the delights of idleness, country walks, tobacco, old wine, and old books, blissfully unaware that he and his entire culture are about to be swept away by the Great War and modern art.9

For all its virtues—not least the close readings of eight major essayists, from Montaigne to Orwell—Good’s densely written monograph does not avoid the extreme statement or depiction. The picture above of the Edwardian essayist, with which Good opens, is an exaggeration. It may recall Hilaire Belloc, author of such collections as On Something, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (the first essay in which is “On the Pleasure of Taking Up One’s Pen Again,” a panegyric on his Waterman 1905 Ideal fountain pen), and, simply, On. The caricature is unfortunate and misleading, for Belloc at least (a close friend of the engagé G.K. Chesterton) offers biting and still-relevant cultural critiques, including of modern consumerism and materialism, which often striate his familiar compositions, for instance the popular essay “The Mowing of a Field.” Good misses the same essential point about essaying as Cristina Nehring: you start from the small, ordinary, and familiar and proceed in, through, and by means of it toward what Lukács calls “the Ultimate.” To ignore or bypass the mundane and ordinary leaves you with only the half-truth of immanence, deprived of the possibility and prospect of transcendence. The essay’s way may

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be wandering and rambling, but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, indirect. Good, it appears, would take the essayist at her word when, in his characteristically self-deprecating mood, he claims to be writing “upon nothing.” The essayist—the familiar essayist, in particular— writes upon something. That writers in the form from Montaigne to Bacon, Cornwallis, Cowley, Dryden, John Norris of Bemerton, and Lady Mary Chudleigh employ the tiny preposition “on” or “of” in their titles points to the presence and the importance of subject matter. Because he fails to distinguish between the familiar and the personal essay, Graham Good misses the difference between “the self observed” and “the observing self.” Not all personal essays are familiar, although all familiar essays are personal. The reason why is not, pace Lopate, the “writer’s ‘I’ or idiosyncratic angle.”10 Personal essays become other than familiar when the scales tip, and the focus becomes “the self observed,” when the writing is primarily about the self of the writer rather than “on” or “of” something outside the self. The familiar essayist—one of the best of whom is the aforementioned Hilaire Belloc—writes “On Nothing,” “Of Books” and “Of Practice” (Montaigne), “Of Studies” (Bacon), Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay (Dryden), “On Solitude” (Norris of Bemerton), “On Not Liking Sex” (Nancy Mairs), and the like. Although Lopate includes E.B. White among the personal essayists generously represented in his popular and influential anthology, it is better because it is less confusing—as well as accurate—to regard White as a familiar essayist. With regard to White as a person off the page, his readers learn hardly more than they do about his mentor, that “hair-shirt of a man” as he calls him, the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden and other renowned and now-canonical essays. Leading off his magisterial account of time spent largely alone at Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau writes, perhaps echoing the essay’s progenitor, Michel de Montaigne: In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.11

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An inadvertent acknowledgment of his Spiderly modernness, this statement looks forward toward White, who continues the tradition, as well as backward toward Montaigne. In Thoreau and White, it is “the first person that is speaking”; in Montaigne, differently, it is the self observing itself, writing about itself. White is well aware of what Lopate calls “the stench of ego”12; he writes in 1977 in the intriguing foreword to his Essays: I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature selfabsorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.13

You cannot but, I believe, detect the saccharine smell of irony in White’s economical words. The complexity of his response to the (self-inflicted) charge of egoism and self-absorption appears in the way he moves, without breaking stride or a sweat, to an admission of creativity in the representation he offers of that self; the passage smacks of the acknowledgment, not so much of self-fashioning, as of a reluctance to reveal very much in a strict autobiographical sense. White acknowledges wearing many “shirts,” even to putting on “the mantle of Michel de Montaigne,” which hangs ready in his closet. He has already used the image of the essayist’s dress or attire, earlier in the brief foreword, even more directly suggesting that the essayist adopts, and adapts, a varying—divers et ondoyant (Montaigne)—persona as needed or desired: “The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter.”14 In other words, the “I” of the familiar essay, such as E.B. White crafted near to perfection, is personal in the sense of being distinctive (whether or not “idiosyncratic”), highly individual, and peculiar (i.e., particular). The so-called voice we hear, crucial to any essay’s effectiveness and success, is the autobiographical essayist’s—he pulls on one of the many shirts he has awaiting him in his closet, but that “voice” remains, ineluctably, an accoutrement, selected for

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the occasion. It tells (you something) about the essayist, but only indirectly. *

* *

To illustrate the difference between the voice of the familiar essayist and that of the personal, take Montaigne’s “Of Practice” and White’s “Death of a Pig,” both of them well known to amateurs of the form. The voices have much in common, it is true; their obvious qualities include being candid (the “first ingredient,” White thought), respectful, sensitive, observant, thoughtful, engaged and engaging, affable and personable, inviting, generous of spirit, knowledgeable but not pedantic, self-deprecating, restrained (including of expectation), experienced—wise. Montaigne is directly autobiographical, recounting the near-death experience that was a fall from his horse and proceeding to an apologia for his new kind of writing, the essais. His topic is familiar: the matter of practice, that is, the preparation for death, thence the practice of this particular, new-fangled kind of writing down the page. White treats death, too, that of a pig that, obviously and grievously sick, becomes more to him than the prospect of ham or bacon, becomes, in fact, nothing less than a presentiment of his own lack of difference from pig and a symbol of his own impending, definite doom—he too will die. But the “I” whose voice we hear on the page of White’s wonderful essay is clearly quite different from that we (blithely) call Montaigne’s. Montaigne’s feels unscripted, as it were, whereas White’s feels crafted. Perhaps it is the difference between nature and culture, or else, the demands and exigencies of strict fidelity to the self and that to the work under construction. For White’s voice appears directed, shaped, and made, which conclusion I submit as neither criticism nor praise but simply as description. Although the personal essay differs substantially from the memoir, having, for instance, a greater interest in and concern for a topic being engaged and/or illustrated, the story that it tells tends to exist for the sake of revealing something about the life being represented. In a familiar essay, much less likely as it is to be confused with a memoir, the story is larger than the life engaged, and the life glimpsed in a familiar essay exists there largely for the sake of the story being told. The familiar essay shows somewhat of the autobiographical self not for the sake of revealing the self but so as to contribute to an overall artistic and thematic whole. It is a matter of relative emphasis—and

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serves to establish not just the importance but also the actual necessity of comparative analysis: you cannot hope to describe accurately— forget the possibility of defining—the familiar essay apart from the personal, and vice versa. There is, in fact, a spectrum of possibilities, with the personal at one end and the familiar at the other, and you must move laterally, along that line, toward determining the position of an individual essay. The subject matter, it bears emphasizing, largely makes the familiar essay what it is: it is recognizable by human being qua human being, shared by her and him, and common to us all, requiring no arcane, specialized, or professional knowledge—an amateur’s haven. The approach follows suit, paralleling the subject matter, being, that is, familiar, never esoteric. The same holds, necessarily, for the style. Thus, the familiar essay highlights, as it embodies, conversation, assuming not an equality of perspective or level of awareness or capacity but a familiarity with what is being treated, a familiarity that the essay reciprocates by appearing familiar with the reader’s own interests and concerns. Not just conversation, therefore, but “Gen’rous Converse.” *

* *

Few if any have written more incisively of the familiar essay than Clifton Fadiman, the famous literary personality of the mid-twentieth century. In “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay,” he laments the decline of this essential form as he fears that “[e]xplaining the decline of the familiar essay is one of the few pleasures now available to the familiar essayist.”15 Fadiman’s terms are fresh, his analysis shrewd, the writing much better than that in Joseph Wood Krutch’s better known “No Essays, Please!” Indeed, Fadiman explains thusly the situation and the condition of the familiar essay (a term that he later on, unfortunately and confusingly, interchanges with “personal essay”): “It is the familiar essay that is being starved by our time. On what does it live? The vitamin essential to it is the reader’s willingness to hold casual ideas in suspension. In an age of order that vitamin abounds. But not in our age of anxiety.”16 Fadiman explores the decline and fall of the familiar essay, writing, for instance, [t]he familiar essayist invites me to rest in the shade of the perpendicular pronoun. His connection with me is a personal one, chancy and fragile, a friendship sustained only by a few dozen paragraphs. He does

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not raise, much less settle, the kind of issue known as crucial. He is full of opinions and void of conclusions. He has the impertinence to solicit my interest in such useless topics as old china or getting respected at inns or the feats of Indian jugglers. By a cunning display of his personality he seduces me into a co-consideration of these small matters. He exerts charm, not that he may persuade me to anything, but solely for the pleasure of it. He demands only that I do my best to march with the humor or eccentricity of his mind. If I cannot follow him, the devil take me. He wants to involve me but not if it means truckling to my prejudices, streamlining his style for my greater ease, or pretending that in the veined shell of his paragraphs lies hidden the pearl of the Truth. The familiar essayist is his own man. At no price will he be mine.17

Fadiman goes on to admit that the essay reveals ego, but he carefully distinguishes the essayist’s “private ego” from “the public ego” of the modern hero. Everyone now talks, he writes, of the “the individual” and “individualism”: “Individuals don’t champion individualism,” he says crankily. “They live it.”18 Unfortunately, Fadiman fails to exploit the critical value embodied in, for instance, suspending conclusions. He offers the essay as merely alternative, lying quietly, nonassertively, unobtrusively, and passively beside the hectoring, the hurry, the Herculean willfulness. It is, of course, unassertive, neither arguing for nor attempting to persuade, let alone to coerce, whether or not it carries a positive charge; intersecting the merely alternative, as transcendence does immanence, is a subtly and effectively critical component toward which the familiar essay proceeds. Contrary to Fadiman’s claim, the familiar essay is, in fact, in its own indirect manner, more than “quaint.” The small matters. *

* *

Now, a half-century after Clifton Fadiman wrote, his daughter Anne has weighed in effectively on the familiar essay, developing and extending the arguments cited above. Following her impressive first book of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, which signals an obvious difference from the professional, specialist reader, Fadiman recently published At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, which she prefaces with perhaps the best succinct account, despite a misstep or two and an occasional overstatement, ever managed of the form she passionately embraces and extols. It is, the familiar essay, she

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makes clear, “the passionate discourse of an amateur” (Allen Tate’s misappropriation of R.P. Blackmur’s excellent description of critical commentary).19 As Fadiman correctly and suggestively notes, “Today’s readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal—very personal—essays (more heart than brain), but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).” Survival of the familiar essay, she avers, agreeing with Andrew O’Hagan, “is worth fighting for.”20 For her, Charles Lamb is the quintessential familiar essayist, and essential to that form, she believes as I do, is conversation: “Conversation” is “at the center of the familiar essay,”21 about which she proceeds to write—later to illustrate in her following essays. Note the (perhaps too-close) similarity with and yet difference from Graham Good’s caricature of the belletristic essayist in Anne Fadiman’s account, which, I am afraid, does appear in Clifton Fadiman’s account of and embodiment of the familiar essayist. The genre’s heyday was the early nineteenth century, when Charles Lamb was dreaming up The Essays of Elia under the influence of brandy and tobacco and William Hazlitt was dashing off Table-Talk under the influence of strong tea. The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy. Hence the profusion of titles beginning with the word “On”. . . . On gusto! The familiar essay in a nutshell!22

Unlike Good, Anne Fadiman emphasizes otherness, the essayist engaged in actual conversation with a person, the reader a stand-in, the vicarious representative of the essayist’s flesh-and-blood friend. She is right, too, to contend as I have for years: the familiar essay is about the self, but the self confronting a “subject” outside himself or herself. There is no self-indulgence—nor often, I submit, selfcenteredness, “the stench of ego” having been purged by the writer’s immersion in her subject, an effect continued by the implicit acknowledgment of engagement in conversation with an-other self.

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I doubt, however, that, good as it is, Anne Fadiman’s description of the familiar essay will ease Cristina Nehring’s mind or will satisfactorily address her concerns. There remains, in Fadiman’s own essays, as in Lamb’s, that oft-noted “lightness of tone and touch” that will, willy-nilly, be seen by the so-minded as failure, ignorance, or dismissal of the serious, the high-minded, the important. Familiar essays, it will be said, lack gravitas. Some readers, it is clear, wish an essay of ideas, even if they do not use the term (e.g., Cristina Nehring), and in recalling attention to Victorian essayists from Thomas Carlyle to T.H. Huxley, Gertrude Himmelfarb shows in her new anthology just how it was once done. The Victorian essayists of ideas, I suggest, push the familiar essay about as far along the spectrum from the personal as possible— further movement in that direction turns the essay into the (definite and professional) article, the essay’s “opposite” (harrumphs William H. Gass). The traditional familiar essay does not lack for ideas, although the style and manner of the form often obscures them, for example, in Sam Pickering and even the aforementioned Anne Fadiman. Fadiman herself laments the current situation, which features “plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal—very personal—essays (more heart than brain) but not many” with “equal measures of both.”23 This last proves extremely hard to effect, smacking of the tension that marks the middle way, which is, avers Eliot, the hardest way of all. E.B. White is capable of pulling it off, but he is a rather rare instance, a consummate artist. In any case, Fadiman’s generally acute analysis may both enlighten and blind, for although heart and head are the issue, the challenge may lie less in negotiating a balance between them than in discovering the way to move from the “inferior” to the “superior” (all oppositions, according to Jacques Derrida, involving a hierarchy). That is to say, if “head” is “privileged,” along with ideas, the path may be indirect, via the “heart.” Suppose—just suppose for a moment—that ideas be best approached in, through, and by means of matters of the human heart, the representation of facts, particulars, persons, emotions, and experience. Literature would thus be the foundation on which philosophy (along with theology) builds. The essay, as form, lies somewhere between, “almost literature” and “almost philosophy.” Move too far in one direction and the essay becomes literature, that is; move too far in the other direction and the essay becomes an

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analysis of ideas. The familiar lies between, almost one and almost the other, at the same time. *

* *

In the remainder of the present essay, I wish to adduce some points that allow further clarification of the nature of the familiar essay and of its importance. I begin with a crucial difference in the history of the essay, perhaps never before noted. Already in the alleged father of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, and made a staple during its Romantic heyday— remember that Wordsworth labeled his and Coleridge’s revolutionary “lyrical ballads” as “short essays”24 —the essay is seen as reflective. In 2001, the distinguished poet Anne Carson pointed to reflection as the perhaps defining characteristic of the essay.25 It is also essential to Romanticism—whether of the Wordsworthian, the Montaignian, or the contemporary sort: in his epochal preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth (re)defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility. Essayists like Lamb and Hazlitt have an experience and later reflect on it, seeking to find and extract meaning (which effort distinguishes their effort from “pure” memoir or autobiography). But notice what happens in Modernism—when, for example, T.S. Eliot confronts precisely Wordsworth’s definition of the poet and of poetry. Reflection in poetry gives way to observation (Eliot’s equally revolutionary first volume is, recall, Prufrock and Other Observations), and the same happens in essays. Eliot does not reflect on his experiences reading; rather, he compares Donne and Tennyson, for instance, Donne and Lancelot Andrewes. Virginia Woolf is perhaps an even better example of the anti-Romantic essay; the much-anthologized “The Death of the Moth” brilliantly exists as observation.26 In such essays, in short, no division occurs between experience and (derivation of) meaning. There is no temporal distance, tranquil or otherwise. Meaning is there in the moment of experience, to be observed, or it does not appear at all—no “dissociation” of significance, we might say, playing on Eliot’s famous and controversial notion of the “dissociation of sensibility” that set in around the time of the development of the essay in English (“The Metaphysical Poets”).27 It is the familiar essay that features observation, as it does a certain critical spirit—and that brings me to the second of several points in pursuit of clarifying the familiar essay and of advancing

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its meaning and significance. By the turn into the last century—the Edwardian period that Graham Good ridicules as blinkered, selfindulgent, and largely irrelevant—the familiar essay was beginning to assume a new, more pointed and urgent tone. To be sure, signs of cultural criticism appear in essays from the beginning, perhaps implicit in Bacon’s hortatory “counsels, civill and morall,” explicit in Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay, which, while locating literary debate within the literal context of war, engages in various attacks on the previous “age” alongside a paean to the enlightened English present under the restored king, Charles II. Later on, in the nineteenth century, Thoreau favorably opposes “wildness” to debased, materialistic civilization; Lamb and Hazlitt offer exacting cultural and political commentary; and Matthew Arnold makes the essay an instrument of criticism in the large, truest senses, fighting against the sectarian spirit, seeking to educate a nation of “philistines,” and holding up literature as the new religion, clearing the path for a “disinterested” capacity to bring the best that had been thought and said to the elucidation of practical problems then besieging the Western world. The way was thus clear, before the Great War and “modern memory,” for such criticism as marks the perspective of writers like Belloc, his friend Chesterton, and others. Belloc, for one, retains the form, tone, and characteristics of the familiar essay while offering within it important criticism, whereas Arnold had pretty much eliminated some familiar features of the essay, his interests lying almost exclusively in criticism. Take once more Belloc’s classic essay, “The Mowing of a Field,” a brilliant instance of indirectness. The subject matter is innocentlooking, certainly, although behind this sophisticated writing stands the revered tradition of “Mower poems,” allegories of Christ and his work. Belloc does not invoke this tradition, however. The delightfully orchestrated and lovingly represented agrarian setting—in the south of England around the turn of the last century—becomes, in the course of things, far more than setting or backdrop; it functions not quite as utopia but certainly as vital contrast with—and alternative to—a world gone increasingly commercial, materialistic, and inimical to “Gen’rous Converse,” a world driven by directness, as a matter of fact. It is a pastoral scene reminiscent of Wordsworth, but the Romantic poet rails against “the world,” full of “getting and spending.” Belloc does not rail, nor does he reflect so much as dramatize.

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“The Mowing of a Field” celebrates art and the respect with which art is made. Belloc appears pointed, but not overbearing, in emphasizing how just about any worthwhile human activity participates in artfulness—when done well, when done right. (Belloc thus anticipates the great, neglected Modernist Welsh poet David Jones as Rowan Williams has recently represented him.28) Meaning and critique intersect the narrative throughout the essay, certainly as early as the third page, when, after showing that art is involved in knowing when to mow your field and in sharpening and otherwise preparing your scythe for its work, Belloc renders up this beautiful and powerful account of the act—and the art—of putting instrument to its seemingly menial task. Belloc extends the art incarnate in mowing, moving laterally across a spectrum of comparative activities. Notice below the essayist’s control of his art of writing, the modulation of voice, and the dramatic expressiveness of the language, the syntax, the length of sentences, the crescendo, and the climax with the soft and yet devastating effect of the words “like making the meadow bleed,” which must be read with pathos, poignancy, and seasoned regret if not horror: When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much for one’s trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower. Mowing well and mowing badly—or rather not mowing at all—are separated by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing. For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it clean off at the tip. If anyone is standing by he cuts him in the ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scytheblade just barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of his mowing are always the same.29

“The Mowing of a Field”—a sort of Zen or Tao of mowing—is, like Eliot’s more famous “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a familiar essay concerning tradition and the individual (talent).

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The passage quoted above anticipates and prepares the way for the most sustained critical commentary in “The Mowing of a Field.” Again, Belloc proceeds dramatically, rather than reflectively, first introducing a man seeking employ just as he himself needs labor. The scene that Belloc respectfully depicts, dramatizes art here too and its inherent, characteristic, and necessary indirectness. The comparison and contrast is vivid and striking, the cultural critique still relevant. [H]e told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand; and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, “kindly.” For it is a good custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was his labour at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom with lesser men.30

There is an entire, traditional way of living represented here, founded on respect, art, ritual, fiction, and manners: “Gen’rous Converse.” The issue is, of course, moral: whether one belongs with “lesser men.” There is no question of naiveté, either; people of the Valley are well aware of money and its rule, as Belloc himself shows in his quest of labor “at the least pay.” With commerce and materialism depicted, then, as “dry bones,” Belloc not only indulges in paradox such as his friend Chesterton employed everywhere,31 but he also conveys the necessity of Incarnation: embodying, as he does, the values he illustrates. After illustrating the artful, respectful, and necessarily indirect manner of buying a pig, Belloc moves on to this summary statement, as he nears the end of the essay: Thus do we buy a pig or land or labour or malt or lime, always with elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising the land.32

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Here the criticism reaches its climax. Some decades after Belloc and in a world altogether more bent on progress, improvement, efficiency, and directness, a world capable of destruction including self-destruction, E.B. White developed the critical thrust of the familiar essay, thus paving the way for writers like Joseph Epstein, Anne Fadiman, and Sam Pickering. I cannot credit him, obviously, with thus doing something new and unheard of, but after him, the familiar essay is never the same, never again innocent. He fully revitalizes the form, perhaps taking a cue or two from Belloc and making the familiar essay at once dramatic and critical—and artful. Evidence abounds of White’s criticism of the modern world and modern life, with its hurry, its distrust and abuse of memory, its gross misunderstanding of time, its mechanization. For illustrative purposes, take “A Report in January,” in which White criticizes the language of the future. After quoting a telling letter from a hatchery man in response to the essayist’s order for “fifty day-old Silver Cross chicks,” writing that is the very opposite of his and his teacher Will Strunk’s lectures on simplicity—and a dystopian model of impersonality, jargon, and bureaucratese,33 White proceeds, with palpable irony, in the process completely deflating the modern would-be heroics—the voice is the familiar essayist engaged in serious critical work. To the quite unfamiliar, technical, obfuscating neglect of and disrespect for readability, White pens a devastating yet humble response, which begins with these words: “This struck me as a real chatty letter. . . . Even though I got lost in the tangle of [abstract language], I liked getting the letter. Livability is what I am after: I greatly admire a live bird.”34 White thus answers the technical, pseudo-highfalutin with common language: clear, to the point, accessible, familiar to human beings. His criticism here will serve as a pattern of that that he incorporates frequently and characteristically in his essays (e.g., “Coon Tree,” which, in a near-allegory, criticizes “a technological formula that is sterile” if sanitary and convenient).35 *

* *

A rare instance of White doing literary criticism, “A Slight Sound at Evening,” is White’s familiar-critical essay on Thoreau’s Walden, written on the occasion of its centennial: a brilliant, stirring, level-headed

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tribute to this great (and oft-mentioned if little-read) collection of related essays in praise of simplicity. White’s own panegyric centers on the need we and modern culture have of Thoreau’s strident criticism. White thus mirrors his subject; he also follows Alexander Pope’s advice, which is to read “With the same Spirit that [your] Author writ.”36 But White and his essay also differ in fundamental ways from the difficult man he admires and the book he reveres. White is no Thoreau—and I for one am very grateful that he isn’t. White invites you in, Thoreau does not. The earlier writer strikes such a Spartan pose and hankers so after purity that I feel vastly inferior. White was no Transcendentalist, of course; in fact, he writes against purity, opting variously for mixture, complication, and dirt. Thoreau does everything, moreover, to maintain—and to increase—the distance between us. We who constitute Thoreau’s audience are mean and sniveling creatures, sometimes apathetic, rarely courageous, almost always a discredit to our nature: “hug[ging] the earth,” how “rarely do we mount,” our eyes on our footsteps—“Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more.”37 Thoreau has unrealistic expectations—who, for example, can walk four hours a day? He was no fan of compassion, bent on Being and little interested in “doing” (for others). White can be critical, but he is never—not once, as far as I can tell— strident or overbearing. His expectations are well under control. He wrote children’s books, lovingly creating and treating an unforgettable spider and a lovable pig. His allegedly ghoulish old dachshund Fred was another gift to the reader, an act of generosity. Whether or not White often smiled, he found joy in the world and took pleasure in it, an affirmativeness marking his very prose. The following passage is beautifully exemplary of just this point—notice, perhaps especially, the second sentence here, which reveals more about White than it accurately accounts for Thoreau and Walden. Best to come upon the book in youth, White writes, when the normal anxieties and enthusiasms and rebellions of youth closely resemble those of Thoreau in that spring of 1845 when he borrowed an axe, went out to the woods, and began to whack down some trees for timber. Received at such a juncture, the book is like an invitation to life’s dance, assuring the troubled recipient that no matter what befalls him in the way of success or failure he will always be welcome at the party—that the music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet.

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In effect, that is what the book is—an invitation, unengraved; and it stirs one as a young girl is stirred by her first big party bid.38

As fine as this is—it is familiar-critical—the following sentences are stronger as acute commentary, White carefully joining his subject in criticizing current ways of living. White’s capacity for sound judgment is on display here. His is not an Arnoldian “disinterested” account; it is passionate and engagé. White never surrenders his right to differ from his subject while able to see and acknowledge a variety of other responses; in short, White displays the qualities Montaigne so admires: ondoyant et divers. Many think it a sermon; many set it down as an attempt to rearrange society; some think it an exercise in nature-loving; some find it a rather irritating collection of inspirational puffballs by an eccentric show-off. I think it none of these. It still seems to me the best youth’s companion yet written by an American, for it carries a solemn warning against the loss of one’s valuables, it advances a good argument for traveling light and trying new adventures, it rings with the power of positive adoration, it contains religious feeling without religious images, and it steadfastly refuses to record bad news.39

A critical note unknown to Clifton Fadiman, for one, striates White’s words and sentences. On that critical note, moreover, rides a powerful conclusion, a definite advocacy, not a mere alternative. As White proceeds in his tribute, he does something other than offer either “the record of close reading” or the “product” of it.40 White is, I would argue, engaged in close reading, but it is close reading of the whole at once, rather than via individual parts. The results can be stunning; White participates in Thoreau’s effort, his essai, which signals my third point: the variously participatory nature and direction of the familiar essay. White clearly extends his subject’s work.41 *

* *

White’s opinions and judgments are never far from the surface in “A Slight Sound at Evening.” Walden, he makes clear from his opening paragraph, is relevant, of practical use to us, needed in fact: it “still lifts us up by the ears, still translates for us that language we are in danger of forgetting.”42 White goes on, as a matter of fact, to

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define just what (powerful) effect the book has had on him. He is thus no more distanced from Walden than its author was from his writing, White’s no ordinary critical commentary, in other words. Specifically, he cites this passage: “ ‘I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ ”43 White buys into Thoreau’s characteristically great expectations because he is different, wary precisely of expecting too—so—much. He records: “The sentence has the power to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt. I recall my exhilaration upon reading it, many years ago, in a time of hesitation and despair. It restored me to health.”44 White is here, moreover, hardly impersonal although no more autobiographical than his subject. His is familiar criticism rather than “personal criticism.” White does, however, go on to write more about himself. “I cannot,” he begins, “in this short ramble give a simple and sincere account of my own life,” but he offers a description of his “writing life.” Specifically, he notes, thinking “Thoreau might find it instructive,” that he is writing “in a house that, through no intent on my part, is the same size and shape as his own domicile on the pond.”45 According to White, in his little boathouse, he is there both “a wilder” and “a healthier man, by a safe margin.” The reason, he allows, is not far to seek: “It is because I am semi-detached while here that I find it possible to transact this private business with the fewest obstacles.”46 I suspect that being “semi-detached” bears more importance than White recognizes; he does not pursue the insight. But in any case, by following Thoreau’s example, White further participates in his mentor’s way of doing things. White moves instead to imagine what it would be like to bring “Thoreau back to life and show . . . him the sights.”47 He doubts that he “would be thrown off balance by the fantastic sights and sounds of the twentieth century,” for “Everywhere he would observe, in new shapes and sizes, the old predicaments and follies of men—the desperation, the impedimenta, the meanness—along with the visible capacity for elevation of the mind and soul.”48 Key is familiarity, represented here dramatically and effectively. Thus speaks the moralist and the critic. And so, before we reach the last sentence of “A Slight Sound at Evening,” we understand and appreciate that this essay, like so many of White’s, indeed like the

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form itself, has to do with time: “I find it agreeable to sit here this morning, in a house of correct proportions, and hear across a century of time [Thoreau’s] flute, his frogs, and his seductive summons to the wildest revels of them all.”49 That is to say, Walden itself achieves the transcendence that its maker was always seeking: it transcends time. In his own essay, White manages to collapse the temporal difference separating him from that great book. He not only does so implicitly, of course, but he also does so explicitly and literally by resuscitating, and resurrecting, Thoreau, bringing that writer to be with him, taking him to observe the sights and sounds of a full century later. Literalizing the presence of a needed writer, and his text possessing the capacity to recall one to health, White dramatizes the whole point of his writing about Thoreau and Walden on the occasion of the latter’s centenary. As an instance of a familiar-critical essay, “A Slight Sound at Evening” is clearly different in its mode of close reading from others. Andrew Lytle’s essays in The Hero with the Private Parts, for instance, engage in very close reading, and unlike instances easily caricatured, they turn outward, away from the text as “verbal icon” or “wellwrought urn”; their object is not to display the text as object, however brilliantly conceived and executed, but instead to proceed by means of close reading of a text to illumination and elucidation of the world. While resembling Lytle’s procedure to some degree, in, for instance, declining to appear a self-enclosed whole, White’s essay that we have been following works in macroscopic fashion. White looks back, as it were, from having completed his necessarily temporal and sequential close reading to the entirety of the text, recording his reading of the text’s large and complete “point.” I, on the other hand (to risk the charge of egoistic reference), may appear somewhat more concerned with the reader than White, whose concern lies with the text and its implications and uses, and Lytle, who is concerned with the world that the text represents. The differences are subtle, to be sure, but not, I submit, sophistical. *

* *

At this critical point, I (re)turn to the notion of the essay as medium. The crucible in which, as I have put it, experience is tried and tested, that observer whom we call the essayist is, he or she, a mediator. I do not, of course, imply that the essayist is some kind of “Christ-figure,”

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a symbol of the Divine embodiment. Nor do I wish to aggrandize the essayist, merely to point out a structural function, a pattern (my fourth point). The essayist is more than a medium—that is the function of the form in which he or she works. The essayist is, in a way that is more particular, the mediator, as I have said, able to perform that role, participate in that pattern, because he or she apprehends truth and, more, embodies it. As I have claimed, the essay’s values are those of the speaker and the writer.50 In essays, these two are one and pretty much have to be. If sufficient distance appears between them, as, differently, in Sam Pickering’s early essay on box turtles, in which the married essayist pretends to be single, and Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which the speaking voice functions as one of the principal objects of satire, a so-called essay would fail as essay. The latter work turns out not to be an essay, and Pickering’s essay earned the wrath of readers, who rightly expect that the essayist speak to them in her or his own voice. Of course, my point here does not apply to those essays where the speaker is obviously a fictional character who has the essayist’s general respect and approbation, for example, The Spectator “papers” of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Such examples, at the very least, though, alert us to the crucial importance of the essayist’s voice and of embodiment. In this respect, the familiar essay is unique, its writer in a nonpareil position among forms of writing. Perhaps in Gustave Flaubert’s great novel Madame Bovary, literature comes close to this nearly defining characteristic of essays. Signaled from the very first word—“Nous”— this novel turns an essayistic eye on the narration: after establishing his participation in the events (to be) narrated, the first-person narrator essentially disappears, making only one other, largely inconsequential appearance in the novel. He disappears from the narrative, though, only so as to reappear in the narration, for he serves, in lieu of any other developed claimants, as Flaubert’s hero; indeed, although Flaubert famously averred that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” it is the novel—the whole work—that is he, not just the title figure. Madame Bovary the novel becomes so in the form of an essay about temperament and circumstance, Romantics and bourgeoisie—a monumental achievement. Flaubert thus helps us see, I further suggest, that in essays the speaker (or narrator) mediates. He or she is an in-between, serving the reader,

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providing help badly needed, doing what the reader is unable to. After all, the narrator has, himself or herself, directly and particularly, that is to say individually and personally, undergone the experience(s) represented, and now in writing about it, writing offered as either observation or reflection or some combination of the two, he bears witness, sharing with and serving her reader. The essayist has, of course, done more, much more, in fact, for he has not only had the experience but also weighed it for significance and meaning, performed the necessary work of reading and interpreting. In novels and short stories, differently, this act is the reader’s burden. Essays, though, make, in this sense, fewer demands (and that is the reason why, I have argued elsewhere, they serve beginning students well51). In other words, having read the represented experience already, the essayist mediates between the fleshand-blood reader, you or me, and the experience(s) represented on the page. In Madame Bovary, to return for a final time to this perhaps greatest of all novels, the narrator’s withdrawal from participation in the narrative (in favor of a critical thematic role in the narration) points to the sort of impersonality and “authorial” absence famously extolled by Stephen Dedalus—and satirized by James Joyce, who abandons him—in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Even the responsible reader might not sufficiently appreciate or understand the experience recounted. Certainly she or he could not fully understand its significance, that is, its meaning for the essayist unless the essayist made the point directly, himself or herself, declaring his “take.” The reader might well, moreover, mistake, reading the essay for either its representation of experience or its declared and elucidated meaning. The essayist, after all, brings both experience and meaning together in his own person. Another both/and, this one perhaps unique to the essay. *

* *

Elsewhere, especially in Tracing the Essay, I have sought to show that in essays, truth appears embodied in the work’s so-called speaker. In Religio Laici, for instance, John Dryden himself bodies forth the essaypoem’s essential values, which are represented as moral and personal choices: he is the alternative to the Deist, the Papist, and the “Fanatick”; he successfully navigates the murky and dangerous ecclesiastical and doctrinal waters; he is—rather than merely “represents”—the desired, necessary, and sought-for via media. The same is true in Alexander

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Pope’s less dramatic An Essay on Criticism, the poet-essayist appearing to fulfill the aims of the “ideal critic,” and so to provide the answer to the urgent question, “But where’s the man?” In our own time, essayists as like and (yet) different as Sam Pickering and Scott Russell Sanders embody the necessary values of individualism and close attentiveness to their surroundings and the environment that their essays discuss. The character of the essayist remains largely unchanged over time: from Montaigne to Dryden and on to William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, thence to E.B. White, and most recently, Pickering and Anne Fadiman, pervasive and prominent are the virtues of moderation and balance, sensitivity to nature, fairness, openness, respect, responsibility, maturity, and moral rectitude—in short, wisdom. In other words, these familiar essayists and others—Nancy Mairs springs immediately to mind, along with Richard Selzer and Edward Abbey—bear witness to the needs their writings differently describe, analyze, lament, and extol. There can be little doubt that the essayist engages in constant observation, thus witnessing the antic actions of beetles and men and women alike, the comedy and the tragedy of human existence, human depravity, and human generosity, the work of caritas and of Providence in the world. Familiar essayists, though, not only witness, but they also “render, afford, give” (the dictionary definition of “bearing witness”). This occurs in several ways: for example, essayists let be—in the sense of respecting the reader and (so) not imposing an opinion or argument, which, in any case, they tend not to push or assert but, rather, allow to develop. The reader is offered an opportunity to participate, having been invited into the essay, into the story, into the dialogue. The essayist gives space, not just to the reader, but also to the other side of his or her positions, as well as to other voices, via the well-known and beloved penchant for quoting.52 The essayist bears witness to civility, to civilization, to culture and manners and the capaciousness of “Books and Humankind” alike and to their vital, essential relations. The essayist thus affords us readers a glimpse of both/and. To borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin, the essay is not monological. *

* *

Every essay burns with the whole being of the essayist. Thus appears the notorious riskiness of writing in this venerable and protean form. Emerson, evidently, was right when he said, “Then I dare; I will

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also essay to be.”53 Essaying is daring as well as risky business, for as Montaigne famously put it, inaugurating the form: “I expose myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance, each part in its place. . . . It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.”54 Of course, Montaigne makes it appear as if this exposure, this Incarnation, is solely a matter of authorial intention, execution, and control. It is not. As in the essay’s close relative, the dramatic monologue—particularly of Robert Browning—the writer reveals more of himself than evidently intended. In any case, the essay reveals how the timeless intersects its characteristic focus on time (E.B. White’s essays—everywhere you look— are about nothing else but time, consummate instances, very nearly paradigmatic, of the form to which his predecessor Montaigne gave birth). In representing the extra-ordinary in—that is, intersecting— the ordinary, the essay exists and functions as “Incarnational art.” In this representation, it is important to observe, there appears no suggestion that the moment of intersection is unique or indeed all that unusual. Rather, it is fundamentally and characteristically familiar. The familiar essay, in its basic and nearly defining modesty and humility, never suggests, or pretends, either that it has special (let alone unique) access to truth or understanding. It simply—simply—participates in reality and in the revelational pattern, the universal pattern we call Incarnation. In that sense of participation, the essay mirrors what is always already the case, helping us, to be sure to see it—and likely know it for the first time. *

* *

The “personal” essay especially, from Montaigne to more recent navel-gazers, focuses sharply on the self, often the writing primarily a means of self-expression. Questions of art may hardly matter. The more “familiar”—and observational—form of the essay offers opportunity for artfulness, but critical writing in the form of the essay often either eschews the quest of artfulness or else it is so concerned with representational accuracy that the site quickly closes (Eliot is exemplary here too). Woolf, I think, achieves artfulness in such an essay as “The Death of the Moth,” familiar, observational, and expertly and lovingly “made”: “The signification of the words

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is neither conceptual nor representational; it is the positing of a world in which these words ‘catch’ and establish certain relations or resonances.”55 *

* *

In conclusion, allow me to illustrate my four-point thesis via a brief look at Richard Selzer’s wonderful little essay “A Worm from My Notebook,” included in his 1986 collection Taking the World in for Repairs. The essay consists, essentially, of two parts; absent the first, Selzer would have made a short story, that of Zairean farmer Ibrahim who contracts and dies from disease brought on by the infestation of Dracunculus medinensis, the “Guinea worm.” As Lydia Fakundiny, editor of The Art of the Essay, has shown me, 56 Selzer—surgeon, Yale professor of both surgery and writing, writer extraordinaire—has so made this essay that the Worm (appropriately capitalized) worms its way into and around the story, the essay that hosts it, you and me as readers. The narrative illustrates and embodies the principles of writing and of art that Selzer succinctly declares in his opening paragraph: the brilliance, the artistry, here starts from the relation of and the resonances within these two parts—they rely on and depend upon each other, the result that state that Eliot describes in “Little Gidding,” the last of his magisterial Four Quartets: “The complete consort dancing together.”57 Every word counts because each is charged with meaning, the definition of literature, according to Ole Ez (Pound). The passage will also serve to return us to Cristina Nehring’s animadversions against the essay and perhaps to focus a different understanding of the form’s relation to its subject matter, the world, the author, and itself. For those familiar with the facts of the author’s life, the opening sentence is ironic: at once a claim of modesty and a dramatization of his central theme concerning fact and fiction (he did teach writing, at Yale). By the second sentence, this artful “maker” shows another theme worming its way into the writing, that of the necessarily indirect way an essayist takes and the indirect means by which he proceeds to “ultimate” concerns. Selzer then continues, on the trail of the extra-ordinary within the ordinary (for Adorno, too, “the Ultimate”): Just as there are no great subjects, there are no limits to the imagination. Send it off, I would urge my students, to wander into the side

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trails, the humblest burrows to seek out the exceptional and the mysterious. A doctor/writer is especially blessed in that he walks about all day in the middle of a short story. There comes that moment when he is driven to snatch up a pencil and jot it down.58

Will and personality are not—or no longer—in play: the writer is “driven.” Selzer is worming his way into a major point regarding the necessary (and magnificent) giving of the writer to his or her creation, a kind of self-emptying. Notice, too, that the “sources” of “fine writing” do not include the authorial self or its intentions, needs, or desires: Only, he must take care that the pencil be in flames and that his fingers be burnt in the act. Fine writing can spring from the most surprising sources. Take parasitology, for instance. There is no more compelling drama than the life cycle of Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea worm. Only to tell the story of its life and death is to peel away layers of obscurity, to shed light upon the earth and all of its creatures. That some fifty million of us are even now infested with this worm is of no literary interest whatsoever. Always, it is the affliction of one human being that captures the imagination. So it was with the passion of Jesus Christ; so it is with the infestation of single African man.59

I have always thought that this reference to Jesus Christ by the selfproclaimed agnostic significant, particularly in relation to such another essay of Selzer as “An Absence of Windows,” which, after mentioning Heaven, ends with the self-deprecating, highly charged, and resonant word “carpentry” to describe the author’s own practice of surgery. I am not sure why the reference is significant, although it illustrates the essayist’s capacity for seeing and sympathizing with other-ness. Of more significance, ultimately, is the implicit reference above to what Flannery O’Connor has finely called “incarnational art”: statement does not carry the day, but idea enfleshed, as it were—a pattern, if you will, that Selzer will proceed to illustrate, and dramatize, in offering a narrative about a “single human life.” At this point, Selzer makes a decisive turn in the opening paragraph of “A Worm from My Notebook”: he embodies, via his own procedure and writing practice, a theory of knowing and a theory of writing. First, the understanding, found in scholastic thought, that “knowing is always a form of participation in the active intelligible life of an object”60 —a kind of worming yourself into—that reproduces itself in the life of the subject. This is also, you might note, the

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essential difference that Eliot locates between the more modern John Donne, a “personality” interested in “self-expression,” and the more medieval Lancelot Andrewes, whose emotion “is purely contemplative . . . wholly evoked by the object of contemplation . . . [and] wholly contained in and explained by its object.”61 In short, Selzer the writer now invites his reader into the story, asking her or him to participate in it, for implicit here is the notion that “what is involved in knowing something is more like re-enacting a performance than labelling an object.”62 Shall we write the story together? A Romance of Parasitology? Let me tell you how it goes thus far. I will give you a peek into my notebook where you will see me struggling to set words down on a blank piece of paper. At first whimsically, capriciously, even insincerely. Later, in dead earnest. You will see at precisely what moment the writer ceases to think of his character as an instrument to be manipulated and think of him as someone with whom he has fallen in love. For it is always, must always be, a matter of love.63

I know of no more telling, beautiful, and resonant declaration and description of writing—a site to behold. Its own art smacks, certainly, of the Trinitarian: Being, Understanding, and Love, the medium that remarkable capacity that Selzer incarnates in his evolving relation to his (created) character. Selzer is clearly aware—and teaching us—that art is a matter of love, understood as the giving of the self to the thing made, as a participation in its being. Like Bishop Andrewes in T.S. Eliot’s description, there is in this case “a contemplative absorption in what is truly there,” “a suspension of artistic control so as to let the inner necessities of the subject—in this case, the imagined person—unfold,” a “dispossession of the desire to hold everything inside your own head.”64 Another way of putting it: “There is the sense that the world ‘gives’ itself to be understood in the very moment when we realize that describing it simply in terms of how it relates to me, let alone serves my interest, is an inadequate or actively untruthful perspective.”65 Actively “generating otherness,” Dr. Richard Selzer, his pen as finely honed as his scalpel, acts out, in coming to love his Zairean farmer Ibrahim, the “self-dispossessing character of the love that . . . God displays.”66 This he does, remember, as a self-described nonbeliever. We then perhaps start to glimpse that “an absence of windows” refers to the putative absence of God, seen as being the nature of reality

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itself, which we are called to understand, in order that we (too) may truly, “disinterestedly” love. In Selzer’s skilled hands, the strange becomes familiar precisely when the familiar is estranged. Estranging the familiar creates space for—creating the site of—art. “A Worm from My Notebook” is not about its author, is not his reflection or the expression of his personality, but it is about the very stuff of art, not least its sinuous way of infesting us—and perhaps restoring us to health, however indirect and ironic the means. Reading works of art, as when writing them, you discover connections, begin to understand relations. Writing-as-reading, perhaps most often and most helpfully in grappling with essays, you move laterally and comparatively, you participate in the being of the object, and you put-in-other-words: “the glorious essay” (Antioch Review). The familiar essay has the capacity to be art not least because it trains its eye on the world, which it faithfully observes and meticulously accounts for—White once or twice refers to himself as (merely) a “recording secretary.” The essay then represents the self’s keen observations in a manner both affirmative and critical. In other words, the familiar essay witnesses. *

* *

The fact of the matter is, the essay being a site (rather than a genre), its subforms exist along a spectrum of nonfiction writing that, actually, runs from the (scholarly) article on one end to the autobiography and (a bit differently) the memoir, on the other end. Seen in this manner, the forms of nonfiction extend from one extreme of so-called objectivity, and gracelessness of expression, to the other extreme of the personal, the autobiographical, and the confessional. The end subforms are by no means, that is to say, the personal and the familiar (essay); rather, both exist nearer the center. In fact, I would argue that the familiar essay occurs very close to the center of the spectrum and is structurally the heart of the essay as form. Historically, of course, and never more so than at present, the personal essay is the dominant subform. Yet, the familiar sort of essay embodies—in its tension, its Incarnationism, its defining intersectional qualities—the form’s essential nature better than the personal does. When we think of essay, therefore, we have in mind—or should do—the familiar, strictly considered.

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Within the familiar essay occurs a similar spectrum of differences and kinds. At one end or “extreme” is the bookish, urbane, and “light” sort that marks at least much of Anne Fadiman’s (delightful) writing, while at the other stands the much more serious, intellectual, and critical discussions of writers like Andrew O’Hagan and literary critics like James Wood and Cynthia Ozick (European critics and commentators like Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno and even Derrida and Heidegger occupy uneasy positions at this end). Between these “extremes,” near the center of the spectrum that constitutes the familiar essay, E.B. White wanders about, and with him Joseph Epstein and (the early) Sam Pickering, treating ideas, to be sure, but in writing imaginative and “creative,” often humorous, in fact.

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CH A P T ER

2

On Time, the Familiar, and the Essay

In a recent book Tracing the Essay, I suggested that the venerable form ends in truth via a meandering, often circuitous but always indirect journey or course through experience. Often—for example, in the essays of E.B. White—the writer himself or herself embodies truth. In that book, I did not, however, treat ideas specifically. Literature—that is to say, poems, novels, short stories, and plays— represents persons caught in concrete situations and under more or less familiar conditions with varying degrees of verisimilitude. Ideas are by no means absent in these forms, of course—and not just in such decidedly intellectual works as those of Joyce and, differently, Orwell, of Melville and T.S. Eliot, of Ibsen, Shaw, and Shakespeare. But ideas matter and function differently in essays; here, they are the very life blood, at once the occasion, the driving force, the subject matter directly, and the center of attention. On stage, as it were, are ideas. In that sense, the essay reveals its characteristic tension: for while it is most often indirect, here it is direct. In dealing with ideas, literature—plays, poems, and stories—takes the path of indirection. As Flannery O’Connor has argued, stories are incarnational art when persons and plots embody ideas, mystery incarnate in manners, for example.1 The situation appears to be one of apples and oranges. For the essay, too, is an incarnational art, despite Flannery O’Connor’s slighting of it.2 It has to do with ideas embodied in and derived from observation and experience; in the essay, moreover, the ideas are at best represented in practice. Accordingly, the essayist, I want to stress, is no Spider, but rather a Bee—to take once more Swift’s wonderful allegory of the Ancients and Moderns in The Battle of the Books. Interpolating, I argue that the Spider (the Modern) writes “upon Nothing” (as the companion piece, A Tale of a Tub would

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have it), engendering all out of himself and producing in the event nothing but “fly-bane and a cobweb.”3 The Bee, on the other hand, is an empiricist, a veritable Baconian figure (despite Swift’s casting of Bacon with the Moderns), who “by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things,” takes in from outside himself, producing in the end “honey and wax.”4 To be sure, the familiar essayist, like Moderns, brings the self into play—the form is an in-between thing, Janus faced—but as medium, as, in other words, the crucible in which experience is tried and tested, weighed and assayed. Speaking of Bacon, and thus of the English essay: unlike Montaigne, the Frenchman credited with being the progenitor of the “personal essay” at the tail end of the sixteenth century, he represents his little efforts as directly and eminently useful. The title of his first volume of essays indicates precisely that: Essayes or Counsels, Morall and Civill. Montaigne, on the other hand, adamantly resists the notion of his new-fangled writing being useful to anyone but himself; he finally concedes that, if his essais prove of use to others, well, then, that is no more than accidental: “What I write here,” he proclaims, “is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.”5 Revealing, however inadvertently, the essay’s characteristic tension, he more or less immediately adds, in a new paragraph, following the hope that it “not be held against me if I publish what I write”: “What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another.”6 Utile is not even an indirect benefit, according to the wily old Gascon, avoiding arguments regarding utile; if his essays prove of use to a person other than himself, that is “by accident,” they were never intended for the use, the instruction, or the benefit of anyone but himself. Here, he anticipates Swift’s representation of the Modern hack writer in A Tale of a Tub, engaged in navel-gazing, alone—ominously so—in his dark and dank garret, scribbling away, “upon nothing,” the writing turned so far inward that digressions compete with the “tale” and ultimately smother it, the seventh section bearing the title “A Digression in Praise of Digressions,” the tenth being “A Further Digression,” that is, “The Author’s Compliment to the Readers, Etc,” and the “Conclusion” containing the blind-but-insightful/ insightful-but-blind statement by the Hack that “I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors; which is to write upon Nothing; when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen

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still move on; by some called the ghost of wit, delighting to walk after the death of its body.”7 The self-satisfied, self-enclosed Hack is self-expressive—like Swift’s Spider—whereas Bacon, always observing, is always sharing with us the results of his experience, indeed instructing us. Ideas, then, are the direct purview of the essays, foregrounded in practice; so the essay is useful.8 This means that the essay is, strictly speaking, of probably limited artfulness, given that art is gratuitous, as a thing made, beautiful by definition. Despite the blithe titling of anthologists proclaiming to instance the form’s art, relatively few essays deserve that honorific. These include, I would suggest, such an essay of Virginia Woolf as “The Death of the Moth” and Richard Selzer’s “A Worm from My Notebook.” Other essays tend to fall short, although aspects of art will certainly be found in characterization, in narrative, in thematic resonances, to name but three. If, by the way, Bacon clearly emphasizes utile, unlike Montaigne, the latter does not insist on (earlier, more medieval, and Catholic) dulce; that he only engages in (Romantic) self-expression at once complicates any effort to simplify the essay and its tension-filled history and points, as a matter of fact, to the tension “always already” present and active in essaying. Despite first thoughts, no doubt, this situation should be no cause for alarm or lament. The essay should accept the nature of its being and not pretend to be—or aspire to be—something that it is not, something grander, sublime, or pure, for it is none of these. It is neither literature nor philosophy when it properly understands and accepts its limited nature. The essay simply “stands a short distance down the line,” according to one of its most skilled practitioners. In terms different from but nevertheless analogous to those I have been using here, White writes with beguiling irony and stunning accuracy of its “second-class” citizenship.9 When the essay tries to transcend its nature, it turns into something often monstrous, having lost its familiar appeal—and its familiar shape. Lest I be misunderstood, I wish to affirm that the essay can be, and sometimes is, a thing of beauty, whether or not of art: think of Hilaire Belloc’s “The Mowing of a Field,” G.K. Chesterton’s “A Piece of Chalk,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” and such of White’s essays as “Death of a Pig,” “The Ring of Time,” “Once More to the Lake,” and “A Slight Sound at Evening.” Even in the best of these, however, the beauty is limited and impure,

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“contaminated,” as it were, by extraneous motives and utilitarian purposes (e.g., elucidation of Walden and, in Belloc, determined social and cultural critique). *

* *

Rather than a genre—Roland Barthes thought it ageneric—the essay is a site, where differences, polarities, and oppositions meet. It thus parallels Incarnation, which is the intersection of time and timelessness, the essayist’s characteristic concern. Tension marks the essay, as it does Incarnation. The familiar description of the essay as a ramble misleads and distorts unless it is accompanied by the immediate elaboration cum caveat and qualification that the essay is both process and product. An essay lacking in one or the other fails to meet this essential criterion. The essay reveals itself as both product and process—art and discovery, culture and nature, knowing and not knowing—as it explores, willy-nilly, questions of temporality and the universal and eternal. Unlike the fiction writer or the poet, the essayist begins, as E.B. White declares, with an “idea.” But idea must join up with form. It becomes incarnate, taking on form, thus joining with the writers of poetry and fiction. Since in essays ideas are never transcended, or left behind, but embodied, some tension necessarily remains. T.S. Eliot points to the defining pattern when “and” replaces “between” as he moves from “The Hollow Men” (1925) to AshWednesday (1930), following his embrace of Anglo-Catholicism. Such a line in the later poem as “Teach us to care and not to care” affirms as it makes the point: paradox rather than transcendence. Four Quartets is built on the incarnational foundation. Thus Eliot writes in “Little Gidding,” for instance: “the intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere. Never and always.”10 More simply even, later in the poem: “History is now and England.” Eliot makes clear, moreover, that, contrary to Heraclitus, whom he quotes in two epigraphs to “Burnt Norton,” the way up is not the way down. Rather, all hinges on “way.” Thus, in “East Coker,” in a strongly essayistic way (e.g., “You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?”), Eliot writes, repetition affirmed as the point: “You must go by a way. . . .” Three times thus, a fourth with a perhaps

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telling modification: “You must go through the way. . . .” A stellar affirmation, this, of both/and, the pattern that defines—and is—Incarnation. In the first poem of Ash-Wednesday, his so-called conversion poem and his most enigmatic work surely in either verse or prose, Eliot offers a statement on time that has led many readers astray. They think it his own unmediated position, missing its essentially dramatic nature: Because I know that, for example, “time is always time,” just as place is just place and “the actual” is so “only for one time / And only for one place,” then I accept this situation as it is, and I “rejoice” in it—renouncing “the blessed face” and “the voice.”11 The “speaker” thus flouts Incarnation. Here too, the unsuspecting reader may well be duped, upset by a mosquito wing. Four Quartets, at least, is an essay, Eliot given to trying on various possibilities, donning various vestments to see what fits best, what belongs. *

* *

E.B. White opens his 1954 collection of “stories, essays, and poems,” The Second Tree from the Corner, with sections on, first, “Time Past, Time Future” and then “Time Present.” One of the most telling, and biting, of the pieces in the second is “The Age of Dust.” White first reports putting up a swing for a three-year-old girl in bucolic conditions and then juxtaposes this experience with an article he came across on radiological warfare, so-called death dust. In utter disbelief White quotes from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “ ‘The area that can be poisoned with the fission products available to us today is disappointingly small; it amounts to not more than two or three major cities per month.’ ”12 After reluctantly dismissing the possibility of satire, White concludes that the article bears the “purity of detachment.”13 Although White does not say so, the author quoted recalls the insouciant, “objective” speaker—and advocate of the cannibalism of young children—of Swift’s great satire “A Modest Proposal.” White then responds with this acute and moving analysis: The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man’s adjustment to it—the speed of his acceptance. Already bombproofing is on approximately the same level as mothproofing. Two or three major cities per month isn’t much of an area, but it is a

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start. To the purity of science (which hopes to enlarge the area) there seems to be no corresponding purity of political thought, never the same detachment. We sorely need, from a delegate in the Security Council, a statement as detached in its way as the statement of the scientist on death dust. (pp. 115–16)

We need not adjustment, but “a person who still dwells in the mysterious dream world of swings, and little girls in swings; he must be a memoirist remembering the past (p. 117).”14 Remembering the past so as to live fruitfully—thus able to “fructify,” to borrow Eliot’s term—in the present. The note, a few pages on in “Time Present,” on “Remembrance of Things Past,” follows naturally, with a more mellow and familiar tone. White here returns to the subject of pigs and the subject of purity, specifically its cognate the sanitary. White then develops the theme of man’s necessary “link with nature,” which offers the gift of a “chord” to which we may respond.15 It seems clear that in writing about our relation with Nature, our “Mother,” and striving to describe the true nature of reality, White is concerned, ultimately, with nothing other or less than God, and Nature—the Mother—is our mediator, our intercessor, the means in, through, and by means of which we come to know God. This may be as close as White ever came to acknowledging the pattern defined as Incarnation. More typical, by far, is White’s (immanent) embrace of the physical world, sans Logos, that is. Again from “Time Present,” I draw on “The Dream of the American Male,” which resonates not just with the notes I have mentioned above but also with the earlier essay, “The World of Tomorrow,” which ends on “the heroic man, bloodless and perfect and enormous, created in his own image, and in his hand (rubber, aseptic) the literal desire, the warm and living breast.”16 In the later note, White begins with the eminently desirable movie star, the deliciously surnamed Dorothy Lamour, a virtually iconic figure. He then pens these sentences, objectionable as some—several of which are elided here—may now be: The dream of the American male is for a female who has an essential languor which is not laziness, who is unaccompanied except by himself, and who does not let him down. He desires a beautiful, but comprehensible, creature. . . . She is compounded of moonlight and shadows, and has a slightly husky voice. . . . Her body, if concealed at all, is concealed by a water lily, a frond, a fern, a bit of moss, or by a sarong—which is a simple garment carrying the implicit promise

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that it will not long stay in place. . . . Man’s most persistent dream is of a forest pool and a girl coming out of it unashamed, walking toward him with a wavy motion, childlike in her wonder, a girl exquisitely untroubled, as quiet and accommodating and beautiful as a young green tree. That’s all he really wants. He sometimes wonders how this other stuff got in—the instrument panel, the night sky, the full load, the moment of exultation over the blackened city below.17

These last words perhaps recall Eliot, represented in “Little Gidding,” as out on duty as a fire warden in London, the early morning still resonant with the menacing, deadly sounds of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, that “dark Dove.” Man’s desire, according to White (but not Eliot) is desire, and the desire is quite specific, altogether immediate and physical. Nature, then, which White identifies with the female and with maternity, exists opposite the myriad forms of the artificial and the man-made, which often presage destruction. Nothing better illustrates the physical, of which Nature stands as synecdoche, than the female breast, which both literally and metaphorically can keep one alive and going. Nature is, then, mediator: between Being and being. *

* *

While in both Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets Eliot opposes any Eastern forms of asceticism—“Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood,” he prays to the “Blessed sister, holy mother” in the earlier poem. Indifference, moreover, for Eliot bears the smell of death and (self-)destruction that we find throughout The Waste Land, most famously in the classic seduction scene at the poem’s geographical center, in “The Fire Sermon.” As in AshWednesday, with its desire and aim “to redeem the time,” so in Four Quartets, Eliot seeks love that is an expansion beyond desire (“Little Gidding”). White is, contrariwise, very much attached. What he calls “the purity of detachment” is modern, and especially scientific and technological, insouciance—a lack, really, of caring. Not much one for paradox, White does not see that caring comes in more than one form, or that it might be desirable to care and not to care—at the same time. For him, though, the alternative—the only alternative—to

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caring is not caring. He is evidently unable to envision “expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” Both White and Eliot prize and privilege the moment, but for White the moment is, to use Eliot’s word, “unattended.” Note, especially, the very beautiful passage in “East Coker” of rustics dancing (which, incidentally, resonates with a strikingly comparable passage in “Little Gidding” on writing as made of mutually supportive elements). The language is (sometimes) Elizabethan, the scene vividly realized. It is pointedly not idealistic; indeed, in its very naturalism, it smacks somewhat of White in Maine. Any similarities between White and Eliot exist, though, in tension with differences. In that time and place long before, Eliot imagines The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodious sacrament. Two and two, necessarye coniunction, Holding eche other by the hand or the arm Whiche betokenth concorde.

Round and round, they go, dancing, in tune, in time, these rustics, these lusty folk “nourishing the corn.” They also, then, keeping time in their dancing, keep an analogous “rhythm” “in their living,” for they live in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts.

We are not so far, after all, from the death of a pig. Not only does the Elizabethan period intersect the twentieth century here, but so does writing—thanks to the passage in “Little Gidding”—intersect dancing. What matters is, finally, “association,” and “concorde,” as signified by dancing and signifying, in turn, “matrimonie,” which is, itself, a “sacrament,” pointing to the greatest association, that of man and God: “two and two. Necessarye coniunction.” In this fashion, then, to recall again Archbishop Rowan Williams, we experience in Eliot what is missing in White: “words ‘catch’ and establish certain relations or resonances.”18 In short,

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T.S. Eliot appears the artist, E.B. White a craftsman, albeit a consummate craftsman. In “East Coker,” part of perhaps the greatest poem of the twentieth century, likely the greatest religious poem since The Divine Comedy, time appears represented in another dimension—embodied as it is. Attention thus shifts to keeping time, rather than “taking” or “spending” or “making the most of” time. Time begins, indeed, to appear as gift and as guide—as guide to gift, and so as mediation. The nature of things, reality-as-such, Being, God—Eliot and White alike appeal to nothing more, nothing besides. Keeping time amounts, at least, to being in tune, at-oned, atoned. *

* *

If anyone knows how to live life, it is familiar essayists, or so it would seem. They, in fact, show us not only how to live well but also that living well is inseparable from making the best use of time. From Montaigne to Scott Russell Sanders and Nancy Mairs, the picture of the essayist in time reflects continuity and consistency. The significant life is ordinary, but not pedestrian; it is rooted in place—local, in every sense; its wisdom is earned and practical, not theoretical; it is at once skeptical, wary especially of systems and principles, and affirmative of life’s newness and joy; the mind and its capacity for lucubration matter less than the senses, which prove reliable time and again; the significant life depends upon control of one’s expectations, not least of what time brings, and acceptance of one’s own incapacities, which perhaps only grow greater with time; it knows better, often as a result, than to fritter away days and weeks and lifetimes, understood as limited and therefore precious, prizing economy. Life is all about belonging, as E.B. White averred. Sam Pickering says it especially well, explaining the difference from his former, pre-essay life: “I now have trouble reaching conclusions. Instead of cudgeling stray dogs along the route I travel . . . I stop and pet them. If they could talk, I’d probably sit down, start chatting, and forget about the race.”19 Values and priorities change, and with that change comes new respect for detour, delay, and indirectness; a wavy, mazy ramble takes the place of the once-revered straight line: the essayist slows down, grasping the value of cultivation as he or she does that of a beautiful rose, a beautiful woman, a great wine, a child with longing eyes, a parent with trembling hands, a dog with a wagging tail, a bon mot and a resonant

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piece of writing, a student who just needs to be heard. About time, in every sense, the essay understands that anything worthwhile, not least forms of love—and the essay is always the work of an amateur— needs attention and takes time. The most famous line E.B. White ever wrote is probably the chilling, self-expressive, meta-last sentence of “Once More to the Lake,” the great, frequently anthologized essay about the author, his son, and what he elsewhere describes as “the ring of time”: “As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”20 I can never read these words without participating in that cold, creeping, expanding frisson. Time was White’s recurrent, perhaps characteristic subject, as it is for the familiar essay as form. Death claims a pig he is preparing for “murder,” and White understands that his lot is the pig’s, his fate joined in a common progress; on the centenary of the publication of his most famous book, Thoreau literally returns to earth familiar with “the fantastic sights and sounds of the twentieth century”; 21 signs of change abound, but few of improvement or “progress,” in spite of the hype: In “Coon Tree,” writes White, “Events carry us rapidly in directions tangential to our true desires, and we have almost no sensation of being in motion at all.”22 White questions our “commonest assumptions,” including the familiar one that “the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small.” It is doubtful, he thinks, that the world “remodeled by Man the Architect” is better, or better off, than “it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions.”23 White’s quaint last word takes the air out of man’s pretensions. The question is, what differences does time make? That time is humankind’s great concern—not only our apparent enemy, but also the medium of our hopes as of our fears—appears in the justly revered 1956 essay, “The Ring of Time,” about an afternoon in early spring spent observing a circus rehearsal in Sarasota, Florida. With no flash or fanfare, White simply and modestly observes that “[t]he circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know,”24 and in preparation for just that, this rehearsal with a young girl riding, in circles, on the back of a horse as her mother stands, also watching the reenactment of so many performances, the observing essayist catches meaning of the most profound sort: everything assumes “the shape of a circle,” and as he continues to observe,

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time starts to follow suit; White then imagines that the “beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same, and one thing ran into the next and time went round and around and got nowhere.”25 It may be helpful here to recall Eliot’s thematics and poetics of time in Four Quartets and especially the repeated observation, as stated in “Little Gidding,” that “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Difference matters more than similarity, however, for Eliot at once confronts and rejects the Heraclitean notion, represented too in Ash-Wednesday, that “the way up is the way down”: he thus deconstructs—the word is exact—an identity only assumed. In “The Ring of Time,” as White continues to observe the girl and consider what she has come to represent, he disavows as did Eliot the idea of time as circular—there is an echo, however faint, of that chill that blocked him on the pond in Maine with his son: the girl, he thinks, “is too young to know that time does not really move in a circle at all. . . . Everything in her movements, her expression, told you that for her the ring of time was perfectly formed, changeless, predictable, without beginning or end, like the ring in which she was traveling at this moment with the horse that wallowed under her.”26 And then reports White, who earlier described himself as “recording secretary” for the “society” bedazzled by a circus rider, he “slipped back into my trance, and time was circular again.”27 The later, political reflections on the South and integration conclusively disabuse us of the notion of the circularity of time: it is, White writes, “the gift of the sun, the gift of the South. This is true seduction. The day is a circle—morning, afternoon, and night.”28 The postscript, dated April 1962, cunningly attests to what its subject, the crabs of Fiddler Bayou, is all about: “one of the creatures most acutely aware of the passing of time is the fiddler crab himself”29 —tempus fugit. In “The Ring of Time,” scene leads to reflection, and reflection derives from the assumption that the scene holds meaning; more, that idea is here idea embodied, although White does not quite understand in those terms. Apparently consumed with, haunted by, the passing of time, White takes a somewhat different tack in the straightforward essay, “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?” Idea here dominates with relatively little narrative. What there is, concerns Andy and Katherine’s mutual malaise upon spending Christmas in pastel Florida, with its artificiality, its softness, and its creature comforts, where forests of red poinsettias

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dwarf the purchase White makes of a single one, where, instead of a traditional Christmas tree, the Whites have “a cluster of three little palmlike trees” that resemble “a miniature version of the classic oasis scene in the desert.”30 They are away from Maine, family, and fir, away from almost everything familiar—no longer belonging. The essay begins with resignation: “times change, circumstances alter, health glides slowly downhill.”31 Discovery—and recovery— comes via the mail, which brings, along with a toy drum and drumsticks, gifts of a grandchild, “a branch from a balsam fir” accompanied by “a harness strap of sleigh bells. The branch,” White writes, with great delight, joy, and thankfulness, “had unquestionably been whacked from a tree in the woods behind our son’s house in Maine and had made the long trip south. It wore the look and carried the smell of authenticity.”32 Space thus constitutes the stressful, demoralizing distance here, rather than time, but with the arrival of the care package from back home space collapses, and time regains its familiar dominance, space temporalized: “Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight!”33 For a time, that is, for a moment in time. *

* *

Written from a Christian understanding, in particular an AngloCatholic understanding, Four Quartets is fundamentally, basically, and first of all about time. The effort is, according to many readers, to redeem time. That essai has precisely to do with “the moment.” Romantic poets had notoriously built their work around the notion of time as destroyer: like the knight in John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” we have a bright, shining moment—Wordsworth referred to such as “spots of time”—and then it vanishes, leaving us wan and forlorn. Mutability had long before stirred the imaginations and fueled the regret of poets, but for Romantics the enemy appears all the more determined, the scythe and the sickle sharpened and ready to slice through to the very heart. Eliot was no stranger to this view, although he had long been wary of Romantic self-indulgence. By the time he wrote Four Quartets—the first poem, “Burnt Norton” first appeared in 1935—Eliot had read and assimilated Lancelot Andrewes as well as St. Augustine, with their very different take on time from the Romantics. In “The Dry Salvages,” he asserts, definitively, “Time the destroyer is time the preserver,” complicating the all-too-familiar binary opposition and pointing to a radically different understanding from the Romantics, not at all new, to be

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sure. He had led off Four Quartets with another depiction of a significant, not-so-secret garden and a privileged moment (whose eclipse The Waste Land had lamented). In the second of the four poems, “East Coker,” he wrote, at once explaining and—we shall come to understand—incarnating the point, the point of complication, association, separation overcome. “A lifetime burning in every moment” replaces “the intense moment, / Isolated”—an entirely different understanding from the Romantics’. They had got time all wrong not just because they saw it as only destruction (and not also preservation) but also because they misunderstood the nature, meaning, and significance of the moment. The full meaning of Four Quartets lies on the surface of the quoted passage, as well as of others. “Burnt Norton” opens by challenging the opening verses of AshWednesday. What the speaker of “Burnt Norton” rejects, renouncing, is the voice of the assertive lines, which is not to be identified with Eliot. Early in Ash-Wednesday, we find an understanding rooted in the Orient, not so unlike the Hindu understanding that pervades the end of The Waste Land, with its quite unchristian although Trinitarian understanding to “give, sympathize, and control.” Self-control and asceticism are not the way, Eliot has learned (and makes clear also in various prose essays around the time, especially that on his old Harvard teacher, the Orientalist Irving Babbitt). Thus, Four Quartets opens with verses on time, also quoted earlier, signaling the subject of the entire great work; they too, via their prose-like diction, suggest the essentially essayistic nature of Eliot’s undertaking. Ash-Wednesday, you recall, had urged us to “Redeem / The time.” The speaker is, in the later poem, the philosopher-essayistpoet. The responsible reader—of Eliot as of time and the world— must be vigilant, alert, capable of distinguishing. The pilgrim quest, first undertaken in “What the Thunder Said,” the final but inconclusive section of The Waste Land, is for pattern, interpretive pattern, that explains and sums up the way things are (i.e., the nature of Reality, of God); the quest ends—or rather, reaches climax—with the understanding that is precisely Understanding. I mean the declarative passage in “The Dry Salvages,” which at once encapsulates, summarizes, and embodies everything. The pattern found, understood, and accepted is of time and in time; time is its subject and its object: we, typically, get only half of it, missing the essential site—perhaps no writer has come so close to identifying the pattern, making clear Incarnation—without the definite article—as that pattern. Eliot’s words clearly invoke other treatments of “the moment,”

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heretofore separate, isolated, vulnerable. From “the moment” as familiarly understood now to a radically different understanding, older than Christ and the Church, as old as time itself, the pattern that is always everywhere present (and therefore has been): The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled, Where action were otherwise movement Of that which is only moved And has in it no source of movement— Driven by daemonic, chthonic Powers.

In Four Quartets, Eliot speaks, as noted earlier, about “dispossession,” without assuming the Oriental position, already rejected in Ash-Wednesday, that emptiness is, in and of itself, desirable and effective. In such lines focusing on kenosis, we inevitably detect an echo of Thoreau, in “Walking,” where he argues for “a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance” and contends that most of our “knowledge” is “but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance,” which, he then suggests, is “our negative knowledge.”34 Eliot emphasizes the way, not just any way. He also insists on in-directness: you go in, through, and by means of. In addition, Eliot pursues the enigma of the copula, and we must beware of assuming that an identity exists between the two sides of the equation: the way up, for example, is not down, pace Heraclitus (with the famous claim that Eliot uses as an epigraph to “Burnt Norton”). Eliot, we will rightly conclude, is throughout Four Quartets concerned with Being. So was Thoreau, throughout Walden. As is the essay as form: the term derives from the French essayer (meaning to try, to attempt), but the word “essay” (or essai) recalls also the Latin esse (meaning to be). Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, no mean essayist himself, famously declared in his journals, as I have noted: “Then I dare; I will also essay to be.” Starting off Walden, Thoreau declares, with little humility or sympathy: “All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”35 He thus sets up a binary that he will pursue throughout these assembled essays: being and doing—here

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the copula, different from Eliot, presides over opposition. Thoreau represents commitment to “the art of life,” and living he equates with being, not doing (306). Work he would not do but for its necessity; he would get it over and done with. Accordingly, he asserts, still in the first essay “Economy”: What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather, Set about being good.36

It is but a short step, and a couple of pages, before he writes that “philanthropy . . . is greatly over-rated.”37 He agrees, he says, with what “the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works”; “life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel.”38 Being is, then, mental, intellectual, spiritual, whereas doing is menial, physical, beset with impurity. No matter what he sometimes says to the contrary, Thoreau is no friend of the body, toward which a man must exercise “austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it.”39 The essay-chapter in Walden titled “Higher Laws” makes the point—notice the refrain of “purity” and its cognates in this single, long paragraph (some of which I have omitted), which leads to a forceful rejection of any sort of incarnation: We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. . . . Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? . . . Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. . . . Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established.40

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The following paragraph continues the plea for purity, which Thoreau mentions there no fewer than five times: “Nature is hard to be overcome,” he writes, “but she must be overcome.”41 It comes as no surprise, then, to hear Henry Thoreau’s bold assertion in the “Conclusion,” which recalls the debacle that Jonathan Swift chronicles regarding the Floating Island in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels, that to Laputa (= “the whore”). This is Thoreau, straight and unadulterated: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”42 This passage confirms, as if confirmation were necessary at this point, that Thoreau inverts the very nature of things, unfamiliar with, and hostile to, Incarnation. Thoreau may exhibit the primarily moral drive of the essay as form, but he shows little patience with the premium it places on practice, interested as he is in “higher laws” and ideals. These he would attain directly, without the mediation of the body, the physical, or the material—all of which bears the damning marks of impurity. Of course, only the realm of dreams, ideals, and ideas can pretend to purity, and amidst them Thoreau would have us build our homes—disrespectful of foundations—from the top down. It is the old whoredom—not “wisdom”—of the a priori. In The Dunciad, over a century before, Alexander Pope had exposed its nature, strategies, and ultimate aims. The speaker—“Sworn foe to Myst’ry” (4.460)43 —is one of the Dunces, a clergyman of the Deistic inclination, addressing Dulness herself: When pious hope aspires to see the day When Moral Evidence shall quite decay, And damns implicit faith, and holy lies, Prompt to impose, and fond to dogmatize: Let others creep by timid steps, and slow, On plain Experience lay foundations low, By common sense to common knowledge bred, And last, to Nature’s Cause thro’ Nature led. All-seeing in thy mists, we want no guide, Mother of Arrogance, and Source of Pride! We nobly take the high Priori Road, And reason downward, till we doubt of God: Make Nature still incroach upon his plan; And shove him off as far as e’er we can: Thrust some Mechanic Cause into his place; Or bind in Matter, or diffuse in Space.

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Or, at one bound o’er-leaping all his laws, Make God Man’s Image, Man the final Cause, Find Virtue local, all Relation scorn, See all in Self, and but for self be born. (462–80)

The incarnational pattern is different, a posteriori, rather than a priori. In it, Being knows Itself in giving Itself, emptying Itself so as to become full. Love flows from and returns to Being. Doing is, then, neither first nor second (or last). Moreover, both Being and Love depend upon Understanding, in, through, and by means of which each must proceed—that necessary mediation represented in Christian incarnational understanding as the person Jesus Christ. Contrary to Thoreau, in other words, Being is “always already” mediated; it cannot be reached or attained directly. Doing may, however, open a path toward it, for as Donald Davie puts it in his splendid autobiography These the Companions, in a chapter titled “Puritans,” it makes all the difference to understand churchgoing as “the physical act of worship, not the mental act of belief or assent.”44 Eliot, I think, means something similar when, in Four Quartets, he reaches climax in the third poem by declaring that “[t]he hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation,” and then proceeds to and with a fourth and final poem, where action, and not belief, is pivotal and fundamental, here both prayer and “faring forward,” for instance, acquiring prominence and privilege. *

* *

For all his disbelief, E.B. White could and did write feelingly of Christmas. I am thinking now particularly of the beautiful note included in The Second Tree from the Corner and titled “The Distant Music of the Hounds.” White begins this celebratory little essay with lamentation over the ever-increasing commercialism of the Christian holiday season. Having excoriated the department stores and the various noisemakers, who were succeeding in making it difficult to hear “the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times,”45 White offers these strikingly affirmative observations that stem from recognizing Christmas as penetration and unique intersection: The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart—over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers. It

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is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of confusion.46

White may not have believed, but he wrote—that is, acted—as if he did. If he was not Christian, Christianity nevertheless needs more like him. White is not finished yet. In such a time of crisis as ours, he writes the following, never far removed from Henry Thoreau, lamenting as did Wordsworth also what man has made of man—White’s pregnant words may be applied to that allegedly simple thing, the essay. “Christmas,” he says, must compete as never before with the dazzling complexity of man, whose tangential desires and ingenuities have created a world that gives any simple thing the look of obsolescence—as though there were something inherently foolish in what is simple, or natural. . . . The human brain is about to turn certain functions over to an efficient substitute . . . We have tended to assume that the machine and the human brain are in conflict. Now the fear is that they are indistinguishable. Man not only is notably busy himself but insists that the other animals follow his example.47

This powerful little essay rounds to a close with words that will help to bring this chapter to a close. The directions here that White identifies as modern thinking are those predicted by Alexander Pope, writing in The Dunciad about the consequences of a priorism and the swirling vortex of reductions that culminate in Self. White’s alternative to modern obsessions and unrepentant desire is the familiar grown estranged and now distant. It is to Nature that he turns, no Transcendentalist despite the Thoreavian influence and pervasive flavor. Differently, Pope wrote of proceeding “thro’ Nature up to Nature’s God” (An Essay on Man, 4.332). Still, White, without religious images except for the significant mention of—and feeling about—Christmas, appears rooted in what is distinctly outside the voracious “self.” So this day and this century proceed toward the absolutes of convenience, of complexity, and of speed, only occasionally holding up the little trumpet (as at Christmas time) to be reminded of the simplicities, and to hear the distant music of the hound. Man’s inventions, directed

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always onward and upward, have an odd way of leading back to man himself, as a rabbit track in snow leads eventually to the rabbit. It is one of his more endearing qualities that man should think his tracks lead outward, toward something else, instead of back around the hill to where he has already been; and it is one of his persistent ambitions to leave earth entirely and travel by rocket into space, beyond the pull of gravity, and perhaps try another planet, as a pleasant change. He knows that the atomic age is capable of delivering a new package of energy; what he doesn’t know is whether it will prove to be a blessing. This week, many will be reminded that no explosion of atoms generates so hopeful a light as the reflection of a star, seen appreciatively in a pasture pond. It is there we perceive Christmas—and the sheep quiet, and the world waiting.48

Incarnation spells the story we have been following, and the line from “The Dry Salvages” summarizes it: “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.” The issue is pattern, not particular dogma or doctrine, and the word “gift” directs our attention where it ought to be: both the pattern and the understanding of it is a gift—a gift from Being. That gift humankind typically gets half right: we grasp, easily and readily enough, the notion of immanence, as we do that of transcendence. But to understand the whole of which they form constitutive parts requires great effort, far more than one might suspect or expect. Part of the difficulty, a large part of it in fact, stems from misunderstanding the copula. Immanence is not identical with transcendence or equal to it. A way is involved, the two ideas being binaries, and as Jacques Derrida has observed, whenever you have opposition, you (also) have hierarchy: one of the terms governs the (enslaved) other. In this case, privilege accrues to transcendence—the idea, the law, the ideal—the spirit. But Incarnation is itself another pattern altogether: transcendence may well be desirable as end, but the way thereto leads in, through, and by means of immanence: the body, the physical, the material—the letter. The further thing is, once transcendence is reached, immanence is not left behind—or transcended: transcendence and immanence are indeed linked, inseparably, in a quite specific way that requires understanding, and understanding, according to Eliot, that necessary mediator, takes “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action”—not least, “action.” “To apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time” is a gift that very few of us ordinary folk may ever truly know, for it is “something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s

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death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” But here—Incarnation—“the impossible union / Of spheres of existence is actual.” Union is impossible—of immanence and transcendence, body and spirit, the divine and the human, time and timelessness— and yet union there is.

CH A P T ER

3

Envisioning the Stranger’s Heart

I used to despise essays. In high school I had only a passing acquaintance with them; the few we read, one or two by Bacon, something by E.B. White, and, as I recall, J.B. Priestley, seemed harmless and inconsequential: only somebody’s opinion on something. I first came to rue essays in college, where, in freshman English, we read them so as then to make more of their kind. The implied lesson further diminished their already low status: their value lay solely in their instrumentality. The ones we read in Honors English at Wofford College in 1961— “skimmed” may be more accurate—I did not take seriously, since we hurried through them on the way to producing our own more dismal progeny. If the essays we (sort of) read were merely preparatory, a means to an end, those we wrote served only a local function: academic exercises. Little wonder that essays had fallen into sad disrepute, prompting Joseph Wood Krutch to exclaim ten years earlier: “No essays, please!” Yet we stumbled, mumbled miserably on, dishonoring the form and in the process despoiling the language, writing more and more wretched imitations of the stuff we read. What we wrote bore the appearance of tweed and carried the smell of fustian: its name was irrelevance. I found reading essays a bore and writing them torture. The ones I was forced to read I had not been taught to appreciate; the ones I was required to write I approached with a sordid combination of dismay, loathing, and fear. Although the whole business smacked of the artificial and merely contrived, it was serious, very serious. Write a bad essay, and you got a bad grade, and a bad grade not only signaled intellectual weakness but also represented moral failure for one who was the first in his family to finish high school, let alone go to college. Besides, “English” was beginning to seem important, though I was far from being able to say why. Something there was that attracted me, even as I felt reduced by the results of my effort.

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My teacher, the severity of whose standards I associate with the hardness of his leather soles and heels (I can still hear their rhythmic tapping), wrote that semester almost as much on my limp pages as I had. He not only ferreted out the occasional grammatical error or misspelling but also spotted, almost gleeful and affirmed in the achievement, clichés, infelicitous, and, worse, unidiomatic expressions, difficulties in prose rhythm, lack of coherence, failures in argumentation, rhetorical ineptitude, and inattention alike to pace, to the reader, and to the text I was commenting on, among other lapses now happily lost to memory. I was bullied as much by his unrelenting thoroughness and unsparing red pencil as by my proven ignorance and growing distaste for the form I was allegedly representing. That form I blamed for my suffering. I plummeted toward the nadir with a paper—hardly an essay—on some work by Lionel Trilling, my teacher’s hero; I hit rock-bottom with my next disgrace, on Emerson’s “Nature,” which earned the first F to blemish my record. Though it was the A he for some reason gave me for the semester that made me an English major, his damnable thoroughness never quite balanced the devastation of his unrelieved critique. If I cannot praise him as a teacher of writing, I cannot but fault him as a teacher of reading, an activity that should lead naturally rather than artificially to writing. What my teacher did not do—and it continues to plague the teaching of writing—was to recognize and treat the essay as an art form worthy in its own right of the closest attention and the most scrupulous reading. We read essays as no different from newspaper articles and bottle labels: straightforwardly, as factual accounts, the meaning of which was supposedly transparent. Looking for no artful construction or literary effects, we of course found none. If you don’t—or can’t—read essays, how can you be expected to write them? We wrote “essays” as if they were “compositions,” entities that smack of the artificial and the mechanical. Needed, I find now, is an altogether different take, one that treats the essay as creative in the same way as novels, poems, and plays, differing from these more respected forms, of course, in the degree or extent of entailed artfulness. More than the sum of its parts, the essay, like these literary forms, moves closer to the thumping human heart than to a humming, externally powered, and vibrating machine. Before the really good essay, as with any other strong writing, your heart beats in answer, responding to its power, its insight, its honesty—its seeming organicism.

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Despite Freshman Honors English, and despite (not because of) three summers’ tries at news reporting, I could not write, even if I thought I could, pretending the pornographic glop I penned my senior year was a novel. Graduate study in English at the University of Virginia disabused me of a certain notion of writing without quite setting me straight. The distinguished Shakespearean and textual editor Fredson Bowers declined to read past the required twentieth of my fifty-four shapeless pages on Coriolanus. After complimenting me on my memory, which led to a good grade on his objective final exam, Professor Bowers harrumphed, more devastating in a sentence than my freshman English teacher had been in a semester: “Now, Mr. Atkins, all you have to do is learn how to write.” I got a B+ for the course, barely enough to hang on. The emphasis then fell, as it still does in graduate study, on logical argumentation and clarity of presentation, not far removed from what another of my University of Virginia professors (E.D. Hirsch) later praised as “relative readability.”1 I was now further from the essay than I had been in college, for we read none, and we wrote something altogether different. Happily, for the immediate purpose, Francis Russell Hart took the time, a model teacher, to show me the ropes, introducing me to professional expectations as he taught me how to structure a defensible and readable argument (to have known Sheridan Baker might have spared me Fredson Bowers’s wrath). Rus Hart did more than take time and show interest in me as a student—he treated me as a person. He also enlightened when, in response to my sophomoric claim that my professors were interested only in “style,” he declared, “You can’t separate what’s being said from how it’s said.” That simple but profound comment launched a continuing education. A few years later, Aubrey Williams, the distinguished Pope scholar and my mentor in a Clark Library postdoctoral program, added a layer to the instruction, helping me slash 546 pages of a Dryden manuscript to a svelte 222: “Put it in short skirts,” he advised. What I had slowly learned to write is what the philosopher– novelist–essayist William H. Gass excoriates as “that awful object, ‘the article.’ ” Though often loosely labeled essays, articles in truth constitute their virtual opposite. In Gass’s scalding terms, the “definite” article should “be striking of course, original of course, important naturally, yet without possessing either grace or charm or elegance, since these qualities will interfere with the impression of seriousness which it wishes to maintain.” Unlike the peripatetic, skeptical, and

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protean essay, the article never represents itself “as an activity—the process, the working, the wondering”—and wandering, I would add. Instead, it functions principally as “writing born for its immediate burial in a Journal.”2 *

* *

Though I never hated teaching, for years I didn’t enjoy it, or take much pride in it, suffering it, a means to an end, because it kept my family and me afloat. It wasn’t that I preferred research and the writing it leads to, regarding that as my real work. In truth, I felt then about scholarship exactly as I did about teaching: I went about both activities mechanically and grim-faced, experiencing neither excitement nor satisfaction and having no sense of commitment or significance. My first book—that bloated manuscript that I eventually decked out in “short skirts”—took ten years to see the light of common day. It took even longer for me to become what I consider a good teacher. I was never, I hope, a bad teacher, being saved by a conscientiousness verging on the obsessive, which ensured meticulous preparation, partly, to be sure, out of defensiveness bred of the fear of not knowing (the answer). But good teaching entails more, of course, than thorough preparation, fresh readings, fair grading, and faithful keeping of office hours. Though honesty compels admission of a je ne sais quoi, good teaching I now understand as essayistic teaching. I had been, I can now see, an article: rather stiff, not a little pretentious, armed with a packaged set of answers, relying on—and sometimes cowering behind—a parade of citations and authorities buttressing my claim to know. I aspired to mastery, anxious about my performance and impatient when students failed to share my tunnel vision—and to replicate my values. Lacking passion and having little life outside the classroom and the study, I deserved a former chair’s drunken description: I was “one mechanical son of a bitch.” Lacking the sympathy born of the suffering that, as Keats knew, schools an intelligence and makes it a soul, I wrote articles; teaching like an article, I gave little thought to the Other. If the (definite) article reflects the authoritarianism and mastery prized by a profession hooked on the idea of the teacher as magister, the essay mounts a serious challenge to such masculinism, opening a path to an alternative pedagogy. Learning takes a circuitous path, more erring than linear, the journey marked by interruptions,

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detours, returns, blocked exits, mishaps—and serendipity. The essay charts just such a course, represents just such a journey, as it records in “roundabout” fashion “the course of interpretive discovery.”3 Nothing mechanical here, instead a teaching dialectical and tentative rather than masterful and dogmatic, defined by deep (self-)questioning instead of the imposition of answers, and open to discovery rather than driven to transmit what Paulo Freire termed “the banking concept” of education.4 In a recent book devoted to the essay in Germany 1680–1815, John A. McCarthy argues that “the ‘spirit of the essay’ (Geist des Essays) is the mode’s one genuinely essential quality,” a spirit he defines as “skeptical inquiry, daring experimentation, and ironic play”5 —elsewhere, in the present book, I question the notion of “essayism” and essayistic “spirit.” For now, though: Thomas Harrison finds such essayism perhaps paradigmatically displayed in Ulrich, Robert Musil’s protagonist in the novel The Man without Qualities. It was, writes Musil, “approximately in the way that an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, takes a thing from many sides without comprehending it wholly—for a thing wholly comprehended loses its bulk and melts down into a concept—that [Ulrich] believed he could best survey and handle the world and his life.” A few pages later, Musil significantly adds, The translation of the word “essay” as “attempt,” which is the generally accepted one, only approximately gives us the most important allusion to the literary model. For an essay is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that might on a more favorable occasion be elevated to the status of truth (of that kind are only the articles and treatises, referred to as “chips from their workshops,” with which learned persons favour us); an essay is the unique and unalterable form that a person’s inner life assumes in a decisive thought.6

Musil echoes Theodor Adorno and what he calls “the abhorrence of the essayist to any kind of dogmatic system because of its tendency to limit the free flight of thought”; “genuine skepticism,” McCarthy writes of Adorno, is “the philosophical principle” at work in the essay.7 In another important account, Max Bense extends the point, arguing that the essayistic involves more than skepticism, more than openness and genuine exploration of alternatives: He writes essayistically who composes in an experimental manner, who not only scrutinizes his object from various vantage points, but

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also—during the act of writing itself, during the formulation and communication of his thoughts—discovers his topic or invents, questions, examines, tests and thinks it through, showing what is discernible at all under the aesthetic, ethical, practical, and intellectual conditions set by the author.8

These discussions bear at once on writing, teaching—and living. The essayistic teacher, I contend, not merely is open to different interpretations and perspectives but can also function, maybe flourish, in that condition Keats labeled “negative capability”: that ability to reside “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” thus to remain “content with half knowledge.” 9 No “egotistical sublime,” “which is a thing per se and stands alone,” the essayistic teacher resembles the poetical character as Keats described it: it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.10

The essayistic teacher, further, knows his or her own limits and respects that which transcends human power and control. Grace exceeds knowledge as it does art, and the humility the teacher knows may allow her or him once in a while to experience it. Part of the glory of essayistic teaching lies just here, in serendipity and the unpredictability of discovery, above all in envisioning the heart of the stranger (about which much more later). Sauntering wide-eyed, like the essayist whose mantle he has partially donned, whether he can quite identify it as such or not, the unarticle-like teacher may find not only the unexpected, the detour, the obstacle a hindrance to the mere conveyance of knowledge, but also that difficulty proves a boon, opening a path to new insight. As the essayist “discovers his topic . . . during the act of writing itself”—“the course of interpretive

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discovery”—thinking through, in, and by means of the writing, so does the essayistic teacher come to know in the process of engaging with texts, students, and their questions. The destination is reached in the going—another “course of interpretive discovery.” *

* *

Students today respond eagerly to the essay. Undergraduates and graduates alike find that it offers opportunities denied them elsewhere in the academy, a breath of fresh air in the sometimes fetid atmosphere of the halls of ivy and a positive response to familiar human needs. I do not think I exaggerate: the essay points a path toward a fulfillment that traditional academic writing knows not of. It is something we crave, as well as need, creatures of flesh and heart as well as mind. The essay alone, in fact, offers what makes writing in college more than an (academic) exercise. Because it combines, indeed requires, both the artful and the personal, writing essays offers satisfactions and significance that composition courses too often lack. The form itself demands your best efforts as you write about what matters to you. Teaching the essay may also bring out the best in the teacher. *

* *

My destination—the essay as a form to be taught and practiced, with its implications for teaching and for living—I reached via a path neither linear nor random. Perhaps surprisingly, as I have detailed in Estranging the Familiar,11 my years-long work on and in deconstruction taught me to value the openness, antidogmatism, wariness of systems, and “both/and”-ness that also marks the essay. My later work on the critical essayist (and poet) Geoffrey Hartman cemented the connection; I mean both his striking commentary on the essay and his own particular essaying. Without the work in theory, I am not sure I would have been available to the essay. Something else kicked in, too. Having had my critical writing once or twice praised for its clarity and ease of expression, I had begun to love sentences, glorying in those that I found in essays in particular and then working hard to make some of my own, both “comely and muscular.”12 It is hard to miss the great care essayists, of various persuasions, lavish on their sentences: not only Ozick but also, for instance, Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, Richard Selzer, to say nothing of E.B. White

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or G.K. Chesterton. Essays thrive on strong sentences, frequently sporting the epigrammatic as they combine with sententiae: finely chiseled, often dancing, reaffirming the potential of the “pretious life-blood” (Milton) that is our language. Sentences thus matter a lot, figuring the artfulness that helps make the (familiar) essay worthy of the most serious attention. Something else contributes to that significance, and that is a focus on the personal, without which the essay simply morphs into its “opposite,” that “awful object, ‘the article.’ ”13 The matter of the personal is, as I have already remarked, complex, and I shall continue to treat it in these pages. Suffice it to say at this point that in some quarters we have experienced a resurgence of interest in all things “personal” and pertaining to “personality,” in some cases a return with a vengeance veering toward indulgence; thus the “personal essay” poses a certain problematic. Without the artfulness that the “familiar” essay practically ensures, the personal flounders, appearing sometimes as merely experimental and reading like an unleavened, half-baked diary entry, not yet ready for consumption. The personal and the artful come together in the (familiar) essay. The need remains: to envision the heart of the other, however he, she, or it be understood—the way to avoid indulgence. Though deriving from personal experience, familiar essays differ from, and transcend, what Scott Russell Sanders calls “pure autobiography.”14 That and its confrere, the memoir (distinctions grow hazy here), foreground an individual’s private experience without extracting from it a generalized, possibly universal point. Point matters. Experience has brought the essayist to it, even though she or he would not sacrifice or even subordinate the journey for the destination reached. Scott Sanders focuses the issue: “I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to me a door through which others might pass.”15 Since Montaigne, essayists have reflected in their titles this transcendence of the merely private or individual, a tiny preposition opening a door from the self onto the larger world, thus Bacon’s “Of Studies,” Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey,” Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook,” Nancy Mairs’s “On Loving Men.” *

* *

I now regularly teach the essay, and I think I teach it, as well as other subjects, essayistically. In a sense, I’m far removed from my freshman

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English experience and the worthless stomping of student prose. Lusting to write essays, I’m also about as far from my graduate school experience as imaginable. I think of a recent class in Advanced Composition. While others described the great Midwestern floods, offered an op-ed piece or two on handicapped-accessible playgrounds, and palavered on the evils of the lottery, intercollegiate athletics, and divorce, “Beth” struggled with what I call “the curse of autobiography.” After breaking the yoke of J-School objectivity and loosening the noose of Freshman Comp impersonality, she wrote about herself, her desires, and her needs, consigning to paper straightforward lamentations concerning failed “relationships” and her sad if hardly original experience peddling bras and panties. She proved unable, despite my earnest encouragement and frequent conferences, to find some generalized point that might give structure to her local details, lacking the skill or the imagination—not just the experience—necessary to move through and beyond the merely autobiographical, thus to derive an insight or judgment of interest and value to others. “What drives your writing?” Josh asked her, an essayist in the making. “What justifies it and makes me want to read on?” I sympathize, identify—which may be one reason my classes now seem to work. We struggled, Beth and I, well past the end of the course, both sensing an importance. At some point, well into the fall, we both saw: she realized the need to “envision the stranger’s heart,” which in this case is the reader’s, Josh’s point exactly. Despite the touted view of the essay as egocentric and self-indulgent (which it, of course, is), this lovely form that is the familiar essay insists on and derives from attention to and sensitivity for the other who receives it. I’m not sure you can be both an essayist and selfish. The essay demands capaciousness, expects it, exacts it. If even folks with the gift of experience have trouble executing the form we love, what of college students who indulge in “the curse of autobiography”? Since experience most often means years, they lack what “school[s] an Intelligence” and makes it “a soul.” Having too few years, perhaps they lack the necessary maturity—that power of memory and thus the capacity to place themselves in others’ shoes that Cynthia Ozick discusses and that Keats called “gusto.” If only years bring the mature mind and the seasoned heart, how can we expect eighteen-year-olds to make honest-to-God essays? Possible,

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even likely, disappointment in the achievement seems to me better, more pedagogically responsible, than insipidity of expectation. Can students from whom nothing is demanded that they cannot do ever do all they can? Better, ultimately, I suggest, to come up short as an essayist, making “only” autobiography, than to pass muster, perhaps succeed, in an effort impersonal, largely mechanical, and artificial. The challenge of the essay—to write personally and artfully about the familiar and through it to approach the universal—at once enlivens, inspires, and stretches. A familiar essay, furthermore, starts at one point and picks up lines as it proceeds, becoming unselfish, veering sometimes, expanding and enriching at others, acquiring layers in its wondrous, unpredictable, and serendipitous journey. Such layering goes some distance toward outwitting “the curse of autobiography,” allowing a responsive imagination to balance the lack of experience. Essaying, as Montaigne tries to teach us, is a writing of our lives. What would be more important? What else should we be doing? Better the skepticism that Montaigne bequeathed to the essay than the confidence that, though it be sexy, easily veers into arrogance, thence into dogmatism. Yet, there’s Hamlet, caught, thinking, always just thinking, assaying. *

* *

In the essays of Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, and Sam Pickering, as of George Orwell, James Baldwin, and Scott Russell Sanders, you feel commitment in the shape and rhythm of their sentences, hear it in the inflection of the voice we respect and trust; it’s a knowing that transcends intellection, bred of the experienced and thus broken heart. The drama in their work works itself out in the relation between their individuality and the subjects they so caringly engage. In the essayists I admire and keep coming back to I find an affirmation of life’s newness and joy. Joseph Epstein goes further: “love of life, in my reading of them, is one of the qualities that all the great essayists hold in common.”16 The essayist’s love is of a particular kind of life. Jacques Derrida would no doubt claim that desire for presence, fueled by nostalgia, drives the familiar essay, its goal the recovery of a life never available. Such a dismissal, I’ve come to realize, is both unfortunate and reductive, perhaps deriving from the lack of experience that “schools an Intelligence” and makes a soul. Think of Sam Pickering, author of numerous collections of familiar essays,

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living in Storrs, Connecticut, writing pleasantly about what he cares for most, spending time with Vicki and the kids, exploring the surrounding meadows and visiting Unnamed Pond for the hundredth, maybe thousandth, time, taking the time to become acquainted with nature’s great gifts and always finding something new and wondrous. The serendipity extends from these discoveries to those the mail brings from his readers, and so he responds, creating a place, a stance, responsibly. What a wonder-ful situation: to have people respond to your writing on a deeply human and personal level, finding it familiar (sometimes because fictionalized). Derrida’s respondents, far more numerous, sophisticated, and celebrated than Pickering’s, trust his ideas—they are intellectuals; Pickering’s ragtag bunch of irregulars respond to the familiar emotions, desires, and needs that we all share in this vale of tears: they find, and perhaps then extend, a shaft of light in a world all too bleak, dark, and uninviting. In essays, you find remarkably little nostalgia for a better life—since the essayist lives it, if in part only in his or her imagination. Essays are called familiar for good reason: they latch onto, explore, question, illuminate, and reveal wonder-ful surprises in the commonplace, what we all know, what we share. Essays are our lyrical ballads, at once revolutionary and conservative. Listen to Geoffrey Hartman’s description of Wordsworth’s similar and quietly epochal efforts: They displaced the avid reader’s attention from the unusual or fantastic incident to the sensitive response that an ordinary life might elicit. His almost plotless ballads are our first instance of minimalist art. But they are not abstract like that art: they surround familiar thoughts and happenings with an imaginative aura. The strange subtlety of Wordsworth’s poems was intended to retain ear, eye, and imagination, to wean them from the age’s degrading thirst after “outrageous stimulation.”17

Montaigne (of course) said what most needs saying when he perhaps inaugurated the essay 400 years ago: “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.”18 The essay may, then, be instrumental, after all. In fact, the essay is a medium for opening the path towards life’s newness and joy.

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CH A P T ER

4

E.B. White and the Poetics of Participation

Understanding is the name of the game, the best one in town. We read (texts) in order to understand them; we want to understand them, not so as to understand understanding (as Geoffrey Hartman supposes), but so that we can understand what they understand. Text and world engage in a reciprocal relation (the world understood allows us better to understand texts). There is no escaping reciprocity—or circularity—and that is no cause for alarm or lament. Understanding, willy-nilly, involves participation, as participation involves sympathy. I can no more understand a text by standing outside it than I can hope to understand the world by withdrawing and absenting myself from it, its challenges, opportunities, horrors, and glories. The ancient Hebrews learned to “envision the stranger’s heart” thanks to their bondage in Egypt.1 Odysseus comes to selfcontrol, sympathy, and generosity because of his visit to the Kingdom of the Dead, where he participates in nothingness. The Logos understands man because He took our form and being in the person of His Son, Christ Jesus, thus making love possible as He so loved us. We like people who understand, who are understanding. E.B. White is one of those writers who is understanding of the human predicament, of our capacity for both meanness and greatness, of time’s apparently merciless march, of his own failings and penchant for error. “Andy” White seems, moreover, to be one of the most understanding persons we know. He also appears notoriously understandable, in his own right. Too rarely do we go further and ask and seek to understand what lies behind that capacity for understanding: his own understanding. Possibly a paradox: sometimes at least, participation entails keeping quiet, holding your peace, controlling the urge and tendency

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to speak. Nowhere is this truer than in teaching, which includes a pastoral function. In conversation, too, with a friend or acquaintance, or when solicited for advice, participation means listening. The same is true in reading—and in writing, manifested in White as restraint, simplicity, brevity, and self-effacement. *

* *

I begin, not with White, but with his fellow-familiar essayist, physician–teacher–writer Richard Selzer. No one I know has more effectively dramatized what I call “the poetics of participation,” not even E.B. White. In his brilliant essay “A Worm from My Notebook,” we recall, Selzer tells the story of a poor Zairean farmer named Ibrahim who contracts the lethal Guinea worm. Selzer precedes the fiction with incisive commentary about writing, and in “meta-”fashion about writing this story. By means of the obvious echo of parasite and host, the story itself dramatizes the worm’s literal participation in the man. Just as, moreover, dreaded Dracunculus medinensis “worms” its way inside, so does the story worm its way into the reader—but then the reader also worms his or her way into the story. Selzer has alerted us to these goings-on in inviting us to participate in the writing of the story, too. After all, he writes, and I quoted it earlier, 2 you have to love your characters, and the reader must participate in that love. No one, perhaps, has ever written better about writing. Here, the poetics of participation becomes, inevitably, the ethics and even the theology of participation. Recall White, starting off his foreword to the 1977 collected Essays: his apologia for essaying and an enduring, sustaining description of such a writer’s work. His opening words focus on the essayist as “a self-liberated man,” one who enjoys, delighting in adventure and discovery. “Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”3 These last words often receive more attention and are assumed to bear more weight than they deserve in context. They participate—dare I say?—in a whole that does not so much compromise them, or is compromised by them, as they qualify them. In truth, the last sentence springs a certain surprise, even given “self-liberated” in the first words of this “Gen’rous Converse” (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism); it stings—rather than packs a wallop—alerting the reader to the necessity to read.

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White’s assumption emerges clearly: the essayist believes that his or her reader will show interest in his every word, thought, saunter, and discovery. The reason is—or at least, a reason is—that the reader matches the writer, the essayist, in giving herself up to the other, in participating in adventure, in following “the course of interpretive discovery.”4 A pattern exists, in other words, in which reader and writer alike participate. That White immediately, still in only his second sentence here, turns to metaphor confirms the point, metaphor being the agent of reciprocity, says Cynthia Ozick.5 The word “excursion” at the beginning of the next sentence bolsters the sense White is developing, whether consciously or not: “excursion” echoes—in the ear of the participating reader—with “excursus,” linking walking and writing. The essay is, as everyone says, a famously peripatetic and ambulatory form, the essayist frequently out walking and almost as frequently writing about his walks (Thoreau, William Hazlitt, Edward Hoagland, Sam Pickering, to take but a few who spring immediately to mind); essaying is, in fact, a kind of walking about, a sauntering, “taking a line out for a walk” (Joseph Epstein, drawing on the artist Paul Klee). Walking is thus a metaphor for essaying. By extension, we come to see that—and how—writing and living life participate in one another and engage in fruitful reciprocity. In the writing that follows in this charming, engaging, and insightful book, the Essays, made of thirty-one instances divided into seven sections, White dons the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, acknowledged “father” of the form. He may feel free, this “selfliberated man,” to “pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast,”6 and yet there stands a form, bequeathed to him (and us) by the sixteenth-century Frenchman. Nobody has been able to define it, few to describe it accurately; no one comes closer than White, pointing to its tension, its way of bringing together seeming opposites: “even the essayist’s escape from discipline is only a partial escape: the essay, although a relaxed form, imposes its own disciplines, raises its own problems.” 7 White has even written, a few sentences before, of “the essay form (or lack of form)”8 Rather than contradiction, I suggest, rather even than complication, White reveals inclusion. Everywhere, the form (or lack of form) he embraces and celebrates opposes, and resists, exclusion, making room, inviting in—“to life’s dance.” The recipient of

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invitation “will always be welcome at the party.” The “music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet.”9 I take White’s apt words from “A Slight Sound at Evening,” an essay commemorating the centennial of Thoreau’s Walden. White himself, of course, accepts the invitation to participate in “life’s dance,” finding—if not quite contentment—enjoyment and satisfactions in country life, obviously in writing, in the old Ford Model T, the sights and sounds of New York City, a young girl rehearsing bareback riding for Ringling North’s circus. He is “a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work,” and a note of affirmativeness marks his essays, as it does, says Joseph Epstein, the work of all the major writers in the essay form.10 In writing about Thoreau, that “hair-shirt of a man,” “a sort of Nature Boy,” whose greatest work “is his acknowledgment of the gift of life,”11 White show us that literary commentary fundamentally involves active participation in the work being read. White’s is no cool, detached, distanced, or simply professional “approach”; instead, he seems almost flooded by Walden. White even writes in a place resembling that famous cabin two miles from Concord at a clearing on Walden Pond. Notice the distinct and specific echoes of Thoreau in the following confessional paragraph, words and phrases not so much taken from the Transcendentalist as shared with him—White has accepted the invitation and now, responding, dances with Thoreau, with whom he does not, however, identify. He supposes that Thoreau “might find it instructive to know” that this essay is being written “in a house” that just happens to be “the same size and shape” as his own cabin on Walden Pond. Here, in his boathouse, he writes, he is both “wilder” and “healthier” than elsewhere: I have a chair, a bench, a table, and I can walk into the water if I tire of the land. My house fronts a cove. Two fishermen have just arrived to spot fish from the air—an osprey and a man in a small yellow plane who works for the fish company. The man, I have noticed, is less well equipped than the hawk, who can dive directly on his fish and carry it away without telephoning.12

Participation, not identification. The fisherman in the plane, moreover, above and distanced, lacks the hawk’s success, for the latter dives in with the fish. White, differently, shares his house, which he also shares with his mentor Thoreau.

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A few pages later, following added white space, White acknowledges that he “sometimes amuse[s himself] by bringing Henry Thoreau back to life and showing him the sights.”13 Thoreau thus now shares scenes and experiences with the later writer and admirer, participating with him, timelessness also intersecting time here. White imagines Thoreau’s responses and allows his words to mix with his own. White then moves to conclusion with a striking paragraph about the exact nature of the relationship between the earlier writer and himself, the reader of and commentator on the former—no solitary walking for White: “At any rate, I’d like to stroll about the countryside in Thoreau’s company for a day, observing the modern scene, inspecting today’s snowstorm, pointing out the sights, and offering belated apologies for my sins. . . . [T]he author of Walden has served as my conscience through the long stretches of my trivial days.”14 Here, whether intentionally or not, White reveals his difference from Thoreau, who, in my judgment at least, is pointedly uninviting and always seeming above us ordinary folks. I find him unwilling to participate in my life. Yet, White solicits Thoreau’s companionship. He ends this brilliant tribute, this sterling instance of familiar criticism, with these resonant, responsive, and responsible words: “Hairshirt or no, he is a better companion than most. . . . I find it agreeable to sit here this morning, in a house of correct proportions, and hear across a century of time his flute, his frogs, and his seductive summons to the wildest revels of them all.”15 White thus invites us to join him and with him in experiencing a writer said to invite us to “life’s dance.” White is an altogether more agreeable person—because so understanding. *

* *

Perhaps nowhere in the essays does White show greater understanding and compassion than in the justly celebrated “Death of a Pig,” with its deftness of touch and supreme rhetorical control of a situation named as “murder” and treated with sympathetic and self-effacing humor. The critic has, in turn, to be careful and wary, and try for similar deftness and delicacy of touch in writing of this comic piece, this humorous essay. As often, White here represents the situation as embodying a pattern, in which he comes to participate and so to understand (similarly in “Once More to the Lake,” repetition of the father in the son signaling participation in time): “The scheme of

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buying a spring pig in blossom-time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern.”16 Unfortunately for pig and man in this case, “[t]he classic outline of the tragedy was lost,” and as a result White now adds, he “found [him]self cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician—a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop.” In this unbalanced dramatic situation, White finds that his “sympathies were now wholly with the pig.”17 The nature of the play being performed may have changed—from tragedy to farce and “slapstick”—but White has a role to play, and he participates fully. The trouble is, White “wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption . . . no deviation.”18 He thinks, in other words, at the outset of his troubles, of his troubles, of himself, and an expected and comforting routine. Like the dying pig, White needs to be purged. Ironically, his comes as a result of administering an enema to the suffering animal, of participating intimately, literally. “I discovered,” he writes, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles. The pig’s lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. . . . His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness.19

Thus, White participates in the pig’s lot. In so doing, and still very much self-centered, he “knew that what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world.”20 Still, not only does White hold his pig “steadily in the bowl of [his] mind,” but he also shares (in) his pain and suffering, the point accented by White’s use of a phrase recalling the vet’s diagnosis: but whereas the latter spoke of “deep hemorrhagic infarcts,” White writes that he eventually “cried internally—deep hemorrhagic intears.”21 Sympathy, in other words, and participation, but not identification. White writes here, he says, because someone needs to “do the accounting.”22 He needed, apparently, to share the story, perhaps thereby, via confession, to assuage (at least) his felt guilt. After all, “the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered . . . a sorrow in which [the community] feels fully involved. I have written this account,” he continues, in the last paragraph, “in penitence and in

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grief, as a man who failed to raise his pig, and to explain my deviation from the classic course of so many raised pigs.”23 *

* *

Here Is New York is surely one of White’s most revered and most successful essays (for us post-9/11 readers it contains eerie and horrid anticipations and predictions of airplanes plowing into towers and skyscrapers). In the foreword to Essays, White himself finds that the essay has “been seriously affected by the passage of time and now stand[s] as [one of the] period pieces”: “I wrote it in the summer of 1948, during a hot spell. The city I described has disappeared, and another city has emerged in its place—one that I’m not familiar with.”24 So saying, he accomplishes more than one important thing: he affirms the timeliness of time and its crucial thematic place throughout his writing, and he confirms the critical role of familiarity, in writing as in life, a subject directly focused in, for instance, “Home-Coming,” about a very different kind of home. That White names familiarity as key to understanding in New York and Maine alike, despite their massive differences, is precisely the point: they share something, you find something crucial repeated, a pattern emerges and persists. Pattern, borne of repetition and its understanding the product of observation, points Here Is New York. White’s method and procedure, though, are subtle, his manner deliberate but delicate. Take this passage of keen observation that breeds less a pattern than a difference enriched by the reader’s perception of the echo of T.S. Eliot’s Tiresias, that “composite” figure—the most important “personage” in The Waste Land, writes the poet in the notes he added to the poem— literally blind but figuratively capable of great insight; indeed, having lived—and participated—as both man and woman, he has the capacity to “foresee” all that happens between the lustful “clerk carbuncular” and “the typist home at teatime” in the poem’s geographically and thematically central section titled “The Fire Sermon”—the prophet thus participating in the sordid scene. “With dinner in mind,” White records, this time, stopping in “an ex-speakeasy in East Fifty-third Street,”25 an echo with significant differences and outcome: “Behind me . . . a young intellectual is trying to persuade a girl to come live with him and be his love. She has her guard up.” White as “recording secretary” writes, “In the mirror over the bar I can see the ritual of the second drink.”26 The single word “ritual” catches the repetition

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and recurrence, but White is less interested here than Eliot is in The Waste Land in any pattern that he as observer might perceive. White remains with the details, with the literal level, attentive, scrupulous, recording. As he has (just) written, “New York provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing. I wander around, reexamining this spectacle, hoping that I can put it on paper.”27 Early on in Here Is New York, White plants the seeds that he will bring to fruition in the course of the essay, referring to “this fragile participation in destiny,” observed in the “link with Oz” thanks to the regular appearance of the actor Fred Stone at a shared lunch counter: a “man sitting next to me (about eighteen inches away along the wall).”28 What White then terms “the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation”29 marks this particular experience and, by means of its “blend” of difference and opposition, defines the New Yorkers’. No one moment in the city, says White, is completely alone or separate: “I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight . . . and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss.”30 The familiar essay itself, especially as White performs it, participates in the action and experience White so well describes and embodies. Here Is New York is, in some ways, unusual for him as essayist. Certainly it begins less concretely, more reflectively, more philosophically perhaps, and less personally than do his other contributions in essay form.31 Yet, before long, in paragraph after paragraph, he turns, naturally it seems, from the general to the personal, reversing, in fact, the typical essayistic procedure of proceeding to the general (and universal) in, through, and by means of the concrete, the particular and the personal. White’s subject, though, is not himself, but the city, and he is writing not a personal but a familiar essay. Still, he accounts for the city by literally putting himself in it: “I am, at the moment of writing this . . .”; “It is Saturday. . . . I turn through West Forty-eighth Street. . . .”; “I stare through the west windows at the Manufacturers Trust Company and at the red brick fronts on the north side of Ninth Street. . . .”; “I head east along Rivington”32 —a walker in the city, to borrow Alfred Kazin’s book title. The descriptions, by the way, could usefully, instructively be compared with T.S. Eliot’s of the modern city in The Waste Land, for White too observes the filth, the ennui, the angst, the competitiveness, the indifference, the suffering. White too discerns pattern, but,

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frankly, he appears, to me at least, as more capacious, able to see pattern without reducing direct, concrete experience and its details for the sake of generalities. In any case, White observes the universal in the particular, timelessness in time, meaning in experience—notice, here, how he puts the reader, too, in the position of participant, shifting to the second person: Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal— the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism.33

White knows, understands, and sympathizes, for “each sleeper” he sees, on the street, has “drained his release.”34 You (too) participate, even at a distance: be it as reader, at eighteen inches from a fellow diner, or in giving alms, however minimal and with whatever contrivance and avoidance of physical contact. The essay, as form, is the pattern that White dramatically represents: it takes you through the particular to the general and the universal, revealing in the process the extra-ordinary in the ordinary. Perhaps above all else, New York provides its denizens something that is itself extraordinary and yet familiar if not precisely ordinary: “the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.”35 All this the commuter misses—“the queerest bird of all.”36 He, simply put, does not participate and so “discovers nothing much about the city except the time of arrival and departure of trains and buses, and the path to a quick lunch. He is desk-bound, and has never, idly roaming in the gloaming, stumbled suddenly on” the extra-ordinary within the ordinary; indeed, “he has never come suddenly on anything at all in New York as a loiterer, because he has had no time between trains.”37 So described, the commuter appears as a familiar essayist’s opposite. White thus concludes: “The commuter dies with tremendous mileage to his credit, but he is no rover. . . . The Long Island Rail Road alone carried forty million commuters last year; but many of them were the same fellow retracing his steps.”38 The essayist is, of course, defined by his or her difference, even eccentricity, often individuality.

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To this essentially satirical observation and description, White adds an unusually short paragraph, still thinking of the commuter but now offering an alternative, or perhaps it is an antidote, properly but differently represented by a particular and specific person, one named at that: The terrain of New York is such that a resident sometimes travels farther, in the end, than a commuter. Irving Berlin’s journey from Cherry Street in the lower East Side to an apartment uptown was through an alley and was only three or four miles in length, but it was like going three times around the world.39

It is hard, very hard, for a commuter to participate—in communion.

CH A P T ER

5

“The Way Life Should Be,” or the Maine-ing of Existence: E.B. White as Familiar Essayist

Teaching often leads to critical essaying, or so I have found. The inspirational course in this case was one of the more unusual ones I have taught in 40 years of professing English: E.B. White and T.S. Eliot—a literal “course of interpretive discovery” (to quote Paul H. Fry again).1 I offered it in the first place because I am an amateur of both writers, as much for their differences as perhaps despite them. Eliot left the States for England; White, less grandly, left New York City for Maine. Neither transcended his former place, White often returned to New York, and indeed place mattered greatly to both men, albeit differently (e.g., see Eliot’s Four Quartets). For Eliot, place was inseparable from history and culture; for White, it came to mean the rural. Eliot was always a “city” poet, his values urban, his style urbane, indeed cosmopolitan; White valued dirt and mud, farm and friends, pigs and people, raccoons, balsam fir, old kitchens, a ghoulish dachshund named Fred. On the verge of retirement now, I find myself inclined more and more toward the off-hand, the slighted and the neglected, the unexpected, the unusual2 —always an outsider, I suppose. I admire White’s Yankee plain-spokenness and Eliot’s (Southern) courtliness, his faith and White’s skepticism, the latter’s Democratic liberalism and the former’s self-professed Royalism. I find myself, too, in-between White and Eliot, or, rather, both one and the other. Little wonder that in the course sparks flew, as I figured they would. If Eliot and White do not agree on the via media, and they most certainly do not, they yet both take, and meet on, the indirect way. Over time, I have learned from Eliot to value comparison, one of the two tools of the critic, he vowed, the other being analysis. I have

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taught Eliot alongside his friend Pound as well as by himself and never found the journey quite satisfying, despite all that I learned (not least from the students, struggling with this difficult and demanding writer, in prose and verse alike). Every time I teach White, on the other hand, students fall in love with him, poor, often humorless graduates as well as “untheorized” undergraduates. Eliot thought that modern literature would have to be difficult; White, like his Cornell teacher Will Strunk, figured “the reader was in serious trouble most of the time,” no matter what he was reading, “a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.”3 In spite of Eliot’s (earned) reputation as serious and even stuffy—to which his friend Virginia Woolf contributed in representing him in a four-piece suit—he loved humor, perhaps as much as White did (Eliot was especially enamored of Groucho Marx). So, I started the White-Eliot course with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Wild Swan. I reckoned that I would throw the students a couple of ropes on which were strung cookies, chips, and various libations. *

* *

This book too enacts “the course of interpretive discovery,” testifying to and affirming my argument that strong critical writing, like the essay whose form it takes, leads to insights and understanding unknown or unavailable to the writer at the outset. One of my important discoveries in writing here, to be candid, came in returning to, and knowing for the first time, E.B. White writing on Thoreau, especially the observation that in the earlier essayist appears “religious feeling without religious images”4 —a “luminous detail” (Ezra Pound).5 Suddenly—at long last, really—I saw in White what White sees in that writer and man he so much admires.6 At the same time, the difference between White and Eliot loomed large and massive: White lacks the “religious images” that Eliot finds essential to “religious feelings.” Yet, Eliot affirms, in the single most important verse of his greatest poem (Four Quartets), “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation,” pointedly omitting the definite article.7 Incarnation, in other words, signifies the pattern of which the Incarnation stands as the paradigmatic instance in human history. Eliot may, then, have more in common with White (and

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Thoreau) than first appears—although, truth to tell, he also has the “religious images”: in Four Quartets, he chooses not always to invoke them, his concern being with the moral order built into the nature of things and available to all men and women everywhere and at all times. *

* *

In a tribute to his late Cornell University English teacher Will Strunk, White wrote of the simplicity that he found in Henry David Thoreau, admired, and tried consistently to practice in his own life. Here, in the essay that would eventually introduce the best-selling Elements of Style, Strunk’s famous “little book” that his student resurrected, White applies as taught the principles of simple living to the difficult task of writing. “Cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity” are the watchwords of Elements of Style, virtually defining simplicity. Often crying “Omit needless words!” Will Strunk wrote this, which White describes as “a short, valuable essay on the nature and beauty of brevity—sixty-three words that could change the world”8: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.9

With classic essayistic self-deprecation, White confesses to “have been trying to omit needless words since 1919.”10 Then, the student reveals the perhaps surprising fact about his mentor that he cared very much about readers, their inevitable plight, and the difficulties inherent in the act (and art) of reading: “All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader.”11 The ensuing familiar imagery of the reader in a swamp, in need of a helpful, saving rope, quoted earlier, points the nature of the effort. Eliot was of a different mind, altogether, although he shared the Strunkian commitment to precision and exactness of expression. Writing in “The Metaphysical Poets” around the same time as White was beginning to put pen to paper, he announced—some say “pontificated”—that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present,

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must be difficult.” The reason is clear, he explains, no more likely to throw his reader a rope than to use such a metaphor: Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.12

White’s friend Thoreau was wary of civilization, indeed opposed to it (according to the essay “Walking”), and White shows no sign of having read Dante or Joyce, of having seen Franz Hals or Picasso, or having heard Mozart or Mahler or Aaron Copland. Eliot often wrote, in fact, of difficulty, both describing and endorsing it. Anglo-Catholic Christianity, which he embraced in 1927, appears as demanding, risky, enormously difficult: “the via media,” he said, “is of all ways the most difficult to follow.”13 In Four Quartets, Eliot cuts to the heart of Christian belief, the Incarnation, but strategically presents it as “Incarnation,” referring to the pattern always and everywhere present, in all times and places. In another essay, this one on the seventeenth-century French writer Blaise Pascal, Eliot outlines the progress toward belief, “the process of the mind of the intelligent believer,” detailing the steps or stages through which such a person passes. The passage is familiar, smacking—unusually for “the invisible poet”—of the autobiographical. The “process” culminates in acceptance of the doctrine of the Incarnation, “the heart of the matter.”14 The Incarnation is, as I have stated, the paradigmatic instance of Incarnation. On the way, in the process, to this essential dogma, you start, in other words, where White apparently stopped and stayed: with the world faithfully and exactly observed and represented. You should, however, proceed in a posteriori fashion: in, through, and by means of the small and ordinary to the large, general, universal, and extra-ordinary, transcendence available only via immanence. White would, of course, never use the word “parthenogenesis,” any more than he would think of beginning a poem—he was also a poet—with such words as Eliot uses, opening “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”: “Polyphiloprogenitive / The sapient sutlers of the Lord / Drift across the window-panes. / In the beginning was the Word.” White was not a believer, although he might well accept that

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“In the beginning was the word.” Eliot thought that the letter “giveth life” whereas “the spirit killeth.”15 *

* *

As I noted earlier, on the centenary of the publication of Walden, Thoreau’s collection of linked essays about time spent away from “civilization,” E.B. White, long smitten with the book and its author, offered a beautiful and moving tribute, as relevant today as—if not more so than—50 years ago. Admitting that “Walden is an oddity in American letters,” perhaps “the oddest of our distinguished oddities,” its sympathetic critic also describes the book as “like an invitation to life’s dance.”16 The metaphor of life as dance bears great significance, including to Eliot and especially in the second section of Four Quartets (titled “East Coker”). We shall return to it directly, but for now I wish to stay for a moment with White’s personal take on the book before him. He emphasizes what it has done for him, what Thoreau had learned and what others can learn from him, what Walden can thus do for others. White quotes this sentence: “ ‘I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ ”17 White then follows with a statement of personal significance, the whole point of “A Slight Sound at Evening”: “The sentence has the power to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt. I recall my exhilaration upon reading it, many years ago, in a time of hesitation and despair. It restored me to health. . . . I am merely paying off an old score—or an installment on it.”18 White indulges no more in autobiography than does Thoreau, telling only as much as we need to know, referring merely to “a time of hesitation and despair,” and so making clear that by “sea of doubt” he has in mind something less sublime and grand than philosophical angst or theological despair. The site being extolled is moral, familiar, and eminently recognizable; we easily and readily sympathize. The commentator on Walden engages, attracts, endears because he is a vital participant in the story of the book, its meaning and its significance— his own place (of writing) modeling Thoreau’s famous tight little cabin on Walden Pond, in the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts. We (come to) care about this great, odd book because White does and because he testifies to its capacities, its capaciousness.

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At the end of his essay, when he imagines Thoreau back on earth, observing humankind’s newfangled toys and our supposed and prized technological advances, White demonstrates the meaning and significance of familiarity.19 Hope and realism coexist, without either enthusiasm or despair, revealing earned balance and restraint. But Thoreau here is more than an observer: this “hair-shirt of a man” is a reminder, a critic, thus “my conscience through the long stretches of my trivial days,” an “upright man, who long ago gave collaboration to impulses [men and women] perceived were right and issued warnings against the things they instinctively knew to be their enemies.”20 “A Slight Sound at Evening” ends by returning to its beginning. It reaffirms the centrality of time in all our business and as our business. It also makes clear that what we have just witnessed in the essay, with Thoreau returning to earth after a hundred years elsewhere, is an intersection of the timeless with time. Thus White concludes his essay, his tribute, on a note or two of timelessness—Thoreau’s “invitation” to join in “life’s dance,” he writes, still “stands”: “It will beckon as long as this remarkable book [Walden] stays in print.”21 Sameness triumphs over temporal difference—not just sameness, however, but also the unchanging, the immutable, the eternal sounds, the universal values, and the human capacities for appreciation, sympathy, and understanding. Thoreau the essayist, the author of enduring Walden, represents, in White’s eyes and to his ears, the timeless, here depicted as returning to time, with its evanescent and ever-changing “sights and sounds,” intersecting with it, familiar. White’s earlier response to Thoreau confirms my point. The essay is “The Retort Transcendental.” Having affirmed that he carries about with him the World’s Classic edition of Walden that he bought (in 1927 for 90 cents), he now suffers the consequences. It is, he writes, “the most amusing detective story I possess,” and he goes on to say that, after rereading it so many times, he finds himself replying to someone’s questions with a quotation: for example, to a headwaiter’s question whether he is alone, he is apt to respond: “ ‘I feel it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time,’ I reply. ‘To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone.’ Then I glare triumphantly at the waiter and snatch the napkin from the plate.”22 The essay’s title not only bears a pun, of course, but it also marks Thoreau’s emergence in White’s world and in this case, his incorporation of and frequent sympathetic engagement with the earlier writer precisely as an act

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of transcendence, the author of Walden and his often-biting words intersecting White’s own. White’s is by no means an orthodox, or even a Christian, interpretation of timelessness. Thoreau himself, mortal albeit great man, embodies the timeless: he is timelessness in “A Slight Sound at Evening.” White’s artistic strategy is, in any case, little short of brilliant, for he succeeds in dramatizing—rather than simply declaring—Thoreau’s immortality and so that of the book to which he pays lasting tribute. *

* *

For all his fondness for and admiration of Thoreau, White was no Transcendentalist. As much as he (too) was for simplicity, White never reduced things; while Thoreau looked for purity, White seemed perfectly content with mixture, even with dirt, in “Coon Tree” writing against “sterility” and the “smells of modernity and Ajax.”23 “I was pleased to learn not long ago,” he writes in this 1956 essay, “that children in unsanitary homes acquire a better resistance to certain diseases (polio and hepatitis among them) than children in homes where sanitation is king.” Indeed, he adds, concluding the essay, “neither my wife nor I have enjoyed as good health since the back kitchen got renovated,” with the result that “sanitation broods over all.”24 White had no desire, nor did he secretly harbor the wish, to overcome either the familiar “sights and sounds” of the world in which he lived or the muck and the mire of the pig yard in which he walked, along with his old dachshund, to minister to his dying charge—and administer an enema of rich suds. The exemplary result of that “colonic carnival” was new understanding on the essayist’s part: he is attached to the pig, sharing his lot—“the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness.”25 “Embodiment” is, of course, incarnation, with a small letter. The experience of caring for the pig, heretofore destined for “murder,” as White put it, and signifying no more than ham and bacon, brings White to meaning, or meaning to him. Let us pause briefly over “Death of a Pig,” about which I have written at some length in Tracing the Essay. I am reminded—perhaps perversely, I admit—of Odysseus and his visit, along with his men, to Circe’s alluring island. There, sensual pleasures abound, not least for the great “hero” himself, and his men are all too ready to indulge. Indeed, in a striking anticipation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Homer has Circe turn them into pigs. They

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become, that is to say, literally pigs as a result of their brutish behavior. I doubt very much that White was thinking of The Odyssey when he composed his essay (nor when he wrote Stuart Little, either). Still, we associate pig with earthiness, certainly the physical and material world. This sense acquires additional resonance and meaning from White’s key assertion that “[t]he pig’s lot and mine were inextricably bound now. . . . His suffering became the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness.” In short, White identifies with the pig, and the man’s suffering is both in and at the hands of time: he too—White, you, and I—will eventually share the pig’s lot, its fate. Time is the enemy, and any meaning is completely immanent, with nary a hint of transcendent, and so “embodiment” never becomes Incarnation. Because it never becomes transcendent, meaning never reaches Incarnation. In fact, in White, for all his capaciousness, there lurks a certain sterility: Transcendence does not impregnate Immanence. A whole is reduced to one part, and embodiment in White lacks the richness that is its potential, meaning little more than “representation” or, perhaps, “depiction.” Here, White is closer to Pound than to Eliot, who dedicated The Waste Land to his friend with the borrowed words “il miglior fabbro.” Pound was, in the words of one commentator, a “pagan fundamentalist” and an “immanentist,”26 for whom, as Pound himself famously wrote in the Cantos, “the Gods have not returned / ‘They have never left us.’ ”27 I do not mean to suggest that White consciously followed Pound or that he was anywhere near as extreme in his literalism. Pound, after all, saw Bacchus in the wine, his understanding quite “simple”: as the classical scholar D.S. Carne-Ross put it with grave authority, there is no “reverberating dimension of inwardness . . . no murmurous echo chamber where deeps supposedly answer to deeps.”28 The thing simply does not point beyond itself (nor does it point to us). There is, then, a tantalizing similarity here between Pound’s understanding and White’s practice, but that is all there is, an intriguing brief of similarity. White had, it seems, no more truck with the (pagan) gods than he did with (the Judeo-Christian) God. White’s attention is, in any case, directed to the here-and-now and familiar to the earth that is humankind’s home—our only home, he feels sure. The focus is good, for he proves a solid steward of the land he has inherited, grateful for it as well as indebted to it and determined to cultivate it. He has no interest in escaping or transcending it for the Moon, nor of purifying it of its muck and mire. In other words, White accepts reality as he finds it, in all its impurity, a keen

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observer as well as a conscientious attendant. More, he witnesses to its goodness, its fecundity, its pleasures, as well as the brutishness that is inseparable from life here and now. Both/and-ness bears vestiges of the incarnational pattern. *

* *

As Roberto Calasso wrote in a recent and important book Literature and the Gods, in Greek “the word theos, ‘god,’ has no vocative case. . . . Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens.” Atheos, on the other hand, “was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods.”29 The significance of this brief foray into linguistics emerges when Calasso takes us to the late eighteenth century in Germany and the reappearance of the Greek gods in the work of Heinrich Hölderlin. Suggestive, and exemplary, is the point made in a letter to the German poet from Siegfried Schmid: “ ‘All is life, if God animates us, invisible, felt. / They are light touches, but of sacred power.’ ”30 In other words, more vestiges of the Incarnational pattern: Being impregnates, creating Understanding and sympathy (in, through, and by means of which Love flows). Calasso says “there is one writer of whom we may suspect that he saw the gods enargeis, in all their vividness,” someone other than Pound, that is. That writer is Hölderlin, about whom Calasso offers this telling commentary: One needed to go beyond and behind the gods, to arrive at the pure divine, or rather the “immediate,” as Hölderlin was to write one day in a dazzling comment on Pindar. It is the immediate that escapes not only men but the gods too: “The immediate, strictly speaking, is as impossible for the gods as it is for men.” Hölderlin is referring here to the lines where Pindar speaks of the nomos basileus, the “law that reigns over all, mortals and immortals alike.” Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive. This is the immediate: but pure intensity, as a continuous experience, is “impossible,” overwhelming. To preserve its sovereignty, the immediate must come across to us through the law. If life itself is the supreme unlivable, the law, which allows both mortals and immortals to “distinguish between different worlds” is what transmits life’s nature to us.31

I hear in Hölderlin’s words anticipations of Eliot’s point that human beings can stand only so much truth. The “immediate,” moreover,

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may be likened to that point of intersection of time and timelessness, of the human and the divine, which Eliot understood as being everywhere and at all times evident and discernible even as a human being can rarely grasp it: an “occupation for the saint.” The “unattended / Moment” is not the “immediate.” Note, importantly, that, echoing the Greek understanding as brought forth by Calasso, Eliot writes that the understanding is “given / And taken”: given from outside to us and accepted by us (or not). Further, while I do not presume to claim that Hölderlin, for one, almost secretly brings in Transcendence, I have to wonder about the origin of the “immediate.” In any case, emphasis falls—rightly—on the moment, which essayists like White prize, call to our attention as the most important thing, and perhaps only glimpse, half understanding it as only “unattended.” *

* *

Living in Maine became for White an extended moment. Although he and Katherine had long summered there, it was not until 1957 that they left New York City to take up permanent residence in the Pine Tree State, although they had moved there twenty years earlier. They returned to the city frequently, living there again for one extended period from 1943 to 1957. Maine held their hearts, as his plaintive essay from Florida after Christmas 1965 makes clear. Maine was what White—and Katherine—treasured. No single piece of writing is more important in this regard than “Home-Coming,” dated from Allen Cove in December 1955—it is the second in the collected 1977 Essays, preceded only by “Good-Bye to Forty Eighth Street,” dated two years earlier. “Home-Coming” is both a panegyric and a hymn, at odds with an account written by Bernard DeVoto—from the beginning, White emphasizes Maine’s mixed nature, its impure state, in other words (even the pure comes mixed, perhaps helping to account for Mainers’ legendary contrariness): Like highways everywhere, [the road into Maine] is a mixed dish: Gulf and Shell, bay and gull, neon and sunset, cold comfort and warm, the fussy façade of a motor court right next door to the pure geometry of an early-nineteenth-century clapboard house with barn attached. . . . Woods and fields encroach everywhere, creeping to within a few feet of the neon and the court, and the experienced traveler into this land

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is always conscious that just behind the garish roadside stand, in its thicket of birch and spruce, stands the delicate and well-proportioned deer; just beyond the overnight cabin, in the pasture of granite and juniper, trots the perfectly designed fox. This is still our triumphant architecture, and . . . its flavor steals into [the Maine man’s] consciousness with the first ragged glimpse of properly textured woodland, the first whiff of punctually drained cove.32

No purity here, although the deer are “well-proportioned,” the fox “perfectly designed,” the woodland “properly textured,” and the cove “punctually drained.” Things are right, tempting me to cite Alexander Pope’s oft-caricatured line: “Whatever is, is right.”33 What you see is also what you get; there is neither masking nor pretense. The literal reigns, along with the familiar. In “Home-Coming,” the essayist takes his time, manner and matter reflecting each other perfectly.34 White identifies with nature, is on the way to becoming one with it; Thoreau went sauntering, sans terre, heading west, especially southwest, he says in “Walking.” Thoreau may have been essentially homeless, whereas White was, in any case, on the way home, headed east: the familiar embodied. Then Maine itself, White both arriving home and writing most directly about what Maine means as home. Surely it bears significance that the great essayist is for once at a loss for words, falling back on such clichés as he scrupulously avoids everywhere else, clichés that serve for rather cheap humor! What happens to me when I cross the Piscataqua and plunge rapidly into Maine at a cost of seventy-five cents in tolls? I cannot describe it. I do not ordinarily spy a partridge in a pear tree, or three French hens, but I do have the sensation of having received a gift from a true love.35

Notice how quickly White recovers, turning the cliché into a point of utmost significance, transforming, engaging in an act that can perhaps only be described as metamorphosis: “having received a gift from a true love.” Maine as gift, then, the embodiment of an act of love. Having righted himself, White now proceeds with his account of coming home: And when, five hours later, I dip down across the Narramissic and look back at the tiny town of Orland, the white spire of its church against

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the pale-red sky stirs me in a way that Chartres could never do. It was the Narramissic that once received as fine a lyrical tribute as was ever paid to a river—a line in a poem by a schoolboy, who wrote of it, “It flows through Orland every day.” I never cross that mild stream without thinking of his testimonial to the constancy, the dependability of small, familiar rivers.36

White here recalls Thoreau, who prefers the Mississippi to the great rivers of Europe, American pride shining through “Walking” for all its puffery and criticism: and the beautiful rather than the sublime, new versus old, the familiar opposed to the strange. Might that “white spire of its church” point toward the Transcendence that White always misses? *

* *

I find myself unable to cease quoting—especially since the next paragraph of “Home-Coming” becomes acutely reflective, analyzing perhaps as insightfully as anyone ever has the meaning of familiarity, itself now discovered as the virtual definition that White almost despaired of being able to offer. Familiarity, of course, names the essay as well, and the idea of belonging is inseparable from both the form and that sense of invitation with which and from which it springs—we are back to the notion of things done right, appearing right, “wellproportioned,” “perfectly designed,” “properly textured”: Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness. A farmer pauses in the doorway of his barn and he is wearing the right boots. A sheep stands under an apple tree and it wears the right look, and the tree is hung with puckered frozen fruit of the right color. The spruce boughs that bank the foundations of the homes keep out the only true winter wind, and the light that leaves the sky at four o’clock automatically turns on the yellow lamps within, revealing to the soft-minded motorist interiors of perfect security, kitchens full of a just and lasting peace. (Or so it seems to the homing traveler.)37

Outside is supplemented by inside, which takes over at the right time, continuing, supporting: the human cooperating perfectly with—in tune and in time with—the natural. “Homing” is the right way of describing such a traveler as White—very much cum terre. Home, though, no more transcends or can transcend time than Maine ways can fend off the rampaging armies of the modern and

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so-called progress. Thus, White, appropriately and with due sense of proportionality, design, and texture, adds to “Home-Coming” a familiar postscript dated April 1962. It begins with an open acknowledgment that the way home constantly changes: for example, “The seductive turnpike, which used to peter out conveniently at Portland, introducing the traveler to the pleasures of Route 1, now catapults him clear through to Augusta and will soon shoot him to Bangor if he isn’t careful.” The result of the various “improvements,” the pure changes, is that “I was home three minutes earlier but have no idea how I spent those extra three minutes or whether they profited me as much as the old backward glance at Orland—its church spire, its reliable river, its nestling houses, its general store, and its bouquet of the flowering of New England.”38 It’s all, as always, about time and what you do with and in it (note the reappearance of that church spire). And here, one paragraph from the end, it’s spring and all. *

* *

Thoreau spent time in Maine, penning The Maine Woods, in fact. The book preceded White’s essays by more than a hundred years, and Thoreau was not much concerned with notions of home, familiarity, or, really, the meaning of life. What preoccupied him, in this admittedly brilliant work, are big questions of civilization along with somewhat lesser ones of the white man and the Indian, of character, and of wildness, his perennial favorite. Maine has subsequently attracted a large number of writers ever since Thoreau, both those native to the state and those more or less Johnny-come-latelies. One native essayist certainly worthy of notice, although he is now unfortunately forgotten, is Robert P. Tristam Coffin, native of Brunswick, Rhodes scholar, Pulitzer Prize–winner for poetry, prolific essayist, and longtime professor at Bowdoin College, his alma mater. One of his most telling essays, or so I find, is “Princes of the Coast,” included in his 1929 collection An Attic Room: Essays on the Jovial and Beautiful Life. Coffin is too much of a belletrist, I reckon, to suit many fancies nowadays, but this essay in particular says a lot about Maine. “Everything,” in Maine, he writes, “looks as if it had just left the fingers of the Creator.”39 The people there, he goes on, are “easy,” although they are very busy indeed, jobs of work always

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to be done. Still, workers “take their own sweet time.” Coffin then proceeds to this acute analysis: They approach it as artists would. They plan; they meditate; they sit and wait for the divine spark. They make the mere sitting a glorious business in itself. None can sit more wholeheartedly or more philosophically than they. For there is just one way to split a hake to dry it or to make an arrow for the vane that points the winds. There is just the proper mood to be caught when one does a job and just the proper phase of the moon.40

Ecclesiastes and Hilaire Belloc and White meet at the site that is Maine and recognize one another. Familiarity also meets and embraces constancy and tradition, and life emerges as an art. And more, for as Coffin put it, “Maine sees no devastating changes”: All the men who make it their life’s business to take the world by the horns and batter it about to suit them have been gone into the West these many years and become millionaires. They come back now and then in their opulence to buy the Sheraton tables and the Sandwich glass of their ancestral houses to take back to their trans-Sierran bungalows. But one thing they are never able to buy from their easy-going kindred is the serenity in living that makes these Down-Easters the kings that they are. Princes and artists, even when they farm twelve acres and a string of fifty lobster traps—aristocrats evermore.41

I for one think that Coffin comes close to capturing the exact spirit of Maine, which White thought himself incapable of pulling off. Coffin gets perhaps even more acute in continuing: The gestures of these kings are not things that grow overnight. They have centuries of life artistically lived behind them. If there is in our country that elusive thing called culture, that is, the science of fitting oneself gracefully into the landscape, as an old farmhouse fits, then Maine is the best place to look for it.42

Coffin thus anticipates White, who likewise noticed how, once you cross over into Maine, you see how everything fits, belonging, familiar. Art is everywhere, not least in cooking, about which Coffin notes, with flavor and gusto: Give these Maine cooks pork, flour, an onion or two, and a fish just done flopping, and you have the Gates Ajar and all the Delectable

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Mountains right in your backyard. There are many, remember, who believe that cookery is still, as it always has been, the index of a people’s inner harmony and a patent of culture.43

Moreover, according to this native Mainer, the people of his state are not narrow. Nor are they rigid, lacking “the sourness and smallness, the shrewdness and the ‘saving’ quality” often identified with Maine. No people who have lived in the bright opal fogs and the wines of Maine air could be hard or harsh. The quality of Maine vowels speaks volumes on the Maine character. The nasal trumpetings of Connecticut and Vermont are not heard here. Anglo-Saxon “breakings,” as in the South, are the symbols of an inner generosity of spirit, “gyarden,” “cyow,”—the kindly drawl in mouthing homely words. In mind as in stature these men run big.44

Coffin’s conclusion is hardly surprising: Maine is “a state of mind”45 —Pound thought God a state of mind. After writing that “[p]eople in a backwater seem somehow to grow into something noble and calm as the elements themselves,” Coffin proceeds to aver that “[i]t is a significant fact that Colonial Maine was settled by Church of Englanders and not by gloomy Dissenters, by men who took their religion as gracefully as the men of Massachusetts Bay took theirs hard.”46 Coffin then follows with these sentences, which conclude the penultimate paragraph of “Princes of the Coast”: So the fever and stress of states in the cyclonic paths of national progress have left Maine untouched. Its sons who must bite into granite and hammer the earth into tools for materialistic gain have left it and gone hammering across the West. The sons who were more interested in living comfortably at home with their own souls have remained. . . . The people here have lived like gentlemen who work. Those two things, the gentleman and work, the Old World had said could never mix; but Maine has given the old axiom the lie. For Maine, partly by virtue of its landscape, has made work so zestful and rich a thing that it has become play—play for the imagination as well as the muscles. . . . To have the sea always in one’s eyes above the compacted evergreens of shining islands is a sure promise of beatitude. To make work a leisure, to make what one happens to have in the way of possessions enough for luxury—here, it seems to me, is the secret that folks in this backwater have known and lived by these many years.47

Art, harmony, meditation, faith and skepticism, gentlemanliness along with hard labor, life as a whole; in other words, neither separatism nor

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sectarianism but an engaging, embracing, endearing, earned both/ and: work as art, the art of work. Mainers are, writes this Mainer, “artists in living”: “Boomers” and Rotarians have not found Maine people very anxious to climb aboard bandwagons or to uplift and sell themselves otherwise. But visitors have often gone away feeling very humble. It is an illuminating experience to discover a race of people who are satisfied with themselves as they are, who do not care to grow into some dubious other thing.

“I doubt,” Coffin writes as the essay’s final words, “if the Athenians of the golden century were very different.”48 I’ve been to Maine a few times—far fewer than I’d like—now that I’m married to a Mainer, who lived for 15 years in my native South Carolina, before joining me here in Kansas ten years ago. Having grown up in Sherman, 60 miles from Canada, without a traffic light, the nearest mall of consequence in Bangor 90 minutes away, Rebecca doesn’t want to return to Maine, not to live there anyway, although I keep saying it is my ideal. I suppose she has “the way life should be”—the words that welcome you to the state—in her veins and her heart. Here also I’m on the outside looking in—but wishing to participate. In an essay on Drury Pond, included in the compilation A Place on Water, Robert Kimber helpfully adduces a new old term to describe Maine, his opening words as precise as they are suggestive: We know that here—on this pond, at this moment, for as long as it lasts—we are living an idyll. Idylls are not a hot literary item these days. They celebrate the peace and simplicity of pastoral existence, things most people can hardly conceive of, much less hope to experience. The very idea of an idyll seems rather quaint and cute, a theme for a costume party maybe, shepherds and shepherdesses cavorting on the green.49

The term “idyll” is itself suggestive, and Kimber, tracing its etymology the way Mainers trace their ancestry, respectful and diligent, discovers that in ancient Greece Theocritus “called his short poems about rural life eidyllia or ‘little pictures.’ ” That word in Greek “is a diminutive of eidos, meaning ‘form’ or ‘picture,’ and that noun goes back in turn to the verb eidein, ‘to see,’ which is also the root of ‘idea’

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and of the Greek eidenai, ‘to know.’ ” From this, Kimber reaches his conclusion: “What the idyll is really about, then, is not a masquerade ball but about seeing and knowing the natural world, living in it and in harmony with it. At Drury Pond the human and the natural coexist in a near perfect balance.”50 As I read him, Kimber is more an environmentalist than a naturalist, much less literary than Coffin, quite a bit less observant and reflective than White. Like Coffin, though, he approaches the idea of Maine as art, form, and meaning. He inches up, sneakily like all essayists, on epistemology and ontology, but he reduces the capacious site on which he has stumbled when he talks, in words that smack of jargon and agendas, about “the natural world.” In his hands, “harmony” becomes less a union of form and matter, of physical and spiritual—as in Coffin—than a collusion of humankind and environment. White lived in a world grander and greater than any environment, no matter how green. Whether we call the way of living—the gerund seemingly more precise than the mere noun “life”—pastoral, idyll, or art, we know what it is that is so hard to put into words, that reduced White to calling it indescribable. We know what it is, have smelled it, touched it, been touched by it, and all it bears, like the balsam fir the Whites in Florida for an otherwise artificial Christmas received from Maine, “the smell of authenticity”51—at Christmas, a gift from afar, from home, in fact, calling us home. The authentic and the familiar are inextricably bound. *

* *

Born at the time of massive exploration of the microcosm and the macrocosm alike, the essay seems bent—as in the recent work of Scott Russell Sanders, for example—on returning home, knowing it at last, perhaps “for the first time.” Eliot invites us to return to the first poem in Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” and to explore again its representation of a garden scene deeply resonant with that in Eden (“burnt” also resonates with the poems’ conclusion that we will be “Consumed by either fire or fire” [“Little Gidding”]). The structure of Four Quartets borrows the pattern of Incarnation, each moment, here, there, everywhere, alive and burning with meaning, representative of the intersection of time and timelessness, each passage

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(for instance) thematically and rhetorically declarative at once of both a part and the whole. *

* *

Such writers on Maine as we have observed, but especially White, none clearer or more effective than he, offer a largely inchoate glimpse of the pattern that defines Incarnation. Maine appears as a kind of Heaven on earth—for the most part, I’d say, and with all its well-acknowledged faults. That notion, familiar as it is, trite as it may appear, writers like White literalize: meaning exists in familiarity with and to a specific place (time becoming virtually spatialized), in everyday experiences of farming, noticing, conversing, observing changes of season, responding to discomforts, baking, and cooking, in being up early and going about the necessary chores of sustaining life, of doing and working and making. White for one thus literalizes the idea of Heaven on earth in an almost purely material way. Still, that literalization, never shouted or even whispered but felt, points to pattern, rather than to metaphoricity. Maine is not Heaven on earth; it is, as the state proclaims on its welcome signs, an invitation to experience, an observation, an offering, and a gift, rather than a boast. It all works, it all fits, it is all fit and proper, belonging. Maine insists on things being done right. *

* *

Unlike elsewhere, personality hardly exists there. Certainly Mainers don’t parade personality, much care for personality, or genuflect before personality. For all their alleged tight-lippedness, frugality, and cantankerousness, their supposedly fierce independence and their toughness mental and physical, Mainers resist calling attention to themselves. They may be different, but not from each other; they may, and do, debate, contest, and quarrel, but they see eye to eye on the basics. Long winter nights inevitably bring out puzzles and Parcheesi, staving off boredom and insularity alike and placing a wellchosen premium on doing and making, on solving problems rather than thinking up new ones or exacerbating old ones. Mainers work with their hands, even when not working. They appreciate and they understand the value and importance of work, of making—not least of making a life for themselves.

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Isolated by geography, weather conditions, and inclinations alike, Mainers come together—in play, in work, in worship in and outside churches—sensitive to the earth of which they consider themselves custodians and stewards, observant, celebratory, affirmative, and worshipful of place, whether or not they exactly agree to call it holy or sacred. Such ideas do not spring from their individual heads; Mainers may be independent, but they are no more individualistic than their Anglican ancestors, so different from the Puritans who settled elsewhere in New England and raised such a stink with unfamiliar and disembodied notions. That’s just it about Mainers: they go in for embodiment, for practice rather than theory, for doing more than thinking—they participate. Compared with other folks in this diverse land we call our own, and thinking of Jonathan Swift’s allegory in The Battle of the Books, Mainers resemble the Bee, instead of the Spider, Ancients rather than Moderns. The Maine-ing of life makes a certain sense, then, doesn’t it?

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CH A P T ER

6

The Limits of the Familiar: E.B. White and T.S. Eliot

Even Eliot’s essays are difficult, so that, when teaching undergraduates, I pair the well-known “Tradition and the Individual Talent” with Hilaire Belloc’s much more familiar essay “The Mowing of a Field.” Seldom do students fail to recognize the parallels between these two essays, and rarely do they prefer Eliot’s essay and his take on tradition. Comparison reveals difference, of course, and Eliot’s position appears much more nuanced, complicated, and complex. Ultimately, Eliot argues for an intersection of tradition and the individual, whereby the modern reader discovers that the way to authentic and genuine individuality lies in, through, and by means of tradition and the would-be individual’s grasp of it. Belloc, on the other hand, argues much more simply for tradition. He it is, not Eliot, who argues for—and stops with—the surrender to tradition of individuality (which he identifies with Promethianism). Despite Belloc’s deep and abiding Catholic faith, there is no hint in his essay of “the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together.”1 Only Eliot would, or could, write, I reckon, “if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged.”2 Eliot understood the necessity of “a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other.” Accordingly, he said, “To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art.”3 Eliot is right: we return to the past not because it is the past but because it holds value for the present, with much to teach us. Belloc is clear because he does not complicate or interimplicate. Although he does not exactly simplify, he makes his points, in the way

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literature does: by means of story and character. So does White, more fully and effectively. There is meat on the bones, ideas enfleshed. The form is incarnational, no matter what the “beliefs” of the writer apparently are. You cannot miss that the poet and essayist Eliot was trained as a philosopher and remains philosophical in orientation. White, like Belloc, tells tales, there is “human interest” (the goal of journalistic writing), and students as well as “ordinary” or “common” readers respond warmly. You love White and Belloc; you admire and respect Eliot. You also learn from him. But then, you also learn from Belloc and White, do you not? *

* *

White’s famously self-deprecating manner, aided and abetted by his characteristic wry humor as well as his frequent use of dogs, raccoons, and pigs, plus the fact that he is best known as the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little all contribute to his status as a “second-class citizen,” the situation that he himself described and seemed to accept—as an essayist. Of course, Georg Lukács warned us a century ago to suspect such claims, for the essayist is merely “pretending” to treat the mundane and the superficial, his or her eyes trained, in fact, on nothing short of “the Ultimate.” In any case, White plainly has a lot to teach modern, Modernist, and postmodern readers. Particularly important in White as essayist is his own “journey towards understanding” within his essays, “the course of [his] interpretive discovery.” “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?” chronicles Andy’s—and Katherine’s—change in understanding as they face the textureless, savorless prospect of a Christmas in Florida, amidst the ubiquitous poinsettias and bougainvillea, and the separation from home and the familiar in Maine. The change occurs via the instrumentality of a “care package” from home, featuring a bough of fir, which brings them back to something “authentic.” Husband and wife then grasp what they have been missing, what fueled Katherine’s sickness of heart, what Andy had struggled with. They both, finally, “see.” The basic structural pattern also appears in, for example, “Death of a Pig,” “The Ring of Time,” and “Once More to the Lake,” these perhaps White’s most popular, most cherished, and most frequently anthologized essays. Take “Death of a Pig,” in particular. White

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himself speaks, in his second paragraph, of “a familiar scheme to me,” one that “follows an antique pattern.”4 He thus refers, of course, to the “tragedy,” a.k.a. “the murder, being premeditated,” that is the raising and nurturing by man of pig in order, “when the solid cold weather arrives,” to butcher it: “the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.”5 The story that White tells, tells quite another story, following a different pattern altogether. White’s tale of a pig is a modern-rural journey toward understanding that does indeed follow an ancient and familiar pattern. White is no longer in Ithaca, Odysseus’s home, but he is titular head of his little farm in Maine. He represents himself as less like the hero—the opening paragraphs are rife with dramatic images—and more like the suitors, eager to do “belly’s bidding.” White is not only unheroic, but he is also unlike the faithful steward Eumaios. Note the opening paragraph, with rationalizations worthy of even Odysseus, said to be “never at a loss”: I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.6

An apologia pro vita sua, White’s tale constitutes a public confession—of failure, of farmer at a loss. But one kind of (material) accounting turns into quite another, White witnessing, testifying. The tale thus has to do with pig and man, this man, the writer of the “account.” He represents himself, with self-pity aplenty, as uncertain, no longer in “decent health,” and rapidly “deteriorating” in part, apparently, because he has learned, in the course of pig’s travails and his own efforts to stave off its death, of his own mortality. “The classic outline of the tragedy was lost. I found myself cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician—a farcical character with an enema bag for a prop”—no tragic or epic hero, then. In the event, White found that “my sympathies were now wholly with the pig. This was slapstick.”7

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At first, rather naturally, White sympathizes only with himself—it is merely about himself that he can think. He has been advised to administer castor or sweet oil and, if that does not work, soapy suds, but he takes his time and now admits that “I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation. I just wanted to keep on raising a pig, full meal after full meal, spring into summer into fall.”8 White thus seeks to control time, to perpetuate his selfish, comfortable, and entirely familiar pattern of action—in short, he would have his own little universe isolated and protected from interruption and change. Indeed, he wants no participation in change. As time marches on, White continues to observe his pig—he has not yet called in a vet, has not yet administered the aforementioned vile enema. At one point, he takes heart, not supposing that he “was going to lose my pig”; he remains concerned with himself, albeit differently: when the “slop”—my word, not White’s—lies stale and untouched, souring in the sun, the pig’s imbalance becomes the man’s, vicariously, and life seems fragile, displaced, transitory.9 Time passes, bringing change to our imagined patterns of existence; hence our life begins to appear as susceptible, vulnerable, and as desperate as the pig’s. Indeed, this is exactly what White soon records: I discovered . . . that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles. The pig’s lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession. His suffering soon became the embodiment of all earthly wretchedness.10

White will shortly describe himself as having a “proud scheme,” but then came a change, a difference: “The awakening had been violent and I minded it all the more because I knew that what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world”11—White never much cared for the neat and tidy. This is not just the familiar estranged but the familiar deconstructed. White has not exactly visited, like Odysseus, the Kingdom of the Dead, but in giving his pig an enema, he has himself been purged of (some of his) selfishness. He too, then, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, knew nothing until he knew nothing. Once he did, he could

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sympathize, engage in that act of reciprocity that another essayist, Cynthia Ozick, identifies with the origin of moral concern, “envision[ing] the stranger’s heart.”12 The coloration of White’s care, though, remains self(ish), for he stresses his own liability, accentuated, as we have seen, in the opening paragraph of “Death of a Pig.” Growth in capacity, and capaciousness, may thus be limited and compromised, but change, dramatic change, appears in White. However compromised White’s care for his pig remains, there is, in the course of that care, development of sympathy. While it is not love exactly, it may call to mind Richard Selzer’s dramatization of what develops between writer and character. I refer to his aforementioned brilliant essay “A Worm from My Notebook,” collected in Taking the World in for Repairs, which combines fiction and nonfiction. That is exactly what “A Worm” does: part short story, part reflection on writing, this essay the site—the intersection—where so many differences meet.13 Selzer might be describing the essay—or the work of White, in particular, who always forgoes “great and noble concepts” in favor of “the singular details of a single human life,” and sometimes, those of a single dying pig. Telling—that is, writing—the story, Selzer goes beyond White, who comes in the course of the event represented to care about his pig. Selzer comes to love his character, whom he names Ibrahim, a Zairean farmer, in the course of writing about him, as a result of the writing, that is: it is not the character but the writing that is now instrumental. The change, the discovery, occurs in the present time of writing. Writing and love thus intersect—as do short story and essay, fiction and nonfiction, author and character, even author and reader (since the latter is invited into the writing of the story and since, furthermore, the infesting, lethal worm—here capitalized—is also a metaphor for, among other things, the story’s action upon the reader and the reader’s action upon the story): as the Worm makes its way into Ibrahim’s leathery foot, Ibrahim as character worms his way into the author’s (and the reader’s) heart. Introducing Selzer into the mix is not intended to diminish White’s achievement, only to contextualize it. White’s contributions to the essay are enormous, including the seamless manner in which he threads in story. Also critical is the fact I have chosen to emphasize here, and that is the role played in his essays by discovery and change, for in his very best writing something significant happens in the course of the story represented. You have but to look before and

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after him to grasp just what he was able to do, something greater than the great majority of the great essayists. The ideas that White embodies in his essays are not grand or grandiose, although they are fundamental, none more so, of course, than his signature treatments of time. White is well aware, as the best essayists are, of the time we ordinary mortals spend—often a telling verb, indeed—in company with persons more or less like ourselves, engaged in familiar and quite ordinary activities. Eliot famously said that since the seventeenth century we have been suffering from a debilitating “dissociation of sensibility,” that is, an inability to feel “thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”14 I can’t very well argue against Eliot because, for one thing, I have never been able quite to grasp what he means. I do think, however, that White shows, in his lucid observations of ordinary men and women moving through time, what Eliot prizes: the “amalgamating [of] disparate experience.” Eliot writes that “the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking.”15 In many respects, as he would surely affirm, White is an “ordinary man,” a man who, in any case, writes of ordinary experience, including such things as “the smell of cooking,” the wild tingle and tangle of love, such noises as the typewriter makes. Indeed, he precisely captures the intersections of writing and doing the familiar, ordinary things. Something else, too, although I intend not to suggest some veiled or invidious comparison: recall another Eliot’s remarks on the ordinary. I mean George Eliot, writing in Adam Bede, namely in the remarkable and very essayistic seventeenth chapter of the novel, titled “In Which the Story Pauses a Little.” The novelist’s focus there is truthfulness and representation, and she brilliantly compares her efforts to Dutch genre painting, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light,

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softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her. . . . 16

George Eliot’s philosophy of art is summed up in her simple words “the faithful representing of commonplace things.”17 She had written earlier that “it is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.”18 Like George Eliot, White would not tidy up, dramatize, overextend, or simplify. She says, again in Adam Bede, that life is “a mixed entangled affair,” and for all his praise of Thoreau and simplicity, White well knows that even the simple life is complex. Unlike the Transcendentalist, White stands against purity. George Eliot concludes her chapter, the essay “In Which the Story Pauses a Little’’ (the title itself a metaphor for how the essay works as form): “I have observed this remarkable coincidence, that the select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest”19 —a sweeping charge, but brio and bravado aside, this could stand by implication as a striking apology for the essay. Eliot also observes that her readers, some of them at least, wish something different: Perhaps you will say, “Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair.20

White too is a truth-teller—arguably clearer-sighted than George Eliot. She concludes that “human nature is lovable”; 21 White would say, I reckon, that she half understands, for human nature is both lovable and hateful. He never hides, covers up, reduces, or touches up “with a tasteful pencil.” On the contrary, he subscribes to the notion he describes in the foreword to the 1977 Essays, one that he traces back to the “origins” of the essay in Michel de Montaigne: There is one thing the essayist cannot do . . . he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time. Desmond MacCarthy, in his introductory remarks to the 1928 E.P. Dutton &

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Company edition of Montaigne, observes that Montaigne “had the gift of natural candour. . . .” It is the basic ingredient.22

*

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Telling the truth, attending to “slight sounds at evening,” observing the coloration of his wife’s distress away from home in Maine at Christmas, administering an enema to a dying pig (and noting scrupulously the machinations of his attendant Fred), refusing to simplify or reduce, White shows no interest in curing our ills or correcting our ways. No doubt, he would wish that we wrote more like Thoreau and less like the insouciant, noun-infested hatchery man quoted in “A Report in January,” and he would wish that man “spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority,” indeed that we develop a capacity “to resist a technological formula that is sterile.”23 He might wish that we were all Mainers, although he would hardly wish that we all lived there. As much as he praises Thoreau and Walden, he by no means represents it as curative. It is, White writes, “like an invitation to life’s dance”24: White controls his own expectations, reins in any optimism, conservative in liberal’s clothing—neither a projector nor a social engineer. “Religious feeling without religious images”25: here White and George Eliot intersect, here White and T.S. Eliot diverge. Moreover, like Thoreau, White records, this mere “recording secretary.” White thus practices—embodies—in his writing the modesty and the humility with which he looks upon the prospects of those things he admires and cherishes. Not even the beloved teachings of Will Strunk—“Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”26 —will save the world. The alternative to attempting to save the world, to cure it? Not to do nothing, as another essayist James Baldwin powerfully observes at the end of “Notes of a Native Son”: but also to accept. And White accepts the nature of things, understanding the urgency all of us face in the face of time: to do our best within the situation in which we find ourselves. Shakespeare may have thought readiness is all; for the essayist, response is all. *

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Well aware that humankind can stand only so much truth, T.S. Eliot chastens, disabuses us of false notions, warns us of just how bad our

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plight is: in modern society and as beings who crave more than we have or conceivably can get. Sometimes, it is clear, Eliot deliberately frustrates our drive toward meaning—Ash-Wednesday springs first to mind, in this regard. If The Waste Land leaves us hearing thunder but receiving no rain, whose capacity we evidently misunderstand anyway, if we have only fragments “shored against [our] ruin,”27 and thus are able to hear perhaps salvific words only in a foreign language that we also don’t understand, the later, Anglo-Catholic poems emphasize not Christian comfort but Christian difficulty, pain, ardor, and difference from the vanity of our hopes: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” writes Eliot in “East Coker,” “[i] s the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” In like manner, “Sin is Behovely,” according to “Little Gidding.” We are gifted, writes Eliot in “The Dry Salvages,” with “only hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” The “familiar compound ghost” that emerges upon Eliot in “Little Gidding” offers the very opposite of comfort, disclosing “the gifts reserved for age / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort,” ending with these potentially dispiriting words: “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’ ” A summation, and epitome, of Eliot’s purgatorial understanding of Christianity appears in the fourth section of “East Coker,” the uncharacteristically (and ironically) easy verses rendered as allegory in language both clear, conventionally lyrical (and not fragmentary or elliptical), musical, in fact. There is no easy way, no direct, painless path, no escaping our inherently paradoxical condition and situation, this clearly “mixed entangled affair”—a “God of Thunder” (John Crowe Ransom), indeed. Not only is “the disease” “Our only health,” but the (“dying”) nurse’s—that is, the Church’s— “constant care is not to please”: “to be restored,” then, “our sickness must grow worse.” Even as we are assured that “the absolute paternal care / . . . will not leave us,” we are disabused of unearned optimism, for that “care” “Prevents us everywhere.” The conclusion thus hardly surprises: “The dripping blood our only drink, / The bloody flesh our only food.” White is never so harsh, nor so brutal, even when most pessimistic. He, in fact, always seems to find something sustainable—not in rituals or in dogmas or doctrines, theories or ideas. Sustaining White,

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in addition to family, is satisfying activity, often of a mundane and a menial sort: work, in short, including writing. Writing seems to enable White’s self. The familiar saves, not least when its schemes are disturbed, disrupted, deconstructed. For T.S. Eliot, writing is the result of seeing, which enables him to write. For White, contrariwise, writing enables, certainly advances, seeing, which sometimes, at least, comes about in, through, and by means of writing itself. It is, in any case, writing, an essai, a trial, an effort (in more than one sense, I vow). White is exactly and very much what he asserts in “The Ring of Time”: a “recording secretary,” who gets down on paper what happened, what has been observed in a local, ordinary situation. The ordinary and familiar he rarely translates into the extra-ordinary, no estranging the familiar, either. The ordinary remains ordinary—White steadfastly resists puffing it up, or deserializing. Yet, time is intersected by something that leads to understanding, thence to love, modestly represented, of course, without pretense, with humility. The moment matters, as it does in and for T.S. Eliot.

CH A P T ER

7

Toward a Familiar Literary Criticism

I. C  I D The writer’s responsibility lies in observing, in seeing clearly “the nature of things.” Eliot shows the way, illustrating it in his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations and commenting on it in such essays as “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Lancelot Andrewes.” The position he both describes and embodies, and that I embrace too, is anti-Romantic: the writer’s job, poet, fiction writer, or essayist, is not to reflect (as Wordsworth does) but to reveal what he or she sees. Opinion does not matter; indeed, it should be kept out of the picture. As Eliot, his friend Pound, and other Modernist writers—not “Moderns”—insist, the writer snaps a picture for us. The critic, or commentator, on the other hand, who always comes after, bears a different burden, having a separate though related responsibility. While he or she must, of course, look closely at the work on which he is commenting, seeing it as clearly as possible, her responsibility is not just, or perhaps primarily, to the eye. It is (also) to the ear. The critic sees, but his job lies most importantly, I wish to suggest, in listening—listening to what the text is saying. The shift in metaphor is momentous. *

* *

In this regard, I agree with Geoffrey Hartman, who has shown how Wordsworth represents the responsibility of (critical) response via the account—the allegory—he draws in the fifth book of The Prelude, the autobiographical episode of “the boy of Winander.” Partly on the basis of this rich passage, Hartman makes a cogent argument for “answerable style” in criticism: And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth

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Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him—And they would shout Across the watery Vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call—with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din!1

The passage matters, as interpreted by Hartman, for more than one reason. If you, as reader, as critic, respond answerably,2 the text answers, in turn, as if opening itself up, revealing itself, measuring, adjusting, correcting, sometimes affirming your questions to it and of it. The emphasis on “call” here as what the primary text does is crucial. The initial act, inaugurating the act of reading, comes from outside (the self). The text is far from being inert or disinterested, that is to say. It “speaks,” a point on which John Dryden insisted in his great essay-poem of 1682 Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith. The text wants a response to its “call.” In 1711, in An Essay on Criticism, the young poet Alexander Pope brilliantly identified the act of responsible reading as “Gen’rous Converse”: a conversation between reader and text (or author), involving give-and-take. Of course, there is more—there is always more. The metaphor of the text speaking lacks innocence. What matters is not so much the implication—which Derrida would deconstruct—of a person behind and within the text, a sign of our desire for presence. Here, we can easily get sidetracked. Of primary importance is the nature of the act—speaking. It is not the sound of voice that accounts for so much but rather the implicit invocation of the ear in response. Response, which the text always solicits, is dependent primarily on the ear. Voice speaks to ear, requiring that the receiving object listen. The writer’s seeing, on the other, does not imply—does not have inherent within it—the notion of anything more than a repetition of the writer’s original act. It does not require a reader, an organ engaged in listening, or, indeed, a response. Having claimed so much for the ear and critical response, I must hasten to deny that I thus denigrate the original act of seeing. Seeing (always) comes first. But the critical act is, by nature if not by definition, qualitatively different from the primary act of (creative) writing. Thus it is that Eliot fought against the conflation of the two acts, steadfastly denying that criticism is art.3

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But when seeing and hearing come together, the result can be beautiful—not breathtaking, nothing so sublime as that. The eye comes first, seeing; it then makes, creating a work of literary art that I define, along with Ezra Pound, as “language charged with meaning.”4 That “charge,” or, rather, those charges are resonances detectible by the ear, listening intently. The ear prevents the tyranny of the eye, and the eye works against the depression of silence. *

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I choose to illustrate the point—it isn’t just mine, for others have preceded me, including Geoffrey Hartman and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams—with reference to three works: Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Book Twelve of The Odyssey concerns Odysseus’s visit to the Kingdom of the Dead, the climactic episode in the hero’s “journey towards understanding.” Here, encountering nothingness (literally), the man supposedly never at a loss begins the purgation of his reckless and demanding ego (I read in W.H.D. Rouse’s prose translation, now in little favor but meaning for me the great poem that we know as Homer’s epic). The pivotal moment occurs when, after rudely dismissing the great warrior Agamemnon, Odysseus meets the even greater hero Achilles, who asks only, as Agamemnon did, for some news regarding his son. The reader’s attention “catches” at the similarity and the difference. Whereas Odysseus told Agamemnon, without any apparent sympathy, “it is a bad thing to babble like the blowing wind,” he details Neoptolemos’s exploits, and as a result, “Achilles marched away with long steps over the meadow of asphodel, proud to hear how his son had made his mark.”5 Words, and actions too, resonate—we make comparisons, derive significance. At once summarizing and extending the action in the Kingdom of the Dead, and the cumulative effects on Odysseus, is his (final) reaction to Aias Telamoniades, whose soul kept apart, still resentful for my victory over him when there was question about the arms of Achilles. The goddess his mother set them up as a prize for the best man. How I wish I had never won such a prize! What a life was lost for that! Aias, first of all the Danaäns in noble looks and noble deeds, except Achilles the incomparable. And so I addressed him in gentle words: . . . “Nay, come this way, my

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lord, and listen to my pleading: master your passion and your proud temper.”6

We now see Aias as having been like Odysseus, whose difference in relating to Agamemnon and Achilles reveals a difference from his own former self: gracious, self-effacing, gentle, instructive, caring. Odysseus has, indeed, grown increasingly gentle, a fact apparent to comparative reading that begins from aural observation of difference. The reader must, that is, parallel—or “mimic”—the object of Odysseus’s instruction: “listen to my pleading,” the Trojan hero tells Aias.7 Homer’s reader should also remember that the original audiences for this poem heard the words. The reader of Joyce’s great semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man must also hear the words—this is, after all, very nearly poetry, so meticulous was its author, who spent seven years composing it. I would also contend that the responsible reader becomes Joyce’s hero, burdened with the task of distinguishing, for example, the difference between irony and straightforward statement, autobiography and fiction, Stephen’s “forged” Romanticism and Joyce’s Modernism. Stephen—literally—does not see well. I shall cite one small but significant detail. Take the penultimate diary entry, Joyce’s having “left” the narrative to his (former) hero’s own words—Joyce likewise abandoned the early version of the story, which bore the eventually discarded title of Stephen Hero: 26 April: Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.8

The reader’s responsibility here matches that earlier when Stephen mistook the Renaissance prose writer Thomas Nashe’s line “Brightness falls from the air” for his own narcissistic and solipsistic mistaken notion that “Darkness falls from the air.” 9 The difference is emblematic, and the reader’s ear thus well attuned when he or she gets to the end and hears Stephen’s grandiloquent—and mock-heroic—words. The word “forge” strikes the ear, catches the attention—in part because Joyce has used it twice before10 in highly charged passages and in part because the reader who has heard realizes that Stephen the

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so-called hero will create nothing other than a forgery, if he “creates” at all. The entire entry then emerges as a final revelation of Stephen, hardly a hero, who cannot distinguish as the reader(-hero) must and can: Stephen has never once “encountered the reality of experience,” and only a Satanic, Luciferian, Icarian figure would dare to claim that he will (be able to) “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.” All depends on hearing the words, picking up on the resonances, making comparison, and deriving difference and, therefore, significance. I shall spend somewhat less time and space on my third and final instance, for I believe I have established the point. I shall mention but two passages, which are quite different in poetic locale and “setting” as well as in subject that taken together and compared—heard— instance the central pattern of Incarnation, “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood.”11 Meaning lies not in particular, isolated, “unattended” moments, as thought Eliot’s friend Pound, that pagan fundamentalist and immanentist,12 but, rather, in every moment. As we noted earlier, the pattern operative and determinative in writing, which requires nothing less than “The complete consort dancing together,” appears—is revealed, embodied, incarnate—in the literal dance among Renaissance rustics that Eliot depicts in “East Coker,” which takes us back to his own beginnings. The point is not only thematic but also rhetorical, for the reader is charged with responsibility for hearing echoes and “rhymes,” picking up on resonances, and making comparisons; he or she it is who must hear what the poet-essayist has seen. It’s all in the rhythm: keeping time. Time is the province of the oral, space that of the seen and the written. Resonance—and association—creates rhythm, as repetition, and Eliot had established in Ash-Wednesday that the urgency consists in “restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme,” thus to “Redeem / The time.”13 Vocation is crucial. The critic hears the “call” of texts and responds, “answerably.” There must, always, be an answer. But when, directly, I talk about “the vocation of literary criticism,” I mean something more. That is, I have in mind the summons given by a transcendent power to perform certain acts, fulfill certain functions—in short, to accept responsibility for enacting the work of that power in the world. Formerly (at least), we said that a clergyman had accepted the call to do the Lord’s work: he had been called and had answered; he had thus been “called” to the ministry or the priesthood, and so his vocation was the clerical.

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While the critic is no minister or priest—nor is, despite Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the artist—she or he participates in a pattern whose structure is vocational. The critic, like the clergyperson, is called to do—that is, to perform and to enact—the work of literature.14 He or she does so in “answerable style,” clarifying texts, passing judgments immediate and general, and extending them in the very act of commenting on them. The job is worthy: one of service and—yes—stewardship, therefore one of responsibility perhaps not awesome but noble. Its great, and determined, enemy is pride, as Alexander Pope established in An Essay on Criticism. It is no accident that Pope called his poem an essay, for an essay is the style and manner answerable to the call that texts make. In an essay, voice is, if not everything, nearly all. The only form of writing that enables this necessary attempt is the essai. Essays should be heard and not just seen. *

* *

A key argument, around which my explorations and divagations revolve, is that writing is reading. It was Andrew Lytle’s brief description of the controverted relation of reading and writing that bred this idea.15 Fecund as that novelist-critic’s words are, they acquire full force and significance only when juxtaposed with and supplemented by a no doubt surprising source: the voluminous and brilliant critical commentary rendered for over half a century by the distinguished Yale scholar and theorist Geoffrey H. Hartman, particularly as his virtually unique style, manner, and texture have been captured by his colleague Paul H. Fry in words that I have quoted more than once (e.g., “the course of interpretive discovery”). Reading, in other words, in, through, and by means of writing: occurring via the instrumentality of writing. Criticism is always secondary, but writing is not simply a result of reading but—also—the very act of reading. To be sure, writing constitutes response, and yet there is simultaneity—and with it, presence. Andrew Lytle’s point is the basic one, though left more or less dangling: to read well, you have to write it down. By that, he clearly means more, much more, than merely jotting down notes, recording responses, detailing impressions. Although other conditions and opportunities for reading well certainly exist and obtain, the surest way to do so, indirect though it be, involves writing as you read. This

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necessarily involves some paraphrase, perhaps a good deal of quoting, and a recording of the present moment of reading itself. It is not, however, some sort of (distanced) self-expression, certainly not any kind of so-called free writing. Later editing and polishing are always possible, often desirable, and not infrequently necessary. Still, “writing as reading” constitutes the clearest instance I can imagine of a record of reading. As a “record,” moreover, to modify Morris Dickstein’s loaded contrast, we have not the product of close reading but close reading enacted.16 Indeed, “writing as reading” insures intensely close reading and, most often, a “keen” attention to philology. All this emphasis on reading does not preclude the possibility that the writing will be graceful and efficient. Although I once and for a long while supposed that reading as act translated into “getting inside”—even “becoming your author” as Virginia Woolf averred in a famous statement—I now recognize, rather, that the text is getting inside you, the reader (like the Worm in Richard Selzer’s essay). You are never closer to it than when, as it were, the text speaks through you, become instrument and mediation. In fact, “writing as reading” mitigates the always real possibility that the self will interfere and, in its willfulness, countermand the text’s own willing, making it say what the reader wishes to hear. Surprise occurs precisely because the text “speaks itself,” as Dryden put it. *

* *

Writing as you read, as a matter of fact, you encounter discovery. Discovery happens. Other strategies, awareness, and discipline matter, of course. These centrally include comparison and what I call lateral reading, ways of proceeding productive, respectful of texts, and rooted in intense closeness to the words of the text. In fact, I would argue, contra Fry, that, while in Hartman the allusiveness is dense, it is more than stylistic. It stems from what I am calling “lateral reading” and the entailed comparisons revealed. Allusiveness, moreover, reflects discovery by means of just that revealed connection and relation. In any case, the goal is not so much, or not always, the extraction of meaning as it is the recognition of how the text works. Precisely here I find Paul Fry’s description of Geoffrey Hartman’s “work of reading” (as he himself labels such close and “literate”

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efforts) extremely suggestive. Hartman’s reading, writes Fry, takes “cues” from the calling text.17 It is Hebraic in that sense, both mindful of and reminding us of rabbinical hermeneutics. The commenting text clearly remains secondary, and yet it neither narrows itself nor locks itself into a corner with some assumed responsibility for tying off loose ends and packaging the text as well wrought, unified, and complete, every part, every jot and tittle, contributing to a revered whole, a “verbal icon.” Hartman’s alternative, though, as embraced by Paul Fry, surely reminds us of Swift’s exposure of “enthusiastic” reading in A Tale of a Tub (e.g., Peter-Papist on “knots” and on bread as mutton).18 Hartman readily acknowledges, and indeed embraces, alliance with “Northern Protestantism” and its relative freedom in reading.19 Is it possible, somehow, to unite Hartmaniacal reading—rabbinical, Protestant, and enthusiastic—with via media, classical, and Anglican modes, bringing Hartman (and Fry) together with Andrew Lytle, Dryden, Swift, and Eliot? I am willing to suppose that what Fry means to praise in his colleague is a looking through the text, such as Hartman directly endorses in Criticism in the Wilderness. I would, at the same time, insist that the reader first look at the text. Still and all, taking cues from the text frees the commentator of the self-imposed need to explicate. He or she reads in order to understand, thence to share achieved understanding, rather than to explain—or to use and abuse, which is what Dryden condemned as “expounding.” Shifting the focus from meaning to how the text works helps. I hope we all three agree—Fry, Hartman, and I—on the necessity of being tied to the text, through which we proceed to look. Hartman, though, is more willing than I, almost eager sometimes, or so it seems to me, to give license to the interpretive mind. On other points, more substantial agreement obtains. Fry does not mention it, although he implies it: Hartman is an essayist. Hartman acknowledges as much, particularly in Criticism in the Wilderness, while aligning himself with a Continental brand of essaying such as we find, variously, in the Romantics, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida, for instance. He directly challenges the “teatotalling” kind of criticism that he associates with Eliot and other Anglo-American writers who manage to produce what he unfairly dismisses as “sublimated chatter.” For Hartman, in other words, the true essay is a sort of “intellectual poetry,” the

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emphasis residing perhaps in the adjective.20 He shows little patience with the “familiar” kind of essay even as Fry links him with a “personable” criticism and as he himself endorses leading off Criticism in the Wilderness: “This is a book of experiences rather than a systematic defense of literary studies. . . . I prefer to confess what art has meant to me.”21 Hartman’s writing is certainly “roundabout,” a point that I have developed in Criticism as Answerable Style. It avoids the a pic ways of what he himself describes as “the ‘definite’ article.” Indirectness is primary to the essay as form, whether Continental (see Adorno on the essay) or Anglo-American. It is, moreover, process-oriented, literate but relatively free in representing the explorations and navigations of the speaking mind. In The Fate of Reading, Hartman describes the essay as “tentative, continuously self-reflective, structured, yet informal,”22 and his own contributions to the form, including “The Fate of Reading,” enact structure as a mirror of the progress of the mind. “What I think, what I am” is the essayist Edward Hoagland’s brilliant summation of the essay’s “roundabout” method, its “unmethodical method.” The depth and extent of the essay’s being as discovery appear in its origin. Montaigne “founded” the form, an “arrogant courtesy,”23 at the end of the sixteenth century, in the midst of the glorious circumnavigations of the globe. It was the great age of discovery, and Montaigne, and those essayists who took up his mantle, explored the microcosm of the human, perceiving, interpretive mind while others were busy exploring the macrocosm and discovering, along the way, the course of the blood through the human body, the way from Europe to the East, and the path of the earth around the sun. Not least of course, Gutenberg had “discovered” moveable type, making printing possible, near the time of his fellow countryman Martin Luther’s essential discoveries from the greatest text of all, which then became available to Everyman. Little wonder that the form that developed in the Renaissance, empirical, skeptical, personal, is inductive in procedure. As Lydia Fakundiny, one of the most astute and authoritative commentators on the essay, has remarked, you discover your way by going, direction from having gone, and so “the doing, the writing itself, is both a path to knowing and a path of knowing.”24 Among many others, William H. Gass agrees, acknowledging that the essay is born as “an activity— the process, the working, the wondering.”25 Wandering, the essayist

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wonders, wondering as she wanders—these very words reflective, in their structure, of the relation of writing and reading. Lydia Fakundiny also writes: “Setting out to write an essay, you have no predetermined course to follow, no generic mold to fill or rules of composition to draw on—pockets empty.”26 Essaying is risky; it can be frustrating and maddening. Programmed to structure their writing tightly, logically, students find the essay difficult to manage, even as, when its way is described, it sounds so easy: laissez-faire incarnate. But it is not mere wandering. Essays, somewhere, somehow, have a point, as Edward Hoagland rightly insists.27 That point is reached, however, in the going, in the writing, and by means of it. I don’t know where I am going, exactly, when I sit down to write, nor exactly what I am going to say, what I have to say—not until I have written it, that is (as here). But as I have maintained in Reading Essays: An Invitation, process forever lies in tension with product, form with apparent formlessness. The essay thus differs from self-expression, from the journal or the diary. It does get somewhere, somewhere often discovered in the process of writing. Simply put, the essay is open to surprise, to discovery. Unlike the article, which always “knows” (Gass), 28 the essay shares the Renaissance abhorrence of dogmatism and authoritarianism. Serendipity is cultivated rather than ignored or kept at arm’s length. Thus, the essay is notoriously willing to stop, veer, digress, start up again, even to start over. I can think of no better illustration, no better incarnation, of the essay’s way of proceeding—neither strictly linear nor wantonly licentious, either—than the last paragraph of William Hazlitt’s great, familiar essay “On Going a Journey.” The paragraph is surely anathema to teachers smitten with argumentative form, the five-paragraph structure, and a controlling thesis. The passage is long, but revealing, and so I quote it nearly entire. Hazlitt prefaces the paragraph, by the way, by ending the previous with these words: “To return to the question I have quitted above.”29 Going a journey turns out to be much like essaying, Hazlitt’s essay an allegory of essaying: I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company with a friend or a party, but rather the contrary. . . . They are intelligible matters, and will bear talking about. The sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable and overt. Salisbury Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In setting out on a party of pleasure, the first consideration always is where we shall go: in taking a solitary ramble, the question is what we shall meet with by the way. The mind then is “its own place”;

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nor are we anxious to arrive at the end of our journey. I can myself do the honours indifferently well to works of art and curiosity. I once took a party to Oxford with no mean éclat—showed them the seat of the Muses at a distance, With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn’d— descanted on the learned air that breathes from the grassy quadrangles and stone walls of halls and colleges—was at home in the Bodleian; and at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered Ciceroni that attended us, and that pointed in vain with his wand to common-place beauties in matchless pictures—As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not feel confident in venturing on a journey to a foreign country without a companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishman to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this relief, which is at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite. A person would almost feel stifled to find himself in the deserts of Arabia without friends and countrymen: there must be allowed to be something in the view of Athens or old Rome that claims the utterance of speech; and I own that the Pyramids are too mighty for any single contemplation. In such situations, so opposite to all one’s ordinary train of ideas, one seems a species by oneself, a limb torn off from society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship and support—Yet I did not feel this . . .30

Process here is related to product, for Hazlitt is engaged in the “roundabout” discussion—and exemplification—of what he has stated directly: the “train of ideas.”31 That is his subject as well as his object. The reader may or may not have just discovered it. Proceeding, Hazlitt writes, Yet I did not feel this want or craving very pressing once, when I first set my foot on the laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled with novelty and delight. The confused, busy murmur of the place was like oil and wine poured into my ears; nor did the mariners’ hymn, which was sung from the top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour, as the sun went down, send an alien sound into my soul. I breathed the air of general humanity. I walked over “the vine-covered hills and gay regions of France,” erect and satisfied; for the image of man was not cast down and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones. I was at no loss for language, for that of all the great schools of painting was open to me. The whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes, glory, freedom, all are fled: nothing remains but the Bourbons and the French people!32

The writing itself seems less palpably present than what it records, attributable at least in part to Hazlitt’s use of the past tense; yet we

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feel directly, as Edward Hoagland puts it, “mind speaking to mind.”33 Hazlitt’s essay captures “the human voice talking, its order the mind’s natural flow”; there is here no “systematized outline of ideas,”34 for the essayist—brilliantly—gives us the “train of ideas” tracking: shifting, recognizing, qualifying, hitting a bump or two, rounding a curve here and speeding straight ahead for a while, discovering. As he moves to conclude, Hazlitt does in fact hit the straightaway, not rushing to end but discovering a finish that requires a staying on the main track, impossible to envision earlier. There is undoubtedly a sensation in traveling into foreign parts that is to be had nowhere else: but it is more pleasing at the time than lasting. It is too remote from our habitual associations to be a common topic of discourse or reference, and, like a dream or another state of existence, does not piece into our daily modes of life. It is an animated but a momentary hallucination. It demands an effort to exchange our actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of our old transports revive very keenly, we must “jump” all our present comforts and connexions. Our romantic and itinerant character is not to be domesticated. Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful and in one sense instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as to our friends. So the poet quaintly sings, Out of my country and myself I go. Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them: but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!35

The situation Hazlitt describes, of the self separated from itself by the defamiliarizing experience of travel, resembles, clearly, that of reading: “we are not the same” but, instead, “out of our own country.” So discovering and making known, Hazlitt is effective largely because he is at once totally absorbed in his subject and flooded by it—attuned, at-oned. *

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Criticism is, of course, tied, historically and formally, to the form that Hazlitt beautifully and effectively engages, with its meandering, mazy

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ways. Criticism has, over time, taken other forms, obviously, including poetry, although there it has often been as a hybrid imbricating the essay, and including prose that is not finally separable from the essay: proto-essays, perhaps, in Plato, Seneca, Plutarch, and Horace, for example. In English, Dryden penned nothing but essays (even when he called his writings by other names), and Pope (in verse), Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Pater, Virginia Woolf, Eliot—the great names in English criticism—have written essays rather than “articles” or monographs. With the rise of the research universities in the late nineteenth century, and at the same time the advent in this country of both university presses and the Modern Language Association, the essay faded into disrepute, no longer turned to as a viable vehicle of critical commentary. In the past fifty years or so, de rigueur is academic criticism void of the essayistic virtues: indirectness, humility, grace of expression, personal engagement, strong individual voice, a sense of discovery. Those characteristics you find in Andrew Lytle’s critical commentary. I cite, in particular, his brilliant essay on Madame Bovary, “A Passionate and Incorruptible Heart,” included in The Hero with the Private Parts. I will forbear quoting at length (for once) and, instead, cite the last paragraph of the aforementioned essay, commenting on Emma’s death scene, in which appears the “loathsome” blind beggar, singing. Lytle’s writing reveals at once his own passion and his oneness with Emma, whom he can still criticize. This is an individual voice, with a strong mind behind it, present and engaged, expressing particular and particularized judgments, individual and pointed: “[The beggar’s] presence at her death is not accidental. They are equally victims in kind, if not in degree. He is singing a love ballad. It has all the innocence of spring and youth. It withholds the consequences of love.”36 Unlike Hazlitt, whose passionate involvement is largely with the object of reflection, Lytle appears not at all to reflect but to observe. The observation has, however, the perhaps strange effect of making the writing fully present, a fact achieved partly through the short, declarative sentences, all beginning with the subject, partly via the present tense, and partly by means of a quality not readily susceptible to analysis, conveyed by feel, tact, and texture, but likely impossible to state other than poetically. I feel, keenly, the present moment of the writing. This is clearest, I think, in the fourth sentence I have just quoted (although I am not sure that Lytle gets it right here, for the beggar’s ballad seems not innocent but lyrically prurient). If

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discovery appears, it does so magnified in the essay’s final sentences, which seem to flow out of the preceding, not simply follow from them, the emphasis always upon how the novel is working and upon being able to state that, rather than what it means, or may mean. This is observation, not at all reflection, and keen, accurate, detailed observation provides realization—discovery—that points significance. The priest and the atheist sit up with the dead body to emphasize further the essential meaning. The priest sprinkles holy water; the druggist, chlorine solution. The priest says we will end by understanding each other. They already understand. Bread and wine is spread for their repast. Not the blood and body of our Lord ends the action, but the worldly bread and wine to appease their carnal appetites, as it diverts them from the smell of decay, which, being exuded by the dead flesh, becomes the final symbol of death in life, the description of the society that has undone Emma.37

Perhaps ironically, the scene in Madame Bovary, as seen and read by this novelist engaged in critical commentary, is made to seem liturgical. I think of Communion—and “necessarye conjunction” (“East Coker”). *

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As a critical complement, I turn to Geoffrey Hartman, and first his essay on Roland Barthes, “Barthes’ Vita Nuova,” published as a review of Image/Music/Text: Essays and reprinted in the critic’s 1985 volume Easy Pieces. It is writing that Hartman describes as “more journalistic . . . than academic.”38 Hartman represents reading here as “indissociable from a desire to talk back to the page or to correspond with minds that have cherished their own thoughts”: “To read and then write about a book—to do this by oneself though not for oneself—may still be among the freest imaginative endeavors.”39 His conviction remains firm that “Nothing can lift us out of language into a surer medium.”40 In the Barthes piece, somewhat constrained by the nature of reviewing, Hartman both alludes densely and places, as his preface has suggested he will do, Barthes’s work in relation to the concerns that have fueled his own critical work from the beginning. The following

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paragraph, from near the middle of Hartman’s essay, embodies, I think, interpretive discovery, recording its very course: To some extent this re-visioning of author as scriptor returns us to a medieval notion of the anonymous scribal artist. To locate the scriptor only in the modern period is obviously a myth; but the important thing for Barthes is that through this notion of scriptor we come to reinterpret all art, not only modern works. He wants to purge from criticism the Romantic idea of a personal genius writing a personal book that only he was capable of producing. Barthes proposes a belated and desperate theory of Impersonality.41

Hartman thus contextualizes Barthes, relating him to the critic’s own work but, far more importantly, placing him in tradition. Hartman’s thinking, his writing, brings him (once again) to Eliot. At the same time, he encounters in Barthes opposition to the kind of critical writing he himself has been doing (and directly acknowledged in Criticism in the Wilderness, five years earlier). By the end of this brief essay, after alluding to Barthes’s own A Lover’s Discourse, Hartman is praising his subject (e.g., “Yet Barthes persists in his folly, and succeeds”) and writing thus, writing his reading: “ ‘With my language I can do everything,’ we read in A Lover’s Discourse, ‘even and especially say nothing.’ ”42 Hartman then follows, and concludes his essay, with two paragraphs full of discovery for the interpreter: Barthes, like Flaubert, writes that “nothing.” Whether our language is veiled, as in the Classic manner, or exhibitionistic as in the modern, we confront, says Barthes, “the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little.” So Barthes’ own style shuttles between too much and too little, between operatic and Classic.43

“Shuttle” is a favorite term of Hartman’s, appearing often in his writing (most prominently, “The Voice of the Shuttle” in The Fate of Reading). There is, in any case, never any reduction in Hartman’s commentary, his writing always respectful of the complexity of the work he is reading, never any reduction to meaning, simple or otherwise. In this book, then, the “discourse of an Amateur,” as Richard Blackmur called criticism, seeks to become “amorous discourse.” Barthes as

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critic, semiotician, master of meta-language, constructs an elegant confection out of his struggle with both fictional and systematic forms of learning. From these, by a recycling that literature is always meditating, he draws a new “primary” language. Jacques Derrida in Glas (1974) and Norman O. Brown in Love’s Body (1966) accomplish, in very different ways, a similar feat. Is criticism finding its own style at last? Or recovering a formal possibility that is, in truth, very old? To make criticism creative, to reconcile learning with the language of love, inspired one of the first essays of the vernacular muse in the Renaissance, appropriately entitled by Dante La Vita Nuova.44

Hartman ends with the title with which Eliot concluded his magisterial “introduction” to Dante. Moreover, Hartman’s interrogative sentences in this passage bear significance. They are not merely rhetorical but rather point to the present moment of the writing. They also lead to the significant discovery implicit in Hartman’s characteristic interest in “creative criticism,” here described in new and exacting language, bred by reading Barthes, as the effort—the essay—“to reconcile learning with the language of love.” Barthes famously declared his alliance with essaying, claiming that he had never written anything but essays, and essays are the work of an amateur. That this work of love, this lover’s discourse, the “passionate discourse of an amateur,” is criticism marks the “impossible union” of form and content, love and learning, that only the form Michel de Montaigne long ago bequeathed to us as essays makes available. My second instance of critical complement to Lytle is Hartman’s reading of Yeats’s famous poem “Leda and the Swan,” which is exemplary. In “Understanding Criticism,” the first essay in Criticism in the Wilderness (1980), Hartman writes of the “hermeneutic perplexity” engendered by fictions: “The spectacle of the critic’s mind disoriented, bewildered, caught in some ‘wild surmise’ about the text and struggling to adjust—is not that one of the interests critical writing has for us?”45 The question is important, the description more so. In his densely allusive, agile way, Hartman mediates the poem for us. He is clearly present in the commentary—an embodied character, I would say, despite the absence of autobiography. Hartman’s writing, here and elsewhere, interests not only because it opens up Yeats’s poem but also because it as well makes the poem a “fable” (Hartman’s own characterization) of the hermeneutical plight and itself becomes a secondary story: the commentary, that is, like the poem on which it comments and that it mediates, both says

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and does. We, thus, read Yeats through Hartman, but we also read Hartman through Yeats. Before he quotes “Leda and the Swan,” Hartman says this, by way of introduction: “The critic, then, is one who makes us formally aware of the bewildering character of fiction. Books are our second Fall, the reenactment of a seduction that is also a coming to knowledge.” He adds, his terms resonating with the idea of the Eucharist and of that first eating in the Garden that Incarnation addresses, clarifies, and responds to: “The innermost hope [books] inspire may be the one Heinrich von Kleist expressed: only by eating a second time of the tree of knowledge will we regain paradise.”46 Hartman then uses the poem47 to clarify the situation of the reader or interpreter. He offers no explication of the poem; yet his commentary is not just the “result” of his reading of it—but then again, it is not here quite the “record” of reading either. Still and all, the distance between critic and work is minimal; you certainly feel the effects of the poem on Hartman. Voice being the critic’s purview, Hartman begins with that question: what we hear in the poem, and “Where got Yeats that truth?”48 Hartman alludes to the magic, the visionary. You cannot but feel the engagement and the movement of Hartman’s thinking as he proceeds: “Though we grant [Yeats], provisionally, the authority of his poem, we note that his empathy runs parallel to Leda’s and focuses on the unspoken promise of an initiatory or ‘strange’ knowledge—in fact, on the first temptation Genesis spells out: ‘Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ ”49 There is a presence to the commentary: not only of the commentator in the text but also of his writing as he reads. Immediately, Hartman turns from the poem to what he sees through it of the hermeneutical situation with its entailed perplexity. He uses Yeats’s verses to clarify, having, as it were, taken the poem into himself, which strengthens him. He finds details of correspondence and offers allusions that in turn surprise his reader, Hartman’s mind well stocked, agile, and remarkably elastic. This is the critical mind responding—and dramatically represented: thinking and writing as reading: So fiction imposes on us, by a subtle or blatant seduction. We are always surprised or running to catch up or wishing to be more fully in its coils. This may explain why the detective novel, with its mock catharsis of false leads and inconclusive speculations, is a favorite of intellectual readers. Literary commentary is comparable to the detective

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novel: confronted by a bewildering text, it acts out a solution, trying various defenses, various interpretations, then pretending it has come to an authoritative stance—when, in truth, it has simply purged itself of complexities never fully mastered.50

Has anyone ever written better of the nature, rationale, and texture of literary commentary—or of the humility that is a principal attribute of it? I will not rehearse all of Hartman’s argument. Instead, I will simply contextualize it by noting that he opens this first essay in Criticism in the Wilderness with just this question: “What difference does reading make?”51 He soon adds, referring to Emerson, “we must think through him, allow him to invade our prose,” the difference that reading makes being, “generally, writing.”52 His own efforts here Hartman has described, in the introduction, as “a book of experiences”: “I prefer to confess what art has meant to me.”53 Then, after acknowledging, with unusual directness, that “I have used ‘Leda and the Swan’ as a fable for the hermeneutic situation,”54 Hartman proceeds to important observations—I thus avoid the term “reflection”—on mystery, asserting along the way that Eliot’s “impersonality theory” is “a form of mystery management.”55 However fair or unfair this may be, Hartman adds this stunning paragraph, which I adduce as the final word on the subject of the embodied critic: A critic aware of the survival in art of the language of mystery and myth is in a case exactly parallel to Yeats’s. What offends cultural standards may still attract us because of its imaginative daring and peculiar organization. Like an observer of alien rites, the critic is often caught between acknowledging the consistency or attractive horror of what he sees and rejecting it in the name of his own enlightened customs. The split may tear him apart, even at a distance. And if, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or the spy at Bacchic orgies, the critic then immerses himself in the destructive element, he still creates, as it were, the writer who has gone in search of him. The critic is always a survivor or someone who comes late. So the character or role of being a critic is implicated in this conflict between mastery and mystery, or rhetoric and hermeneutic hesitation.56

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Somewhat similar to the essay’s—and criticism’s—course of interpretive discovery is the journey to that moment when art reveals its

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fundamental opposition “to the will to power as . . . to the cult of personality.”57 I mean that “dispossession of the artist in the work,” which occurs when the text “gives” itself in that very moment “when we realize” that thinking of it “simply in terms of how it relates to me” or I to it, “let alone [how] it serves my interest, is an inadequate or actively untruthful perspective.”58 A recognition of other-ness occurs with the “dispossession,” such that the artist—or the reader—is able “to let be,” for it is always, with art, a matter of Being, of ontology. In other words, similar to those that Eliot uses in Four Quartets, the love—for it is always a matter, too, of love—is “disinterested,” or, in Archbishop Rowan Williams’s words, in the Clark Lectures published as Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, “simply the self-forgetting and urgent desire that there be real life in the product, some sort of real independence from will and sentiment.”59 “The work ‘pleases,’ ” Williams continues, “in [Jacques] Maritain’s sense when it has this independence; it is beautiful when it is released from the artist.”60 The essay may not be a work of art at all, although it is a product of craft. It is not art when it simply represents just this writer’s individual possession of the matter observed or reflected upon; a site where differences meet and play, rather than a thing, such an essay does not have its being, like art, as a made object. It then participates in the post-Renaissance “cult of personality” that Maritain deplored, as did David Jones and as did Eliot. The latter also sought to turn the essay away from personality and reflection upon experience toward the object itself, for example the text. In this, he was aided by the early seventeenth-century Anglican churchman Lancelot Andrewes, whom he described precisely as being “wholly in his subject, unaware of anything else. . . . [Thus] his emotion grows as he penetrates more deeply into his subject . . . Andrewes’s emotion is purely contemplative; it is not personal, it is wholly evoked by the object of contemplation.” His contemporary, the more famous John Donne, is different, not averse from essaying, as a matter of fact: “a ‘personality’ in a sense in which Andrewes is not: his sermons . . . are a ‘means of self-expression.’ ”61 In this characteristically tight comparison, Eliot captures precisely and succinctly the difference between Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. It may be enough, I submit, to take the following short passage in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent exposition of the work of Jacques Maritain, especially his later Mellon Lectures published as Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry: “The artist exercises intellect

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with such detachment that the effect is a sort of image of sanctity, a contemplative absorption in what is truly there.”62 The essay is (usually) not art, nor is literary criticism, as Eliot argued as early as The Sacred Wood. Criticism is, by definition, secondary, always and necessarily so. It is constituted as response, with responsibility to the “calling” text or texts. I see no way—although I have tried—to render textual commentary artistic. It can and should, of course, reflect craft and be well written. Criticism’s being, however, that is, its commenting, interpretive, and clarifying function ties it ineluctably to representation, and in a real sense, imitation, at the very least a putting-in-other-words. Criticism thus retains, willy-nilly, its drive toward the practical, and that separates it from art and keeps it forever just this side. Such a situation should not, though, be cause for lament or hand-wringing. Criticism remains a vital activity: needed and perhaps never more so than at present when our capacity for and skill in reading well is dismally deficient, embarrassing, and debilitating.

II. “G EN ’ ROUS C ON V ERSE ” “Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!” declared Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism.63 It is the essential point. Beside it, the notion—which I once embraced and advanced—of a “personal criticism” pales. To seek a personal criticism is to put the emphasis in the wrong place, misunderstanding the nature of the essai. Of course, criticism should never be impersonal, but it certainly need not be autobiographical. Rather than “personal,” I suggest “familiar”: criticism offered as “Gen’rous Converse,” rendered in a voice much like the reader’s, one human being speaking to another. That voice may be more modest than the ordinary reader’s, for the literary or critical essayist appears to have learned to curb his or her expectations, to know himself well enough to grasp that—in Swift’s words—when the imagination or fancy gets astride upon the reason his expectations of himself become totally unrealistic. Personal criticism, so-called, runs the risk of flouting the humility borne of control of expectations. For all our easy assumptions to the contrary, neither must criticism be “the careful product of a professional,” in the sense excoriated by William H. Gass: “striking of course, original of course, important naturally, yet without possessing either grace or charm or elegance, since these qualities will interfere with the impression of seriousness which it wishes to maintain.” Like the (definite) article, whose form

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such criticism takes, this eschewing of all sense of “activity—the process, the working, the wondering”—this unfamiliar, professional “product” “is written as only writing can be written, even if, at various times, versions have been given a dry dull voice at a conference, because, spoken aloud, it still sounds like writing written down, writing born for its immediate burial in a Journal.”64 “Yale Critic” Geoffrey Hartman has long railed against a cool, pointed, detached criticism “ludicrous” in the face of the extraordinary language-event that is a literary text of interest and value. He suspects that the merely professional critic does not want “to come out,” rather to remain safely behind his or her mask of impersonality, sublimating one desire after another (including that of being an artist). Hartman’s own is a “personable” criticism, hardly autobiographical and hardly “objective.” He calls his important Criticism in the Wilderness, as we have observed, “a book of confessions”; it is personal in the sense that it is engaged, passionate, and reflective of a particular, highly individualistic sensibility, recording, like Anatole France, the “journey of his soul around masterpieces.”65 Hartman’s is, at once, a record of his close reading and the result of it. Hartman’s solution proves the very opposite of Eliot’s, as the latter appears, for example, in his essay on Lancelot Andrewes, for he solicits, if not a “personal” criticism, at least a “creative” criticism that capitalizes fully on the critic’s “personality” and gives vent to allegedly repressed psychological needs and desires. It is the Romantic answer par excellence, light-years from Eliot’s avowed classicism. Indeed, Eliot incarnates the very kind of critical commentary that Hartman rejects: related to and smacking of the familiar Anglo-American (and, more specifically, Anglican) via media and pointedly indebted, says Hartman, to the tradition of the familiar essay.66 Eliot makes the point with characteristic precision, subtlety, and indirection when, in a section of The Sacred Wood titled “The Romantic Aristocrat,” he writes: “Romanticism is a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon themselves.”67 Whether the goal is exactly to “familiarize the strange,” it is certainly not to estrange the familiar. *

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Since I wrote Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing (1992), in which I championed a personal criticism based in

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a return to the essay, signs of hope have appeared. PMLA remains as hide-bound as ever—the one place, said Joseph Epstein, familiar essayist and then the editor of The American Scholar, you would look in vain for an essay.68 If any difference appears in academic critical writing, it is for the worse, for with the unseating of theory (as such) as kingpin has come a strident, polemical political writing that, ironically enough, smacks of crass professionalism. Happily, journalistic critical writing has begun to reassert itself, perhaps the most notable example being the emergence, and somewhat grudging academic acceptance, of James Wood, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. If, as I believe, the goal is a criticism neither overtly theoretical nor quite (or simply) journalistic, neither personal in the sense of autobiographical nor impersonally professional, where is “the common reader,” that idealized representation first named by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and recalled by Virginia Woolf early in the twentieth? Can we do no more than, according to Clara Claiborne Park, writing in 1992, hope for “rejoining the common reader”?69 Should we want to do so or be at all concerned to try? Critics and writers like George Steiner and Frank Kermode angle for a quite uncommon reader, and one of Geoffrey Hartman’s most severe asseverations touches upon the inevitable heavy burden of knowledge that any modern—or postmodern—reader bears. We cannot turn back or undo the present—Eliot the classicist said as much in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in 1920. “What then remains . . .?” we may well ask with John Dryden, writing in Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith in 1682, about a very different matter. Dryden’s subject there was reading of Holy Scripture, under post-Reformation conditions of freedom and license. He took comfort and solace in the tensional in-betweenness of the established via media: What then remains, but, waving each Extreme, The Tides of Ignorance, and Pride to stem? Neither so rich a Treasure to forgo; Nor proudly seek beyond our pow’r to know. (427–30)70

The “opposite” of the much-prized (though never much-liked) article, according to Gass, the essay is better known negatively than for what it is. It is “What then remains,” known by its differences, revealed

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by such comparisons as that with the (definite) article; the essay may even lack “positive charge.” Our understanding of the essay in the English-speaking world— its “father” is widely acknowledged to be the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, writing at the end of the tumultuous sixteenth century—derives from modifications of the French essais by the great experimenter and political figure Sir Francis Bacon. Just a few years after Montaigne wrote in French, Bacon adopted, and adapted, the new form, referring to his hardly personal or autobiographical short “pieces” as essays. As a result of this bivalent situation, the essay exists as indebted to both Montaigne and Bacon; it is both formal (like Bacon) and informal (like Montaigne), both personal and hortatory. Whereas the Frenchman is famous for asking, que sais-je? the Englishman answers, “I know.” The essay, in other words, hangs between one who asks, what do I know? (and, already divided, this time within, what do I know?) and one who answers, “I know.” The tension is palpable, the difference, great as it is, somehow productive in the site that comes closer than anything else to defining the “glorious” essay. I am not sure that Bacon, for all his knowledge derived from vast and deep experience, ever appears arrogant or dogmatic, even as he claims “to know.” But if we took his (more familiar) essays as the sole standard, we would miss out on much as well as understand only a part, albeit a significant part, of the essay’s considerable history. If, contrariwise, we ignored Bacon, sacrificing him, as is more likely, on the altar of the much more personal (and personable) Montaigne, we would similarly diminish and impoverish our understanding and pleasure. In short, we need both Montaigne and Bacon if we are to avoid partial appreciation. Importantly, there already appears in Montaigne a wariness of expectation. In “Of Practice,” for example, which becomes an apologia for the new kind of writing in which he is engaged, he both expresses its value—essaying is not only a science, but “the other sciences . . . are incomparably less useful”71—and reveals, and embodies, the tension essential to its very being. To say merely that Montaigne evinces his modesty or humility misses a crucial point, which appears in these words: What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.

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And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am using only what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.72

It is also important to note that Montaigne predicates everything on usefulness, and usefulness will hereafter be a major reason for essaying, perhaps the major reason for practicing, and indulging, this new form.73 Criticism reveals, and embodies, a similar, parallel tension, for it stakes a claim to usefulness, never more so, of course, than when as so often it is practical, geared toward elucidation and assessment of particular works. That utile exists alongside, I would want to insist, however, a dulce, apparent in its varying degrees of at least gracefulness and elegance of expression and thus creating a further tension. Yet, like Montaigne, the critical essayist must be wary of claiming too much, of expecting too much, not least of himself or herself. Eliot’s magnificent, magisterial Four Quartets, an essay in verse, comprises a thoughtful, evocative study of the nature and the danger of expectations, concluding with the quite humbling acknowledgment that “Sin is Behovely” (“Little Gidding”). I would argue, furthermore, that Thoreau’s essays do not succeed as essays precisely because the writer’s expectations are unrealistic, his problems thus resembling those of Swift’s satirized hack–projector–speaker in “A Modest Proposal,” the point being that his proposal is anything but modest. In Estranging the Familiar, I now see, I too indulged great and unrealistic expectations, looking toward revitalizing literary criticism by means of a “return of/to” the essay. Embracing the notion of a personal criticism, which was to be abetted by the personal essay, I was implicitly advocating the very thing that criticism does not need, that in fact it needs to curb and to avoid, a premium on personality. Moreover, there was more than a hint harbored of a desire, like Stephen Dedalus’s, to create anew, to forge something out of my own innards (or filth, according to Swift). Now, nearly two decades later, here in this book, I recognize and accept the primacy of the familiar (which is not the opposite of “personal”). What matters, after all, in and to critical writing is the capacity of the reader’s insight into the work or works under consideration. I might, then, repeat here Pope’s

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warning with which I opened the present essay: “Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!” *

* *

The critic is a writer as well as a reader—another truism, containing truth, the depth and extent of which we too little recognize and acknowledge. Being a reader is, I reckon, primary, but the critic’s being as (also) a writer is not to be slighted, although it commonly is. That the critic herself or himself often does not claim to be a writer, describing and announcing himself as (only) a critic, evidences the irony with which Georg Lukács invests the essay, and perhaps especially the critical essay. Criticism is inseparable—and unrecognizable apart—from both considerations of usefulness and those of quality and capaciousness of expression. There is, in other words, no avoiding dulce et utile, including their own inseparability. The question of close reading now asserts itself. Signs of a renaissance are all about: in books offering to teach us how to read novels, poems, even essays. Their presence points to need, and teachers’ experience surely confirms the dire situation of reading among our youth (and beyond). A group of professors recently received an “urgent” email from a fellow scholar-critic, vested with teaching twentiethcentury poetry, requesting help with teaching students to read. He sought tips as well as titles of helpful texts. Evidently, it had not occurred to him not only that he should know how to teach close reading but that that constitutes precisely his fundamental responsibility. He went on to solicit “examples” of “exemplary” close readings as well as instances of explanation of what close reading is and how it works—in jargon-laden terms. If close reading is poised to make a comeback, perhaps in university classrooms and professional publications alike, it will be after decades of abuse and ridicule. Linked to New Criticism, close reading became an opprobrium during the heyday of European-based theory, evidence, it was claimed, of (especially) British common sense and flair for the practical. Geoffrey Hartman railed against an overweening emphasis on practical criticism, inspired and fueled by pedagogical interests and concerns. In the classroom, the need is ever present for instruction in close reading. In print, for a time at least, close readings became the main efforts of soi-disant critics.

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Still, Morris Dickstein seems extreme in simply opposing the “record” of close reading and the “product” of close reading.74 He diminishes the former so as to elevate the latter, the kind of critical writing that he admires in Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and other “New York intellectuals.” The proof is, however, in the pudding. I for one find the commentary of such New Critics, and close readers, as Cleanth Brooks valuable and desirable because they are at once of practical value and a delight to read, useful, and pleasurable. Describing Geoffrey Hartman’s criticism as “the most realistic record we have of what literate reading is like,”75 Paul Fry effectively links the different takes on the use of reading in criticism that Dickstein dramatically opposes to one another. It is hard to imagine criticism as we know it isolated from and shorn of close commentary on texts. The result, I fear, would resemble the miasma that now parades under the aegis of American or cultural studies, which a local colleague has described as idea-based (as opposed to what English departments used to do, which is textbased). Do texts play the ancillary role of evidence in our writing, or are they the medium with which and in which we work, plying our trade? In any case, why must close readings be assumed to be deadly, of very little interest to anyone other than a narrow band of professionals? The sparse critical writing left by Andrew Lytle is an exception to the commonplace assumption. Novelist, short story writer, teacher, and long-time editor of The Sewanee Review, Lytle was a Southern “Agrarian,” a member of a clearly reactionary tribe linked to Vanderbilt and then the University of the South, who never got over the South’s defeat in the Civil War and who feared the directions the New South was taking in hot pursuit of the rest of the country, modernism, industrialism, consumerism, and materialism. I want to return now to Lytle’s brilliant essay “In Defense of a Passionate and Incorruptible Heart.” First, the opening paragraph of Lytle’s subtle and precise discussion of one of the greatest works of literary art: Before a growing nihilism in literature I want to talk about a book and its heroine, a book which is now neglected in its own country before the existentialist sense of experience and the misuse of the stream of consciousness by certain contemporary authors. Book and heroine bear the same name: Madame Bovary. . . . This neglect is a part of that

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chill sense of chaos, unseen but felt (chaos casts no shadow), which threatens Christendom.

As Lytle continues here, he offers comments that directly recall Incarnation, that “impossible union” (Eliot) of apparent opposites, here West and East, that Lytle suggests are really parts of an essential whole. As a term for our society the West is too geographical; it is to the secular society of our day a submerged half-truth, for the symbolic meaning of the West is death, the grave, the night sea journey; and in spite of the blatant political public assertion that the West is power, underneath we feel the threat of its eternal mythological meaning. And this makes for a fearful speculation in so far as it is separated from its completing symbol, the East, which promises renewal of life and light. This failure to consider together the two halves which make a whole remotely, but surely, has to do with the present state of letters. . . . [N]ever before in our culture have the arts disclosed so sensitively our essential disorder: in fiction a kind of energetic formlessness, an intensive enlargement of a part for the whole, an obscene preoccupation with the personality of the author rather than with his work, and last, eroticism everywhere replacing love. . . . And yet it is this far we have come.76

At this point, Lytle turns to Flaubert’s great novel, a bit abruptly, I have to say. Of course, the big game that Lytle pursues is the modern condition (to take Hannah Arendt’s book title), and he soon follows with some fine writing, especially on the prevalent assumption that “man is only matter, only a sensibility,” which he roundly rejects as “the subtlest lie of all.”77 Madame Bovary addresses this very situation, the perversion of “the human condition.” Lytle’s close reading of the novel, which punctuates his essay, is thus framed, in large cultural terms. The “record” of close reading enables the large commentary and critique; Lytle unites and shows in his essay that “record” is the means in and through which the “result” must proceed, justifying, supporting, and legitimating any large claims. These are not distinct acts, such as Dickstein would have us believe. To make clear just how Lytle’s critical writing proceeds, I turn now to the last paragraphs of his essay and will quote an even larger section than earlier. Here the emphasis falls on his “record” of reading. Lytle takes us to the sad, devastating closure of Madame Bovary: The story now quickly ends. . . . By now Emma can appeal only in terms of this agency, no longer in terms of herself. But there is one true sense

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of herself that refuses invasion. It is desperate, blind, but it has not been touched in its integrity; and this is her quest for the sacrament of love. Finding nothing but the spurious, soul and flesh maimed by the opposite of what she has sought, she will not compromise, not even in death. “She stretched forward her neck [toward the crucifix] as one who is thirsty, and glueing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest kiss of love that she had ever given.” Then the priest gives her extreme unction.78

Before reading Lytle on Emma, I had assumed her last act an obscene perversion, but that I was wrong, seeing but one-half of a whole, is suggested by the novelist’s pointed reference to “the Man-God”: Incarnation of love. As to the criticism being performed: Lytle’s differs, obviously, from the usual critical commentary, in part because of his own passionate engagement with the story—this is no dryasdust writing, nor is it an insignificant dissection of a text. The critic is by no means distanced from the story, not only engaged with it, but also very much in it. Cultural commentary exists alongside textual summary and analysis. Clearly, the Flaubertian text as read by the critic enables and empowers the critic’s far-reaching cultural critique. From this paragraph. Lytle moves to the penultimate one in the essay, his eye focused sharply on Flaubert’s text, attuned to it, at-oned in fact, signaled in the union in the first sentence here of narrative detail and the reader’s observation of the novel’s revealed structure: As the oiled thumb passes, the two parts of the structure are revealed by a kind of final juxtaposition of opposites: the image of her demand for love against the corrupt means by which she has had to seek it. The sensibility, instead of uniting mind, heart, and imagination in the love she sought, has been made to divert, distort, and waste the substance of life. The thumb, “First upon the eyes that had so coveted all worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm breeze and amorous odors; then upon the mouth, that had uttered lies, that had curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the hands that had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more.”79

Lytle does not simply repeat the text, nor does he engage in mere paraphrase, although he mirrors his author in delighting in the precise and scrupulous rendering of detail; rather, he unites, in one act of reading, observation (and its record) and analysis and interpretation. He thus extends the text, putting it into his (other)

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words, words that go beyond Flaubert’s without altering them. It is a familiar essai, unfortunately unfamiliar to readers nowadays. I am further extending the effort, following the same procedure here, willy-nilly. As fine as Lytle’s observations are, as meticulous and faithful as are his extensions of Flaubert’s own magnificent writing, the final paragraph of “In Defense of a Passionate and Incorruptible Heart” rises, in my judgment, to a level of critical commentary all too rarely attained. I will give Lytle the last words in this section, although I have cited them before and even as I quibble with him over certain, relatively minor details in his conclusion: As controlling image, the living disease, the loathsome corruption of the blind beggar of Rouen, is outside in the street, as Emma is dying. He is there for symbol of the action, the human being as victim of a society totally selfish, carnal, and material. His presence at her death is not accidental. They are equally victims in kind, if not in degree. . . . His presence and his [“love”]song combine the essence of the action. Emma has to die to learn. Perhaps she learns only the half of truth; perhaps the other half comes quickly with the final illumination beyond death. The priest and the atheist sit up with the dead body, to emphasize further the essential meaning. The priest sprinkles holy water; the druggist, chlorine solution. The priest says we will end by understanding each other. They already understand. Bread and wine is spread for their repast. Not the blood and body of our Lord ends the action, but the worldly bread and wine to appease their carnal appetites, as it diverts them from the smell of decay which, being exuded by the dead flesh, becomes the final symbol of death in life, the description of the society that has undone Emma.80

The close reading that Lytle renders, as fine as I consider his essay to be, may never engage many readers. I am reminded again of Eliot’s observations concerning Bishop Andrewes, precise, meticulous, and scrupulous of detail, linguistically oriented, “verbal and pedantic,” to the point of “sqeez[ing] the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess”81— Andrewes attracts readers, when he does, for his elegant and eloquent preces privatae, not his sermons. In like manner, Lytle’s “record” of his close reading is so textual, and text-ured, that “the common reader,” if such exists, may gasp for air in a space where he or she cannot envision a forest, besieged, or so it may feel, by so many tall, imposing, and darkening trees.

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What to do, then, about close reading? On one hand, it is crucial to and as criticism, a compelling instance of utile. On the other hand, it can stifle, tempting one to the other (perhaps) extreme, where dulce asserts its (perhaps equal) rights. Will—or can—“the record of close reading” ever, somehow, attract a significantly large audience? I had once thought, and proposed, that a “personal criticism” might well do the trick, somehow talking about a text while talking about the self, and vice versa. I have, alas, no reason to think I was anywhere near the mark. The late novelist William Maxwell did a creditable job of uniting narrative and commentary in The Outermost Dream, but his essays are actually reviews, with a primary focus on the original writer’s biography. The key may reside, as so often happens, in the question of audience. Reluctantly, I am learning to face the fact—and to accept it, however grudgingly—that a so-called common reader, attracted to biography and history, may never find “the record of close reading” of particular interest—not enough, at any rate, to fork over $25 or more. When you think honestly about it, you will perhaps agree that there are far better ways to spend one’s money and time than on what amounts to a sort of retelling of what happens in a poem or novel. Why not read the primary text, for it will surely be much better written? Why have a poor imitation when the original is available— and probably for less money, if not costing more time? Of course, any criticism worth reading is more than simple paraphrase. It is more, in fact, than explication de texte. Such criticism as Andrew Lytle’s on Madame Bovary consists less of explication than of extension and application. Even so, who now reads the essays in The Hero with the Private Parts? Perhaps if the form of Lytle’s writing were more imaginative and creative? Easy to say, but very hard to effect, even in imagination in any particulars. I doubt, in any case, that readers will take to rehearsal of textual actions unless they are already familiar with the work. That means not only an educated reader but also a reader with some training in literature, reading, and criticism. Not, however, a professional, not necessarily such a person. Instead, for instance, a teacher of the humanities, perhaps of world literature, hardly a specialist in the area of the text at issue. He or she would not only be familiar with books and reading strategies but also concerned with larger issues of effectiveness, meaning, significance, and value that the specialist tends to take for granted, his or her attention typically directed to more

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minute and technical considerations. To recall Alexander Pope, once more: the critic must needs possess “A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind” (An Essay on Criticism, 640)—yet another both/and. A familiar criticism—it is that I am modestly proposing—would carry the tone and bear the style of that traditional form of essay that we associate with a certain elegance, personal engagement, wide reading, modesty of demeanor, worldly and spiritual wisdom, urbanity, and capaciousness of feeling and sensibility. The subject matter of the familiar-critical essay would (often) include close reading of texts, differing somewhat from Andrew Lytle’s style though not in matter. The audience the critic could not ever expect to be great, her or his hopes notwithstanding. The critic would have to accept—graciously, at best—not only his secondary status but also the limited extent of her readership: between the specialist and the general.

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CH A P T ER

8

Of Swords, Ploughshares, and Pens: The Return of/to Civility, Against Winning, and the Art of Peace

Civilization is a precarious practicality. Its existence derives from difference and is dependent upon relation properly understood. Far from a disembodied idea, it thrives on feeling, emotion, and passion at least as much as ideas and must always be tempered by prospects of comity; it remains forever subject to nothing less than civility. Civilization is notoriously hard to come by, even if taken for granted by those who pretend to it, and even harder to keep elastic and supple. Institutions are its bulwark, the arts at once its sentinels and its physicians, charged with cleansing the mental palate, sharpening the eyesight and the hearing, and ordering the heart’s otherwise willful motives. In quoting (so much), the essayist signals his or her invitation to others, welcoming them in for conversation, dialogue, exchange of point of view; it is an acknowledgment of attention to others, a restraint on the selfishness that hogs attention. The poet and essayist Alexander Pope, a product of a refined civilization no longer understood or much appreciated, wrote knowledgeably in An Essay on Man of “Reason’s comparing balance” (2.60) and of that “well accorded strife” (121) that enables “the balance of the mind” (120) and mirrors “the jarring int’rests” that “of themselves create / Th’according music of a well-mix’d State” (3.293–94).1 Pope saw and understood relation as critical, and relation depends upon— while deriving from—difference. Pope thus instances central problematics of civilization. The lines from another of his great essay-poems, that at once of critical commentary and creation, written when he was no more than 21, represent the ideal critic, who by work’s end, turns out to be the writer

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himself; thus Pope stands guilty of the very pride that he excoriates, a failure of modesty, tipping the balance otherwise espoused. Preaching is easy, teaching somewhat less so perhaps, but practice and action demand vigilance as well as diligence, self-scrutiny and selfconsciousness, control, discipline, and concerted effort. Civilization is always, everywhere, a matter of practice, not of theory. It is inseparable from civility, such as that Pope describes. Conversation, and especially that conducted in a spirit and a tone of generosity, marks its appearance. Not every culture attains (to) civilization. Civilization makes a person civil, not only placing him or her for the nonce above the beasts and mere animals, but it also constantly reminds him or her that he or she is not and never will be an angel, free from immodesty, pride, and the baser instincts and proclivities. Human being is im-pure, a mix, indeed. Flannery O’Connor was right in averring in “The Teaching of Literature” that the writer traffics in “mystery and manners,” the name of her posthumously published collection of nonfiction pieces. Both manners and mystery are essential, the former another name for those activities we enlist under the rubric “civilization,” and the latter what Incarnation reveals—Hellenism and Hebraism redefined and together again: It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. About the turn of the century, Henry James wrote that the young woman of the future, though she would be taken out for airings in a flying-machine, would know nothing of mystery or manners. James had no business to limit the prediction to one sex; otherwise, no one can very well disagree with him. The mystery he was talking about is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.2

These “conventions” make up our civilized existence; they are the real, for they are indissolubly linked to the material, to what the senses provide us with. O’Connor again: Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn’t actually experience, who isn’t made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.3

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This, from the essay titled “Writing Short Stories,” captures exactly and perfectly the incarnational basis of storytelling (nonfictional as well as fiction, I would say) and of the effects of literature; it serves, at the same time, to ward off our natural tendencies toward Gnosticism, with its reverence for disembodied ideas, themes, and theories, all abstractions from the senses (on whose primacy Eliot, who was trained as a philosopher, always and vigorously insisted). Manners, we may then say, or civility, or civilization—such is the means that is not merely means, for there is no other access to mystery, which comes at us always in indirect mode. When mystery is approached—in, through, and by means of them—they are not then transcended in the sense of being left behind; they cannot be discarded, replaced, or dispensed with: manners and mystery. We separate them at our peril, inclined and prone to “half-guess” the hint, “half-understand” the gift (Four Quartets).4 In still another essay included in Mystery and Manners, O’Connor expands on the fundamental fact about fiction—that it is, and must be, concrete. As she says, “the nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus,” which, as I have said, the artist, whatever the medium, works to cleanse, sharpen, strengthen, and refine. Continues O’Connor: The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth. 5

This is finely said, and resonant with Eliot’s opening argument in The Sacred Wood that the critic must first deal with texts before moving to ideas and problems, the way thereto always leading in, through, and by means of “the letter.” Importantly, O’Connor proceeds to

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elaborate and extend her argument into the realm of philosophy and theology: The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art.6

And there you have it, the cat out of the bag, tagged, and fully identified, the heart of the matter. Arguably, the (Protestant) Reformation launched this modern spirit, with its enforced separations, rejection of mediation, and denial of the beauty and place of matter, dispensing with art, music, architecture in the essential progress—so-called—of the human soul toward salvation. Ransacking the churches, the Protestants left the soul with precious little to feed upon, the senses far from atoned, or purified, in their servitude. Violence marked, and striated, the very effort. *

* *

Civilization is about nothing if not restraint and the curbing of violence to which mankind has been prone depuis la fondation du monde (René Girard). The brutes know nothing of such restraint, uncivilized, even though mere animals will not attack or seek to destroy their own kind. Civility marks very nearly opposition to violence, enacting that learned capacity to get along, somehow, with one another—“envisioning the stranger’s heart.” As Alexander Pope recognized, and taught, and as, in our own time, René Girard has worked hard to show, difference lies at the very heart of civilization, a complex, complicated notion forever in need of the closest observation, scrutiny, interpretation, and enactment. The locus classicus is Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, which puts Chaucer in other words. I refer specifically here to the hero Ulysses’s poignant evocation of order, thus: . . . O when Degree is shaked Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick! How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

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The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too.7

In Girard’s words, degree, “or gradus, is the underlying principle of all order, natural and cultural”: It permits individuals to find a place for themselves in society; it lends a meaning to things, arranging them in proper sequence within a hierarchy; it defines the objects and moral standards that men alter, manipulate, and transform. The musical metaphor describes that order as a “structure,” in the modern sense of the word, a system of chords thrown into disharmony by the sudden intervention of reciprocal violence.8

It is impossible for me not to think of Eliot’s Four Quartets. At any rate, then, himself having quoted Shakespeare’s lines in “The Sacrificial Crisis,” the second chapter of Violence and the Sacred, Girard goes on to explain: . . . [I]t is not the differences but the loss of them that gives rise to violence and chaos, that inspires Ulysses’ plaint. This loss forces men into a perpetual confrontation, one that strips them of all their distinctive characteristics—in short, of their “identities.” Language itself is put in jeopardy. “Each thing meets/In mere oppugnancy:” the adversaries are reduced to indefinite objects, “things” that wantonly collide with each other like cargo on the decks of a storm-tossed ship. The metaphor of the floodtide that transforms the earth’s surface to a muddy mass is frequently employed by Shakespeare to designate the undifferentiated state of the world that is also portrayed in Genesis.9

Precisely such impending collapse of All (things) prompts Pope’s devastating representation of the return of Chaos and Old Night at the bleak conclusion of Dunciad IV.

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According to Girard, who came to Catholic Christianity by way of his work in comparative literature, the only “escape” from reciprocal violence is via the God-man Jesus Christ—God enfleshed, incarnate. As Girard writes in “The Divinity of Christ”: To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception. We do not have to adopt the hypothesis of Christ’s divinity because it has always been accepted by orthodox Christians. Instead, this hypothesis is orthodox because in the first years of Christianity there existed a rigorous (though not yet explicit) intuition of the logic determining the Gospel text.10

Christianity and civility: “meant each other’s Aid.” More: they are interimplicated, Christianity void of “reciprocal violence,” the supreme and paradigmatic form of civility and civility ultimately dependent on Christianity for its thorough and complete enactment. *

* *

Earlier, I quoted O’Connor’s apt distinction between literature’s way of dealing with the concrete, the material, and the senses, particularly its incarnational nature, and the modern proclivity for the disembodied idea, abstraction, and the merely (and immediately) spiritual. She does not say, although she might have done with a slight shift of point of view that the form in which she is then writing—the familiar essay— lies precisely between the two contestants: not quite but almost literature and not quite but almost philosophy (as well). I shall return in a moment to the familiar essay, arguably the most civilized of all forms of written communication—not least because of its closeness to and basis in “Gen’rous Converse.” It seems almost written and almost spoken. *

* *

False, or, better, sham, civility marks the modern academy’s profound and pervasive if clandestine violence, a commitment variously

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manifest and uniformly denied. Evidence abounds and has long been remarked if generally ignored. Decades ago, in the pages of College English, an organ of the National Council of Teachers of English, Keith Fort revealed,11 devastatingly, the martial metaphors that (we all know) inhabit and characterize critical and scholarly academic writing (trained in graduate school as a “competitive scholar”—the phrase the department’s graduate director used at Virginia in the late 1960s—I once wrote “articles”—not essays, please note—that opened with the “opposition,” or “whipping boys,” another imbibed term, and proceeded to try to destroy their arguments so that my own might win out and so establish me as authoritative and dominant, my argument not merely valid). Sometime after Fort wrote, Jane Tompkins penned a couple of essays as alternative, along the way exposing the violence that marks conference “presentations” in particular: “shoot-outs” at the OK Corral was Tompkins’s by no means farfetched caricature.12 If people read Fort and Tompkins, and a few others, notably including feminist critics, few paid heed, and so nothing changed, as Girard would have predicted, and as far as I can see, although theoretical fashions have morphed a time or two since then. I contributed to this situation, in both presentations and print, and I now understand the role played by my quest of difference in the reciprocal violence that I have both inflicted and suffered in the academy. *

* *

I proceed now to illustration. I choose, with some trepidation, to write autobiographically, for I know first-hand the effects of violence in the academy. Central in it is the professoriate’s extreme fear of and quickness to assume and condemn what is perceived to be plagiarism. Lest I be misunderstood, let me make my position clear. I do not in the least condone taking the ideas or the words of another as one’s own. Such is nothing other than cheating, a deplorable shortcut, and I still bear the influence of my mechanic father, the most honest man I have ever known, as well as of my graduate training under the sometimes-contentious mantle of an “Honor system.” I have never knowingly borrowed from another without attribution, without, that is, acknowledging my debt specific and general, and I have always tried to inculcate in my students the same scrupulousness. I am not,

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however, fanatical, as many of my colleagues seem to be. Of course, unlike them, I have been accused, in print, of plagiarism, have suffered the consequences, and have lived to tell the tale, a sad, unfortunate, and totally preventable one. The occasion was my first book, published in 1980, The Faith of John Dryden: Change and Continuity, on which I had worked for eleven years, expanding my doctoral dissertation on “Dryden’s AntiClericalism” with the aid of national grants and fellowships and work at the Huntington and Clark libraries in Los Angeles. One of the first reviews of my book, published in a respected and influential specialty journal, was written by the scholar whose arguments concerning Dryden, his poetry, and his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism I wrote against—and sought to demolish.13 To this day, I consider the older arguments short-sighted, mistaken, and injurious to Dryden, his poetry, and his faith. By means of crafty, rhetorical devices, I was made to appear guilty of stealing both the scholar’s ideas and his words. One could hardly expect from such an interested reviewer a fair and balanced assessment of a directly competing argument—even if I had been more generous in writing about him, as I should have been. From the first sentence of the review it was clear what I was in for, and what the reviewer was up to. The tone was, from the start, antagonistic, the aggrieved scholar writhing in righteous indignation and demanding justice. Members of my department bought his argument, without, it appears, reading the review and responsibly comparing the two books. My most eager opponents were fellow-specialists. Others were less direct, furtive in their glances and bent on avoiding me when our paths crossed. One colleague said to me that I “must be thinking of killing [my]self.” I quickly became a scapegoat, in part, I have always suspected, because I had begun to work in theory, which challenged deep-held beliefs and called in question usual, comfortable ways of doing things. A motion in the Advisory Committee to pursue an investigation of “the scandal” failed by one vote, that cast by a graduate student, as I sat, like the “yellow owl” in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, on trial, barely comprehending, disbelieving the things that were being said. While colleagues outside the department pledged their support, and my (then-)publisher accepted another of my books for publication, I

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felt besieged. A major university rescinded an invitation to campus to interview for their department chairmanship, and at home influential colleagues convinced the Dean of the Graduate School to conduct a thorough investigation. A few former students, aggrieved by their grades, took the opportunity for challenge, threatening me—and the university—with lawsuits. In the event, nearly eighteen months after the scandal hit the fan, a three-person, blue-ribbon committee, appointed by the graduate dean, exonerated me. By that point, I was a changed person. For the better, I must say. Even so, I would not want to undergo again, or wish upon another, the vilification, the constant, debilitating anxiety and fear, the extreme risks that followed the publication of the proven false charges. I will not detail the fear that, while knowing I was not guilty, I breathed in and out for a year and a half. Nor do I wish here to rehearse the arguments I presented to the investigative panel. Even though they officially cleared me, my story got out only by word of mouth. Once accused of plagiarism, you are never completely free of the imputation. As a result, years later I was informed by another colleague that “the scandal” was still being talked about at whatever conference he had just returned from— where, no doubt, there were shoot-outs aplenty. Only a few years ago, still anxious whenever taking mail from my departmental box, never again easy about what new threats might lie in wait for me, I learned that a former graduate school classmate was engaged in a study of the effects of plagiarism and was assuming, so his letter read, that I was “demonstrably guilty of this most heinous of offenses.” I was advised simply to ignore the letter, and I did. But even today, almost 30 years after the charges, I do not feel at ease or free of suspicion. I have reason to believe, in fact, that my work on Dryden—and even that on Pope—is still being ignored because of those charges long ago and ill-founded. I never doubted my innocence. I had good reason, however, to doubt the justice available in the academy. The most seemingly careful and scrupulous scholars, diligent readers and logicians, at least by professional standards, jumped to conclusions, in some cases pursuing private agendas and in others some sense of vengeance for injuries or affronts real or imagined. The clamor for action within the department climaxed very soon after it became known that my salary had been boosted in response to an outside offer. In any case, colleagues

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did not read carefully and objectively—that is, responsibly. Truth to the tell, the reviewer, the well-known scholar whose authority I was determined to overthrow, whom I sought to unseat as the premier commentator on Dryden—the stakes are always so low in academic turf wars—seduced readers with his rhetoric disguised as rigor and logic. Juxtaposition of passages in the two books effectively cast mine in the worst possible light, especially when combined with clever and misleading ellipses and a marked failure to acknowledge my extensive citations of the prior book both throughout and even within calledout passages. To be sure, some of my phrasing did resemble and echo that in the book I was challenging. I can only plead now, as I did then, that having spent eleven or more years writing and rewriting, all the while flooded with that book, I knew the positions and the language thoroughly. I no doubt absorbed some of both. I was, I must admit, ungenerous and ungracious in the tone of my citations: engaged in battle, I granted my opponent no ground, conceded no thrusts or points. Examination of my many hundreds of notes, all detailed in careful longhand on well-worn 3x5 cards, showed that, contrary to the published insinuations, I had done a great deal of primary research myself, by no means relying on anyone else’s work except in cited instances, all of which I documented. Examination of the copy-edited typescript of my book, which I had fortunately retained, revealed that my copy-editor had removed as unnecessary a particularly telling acknowledgment of the reviewer’s book. Neil Hertz once speculated about the academy’s blood-lust for plagiarists, and I can do no more here than build upon his superb suggestions.14 I begin with the clear desire, variously and everywhere manifest, for difference, if not always for distinction. That translates, inter alia, into a felt need to pursue distance from those who themselves deliberately blur differences by taking others’ ideas and words as their own, a feared absorption and a fearful identifying. The antagonism toward plagiarists is, as I have remarked, justified—at least before it morphs into a fetish and a blind. Plagiarism police, whose name in the academy is Legion, gleeful in time-consuming successes, proving worthiness as detectives and guardians of propriety, property, and the proper, surely fear their own complicity, for it is so easy, especially when you have spent so many hours, days, and years with another’s writing, to forget exactly where the line exists between you and him or her, that difference inevitably blurring over

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time. The potential for unwitting absorption of words and ideas lies in everyone who works with written texts. Often, it is the relatively inexperienced writer, who fails to grasp this crucial fact. Often, it is the common and familiar phrasing that we can no longer distinguish as our own or someone else’s. *

* *

The return of/to the essay: In the following pages I repeat some of my own ideas and words, even those earlier in the present book. I must do so for maximal effect. Academics long ago made the article—the definite article, says Geoffrey Hartman, accurate in his punning—the form of choice for writing about literature. In so doing, they fly in the face of history and tradition. Since at least Dryden in the mid-seventeenth century, criticism had taken the essay as its form, making the two virtually inseparable. Then, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, at a fever pitch of the “intellectual” essay in Anglo-America, came, at the same time, university presses and the Modern Language Association, both abetting the cause and the thrust of (Germanic) scholarship. An inclusive, familiar form, the essay invites, welcomes, and engages you in “Gen’rous Converse,” treating you as something of an equal, amateur to amateur, layperson to layperson, respecting you enough as reader to be written evocatively, rather than, like the article (and monograph), spelling out every jot and tittle, from the announced thesis through the logically controlled and rhetorically impersonal body of argumentation, on to a summary that tiresomely repeats the thesis, in case you had not gotten, or forgot, the point. The procedure is careful, relentless, ruthless, intended not to be read (certainly not aloud) but to be worked through, like a problem in logic. The article is intended for specialists, engaged in problem solving of a narrow and technical sort. As William H. Gass harrumphed years ago, the article, the essay’s “opposite,” is an “awful object.”15 The article as form insists on, celebrates, and promotes difference. Unlike you, the writer of the article resembles the satirized persona in Jonathan Swift’s famous satire “A Modest Proposal,” sometimes mistaken as an essay:16 putatively objective, certainly impersonal, even mechanical and clinical, thus bearing no emotion, apparently having little human feeling. Such a writer is, moreover,

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likely a specialist, adhering to strictly prescribed boundaries, venturing no further than his bailiwick, observing flies and mosquito’s wings (while Rome burns); he is a specialist, a thoroughgoing professional, and if he addresses anyone in particular, it is never more than implicitly, and that merely implied reader is a fellow specialist, who knows perhaps as much as he does, and who cares perhaps even less. The writer of the article is always sure, certain, even as—and because—his argument is buttressed by a depressingly long list of distracting and often indulgent notes, designed not just to prop himself up but also to show off his command and mastery of all relevant contexts and entailed materials. He is, in the event, indifferent; yet he seeks to establish difference, making himself unique and invulnerable. Modest, unlike the article, and unlike the article, self-effacing, which fact implies the acknowledgment of a self, the essay promotes, not identity, but conversation and relation. Instead of pressing for difference, the essay is different (if it insisted, it would not, could not, be different). Take again, as a striking instance, Hilaire Belloc’s “The Mowing of a Field,” from his 1906 collection Hills and the Sea. This brilliant, mellow essay invites you in via its detailed, welcoming description of the south of England, proceeds to exquisite but understated observations on the arts of blade sharpening and then of mowing itself, all the while engaging in broad contextualizing; it then moves outward, toward conclusion, with spare but appealingly sharp accounts of how to buy a pig and how to hire and attain employ. Its last pages make for effective cultural critique as they dramatize the essay’s point of view concerning respect, a major theme. Belloc himself, the erstwhile essayist, emerges in and by means of the writing as the embodiment—the Incarnation—of value(s), treating his swarthy Celtic laborer with decency and kindness, all the while maintaining difference. The following sentences capture the beautiful, intelligent texture of this wonder-ful essay, a paradigm of civility and of order and civilization, thus of difference maintained but never asserted: Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand; and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, “kindly.” For it is a good custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was his labour at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were free men, the one granting a grace and the other

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accepting it. For the dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in [a different] fashion.17

Belloc here captures exactly and perfectly the way of civilization: indirect, free, self-conscious, built around the familiar, which one never misconstrues as anything other than “fiction and observances.” “Lesser men” include “the bad or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past” as well as the “sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words,” who ends up paying more than double—“all because he did not begin by praising the land.”18 No familiarity, in other words, in any sense or manner. The speaker, meanwhile, is engagingly different, different, too, in his sympathy and understanding, from the laborer whom he has employed. “The Mowing of a Field” then ends on this note, Belloc taking courteous leave of his reader as he does of his character: He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do, making their walking a part of the easy but continual labour of their lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind the woods of No Man’s Land.19

Difference thus remains, but not frozen into opposition, only relation—civil relation. “No Man’s Land” wonderfully, cunningly points to another world, beyond the earth and time, in another dimension, where alone difference no longer matters. *

* *

As William H. Gass has noted, the essay also “convokes a community of writers.”20 A bookish form, the familiar essay is “Born of books, nourished by books, a book for its body, another for its head and hair, its syllable-filled spirit, the essay . . . more often than not a confluence of such little blocks and strips of text”—thus a quilt, I have said. It loves to quote, thrives on quotations, in fact: “The apt quotation is one of the essayist’s greatest gifts, and, like the good gift, congratulates the giver.”21 Thus, “Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero,

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Lucretius meet on a page of Montaigne. . . . Virginia Woolf writes of Addison by writing of Macaulay writing of Addison, of whom Pope and Johnson and Thackeray have also written. On and On”22 — indirectness abounding. The article-writer knows and offers few of these pleasures, and so, confronted with the fact of plagiarism or its mere suspicion, reacts mechanically. In the event he or she may not even read the evidence, not responsibly at any rate; too rarely does he or she consider the consequences—the possible, likely effects on other human beings—of his quest, his insinuations, his accusations, her condemnation. The human context—consideration, sympathy, understanding—is, after all, none of his business. He traffics only in facts, the “unattended” fact, blithely unaware that facts, always subject to manipulation and rhetorical chicanery, are dead matter whereas writers—including himself or herself—live and breathe, have families as well as careers. Seeking difference, the academic writer pretends to have found and established it when he locates supposedly illegitimate identities (between another writer and yet another text). Difference is unsatisfactory, here, until it becomes absolute, frozen into opposition. That difference, ironically, only produces doubles of what it thinks to have exposed; thus, I was judged and condemned for inadequate attribution in, through, and by means of failing to acknowledge my clear acknowledgments of the accuser. It is, in every sense, therefore, a vicious cycle, a system of “reciprocal violence.”23 The way out is clear and simple—and difficult. It is well-nigh impossible to respond in a different manner, answerability again the issue. The temptation is great, the desire strong, the wish for revenge very nearly unquenchable short of bloodletting. For us (bloodless) academics, ink replaces blood, although the pen is just as lethal to souls, hearts, feelings—and careers. The greatest of all ironies is that difference “always already” exists. We need not insist on it; to do so is, in fact, to subvert the desire and to countermand the intention, producing the opposite of what is sought and inevitably reducing difference. The essay knows that we are not identical. It thrives, in fact, on difference. Thus, Montaigne, acknowledged father of the essay, celebrated the “ondoyant et divers.”

CH A P T ER

9

The Essay in the Academy: Between “Literature” and “Creative Writing”

The essay has not fared well in the academy. Graduate study, university presses, and the Modern Language Association have, none of them, treated the essay with respect; indeed, its eclipse begins in the late nineteenth century just as the powerful and nearly defining forces were reaching our shores. Although we now inhabit “the age of the essay,” or so we have been told, the academy has belatedly begun to take notice.1 Still, it has not exactly embraced the venerable form. Rather, the academy has, somewhat grudgingly, begun to accept essays as part of “the fourth genre,” jobs have opened in the teaching of essay writing (as part of “nonfiction”), university-based periodicals have made room for essays in their brittle pages, and university presses have published essayists like Sam Pickering, Nancy Mairs, Phillip Garrison, Amy Blackmarr, and Scott Russell Sanders. Professors of English long ago took to the essay—as the form for (some of) their writing, although all too rarely as an object of serious study or of critical analysis and evaluation. Chauncey B. Tinker and Charles S. Brooks (both of Yale) and Robert P. Tristam Coffin (of Bowdoin) are but three of the neglected essayists, who found time and opportunity outside their teaching and scholarly work to pen collections still worthy of attention. Such essays have, perhaps most often, been of the familiar sort: urbane, bookish, graceful of expression, light-hearted, tending toward the long-discredited “belletristic.” When I was in college, in the early to mid-1960s, we encountered essays only in freshman English. As I have lamented before, we read them—if we did—as models for our own miserable efforts to make more of their almost equally miserable kind. I remember, for instance, J.B. Priestley, but I doubt that we encountered Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, or Chesterton. Essays were, after all, pretty clearly

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not literature, and so did not deserve—or require—much attention; since they were generally clear and straightforward, offering simply a mix of fact and opinion, they did not deserve the honorific of “creative writing,” either. We wrote them, or some approximation of what we (may have) read, as we (may have) read them, as means and instruments to the production—the term seems right—of what Richard A. Lanham has finely described as the “c-b-s” understanding of expository writing.2 I discovered the essay when, nearly twenty years “doctorated,” published, and tenured, I started to notice and appreciate sentences. In graduate school, in the late 1960s, we read no essays at all. We read plenty of articles, of course: “objective,” impersonal, graceless of expression, clear, logical, important, professional, narrow, and dull. They may even have been called “essays,” so cavalier has the academy been in naming (i.e., misnaming) its privileged form and failing to draw essential distinctions. In the past twenty to thirty years, matters have gotten a bit better. Articles, term papers, just plain papers, and themes are still, however, called essays, and although “creative nonfiction” has burgeoned as a “field,” the essay receives very little scholarly, analytical, historical, or critical attention. It continues, in other words, to slump under the burden of reputation as light if not frivolous, merely straightforward if not easy, in short, as a slight thing worthy of no better than “second-class” citizenship. Essayists do not help their cause by their continual—and accurate—description of the form in which they labor as modest and humble (even if ironically so). In the academy, assertion counts, along with confidence, feigned or real, pretense, and dogmatism. In truth—I am not the first to say so—the essay is not literature, only “almost” literature. Neither is it philosophy, although “almost” so. Nor is it—despite the assumption of courses that I regularly teach—creative writing, although it certainly exhibits features and stands as the product of the creative and the imaginative, just as it borrows techniques and devices from fiction and from poetry. It stands between these and a multitude of other differences and binaries: “hang[ing] somewhere between what I think and what I am,” avers Edward Hoagland.3 An in-between thing, and a kind of both/and, the essay understandably resists the assertive, the certain, the dogmatic, and the totalitarian. It is, often at least, known by its

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difference, appearing to lack positive charge. Thereby hangs a reason for its need—nay, its necessity—in the academy. As a matter of fact, I shall go so far as to say that the essay stands as an implicit—and often, explicit—critique of academic values. No one has ever painted these values with as sure brush strokes as William H. Gass, writing about Emerson and acutely (and acerbically) differentiating between the essay and the academy’s prized “article”: the essay is, he writes, taking the indirect way of the essay and declaring its freedom from positivisms, obviously the opposite of that awful object, “the article,” which . . . represents itself as the latest cleverness, a novel consequence of thought, skill, labor, and free enterprise, but never as an activity—the process, the working, the wondering. As an article, it should be striking of course, original of course, important naturally, yet without possessing either grace or charm or elegance, since these qualities will interfere with the impression of seriousness which it wishes to maintain; . . . it must appear complete and straightforward and footnoted and useful and certain . . . ; for the article pretends that everything is clear, that its argument is unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit inferences, no illegitimate connections; its manners are starched, stuffy, it would wear a dress suit to a barbecue, silk pajamas to the shower; it knows, with respect to every subject and point of view it is ever likely to entertain, what words to use, what form to follow, what authorities to respect; it is the careful product of a professional, and therefore it is written as only writing can be written. . . . [S]poken aloud, it still sounds like writing written down, writing born for its immediate burial in a Journal. It is a relatively recent invention, this result of scholarly diligence, and its appearance is proof of the presence, nearby, of the Professor. . . . 4

Gass’s own writing, his stunning prose, this glorious essay—modestly titled “Emerson and the Essay” and full of aperçus—stands as a triumphant rebuke to the “article”—an embodiment of the essential argument, fulfilled in the character of the essayist. When I stumbled across Gass’s essay in the late 1980s, within three or four years of its publication in his Habitations of the Word, I was struck by the justness of the criticism, and I marveled at the expression, its freshness, its boldness, its undisguised passion, its conversational and quite unacademic gracefulness (I would later come to think of Gass’s prose, thanks to Cynthia Ozick in quite another

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context, as both “comely and muscular,”5 and to appreciate the space he clears, as had Ezra Pound before him, for wit and humor in rendering critical commentary on literature). I loved the sentences. I could also bear witness to the scholarly and critical pretenses that Gass uncompromisingly exposes: I was, in many, many ways, this very article. It would take many years, many sentences read, studied, and written, and a belated growing up, for me to realize that I shared some (of its more undesirable) features. One reason—perhaps a major one, at that—for the essay’s longtime low status in the academy lies just here. The essay is an outsider, a challenge not only to the academy’s obsession with the “article” (and its big brother, the monograph) but also to its reigning values of so-called objectivity, disinterestedness, theoretical a priorism, and alleged pursuit of truth at whatever cost(s). I was told in graduate school that I should aim to be a “competitive scholar,” and I was taught to read and write in a manner governed by logic, clarity, and impersonality. I remember bragging to my first wife, whom I met while we were both in graduate study at the University of Virginia, that I was interested in determining “the truth about texts.” In college, I had learned to love English, because it promised what a favorite teacher called “a journey toward understanding.” Scholarship, though, came to replace genuine critical inquiry, and for a limited time I pretended I was engaged in the pursuit of truth—when, in fact, I was pursuing a career. In describing the essay as “an outsider,” I borrow the term and the idea of Michel de Certeau, the late French historian, psychoanalyst (he studied with Jacques Lacan), and Jesuit (he was also a student of Henri de Lubac), who was a central part of the epochal year 1968 in France and who became later in life a professor at the famous Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. De Certeau’s coinage “heterologies” signifies those (academic) disciplines that study the self in relation to “the other,” for example, history and ethnography. One of his most important works is L’Invention du quotidian (1980), which has been translated as The Practice of Everyday Life. The book bears importantly and obviously on the essay, particularly as a challenge to the disciplines. As de Certeau’s contemporary Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish, power reigns in the academic world, which rules off areas that cannot be studied or that are to be marginalized: discipline implies rules, laws, and punishment. In a recent New York Review of Books essay about de Certeau, several

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of his often opaque books, and of at least one study of his work, the distinguished University of Toronto historian Natalie Zemon Davis writes authoritatively and suggestively: Certeau examined commonplace activities over which control could in principle be maintained by the institutional organization of space and language and suggested how in fact control was ignored or bypassed. People walk their own way through the grid of city streets, zigzagging, slowing down, preferring streets with certain names, making turns and detours, their own “walking rhetoric.” People read in ways that escape the social hierarchy and “imposed system” of written texts: they read in all kinds of places from libraries to toilets. They read with their own rhythms and interruptions, thinking or daydreaming; they read making gestures or sounds, stretching, “a wild orchestration of the body,” and end up with their own ideas about the book. “These procedures and ruses . . . compose the network of an antidiscipline.”6

The “walking rhetoric” reminds me of the essay’s fundamental strolling, wandering, rambling, peripatetic, and digressive nature. Indeed, whereas Theodor Adorno once celebrated the essay for its antiadministrative basis, I would add to that its essential anti-disciplinarity. The essay is not only “almost literature” and “almost philosophy,” but it also lies between literature and creative writing. Its very digressiveness, its patent refusal to proceed in strict linear fashion or to march single-mindedly toward a foregone conclusion—all this, and more—represents a stiff, and perhaps unanswerable, challenge to disciplinary thinking. The essay exists and functions outside prescribed lines, respecting few boundaries as it takes on any and every subject (matter), all the while uninterested in imprimaturs and professedly lacking in expert knowledge. The essay thus represents radical otherness, of a sort not often seen in, say, gender–race–class or postcolonial studies, when they are carried on in the usual manner, attentive to disciplinary requirements (even if, and perhaps especially when, “interdisciplinary”) and bent on the blessings of “the profession.” The essay cares little about “the profession,” less about “professionals,” and even less about “professional” understanding, regulations, and obligations. Nowadays, students are interested in the essay, but, so far, at least, mainly in writing essays, not in studying them. Even here, signs abound of a narrowing and restrictive professionalism such as has befallen English studies generally. The aim is to succeed, to get

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published, to get a job, to get promoted, to get tenure. We have lost, to our detriment, among other things, nearly all sense of the academic life as a calling, a vocation. When I told a recent and required introduction to graduate studies class that the course would be in the “advanced,” rather than the “professional,” study of literature and writing, they sneered and jeered, and then met with contemptuous dismissal my description of our teaching, research, and writing as a vocation. Students have always, of course, preferred the direct path and are vulnerable, like the academy to which they aspire, to often-unbridled enthusiasm, fads and fashion, and the latest and most pretentious theories. Prized objectivity is, then, unmasked as a means and an instrument to be wielded in hot pursuit of the current a priorism. *

* *

Writing essays appears easy—easier than making poems or novels or short stories. It does not require that much imagination and creativity, or so the belief runs. It appears easier, too, than a scholarly article, for the latter is dependent upon research—you have to know something, have facts to support your arguments, and be able to argue, in the first or at least second place. With the essay, after all, you “take a line out for a walk,” guided—supposedly—by the flights of fancy to which the mind readily falls prey. You don’t even have to worry about structure, for while the essay differs from both mere self-expression and so-called free writing, it is a notoriously “formless form,” a notion deriving from Walter Pater in the Victorian period and still frequently bruited about, a truism dangerous to susceptible and self-interested minds. Of course, the truth is, once students get into the writing of their own essays, they find—when the expectation is sufficiently rigorous, a term not much prized, unfortunately, in creative writing circles—that essays actually prove harder to make than (definite) articles. The key to writing essays lies, I think, in reading essays. You have to know what the—“bookish”—form is and is capable of, just as you have to know a good deal of the history of that form, discovering what has been done in the form, before you set about making one of your own. A certain professionalism of approach precedes the amateurism, if you will, of essaying. We normally, I suspect, subscribe to the opposite sense of required movement, supposing that the end is the professional, the amateurish merely that from which you begin, a

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stage to be transcended. In fact, though, you go in, through, and by means of the analytical, the scholarly, and the critical to reach—if you can—a position like that of the once-familiar “common reader,” as Dr. Johnson and then Virginia Woolf defined the person whose interests lie precisely in the familiar and the universal, with what concerns us all as human beings, in the fullness of our capacities as human beings, that is. Johnson wrote the following, which Woolf quotes, prefacing her first series of essays bearing the title The Common Reader: “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.”7 Woolf then follows, with this exemplary description, which with some slight modifications is as relevant now as nearly a century ago: The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.8

A certain professionalism, as I have suggested, saves the reader from the worst habits of the amateur, but it must, in any case, always be subordinated to the principled drives of the amateur, the one who loves. As to Woolf’s words above, they, like Gass’s, embody the critical values extolled. *

* *

Creative writing classes typically, I believe, no more respect reading than literature classes typically have much to do with writing. The

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essay offers help in this situation, a way, no less, to unite reading and writing, something sorely needed in the academy and for society and culture. Without intending to suggest exemplariness, I shall note that I always begin essay writing classes with roughly a month of reading familiar and personal essays from Montaigne and Bacon to Edward Hoagland and Annie Dillard. In literature classes, Freshman Honors, say, and undergraduate-graduate “studies” courses in Pound and Eliot, I spend a good deal of time on writing, with a focus on what “our” authors say and illustrate about it, and I conclude the semester with workshops on the students’ “term” projects, where I recommend, but do not require, the writing of essays. Such procedures, I find, promote a sense of both wholeness and community in the course, something sadly lacking in many English courses. Although essays used to be taught, almost exclusively, as an instance of expository writing, their teaching thus housed in composition, now, because they are seen as part of “creative nonfiction,” essays are more likely to find a home in creative writing. Again, the present situation represents opportunity, not hand-wringing or sly dismissal, let alone sneering contempt. I see nothing to be gained, for anyone, by further narrowing “creative writing.” Indeed, its separation from reading, from the study of written texts, promises only to eviscerate it. As a “bookish” form, the familiar essay seems perfectly positioned to mount a campaign against the academic pigeonholing of reading and writing. It could help make “creative writing” intellectually responsible. Applied, as it were, to literature classes, so-called, the essay could help bring back grace of expression and help restore the interests of “the common reader.” William H. Gass made the essential point having noted the essay’s historical penchant for quoting, for engaging in conversation and dialogue with other texts: “Born of books, nourished by books, a book for its body, another for its head and hair, its syllable-filled spirit, the essay is more often than not a confluence of . . . little blocks and strips of text.” 9 The essay typically says, according to Gass, “Let me tell you . . . what I have just read, looked up, or remembered of my reading. Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Lucretius meet on a page of Montaigne.”10 Gass adds, “the essay confirms the continuity, the contemporaneity, the reality of writing.”11 The text that we call essayistic

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is thus—to invoke a buzzword—intertextual. It is a civilized form, the essay—more: an embodiment of education and an inspiration to discovery. *

* *

Separating reading from writing, literature (and the essay) from creative writing, spells disaster. Allow me to illustrate via a situation of which I was recently a part. Now, I should say, to begin with, that in my department, at a large Midwestern doctoral-granting university, I am increasingly considered an essayist, that is, a writer. Although credentialed as a scholar (of Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature), with a number of publications also in contemporary critical theory, I am now routinely classified, surely with some unease, as a creative writer (this despite never having published a poem, a story, a play. Perhaps there is an implicit, inadvertent concession that critical writing can also be essayistic, whether or not artistic?). Colleagues in literature no longer seem to claim me, or to want me among them, while the “real” creative writers regard me with (understandable) suspicion and doubt. I am in-between, merely a site, a pilgrim, sometimes a truant. Thus, my insistence that a creative writing student—for the PhD— know something and be able to do minimal critical analysis met with the same disfavor and defensiveness that accompanied my repeated efforts to introduce critical essay writing into literature classes. It all feels, not so much strange, as uncomfortable. It is not so much, either, that my allegiances are divided or that I am turning (more) cranky and irascible. I understand why Eliot said the middle is the most difficult of ways. No one likes tension. *

* *

I usually enjoy “creative writing” examinations for the MA. They are called, actually, “Defense of the Thesis,” and they usually turn out to be genuine conversations, with little gratuitous display of learning or one-upsmanship. Literature exams for the MA, on the other hand, are examinations, with very little conversation or generosity of spirit. PhD exams are more so than the latter, with examiners frequently preening before colleagues and determined

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not to appear soft or easy. Could the best of the latter examining mode be applied to creative writing “defenses,” and a bit of the “Gen’rous Converse” be brought to the examinations of students in literature, especially candidates for the PhD? It is a result devoutly to be hoped for. *

* *

I continue to hang between, no matter how uncomfortable and lonely it be. The essay, after all, is mannerly. It reminds us all of the virtue—and the necessity—of civility, of mutual respect, of sympathy and understanding. For those reasons alone, it deserves a place in the academy, a place of respect. The essay itself depends upon strong, effective, correct writing and so addresses another lack in the ivy halls of our colleges and universities. Composition studies seem to have brushed aside the notion of correct writing and the knowledge of traditional grammar on which it depends; as a result, sentence-level errors have perhaps never been so prominent or so frequent, not least among English majors. I have often thought that in essays sentences matter more than in any other form of writing. You begin to write from and with sentences—they come before big ideas, after which students continue to whore. *

* *

Creative writing and literature. Writing and reading. Imagination and scholarship (and criticism). The writer and the academic. Grace and strength of expression and rigor. Wit and judgment. Heart and head. Beauty and truth. The “comely” and the “muscular.” The essay stands modestly and functions humbly between these and other such differences, inviting, welcoming. Georg Lukács was not off base in referring to essays as arrogant courtesies. Eliot, poet and philosopher, who knew a thing or two about separation and both/and-ness and the via media, represents the entailed situation without pulling any punches: human being finds itself “[i]n the middle, not only in the middle of the way,” but also “[o]n the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, / And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment” (“East Coker,” in Four Quartets).13 Writing of “The hint half guessed, the gift half understood” in “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets, Eliot also pointed

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to the way in which we miss connections, relations, and the whole (I have italicized Eliot’s all-important adverb). Creative writing and literature are neither enemies nor antagonists; they are, perhaps, much more like wit and judgment, as the young poet Alexander Pope represents them in An Essay on Criticism, itself a model of clear and responsible understanding of relations, notably including of part and whole.

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CH A P T ER

10

Essaying to Be: Higher Education, the Vocation of Teaching, and the Making of Persons

Twenty-first century education is largely vocational. To say so is ironic—if we take the term “vocational” in a sense it has not enjoyed for perhaps nigh on to a hundred years. The so-called liberal arts in steady decline near now to irrelevance, we find precious little awareness of calling, even in theological studies. When, as I mentioned earlier, I announced to students in my introduction to graduate studies course that we would engage with “advanced” rather than “professional” issues attendant upon literary studies, they rose up in disbelief, spite, and anger. I did little to earn their respect in describing my own understanding of teaching as a vocation. The situation saddens, worries, and portends badly. Instruction in the humanities, I fear, is in particular disarray. While graduate students are preparing ever more narrowly (in my own department, a major field on the “comprehensive examination” recognized as creative writing pedagogy, for instance), expected to know theories rather than the breadth of English and American literature, undergraduates are often treated as little more than advanced grade-school students, offered a “dumb-downed” version of theory, taught in advanced composition courses not to write well but to engage in “servicelearning” activities in the community, given time in creative writing classes to express themselves with next-to-no attention to form, treated as uneducable and therefore sacrificed upon the altar of professionalism. I exaggerate very little, while agreeing that community service, for instance, is important—as an extracurricular activity. Moreover, to separate undergraduates ruthlessly and crudely from graduate students has the effect, I am afraid, of mainly lowering expectations of

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the former while further narrowing—and “professionalizing”—the latter. Graduate students need more humanity in their instruction, undergraduates more attention to their full development as human beings. The solution—if solution be imaginable—lies not in a blind or unquestioning return to old pieties and Victorian calls to yoke together, à la Matthew Arnold, Hellenism and Hebraism, Athens and Jerusalem, culture and morality, manners and morals.1 Yet far too many babies have been tossed out with the bath water. Refusing to accept the past as salvation often means neglecting or dismissing it altogether. The academy leads the way—always, it seems—in oscillating violently from one extreme to another, unable, ill-equipped, and uninterested in trying, with Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, and the great literature of the English “neo-classicals” like Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Johnson, to steer between extremes, avoiding Scylla while negotiating around Charybdis. I lack the presumption to propose a neat, easy, and quick solution to matters so complex. My essay here is no “modest proposal,” for I am less a “projector” than an interested, engaged party, exploring the situation, considering, trying on possibilities—essaying, in other words. *

* *

The teaching of literature, especially, is a vocation. It is a calling not because literature now substitutes for religion, as Arnold predicted, but because literature finds its completion in religion and religious questions. It is the letter in, through, and by means of which spirit may be reached and understood. (Thus, I was right, decades ago, to choose professing literature over joining the Christian ministry, but only because the former is the essential beginning, though, of course, too often lacking the “pastoral” concerns for which the opportunity nevertheless exists.) As Eliot put it, without his usual moderation and restraint, “the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.”2 Eliot also made the essential point about the relation of religion and literature, this in an essay of that title: What I have to say is largely in support of the following propositions: Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary

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criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.3

You give yourself to literature, its study, the teaching of it, and the writing about it, as you do to another person whom you love. For it is, always, as I keep saying, a matter of love—or rather, it should be. You serve, you are literature’s steward, entrusted for however long with its care. That means respect, for you have to respect literature, its past, and its potential (as well as its limitations, for it is at once both end and means, necessitating a balancing act and a good deal of tact). The teacher of literature, like the critic of literature, is not in it for the money, of which there is usually precious little anyway; it is no 9-to-5 job where you leave the work behind you upon leaving the office, having, really, neither beginning nor end. It consumes as it renews; it floods as it deposits you afresh in places both novel and familiar. The teaching and the writing about literature are not jobs like others. You give yourself to the subject, at best become at-oned with it, so that the great work may speak through you, become its medium. There is entailed, therefore, responsibility as well as opportunity, the burden of criticism heavy on the shoulders of the teacher and the writer-commentator alike. It is not a religious calling, this important work that I am describing, but a vocation, nevertheless. It demands your best, exacting responsibility, calling out your most considered and most judicious efforts of mind and spirit, heart and soul, thinking and feeling. You are tasked with responding, with responding as a whole, without which effort your “mimic hootings” will go without answer: “answerable style” defines the way of your response, which is always secondary. I think it comes down to this: literature is not to be used, not for a career or advancement, not for political or polemical purposes, either. Literature exacts distrust and fear of all forms of a priorism, which, as Alexander Pope suggested in The Dunciad, portend reduction ultimately to Self. You must be open to literature, receptive, not, as is so often the case nowadays thanks to the advent of theory and the domination by politics, assertive, loud, tactless, forcing, and

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domineering. Literature simply and steadfastly resists mastery, the very idea of which it actively and everywhere rejects and repudiates. Literature does not exist as a medium for your self-aggrandizement. It is not there so that you can show off. A perceptive reader will be able to pick up your love of or contrariwise your use (and thus abuse) of literature. Scholarship, critical tools, and theories exist to serve literature, not to dominate it or reduce or replace it. You read in, with, and through literature, not against it, no matter what some theories tell you. If this all makes the critic’s job second-class, so be it. The critic, like the teacher who he or she normally is, always comes second. Something there is to be said for acceptance in a situation decidedly ethical and moral. Where’s the person, asked Pope, who has the capaciousness—the balance and the union of apparently opposite qualities—to serve literature, recognizing always the relation of part to whole? *

* *

The most devastating and disastrous consequence of the ongoing and narrow, reductive professionalization afoot in contemporary higher education is very rarely considered. I refer to the eclipse of the moral center of education: We have lost, to our utter detriment, the sense of educating persons, no doubt related positively to the older sense of teaching as the making of persons. The loss is particularly acute, I believe, in the humanities, perhaps most acute in the study and the teaching of literature. For decades, the major interest has been technical, as first we considered literature as the “well-wrought urn” and, most recently, as a “text” shorn of an author and liable to manipulation and power plays, which, so it is claimed, is what the text is anyway. We appear little interested in reading stories, poems, essays, and plays in order to learn, to gain knowledge, to see what their authors saw so that we may perhaps gain some greater understanding of what it is to be human. Professors of literature nowadays have little truck with knowledge. Scholarship is largely passé. We come already equipped and ready for the study of literary works of art, or so it is believed. We bring enlightenment with us, rather than turn to literature for it. Thus, we expose texts, often reading them against themselves. The comment of a fledgling “postcolonialist” in my aforementioned introduction

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to graduate studies course attests to the point and the prevailing way of doing business: “I find myself writing better criticism when I ignore what the text is doing or trying to say.” He went on to admit— proudly—that he often does not read the entire text! Knowledge of textual wholes thus eludes today’s students, especially graduates, just as does knowledge of one tradition after another. We rarely test for “comprehensive” knowledge, and students can get a PhD in English without having read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, or T.S. Eliot. Hardly anyone knows about the essay historically or as a form. The consequence of the eclipse of knowing, aided and abetted by the rarity of in-class examinations, their eclipse coinciding, of course, with the great decline of lecturing (in favor of discussion, dialogue and discourse, workshops, and peer groupings), is that our students have precious few facts that can serve as foundations for their pursuit of learning. Today’s students too often follow Thoreau, who, uninterested in the past, advised his readers, those leading “lives of quiet desperation,” to build their castles in the air, “hitching their wagons to a star,” said his friend Emerson, dream-catchers all, enthusiasts, and “projectors”: having indulged their fancies, “Now put the foundations under them,” wrote Thoreau in the concluding essay in Walden,4 even so E.B. White’s favorite, life-sustaining book. The basics—the foundation—is precisely what today’s students do not have a sufficient grasp of; they rarely show interest in the “beginning” details, cavalier with facts, dismissive of grammar (for instance), impatient with the fundamentals of sentence construction (without which no one is able to write well), and unaware that literature teaches us how to live, the essay how to make the most of the short time we have on earth. The fault is not theirs, or, rather, not theirs alone, or even primarily, I would say. Education has not served them well because those entrusted with educating them have not well served their charges. We may well have to return to the beginning, and we might, if graced, know it for the first time. *

* *

When he wrote in his journals that he would “essay to be,” Ralph Waldo Emerson affirmed the form’s inseparable connection with ontology. While the term “essay” is widely associated with the French essayer (to try, to attempt), it is not often related to the Latin esse (to be). Montaigne was, of course, there well before Emerson, averring

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that writing in the form he virtually created out of whole cloth had an influence on his life off the page. Wrote the Frenchman of the person who appears on his page: In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me.5

Montaigne here instances what Stephen Greenblatt has made famous as “self-fashioning,” a notion that O.B. Hardison, Jr., applied directly to the essay.6 In his popular anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, after quoting the passage from Montaigne just above, Phillip Lopate makes the point succinctly: “The essay is an enactment of the creation of the self.”7 Lopate then writes, In the final analysis, the personal essay represents a mode of being. It points a way for the self to function with relative freedom in an uncertain world. Skeptical yet gyroscopically poised, undeceived but finally tolerant of flaws and inconsistencies, this mode of being suits the modern existential situation, which Montaigne first diagnosed. His recognition that human beings were surrounded by darkness, with nothing particularly solid to cling to, led to a philosophical acceptance that one had to make oneself up from moment to moment.8

Enter here risks aplenty: Lopate may be right about Montaigne, but I do not accept his general assumptions about the self and about life. The personal essay, which he touts, is one thing, but the familiar is quite another: the former, Spider-like, does indeed focus on the self, but the latter functions, I have maintained, like Swift’s Bee, taking in from outside itself rather than building out of itself. Lopate interposes himself and his values rather than being true to the critic’s vocation, which entails giving up the self and surrendering the personality that the personal essay highlights and aggrandizes. Still, Lopate is right to describe the essay, of whatever stripe or sort, as “a mode of inquiry, another way of getting at the truth.” 9 *

* *

Essaying, I contend, offers a potentially crucial aid to education, particularly to its neglected responsibility for the making of persons.

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Writing essays teaches you a lot about yourself, helps you to see yourself in unblinkered ways, and prompts some reconsiderations and facilitates—it is the best-case scenario—important and needed changes in the being that you are. I must be wary of making too large claims and so will bring the discussion very much down to earth. That is, I shall look closely at three “papers” submitted recently in my classes on writing essays and studying the form of the essay. The following is true, I must add, except for the students’ names; otherwise, nothing is either made-up or embellished—no creative nonfiction here. The first paper I take up is one submitted as an essay in my class on the form of the essay, this by a junior English major, already an editor with the student newspaper. The paper began, melodramatically, with Peter’s announcement that he was seriously considering dropping out of school. (It felt, at least to me, like a threat.) In grandiloquent terms, Peter went on to claim, and to lament, that “no one cares about writing.” He blamed English, creative writing, and Western Civilization teachers alike, as well as other editors at the newspaper. Following a rather wrenching account of his family’s recent financial setbacks, Peter wondered if his writing might be better served out of school—Hemingway-like, I suppose—than in, where, he said, too much attention is given to mechanics, grammar, spelling, and other “petty” details, on which “ideas” are so often sacrificed. These claims are not without some validity, but Peter overgeneralizes, often grossly. He also does not write well, various kinds of mistakes abounding, so many, in fact, that one student in the workshop wondered aloud if they were deliberate. They weren’t, of course, as Peter admitted, steadfast in his assessment that such “don’t really matter. For a writer, there’s always an editor.” I pointed out, however, that such a position undercuts the authority of the paper’s lament about the sorry state of writing. “Let him without sin cast the first stone,” I may have said, platitudinously and with too much sanctimoniousness for my own taste. Peter was, in any case, generally oblivious to the texture and quality of the voice in his writing, which a couple of students called “arrogant and presumptuous.” Another came even closer to the heart of the matter, albeit resigned to the fact that “to change things for the better, you would have to change as a person.” She was, of course, right, although Peter probably could not accept that assessment.

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The next paper I instance was the last of three to be workshopped in nonfiction writing, a class for juniors, seniors, and graduate students. The author is a junior in creative writing, who had had a lower-level class in essay writing, offered by a colleague. The student appeared hard working, but was motivated by grades, a condition I try to address by not putting them on returned work. Fred wrote the first paper about a car accident he was involved in and received justifiably harsh criticism from his peers, primarily because of the sophomoric and whiny voice. His second paper, no less stubbornly autobiographical, fared little better. The writing I wish to focus on concerned Fred’s bed, especially its importance to him as a haven from the world—an only child, he lives at home, with his parents, 40 miles from campus, to which he commutes twice weekly. The writing, at the sentence level, showed some improvement, some greater command of the fundamentals of the language. Perhaps the following words will suggest the flavor of Fred’s writing—the subject is some of the worries that initially bother him as he crawls into bed one evening: “Did I remember to put the toilet seat down so nobody falls into the toilet late at night? (Silly me, of course not!)” The problem is, as I pointed out, not the subject but rather the “take” on it by one who appears in the essay immature, not yet developed in “coping” skills, still tied to home and parents, virtually consumed by comfort and convenience—an inhabitant of Homer’s Phaiacia (rather than Circe’s island, which is, of course, hardly better). The voice needs to reflect on itself, comparing with such others as true essays promote. Essays are essential in education because they do not let the author off the hook; in fiction you can, and often should, point to the difference between narrator and author, for the former may be used for particular rhetorical purposes by the latter. Similarly with poems and plays, where characters are not automatically to be identified with the writer. In essays, the voice is the author’s, and so if there is a problem with voice, it is usually a problem with the author, which is the case with Fred’s “essay.” He, the student, the junior living at home with his parents, this creative writing major, has obvious problems of personality and character that the essay—perhaps uniquely and unequivocally—reveals, holding a mirror up to the writer’s incapacities. The final paper I bring forward is the third effort by a senior creative writing major in the nonfiction writing class, a young woman who had earlier in the semester described herself in conference as “somewhat mean, often a bitch.” In class, however, she appeared

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mainly reserved, frequently shifting in her chair; when, rarely, she commented on her peers’ work, she usually made astute observations. Her writing did not, unfortunately, match her critical sense, for she consistently made the very mistakes she was able to detect in others’ writing. Her third “essay,” titled “My Mistakes . . .,” was (again) rife with sentence-level errors: typos, misspellings, grammatical glitches. Once more, she had not edited nor even proofread, and the whole smacked of first-draft-itis. As serious, fundamental, and debilitating as these mistakes were, they were matched by the failure of voice. If Peter was insouciant and arrogant, and Fred inexperienced and sophomoric, the one pretending to mastery he was far from having and the other essentially clueless about the image he was presenting, the author of “My Mistakes . . .”—I’ll call her Doris—was well aware of her image and content with it. The students had learned—from me, alas—to separate the writing from the writer. I had drilled into them—with sermonic dispatches about respecting one another—that we were to treat what appeared on the page, not to psychoanalyze or criticize the author for her or his opinions. These distinctions are, of course, necessary, and I would not teach otherwise. But clearly I failed to clarify—in a quarter of a century or more of teaching essay writing I have not encountered the problems of that semester (a situation that has helped to breed the present essay). That is, I did not make clear that a reader is justified in criticizing the voice heard in an essay when that voice is the representation on paper of the author. The students busied themselves praising Doris’s “honesty”—even when she wrote that, in her job as a waitress, she cares not a whit about her customers. “I’m in no hurry, and besides, their eating habits are disgusting.” The tone was consistent throughout the nine, unrelieved pages, culminating, at least as I recall, in an account of her “relation trouble,” presumably some of the mistakes alluded to in the paper’s title. “I treat my boyfriends like crap,” she wrote (only her word was not “crap”). “But if they can’t take it, let them, as the old saying goes, get out of the kitchen.” Her current boyfriend, said Doris, in all honesty and without self-consciousness, guile, or guilt, she “put[s] down so as to build myself up.” The author here too—that is, the person writing—is the problem, even more so than the other instances I have given, and there is, despite my students, something to be said and done—that must be

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done, and soon. Doris, by the way, later asked me to direct her independent study of the essay the following semester. The place to begin is Annie Dillard’s claim that if you do not like the voice you hear in an essay, you will likely stop reading and toss the work aside.10 In essays, voice means the author’s, “voice” here naming a part for the whole that is the person as she represents herself on the page. Ultimately, you either like or dislike the author as he appears in the essay—White, for instance, in “Death of a Pig,” warts and all. It is important, though, that you not begin directly, by addressing the faults and failures of the author. Instead, you begin with the voice, and you proceed carefully, cautiously, treading lightly. Your budding essayist needs be perceptive enough to get it when you expose that “voice” for what it is: in Doris’s case, mean-spirited, bitter, angry, quite unlikable. The essay’s notorious riskiness stems from its revelation of character. “I expose myself entire,” said Montaigne, inventing the essay and offering an apologia for essay writing in “Of Practice.”11 Essay writing enhances self-consciousness. It offers a window onto the soul, at which you look at your own risk. Because the voice in an essay is the author’s, exposure occurs, the writer vulnerable, and open to criticism of a fundamental sort. Essays reveal the person—you stand naked. As others see you, you must begin to see yourself—as you are, exposed entire. The way is thus opened toward self-correction, if not purgation. The question arises: do you have to be a “good person” in order to write essays? Or, conversely, as I seem to be suggesting, can you learn in, through, and by means of essay writing to be a “good person”? The question is not easy to answer, and of course, we usually have no way of knowing what the essayist, off the page and in his or her “real” life, is like. I have known some essayists along the way, and they are, almost without exception, decent, charitable, engaging, sympathetic human beings, towing no party lines in politics and of quite different religious persuasions (or none at all), Scott Russell Sanders, Chris Arthur, Sam Pickering, Tod Marshall, Dan Martin, Nedra Rogers, Cara McConnell, among them. The key to our conundrum may lie in self-consciousness, which I take to be the positive side of the essay’s notorious self-interestedness. The three students whom I have discussed above all lacked selfconsciousness; they are simply unable to observe themselves as they appear to others. Too much self-consciousness is, of course, a fault

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and can be debilitating; some is necessary, though, for effective and responsible social interaction. The capacity to see the self clearly, and more or less objectively, is a tall order and in most of us requires effort, discipline, a strength of character—which is precisely the point. You have to work to become self-conscious—at least most of us do. But with a modicum of this capacity when writing an essay, you can listen to the voice in the words, on the page, and tell readily enough whether it appeals, producing the necessary effects. You have to be able, though, to compare—always, to compare—and weigh and judge (thus assaying) the voice you hear in your own writing with that you hear, and admire, in, say, White or Scott Sanders or Zora Neale Hurston. *

* *

You make a person, I reckon, pretty much the way you make an essay: slowly, with respect and care, attentive to response, and always— always—concerned to shape. Shape, not mold. You think more of “the object,” than you do of yourself. Respect means for the difference from you, for though you be very much in the offspring, your creation, child or essay, you are not identical to it, and you should not desire to impose (yourself) on it. Nurture, cultivation—these are key. You don’t give a child born of your loins free rein any more than you do that child that is the essay you (think you alone) are writing; both an essay and a flesh-and-blood, only-begotten child have wills of their own, and you take them out for a walk, without releasing them to wander alone or far from your oversight. Instead of controlling, you listen, intently, trying to figure out the bent of this particular twig and that particular bough, and you respect the individual inclinations, but you certainly don’t always agree with them, and when you don’t, you say so and attempt to influence them to turn as you think best—for them. You need good judgment, and you need restraint as well as respect for the other. You are the author, after all, your name sits proudly upon the text, and you must never forget your child’s basic willfulness. You are willful, too, of course, but in order to respond to your child’s willfulness, you must curb your own: not by relinquishing your responsibility, your burden, for guiding and shaping, but instead precisely in, through, and by means of guiding and shaping, acts that are themselves guided and shaped by nothing less than the love

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beyond desire that Eliot elucidates, in his brilliantly presentational way, in Four Quartets. *

* *

Teaching is, happily, never far from essaying, certainly not from essays that comment on literature, and teaching must always be concerned with the making of persons. It is not at present, however, and has not been for some time. The reasons are ready to hand, and they centrally include the fear of academics that they have crossed the line and become personal, that they have sacrificed touted professionalism, and that any real engagement with students as persons will earn their damnation along with that of administrators who dare to create and enforce strict policies of behavior, the fear, in short of acting in loco parentis. The academic world likes to think of itself as what it is not: “hip” and “cool.” Teaching has a pastoral function, even if few will admit it, fewer still act on it. Teaching and ministering—what we used to call in then-backwater South Carolina, “preaching”—come together here. It is not enough to say, you also have to do: not only embody what you teach but do so in the care you show of your charges as persons. Recently, during a grueling, sometimes tendentious three-hour oral Comprehensive Examination for the PhD in my department, I sat and marveled how my colleagues could show so little concern for the student—another Camusian “yellow owl,” I reckon. The plague here is the detachment, the lack of fellow feeling, manifest in the failure to understand that, even at this high and coveted level, we are talking with and exacting questions of a human being in an unparallelled situation. There is a defendant, and he is being judged—by us. He is required to know everything, and we forget that we suffered through something like this some years before—his is the stranger’s heart that we fail to envision, even though our own suffering should have taught us, says Cynthia Ozick, pointing to the advent of morality in the ancient Hebrews’ enslavement in Egypt; they, though, learned the power of reciprocity, which we have forgotten, if we ever knew it. The humanities should surely cultivate and nourish not trials but conditions of give-and-time, professors engaged in “Gen’rous Converse,” posing questions and calling for response, response that leads to further response in kind, question and answer done in “answerable style.”

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I am not here advocating that most-feared situation of “touchyfeely.” I am, though, arguing for both humane treatment and genuine care. Perhaps the aim is represented in Eliot’s prayer in AshWednesday: “Teach us to care and not to care” (italics added). The paradox is important, is crucial. More than 35 years ago, when I came up for promotion to associate professor and tenure, I wrote, without really understanding, that my philosophy of teaching involves both the subject (matter) and the student. I understand a bit, now, of just why we must never separate out the student in our teaching: we’re always teaching someone about a subject. The student and our “discipline” are both, after all, subjects. *

* *

Essaying—I have very nearly concluded—is for undergraduates. Graduates, including creative writers, bear too much professional baggage. They may have too much discipline. White says of the writer of essays what could never be said of the graduate student, taking himself as example: “content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence.”12 The telling terms tumble and mount up: not just “undisciplined,” but also “content,” “living,” “free,” “enjoying,” “satisfactions”—words very rarely associated with graduate student “existence.” Graduate students could benefit from essaying. In fact, I have known many who did. A few “take to” the essay like ducks to water. Actually, they have often seem starved—for water, for air, for relief and surcease from “that awful object ‘the article,’ ” the essay’s object, according to William H. Gass. But graduate students know—or think they know—too much. They have little humility, a lot of arrogance, and these days they come “theorized,” burdened with ideas half digested (if digestible, at all), and given to talk, much talk, regardless and careless of whether anyone is listening; they spout theories, often half-baked political notions, everything laced with jargon and reeking of assurance. No modesty, no irony, no humor, no sense of calling (unless it be that of the dollar). *

* *

Stemming from and being about ideas, the essay may seem a short distance down the line from direct human interest of the sort that

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journalists and their editors mean by those words and that is the bread-and-butter of fiction especially. Of course, we apologists for the form never tire of pointing out, the essay treats topics readily recognizable, familiar, and relevant to ordinary folks engaged in daily life. Yet, something appears to be missing. It is not the absence of characters. Essayists like White manage characters as adroitly as do fiction writers: his wife Katherine, his old dachshund Fred, Henry Thoreau, Will Strunk, for example. To stick with White, there is also what Flannery O’Connor honors as “incarnational art”: White himself embodies the manners in which mystery appears. What is missing is such embodiment of ideas in more characters than the speaker. The critical essayist thus stands at a particular disadvantage. Like literature, from which it nevertheless differs in ways that I have described at some length, the essay is a secular instrument. It is reflective (in the Romantics) and observational (in the Modernists). At best, in Woolf and Eliot, say, it represents what the writer sees and is what she or he then makes as a result of that seeing. Faithful to reality, observant of the nature of things, and seeing clearly, the essay too is incarnational. You get “the world” down right, and the pattern is there, willy-nilly. You don’t have to be Christian yourself, nor must your writing be overtly or even covertly religious in nature or orientation for your work to bear the pattern Incarnation. Indeed, religion—or at least theology—can interfere, obscure, and even subvert the pattern. *

* *

To the idea of calling, which I have extended by means of the issue of conversation, I would add now that which John Dryden mentions in Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith.13 His “thoughts” there were, he says, “bred / By reading” (226–27) a specific work of religious history and criticism. “Thoughts bred by reading” are a responsible response: in kind and therefore answerable, beyond “mimicking,” however, in the way that they not only look at the text but through it. The “calling” text breeds in the reader, who is receptive and fecund. Response is, in this fashion, an ineluctably feminine act, an instance of the Trinitarian pattern, response analogous to Understanding. In breeding, the calling text—like Being Itself—does not simply replicate itself, although it is always very much in the (new) creature.

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Read with the same spirit with which the author wrote, Pope teaches us in An Essay on Criticism (224). The “original” text lives on in the text that it has bred: like parent and child. Conversation too—“Gen’rous Converse”14 —breeds. It breeds (new) ideas in the respondent, whose writing, for instance, at once mimics, prolongs, clarifies, and extends the conversation, revealing its richness, its perspicacity, its relevance, and its fecundity. “What then remains . . .” (Dryden, in Religio Laici, 427) is the conversation bred by reading, which Dryden, incidentally, embodies in his Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay: four characters (of whom one is the author himself) engage in respectful and generous conversation about literary matters, in a setting quite specific and fraught with broad, familiar, cultural implications and significance. It is an exemplary essay, a dramatic essay in response to the call of drama ancient and modern. *

* *

The critic remains secondary, not at all an essential intermediary or mediator between text and reader. He is “called,” which means that she must “hear.” Seeing comes first, and then hearing. Then, and only then, does the critic engage in conversation with the text. The critic’s job entails conversing with the text that is itself in the in-between position now, breeding response that in the responsible critic instances Love. *

* *

Amor omnia vincit, but depends on understanding. *

* *

“Gardening for Love”15: Love links gardening and essay writing. You don’t rush love—we, at least many of us, have the scars about our hearts to prove it. Tiresome platitudes concerning “love at first sight” and romance versions of tempestuous “love” notwithstanding, love, which certainly involves hormonal response (albeit without being identified with it), takes time, develops over time, requires time for hearts, minds, and bodies to become attuned, at-oned. It grows slowly, precariously, not unlike the tender peach trees I grew up with back in South Carolina: susceptible to early frosts that can virtually destroy

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a whole crop. In a relationship between two people, not excluding author and reader, or teacher and student, for that matter, always fragile and far more delicate than we care to admit to each other and to ourselves, chance or accident is important: some relationships blossom and grow to maturity; others fade, wither, and die. We all know that. Love requires not only time but also nurture and cultivation: it doesn’t just greenly grow on its own, free of attention and work. You don’t maintain and develop a relationship, any more than you breed fullbodied, variegated, and delicately scented American Beauty roses, by ignoring the coloration of response to your caress, the almost imperceptible whisper of need, the appearance of dis-ease, or signs of boredom or hesitation or regret, the strength of attachment, the nature and depth of roots and sincerity. Lovemaking, so central to love even if slighted and misunderstood in our (over-)emphasis on sex, figures the problem (and opportunity): slow, careful nurturing, marked by scrupulous attention, caring, and response produces the best yields. Time matters: it bodies forth, it incarnates, respect—for the other, however defined. You have to take the time, be patient, and love. Love is incommensurate with haste, inseparable from nurture. The same may be said of the essay, of teaching, and of practicing literary criticism.

N 

 T O S,  W U S: T C, A,  D   F E 1. Cristina Nehring, “What’s Wrong with the American Essay?” truthdig.com (Nov 29, 2007), 1. All quotations to Nehring, here and subsequently, are from this page. 2. Regarding the essay as site, see my Reading Essays: An Invitation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), passim. Nicol is quoted in Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1995), xxxvii. 3. Richard Selzer, “A Worm from My Notebook,” Taking the World in for Repairs (New York: Morrow, 1986), 153–54. 4. Ibid. 5. Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed., The Spirit of the Age: Victorian Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 18. 6. Andrew O’Hagan, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 5. 7. All the quotations in this paragraph are from Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay, xxiv. The quotations of Hibbard and Holman are taken from Lopate, on the same page. 8. Italics added. 9. Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (London: Routledge, 1988), vii. 10. Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay, xxiv. 11. Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking Penguin, 1947), 259. 12. Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay, xxxii. 13. E.B. White, Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), viii. 14. Ibid., vii. 15. Clifton Fadiman, “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay,” Party of One: The Selected Writings of Clifton Fadiman (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1955), 350. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 351–52. 18. Ibid., 353.

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NOTES

19. Allen Tate, “Foreword”, in The Hero with the Private Parts, by Andrew Lytle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), xiv. Blackmur’s term was “informed.” 20. Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), xi. 21. Ibid., x. 22. Ibid., x–xi. 23. Ibid., xi. 24. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, vol. II, ed. M.H. Abrams et al. (New York: Norton, 1993), 144. 25. Anne Carson, Interview by Mary Gannon, Poets & Writers Magazine 29 (Mar–Apr 2001), 26–33. 26. For illustration and support of this essential point, including an analysis of “The Death of the Moth,” see my Reading Essays. 27. T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. The Hogarth Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 24–33. 28. See Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2005), especially 43–90. 29. Hilaire Belloc, “The Mowing of a Field,” Hills and the Sea (London: Methuen, 1906), 207–8. 30. Ibid., 212. 31. See Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948). 32. Belloc, Hills and the Sea, 213–14; italics added. 33. White, Essays, 51. 34. Ibid., 52. 35. Ibid., 42. 36. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: R iverside-Houghton Miff lin, 1969), l. 234. 37. Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, 627. 38. White, Essays, 234–35; italics added. 39. Ibid., 235. 40. The important distinction offered by Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 168. 41. White, Essays, 238. 42. Ibid., 234. 43. Ibid., 236. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 237. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 240.

NOTES

179

48. Ibid., 241. 49. Ibid., 242. 50. See, especially, my Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Meaning (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), passim. 51. Atkins, Reading Essays, 1–17, 260–71. 52. See, especially, William H. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 27ff. 53. In the journals. 54. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Practice,” The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 274. 55. Williams, Grace and Necessity, 31. 56. Lydia Fakundiny, letter to the author. 57. Quotations are from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943). 58. Selzer, “A Worm from My Notebook,” 153. 59. Ibid., 153–54. 60. Williams, Grace and Necessity, 30; italics added. 61. T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), 29–30. 62. Williams, Grace and Necessity, 138. 63. Selzer, “A Worm from My Notebook,” 154. 64. Williams, Grace and Necessity, 16, 125, 126. 65. Ibid., 154. 66. Ibid., 158.



O T,  F,   E

1. Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 68. 2. Ibid., 66. 3. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 352, 367. 4. Ibid., 367. 5. Montaigne, “Of Practice,” The Complete Essays, 272. 6. Ibid. 7. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, 352. 8. Scott Black shows that usefulness and practicality were central to the earliest essays; see Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 9. White, Essays, Cited in i, vii. 10. Eliot, Four Quartets.

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11. T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930). Leaving aside for the moment the status of these (Orientalist) claims, the reader knowledgeable of Eliot’s poetry will immediately think of their resonance with the opening, five years later, of “Burnt Norton.” 12. White, The Second Tree from the Corner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 115. 13. Ibid.; italics added. 14. Ibid., 115–16; italics added 15. Ibid., 125–26. 16. Ibid., 117; italics added. 17. E.B. White, The Second Tree from the Corner, 107–08. 18. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity, 31. 19. Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., “Being Familiar,” The Right Distance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 9. 20. White, Essays, 202. 21. Ibid., 241 22. Ibid., 42. 23. Ibid., 40. 24. Ibid., 142. 25. Ibid., 144; italics added. 26. Ibid., 145. 27. Ibid., 143, 145. 28. Ibid., 148. 29. Ibid., 149. 30. Ibid., 152. 31. Ibid., 150. 32. Ibid., 153. 33. Ibid. 34. Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, 622. 35. Ibid., 278. 36. Ibid., 327; italics in the original. 37. Ibid., 330. 38. Ibid., 364. 39. Ibid., 468–69. 40. Ibid., 465–66; italics added. 41. Ibid., 467. 42. Ibid., 563. 43. Pope, Poetry and Prose. 44. Donald Davie, These the Companions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 170. 45. White, The Second Tree from the Corner, 131. 46. Ibid., 132. 47. Ibid., 132–33. 48. Ibid., 133.

NOTES



181

E  S’ H

1 E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Philosophy of Composition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 2. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25–26. 3. Paul H. Fry, The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 200. 4. Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970). 5. John A. McCarthy, Crossing Boundaries: A Theory of Essay Writing in German, 1680–1815 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 58. 6. Quoted in Thomas Harrison, Essayism: Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 2–3. 7. McCarthy, Crossing Boundaries, 45. 8. Quoted in ibid., 44; italics added. 9. Letter of December 1817 to George and Thomas Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 261. 10. Ibid., 279. 11. G. Douglas Atkins, Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 12. Cynthia Ozick, “The Seam of the Snail,” Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989), 109. 13. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25. 14. Scott Russell Sanders, “The Singular First Person,” Secrets of the Universe: Scenes from the Journey Home (Boston: Beacon, 1991), 197. 15. Ibid., 198. 16. Joseph Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay,” Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (New York: Norton, 1985), 405. 17. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 179. 18. Quoted in Lydia Fakundiny, ed., The Art of the Essay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 677–78.

 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

E.B. W   P  P

Ozick, “Metaphor and Memory,” 279. Selzer, “A Worm from My Notebook,” 153–54. White, Essays, vii. Fry, The Reach of Criticism, 200. Ozick, “Metaphor and Memory,” 277 ff. White, Essays, vii. Ibid., viii.

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NOTES

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Ibid., vii. Ibid., 235. Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay.” White, Essays, 241, 234, 236. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 241–42. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 21, 23. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 24. Ibid., viii. E.B. White, Here Is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 34. Ibid., 34–35. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. On White’s development as an essayist, see Robert L. Root, Jr., E.B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999). White, Here Is New York, 30, 32, 40. Ibid., 38–39. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20–21. Ibid., 21.

 “T W L S B,”   M-  E: E.B. W  F E 1. Fry, The Reach of Criticism, 200. 2. I may seem to echo here the essayist Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., The Right Distance. 3. E.B. White, “Introduction,” The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1959), xi.

NOTES

183

4. White, Essays, 235. 5. Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1975), e.g., 21. 6. White, Essays, 241. 7. Eliot, Four Quartets. 8. White, “Introduction,” ix. 9. Quoted in ibid. 10. Ibid., viii. 11. Ibid., xiv. 12. T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Homage to John Dryden, 31. 13. T.S. Eliot, “John Bramhall,” For Lancelot Andrewes, 42. 14. T.S. Eliot, “The Pensées of Pascal,” Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 146–47. 15. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern, 66n1. 16. White, Essays, 234–35. 17. Quoted in ibid., 236. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 241. 20. Ibid., 242. 21. Ibid. 22. White, The Second Tree from the Corner, 94. 23. White, Essays, 42, 44. 24. Ibid., 45. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Herbert N. Schneidau, Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 202–71 passim. 27. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970), 807 (Canto CXIII). 28. D.S. Carne-Ross, Instaurations: Essays In and Out of Literature Pindar to Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 214. 29. Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 2001), 5, 6. 30. Quoted and translated in ibid., 35; italics added. 31. Ibid., 38–39. 32. White, Essays, 32. 33. Pope, Poetry and Prose. 34. White, Essays, 9. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 9–10. 38. Ibid., 12. 39. Robert P. Tristam Coffin, An Attic Room: Essays on the Jovial and Beautiful Life (New York: Doubleday, 1929), 169. 40. Ibid., 170.

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NOTES

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Ibid., 171. Ibid.; italics added. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 177–78. Ibid., 178. Ibid. Ibid., 179–80; italics in the original. Ibid., 180. Robert Kimber, “Drury Pond: An Idyll,” in A Place on Water: Essays, ed. Robert Kimber, Wesley McNair, and Bill Roorbach (Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 2004), 41–42; italics added. 50. Ibid., 42. 51. White, Essays, 153.



T L   F: E.B. W  T.S. E

1. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), 44. 2. Ibid., 43. 3. Ibid., 45. 4. White, Essays, 17; italics added. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 17. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 18–19. 9. Ibid., 20. 10. Ibid., 21. 11. Ibid., 22. 12. Cynthia Ozick, “Metaphor and Memory,” 279. 13. For a detailed reading of “A Worm from My Notebook,” see my Reading Essays, 159–66. 14. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” 30. 15. Ibid. 16. George Eliot, Adam Bede. 1856 (New York: Signet, 1961), 176. 17. Ibid., 177. 18. Ibid., 77. 19. Ibid., 175, 182. 20. Ibid., 175. 21. Ibid., 182. 22. White, Essays, viii. 23. Ibid., 51–52, 39, 42. 24. Ibid., 234. 25. Ibid., 235.

NOTES

185

26. White, “Introduction,” viii. 27. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), and Four Quartets.



T  F L C

1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Norton Anthology of English Literature, 246 (5.372–81). See Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 2. For discussion of these entailed points, see my Geoffrey Hartman: Criticism as Answerable Style (London: Routledge, 1990). 3. The point is particularly clear in the opening pages of Eliot’s The Sacred Wood. 4. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading. 1934 (New York: New Directions, 1960), 28. 5. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (New York: New American Library, 1938), 133, 135. 6. Ibid., 135. 7. Ibid. 8. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 252–53. 9. Ibid., 234, 232. 10. Ibid., 169, 180. 11. Eliot, Four Quartets. 12. Schneidau, Waking Giants. 13. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday. 14. Alla Bozarth-Campbell, The Word’s Body: An Incarnational Aesthetic of Interpretation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979). 15. Andrew Lytle, “Preface,” The Hero with the Private Parts, xx. 16. Dickstein, Double Agent, 168. 17. Fry, The Reach of Criticism, 200. 18. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, 289, 303–04. 19. See Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, 49–50. 20. Ibid., 195–99. 21. Ibid., 1. 22. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 269. 23. Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, M A: MIT Press, 1974), 9. 24. Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay, 678. 25. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25. 26. Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay, 6.

186

NOTES

27. Edward Hoagland, “What I Think, What I Am,” in The Art of the Essay, 691. 28. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25–26. 29. William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” in Selected Essays, ed. Claude Moore Fuess (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 54. 30. Ibid., 55–56. 31. See my detailed discussion of Hazlitt’s essay in Reading Essays, 74–81. 32. Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” 56. 33. Hoagland, “What I Think, What I Am,” 691. 34. Ibid. 35. Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” 56–57. 36. Lytle, “Preface,” 40. 37. Ibid., 40–41. 38. Hartman, Easy Pieces, ix. 39. Ibid., xi. 40. Ibid., xii. 41. Ibid., 41. 42. Ibid., 43; italics in the original. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 43–44. 45. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, 20. 46. Ibid., 21. 47. Quoted in ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 22. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 19. 52. Ibid.; italics added. I would quarrel with the violence of that italicized word. 53. Ibid., 1; italics in the original. 54. Ibid., 35. 55. Ibid., 36. 56. Ibid; italics in the original. 57. Williams, Grace and Necessity, 16. 58. Ibid., 151, 154. 59. Ibid., 168–69. 60. Ibid., 169. 61. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” For Lancelot Andrewes, 29, 30. 62. Williams, Grace and Necessity, 16; italics added. 63. Pope, Poetry and Prose. 64. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25–26. 65. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, 11. 66. Ibid., 233 ff. 67. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 28. 68. Epstein, “Piece Work: Writing the Essay.”

NOTES

187

69. Clara Claiborne Park, Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays 1962–1990 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). 70. John Dryden, Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). 71. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 273. 72. Ibid., 685. 73. On this point, see the enormously useful book by Black, Of Essays and Reading. 74. Dickstein, Double Agent, 168. 75. Fry, The Reach of Criticism, 200. 76. Lytle, The Hero with the Private Parts, 21–22. 77. Ibid., 28. 78. Ibid., 39–40. 79. Ibid., 40. 80. Ibid., 40–41. 81. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes,” For Lancelot Andrewes, 24–25.



O S, P,  P: T R / C, A W,   A  P

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

Pope, Poetry and Prose. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 124; italics added. Ibid., 91. Eliot, Four Quartets. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 67–68; italics added. Ibid., 67. Quoted in René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 59–61. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. René Girard, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 193. Keith Fort, “The Psychopathology of the Everyday Language of the Profession of Literary Studies,” College English 40 (1979), 751–63. See, for example, Jane Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” rpt. The Intimate Critique, ed. Diane P. Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Franees Murphy Zauhar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23–40, and “Fighting Words: Unlearning to Write the Critical Essay,” Georgia Review 42 (1988), 585–90. Upon editorial advice, I omit here the name of the reviewer, his book, and the place of review. The curious should have little trouble in locating the desired information.

188

NOTES

14. Neil Hertz, “Two Extravagant Teachings,” Yale French Studies 63 (1982), 59–71. 15. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25. 16. See my Reading Essays, 55–61. 17. Hilaire Belloc, “The Mowing of a Field,” 212. 18. Ibid., 208, 214; italics added. 19. Ibid., 216. 20. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 27. 21. Ibid., 28. 22. Ibid., 26–27. 23. The idea is developed by Girard.

 T E   A: B “L”  “C W” 1. George Core, “Stretching the Limits of the Essay,” in Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 217. 2. See, for example, Richard A. Lanham, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). 3. Hoagland, “What I Think, What I Am,” 691. 4. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 25–26. 5. Ozick, “The Seam of the Snail,” 109. 6. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Quest of Michel de Certeau,” review of Michel de Certeau, New York Review of Books 55.8 (May 15, 2008), 59. 7. Quoted in Virginia Woolf, “The Common Reader,” The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 11. 8. Ibid., 11–12. 9. Gass, “Emerson and the Essay,” 26. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 27. 12. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, 253. 13. Eliot, Four Quartets.



E  B: H E,  V  T,   M  P

1. Eliot, Four Quartets. 2. T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern, 66n.1. 3. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” Essays Ancient and Modern, 93. 4. Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, 563.

NOTES

189

5. Montaigne, “Of Practice,” The Complete Essays. 6. O.B. Hardison, Jr., “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay,” in Essays on the Essay. 7. Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay, xliv. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., xlv. 10. Annie Dillard, ed., Introduction, The Best American Essays 1988 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988). 11. Montaigne, “Of Practice,” The Complete Essays, 274. 12. White, Essays, vii. 13. Dryden, Poems and Fables. 14. Pope, Poetry and Prose. 15. G. Douglas Atkins, “In Other Words: Gardening for Love—The Work of the Essayist,” Kenyon Review, 13 (1991), 56–69.

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Carson, Anne. Interview by Mary Gannon. Poets & Writers Magazine 29 (Mar–Apr 2001), 26–33. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Coffin, Robert P. Tristam. An Attic Room: Essays on the Jovial and Beautiful Life. New York: Doubleday, 1929. Core, George. “Stretching the Limits of the Essay.” In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander J. Butrym. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989, 207–20. Davie, Donald. These the Companions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Davis, Natalie Zeman. “The Quest of Michel de Certeau.” New York Review of Books 55.8 (May 15, 2008), 59. Derrida, Jacques. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Dickstein, Morris. Double Agent: The Critic and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. Letter to author. 1993. Dillard, Annie, ed. Introduction. The Best American Essays 1988. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. ———. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Dryden, John. Poems and Fables, ed. James Kinsley. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1856. New York: Signet, 1961. Eliot, T.S. Ash-Wednesday. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. ———. Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962. ———. Essays Ancient and Modern. London: Faber & Faber, 1936. ———. Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. The Hogarth Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. ———. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928. ———. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943. ———. The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1920. ———. Selected Essays, 3rd edn. London: Faber & Faber, 1951. ———. The Waste Land. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922. Epstein, Joseph. A Line Out for a Walk. New York: Norton, 1991. ———. Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing. New York: Norton, 1985. Fadiman, Anne. At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007. Fadiman, Clifton. Party of One: The Selected Writings of Clifton Fadiman. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1955. Fakundiny, Lydia, ed. The Art of the Essay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. ———. Letter to author. 2007.

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I 

Abbey, Edward, 23 academy, the and the article, 141, 148 and the essay, 57, 149–51, 158 and violence, 140–5 see also education, essay, vocation Addison, Joseph, 21 Adorno, Theodor, 25, 29, 55, 110, 111, 153 affirmativeness, 17, 60, 66 amateur, 40, 73, 117–18, 145, 155 Andrewes, Lancelot, Bishop, 12, 27, 42, 122, 123, 131 answerable style, 103–4, 107, 163, 172, 174 a posteriori, 47, 76 a priori, 46, 48, 154, 163 Arendt, Hannah, 129 Arnold, Matthew, 13, 18, 115, 162 Arthur, Chris, 170 article, the (definite), 11, 28, 53–4, 55, 56, 58, 111, 112, 115, 122, 124, 141, 145–6, 148, 150, 151–2, 154, 173 Atwan, Robert, 1 Augustine, Saint, 42 Babbitt, Irving, 43 Bacon, Francis, 5, 13, 32, 33, 51, 58, 125, 156 Baker, Sheridan, 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 23, 60 Baldwin, James, 100 Barthes, Roland, 34, 117–18 belletristic, 4, 149 Belloc, Hilaire, 5, 34, 86, 94

Work: “The Mowing of a Field,” 2, 4, 5, 13–16, 93, 146–7 Bense, Max, 55 Berlin, Irving, 72 Blackmarr, Amy, 149 Blackmur, R.P., 10 both/and, 10–12, 22–3, 34–5, 57, 65, 73, 81, 87–8, 89–90, 98–9, 118, 129, 133, 137, 155–6, 158–9, 163, 173 Bowers, Fredson, 53 Brooks, Charles S., 149 Brooks, Cleanth, 128 Browning, Robert, 24 Calasso, Robert, 81, 82 Camus, Albert, 142, 172 Carlyle, Thomas, 11 Carne-Ross, D.S., 80 Carson, Anne, 12 de Certeau, Michel, 152 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 138, 165 Chesterton, G.K., 2, 4, 13, 15, 33, 58, 96, 149 Christ, 13, 20, 26, 44, 47, 63, 140 Christian, 48, 79, 80, 101, 174 Christianity, 48, 76, 80, 101, 140 Chudleigh, Mary, Lady, 5 civility, 135–8, 147 and Christianity, 140 and the familiar essay, 140, 146, 158 close reading, 127–30 as enacted, 109 Coffin, Robert P. Tristam, 85–9, 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 115

198

INDEX

common reader, 124, 131, 153, 155 comparison, 7–8, 14, 28, 73, 106–7, 109 as lateral reading, 109–10 Cornwallis, William, Sir, 5 Cowley, Abraham, 5 creative writing, 149–59 see also essay critic listening, 103–7, 175–6 as “speaking,” 122, 145–6, 151, 175–6 and “vocation,” 107–8 as writer, 127 criticism as embodied, 121 and the essay, 115 and explication, 110 familiar, 67, 103–33 and how texts work, 110 and humility, 120 as participation, 66 its usefulness, 125–7, 132 see also familiar essay curse of autobiography, 59–60 Dante, The Divine Comedy, 39 Davie, Donald, 47 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 153 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 29, 49, 60, 61, 104, 110 DeVoto, Bernard, 82 Dickstein, Morris, 109, 128, 129 Didion, Joan, 58 difference, 136–8, 144, 146–8 and degree, 139 Dillard, Annie, 57, 156, 170 discovery, 56–7, 73 dissociation, 12, 98 Donne, John, 12, 27, 122 Dryden, John, 5, 23, 53, 109, 110, 115, 142–5, 162 Works: Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay, 13 Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith, 22, 104, 124, 174–5

Ecclesiastes, 86 education and making of persons, 60, 164, 166–7, 171–2 moral center of, 164 see also academy, essay, familiar essay Eliot, George Adam Bede and the essay, 98–100 Eliot, T.S., 11, 24, 27, 36, 81–2, 110, 126, 129, 131, 156, 157, 162, 173 and asceticism, 37–8 and desire, 37 and difficulty, 74, 75–6, 93–4 disabuses us of false notions, 100–1 and Incarnation, 74, 76 and indirectness, 73 and life as dance, 77 and time, 42–5, 49–50 turns the essay, 121 and the via media, 73, 76 and White, compared and contrasted, 69–71, 73–85, 89–91, 98–102 Works: Ash-Wednesday, 35, 37, 41, 43–4 “Burnt Norton,” 34, 42–4, 89 “The Dry Salvages,” 42, 43–4 “East Coker,” 34, 38–9, 43, 77, 116, 158 Four Quartets, 37, 42–4, 47, 73–7, 89, 126, 137, 139, 158 as essay, 43, 126 “Lancelot Andrewes,” 103 “Little Gidding,” 25, 34, 37–8, 41, 89, 126, 158 “The Metaphysical Poets,” 75–6, 103 “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” 76 “The Penses of Pascal,” 76 Prufrock and Other Observations, 12 The Sacred Wood, 123, 137

INDEX

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 14, 124 The Waste Land, 37, 43, 69–71, 80 embodied ideas, 41 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23, 24, 44, 52, 120, 151, 165 envisioning the stranger’s heart, 56, 58, 59, 63, 97, 138, 172 Epstein, Joseph, 16, 29, 60, 65, 66, 124 essay as answerable, 108 its anti-disciplinarity, 153 and art, 33, 58, 121 and the article, 11, 53–4, 56, 58, 122–5 bears witness, 22–3, 28 and being, 23–4, 44–5, 165–6 as belletristic, 4, 149 as between, 21–2, 73, 125 as both/and, 22–3, 34–5, 57, 65–6, 150, 153, 158–9 capaciousness of, 23 character of, 2, 4, 7, 11, 13, 15, 23–5, 28, 125–6 character of speaker in, 23 and the contemporaneity of writing, 156, 163–4 and “course of interpretive discovery,” 55, 56–7, 65 and creation of character, 170 and critical writing, 24 and criticism, 12–18, 115, 126–7 as form of criticism, 145 as critique of academic values, 151–2 and difference, 146, 148 and disciplines, 152–3 and discovery, 55, 61, 65, 74, 112, 113, 114 and dramatic monologue, 24 and education, 166–7 its embodiment of truth, 21–3, 31 English, 32 and esse, 165–6

199

and gravitas, 11 ideas in, 31–4, 41 as Incarnational art, 24, 31 indebted to both Montaigne and Bacon, 125 its indirectness, 2, 4–7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 25, 39, 44, 111 and individualism, 9, 23 as intersection, 14, 24, 28, 43 and irony, 2, 127 and knowing, 125 known by its difference, 150–1 lets be, 23 listening, 171 and living well, 39, 61, 165 as made thing, 24, 121, 174 as mediator, 20–2, 175 as medium, 20–1, 27, 32, 33, 61, 128, 150, 153, 163, 164. see also as between under this main level and the necessity of self-correction, 170 as neither literature nor philosophy, 2, 11, 33, 140, 150, 153 in nineteenth century, 2–3 and novels and short stories, 22 and the ordinary, 61, 71, 76, 98–9, 102, 152–3, 174 as outsider, 152 and point, 58–9, 112 and practice, 31, 33, 36 process and product in, 34, 112–13 quoting in, 23, 135, 156 as ramble, 5, 34, 39, 153 reader’s burden in, 22 reading of, 52 and the Renaissance, 111–12 its respect for reader, 23 and restraint, 135 riskiness of, 23–4, 112, 166, 170 and Romanticism, 12 as “second-class,” 33, 150 sentences in, 57–8, 60 as site, 24, 28, 34, 97, 121

200

INDEX

essay—Continued and skepticism, 55 and speaker as embodied truth, 21–2 and spirit, 55 its state, 1, 8, 51, 149 and teaching of, 51–61 and tension, 31–4, 65, 112, 125–6 and uniting of writing and reading, 156 its uses, 22, 32–3, 61, 126 vs. impersonal writing, 59–60 its virtues, 7, 23, 115 and voice, 6–10, 16, 21, 108, 167–71 and walking, 65 its “way,” 34, 41, 47, 49–50, 57, 63, 70, 76, 81, 85, 93, 101, 102, 108, 112, 129, 136–8, 140, 146, 154–5, 159, 162, 165, 170, 172 as indirect, 2, 4–7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 25, 39, 44, 111 as middle way, 11, 22, 157 and the via media, 73, 124, 124, 158 writing of, 57, 154–6, 163–4 see also academy, article, both/ and, Eliot, George, familiar essay, “Gen’rous Converse,” indirectness, individual essayists by name, intersection, observation, participation, personal essay, personality, reflection, self, teaching Fadiman, Anne, 9–11, 16, 23, 29 Fadiman, Clifton, 8–10, 18 Fakundiny, Lydia, 25, 112 familiar essay its artfulness, 58 attempts to define, 3–5 as authentic, 89 centrality of conversation in, 10 characterized, 1–29

and critical spirit, 12–13 and criticism, 12–13, 123, 126, 131, 133 as cultural alternative, 8–9 as “Gen’rous Converse,” 8, 122, 140, 145 the “I” in, 6–7 and ideas, 11 its Incarnationism, 28 kinds of, 29 and love of life, 60–1 its nature and direction, 8, 12, 18, 24 and observation, 12, 24–5 and the observing self, 1–29 and participation, 18 and point, 58 self in, 5–8, 59 state of, 8–9 and the strange, 28 its subject matter, 8 and time, 31–50 vs. autobiography, 58–60 vs. personal, 3–12, 16, 58, 166 voice in, 6–7 see also civility, essay, personal essay familiar-critical essay, 18–20 familiar criticism. see criticism Flaubert, Gustave, 21, 22 Work: Madame Bovary, 115–16, 128–32 Fort, Keith, 141 Foucault, Michel, 152 France, Anatole, 123 Freire, Paulo, 55 Fry, Paul H., 73, 108, 109–10, 111, 128 Garrison, Phillip, 149 Gass, William H., 11, 53, 112, 113, 124, 147, 148, 151, 152, 155, 156, 173 “Gen’rous Converse,” 8, 13, 15, 64, 104, 122, 140, 145, 158, 172, 175

INDEX

Girard, Rene, 139–41 Gnosticism, 137 Good, Graham, 4, 5, 10, 13 Greenblatt, Stephen, 166; self-fashioning, 6 Gutenberg, Johannes, 111 A Handbook of Literature (Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman), 3 Hardison, O.B., Jr., 166 Harrison, Thomas, 55 Hart, Francis Russell, 53 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 57, 61, 63, 103–5, 108, 110, 116–20, 123–4, 127, 145 as essayist, 57, 110 Hazlitt, William, 12, 13, 65, 115 Work: “On Going a Journey,” 58, 112–14 Heidegger, Martin, 29, 110 Heraclitus, 34, 41, 44 Hertz, Neil, 144 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 2–3, 11 Hirsch, E.D., 53 Hoagland, Edward, 57, 65, 111, 112, 114, 150, 156 Holderlin, Heinrich, 81, 82 Homer, 79, 168 Horace, 115 Hurston, Zora Neale, 33, 171 Huxley, Aldous, 11 ideas, 61 enfleshed, 26, 31, 34 idyll, 88–9 immanence, 4, 9, 22, 49–50, 76, 80 see also Incarnation, transcendence Incarnation, 15, 21, 24, 26–8, 34–6, 43–7, 49, 79, 81, 89, 90, 107, 119, 129, 130, 136, 140, 146, 174 see also immanence, transcendence Incarnational, 81, 136, 138, 140

201

art, 26, 31, 174 indirectness, 15, 25, 28, 31, 39, 44, 47, 73, 76, 101, 111, 115, 147, 148, 151 individualism, 9, 14, 23, 60, 71, 91, 93 intersection, 14, 24, 28, 38, 47, 50, 67, 78–9, 81–2, 89, 93, 97, 98, 102 Johnson, Samuel, 115, 124, 155, 162 Jones, David, 14, 121 journey toward understanding, 105, 152 Joyce, James, 22, 105–8 Kazin, Alfred, 71, 128 Keats, John, 42, 54, 56, 59, 165 Kermode, Frank, 124 Kimber, Robert, 88–9 Klee, Paul, 65 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 8, 51 Lacan, Jacques, 152 Lamb, Charles, 10, 12, 13, 23 Lamour, Dorothy, 36 Lanham, Richard A., 150 letter vs. spirit, 79, 162 line out for a walk, 154, 171 literature its relation to religion, 162–3 and stewardship, 163–5 see also teaching, essay Lopate, Phillip, 3–6, 166 de Lubac, Henri, 152 Lukacs, Georg, 2, 4, 29, 94, 158 Luther, Martin, 111 Lytle, Andrew, 20, 108–10, 115, 118 his critical writing characterized, 128–33 observation rather than reflection in, 116 and the present moment of writing, 116

202

INDEX

Maine as a state of mind, 87 and “the way life should be,” 88 and White, 82–5, 86, 89 and writers other than White, 85–91 Mairs, Nancy, 5, 23, 39, 58, 149 Manichean, 138 Maritain, Jacques, 121 Marshall, Tod, 170 Martin, Dan, 170 Marx, Groucho, 74 Maxwell, William, 132 McCarthy, John A., 55 McConnell, Cara, 170 Milton, John, 58 moment, the, 12, 43–4, 81–2, 88, 89–90, 102, 107 de Montaigne, Michel, 4, 6, 12, 18, 23, 24, 32, 33, 39, 58, 60, 61, 65, 99, 100, 111, 148, 149, 156, 165, 166 Work: “Of Practice,” 2, 5, 125, 170 Musil, Robert, 55 Nashe, Thomas, 106 Nehring, Cristina, 1–4, 11 Nicol, Eduardo, 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 110 nonfiction, forms of, 28 Norris, John of Bremerton, 5 observation, 12, 19–20, 22–3, 24, 28, 31, 33, 40–1, 67, 69–70, 72, 81, 90, 98, 102–3, 116, 131 see also Eliot, T.S., essay, familiar essay, reflection, White, E.B. O’Connor, Flannery, 26, 37, 136–8, 140, 174 Odysseus, 63, 79, 95–6 Odyssey, The, 80, 105–6, 162 O’Hagan, Andrew, 3, 10, 29 Orwell, George, 60 Ovid, 79 Ozick, Cynthia, 29, 59, 65, 97, 151, 172

Park, Clara Claiborne, 124 participation, 18–23, 26–8, 40, 59, 63–4, 66–70, 77, 88, 91, 96 and communion, 72 poetics of, 63–72 Pater, Walter, 115, 154 personal criticism, 122–3, 126, 132 personal essay, 7, 24, 58 and memoir, 7, 12 and the self observed, 1–29 personality, 9, 26–8, 31, 39, 44, 47, 73, 76, 101, 111, 115, 147, 148, 151 Pickering, Samuel F., Jr., 11, 16, 21, 23, 29, 60–1, 65, 149, 170 Plato, 115 Plutarch, 115 Pope, Alexander, 17, 22–3, 46–9, 64, 83, 104, 108, 115, 122, 126, 133, 135–6, 139, 143, 159, 162, 164–5, 175 Pound, Ezra, 74, 80–1, 87, 103, 105, 107, 152 Priestley, J.B., 51, 149 purity, 17, 35–6, 45–6, 79–80, 82–3, 99 quoting. see essay Ransom, John Crowe, 101 reading of essays, 52 as “Gen’rous Converse,” 104, 107 its relation to writing, 52 see also writing-as-reading reflection, 12–13, 15, 103, 116, 121 see also Eliot, T.S., essay, familiar essay, observation, White Reformation and modern spirit, 138 Rogers, Nedra, 170 Romanticism, 12–13, 33, 42–3, 103, 110, 117, 123 Rouse, W.H.D., 105

INDEX

Sanders, Scott Russell, 23, 39, 58, 60, 89, 149, 170 Schmid, Siegfried, 81 second-class, 150 self, 5–6, 10 -consciousness, 170–1 creation of, 166 -fashioning, 166 -giving, 23, 27 Selzer, Richard, 2, 23, 33, 57 Work: “A Worm from My Notebook,” 25–8, 64, 97, 109 Seneca, 115 sentences and the essay, 150, 152, 157, 165 Shakespeare, William, 100, 165 Works: Coriolanus, 53; Troilus and Cressida, 138–9 Spider and the Bee, 6, 31–3, 91 Spinoza, Baruch, 98 Steele, Richard, 21 Steiner, George, 124 Stephen, Leslie, 3 Stone, Fred, 70 Strunk, William, 16, 74–5, 110, 174 Swift, Jonathan, 21, 31–3, 46, 122, 126, 162 Works: The Battle of the Books, 91 “A Modest Proposal,” 35, 126, 145 A Tale of a Tub, 110 Tate, Allen, 10 teaching essayistic, 54–9 of essays, 51–61 and essays’ appeal to students, 57, 153–4 as pastoral, 64, 162, 172 of subject matter and students together, 173 see also academy, education, essay, vocation Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 12 Theocritus, 88

203

Thoreau, Henry David, 5–6, 13, 16–20, 44–5, 47–8, 65–7, 74–9, 83–5, 99–100, 126, 165, 174 time, 20, 38–40 as circular, 41 intersection with timeless, 24, 34, 82 Tinker, Chauncey B., 149 Tompkins, Jane, 141 transcendence, 20, 34, 49–50, 76, 79–80, 82, 84 see also immanence, Incarnation Trilling, Lionel, 52, 128 Trinitarian, 27, 43, 174 via media. see essay violence and the academy, 140–8 reciprocal, 139–40, 141, 148 vocation, 107–8, 154, 161–3, 166, 174 voice, 16 as created, 7, 25, 27 embodied, 21 White, E.B. (Andy), 5–6, 11, 23–4, 29, 51, 165, 173 and acceptance, 100 his apologia, 95 authenticity in, 94 and candor, 100 and change as a result of writing, 97–8, 102 as close reader, 18, 20 and “course of interpretive discovery,” 65, 94, 97–8 as craftsman, 39 and desire, 36–8 differences from Thoreau, 17–18, 67 and Eliot, compared and contrasted, 69–71, 73–85, 89–91, 98–102 embodiment in, 79–81, 83 as familiar essayist, 73–91

204

INDEX

White, E.B. (Andy)—Continued and familiarity, 19, 68–9, 78, 80, 83–6, 90 and ideas, 94, 98 and incarnation but not the Incarnation, 80, 84 invites reader, 17, 23, 27 and irony, 6, 16 journey toward understanding in, 94–6 and life as dance, 17–18, 65–6, 67, 77, 78, 100 as literary critic, 18–20, 66–7, 77–9 his “made” voice, 7 and Maine, 82–5, 86, 89 the moment in, 38, 80, 82, 102 the nature of his cultural criticism, 16 participation in, 18–20, 23, 27 his poetics of participation, 62–73 his postscripts, 85 as preferable to Eliot, 71 against purity, 17 and the reader, 74–5, 94 revitalizes essay, 16, 97 and “second-class citizenship,” 94 and the simple, 40, 48–9, 64, 75, 79, 99–100 and time, 20, 31, 33, 57, 60, 63–72, 78–9, 85, 98, 102 and Transcendentalism, 49, 79 vs. Incarnation, 80 and witnessing, 95 Works: “The Age of Dust,” 35–6 Charlotte’s Web, 74, 94 “Coon Tree,” 16, 40, 79 “Death of a Pig,” 7, 67–9, 79, 94–7, 170 “The Distant Music of the Hounds,” 47–9

“The Dream of the American Male,” 36–7 Elements of Style, 75 Essays, 64–6, 69, 99–100 Here Is New York, 69–71 “Home-Coming,” 69, 82–4 “Once More to the Lake,” 40, 67, 94 “Remembrance of Things Past,” 36 “A Report in January,” 16, 100 “The Retort Transcendental,” 78 “The Ring of Time,” 40–1, 94, 102 The Second Tree from the Corner, 35–7, 47–9 “A Slight Sound at Evening,” 16–20, 66–7, 77–9 Stuart Little, 74, 80, 94 “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?” 41, 89, 94 The Wild Swan, 74 “The World of Tomorrow,” 36 see also Maine, poetics of participation Williams, Aubrey, 53 Williams, Rowan, 14, 38, 105, 121–2 Wood, James, 29, 123 Woolf, Virginia, 12, 24, 33, 68, 74, 109, 124, 115, 149, 155, 174 Wordsworth, William, 12–13, 42, 48, 61, 103–4 writer, as speaker, 21 writing and discovery, 74 its instrumentality, 97–8 the present moment of, 116, 118 as reading, 28, 108–9, 117–18, 119 Yeats, William Butler, 118–19