Some years ago, at a large publishing firm, I worked with a Harvard-trained geologist in his early forties who had left an academic post at the University of New Mexico to go into educational publishing. On a rainy afternoon over drinks he told me why. He had published widely and reasonably well, he said, but when he turned forty he came to the conclusion that, as a scientist, he was not first-rate. By “first-rate” he meant a giant in his field. Science, in his view, really was only a place for giants, and to be a second-line scientist, which in his own opinion he was, was to be condemned to spend one’s life doing trivial work. An extremely earnest man, he went into educational publishing, where he thought he could do more good.

In the modern era, there seem always to have been extraordinary essayists.

At the time that he told me this I was myself, along with working as an editor at this same publishing firm, chiefly a book reviewer, which, on most reckonings, would have made me a third- or fourth-line figure. But I recall not being in the least depressed by what he said. I recall, in fact, thinking that one of the advantages of literature over science is that in literature one can do second- or third- or even fourth-line work and it still can matter. One remarks upon an unappreciated writer here, lets the air out of an inflated reputation there, combats a literary tendency one finds pernicious, or calls to the fore an essential but neglected tradition—none of this, it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, is trivial work. Done well it is important in and of itself; gathered together, it can add up to something of significance. Matthew Arnold, who did precisely this kind of work, once wrote in an essay on Sainte-Beuve, another worker in the same field: “excellent work in a lower kind counts in the long run above work that is short of excellence in a higher; first-rate criticism has a permanent value greater than that of any but first-rate works of poetry and art.”

The essay, I suppose, must be counted as “work in a lower kind.” There has never been an Age of the Essay, but, in the modern era, there seem always to have been extraordinary essayists. Drawing on English-speaking writers alone, permit me to read the honor roll: Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Daniel Defoe; Addison, Steele, Swift; Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith; Lamb, Hazlitt, Cobbett; Carlyle, Arnold, Emerson; Beerbohm, Chesterton, Virginia Woolf; Mencken, Orwell, Edmund Wilson. This is not to mention—as I shall now do—some of the men and women who dropped in from other genres and fields of intellectual endeavor to work out on the essay: Fielding and Goldsmith, Hume and Mill, Thackeray and George Eliot, Bagehot and Macaulay, Mark Twain and Henry Adams, the brothers James and William Dean Howells, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Both lists could be easily extended, but I believe I have supplied the names of enough serious players to provide a pretty fair choose-up game.

Of all literary forms, the essay has perhaps changed least over the course of its life. Can this be because the form of the essay is itself so Protean—because essays themselves have so little form? The formlessness of this very old form is part of its pleasure. A critic, comparing Bacon to Montaigne, who is the father of the essay and the Shakespeare of the genre, remarked that Bacon “never attained the freedom and ease, the seeming formlessness held in by an invisible chain” that is part of the pleasure of reading Montaigne and often distinguishes the essayist at his best. Samuel Johnson wrote rather sniffily of the essay as “an irregular, undigested piece.” Aldous Huxley, with Montaigne in mind, once referred to the method of the essay as “free association artistically controlled”—the artistic control clearly being crucial. Rudely inserting myself into this august company, I recall being delighted when a reviewer of a volume of my essays once remarked that they reminded him of a comment that Kandinsky once made about his own method: “I take a line out for a walk.”

That same reviewer then went on to lose all the ground he had gained by picturing me as the stereotypical writer of essays—in a phrase, the cliché essayist. We all know that figure: there he stands in plaster of paris, gentle chap, highly cultivated, a lover of nature, a man obviously in touch with the eternal verities. Sheathed in corduroy or tweed, suede patches at his elbows, he puffs reflectively on his pipe. A bit otherworldly perhaps, oblivious to the rush of contemporary events around him, shaped like a Bartlett pear, more full of Shakespeare and Emerson than Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations, he is, our cliché essayist, a bookish man to his papier-mâché fingertips. In recent incarnations, he might have written under the rubric of “The Easy Chair” or “The Peripatetic Reviewer” or “The Revolving Bookstand.” Pipe-sucking, patch-wearing, proud to harken back to the leisurely culture of an older day, that’s the good old cliché essayist, altogether out-of-it and not minding in the least.

It is a cliché—to use a cliché—that will not wash. Certainly, it fits none of the great figures of the form. Consider some among them: Charles Lamb, with his stutter and his dreary clerkship at East India House and his mad sister at home; William Hazlitt, with his passion and his sad marriage and his need to grind out a living through endless scribbling; H. L. Mencken, with his energy and his love of lambasting a phoney and his joy in life despite his unshakable scepticism about finding the answers to any of its large questions; George Orwell, with his rough-cut cigarettes and his working-class get-up and his ideological battles; Edmund Wilson, with his loneliness during hot summers in his Talcottviile stone house and his reading through insomniacal nights and living out his days like the character in “The Cask of Amontillado” imprisoned not by bricks but by books. No, not much evidence of the cliché essayist here.

If there is no standard type for the essayist, neither is there anything resembling a standard essay: no set style, no set length, no set subject matter. The essay is a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anyone and anything can fit. In the college catalogue of this term’s offerings, it does not fall under “creative writing"; it is not, strictly speaking, even imaginative, though there has never been a want of imagination among its best practitioners. In range of interest, it is multivarious: there are literary essays, political essays, philosophical essays, and historical essays; there are formal essays and familiar essays. The essay is in large part defined by the general temperament of the essayist. The essayist is—or should be—ruminative. He isn’t monomaniacal. He is without pedantry; he is not, as they say in university English departments, “in the profession.” The essayist might be found almost anywhere, but the last place one is likely to find him is in the pages of the PMLA.

Along with the essay, there are entities known as the article and the “piece”; let us also not forget journalism and criticism. Are these nomenclatural distinctions merely? Perhaps. No hard rules in this domain, where everyone is his own Adam, free to name the creatures about him as he thinks best. For myself, I hold the essay to be a piece of writing that is anywhere from three to fifty pages long, that can be read twice, that provides some of the pleasures of style, and that leaves the impression of a strong or at least interesting character. By this measure F. R. Leavis, though he might be writing at essay length, is always the critic, never the essayist. Max Beerbohm is perpetually the essayist, even when he is writing criticism of the most ephemeral play.

A certain modesty of intention resides in the essay. It is a modesty inherent in the French verb that gives the form its name—essayer: to try, to attempt, to taste, to try on, to assay. However many words the essayist may avail himself of, he instinctively knows, or ought to know, that the last word cannot be his. If it is the last word an author wants, let him go write books. Not that the essayist need be light, a schmoozer, a kibitzer with a pen in his hand. As Percy A. Scholes, in The Oxford Companion to Music, characterizes Handel, so does the essayist aim to shape himself: “though facile he is never trivial.” And sometimes the essayist can be profound. As Beethoven, quoted in the same Oxford Companion to Music article, remarked of Handel: “Go and learn of him how to achieve great effects with simple means.”

Who becomes an essayist? What is the training? What aptitudes are required by the job? Nearly thirty years after attending a lecture by Stephen Potter, the one-upmanship man, I remain impressed by the answer Potter provided to a most woodenly phrased question from a graduate student in the audience. “Sir,” this young man began, “you are a noted Coleridge scholar, a man of serious standing in the scholarly community, and this being so, I cannot help but wonder what it was that impelled you to write such works as One-upmanship and Gamesmanship—I cannot, sir, understand what strange turn in your intellectual life caused you to compose these most unusual books, whose philosophical implications, though interesting to be sure, are nonetheless puzzling in the extreme. My question, then, sir, not to put too fine a point on it, is, Why did you write these books?” Potter, who was got up for his lecture in a green suit and green tie and wore glasses with a green tint in them, the effect of all of which was to make his lank greyish hair also appear green, cleared his throat with a considerable harumph and, straightfaced as a goat, replied: “Out of work, you know.”

“Out of work, you know” strikes me as quite as good an explanation as any other for why certain highly talented men and women turn to the writing of essays. Many among the great essayists did not set out to become essayists. Hazlitt, we know, wished to be a painter and a philosopher. Matthew Arnold, who began as a poet, stopped writing poetry while still a young man and turned to the essay. Max Beerbohm, though a considerable draughtsman, was an even more considerable essayist. Orwell, had he his druthers, no doubt would have wished to be remembered as a novelist, though today it is for his essays that he is most highly regarded, as least among people whose regard seems to be most valued. My general point is that few people can have set out to be essayists because the essay has never enjoyed the prestige that other genres or forms of art have enjoyed.

A certain modesty of intention resides in the essay. 

The essayist is someone with a strong urge to write and no other place to exercise this urge but the essay. He wishes to leave the stamp of his personality on the page—and, with great good luck, who knows, on the age. But he has discovered that the concentrated language and heightened emotion that is at the heart of serious poetic creation is not for him; nor is the dramatizing imagination that is required, along with a great deal of patience, by the novel. He is probably someone of wide curiosity and sufficient egotism to think that what is curious to him will also be curious to all the world. Not probably but certainly he is someone who desires to exert his will on the life of his times and who demands to have a hand in directing the contemporary traffic in ideas,manners, and morals. All these deficiencies, desires, and demands he is able to pour into that shapeless, bottomless, lovely receptacle, the essay.

Unlike other forms of writing—poetry, stories, plays—the essay is generally written less out of psychological need than out of the simpler need to respond to a political event, a cultural artifact, or the request of an editor. The last is very far from least, and indeed the development of the essay runs along a track side by side with the development of periodicals and magazines. In Walter Graham’s intelligent survey, English Periodical Literature (1930), one can watch this twin development take place with an intertwined inevitability. There had been essayists before there were periodicals—Montaigne and Bacon, most notably, and Plutarch long before either of them—but with the spread of periodicals, particularly in England during the early eighteenth century under the reign of Queen Anne, periodical writing became a dependable way for essayists to earn their living along with retaining the hope, while doing so, of creating literature of permanent value.

The essay and the periodical were for a time precisely coextensive, and the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian were known as “single-essay periodicals”—that is, a single essay made up the entire publication. The Tatler and the Spectator and, to a lesser extent, the Guardian, all the creations of that remarkable journalist Richard Steele, did not invent the periodical essay but, in the words of Walter Graham, “they produced it in its highest form.” As Graham goes on to say: “Steele not only produced the first periodical journalism of lasting value; he was the first journalist to reveal the possibilities of the periodical as a medium for literature.”1

But some say that Richard Steele’s greatest accomplishment lay in bringing the world Joseph Addison. In many respects, Addison was the model essayist. He was a talented man with no particular ground on which to display his talents. He was one of the brightest men of his day at Oxford, which he entered at the age of fifteen. A Whig by temperament and sentiment, he was sent abroad on a pension arranged by Whig politicians—a pension he lost when William III died and Queen Anne, who had a strong aversion to the Whigs, removed it from him. Later he would serve the Whigs when they returned to power as Under Secretary of State, Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Secretary of State. But for the better part of his life his fortunes were tied to those of his party. Had the Whigs not fallen out of power, he might never have written essays.

Addison wrote poetry and he was famous in his day for his play Cato, which has been rendered nearly unreadable in ours. Macaulay, speaking of Addison’s literary qualities, once remarked that he was a man “who reconciled wit with virtue.” Macaulay also said that “to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best portraits, we must go either to Shakespeare or Cervantes.” Yet of course Cato cannot hold a candle to the worst of Shakespeare; and if Addison ever planned a novel, we know nothing about it. Instead this reputedly shy man, said by both Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to be among the most charming conversationalists each had ever come across, this habitué of the London coffee houses whose lovely conversational engine required much in the way of wine for lubrication, this half-scholar, half-politician, half-poet, half-dramatist, finally found his métier and enduring fame in the essay.

Current-day publishing wisdom about the essay begins and ends with this canard: “Essays do not sell.” But the essays of the Spectator, when reproduced in separate volumes, sold in their day notably well. As Macaulay reports: “Ten thousand copies of each volume were immediately taken off, and new editions were called for. It must be remembered that the population of England was then hardly a third of what it now is. The number of Englishmen who were in the habit of reading was probably not a sixth of what it now is . . . In these circumstances, the sale of the Spectator must be considered as indicating a popularity quite as great as that of the most successful works of Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Dickens in our own time.”

Virginia Woolf said of Addison that it was owing to him that “prose is now prosaic.” This sounds rather like a put-down, but what she meant by it was that Addison had taken the Gothic curlicues and Puritanical stiffness out of English prose and left it straightforward, flexible, and conversational: “the medium which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.” It was Hazlitt, who in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers, noted that the essays of Addison and Steele “are more like the remarks which occur in a sensible conversation and less like a lecture. Something is left to the understanding of the reader.” It was Hazlitt, too, who noted that Addison and Steele were in a direct line from Montaigne, “who in his Essays led the way to this kind of writing among the moderns,” and who “had been the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.” Where Addison and Steele mark an advance in the form of the essay over Montaigne is in their taking for their subject their own thoughts as well as the world around them in all its variety, delight, and absurdity. Now the essay not only inquires into what human life is and has been but, to quote Hazlitt again, “follows it into courts and camps, into town and country, into rustic sports or learned disputations, into the various shades of prejudice or ignorance, of refinement or barbarism, into its private haunts or public pageants, into its weaknesses and littlenesses, its professions and its practices—before it pretends to distinguish right from wrong, or one thing from another.” In sum, Hazlitt is describing the essay as he himself would come to write it.

In such essays as “On Familiar Style” and “On the Prose Style of Poets,” Hazlitt set out his prescriptions for style in essay writing. “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style,” he averred, “is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.” On more than one occasion, Hazlitt, who with qualification much admired Johnson (“The man was superior to the author”), attacked Johnson’s style for its pomp and uniformity. “His subjects are familiar, but the author is always upon stilts.” He was prepared to allow the deliberate archaicisms of Charles Lamb—“Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure”—but for the rest he was for the plain style, in which “every word should be a blow; every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow.” Because style and thought are unitary in Hazlitt, those who love the essay revere him to this day.

The need to write for money may be a mixed blessing.

William Hazlitt was the first truly distinguished writer to earn his livelihood almost exclusively through the writing of essays. Then, as now, it was no easy row to hoe. Filled with strong opinions, political to the bone, never overly prudent about making enemies, Hazlitt took his living where he found it, writing for those papers and journals that could contain his strong views. (He was, after all, the author of an essay entitled “The Pleasure of Hating.”) Yet, though much of Hazlitt’s writing was done on the run, somehow much of it hangs together nicely: his writing on writers, his art criticism, his drama criticism, his familiar essays on such subjects as “The Fight,” “The Indian Jugglers,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” to name only three among my own favorites. It all hangs together because it is all bound together by the glue of a courageous, complex, and contentious character who, for all the obstacles life set before him, never ceased to love life. Love of life, in my reading of them, is one of the qualities that all the great essayists hold in common.

With the advent and then the wide spread of periodicals and magazines, the nature and limits of essay writing changed correspondingly. Story writers and poets, though they may write with an eye toward particular journals, are not nearly as hostage as essayists to editors and the confinements of space and time set by their journals. (Although here I am reminded of a writer in a story by George P. Elliott who turned out high quality work of a perfectly unpublishable length: if memory serves, stories of ninety pages and poems of seventeen.) The essayist works under clear pressures, the pressures of prescribed length, the pressures of deadlines, the pressures of the possible prejudices of editors. One cannot read about the life of Hazlitt without a strong awareness of all these matters weighing down on him as he wrote. When his essays disappoint, which they sometimes do, my guess is that it is often because of the necessity of high production under these various pressures. Virginia Woolf remarked that many of Hazlitt’s essays read like “fragments broken off” from some larger book.” Given the immensity of material Hazlitt produced—twenty-one volumes in the P. P. Howe edition of his collected writings—the wonder isn’t that Hazlitt sometimes disappoints but that he is so frequently as good as he is.

It must also be said that these same pressures can have their advantages. The need to write for money may be a mixed blessing, but between writing for money and writing for no money, in my experience, writing for money is better. (Yet writing for larger sums does not necessarily give larger pleasure; there is also the quality of the audience one writes for to be considered.) Deadlines are of course damnable, but without them, as everyone who has written without them knows, less work would get done. Editors may have their prejudices, yet some are biased on behalf of intellectual tough-mindedness and can, in subtle ways, make even veteran writers write better. In this connection I have always been much taken by a passage in a letter Sydney Smith wrote to Francis Jeffrey, his editor at the Edinburgh Review. “I have three motives for writing reviews,” Smith wrote, “1st. the love of you; 2nd the habit of reviewing; 3rd the love of money—to which I may add a fourth, the love of punishing fraud or folly.”

While the Victorians offer a glittering roster of names among practitioners of the essay, the essay itself, during the age of Victoria, became less intimate. It grew longer; it began to address itself directly to serious things. Where it felt the need to become political, in the wider, cultural sense of politics, it did not hesitate to do so—as in the essays of Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Gentleman’s Magazine initiated a “review of books” section, but it was in the nineteenth century that books became, if not always the subject, at least the occasion for essays. Books provided the occasion, certainly, for many of the essays of Macaulay. The length at which such journals as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s allowed Macaulay to go on, for the most part cheerfully ignoring the book under review, cannot but be the envy of contemporary essayists, though it must be said of Macaulay’s essays as Johnson once said of Paradise Lost, that no one ever wished them longer.

Virginia Woolf, in an essay entitled “The Modern Essay,” remarks on this loss of intimacy among essayists during the Victorian era, and feels that the essay went into exile with the death of Charles Lamb only to emerge again in the person of Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm was of course “Max” to his readers—“the incomparable Max,” in Bernard Shaw’s phrase—and it was he who brought personality back into the essay. As Virginia Woolf says, “Matthew Arnold was never to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to Wat.” Virginia Woolf adored Max Beerbohm—as do I—and rightly gauges his gift: “He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man.” Yet one wonders if “personality” is precisely the word. Beerbohm’s great trick, and a fine trick it is, was to be consummately familiar without ever imposing the burden of being personal. This trick is also called charm, and, as Virginia Woolf knew, charm is available in literature only to those who write supremely well.

Charm, though, is given to few, and the intimacy of personality need not be the only voice in which the essayist speaks. None but the most pretentious ass among their admirers would ever think of referring to Orwell as George or Mencken as Henry. Virginia Woolf, in my view, has too pure, too constricted a conception of the essayist. In a lovely essay of hers on Addison, she compares his writing to that of the lutenist, implying, by analogy, that the lute is the perfect instrument for the essayist. This, too, seems too restrictive. Among essayists there have also been the kettle drums of Carlyle, the French horn of Macaulay, the violin of Pater, the cello of Arnold, the trumpet of Mencken, the rich viola of Virginia Woolf herself . . . But I had better stop before I assemble a full symphony orchestra.

In this ensemble what instruments might George Orwell or Edmund Wilson play? Have we here two bassoonists on our hands? Clearly, there is nothing either charming or intimate about Orwell, who may nonetheless be the most widely admired among modern essayists. Orwell had great regard for Hazlitt, but his own work has none of Hazlitt’s high coloring, its appetite for life, its positive passion. A great gloom spreads over much of Orwell’s work. So much in the dark universe of his essays earns the epithets “vile” or “beastly.” He had perhaps the sharpest olfactory system in modern literature, and the smells it brought back to be recorded in his work are, most of them, highly unpleasant. Yet for all their gloom, for all their grey, for all their grunge, Orwell’s essays do not depress. They do not depress because the spectacle of a man writing exactly what he thinks in the teeth of a reigning orthodoxy, a man who hates sham and does his very best to prevent it from leaking into his own writing, is in itself a cheering thing. The essay, as a form, has an honored place for this, too.

Candor is not the spectacle that Edmund Wilson provides. As an essayist, he is quite devoid of charm, and intimacy, for reasons that his journals and autobiographical writings make plain, was alien to him. He wrote an impressive and confidently cadenced prose, yet in his vast body of work it is hard to think of any passages or even phrases that light fires in one’s heart. Wilson brought reading and writing and the literary life into the domain of the essay through prose portraiture. (As Sainte-Beuve had done a century earlier in France.) A critic by temperament, he had the intelligence to know that if criticism is to have serious standing as literature it must turn to biography, where it can set ideas and writers in the context of their times. By doing precisely this Edmund Wilson made his own writing essayistic—and in the process turned criticism into literature.

But if I were confined to reading a single American essayist for the rest of my days that essayist would be H. L. Mencken. In Baltimore, at a dinner of the Mencken Society, I once asked an insurance man who was a member why he read Mencken. He did not stammer when answering, “Because he makes me feel good.” This jibes perfectly with my own reaction to reading Mencken. How is Mencken, as an essayist, able to bring this off? In part through comedy, in part through the energy that vibrates through his prose, in part through high intelligence joined to great common sense. But in greater part Mencken achieves his effect through a quality that cannot be taught or learned or otherwise acquired—he achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre. Mencken took joy in life after looking at life critically and taking full measure of its darkest side, not out of any idiot optimism. In one of the essays in one of his Prejudices volumes, Mencken wrote:

No one knows Who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely improbable that anything properly describable as evidence on the point will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into this world—that is, why the fashioning of man was so badly botched.

Yet one can almost see him, after striking off that passage, setting down his cigar, pushing his chair back from his typewriter, and remarking, “I know this to be true, but that is no reason not to get a good dinner.”

I have dwelt on the essayists who have meant most to me—this is, you might say, the essayist’s prerogative—and left out at least two American essayists who are elsewhere much revered but to whose virtues I am apparently blind: Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. B. White. (And one other whom I do care about and to whose virtues I do not think I am blind—A.J. Liebling.) Emerson is too vatic for me; in his essays he takes such large bites yet leaves one with so little upon which to chew. He bounds from pronunciamento to pronunciamento, and while his generalities do often glitter, I believe that it is in its particularities that the truth of the essay resides. E. B. White writes a pellucid prose, but his subjects have never engaged me. Gertrude Stein once said about Glenway Westcott that his writing has a certain syrup but it does not pour; so, for me, do the fluent essays of E. B. White pour and pour but no syrup comes out.

While there is not today a general essayist who gives the pleasure of Mencken, or a political essayist of the clean power of Orwell, or a literary essayist of the range of Edmund Wilson (Gore Vidal not long ago nominated himself for the latter post, though no one could be found to second the nomination), as a form the essay nonetheless seems to be flourishing. Here is a partial list of contemporary practitioners, as various in their interests as in their methods: V. S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lewis Thomas, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Wendell Berry. (In an earlier generation there had been Lionel Trilling, Robert Warshow, and the young James Baldwin.) Some of these are, in an odd sense, almost regional writers: Tom Wolfe is best on the Manhattan status life, Joan Didion is best on the cultures of California, Edward Hoagland is best outside city limits. A number of the writers I have named are also novelists, yet, with the exception of Naipaul, none is anywhere near so good in his fiction as in his essays. Why, one wonders, should this be so?

I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with the fact that the essay as a form is in the happy condition of having no avant-garde tradition. I say happy condition because, great though the benefits of the avant-garde tradition have been in poetry and fiction, this same avant-garde tradition—and I trust no one will think the juxtaposition of avant-garde and tradition is oxymoronic—can exert a tyrannous pull to keep changing, to do it as no one has done it before, to make it, perpetually and (as it sometimes seems) depressingly, new. The essay is under no such tyranny. The idea of an avant-garde essayist, far from being oxymoronic, is merely moronic.

Not that the essayist cannot dazzle, turn you around, knock your socks off. He can.

Not that the essayist cannot dazzle, turn you around, knock your socks off. He can. Not that there haven’t been radical changes in the way that essays have been written. There have. Yet in even the most experimental essay writing—some of the essays, for example, of William Gass—there is something old shoe about the relationship between the essayist and his reader. “It’s just you and me, kid,” the essayist implies when he puts pen to paper. “I realize that,” the reader in effect responds. “What’s your point in this essay, Bub?” However much art there may be in his writing, the essayist cannot hide behind the claim to be an artist, like Dr. Pepper, so misunderstood. He must stand and deliver. He must provide instruction, entertainment, persuasion, or the reader, like the young woman in the joke about the seducer who took the time to put shoe trees in his shoes, will be gone.

I grew up at a time when the novelist was the great cultural hero, and the novel, if it was written with power or subtlety (or both), seemed the most heroic cultural act. But, for a complex of reasons, the novel seems to be going through a bad patch right now. The essay, though it can never replace the novel, does appear to be taking up some of the slack. It is a form with distinguished predecessors and rich traditions, and between its generous boundaries one can do almost anything one wishes: report anecdotes, tell jokes, make literary criticisms, polemicize, bring in odd scraps of scholarship, recount human idiosyncrasy in its full bountifulness, let the imagination roam free. Subjects are everywhere, and there is no shortage of cultivated and appreciative readers. Don’t spread it around, but it’s a sweet time to be an essayist.


  1.   The Guardian has just been re-published in a beautiful volume edited and with an introduction and notes by John Calhoun Stephens; the University Press of Kentucky, 825 pages, $55.

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