Wake Up Call

By the start of the 20th century, the essay was the runt of literary genres. It was what people wrote when they’d “failed in the larger roles, the finer forms, and could not populate a page with people, with passionate poetry.” This was the conviction of fiction writer and essayist William Gass in 1985--and the consensus of most academic critics at the time.

Despite the number of strong essayists living--as well as the fact that it was an essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who first defined American literature in “The American Scholar”--the essay was essentially considered an expedient, not an art form, by the 20th century arbiters whose business it was to rate literature: a means to a social, political or professional end but rarely an end in itself.

When the first academic studies of the genre began to emerge in the United States about 15 years ago, they routinely opened with elaborate apologies and justifications. Why would anyone want to study the essay? Barred from the realm of art, and increasingly tainted over the last half of the century by association with college composition courses, the essayist cut a bad figure at the Table of the Greats. “The essayist,” lamented E.B. White in 1977, “must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.”

That was then. Thanks to people like Robert Atwan, who founded the annual Best American Essays series in 1986 and has since co-edited “The Best American Essays of the Century” with Joyce Carol Oates, the essay has been rediscovered, dusted off and given a podium of its own. It was high time.

Of course, no one really knows what the essay is. One must settle for fuzzy criteria: the essay usually runs between one and 50 pages; it addresses general readers rather than specialists, lacks scholarly apparatus, bargains on voice, not expertise, chutzpah not authority. It is a meditative form: Its progress is exploratory, its conclusions provisional.

The question remains: What kind of beast is this particular essay that has been roused from the grave and now stares out at us from the pages of “The Best American Essays of the 20th Century” and “The Book of 20th-Century Essays”? It is hardly the mischievous creature Montaigne first dubbed essai in 16th-century France, the presumptuous imp that pranced boldly between the most personal of details and the most sweeping of generalizations about the human condition. Nor is it the oracular sphinx that speaks hard truths about love, loss, learning, ambition, marriage, fear and death that we find in Francis Bacon in the 17th century and Samuel Johnson in the 18th. Nor, finally, is it the high-flying lark of Emerson: the morning sentry that awakens men and women to their day’s work, their inherent potential, their need for self-reliance. In fact, the animal in these anthologies is often a timid, private little burrower: It sticks to itself; it keeps its own turf and takes heed not to step onto the territory of others.

“I’m speaking for myself,” the contemporary essayist seems to say. “For myself and--possibly--for my race, gender or family. I know nothing of you. I presume nothing. I argue nothing.” After all, the patience of the public “wears thin when confronted with sermonizing in its many forms,” as Oates remarks in the introduction to her collection with Atwan. “Sermonizing” is a vague term. Judging from Oates’ collection, it means the advancement of any broad idea.

What the 55 essayists in her volume all do well is provide descriptions and tell stories--generally of autobiographical events. Some of them--from John Muir and James Agee to Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Dillard--do so extremely well. The writing in their essays frequently shines. Their conclusions, however, prove unformulated, even nonexistent. An author is content to tell us of a trip to a mountain with her husband, say, but reluctant or unable to make this experience relevant to us by proffering any larger point. She relates this anecdote elegantly. But that’s it. She fails to exploit her right to interpret, speculate, philosophize, draw conclusions, make points and find generalizations, a right that essayists of all previous centuries have exercised and which has made their work arresting, if not necessarily agreeable.

There are exceptions to this rule in Oates’ volume--familiar (and older) essays like Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s at once general and personal, discerning and despairing Esquire article, “The Crack-Up,” in which he writes: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” There are off-beat essays like Gertrude Stein’s “What Are Masterpieces?” and Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor”--chosen, no doubt, because their stylistic eccentricities partially cloak their “sermonizing” substance. And then there are a few “idea” pieces that passed muster because they clearly articulate Oates’ own (unsurprising) politics, essays that suggest (hold onto your hat) that racism and sexism are evil. Some of these essays surprise with their depth and acuity; Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” for example, has been long neglected as literature probably in part because it has been so much touted as political doctrine.

The greatest liability of Oates’ and Atwan’s selections consists in what at first appears a sensible editorial policy: “The essays should speak to the present,” writes Atwan in his preface, “not just represent the past.” What this ends up meaning though, is that all selections, whether they hail from 1901 or 1999, must click with today’s fashions--they must deal, whenever possible, with race or sex and feed the postmodern appetite for fragmentary, anecdotal and inconclusive narrative. At best, this makes for an extremely homogeneous anthology; at worst, it makes for a dated and repressive one.

Ian Hamilton’s British-published “Book of 20th-Century Essays” avoids some of these pitfalls simply because it avoids some of the faddishness. Hamilton organizes his 49 essays to provide a “portrayal of the century . . . a steady commentary on [its] political ideas.” This method ultimately yields more interesting essays--particularly in the first half of the century--than Oates’, which is the literary equivalent of rewriting history from the standpoint of the victors.

Politics and insight prove remarkably compatible in Hamilton’s collection. Take Mary McCarthy’s fetchingly honest testimonial on communism (‘Most ex-communists nowadays, when they . . . testify before congressional committees, are at pains to point out that their actions were very, very bad, and their motives very, very good. I would say the reverse of myself. . . . “) or Hannah Arendt’s disturbing speculation on Nazi concentration camps: “Men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale. Not only because this renders all punishments of the legal system inadequate and absurd, but because the very immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence . . . will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth.”

G.K. Chesterton’s 1906 piece on women--and why housecleaning gives them endless opportunities for personal empowerment--proves provocative and funny. This and other pieces prompt us to remember what more cautious essay editors too often forget: sermonizing can be fun. What better than a sermon to incite creative, indeed outraged, disagreement, to needle us into engaged formulation of our own views on a subject? Where there is no obligation to agree, there is no cause for offense. In many ways, an essay that “sermonizes” shows more respect for its readers than an idiosyncratic personal reminiscence. The former draws us in, invites our view. The latter silences us. Who is going to argue with a stranger’s childhood memories?

Reading a typical anthology of contemporary essays is too much like flipping through an unknown relative’s carton of faded snapshots. Some are compelling, to be sure, but most strike us as old and indifferent. For the essay to regain the days of its Montaignian glory, essayists might do well to entertain an outdated faith in a common humanity. Only then can they make their experiences relevant to others, only then formulate views large enough to grip us. As America’s first essayist, Emerson, said: “To believe that what is true for you in your own private heart is true for all . . . that is genius.” It is also a kind of lunatic hubris. But at least it’s a provocative start. It rouses and raises us. It does not let us slumber.