Read The Best American Essays 2016 Online

Authors: Jonathan Franzen

Tags: #Essays, #Essays & Correspondence, #Literature & Fiction

The Best American Essays 2016 (2 page)

“Black and Blue and Blond” by Thomas Chatterton Williams. First published in the
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Winter 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Reprinted by permission of Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Foreword

O
NE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING
—and puzzling—comments I’ve encountered on the art of the essay comes from one of America’s foremost essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After the remarkable Elizabeth Peabody showed her good friend Emerson an essay written by her future brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson “complained that there was no inside in it.” Though he never wrote an essay on the essay—most of his remarks on craft and composition are scattered throughout his journals and recorded conversations—Emerson did know plenty about essays and essay-writing. What could he have meant by an essay having “no inside”?

Hawthorne had published the essay Emerson complained about, “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore,” in 1838. A personal, meditative essay (easily found online) that recounts an afternoon spent in near-solitude at a sandy stretch of beach near his home in Salem, Massachusetts, “Foot-prints” was like nothing Emerson ever wrote or would write. A more accomplished essayist than usually acknowledged, Hawthorne, borrowing from his illustrious predecessor Washington Irving, called the essay a “sketch.” Hawthorne published many sketches, intermingling them with his “tales” and making no distinction between fiction and nonfiction when he collected them in various volumes. With its neoclassical language (perhaps he’s having a bit of fun calling caught fish “scaly prey”) and private musings mixed with erotic suggestions stimulated by his characteristic voyeurism, “Foot-prints” is about as far from Emerson as an essay can get.

But how is Hawthorne’s essay lacking an “inside”? I don’t think Emerson (he and Hawthorne shared no warmth) is complaining here about mere surfaces, superficiality. What I think Emerson finds missing is an interiority, an inner dynamic of creative conflict. Hawthorne seems too evasively comfortable in his little private excursion to the seashore. There seems to be little at stake or at risk emotionally or intellectually. Unlike Emerson’s own essays, Hawthorne’s “Foot-prints” contains no centripetal force. Its movement does not seek a center, a vital “inside.” Or so I suppose Emerson thought when he enigmatically criticized Hawthorne’s essay.

It’s not a long way from “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” to “Once More to the Lake.” These are both satisfying essays in their way, but Emerson favored a different kinetics, one that—as it turned out—had little influence on future essayists in the way that his literary hero Montaigne indisputedly did. Both essayists are wholly attracted to Pyrrhonism (from the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who allegedly maintained that nothing can be known with certainty). But Montaigne’s stance of “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?) represented a skepticism immersed in his presence and personality—which centuries later still come alive on the page. In nearly all of Emerson’s writing we do not encounter an engaging personality. We know his thoughts and style of thinking, but we rarely get a glimpse of the man himself. Montaigne’s essays are his memoir; Emerson’s essays, with their chilly impersonality, might be considered almost an anti-memoir. Disappointed readers will always ask the same question: “Where’s Waldo?”

Emerson was preoccupied with sentences. As biographer Robert D. Richardson observes in his succinct book on Emerson’s creative process,
First We Read, Then We Write
, Emerson spoke of writing only in terms of sentences, not in terms of the essay. But the art of the sentence was not achieved without great struggle. Richardson cites one of Emerson’s letters to his friend Thomas Carlyle: “Here I sit and read and write with very little system and as far as regards composition with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.” This isn’t what one would expect to find in a student’s guide to composition, but Richardson’s admirable book is as close as anyone can come to workshopping the essay with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Coherence wasn’t one of Emerson’s compositional goals. He famously wrote that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Richardson expands on this by citing the comments of a Williams College student, Charles Woodbury, a young man Emerson befriended in his sixties and often spoke to about writing, life, and ideas. “Neither concern yourself about consistency,” he once said. “The moment you putty and plaster your expressions to make them hang together, you have begun a weakening process . . . If you must be contradictory, let it be clean and sharp as the two blades of scissors meet.”

He was intellectually suspicious of many conventional rhetorical techniques, which he saw as obstructions to original thought. He dismisses skeletons, outlines, and scaffolding as creative interferences. He dislikes classifications and categorizations. In his journal he admits that many left his lectures “puzzled.” As an orator and one of the most prominent lecturers of his time, he had a devotion to eloquence, but it was not the rhetorical brand of eloquence many expected. Rhetoric comes from the outside and is something we tend to impose on our thoughts. Emerson’s eloquence sought the unsystematic inside: spontaneity, surprise, magic. As a writer and thinker, he was more interested in the spark than the fire.

Yeats memorably said, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” Emerson aspired to the poetry that originates from that quarrel with ourselves. At the core of the essays we find a remarkable self-opposition that seems to be an abundant source of creativity. A mind in process, he knew, is rarely rhetorically persuasive. Toward the conclusion of one of his finest essays, “Circles,” he writes,

 

Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

 

Trigger warning: Emerson’s essays are not “safe spaces.” Not even for himself.

And Emerson is not for everyone. For many readers, all that can be seen is the outside—the lofty exhortations, the bewildering transitions, the poetically expressed abstractions. But unless we read him with keen attention to the Wittgensteinian struggle with language going on “inside” the essay, we miss the literary and intellectual exhilaration. There was some fun had at Emerson’s expense a few years ago when someone discovered the English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s surprising comments in his copy of the essays. Mill was not impressed and apparently enjoyed annotating the margins with “nonsense,” “fudge,” “stupid,” “pooh,” “trash,” “sentimental,” “superficial,” and “very stupid.”

A preeminent logician and hardheaded Utilitarian, Mill, a stickler for precision, was clearly no Concord Transcendentalist. Yet despite his marginal barbs, the two thinkers had something important in common: they shared—along with Montaigne—a passion for free and open discussion and a rare mental capacity for self-opposition. In the chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” in his classic argument
On Liberty
, Mill demands a level of tolerance and respect for opposing opinions that would seem humanly out of reach at any time, and especially so in our current climate of polarized intolerance. For Mill, like Emerson, nothing was truly settled, and he proposed an all but impossible moral obligation on individual thought: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are attempting to stifle is a false opinion; and, if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” He believed that “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” and he maintained what to him represented a crucial distinction: there is “the greatest difference,” he wrote, “between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”

Emerson, as I read him, would certainly agree with Mill’s receptivity to contrary opinions, whether they are debated in a public arena or deep within ourselves. And perhaps that simply shows how irrelevant he is today.

 

The Best American Essays
features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays—essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately 100 are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selection. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Note that abridgements and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series, but if considered significant they will appear in the list of notable essays in the back of the volume. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to

 

The Best American Essays
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
222 Berkeley St., #11
Boston, MA 02116

 

Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note that, owing to the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date of publication, and author contact information) will no longer be considered.

 

I’d like to dedicate this thirty-first volume in the series to the great essayist, neurologist, and scientist Dr. Oliver Sacks, who died after a brave struggle with cancer on August 30, 2015, in New York City at the age of eighty-two. He wrote brilliantly right up to the end, and we are pleased to once again include one of his essays in this series, though, sadly, one of his last.

As always, I’m indebted to Nicole Angeloro for her keen editorial skills and uncanny ability to keep the annual express train running smoothly and on schedule. A special thanks to other publishing people with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—Liz Duvall, Carla Gray, and Megan Wilson. I’m extremely grateful to Jonathan Franzen for agreeing to serve as guest editor and for contributing an introduction that is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of the essay. What he says about the essayist’s difficult embrace of risk and honesty can be felt throughout this exceptionally diverse and often emotionally turbulent collection.

R.A.

Introduction

I
F AN ESSAY
is something
essayed
—something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity—we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night, who you saw there, and how you felt about it afterward: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. Bloggers, both pro and amateur, operate on a similar presumption. Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like
The New York Times,
has softened up to allow the
I,
with its voice and opinions and impressions, to take the front-page spotlight. Book reviewers (who nowadays are basically all amateurs, since almost none of them earn a living wage) feel less and less constrained to discuss novels with any kind of objectivity; it didn’t use to matter if Raskolnikov and Lily Bart were likable, but the question of “likability,” with its implicit privileging of the reviewer’s personal feelings, is now a key element of critical judgment. And literary fiction is looking more and more like essay. Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgård, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

And yet the personal essay itself—the formal apparatus developed by Montaigne and advanced by Emerson and Woolf and Baldwin—is in eclipse. Many large-circulation American magazines, including
The New Yorker
, have all but ceased to publish pure essays. The form persists mainly in smaller publications that collectively have fewer readers than Adele has Twitter followers. Is the essay becoming an endangered species? Or is it a species that has so fully invaded the larger culture that it no longer needs its original niche?

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