The Art of the Personal Essay

A Two-Part Seminar on Essay Writing with

Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D.

at the

Sayreville Public Library

June 18 and 25, 2015

http://www.sayrevillelibrary.org/

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

~ E. B. White

One writes out of one thing only -- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

~ James Baldwin

The English word essay derives from the French essai, meaning "attempt" (from the verb essayer, "to try"). The self-obsessed, and utterly brilliant, sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne called his collection of writings on numerous topics -- ranging from friendship, to cannibalism, and just about everything in between -- essais, and so we usually call a short piece devoted to a single topic which the writer is attempting to explain, an essay. However, an essay may be quite long, even book-length. Jacques Derrida's groundbreaking work Of Grammatology, for example -- which ushered in the deconstructionist movement in literary and cultural theory -- was called an essay. My entire career as a writer has been devoted to the composition of essays, some book-length and highly technical (my works on Origen of Alexandria and Plato's Academy, for example), others shorter and more accessible, on topics of personal interest, such as favorite authors, music, artworks, or -- less often -- political and social concerns. There are two types of essays: the formal, a carefully constructed defense of a position, concept, or idea (a doctoral dissertation or a master's thesis are examples of a formal essay), and the informal or personal essay, which can be as long or as short as the writer wishes, and on any topic or topics under the sun. There are no strict rules for the personal essay -- and therein lies the difficulty; freedom can lead to extravagance, sloppiness, logorrhea (diarrhea of the pen, or keyboard). For the personal essay is rather like the guitar -- it is easy to play a guitar poorly, difficult to play one well. But when one plays well, it can be an extraordinary experience. Just recall Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen at their best. A personal essay, when written poorly, might be rambling, or confused and confusing, or simply boring. When written well, it can have a profound effect on the reader, and bring lasting satisfaction to the writer.

The most difficult part of the personal essay is choosing a topic -- or at least it should be. Just because an event or experience or idea is important or interesting or profound to you, does not necessarily mean it will be so for your reader. My first trip to Providence, RI -- the birthplace and lifelong home of my favorite author, H. P. Lovecraft -- when I was nineteen, was a deeply moving experience for me, one of the milestones of my career as a writer, thinker, and -- without sounding too dramatic, I hope -- as a person. To simply write a chronicle of the events that occurred during that visit would be, I fear, to bore my reader -- which is why I have never done so. I could easily write of the John Hay Library, where I held Lovecraft's manuscripts (with the appropriate protective gloves on my eager hands) and flirted with the pretty librarian; where I strolled up the nearly vertical streets of Stamper's Hill, stopping before the various pre-Revolutionary homes that served as the loci of events in his tales; where, at sunset, I sat across the river and watched the sun set aflame the dome of the Christian Science church, which crowns the hill "as London is crowned by St. Paul's." Indeed, I could go into detail about my youthful and futile efforts to write like Lovecraft and how, after that visit, I came into my own, as it were, and decided that -- for all my love of belles lettres and the "dark side of life," as someone put it to me -- my mind is attuned to philosophy, and so here I am, philosophizing to you about essay writing. So, topics. Simply put, if you have to sit and wrack your brain for a topic, you are not ready to write a personal essay. If, however, you have sufficient interests, things you love, like, despise, or wish to change, et cetera -- in short, if you are a thinking human being -- you have the ability to write a personal essay. Some of my recent essays include book reviews, reflections on Manichaeism, a discussion of free speech and terrorism, and a little panegyric on the duos of John Coltrane and Paul Quinichette. Some of these have been published on my blog, The Aristocrat, where I am my own editor and anything goes. Yet I desire readers -- and I have quite a few of them, thankfully -- so I do my best to keep my essays entertaining, and to avoid self-indulgence (I think), which is the temptation of many writers, Yours Truly especially. Hemingway, James Baldwin, and other fine masters of the craft, advised writers to write from personal experience. That is all well and good, for some topics. But it is also fun to go out on a limb, and write of things of which you are not quite sure, to question out loud, as it were, to send your immature ideas out into the world and see if they can hold their own against the numerous linguistic predators lurking in the dark corners of social media. We are fortunate, I think, to live in the digital age, in which any piece of writing we feel like typing can be sent to hundreds of thousands of people instantly, and perhaps get tweeted, go viral, and cause our in-boxes to fill up with praise mail or hate mail or, sometimes -- and it's no big deal (so I tell myself) -- no mail at all.

So what is the difference between a personal essay and a memoir? In an ideal world, an utopian realm in which truth is always told (or written), the only difference would be the extent of topics covered: a memoir would cover the writer's entire life up to the point of writing, with no poetic license taken, nothing omitted, nothing embellished; a personal essay would focus on a single topic or perhaps a few inter-related topics, again with truth-telling the primary concern. However, we do not live in an ideal world. And the first and arguably the greatest memoir ever written, the Confessions of St. Augustine, is filled with pious embellishments, exaggerations, and not a few omissions (though it is easy to read between the lines, in places). Augustine's concern in his memoir was, of course, with himself -- and his goal in writing, to use the poet e. e. cumming's words, was to spill his bright illimitable soul. And in so doing he gave the Western world its first introduction to the inner life of a person. A millennia later, Montaigne allowed his bright, if not illimitable, intellect to shine forth as he ranged over numerous topics, attempting definitive explanations or elucidations of all, yet more often than not simply stopping short, leaving the continuing exploration to the reader. This is the personal essay par excellence, a conversation between the reader and his or her unknown audience -- a linguistic act demanding attention and, if the reader is so inclined, a response. Shakespeare knew the essays of Montaigne, in English translation, and we would not be amiss to call the Bard's inimitable Sonnets personal essays in verse. The subject of the personal essay, then, is not so much the events of the writer's life -- an essay is not necessarily an episode in an autobiography, although it can be! -- as the writer's response to ideas or emotions arising from or provoked by life-events. Indeed, consider Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, for example:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

A personal essay is akin to a caprice in music, i.e., a piece in which the composer allows him or herself free reign, for the sake of experimentation or simply for showing off. One might be familiar with Paganini's 24 Caprices for solo violin. These pieces were written by that outrageous fellow (it was said that he sold his soul to the devil in return for his mastery of the violin) for one purpose: to dazzle the listener with virtuoso fireworks -- and to bedevil the performer with finger-twisting scales and nearly impossible leaps and twirls of the bow. In composing a personal essay, similarly, one may use one's facility with language to show off in grand euphuistic style, to haul even the most mundane topic to the auroral empyrean wherein Tithonus himself will open his eyes wide in juvenescent wonder. In the Hawthorne essay that we are about to read, old Nathaniel takes something as literally yawn-inducing as insomnia and gives us, as we shall soon see, quite a memorable little performance. Here is Hawthorne's "The Haunted Mind": http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html.

Now, just for fun -- instructive fun -- we are going to listen to Hemingway read his piece, "In Harry's Bar in Venice" (recording on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE04BmNmgAI ).

He was rather intoxicated, or pleasantly buzzed, when he recited this. A truly fine example of Hemingway's personal essay style is A Moveable Feast, actually a collection of inter-related essays forming a more or less cohesive narrative. Let us take a moment to read chapter 12, "Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit":

http://charlyawad.com/images/books/A%20Moveable%20Feast%20-%20Ernest%20Hemingway.pdf

Persuade or Convince?

The topic that one chooses for a personal essay need not be one that requires an argument for or against an idea or concept; in other words, you might not have to convince your reader of anything. However, to make the essay interesting, it is a good idea to at least introduce an idea that requires a bit of persuasion. Intelligent people enjoy having their preconceived notions -- or even their deeply held convictions -- challenged. I certainly do. Even if I am not persuaded or convinced (more on that distinction in a moment) I enjoy taking the intellectual ride with the writer. In Hawthorne's essay, he is not making any earth-shattering claims, rather, he is simply taking the reader on a little excursion into his night-world, which he finds valuable for moral and spiritual reasons. For my part, since first reading that essay, many years ago, I have had a different attitude towards insomnia; now, when I wake up in the wee hours, I think of Hawthorne's words, and I reflect on mortality and the purpose and value of life. Or I take a sleeping pill. But either way, Hawthorne's essay has been proven successful -- for I have not forgotten it; its idea has remained in my mind. That is not to say I have come to hold his views on the afterlife; I remain an atheist and a materialist. He would have had to write a very different essay to convince me of an afterlife and a glorious home on high.

The distinction between persuading and convincing: In ancient Greece, in the Classical era, the philosopher Socrates found himself at odds with the great Sophists, i.e., teachers of disputation who specialized in winning arguments by using beautiful language to persuade their listeners of the rightness of their positions. According to Socrates, and his brilliant student Plato, truth is one and indivisible, and can be communicated through accurate language, simple and accessible for all. The Sophists, however, were not concerned with truth; rather, their only concern was with winning arguments. They were the great lawyers of the age, and highly influential. Socrates, in his simple speech, which consisted almost entirely of questions, made the Sophists sound rather silly, as he gradually, through adroit questioning, poked holes in their elaborately constructed arguments. [Let us pause here to review Plato's dialogue Euthyphro: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html] In essay writing, one may of course take the tack of the Sophists, and meander in zig-zag fashion, treating truth as something culturally determined. That is what the philosopher Nietzsche did. One of his famous sayings is: "There are no truths, only interpretations." I would add that while I do not believe in absolute, universal Truth (with a capital 'T') I do believe in personal truths -- and a fine, even a great, essay will communicate some personal truth. I think that Emerson comes closest to doing this, even though his style is rather slippery and aphoristic. Yet when one reflects upon his rather feverishly expressed words, one gets a sense of truth-saying that increases with each reading of his piece. He wrote many more essays besides Self-Reliance, and he is well worth the effort of careful study. [See the full text of Self-Reliance: http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] In fact, the late Harold Bloom (with whom I was fortunate enough to have studied back in my days at NYU, so long ago) made the characteristically hyperbolical statement that "Emerson is God." What he meant, I think, is that Emerson is a writer's writer, not merely a model, but rather a writer to study over and over again for inspiration -- and to me, the Emersonian well (to indulge in a silly pun) is well-nigh inexhaustible. So a personal essay, at its best, is more akin to the linguistic pyrotechnics of the ancient Sophists, for when we sit down to spill our bright illimitable souls we are not attempting to communicate universal truth(s); rather, we are only trying to -- at best -- persuade our readers that we are on to something, and to hopefully invite them to think and / or read about our idea(s) at greater length. If we are aiming to convince, however, we had best sit down to compose a rigorously argued treatise like the Summa Theologia of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Commentary on Romans by Martin Luther, or the Principia Mathematica of Betrand Russell. While these works are monuments of the human intellect, I doubt that many people have them on their bedside tables, or downloaded on their tablets. A well-worn copy of Emerson, however, may easily be found in the home of many a thinking person.

First, Second, or Third Person?

In a 1994 interview, the underread, if not underrated, writer of literary dark fantasy, Thomas Ligotti, recommended first-person narration for its ability to render all effects -- emotional, aesthetic, even intellectual (a rarity!) -- immediate and aesthetically promising. Ligotti mocked the third-person style, in which the writer gives us what amounts to stage directions. For example, "Tom jabbed a thumb over his right shoulder and said 'Scram!'" Or "Tammy stood at the water cooler wondering if Brandon would approach and say 'Hi'." Ligotti likened this style's effect upon the reader to listening to a radio station that plays one bad song after another. This is not to discount completely the third-person style; Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage, or Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, are two examples of the third-person being not only effective but necessary for the impact of the tale. Joyce Carol Oates's recent novel Carthage, however, commits numerous sins to which a writer is tempted when she or he uses third-person. In my recent review essay, "On Unreadable Writing," I take aim at Oates and others who waste our time with telling rather than showing. This distinction is especially important in personal essay writing. I shall quote briefly from that article (published in my blog, The Aristocrat: www.antiplebeian.blogspot.com):

The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing.

Now essay writing is its own artform; even though it has many affinities with the short story and even the novel -- e.g., conjuring of atmosphere, immediacy, a tripartite structure that tends toward a conclusion and even, in the best essays, builds suspense -- a personal essay is just that, personal, and while it must show itself to the reader as an artform, it is crucial that the writer avoid artifice. I do not like being pulled aside by a loquacious person, saying to me, in tremulous voice, Listen to this! I've got to tell you something! You're not gonna believe it! Or, even worse, being a member of a captive audience where said loquacious person is holding forth. I am sure many of you, at some point, have been at a dinner party or other social gathering, in the presence of someone who wants to to tell a story, a personal anecdote. This person usually begins by making some mysterious remarks, in the hope that someone will ask them to continue. Of course, if no one asks, this person will invariably begin the anecdote anyway, much to the annoyance of the captive audience. We have all been in such situations. A very poor essay teller (I will not call him a writer), E. B. White (my apologies to anyone here who enjoys his work -- and I admit to enjoying Charlotte's Web as a child) has the habit, in his essays, of pulling at his reader's wrist, as it were, and insisting that the reader follow him on whatever excursion he has planned. It is amazing to me that anyone follows him. I certainly cannot. But I will quote, as an example of what not to do, the opening of his very long and ironically titled essay, "The Years of Wonder":

Russia's foolish suggestion that a dam be thrown [one does not "throw" a dam, one builds one] across the Bering Strait brings back happy memories of that body of water and of certain youthful schemes and follies of my own. I passed through the Strait and on into the Arctic many years ago, searching for a longer route to where I didn't want to be [if this were being told to me at a dinner party, I'd reach for more wine at this point]. I was also in search of walrus [hearty gulp of wine here]. A dam, I am sure, would have been an annoyance.

Such is the opening paragraph. The reader, of course, has the luxury of closing the book; our hypothetical captive dinner party attendee has no choice but to find out why the dam would have been an annoyance and why, in the name of all that is reverent, the author was seeking out walrus. So does anyone find this captivating? Would you read on? Why?

Before discussing the relative merits or demerits of White's effusion, allow me to place it alongside a much better (in my humble opinion) opening paragraph by James Baldwin, from his essay, "Every Good-bye Ain't Gone":

I am writing this note just 29 years after my first departure from America. It was raining -- naturally. My mother had come downstairs, and stood silently, arms folded, on the stoop. My baby sister was upstairs, weeping. I got into the cab, waved, and drove away.

That's it. Why should we care? Baldwin is showing (not telling) us a scene that has played out numerous times, in all times and all ages, in all countries ... The terse style is reminiscent of Hemingway (this essay was written in 1977, long after Baldwin had established his style) ... Nothing is really special about this opening paragraph. So why read on? Only two questions arise, and they are not earth-shattering: Why is he leaving America again? And why is it "naturally" raining? What does that mean? This is not enough upon which to build an essay -- but it is enough to nudge one gently to the next sentence, which is, "It may be impossible for anyone to tell the truth about his past." Now we are moving along. We have a mystery here. A possible confession of something kept secret for twenty-nine years. I had no problem reading on. But what about E. B. White? What follows his inane opening paragraph? He writes: "I was rather young to be so far north [What does age have to do with longitude and latitude?], but there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place." More inanity. White is writing not to us, but at us, and using a cutesy mode of reminiscence that makes me picture him in a rocking chair, sipping an iced tea and gazing out over a garden in need of weeding. It is a warm, comfortable day, we have nowhere to go, so we might as well indulge the old man and let him ramble -- assuming, of course, we are in a kind mood. Baldwin, by contrast, is in earnest, grim-faced, speaking with gravity, wasting no words. He is not trying to sell us anything, nor is he attempting to buy our time with nice language. He has something to show us, and he is taking us there. That is good writing.

So, what of the second-person mode used by Hawthorne? It is not easy to pull off, frankly, which is why it is rarely used. It takes more than a fine writer to recognize when the subject matter calls for second-person. The opening to "The Haunted Mind" (the title itself is sufficient to pull one in!) involves the reader immediately in an experience that we all have had: "What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself after starting from midnight slumber!" It is worth noting that a mundane topic, or the description or discussion of an experience that we all have had -- many times -- is cast in a new light when it is placed on the page (or on the screen). "In every work of genius," wrote Emerson, "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Indeed, Hawthorne rendered back to us an experience so common -- waking in the middle of the night, thoughts flowing hither and yon -- that we rarely, if ever, give it much thought -- unless, of course, we've experience a nightmare of rare power. What Hawthorne is describing in his little essay is what Wordsworth called "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.

The adjective "gloomy," repeated here, does not accurately describe the feeling of the moment, of waking on a frozen night, alone in the dark with thoughts of mortality -- one's own and others -- roiling in one's brain; the gloom will settle later, when one is awake in the clear light of day, and the tempestuous night-thoughts a distant, but still effective, memory. The power of the second-person style is more than evident here.

Even more rarely do we find the third-person used in personal essays. The intellectual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was written effectively in the third-person, but that work is not an essay -- although the section "The Virgin and the Dynamo" has often been extracted and presented in anthologies as a personal essay. This is not to say that one cannot 'get personal' in the third-person. In my own academic work -- wherein one is expected to be as objective as possible, and the third-person is the rule -- I have attempted many times to give a first-person flavor to my third-person account. Here is an example from a long article on Maximus the Confessor that I wrote for an academic conference back in 2003:

We have seen how the final goal of salvation, for Maximus, is the transformation of the soul into a receptacle of God involving the substitution of the human ego with the divine presence.  Indeed, as Maximus clearly states, in salvation "only God shines forth through the body and soul when their natural features are transcended in overwhelming glory."  Such a statement implies that the redeemed soul is stripped of its nature and of any defining characteristics qualifying it as a distinct, autonomous being, a person.

I am barely an inch away from first-person here, and am only adhering to the academic standard for the sake of conformity (something of which Emerson would not approve!). I, of course, disapprove of Maximus' position, as my choice of words makes clear. This paper later went on to appear as a crucial chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was published as a book in 2005, and is still selling rather well today (for a recondite philosophical tome). I credit that minor success to the flirtation with first-person narration that I undertook throughout that work, and several others. In writing personal essays, of course, I always use first-person.