The Art of the Essay

Article by Kate Slotover

The thought of an essay may stir distant memories of written work laboured over and handed in at school to be marked. But put these aside and you are free to discover the very particular charms of essay reading. Without the filter of invention and artifice that comes with fiction, the author’s voice can come across in a way that is far more real and immediate. Whilst good fiction can lead us to question our ideas, a well-written essay has as its foundation the desire to explore new ones, offering a very personal point-of-view – whether we agree or disagree is up to us - but there is pleasure to be found in shaping our own thoughts in response.

The original essayist is generally considered to have been a French nobleman called Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). After a brush with death Montaigne took to writing about himself, examining every facet of his daily life, his thoughts and feelings, and he called these pieces of writing ‘essais’ from the French verb ‘Essayer’ meaning ‘to try’. You might simply plunge in and read Montaigne’s essays, which are as vivid and accessible now as they were four-hundred-and-fifty years ago. For context, though, Sarah Bakewell’s biography How to Live, subtitled A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer provides as delightful an introduction to the work of this fascinating and beguiling philosopher as you could wish for. Tapping into our modern preoccupation with self-analysis and our desire to find the essential ingredients for happiness, Bakewell shows how Montaigne was interested in the same questions; ‘He wanted to know how to live a good life’, she writes, ‘meaning a correct or honourable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one’. From cannibalism to friendship, cruelty to his relationship with his cat (‘When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?’) Bakewell guides the reader through Montaigne’s multifaceted world, offering new inspiration for how to lead a richer, more fulfilled life.

From France to America where the art of essay writing seems particularly to have flourished. The New Yorker magazine, first published in 1925, remains a reliable weekly source for anyone seeking good non-fiction writing including pieces they file under ‘personal commentary’. For most of the magazine’s history one of their regular writers was E.B. White (best known for his children’s book Charlotte’s Web) whose essays are published together in The Essays of E.B. White (1976). Like Montaigne, White wrote about what was near to hand, whether it was life in New York or on his beloved farm in Maine. In ‘Homecoming’ he describes the car journey from one to the other, writing ‘I dip down across the Narramissic and look back at the tiny town of Orland, the white spire of its church against the pale-red sky stirs me in a way that Chartres could never do.’ Meanwhile ‘Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street’ covers the experience of packing up his apartment and will make anyone who has ever moved house smile in delighted appreciation. What, after all, do you do with that trophy with your name on? ‘Anyone who is willing to put his mind to it can get rid of a chair … but trophies are like leeches’. White’s voice is full of warmth and humour, it enfolds you like a blanket while at the same time gently urging you to look more carefully at the details of life around you. The writing is among the finest you will ever read, simple, elegant with never a word out of place. Life may unfold at a bewildering pace, White seems to say, but our experience and appreciation of its small moments is the key to happiness.

Known in America for his cartoons and his column in the New York Times, but known, it seems, to almost no-one over here, Tim Krieder’s book We Learn Nothing is a collection of essays that begins with his experience of surviving being stabbed in the throat. ‘After my unsuccessful murder’, Krieder writes, ‘I wasn’t unhappy for almost an entire year’. Like Montaigne many years before him, Krieder’s brush with death led him to an enhanced appreciation of daily life, the only problem being that his newly contented state didn’t last. ‘You can’t stay crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever,’ Krieder muses. ‘Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.’ Yet although temporary, Krieder finds the state of grace that comes with such a reprieve has a value: ‘It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight … a vision to hold on to when you descend once gain beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather’.

Krieder has a gift for perfectly articulating experiences or emotions you will be surprised to recognise and share. Subjects range from being ‘de-friended’ by a close friend who one day simply drops Krieder from his life, to a manifesto on laziness or rather the modern phenomenon of ‘busy-ness’ (‘Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.’) Sharply socially aware, these are essays that slice away at the strange idiosyncrasies of modern life. Krieder acknowledges that there might be an aching void deep inside all of us, but he is good at focusing on the things that make it all feel better: friendship, laughter and shared experience.

Notes:

For anyone interested in exploring the essay genre further The Best American Essay series edited by Robert Atwan and an annual guest editor are consistently excellent. In 2007 it was David Foster Wallace, whose own essay collection Consider the Lobster is both entertaining and brilliant in equal measure. The title essay is available to read online here. E.B. White noted the lowly stature of the essay as a literary form: ‘A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about…’. Perhaps this is why so many incredible essays are available to read online for free, such as The Fourth State of Matter, an extraordinary piece of writing by Jo Ann Beard. If you read nothing else I would urge you to read this. In this case, of course, it’s presence online is thanks to the The New Yorker.