Saturday 26 February 2011

The Essay

First, an apology to those of you I haven't got round to visiting this week. As some of you know, I don't always have the best of health and there are times when I just have to sit back and let life go on around me. In the past I have let this put a stop to my blogging, but this time round I don't want that to happen. I may occasionally have to go silent for a time, but I will eventually come back.

Down time does give me the opportunity to do some thinking about how I want to spend my up time, especially my reading hours and one of the forms I know I want to revisit is the essay. Perhaps thirty years ago I read a great many collections of essays, especially those put together from the work of arts journalists. I read everything published by Bernard Levin, for example, a journalist who had such a following that when he wrote in praise of a show or an exhibition it would turn its fortunes over night, as the RSC discovered when he waxed lyrical about their superb adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Somehow, however, I've let the habit slip and until the last couple of weeks there have been almost no essays on my shelves at all.

The essay is a difficult genre both to compose and to appreciate, I think. By its very nature it has to be thought in a concentrated form, a distillation of many hours of deliberation. Whatever argument the writer is putting forth, it has to be set out clearly and in a concise manner, it has to make its point at the first attempt. There is no option of setting out your thesis in an opening introduction and then returning to expand on your meaning a couple of chapters down the line; you have to get it right the first time.

Likewise, as a reader you have to hit the ground running. You don't have the luxury of easing your way into a writer's style, of gradually coming to understand their point of view. Although you do, at least, have the option of returning to a difficult passage, an essay generally demands a level of concentration greater than the average novel, a commitment to follow absolutely every turn of the author's mind.

And this, I think, is the reason I have let my essay reading fall by the wayside. Concentrated thinking hasn't been my strong point over the past few years and it is a habit, which once you let it fall into disuse, takes some retrieving. Now, however, I would like to do something about this, even if it only a promise to myself to read at least one essay a week, and so, as a way of breaking myself in slowly, I've been gathering a number of books which are primarily essays about reading. If I can't read about books, what can I do?

Anne Fadiman has been on my shelves all along. I love her work and return to it often. However, someone mentioned Michael Dirda on a blog and his work looks ideal. Classics for Pleasure and Book by Book, I found easily enough and yesterday Bound to Please finally arrived. Carolyn Heilbrun was also recommended and I've managed to pick up good cheap copies of The Last Gift of Time and Hamlet's Mother and other Women on line. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of Sarah Bakewell's essays about Montaigne, How to Live. And finally, and quite by chance, last weekend I picked up second hand collections by Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, although the latter seem to be political rather than literary.

So, I can't say that I don't have enough to go at, can I, and the next thing I need to decide is how I'm going to structure my reading. And so, two questions: have any of you tackled an essay reading project and, if so, how did you go about it and are there any other collections of literary essays I might look out for? All suggestions most gratefully received.

Annie

17 comments:

  1. Last year I had this idea to read one essay a week and write about it, but I fizzled about a third of the way through. I love reading essays, but maybe you're right when it comes to the need for concentrated effort to assimilate it all. I was reading mostly from Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay, which is a really wonderful book and very far reaching. There is also a series of books in the US that come out every year of the Best Essays (I think Harcourt Brace is the publisher)--they did a 100 Best Essays of the Century edited by Joyce Carol Oates, which is also good and that I am reading. I think Alberto Manguel also has books of essays if you want to stick to essays about reading and books. I look forward to seeing how you get on. Maybe you will inspire me to get back to them as well!

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  2. ...oops should say I was reading from the 100 Best Essays....

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  3. Hello Annie - I see your name in comments on all the blogs I visit, so thought I should pay you a visit. I have come to love essays thanks to blogging - would never really have considered reading them without the prompting of good blog friends. I know Danielle has had her essay project (which she mentions above) and Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles is also a keen essay reader. Most of the essays I read are in collected volumes (The Oxford Book of Essays, for instance). But I think Barbara Kingsolver and David Foster Wallace are great essayists, and have recently discovered Emily Fox Gordon. Perhaps most of all, I'd recommend Elizabeth Hardwick for her essays on literature. Those I've even reread!

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  4. Danielle, how honest! That is what I'm afraid of, that I will commit myself to something and then not keep it up. Still, if you read for four months that is sixteen or so essays that you wouldn't otherwise have read. I've managed to find a good cheap copy of the Lopate and I do have a collection by Manguel, I'd forgotten it because it's on my Kindle. Now I'll have to decide where I am going to start.

    Litlove, how kind of you to visit. I've ordered both the Oxford (which looks massive: I'm going to have to be in when the postman delivers that. No way is it going through the letterbox!) and a volume by Hardwick. I chose 'Seduction and Betrayal'. Is there any other of her collections I should try and find?

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  5. I have read more essays in the last year or so than I had for a while and have enjoyed getting back into the form. I haven't really focused on literary essays - but have spread more widely across history, social justice/commentary, and literature. Mostly I've read one-off online essays. (If you look under categories on my blog for Reviews - Essays you will see there what I've read recently). The last collection of essays I read was probably around four years ago by an Australian, Inga Clendinnen. It was called Agamemnon's kiss: Selected essays. She's a great essayist.

    Anyhow, my suggestion, such as it is, is not to set yourself a firm challenge as you are probably (if you're anything like me) setting yourself up to fail, but to look for regular opportunities to read essays eg make the essay book the one you carry when you go out or the one next to the bed or the one in "the little room" (LOL).

    Oh, and I hope you keep well ... but never feel pressure to blog. I don't believe in setting oneself blogging schedules that make it a stress rather than fun.

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  6. I forgot. I have read two other books of essays in the last 2-3 years. One is Jane Austen in context, edited by Janet Todd. But they are commissioned essays that seem to have been written to some degree to a formula so, while they were interesting I find it hard to see them as "true" essays.

    I also read a little compilation of Dickens's essays called On travel. Loved it (you can check my review if you like). Not essays on literary topics but great reads nonethless.

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  7. WG, our friendship may be very recent, but you clearly know me only too well. I am far too inclined to set myself up for a fall by aiming at a schedule that eventually becomes more than I can manage. I will try and take your wise words to heart. I'm definitely going to look out the Dickens; they sound right in my line. Thanks.

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  8. You've got a nice pile of literary essays to dig into! Seduction and Betrayal is a good collection.

    I like reading essays and have done two multi-year essay projects one where I read all of Montaigne's essays and another in which I read all of Emerson's essays. I got through all of them one essay at a time, one week at a time with an occasional off week because something else needed my attention. I loved both projects but Emerson most of all and I keep flirting with rereading a large portion of them once school is done.

    Good luck with your essay project!

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  9. I have two 'biggies' on whom my sights are set Stefanie, Montaigne and Virginia Woolf but, with apologies for the pun, I need to climb the foothills first. I hadn't thought about Emerson because (terrible admission) I know nothing about him other than that he belonged to the same group as Thoreau, Hawthorne and Alcott. Where should I start?

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  10. One of my favorite topics ever! I'm in the middle of an essay-reading project, but it's a rather ridiculous, life-long thing. I have five essay anthologies, and I'm reading through them in chronological order, but with every author except those I don't like, I stop and read something book-length by them. So I've read the complete Montaigne this way, and also Bacon's essays, and earlier writers such as Sei Shonagon. I'm still in the 17th century, but I may make it to the 18th this year!

    The anthologies I've been using are Lopate's Art of the Personal Essay, The Oxford Book of Essays, Epstein's Norton Book of Personal Essays, D'Agata's The Lost Origins of the Essay, and Denise Gigante's The Great Age of the English Essay (which is mostly 18C essays). I also really like the Oates book Danielle mentions above.

    Of the people mentioned above, I heartily recommend David Foster Wallace, Emily Fox Gordon, and Elizabeth Hardwick. I also really love Mary McCarthy (The Writing On the Wall, and I'm hoping to read On the Contrary this year), George Orwell, and Joan Didion. There are a few collections I hope to read soon: A.S. Byatt's Passions of the Mind, Zadie Smith's Changing my Mind, William Gass's A Temple of Texts, and collections by Cynthia Ozick.

    Oh, and I love J.C. Hallman's collection The Story About the Story, which has essays on literature, many of which have a personal bent.

    You can see I love this topic!

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  11. Emerson is an influential and oft forgotten gem in my opinion and his writing is top-notch. If you are interested in reading him, start with his "Essays, first and second series."

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  12. Dorothy, what more can I say than a very very loud thank you. The Hallman and the Zadie Smith will have to wit because they are still new and expensive, but I've ordered some Byatt and the McCarthy and how could I have overlooked Orwell? THANK YOU.

    Stefanie, that's really useful. I think I'm going to be able to find copies through Project Gutenberg. Thank you.

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  13. Perhaps Annie, it's just that I know people like us too well .... so much to read, so little ... !

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  14. I did an essay-reading project last year based around Philip Lopate's Art of the Personal Essay, which Dorothy references above. I read four essays from the book every week (fewer in the rare cases where one essay was very long), and chose one on which to write; I published those posts every Monday until the book was over. It was a great way to get acquainted with some new-to-me essayists (best of the crop included Joan Didion, George Orwell, Mary McCarthy & Junichero Tanizaki) and re-acquainted with some old favorites (Woolf & Montaigne). Good luck with yours! I should think that someone with the concentration for extended Shakespeare studies would find essays a relaxing diversion. :-)

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  15. Emily, 'The Art of the Personal Essay' came the other day and it looks extremely interesting. I especially like the way in which it is possible to follow a thematic development as well as a chronological one. There are a couple more volumes in the post and once they have arrived I'm going to sit down and make a selection and see what I can reasonably manage. I'll go back and check your posts. Thanks for the reference.

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  16. The nice thing about projects is you can always go back to them later. Every time I read about collections Dorothy reads or when Stefanie would write about Emerson it always makes/made me want to immediate go and pick up an essay and read it. My problem is not having enough time for everything I want to do.

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  17. Danielle, I think part of my issue is that I am still so caught up with the work ethic that says you have to organise what you are going to do, set yourself a deadline and then meet it. It takes a long time to break the habits of forty years.

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