Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (54 page)

In the midwest girls walk around in bright colored parkas and plastic boots to match. In the East the girls don’t seem to walk at all; they wisp by you like their own cigarette smoke. They weigh less.

That first year of grad school, I walked around campus in cheap shoes and missed my dog, a very fine mutt who, the following year, would die an unexpected death three days before my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Because his corpse was small and furry and because our anticipated losses were large, that mutt didn’t get the mourning he deserved. But I am talking now about the time before his demise, when I wasn’t mourning him, just missing him. Walking along the soggy grass in my cheap shoes, I would think wistfully of what I had left behind in the midwest, to come to a fashionable school in the East, and I would also think of the heavy dumb even love that dogs will give you, despite the fact that you don’t understand — say, oh come on, just say, this is strictly hypothetical — the construction of power in Foucault.

I went home for Thanksgiving and my father said, “Your shoes are cheap. Why don’t you buy another pair of shoes?”

Academics, in my experience, are not inclined to be generous to essayists. They are suspicious of humanism, nervous about too much style, and wary of public celebrations of the personal. They assume defensive postures and query: do essayists believe in uniqueness? Once, at a meeting to plan a graduate conference in literary studies, the kind of meeting where inclusivity is the aim, and the group spends three hours and forty minutes worrying about getting enough wheelchairs, ramps, crutches, hearing aids, tofu, baby-sitters, etc., to make “everyone feel welcome” but especially those people who never really are; once I suggested we open the calls to papers to include creative writing on the conference’s theme, and people looked at me as if I had requested a naked boy be hired to roller skate in and serve me cotton candy. Essayists are thought to be indulgent.

Which means lenient, messy, loose.

This essayist? Undisciplined? Able to set a perfect table but unable to arrange three consecutive thoughts? One might tackle these accusations in a methodical way, or only pretend to.

The essay seems disorganized, I think, because it has a stake in pretending not to know where it is going. Putting on its hat, heading for the door, it seems to follow the random movement of the mind itself. This looks like laziness, but it smells like epistemology. Because essays offer a way of thinking — a dramatization of process as opposed to a curtain unfurled on the final product, all scrubbed and clean as the newborn on TV. Unlike articles, they give form to the streakiest mental processes. I like to call the essayist a sketch artist for thought, since artistry is an important part of the package. Yes, yeah, right, my thoughts don’t really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it’s more honest — more pedagogically useful, more truthful — to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions.

Another thing that makes the essay seem like a mess is its refusal to decide the things it feels it cannot decide. The essay is willing to harbor contradictions. Like a hotel for disagreements, like a pillow on which discrepancy can rest her rumpled head. The article likes contradictions too but it starts with them and tries to resolve them; or it starts with something that doesn’t look like a contradiction at all, and methodically shows it to be one. Either way contradictions are cunningly displayed in such a way that the contradiction appears to be located outside — outside in a text, outside in the culture, most importantly, outside of the author.

Often an essay ends with out any contradiction solved. Often an essay doesn’t even push towards resolution. It thinks it is interesting with out a big bang.

Like essayists themselves, academics learn to quote E. B. White’s self-deprecating remarks about the essayist’s self-centeredness, only they quote them with out irony. Sometimes they quote them before breakfast. Sometimes in an argument my brother quotes them at me. Personally I can’t stand how considerate academics are willing to be. They are clock-watchers and word-counters, all of them! They buckle at the sight of a hasty generalization. They make transitions frank as any handicap. And I know one professor who never considers an article complete until he has checked to make sure all the paragraphs are the same length. (“But why would you want them to be the same length?” I wanted to ask.)

In exchange for the reader’s valuable time academics compress their unwieldy thoughts into some sturdy pill the reader can swallow or take away with him, fingering it in his hand, deciding whether or not he should swallow. The essay is not a pill; it is an unwieldy mass; it is fat slime (the phrase is John Donne’s) some part of which may stick to the reader’s hands, some part of which may evaporate. And this is O.K., I tell myself, since the essay sees all knowledge as provisional.

Imagine a war outside your window and a careless companion who sits with a stack of albums in his lap: “And here’s another snapshot of me!” That is a caricature of the essayist, although not a fair one. Some essays move very close to the short story in which the narrator himself is the protagonist. Other essays are personal simply because they move in unconventional ways. They are mum when it comes to life stories. But they digress, they land like a prize frog on the least likely lily pad of a word, they skateboard off into the horizon when you expect them to hop on the horses and ride. The essayist’s persona quickens in direct proportion to the reader’s inability to predict the next word, argument, mood, or scene.

Essayists get drunk on language. What makes a good essay may have less to do with truth and more to do with what kind of work-out the nouns and verbs get. Art is valued, ease is valued. Because the essay is pessimistic about everything but language.
Life is hard, life is hard,
it says, over and over, like a depressive who fails to fill her prescription. The only thing we can feel good about is the fact that we can talk well and amusingly about how hard everything is, how useless, fleeting, depressing. We rearrange the sounds of our distress. Maybe you’ve noticed, there are no good
cheery
essayists. When too much optimism comes in, the essay falters. Nancy Mairs writes a convincingly ambivalent description of herself as a cripple, but ruins an essay when she claims at its end, like some sunny Tiny Tim waving his crutch, that she wouldn’t exchange anything for “sound limbs and a thrilling rush of energy.” She’s “getting the hang of being a cripple,” she says; that’s the essay’s last line, in case you didn’t hear the music swell or see the credits rolling. Easy resolutions stain the essay, spoil the print of its pessimistic fabric.

Outside the academy, people read essays with out apology. They pay money for them. In hardback, softback, in newspapers, quarterlies, magazines. Stephen Jay Gould recently read a few essays at a bookstore in Providence, and the store was mobbed. I, a well-dressed graduate student who studies the essay, couldn’t get in.

I could get as far as the bookshelves. Gould was beyond the books, in the basement, a room that is usually the temporary housing for the Brown University Computer Store, if anything temporary can be said to be usual, and upstairs seventy-eight science nerds were milling around (I know because I was the seventy-ninth nerd who counted them). We were blinking at each other, through rain-smeared glasses, trying to determine if there was any way we could combine our collective brain power to get down the basement stairs. There was no cordon, but every once in a while an employee would rise up the stairs, like a flame licking the path, a dragon guarding the Gould, and we the nerds stepped fearfully back. I went and hid in the lit section.

And found there one of those huge comprehensive anthologies of literature, the sort of thing which, on a bad day, can induce an inferiority complex, quick as ipecac. But today was a good day. Every author in the book was a familiar, if not an acquaintance, and I felt the professionally heady sense that academia encourages, the sense that I was learning my field. Not just learning it but coming down on it, as elegantly as a linen on a table. This, by the way, is the strategy of the academic article: to cover the field. Or to cover your ass in the field. To point out, with a tick of the tongue and a beam in your eye that the field, in fact, has not been properly covered. In
The Observing Self,
Graham Good explains that the spatial image of covering the field “corresponds to the temporal idea of progress” — as if gradually all the gaps in a discipline could be filled in, as if theoretically (if people didn’t have careers to make; if truth didn’t keep pursuing them like a doppelgänger) the discipline could be declared “finished.”

So there I was, kneeling in the bookstore aisle. (Kneeling is just the first move, an early sign of commitment. Body drops to the floor and then if the pages look good, body is rolling, spreading soft as butter, oozing like oil onto the carpet, never mind the traffic, never mind that oldster with the walker. I’m an uncomfortably comfortable customer, a religious reader — you don’t interrupt a girl who is praying, do you; you don’t step on a person whose fingers are wrung in prayer?) Perusing this book, this doorstop of a book, which, excluding its index, runs two thousand eight hundred and twenty eight pages long, and professes to be an anthology of American Literature, I find that it includes no essayists besides Emerson and Thoreau. Published in 1996, this book includes no twentieth century or contemporary essays at all.

Because of the Harper American Literature and books like it, because most creative writing departments teach playwriting, fiction, and poetry; because it is raining in Puerto Rico and the cheese has been badly wrapped and the line at the bank is long, and all sorts of other more insidious reasons which I leave you to supply, a cry is sometimes raised to defend the essay. Prick up your ears, as O. B. Hardison says, and you may hear a rumor “that the essay is an endangered species. There have even been calls to ‘save the essay,’ as there are calls to save whales and condors.” Who is O. B. Hardison? Good question. He’s a critic at some university. No doubt he is more than that, but we have no time to inquire. Who are the people making the call to save the essay? Another good question, extremely bad timing. I don’t like to unfold a long bibliography. I like to play this game like a house game of Scrabble — with a minimum of proper nouns.

Consider Foucault’s repressive hypothesis. What Foucault did for sex, I’m doing for the essay. Foucault said we talk on and on about sexual repression and fail to see how much we actually talk about sex. In the academy, people are yak-king about whether or not the essay belongs. Our thing is the article, they say. To write essays is to smell of the country; to carry the impression, if not the reality, of being connected to a large sum of money. And yet Derrida writes essays, Cixous writes essays, bell hooks and Leslie Fiedler and Harold Bloom and Jane Gallop and Henry Louis Gates write essays. Basically (correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t read everybody), top-ranking tenured academics write essays, and less secure or successful academics write articles.

I am on a date, a blind date. Lodged in some terrible mistake of a sports car, careening on I-95 headed for Newport, with a graduate student in astrophysics who is quizzing me to see what I know about the moon, the stars. I am studying for a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature. That must be Orion, I shrug and give him a smile that means fuck off. Later when the car is parked and the moon is shining its educational glow he will blurt into my ear and out of nowhere,
“I don’t spell very well,”
and I will understand why the date had to be an astronomical quiz. (Casting his mind to the orthographical oopsies of his
billet-doux,
he was already worrying about writing “sieze” for “seize,” “beasts” for “breasts,” fearing I would red-ink his dyslexic letters and return them.) Hoping the reply will be taken as a field-related willingness to articulate a position and not as a sign that I am encouraging him to lean, wet-lipped, across the car, I tell him: “Most people don’t spell well. Look at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters. He couldn’t spell worth a damn.” People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.

Academics worry that essayists are naive when it comes to the self — which they call “the subject,” to show that they are not naive.

Although it’s true you can learn about yourself while writing, the discovery racket, the voyager motif, the Go-Inward-Young-Man conceptualization of the self as a land that you’ve got to explore, ought to be shelved. Or as the academics say: reexamined. Because it’s hard to separate what you are learning from what you are making up along the way. I know — and who am I? One makes discoveries about oneself but more often one makes up discoveries. One does not pull thoughts from the head as easily as laundry from a dryer.

And don’t essayists know this? Forget real live personalities, forget interviews, confessions, and intentionalities. I’m extracting the Essence of the Essayist, I’m reading what the essayist knows through the form itself. The essayist knows there is no such thing as a coherent self because the essayist writes short pieces. He does not, as Phillip Lopate points out, write one long autobiography, a book form, with a master narrative. We might say the essayist breaks his life into pieces, but then we would miss the essayist’s role in making — as opposed to simply reflecting and shaping — that life. Rather than break his life into pieces the essayist assumes there is no real life, but makes one. Again and again and again. And doesn’t worry too much about the contradictions. Never mind Janus-faced, the essayist is a decahedron. I should have ten faces in this essay alone, and at some point each dissolving, like a monster in a movie.