2023
Favorites:
An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, Norman Mailer
Writing about Jews, Philip Roth
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter
The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention, Gore Vidal
One Night’s Dying, Loren Eisley
* Part 5 of the Essays Project, a course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.
This book covers essays written between 1945 and 1970, what Editor Lopate characterizes as the golden age of the American essay.. While I found some of the earlier essays notable for their intellectual and historic content – (James Agee, The Nation: Democratic Vistas, George F Keenan (1945), The Sources of Soviet Conduct (1947), Walter Lipmann, The Dilemma of Liberal Democracy (1947) and Robert K Merton’s Self Fulfilling Prophecy (1948) – I didn’t encounter any essays that grabbed me until we reached the mid-1950’s, and even there I didn’t find essays whose writing really engaged me until the 1960’s.
1940’s
With regard to the older essays, I thought Keenan’s Sources of Soviet Conduct was very interesting and surprisingly relevant today.
Merton’s Self-fulfilling Prophecy
My favorite of the older essays was Robert Merton’s Self-fulfilling Prophecy, which contains the famous phrase, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences;” and also: “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.”
Having seen the rabbit carefully though not too adroitly placed in the hat, we can only look askance at the triumphant air with which it is finally produced […] Yet the spurious evidence often creates a genuine belief. Self-hypnosis through one’s own propaganda is a not infrequent phase of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
– Robert Merton, The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, 1948
1950’s
The essays gathered from the 50’s didn’t grab me, although I found some interest in Nabokov’s and Trilling’s essays on Lolita (respectively, “On a Book Entitled Lolita” and “The Last Lover.”
1960’s
It was only when we reached the 1960’s – the last decade covered by the collection – that the language of the essays really connected with me.
Norman Mailer, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy
Most notable was Norman Mailer’s, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, an engaging if somewhat journalistic account of an interview with Jackie Kennedy, the resulting article, and its reception. The essay manages to both touch on Jackie Kennedy and also to make larger points about the culture of the time. It was quite witty and irreverant, with well-drawn scenes; it seemed to me to have some intimations of the coming of gonzo journalism.
In those historic days the lawn was overrun with journalists, cameramen, magazine writers, politicians, delegations, friends and neighboring gentry, government intellectuals, family, a prince, some Massachusetts state troopers, and red-necked hard-nosed tourists patrolling outside the fence for a glimpse of the boy.
– Norman Mailer, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, 1960, , p 317, 1962
[…]
We were a curious assortment indeed, as oddly assembled in our way as some of the do-gooders and real baddies on the lawn outside. It would have taken a hostess of broad and perhaps dubious gifts, Perle Mesta, no doubt, or Ethel Merman, or Elsa Maxwell, to have woven some mood into this occasion, because pop! were going the flashbulbs out in the crazy August sun on the sun-drenched terrace just beyond the bay window at our back, a politician – a stocky machine type sweating in a dark suit with a white shirt and white silk tie was having his son, seventeen perhaps, short, chunky, dressed the same way, take a picture of him and his wife, a Mediterranean dish around sixty with a bright, happy, flowered dress.
There was something low and greedy about this picture-taking, perhaps the popping of the flashbulbs in the sunlight, as if everything monstrous and overreaching in our insane public land were tamped together in the foolproof act of taking a sun-drenched picture at noon with no shadows and a flashbulb – do we sell insurance to protect our cadavers against the corrosion of the grave?
– Norman Mailer, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, p 318, 1962
Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a spaceship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communication faint.
– Norman Mailer, An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, p 333, 1962
Philip Roth’s Writing about Jews
I also liked Philip Roth’s Writing about Jews, which was well written and nicely argued, and
Richard Hofsdater’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Richard Hofsdater’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1964, was a very good essay that could have been written today. What we see in the way that Trump has harnessed the animosity and passions of a small group to fuel a political movement is not a novelty’ we can see precedents in McCarthyism, Populism, Anti-papism,, and multiple earlier cases mostly focusing on secret groups like the Illuminate and Masons purportedly inspired by Catholicism and other religious elements. Oddly comforting.
[The paranoid] style has much more to do with how things are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.
– Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1964
“Every historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.”
– Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1964
As I move through my notes on the essays, I find that my appreciation keeps growing as we move through time. I’m not sure what to make of this; while it could be said that I am just drawn to essays from my lifetime, that is belied by the fact that I have a lot of favorites from the 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., Woolf, Lawrence).
Gore Vidal’s The Twenty-ninth Republican Convention,
In any event, I was very taken with Gore Vidal’s The twenty-ninth Republican Convention, 1969. It has a very effective opening that literally sets the stage: “The blue curtains part. As the delegates cheer, the nominee walks towards the lecturn…” I enjoyed the nicely done sketches of political figures of my youth, notably Regan, and thought the use of descriptive language throughout the essay was excellent. To wit:
- “ the eyes are the only interesting feature: small, narrow, apparently dark, they glitter in the hot light, for this is enemy territory…”
- “the eye watches even as the mind dozes…”
- “there was only one important task: creating suspense where none was…”
- “A lady from Vermont read the roll of the states as though each state had greviously offended her.”
- “…staring coldly at the delegates with a stone catfish face.”
- “ …with his jawline collapsing in a comforting way…”
Loren Eisley’s One Night’s Dying
I end with Loren Eisley’s One Night’s Dying, which I thought superb. (His “The Snout,” encountered in another collection, had already elevated him onto my favorites list). Some quotes:
At night one has to sustain reality without help. One has to hear lest hearing be lost, see lest sight not return to follow moonbeams across the floor, touch lest the sense of objects vanish. Oh, sleeping, soundlessly sleeping ones, do you ever think who knits your universe together safely from one day’s memory to the next? It is the insomniac, not the night policeman on his beat.
– Loren Eisley, One Night’s Dying, 1970
[…]
There are parts of the nighttime world, men say to me, that it is just as well I do not know. Go home and sleep, man. Others will keep your giddy world together. Let the thief pass quickly in the shadow, he is awake. Let the juvenile gangs which sidle like bands of evil crabs up from the dark waters of poverty into prosperous streets pass without finding you at midnight.
For example, I call the place where I am writing now the bay of broken things. In the February storms, spume wraiths climb the hundred-foot cliff to fight and fall like bitter rain in the moon-light upon the cabin roof. The earth shakes from the drum roll of the surf. I lie awake and watch through the window beyond my bed. This is no ticking in my brain; this is the elemental night of chaos. This is the sea chewing its million-year way into the heart of the continent.
– Loren Eisley, One Night’s Dying, 1970
[…]
Below me is a stretch of white sand. No shell is ever found unbroken, even on quiet days, upon that shore. Everything comes over the rocks to seaward. Wood is riven into splinters; the bones of seamen and of sea lions are pounded equally into white and shining sand. Throughout the night the long black rollers, like lines of frothing cavalry, form ranks, drum towering forward, and fall, fall till the mind is dizzy with the spume that fills it.
The man was almost upon me, breathing heavily, lunging and shuffling upon his cane. Though an odor emanated from him, I did not draw back. I had lived with death too many years. And then this strange thing happened, which I do not mean physically and cannot explain. The man entered me. From that moment I saw him no more. For a moment I was contorted within his shape, and then out of his body. our bodies, rather–there arose some inexplicable sweetness of union, some understanding between spirit and body which I had never before experienced. Was it I, the joints and pulleys only, who desired this peace so much?
– Loren Eisley, One Night’s Dying, 1970