Thursday, 25 August 2022
My favorites from the Best American Essays of the 20th Century:
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982
And essays which weren’t quite favorites, but which I found instructive:
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970
* Part 3 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.
CT and I have been carrying on a course of essay reading. Thus far, we have selected collections of essays, and read through them, in 40-50 page chunks. This is usually a handful or so of essays. Part 1 was the Oxford Book of Essays, a collection of 100+ English-language essays from the late 17th century on. Part 2 was the Best American Essays of 2020 — several dozen essays selected by the series and volume editor. For Part 3 we returned to a collection with a larger scope: Best American Essays of the 20th Century.
At the end of each part, I like to revisit the essays, and pick a few favorites — or, to use CT’s terms, essays that have been arresting, for one reason or another. I also picked a handful of essays that, while not favorites, are ones that I can learn from.
Most Arresting Essays
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eisley – 1956
I am happy to call this a favorite. It was both beautiful and insightful. The essay is a meditation on dying that alternates between the elderly homeless and brown wasps that emerge in mid-winter; it also describes pigeons that kept returning to the site of a demolished elevated train where they had previously found food, and, in my favorite passage, a field mouse that made a temporary home in a flower pot. The essay suggests that creatures harbor images of times and places that represent safety and plenty, and that long after the place has vanished, the imagined familiarity of the memories bring comfort. Beautifully written.
Eisley also made the ‘best’ list for Part 1, with “The Snout.” After reading ‘Wasps,’ I went out and bought his collected works.
“Then I came to a sign which informed me that this field was to be the site of a new Wanamaker suburban store. Thousands of obscure lives were about to perish, the spores of puffballs would go smoking off to new fields, and the bodies of little white-footed mice would be crunched under the inexorable wheels of the bulldozers. […]
—Loren Eisley, 1953
No house mouse, no Mus domesticus, had kicked up this little heap of earth or sought refuge under a fern root in a flower pot. I thought of the desperate little creature I had seen fleeing from the wild rose thicket. Through intricacies of pipes and attics, he, or one of his fellows, had climbed to this high green solitary room. I could visualize what had occurred. He had an image in his head, a world of seed pods and quiet, of green sheltering leaves in the dim light among the weed stems. It was the only world he knew and it was gone. Somehow in his flight he had found his way to this room with drawn shades where no one would come till nightfall. And here he had smelled green leaves and run quickly up the flower pot to dabble his paws in common earth. […]
About my ferns there had begun to linger the insubstantial vapor of an autumn field, the distilled essence, as it were, of a mouse brain in exile from its home. It was a small dream, like our dreams, carried a long and weary journey along pipes and through spider webs past holes over which loomed the shadows of waiting cats, and finally, desperately, into this room where he had played in the shuttered dal light for an hour among the green ferns on the floor. Every day these invisible dreams pass us on the street, or rise from beneath our feet, or look out upon us from beneath a bush.”
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabokov – 1966
Another favorite that was beautiful and insightful. A meditation on the beginnings of an individual’s consciousness, and exploration of his earliest memories. A delight to read. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I’ve not read Nabokov; I need to pursue his work further.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). ”
–Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
“From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows, a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.”
–Vladimir Nabokov, 1966
Stickeen, John Muir – 1909
Initially this was in my list because a particular portion of the content – that describing Muir’s eagerness to venture forth into a rising storm – had made a big impact on me, and it kept recurring in mind, and in my conversation, for months. On re-reading it after composing this list, I saw that it had lots of superb writing as well (“his feet a mist of motion…“; “The salmon were running, and the myriad fins of the onrushing multitude were churning all the stream into a silvery glow…”).
“I awoke early, called not only by the glacier, which had been on my mind all night, but by a grand flood-storm. The wind was blowing a gale from the north and the rain was flying with the clouds in a wide passionate horizontal flood, as if it were all passing over the country instead of falling on it. The main perennial streams were booming high above their banks, and hundreds of new ones, roaring like the sea, almost covered the lofty gray walls of the inlet with white cascades and falls. I had intended making a cup of coffee and getting something like a breakfast before starting, but when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms…”
—John Muir, 1909
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee – 1972
I found this a very curious essay: it alternates between describing a game of Monopoly and the real-world places to which it refers. The description of the real-world places are triggered by what is happening in the games, and often includes clearly fictional vignettes, such as when the author describes who is “in jail.” It is curious that he never gives his opponent a name or much of a physical description (he is a shadow figure across the board, and seems to be depicted as a member of the elite having graduated from Harvard Law School and his token being the top hat. In contrast, presumably imagined characters in the real world (such as those in jail) are depicted in great detail. It’s not clear to me if the essay has a point more than illustrating that ‘the map is not the territory, or perhaps it may be read as critique of the results of the capitalist system, or about the striving to become middle class, and how even that (like the gated community of Marvin Gardens) is difficult to find.
I hadn’t imagined one could write an essay like this, but it worked, and kept my interest all the way through, even though I can’t point to a particular lesson or shift of perspective it provoked, nor can I saw the language was lyrical or that there were especially good turns of phrase.
“Go. I roll the dice – a six and a two. Though the air I move my token, the Flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs roam.”
—John McPhee, 1972
[…]
“Then, beyond Atlantic Avenue, North Carolina moves on into the vast ghetto, the bulk of the city, and it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne in 1944. Nothing has actually exploded. It is not bomb damage. It is deep and complex decay. Roofs are off. Bricks are scattered in the street. People sit on porches, six deep, at nine on a Monday morning. When they go off to wait in unemployment lines, they wait sometimes two hours. Between Mediterranean and Baltic runs a chain link fence, enclosing rubble. A patrol car sits idling by the curb. In the back seat is a German shepherd. A sign on the fence says, “Beware of Bad Dogs.”
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard – 1982
I was ambivalent about this, but the beauty of the language, and her ability to describe the phenomenology of an eclipse that gave me new insight to its uncanniness, won me over. The writing also had some interesting stylistic moves: an interesting patchwork structuring of the essay, where threads from one patch appear in a distant one (painted shovel and pail; hot walls of a mine; painting of ‘fruit-clown’); a lot of foreshadowing of mood rather than content; repetition in nearby sentences, “I lay in bed… I lay in bed” I did find her personal reactions to be a bit over the top.
“It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into a fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. ”
—Annie Dillard, 1982
“You may read that the moon has something to do with eclipses. I have never seen the moon yet. You do not see the moon. So near the sun, it is as completely invisible as the stars are by day. What you see before your eyes is the sun going through phases. It gets narrower and narrower, as the waning moon does, and, like the ordinary moon, it travels alone in the simple sky. The sky is of course background. It does not appear to eat the sun; it is far behind the sun. The sun simply shaves away; gradually, you see less sun and more sky.
—Annie Dillard, 1982
[…]
From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound.”
Most Instructive Essays
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway, 1923
I’ve not read Hemingway, except some short stories in high school. This essay is a nice example of the power of short sentences and intense concrete descriptions. It begins with arrival in Pamplona and depicts crowds and music and dancing. Rooms are dear, negotiations ensue, and they get situated in a house. It is only two pages in that we learn, along with the author, that something is happening involving bulls.
“We landed in Pamplona at night. The streets were solid with people dancing. Music was pounding and throbbing. fireworks were being set off from the big public square. All the carnivals I had ever seen paled down in comparison. A rocket exploded over our heads with a blinding burst and the stick came swirling and whishing down. Dancers, snapping their fingers and whirling in perfect time through the crowd, bumped into us before we could get our bags down from the top of the station bus.”
—Ernest Hemingway, 1923
I like this quote. It starts out very generally, painting a picture of crowds, dancing and music. Then it brings in the authors perspective – ‘all the carnivals I had ever seen…’ – and then locates him in the street with the rocket’s stick whishing down and him being bumped by the dancers.
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe, 1964
In one way I didn’t care for it – the subject matter is tawdry and depressing, and I find Wolfe, or at least the narrator, cynical and arrogant. Yet, it was fun to read, but seemed more a short story than an essay, with lots of thick description. I was interested to see Wolfe’s technique – would you call it cinematic? – where he is always sketching out scenes:
“Here are Parker and I walking along Avenue B…“
“Here is Parker with his uptown clothes and anointed jowls“
“Here is Parker walking past corner stores with posters of…“
Scene, scene, scene, cut to narrative.
“And there they have it, the color called Landlord’s Brown, immune to time, flood, tropic heat, arctic chill, punk rumbles, slops, blood, leprotic bugs, cockroaches the size of mice, mice the size of rats, rats the size of Airedales, and lumpenprole tenants.”
—Tom Wolfe, 1964
The White Album, Joan Didion, 1970
Like the Wolfe, I didn’t really care for the essay — and unlike the Wolfe, there were sections of it that did not engage me at all. But the parts that were good were very good, and the use of language was notable, with some interesting stylistic moves. The essay seems a blend of a memoir with journalistic writing about the 60’s, written by one of the cool people. One interesting stylistic move is then tendency not to start sentences with “I”, a sort of distancing move…: “the patient to whom this report refers is me;” “By way of comment I offer only…” “In the years I am talking about…” “this verse had on me the effect;” “that the time would come I never doubted…” I also liked the way that she made cross connections between what she was reporting on (e.g., the possibility of strangers at the door with a knife, and later, her internal experience when she was diagnosed with MS). I was asn’t particularly interested in the accounts of the various 60’s icons and iconoclasts.
“I recall looking at a house around the corner with a rental sign on it: this house had once been the Canadian consulate, had 28 large rooms and two refrigerated fur closets, and could be rented, in the spirit of the neighborhood, only on a month-to-month basis, unfurnished. Since the inclination to rent an unfurnished 28-room house for a month or two is a distinctly special one, the neighborhood was peopled mainly by rock-and-roll bands, therapy groups, very old women wheeled down the street by practical nurses in soiled uniforms, and by my husband, my daughter and me.”
—Joan Didion, 1975
Aria: Memory of a Bilingual Childhood, Richard Rodriguez – 1980
While this had good writing, even some distinctive turns of phrase, this is the only essay in either list that is here purely because of its content. It both reveals things I’d not thought of – what it is like to be the child of ESL parents, and how being an immigrant and second language speaker changes who you are, and the attention to the sounds of language – as well making a novel (to me) argument about how to educate the children of immigrants (with which many, of course, will disagree).
“At the age of six, well past the time when most middle-class children no longer notice the difference between sounds uttered at home and words spoken in public, I had a different experience. I lived in a world compounded of sounds. I was a child longer than most. I lived in a magical world, surrounded by sounds both pleasing and fearful. I shared with my family a language enchantingly private – different from that used in the city around us.
—Richard Rodriguez, 1980
The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich, 1981
Excellent writing, of a type I find very difficult. The opening sentence does a superb job of setting the tone and telling you a lot about the author: “It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep sheltered from wind.” The essay reflects on the landscape and people of Wyoming from a period of several years spent on a sheep ranch, in the wake of (unmentioned in the essay) the death of a loved one. Beautiful descriptions. Its argument, such as it is, is encapsulated in the title: space brings solace.
“Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect – tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into pure light.”
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1981
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Here is a link to a similar post for Part 1, a summary of my favorites from the Oxford Book of Essays: Ten favorites from the Oxford Book of Essays