Assaying Harder

...There's not an essay in this lot that doesn't make a claim for it...

...Or poetry...

...but also by a loss of the literary culture —or, indeed, any kind of culture—on whose reciprocal accommodations he depends...

...But enough...

...This can perhaps be justified as the popular college prof soliciting high marks from his students, a stance that may account for some dubious sexual allusions too...

...More to the point, however, is the trivial cuteness of the writing: Standard procedure in slick sports analysis, it should hardly be rewarded with the honorific "essay...

...If one writer will give you both fiction and the essay, gobs of the latter rattling around in the belly of the former, why not buy the two for the price of one...

...The problem becomes far thornier when your subject is the essay, particularly the contemporary essay: There is nothing much to go on...

...Leslie Fiedler's "Afterthoughts on the Rosenbergs" strikes me as first-rate socio-political-historical commentary...

...Instead, it is confined largely to thumbnail summaries and a rehearsal of the virtues that made Howard choose each piece...

...She does not include some of the old stand-bys, say, E. B. White and Edmund Wilson, yet age cannot be the criterion here, since she does admit Dwight Macdon-ald and Eudora Welty...

...The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout...

...Ralph Ellison reminisces eloquently and evocatively about the birth of bop in "The Golden Age, Time Past," almost making me, through sheer stylistic elan and imaginative brio, take bop as seriously as he does...

...Then there is M. F. K. Fisher on her favorite foods, a nice enough personal essay for a food writer, but not quite good enough for a writer...

...Among critics of the arts (assuming that television is an art), we get only Michael J. Arlen...

...The minuscule bio-bibliographies of the authors fail to offer birth and death dates...

...Or that Lewis Thomas would appear with a three-page piece, "Computers," a flimsy and poseurish production, full of easy affirmation...

...Several of the essays here are only slightly less offensive...

...So the hallmark of a true essay is that it really looks out into the world...

...You can't deny range to Howard's florilegium, whatever you think of the scent...

...On the subject of what is the best in an art form, people can get almost as violent...

...But what does "pushy places" (for pushy people in high places) do to make the concept more visual and tangible...

...And has punctuation ever churned more frenziedly, except when Evelyn Waugh parodied the postcards of English schoolgirls traveling on the Continent...

...Yet when you are anthologizing stories or poems, you can at least invoke a Great Tradition to lean on or shy away from...

...none more so than A. J. Liebling's "Ahab and Nemesis" and William Gass' "The Artist and Society...

...By way of etymology, for example, we are told merely, "Essay—from the French essai, a trial or to try," as if the same French word were both noun and verb...

...Take this further sample...

...it's just showing off...

...Worse, she is academically sloppy...

...Technically, though, the book is a disaster...

...Liebling's central subject is the Rocky Marciano-Archie Moore 1955 heavyweight title bout, and he comments on a self-pitying letter he got from the contender: "A fellow who has as much style as Moore tends to overestimate the intellect—he develops the kind of Faustian mind that will throw itself against the problem of perpetual motion...

...for the rest, Gass is indebted only to his own blend of preciosity and pretentiousness, with an occasional bow to the then trendy and since exploded psychiatrist R. D. Laing...

...But critics, poets, novelists, professors, journalists—those used to shooting off their mouths—they shoot (no danger, it's only their mouth's wash they've wallowed their words in...

...and overpragmatic publishing houses ("Who the hell reads essays nowadays...

...In "The Geography of the Imagination" Guy Davenport shows how exhilarating erudition, close analysis, and the history of ideas can be as he leaps in seven-league boots from the past to myth to topography—from Poe's writings to Grant Wood's most famous painting and Spengler's philosophy—and fashions it all into one grand, disheveled piece of scholarship on the rampage, diminished solely by not acknowledging some of its sources...

...The essays are not dated in the text...

...He begins and ends with an image of a caged bear that seems to owe something to Rilke's "Panther...

...Note the unhelpful prolixity, the image-mongering of the first sentence with that precious archaism "nary...

...The obfuscatory trope-tossing might be mitigated by the essay's having something new to say...

...In the November 18,1984, issue of the New York Times Book Review, Philip Lopate published an article entitled "The Essay Lives—in Disguise," whose very title tells more about the state of the form than this Introduction...

...Nor can we ignore the depredations of fiction writers, and occasionally poets, who are really crypto-essay-ists...

...The irony serves merely to allow Liebling to appear to deny his blood lust while indulging it...

...No less alert and incisive, though with an added ontological-metaphysical dimension, is Robert Finch's meditation on a huge, hugely dead finback whale beached on a stretch of Cape Cod sand, where it becomes an intense but ephemeral tourist attraction...

...Norman Mailer's "The Ninth Presidential Paper— Totalitarianism" is the usual jumble of megalomania, phantasmagoria, marketable paranoia, and unprovable assertions—for example, "travel is reminiscent of the trauma of birth, is also suggestive of some possible migrations after death...

...Howard, more precisely, tries to eschew the obvious in three ways...

...There is an impressively dull piece on a spectacular subject: Charles Rembar on whether Nixon should be impeached, and whether the impeachment should be televised—written, alas, with all the liveliness of a legal brief...

...Is the "urgent, particular voice" an extension of or reaction to all that bombardment by images...

...is rare—rarer, let me say—than an undefeated football season...

...Personally, I find some of the selections malodorous...

...Who could have foreseen that the worthy John Updike would be represented by "Eclipse," a two-page anecdote-cum-confession concerning his atavistic fears of a solar eclipse, a piece that ends in attitudinizing overstatement...

...Does the"would comeback" imply the future or the present...

...Aside from the fact that the idea, fuzzy as it is, comes from the piece by Michael J. Arlen opening the collection, this, like the preceding statement, is starvation fare...

...Should you want more recent evidence, delve into Jacques Barzun, Wilfrid Sheed, Cynthia Ozick, Eleanor Clark, James Dickey, Ned Rorem, Susan Son-tag, Gore Vidal, Erich Heller—to name several others neglected by Maureen Howard—and you will not have to fear for the essay's life...

...The Introduction itself, moreover, says nothing about the history of the essay, indulges in little or no speculation about its present or future, and does not even provide useful definitions by the editor or others...

...For one, the collection is catholic, eclectic...

...The Liebling is a clever—too clever—celebration of boxing, I happen to think boxing is a bestial blood sport and should not be celebrated, let alone have its celebrations anthologized...

...William Gass, one of the most overrated writers in America, is represented by an essay that purports to explain the relationship stated in its title, "The Artist and Society...

...There is no preferred way to read this collection," says Howard in her Introduction, and truer words were never spoken...

...one has to rummage among the copyright pages to dredge up, with difficulty, the time and place of original publication...

...Katherine Anne Porter's "St...

...We get such things as "Non-persons unperson persons" and "Reality...

...observe the playing to the anti-intellectual (or student) galleries in that mouth-shooting play on words...

...To whom do those initial dangling participles refer: to "us" or to the essay...

...Apropos one of the essays, she remarks: "Once again that image of looking, really looking and taking in what we see...

...Nonetheless, read Flannery O'Connor's "The King of the Birds" (1961), reprinted in the collection Mystery and Manners, and tell me the essay is dead...

...So I must, at any rate, commend Maureen Howard for her courage...

...That is arch in-tellectualizing of brutishness, excusable as an isolated lapse, but not when it is the staple of the entire essay...

...attitude who is all the crankier in the absence of a Great Tradition for a touchstone...

...to that Gass is eminently entitled, embodying as he does the whole range of conditions for oral marksmanship: Though he is not a poet, he is a critic, novelist, professor, and journalist...

...no, in front of them—among them—quite, quite still...

...Second, she tends to choose the unexpected by expected writers...

...James Baldwin may somewhat overstate his case in "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter From Harlem," yet up to just before the end he manages to channel undeserved hurt and justified anger into measured, dignifiedly scathing condemnation...

...but its power of evocation is very strong, and its knack for making minutely calculated strategies of seemingly offhand syntax creates an aura of intimacy with the reader that offsets the ultimate lack of a clear point...

...Not yet...

...Liebling is describing what he calls Marciano's "pattern of ratiocination": "A kind, quiet, imperturbable fellow, [Marciano] would plan to go after Moore and make him fight continuously until he tired enough to become an accessible target...

...The essay is a quietly devastating portrait of cultural twilight and urban decay, of the decline of a quasiaris-tocracy into terminal quaintness beyond class and virtually beyond classification, save that Hardwick dissects them sovereignly—and wittily, too—with the scalpel of her loathing...

...Consider: "Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs...

...Yet what can excuse the following: "Israel makes war, and there are no symposia published by prizefighters, no pronouncements from hairdressers, not a ding from the bellhops, from the dentists not even a drill's buzz, from the cabbies nary a horn beep, and from the bankers only the muffled clink of money...

...Hence the editor of a tome like The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays is on virgin ground, and confronted by a critic or reader with a redoubled "Show me...

...Because of our continuous exposure to TV, it appears that the essay thrives: "In seeing so much, hearing so much, it seems inevitable that the essay, that thoughtful form with its way of stopping us with an urgent, particular voice, considering, playing out an idea, would come back in force...

...here is a tension of not quite overcome doubt, not wholly swallowed etiquette...

...Still more shocking is her slatternly reasoning...

...And what does fiction do...

...Further, "The best short poem of the 20th century, I would think, is Yeats' The Second Coming"—this in 1963, when the century still had 37 years left to surpass itself poetically (in any case, only one who would rather not think can declare any poem, fine as it may be, the century's best...

...Two paragraphs later, Howard tries again: "If I must declare a thesis at all, it is that during a time when the social sciences have dealt us a surfeit of information on our society and ourselves with no solutions, during a time when we have overdosed on visual images accompanied by meager undernourished texts— the news magazines, the nightly roundup—many of our best American writers have been drawn to the imaginative possibilities of short nonfiction...

...The contemporary essayist is cramped, however, not only by niggardly publications ("No more than a thousand words, please...

...knows the peck of the crow does not disturb the beauty of its beak or the dent it makes in the carrion...

...So the artist "knows the fish is offset from its shadow...

...to deviate from it, dangerously mistaken...

...After this winnowing, at last, we are left with material that earns its place in the volume...

...Just try telling the mother of a numerous brood which of her children she should prefer to the rest...

...Edward Hoag-land's "Hailing the Elusory Mountain Lion," in which a great deal of studied nature lore is joined to lived outdoor experience through graceful, unostentatious writing, moves ahead with the sure-footed grace of the cougar...

...or witty send-ups, e.g., Donald Barthelme's report on the Ed Sullivan Show, where the slightly skewed angle of vision renders everything condignly absurd—but aren't there worthier targets for satire...

...But what about the state of the essay, beleaguered in the here and now, and facing a shrinking prospect...

...Astound-ingly, it somehow manages to be objective in the midst of autobiography, to render a not unfeelingful detachment more potent than the most percussive breast-beating...

...In "On Keeping a Notebook," Joan Didion is not yet so mannered as she was to become, not yet such a depressing mixture of frazzled sensitivity (or is it sensibility...

...Because these three are not easily come by in conjunction, the essay, that piece of thinking out loud, today often exhibits too little thinking and too shrill a loudness...

...An essay, as I see it, is the untrammeled expression of a writer gifted with originality, endowed with a felicity of style, and blessed with enough space from an editor or publisher...

...How skillfully that "rightly" plays off that "affect...

...regrettably, it comes down to not much more than Matthew Arnold's seeing life steady and seeing it whole, albeit bloated, bedizened, belabored...

...There is even better writing in Elizabeth Hardwick's "Boston: The Lost Ideal...

...Slightly mitigating the folly of such writing is the odd sneaky insight, the pawky deviation into sense, on this ramble through the funhouse of Mailer's mind...

...Gass concludes with a chic ambiguity: "After all, we are—artists and society—both swaying bears and rigid bars...

...So The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays is, after all, not a total loss...

...Nothing...

...Howard Moss' affectionate memoir of Jean Stafford is pleasant, slight stuff that fails to penetrate very deeply and takes the subject's greatness too readily for granted...

...Clearly, the most important aspect of the anthology is the essays it contains, and even a pudding-headed gastronome may offer us proof in her puddings...

...After that he would expect concussion to accentuate exhaustion and exhaustion to facilitate concussion, until Moore came away from his consciousness, like everybody else Rocky had ever fought...

...This hardly qualifies as thinking, let alone scholarship, criticism, history of ideas, or, indeed, essayistic writing, something I think we are entitled to expect from the editor...

...and steely self-aggrandizement...

...It is a shiningly reasonable sorting out of vexed, rankling questions, the whole thing couched in arresting yet fastidiously unfussy language, making us feel equally sorry for what became of those poor dupes and for what became of Leslie Fiedler, who once could think and write as lucidly, as beautifully as this...

...At the very least, Howard could have indicated the relation to "assay," with the resultant suggestion of weighing and testing...

...Again, it may be that the bars are moving, and the bears, in terror—stricken— are standing behind them...

...The best place to anthologize a cutesy essay that exalts concussive pummeling is the wastepaper basket...

...The image twists in every direction until it wiggles its way out of meaning...

...It is not restricted to personal reflections, biographical and autobiographical pieces, views on literature and the arts —textbook stuff, if you prefer, whichit actually goes too far out of its way to avoid...

...but neither wisdom nor good will nor magnanimity are [sic] the qualities which will win you your way to the rostrum...

...Present, too, is the endless rambling about cancer—literal, metaphorical, metaphysical—Mailer's favorite polemical device...

...Faust and Melville to plumb Archie's psyche...

...Archie's note made it clear to me that he was honing his harpoon for the White Whale...

...Paul Fussell's "My War," oneofthe most honest, graphic, controlled, and profoundly unsettling conjurations of the experience and consequences of being in a war that I have ever read, may be the best piece in the book...

...Third, she includes surprising writers: the columnist Russell Baker, and the journalists Lillian Ross, A. J. Liebling, Garry Wills...

...Eudora Welty's "A Sweet Devouring" is immediate, pure recollection of how in her youth she discovered literature, and is itself a small, un-sentimentally tender addition to it...

...It's shooting off mouth's wash...

...Nor is there an essay that does not claim to use words, sentences and paragraphs...

...Augustine and the Bullfight" is circuitous, self-serving and quite disingenuous...

...Others are effective specimens of scientific writing, e.g., Stephen Jay Gould's paleontological detective work on the Irish elk...

...savor the inept hypallage "pushy places...

...A final example...

...All literate persons carry their own compendium of favorite poems, stories, perhaps even essays, around in their heads: To confirm this selection is to be redundant...

...The pieces by the journalistic writers named earlier are good enough for ephemeral publication, not for a chrestomathy...

...Equally meaty is Dwight Macdon-ald's "Tolstoy, Orwell and Socialism," offering fine discriminations in a field that has become a dumping ground for preconceptions and over simplifications...

...To the extent that I can make sense of it, it means that because the social sciences provide information with no solution, and the news media offer images without adequate words, the best American writers rush in to fill the vacuum: provide solutions for the problems and texts for the pictures in the form of essays...

...just plentiful friends in pushy places and a little verbal skill...

...His unremarkable effort discovers that TV adaptations vulgarize literature, and that our images have not caught up with our words...

...Reviewed by John Simon Pity the poor anthologist, for whatever he or she does will be wrong...

...If you say "brazen lie"—where it is the liar, not the lie, that is brazen—ascribing the weight, hardness, arrogance of brass to the lie itself makes it more real, repellent...

...If there is an organizing principle behind the running order, it is far from perspicuous...

...Throughout Gass uses baroque imagery, and tries constantly to shock...

...There are refreshing features...

...Granted, the seeds are there, but this is an instance of almost justified narcissism: This is the way that kind of person becomes a writer, and there is enough shrewd observation to offset the purblind self-importance...