Master of a Venerable Form
GOTTLIEB, ELI
Master of a Venerable Form Against Joie de Vivre By Philip Lopate Poseidon Press. 335 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Eli Gottlieb Freelance critic; contributor, "Elle" The personal essay has...
...On the down side, the writing occasionally shows signs of having been vitaminized by dependent clauses and hyphenated constructions...
...The sheer sprawl and rawness of the young country hampered that mode of elegant presumption lying at the heart of the essay...
...The question is hard to answer...
...But how can we pigeonhole an erudite author who writes one of his most moving and engrossing essays on directing a production of Uncle Vanya with 11-year-old schoolkid actors...
...The first of these is a funny yet sometimes pained dissection of architecture's runaway tendency toward literary metaphor...
...Indeed, all that can be said with certainty is that Against Joie de Vivre has earned Philip Lopate a place in the very front ranks of contemporary American essayists...
...So are two linked essays, "Only Make Believe: Some Observations on Architectural Language" and "Houston Hide and Seek...
...For even more than previously Lopate writes as a "generalist," as an academic manqué (two other members of the species are Edmund Wilson and Kenneth Rexroth) who forgoes the protection of scholarly specialization and organizes knowledge along the live circuits of his own curiosity...
...But for the most part the sentences—even in the coils of debate—are swift and precise...
...That advice is from the title essay, a witty debunking of the American mania for forced dinner party gaiety and programmatic cheer...
...When Lopate turns to the more extended formal essay he exhibits considerable gifts of scholarship and a flair for mixing personal narrative into the body of his argument, mildly recalling the punchy essayistic weave of George Orwell...
...The inclination, turned as much on himself as on others, makes him particularly good at describing those small-scale emotional satisfactions that accrue from shaving a beard, subletting an apartment, or Waiting For the Book to Come Out...
...Or lyrical: "I was coming home to the body of Woman, those globes and grasses that had launched me...
...But he carries his learning lightly, obeys the cardinal rule of the essay—style above all—and provides the readerly experience of a particularly meaty conversation...
...Throughout, a disciplined, agile enthusiasm works against an elegiac undertow...
...Keep busy, I always say...
...Then there is the language the book revels in...
...What is the vision for which all this technique and wide-ranging information have been enlisted...
...The form itself is a venerable one, however, with roots in the gravelly paternalism of Montaigne and in Georgian England of the 18th and early 19th centuries, when the rise of periodical literature attracted some of the finest, most supple minds to its digressive pleasures...
...Lopate frequently plays the sleuth of human motives, analyzing casual behavior and searching for what is hidden beneath the obvious...
...Both men often begin with an innocent family reminiscence or a chatty confessional assertion that sets up the reader for the sustained deeper tone to follow...
...Washington Irving and the Transcendentalists were strong exceptions, yet it was not until the mid-20th century that the personal essay achieved maturity in the United States at the hands of writers like James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and, of course, E.B...
...To be sure, Lopate pronounces with authority on architecture, urban design, literature, and film...
...Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt were merely the brightest stars in a whole galaxy of writers emboldened by nascent Romantic ideas about the value of the inner life...
...it is clearly the product of hard-earned personal experience...
...contributor, "Elle" The personal essay has always ranked among the most democratic of literary forms...
...In 1981 Philip Lopate entered the broad territory with Bachelorhood, a collection that was striking for its candor, psychological aptitude and refreshingly accessible style...
...the second depressingly details the decline of Houston and the disappearance of its old city, thanks to greedy developers and their oblivious nouveau riche clients...
...The Dean of the American Essay" has left as his legacy a perfect smallscale portrait of the Yankee gentleman under fire from modernity, drawn in some of the language's most carefully crafted sentences...
...The title piece and "Samson and Delilah and the Kids" (an examination of the Samson myth in literature and film, twined around memories of a moviemad childhood), are notably successful examplesofthishybrid...
...Like a large, well-written novel whose gathering narrative momentum breaks down critical response over time, Lopate's book, alternating between mundane subjects and weighty themes, eventually disarms the reader...
...it speaks to us in sentences of greater complexity, encompassing a larger culture...
...If the essays were occasionally cumbered by a desire to present bottom-line truths, they nevertheless promised something quite substantial from this author in the future...
...This may be due to the compulsively confessional mood of the '80s, the New Journalism's blurring of authorial categories, or the boom in college writing programs that substitute a factory-tested first-person formula for the pain of creation...
...Early practitioners condemned themselves to parasitic dependence on the sermon (Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather) or fell prey to a nearly terminal attack of moral uplift (Benjamin Franklin...
...We can also say that it is committed to civility, to the dignity of culture and critical inquiry...
...At all costs avoid the trough of passivity, which leads to the Slough of Despond...
...Against Joie de Vivre, Lopate's new book, fulfills that promise...
...The prose can be epigrammatic: "Alertness is all right as long as it's not treated as a promissory note on happiness...
...Or appropriately professorial: "A neo-primitive, mythologizing subtext is also involved in this metaphor...
...White...
...Whatever, most of the latter-day offerings are at best lightweight and at worst unreadable—amateurish dilations on the state of one's wardrobe, snow tires or pet dog that clutter the columns of men's and women's magazines as well as the special sections of daily newspapers...
...The same intelligence we came to appreciate earlier is now more resonant and nuanced...
...We can say the mind on display is humane, if by that we mean judicious, candid, clear, flexible...
...But in recent years the genre has given us a more bewildering array of people talking about themselves than perhaps ever before...
...In America the personal essay has had a rougher time...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 8
