Our Essays, Our Selves
BAL?E, SUSAN
Our Essays, Our Selves Can American prose move beyond self-absorption? BY SUSAN BALEE To read The Best American Essays 2001, the new collection of two dozen essays edited by Kathleen Norris and...
...But I do believe that he has standards of action that he means us to observe...
...Nothing replaces it, nothing...
...Over the last decades, American writers enjoyed the luxury of time and money for education, travel, and experience unrivaled in the history of Western civilization...
...That "I" voice can sink to trivial self-absorption, as it too often has in recent years...
...I felt I had adopted a child on the installment plan, a child that was myself, and it felt good suddenly to be part of a community, even if it was only a community of previous selves...
...The writing glitters, but the vein of self-absorption runs deep...
...Is this perfected tool useful in a time grown serious again...
...Many of these essays treat death and grieving...
...Our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements," Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for "we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty...
...Personal essayists talk primarily to themselves, thereby also chatting with someone they will never know, the reader—for whom the act of reading is thus reduced to a mild form of eavesdropping...
...As Atwan puts it, "The mysterious I converses with an equally mysterious I." Ackerman, perhaps without knowing it, summons to consciousness the "community of one" that Thoreau embraced at Walden...
...What is perhaps the most extraordinary, turbo-charged general prose that the English lanSusan Balee's essay on the life and work of Percy B. Shelley will appear in this year's edition of Scribner's British Writers series, edited by Jay Parini...
...These are the creations of a time when nothing much seemed to matter and, consequently, the self came to dominate the writerly imagination...
...The question is whether that prose can finally express anything other than the self...
...Reflecting on what the personal essay is all about, Kathleen Norris claims in her introduction that personal essayists have no other goal than to muse aloud, "to explore an idea or situation through the act of writing...
...I believe that God remains conscious of his creation and interested in it....Whether he's attentive to every moment of every human's life, as some religions claim, I'm by no means sure...
...Roman soldiers flayed the flesh from Akiva's body with metal combs, but he refused to cry out...
...Charles Bowden meditates on the appetite for life, which he associates with an appetite for food...
...But, at its best, this American song of the self can prove a highly moral project: the willingness to take responsibility for thoughts and feelings expressed in its name, to sign a specific signature to a specific opinion...
...In Akiva's case, he sacrificed himself for God, but as Birnbaum points out, whenever we give up our devotion to self, we join the larger community...
...All of these are beautifully done.And yet, what stands out now—in our world, changed on September 11— is, finally, their triviality...
...Following Cynthia Ozick's lead, Birnbaum is fascinated by the life and death of the pre-Christian Rabbi Akiva...
...Or the flesh...
...The fundamental problem of fine writing in our day is whether we can use this perfected tool to express what must be expressed in a time suddenly grown serious again—or whether we must start over, abandoning the style on which we've expended so much effort...
...The first is that writers in America today possess a literary instrument of enormous power...
...Diane Ackerman's "In the Memory Mines," the first essay in the collection, opens: "I don't remember being born, but opening my eyes for the first time, yes...
...In "The Work of Mourning," Francine du Plessix Gray thinks of the death of her parents, as Jeffrey Heiman in "La Forge" examines the loss of his father...
...He only ever seemed to read the paper or watch television or sleep or yell at my mother or slam the door to their bedroom, after which I would sometimes hear my mother crying...
...But it is never replaced...
...guage has ever known is harnessed to the largest narcissistic examination of selves—and what, in the absence of any larger topic for the beautiful prose, prove to be often little and uninteresting selves...
...He tells her: Can American prose be about anything other than the self...
...For some reason he never had time for me...
...In my heart, I knew it must somehow be my fault, that I must be somehow unworthy of his love, his attention even, the way the newspaper or television at least had his attention...
...This all-American prose has, I believe, enough suppleness to survive, and the 2003 issue of The Best American Essays may reveal the existing style wedded to a new purpose in which individual concerns have given way to larger, communal ones...
...Money does not replace the lust for food...
...The second is that those writers have almost nothing to use it on except themselves...
...Birnbaum describes his own family's history of death and victimization during the Holocaust, but he refuses to cave in to either self-pity or cultural hatred...
...The personal essay, a subset of autobiography, has flourished in America in part because Americans have always been encouraged to stand out as sovereign individuals within the nation's collective identity...
...BY SUSAN BALEE To read The Best American Essays 2001, the new collection of two dozen essays edited by Kathleen Norris and Robert Atwan, is to realize two things...
...To give Ackerman credit, she knows she needs to be part of a community larger than herself...
...Reynolds Price's entire essay is a letter to his godchild about the necessity of faith...
...His essay, "In the Bone Garden of Desire," examines his reaction to the deaths of three friends in six months...
...Then Daphne Merkin weighs in, with her essay "Trouble in the Tribe," which begins, "I've been trying to lose my religion for years now, but it refuses to go away...
...His final words to his students were that he had finally found a way to dedicate his life and soul to God...
...This defines, literally, sef-sacrifice...
...I believe that he has communicated those stan-dards—and most of whatever else we know about his transcendent nature—through a few human messengers and through the mute spectacles of nature in all its manifestations, around and inside us (the human kidney is as impressive a masterwork as the Grand Canyon...
...The closest she can get is by reaching out to her unhappy inner children...
...So, for instance, Ben Birnbaum in his essay in The Best American Essays 2001 at least attempts to look outside himself for answers...
...I am not unhopeful...
...That was in a volume called A Defense of Poetry...
...To some degree, of course, it has always been thus...
...If the present-day wielders of the essay manage, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, to aim their gorgeous writing style at the high moral topics now forced upon us, then we may be able to echo Shelley in our time—in defense of prose...
...Similarly, Barbara Hurd, who's logged a lot of miles in her galoshes slogging through American swamps, aims at an ecological description that makes as much use of ancient Buddhists as Birnbaum did of ancient rabbis...
...Ackerman's ability to map her own infant universe is fascinating, in a peculiar way, but it's hard to imagine anything more self-absorbed— except perhaps what she goes on to describe: the bad father who locked away forever her inner child in a row house closet around 1955...
...And they used all that to hone a first-person prose of real power and subtlety...
...He fertilizes his garden with the cremated bones of one and learns to cook and eat with an avidity he had never known before...
...The writers assembled in The Best American Essays reflect upon all manner of things, from food to death to prayer to language to their relationships with parents and children...
...Sometimes it dies, this appetite, sometimes it just vanishes in people...
...She just can't find one...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 6
