The Best American Essays 1991

Contents

Foreward by Robert Atwan
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

Woody Allen. Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind
Margaret Atwood. The Female Body
John Updike. The Female Body
Judith Ortiz Cofer. Silent Dancing
Frank Conroy. Running the Table
Gerald Early. Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant
Gretel Ehrlich. This Autumn Morning
Diana Hume George. Wounded Chevy at Wounded Knee
Stephen Jay Gould. Counters and Cable Cars
Elizabeth Hardwick. New York City: Crash Course
Garrett Hongo. Kubota
Naomi Shihab Nye. Maintenance
Richard Rodriguez. Late Victorians
Dorien Ross. Seeking Home
Mark Rudman. Mosaic on Walking
Reg Saner. The Ideal Particle and the Great Unconformity
Amy Tan. Mother Tongue
Jane Tompkins. At the Buffalo Bill Museum—June 1988
Marianna De Marco Torgovnick. On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst
Mario Vargas Llosa. Questions of Conquest
Joy Williams. The Killing Game

Biographical Notes
Notable Essays of 1990

Reviews

• Publisher's Weekly, September 13, 1991, p. 76
• Library Journal, October 1, 1991, p. 100
• Booklist, October 15, 1991, p. 397
• Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1991, p. 53
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 8, 1991, p. 6
• Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1992, p. S67

Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

Why does authenticity . . . exert such a hold upon us?
—Stephen Jay Gould

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
—Henry David Thoreau

As a child I seem to have made the distinction, without examining much evidence, that "reading" (as in "reading material") was of two types: for children, and for adults. Reading for children was simple-minded in its vocabulary, grammar, and content; it was always about unreal or improbable or unconditionally fantastic situations, like Disney films and cartoons, and comic books. It might be amusing, it might even be instructive, but it was not real. Reality was the province of adults, and, though I was surrounded by adults (I was an only child for five years, and those five years seem, in retrospect, to have shaped my life), it was not a province I could enter, or even envision, from the outside. To explore reality, I read books.

Or tried. Very hard. As if—but why did I imagine this?—my life depended upon it.

One definition of the "imaginative" personality is that it makes much of things. To some observers' eyes, too much. The motive for metaphor—the passionate motive for writing, thus recording, and supposedly making permanent what is ephemeral— remains a mystery. Most writers will say that they write in order to understand, but out of what impatience with things-as-they-are does the motive to understand spring? Writing is a form of sympathy, but there are other forms of sympathy, less circuitous and vulnerable to misinterpretation.

One of the earliest adult books I read, or tried to read, was a book from a shelf at school, an aged Treasury of American Literature that had probably been published before World War I. Mixed with writers long since forgotten (James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Helen Hunt Jackson) were our New England classics—though I was certainly too young, at nine or ten, to know that Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, et al. were "classics" or even to comprehend that they belonged to and spoke out of an America that no longer existed and had never existed for my family. I took it for granted that these writers were in the full possession of reality. That their reality was in no way contiguous with my own did not discredit it, nor even qualify it, but confirmed it: adult writing was a form of wisdom and power (the two, in my imagination, inextricably bound), difficult to understand, in fact frequently impossible to understand (what was "Ralph Waldo Emerson" saying?), but unassailable. These were no children's easy-reading fantasies but the real thing, voices of adult authenticity. Engrossed in tortuous, finely printed prose on yellowed, dog-eared pages (this too was a measure of authenticity—the very agedness, brittleness, of the book), I was capable of reading for long minutes at a time, retaining very little but utterly captivated by another's voice sounding in my ears. (What a rich fund of words for my "vocabulary list"! There would never be an end to the words I didn't know, thus never an end to the excitement of learning them. So, today, four decades later, my heart leaps when I encounter an unfamiliar word—something for the "vocabulary list.")

Our school in rural Niagara County, on the Tonawanda Creek near Millersport, New York, approximately twenty-five miles north of Buffalo, was an old wood-frame one-room schoolhouse in which eight quite disparate grades were taught, and taught very capably, by a heroic woman named Mrs. Dietz. For decades my memory of my first teacher was that of a child's-eye view of a giantess, or a deity: could Mrs. Dietz really have been as tall as I remembered?—so full-bodied, muscular, stoic? When, a few years ago, my parents unearthed an old photograph of Mrs. Dietz and some of her pupils, taken in the schoolhouse, circa 1948, I saw that, yes, Mrs. Dietz had been of above-average height and girth. But then she would have to have been, for not only was it this woman's task to lead eight grades, in turn, through their lessons every school day, but to keep discipline in the classroom, where certain of the overgrown farm boys, attending school only reluctantly, had to be kept from pummeling one another or bullying the girls and younger children; it was her responsibility too to keep the ancient wood-burning stove, the building's single source of heat, going on winter mornings when the temperature might hover at zero degrees Fahrenheit and the windows would be covered, inside, in frost and even rivulets of ice. Studying this old photograph, I feel an identification not with the ten-year-old girl who is, or was, myself, but with Mrs. Dietz—what a paragon of patience she must have been, how overworked and surely underpaid! I remember Mrs. Dietz's emphasis upon such time-honored pedagogical exercises as penmanship, memorization, sentence diagramming, spelling (you stand beside your desk and pronounce your word; then, enunciating carefully, you spell out your word; then you pronounce your word again; then sit down). I remember her deep seriousness, her zeal in her calling—her very teacherliness.

The Treasury of American Literature was one of probably fewer than a dozen books of its sort kept in a bookshelf for use during study time, a reward for having finished classwork early. I tackled it as I might tackle a tree difficult to climb. The poetry—which was called "verse"—I immediately discounted as both too hard and "not real"; even if you could make sense of rhyming lines, they were not, somehow, required to be truthful as prose was. I must have felt challenged by those lengthy, near-impenetrable paragraphs of prose so unlike the brief, simple paragraphs of our readers, the typeface itself small, fussy as lace. The writers, of course, were mere names, words. "Washington Irving," "Benjamin Franklin," "Nathaniel Hawthorne," "Herman Melville," "Ralph Waldo Emerson," "Henry David Thoreau," "Edgar Allan Poe," "Samuel Clemens," and numerous others: I did not think of these as actual men, human beings who might have lived and breathed like the adults of my world; the writing attributed to them was them, autonomous, self-generated, inviolable, and immortal. If I could not always make sense of what I read, I at least knew it was true.

The first "essay-voice" of my experience was Henry David Thoreau. Admirers of the essay form invariably speak of Thoreau with reverence, for no one has stated the case for a first-person accounting of oneself so succinctly as Thoreau: I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew so well. My early reading or attempted reading of Thoreau has long since been layered over by subsequent readings of Walden, "Civil Disobedience," and other works, but I must have been struck by this writer's vivid, direct, precise language, both "poetic" and colloquial, above all different from the abstract, preacherly, obdurate style of Emerson—a wonderful essayist, as adults know, but of limited appeal to a child.

It was the first-person voice, the (seemingly) unmediated voice, that struck me as truth-telling. The difference between the plain-speaking "I" of Henry David Thoreau and the plain-speaking "I" of Samuel Clemens is after all a subtle one. The difference between the "I" of Emerson and the "I" of Hawthorne and of Poe is a subtle one. I no longer remember what the earliest prose pieces by Clemens/Twain were that I read, but I'm sure I read them unquestioningly, as real—"The Story of the Old Ram" from Roughing It, for instance, or "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." I do remember struggling with Poe's "The Gold Bug," which seemed to me an authentic account of an exotic and rather tedious but not improbable adventure, and I still have to think twice to recall whether "The Imp of the Perverse" is an essay—as, so reasonably, it seems to set itself up to be—or one of the Tales of the Grotesque. Poe was a master of, among other things, the literary trompe l'oeil, in which speculative musings upon human psychology shift into fantastic narratives while retaining the same first-person voice. The artful blurring of boundaries between what we call "history" and what we call, simply, "story" has been a characteristic of literature, as of art generally, from the very beginning of our recorded human enterprise.

Why is it that the earliest, most "primitive" forms of art seem to have been fabulist, legendary, and surreal, populated not by mortal men but by gods, giants, and monsters? Why was realism so slow to evolve? It is as if, looking into a mirror, humankind wished to see not its own self-evident face but something very other—exotic, terrifying, comforting, idealistic, or delusional—but distinctly other. The seemingly direct, confessional, self-abrading manner of Montaigne strikes the ear as radical, even astounding, for its time and place. For even Rabelais, rubbing mankind's collective nose in the comical filth of the physical life, was an artist of the fabulist and the surreal.

Writers of earlier centuries—Defoe, Fielding, Swift, to name only a few—presented their wildly imaginative work as history; in our time, writers whose essential subjects are themselves— Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Wolfe, Hemingway, and numberless of our contemporaries—present autobiographical work as fiction. Norman Mailer and Philip Roth have invented personae—"Mailer" and "Philip"—as characters in works of fiction; the unnamed narrator of Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting frequently interrupts his fictional narrative to explain his authorial strategies and to editorialize on history, totalitarianism, the motives for his writing. In such texts, the "I" of the narrative voice so reasonably melds with the "I" of the authorial voice that it is natural to assume, though we understand that we should not, that the two are often one.

In any case, it seemed only reasonable to me as a child, and I wanted it to be so, that writing by adults, for adults, was "real" and to be trusted. With another part of my imagination I was captivated by works of obvious, irresistible fantasy—Lewis Carroll's Alice books above all. But those hefty blocks of prose by "Emerson," "Thoreau," "Poe," those monuments to hard reading—their special value lay in their employment of the "I"-voice, conspicuously missing from elementary school readers. It was, and in some quarters still is, a seeming imprimatur of truth-telling.

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself
—Friedrich Nietzsche

How to define the essay as a genre, clear and distinct from all other genres?

Given that the title of this volume is The Best American Essays 1991, there should be some loci of defining (thus of exclusion), but, as a writer, I am strongly skeptical that there is, still more should be, a quintessential "essay" any more than there is, or should be, a quintessential "novel," "short story," "poem," "play"—what are these, despite the efforts of critics to taxonomize them, but experimental modes of writing, continuously shifting their borders, testing constraints? (Randall Jarrell once wittily said, in a parody of critical myopia, that the novel may be defined as a prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it.) The essays selected for this volume might be described as prose works of certain lengths that have many more right things about them than wrong.

To my mind, the "essay" might be as brilliantly gemlike and condensed as the briefest of Pascal's Pensees, or the aphorism of Nietzsche's cited above. (Nietzsche believed that one should philosophize with a hammer. In his most characteristic practice, Nietzsche philosophized with a surgical scalpel.) Are not aphorisms and epigrams essays of a sort?—miniature, to be sure, but legitimately "essays"? (To "assay"—try, attempt, analyze, judge, "to prove up in an assay.") Indeed, set beside such fast-flying particles, the more conventional essays of a Carlyle or an Emerson lumber along like becalmed elephants.

Like rock strata, genres shift through time. Form and content always seem inevitable, yet the one is easily detached from the other, when purpose and intention alter. The earliest narratives were poems to be sung; the earliest essays were poems to be read—most famously Virgil's Georgics. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura—which, like everyone else, I knew as On the Nature of Things, or The Nature of the Universe—was poetry with a messianic purpose: the spreading of the gospel of Epicurus's fundamentally materialist, unsuperstitious teachings in a world in which capricious gods still ruled. And there were those arduous essays of the English Renaissance, Samuel Daniel's "Musophilus," Sir John Davies's "Nosce Teitsum," Michael Drayton's geographical-minded "Polyolbion"—instruction and edification in the form in which our ancestors believed sugar-coated the pill of didacticism, poetry. (As a graduate student in English literature, I read such works with impatience, even dismay—didn't poets understand that poetry is too wonderful a medium to be wasted on such efforts?) In our time, didacticism in the form of poetry is rare; rarer still, outright instruction, edification. One might argue that such long works as L. E. Sissman's Dying: An Introduction and John Updike's Midpoint are autobiographical essays in poetic form, to name two contemporary poems that idiosyncratically, and most effectively, subvert genre.

Yet, our efforts to define the elusive "essay" remain undiminished. In Habitations of the Word, William Gass, himself an essayist of bold and original notions, states that the genre is biblio-centric and -generated: "Born of books, nourished by books, a book for its body, the essay is more often than not a confluence of such little blocks and strips of text." This is true of some essays, perhaps, particularly certain English essays, but it is hardly true of most contemporary essays of interest; and hardly applicable to the unpassive mode of the essays in this volume, some of which possess a very nearly cinematic clarity and urgency.

With the aggressive modesty that makes an admirer wince, E. B. White perversely defined the essay, the very genre in which he excelled, as "second-rate"—to which my reply is, "There are no second-rate genres, only second-rate practitioners." Compare, for instance, Flannery O'Connor's essays in Mystery and Manners with the strongest of her short stories; Raymond Carver's essays, Fires, with the strongest of his. Compare the essays of Edward Hoagland and Peter Matthiessen with their best fiction, and essays by Annie Dillard, Oliver Sacks, Joan Didion, Francine du Plessix Gray, Richard Selzer, Elizabeth Hardwick, and other of our most acclaimed essayists (some of whom will be found in this volume) with the best work by any of our contemporaries. First-rate writers produce first-rate work, regardless of genre.

The critic and scholar William Howarth, who has written so lyrically, and informatively, on, among others, Thoreau, discusses in a recent essay ("Itinerant Passages: Recent American Essays," Sewanee Review, 1988) the "itinerancy" of the essay form; as if, along with transcribing a literal journey, the form constitutes a journey for both essayist and reader. Certainly this is true of many excellent essays (among them, in this volume, works as heterogeneous as those by Reg Saner, Mark Rudman, Stephen Jay Gould), but one can argue that the same is true for many—most?—works of fiction too. Sam Pickering appropriates the genre as congenial to relaxation, musing aloud, coming to no conclusions: "Instead of driving hard to make a point, the essay saunters . . . . Instead of reaching conclusions, the essay ruminates and wonders . . . . Instead of being serious, it is often lighthearted" (from "Being Familiar," in The Right Distance, 1987). G. Douglas Atkins pushes this idea even further, declaring that essays smile: "Whether or not they make you smile in turn, essays can make you feel good, comfortable, at ease. They're familiar and personal. It's impossible to be with them and remain tight or glum . . . . The smile that creases the face of the gardener-essayist betokens love" (from "In Other Words: Gardening for Love- The Work of the Essayist," in Kenyon Review, Winter 1991).

Most of the essays in this volume, chosen, in part, to represent the diversity of voices that now constitute the American literary community, have been written out of a sense of urgency, both personal and cultural; there is no questioning their authenticity, thus their power. Of course, there is humor here—in, among others, Woody Allen's characteristically mordant little essay: how, in anything by Woody Allen, could there not be humor?—and there are moments of clarity, beauty, epiphany, transcendence; but the dominant mode is urgency. As I am not drawn to art that makes me feel good, comfortable, or at ease, so I am not drawn to essays that "smile," except in a context of larger, more complex ambitions.

Indeed, anger, grief, pity, moral outrage, characterize a number of these essays which, for all their stylistic polish, read like cries from the heart. Richard Rodriguez's elegiac (and controversial) "Late Victorians" has the emotional density of a novel in miniature; Judith Ortiz Cofer's "Silent Dancing" transforms the family memoir into a work of surpassing beauty, and irony: "The only thing [Father's] money could not buy us was a place to live away from the barrio—his greatest wish, Mother's greatest fear." Garrett Hongo's "Kubota," a memoir of his dispossessed grandfather, is almost too painful to be borne, as is, in its very different way, Dorien Ross's "Seeking Home," which begins with the tone of a breezy column in a glossy career-woman's magazine, and ends with a shocking revelation. Anger, bewilderment, and nostalgia are held in dramatic suspension in Marianna De Marco Torgovnick's "On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst," another essay with the emotional gravity of a work of fiction. And there are essays in which cultural criticism is transformed by personal experience from witnesses born outside the cultures in question—Jane Tompkins's "At the Buffalo Bill Museum" (where adult shame and "an image of the heart's desire" contend); Diana Hume George's "Wounded Chevy at Wounded Knee," a meditation upon the genocidal consequences of American policy toward Native Americans which is altogether different from the kind we are accustomed to reading or seeing on the screen. Gerald Early's provocative "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant," like most of his work, manages to be funny, and ironic, and self-effacing, and, not least, taunting: "It is impossible to escape that need to see the race uplifted, to thumb your nose at whites in a competition . . . . Perhaps this tainted desire . . . is the unity of feeling which is the only race pride blacks have ever had since they became Americans."

Stephen Jay Gould's "Counters and Cable Cars" is, among other things, a lyrical tribute to the "moral and aesthetic value of diversity." Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" is a movingly personal, intimate analysis of language strategies, ways of defining the private/public/ethnic/"American" self. One of the most unusual essays is Naomi Shihab Nye's "Maintenance"—an abstract subject made memorable by a metaphor come to life; the most unabashedly nostalgic essay is Frank Conroy's "Running the Table": "Why the orderliness of pool, the Euclidean cleanness of it, so appealed to me." The most ambitious essay in terms of its historic scope and political implications is Mario Vargas Llosa's "Questions of Conquest." And then there is Joy Williams's "The Killing Game": blunt, eloquent, defiantly polemical, as confrontational as a beaker of blood in the face.

In the tradition of our richest nature essays, from Henry David Thoreau to Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Reg Saner's "The Ideal Particle and the Great Unconformity" and Gretel Erhlich's "This Autumn Morning" are meticulously observed, instructive, written with enormous care and ambition. Each is a monument in language to what Saner calls "the littlest causes, their long continuance." ("Nature" as subject and theme is probably the inspiration for most essays that are written; among these, in our era of ecological sensitivity, are the most consistently compelling.) The New York-inspired essays of Elizabeth Hardwick ("New York City: Crash Course") and Mark Rudman ("Mosaic on Walking") make a lively, informal pair—entirely different responses to an identical environment. The pairing of Margaret Atwood's "The Female Body" (a prose poem crackling with the author's characteristic dry-ice wit) and John Updike's graceful response to Atwood (and through Atwood to the mystery of female/male mythologizing) should be explained: they were written by invitation for the special issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, "The Female Body."

These excellent essays, as I've indicated, seem to me linked by a common tone of urgency, even tension, however diverse their voices. Most of them provide news, facts, information—I am predisposed to the essay with knowledge to impart—but, unlike journalism, which exists primarily to present facts, the essays transcend their data, or transmute it into personal meaning. The memorable essay, unlike the article, is not place- or time-bound; it survives the occasion of its original composition. Indeed, in the most brilliant essays, language is not merely the medium of communication, it is communication.

Editors of such yearly anthologies as this one customarily explain their final choices in terms of "excellence" and "personal taste"—it's to be hoped the two are not incompatible—but it should be added, for the record, that editing any volume in which space is at a premium forces choices upon the editor that might not otherwise be made. Ideally, I could have included twice the number of essays I have included. But, after a year of sifting through photocopies of essays sent to me by the indefatigably capable and enthusiastic series editor, Robert Atwan, after decisions, indecisions, revisions, insomnia, and a mounting sense of frustration and loss at being required to leave out so much excellent work (the memoirs alone!—of fathers, families, mentors, famous elders!), I resigned myself to the fact that exclusions would have to be made, in many cases, on quite arbitrary grounds. (No more than a single essay by a writer—obviously. No more than one, or at the most two, essays on a single topic. No excerpts from diaries or journals. No reportage or opinion pieces, however well done. And no book reviews—even when the review is by Larry McMurtry and the subject is "How the West Was Won or Lost.") I was determined to include as many new and emerging writers as possible; at the same time, I was determined not to omit an important essay simply because its author happened to be well-known. I was determined to choose essays from a variety of magazines; at the same time, it seemed wrong to discriminate against Harper's and The Georgia: Review simply because, of American magazines of our time, they happen to publish the most essays of quality, frequently several in a single issue.

As I neared the end of my editorship of this volume, a task that, for all its frustrations, I enjoyed very much, I began to consider how many theoretical volumes of approximately twenty essays I might assemble out of the approximately three hundred essays available to me, in various combinations. A physicist friend did the calculations—the number is 10³¹. That's to say, ten thousand billion billion billion possible The Best American Essays 1991. In the light of such a daunting statistic, it seems a bold, even a brash, act to present the volume you hold in your hand as, in fact, the best. But so it is—or seems so to me. I hope the claim will prove a reasonable one.