Good Prose (9 page)

A frequent lesson of the elders’ stories was the importance of discretion. Pacifique came from a culture that values silence, and so by training he was disinclined to tell his new schoolmates much about his past. Moreover, he worried that American students and teachers would be afraid of him if they knew about the violence in which he had grown up. They might think that it had left him violent too. But as he learned more English, he began to set down some of his experiences. When his teacher told him that some of what he had written was “damn near publishable,” Pacifique said he only wanted to improve his English. The very idea of making his stories public seemed to frighten him. He worried that his stories were unfit even for his teacher to read because they contained so much horror. His teacher tried to reassure him, telling him that art had the great power to transform the experience of suffering and injustice into something beautiful. This idea made a strong impression on Pacifique.

In one of the stories he wrote—he called it “The Color of a Sound”—Pacifique begins with a glass breaking in the dining hall at Deerfield. The sound triggers a memory. His native village is being attacked—on “one of the days my mother apologized
to my brother and me for having given birth to us.” The family’s house is burned down. He and his mother and brother spend the night hiding in the forest. In the morning, standing near a clearing, Pacifique witnesses the killing of a young schoolmate named Patrick. The boy has been tricked into approaching a rebel soldier. The soldier is holding a glass. The soldier drops it on purpose, and the glass shatters. Pacifique explains a superstition in his country, that if you drop something you are eating or drinking, you may blame a person near you for wanting it. The soldier accuses Patrick of having wanted his drink, then orders him to pick up the shards of glass and put them in his mouth. The soldier forces Patrick to chew, then shoots him in the forehead. The story ends this way:

During his first year in America, involuntary memories were an important problem for Pacifique—the dreadful things he could not banish from his mind, gusts of memory that could come at any time. Two years later, he felt that something important had changed. While writing, he said, he had discovered a partial defense against his memories: “That’s how it started. I wrote a story and I felt relieved. I could control it. In the head, I could not. It’s as if you had your hands on it and you could control it and make it beautiful. So instead of it having power on you, you had power on it. When it comes as a memory, it dictates to you, it controls you. After I wrote that story about the breaking glass, I would hear a glass breaking but it never came back that way. I mean, I would remember what happened, but it was never as before. I would think of making some modification in the story, to make the story better. Then if a memory woke me up, I could get back to sleep by writing it down, thinking I could turn it into something beautifully written. I mean, that’s what I wish.”

He didn’t show his stories to other students. He still wasn’t eager to make his past public, but he wasn’t afraid of that anymore. He was afraid that other students would tell him the stories weren’t well made, and because their command of English was superior to his, he would be obliged to believe them. Most writers are vulnerable to criticism. It is hard to imagine one more vulnerable than Pacifique. Writing had been a great discovery for him, a defense against the invasions of memory, a way to get to sleep. But when he wrote stories that included the horrors of his past, he had to believe that the stories were well made, or could be remade until they were. Otherwise, memory would
regain its hold. “If it isn’t well written,” he said, “it is as if it comes back into you.”

Many writers have spoken about memoir as a way to “objectify” experience, to get clarifying “distance” between oneself and one’s past. But that was not precisely what Pacifique intended when he spoke of having power over his memories, nor is it the highest use of memoir. One can also use memoir to get
closer
to the past.

The memories that surface suddenly—merely unpleasant for most people, horrifying for Pacifique—are bolts from a bigger storm, capricious, even random. If you can go back to the source and see your memories whole, you can create truer versions of what you remember. You tell the stories as accurately and artfully as your abilities allow. If you succeed, you replace the fragments of memory with something that has its own shape and meaning, a separate thing that has value in itself. The past becomes an assertion that your life is of the present and the future.

Taking the undifferentiated materials left by the past and giving them pattern and form can be—more than solace—a source of great pleasure. The delight that memoir can offer is like the delight a woodworker may feel when putting the finishing touches on a beautiful desk. The desk is different from the wood forever. And the good memoir is different from the memories behind it, not a violation of them but different, and different of course from the actual experience that gave birth both to memory and to memoir.

I awoke one morning to discover that I was an essayist. It was not what I had in mind for myself, to be painfully frank. I had published a book
, The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity,
which I had imagined as—well, treatise is certainly too strong a word. Meditation? Maybe. But really I had simply thought of it as a book. Now I discovered that it was an essay. Actually, some reviewers said it was a series of essays. I had thought of these pieces as united by their theme, and indeed had written them that way. But the subjects ranged from antiques to climate change to television news to unicorns. I had to admit that they could be read independent of the order in which I had so deliberately put them
.

As an essayist friend of mine has pointed out, one of the problems with the essay, as a form, is that everyone has written one. You can easily make your way through life without writing a novel or a poem, but it is hard to get out of high school without writing an essay. It thus becomes an unexalted endeavor. And yet strangely enough the essay is an outsider’s genre. Essays tend to be critical, subversive of something or other, even if it is just the latest fashion in sunglasses
.

In the family of writers, essayists play poor cousins to writers of fiction
or narrative nonfiction. But great things have been accomplished in essays, which are the natural medium of ideas. Essays yield many of the nuggets of wisdom that inform everyday life, including the one line of Emerson’s that everyone knows: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” This observation, the schoolboy’s friend, might also serve as a credo for the essayist. Essays are a congenial form for the divided mind. Once, years ago, I was teaching a course in English literature. By midsemester the students knew me quite well. One morning I was groping for a phrase, “And, and …” “And yet?” a voice said helpfully. Only then did I realize that “and yet” had become my signature idiom, emblem of the contradictions that I wanted the students to see on every hand. Emblem, too, of the contradictions within my own skull. Essayists tend to argue with themselves. The inner dialogue that might be suppressed in other writing finds a forum here. Montaigne blessed the form when he said, “If I knew my own mind, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.”

—RT

There is something you want to say, and yet you are dogged by the perennial questions—sometimes useful, but sometimes fatal—that can visit any writer. Who am I to be writing this? Who asked me? And cruelest of all, Who cares?

When you write about your own ideas, you put yourself in a place that can feel less legitimate than the ground occupied by reporters or even by memoirists, who are, or ought to be, authorities on their subjects. An all-purpose term describes efforts at sharing your mind: the essay. As an essayist you can sometimes
feel like a public speaker who must build his own stage and lectern. Essays are self-authorizing. This is the dilemma but also the pleasure of the form. The chances are that nobody asked for your opinion. But if your idea is fresh, it will surprise even someone, perhaps an assigning editor, who did ask.

Most good essays transcend argument.
Thoreau argues in favor of walking, says we need to spend more time in nature
might be the unhelpful gloss of the great essay “Walking.” All its wideranging declarations live through the force of personal conviction. Most of the work that we call personal essay goes beyond logic and fact into the sovereign claims of idiosyncrasy. This is not to suggest that essays should be illogical, but they may be, and generally should be,
extra
-logical—governed by associative more than by strictly linear thought. Writers who are used to the strictures and scruples of journalism can find themselves stymied by the essay, inhibited by the freedom thrust upon them.

The great essayists of the past have in their various ways established the contemporary essayist’s rights. Montaigne virtually invented the form. Emerson and Thoreau defined it for America, and never before or since has the essay had such cultural sway.
Walden
, though a full-length book, is essentially an essay, or even (in its loose confederation of ideas) a collection of essays. In a classroom today, Emerson and Thoreau may be remembered as otherworldly spirits who wrote in opposition to the materialism of their time. But on the page they were swashbucklers. Thoreau might have been our best-known hermit, but if you listen to him at the start of “Walking,” it is not a hermit’s reticence that you encounter:

Thoreau revels in extravagance and hyperbole. One would pay to hear the tone of voice in which he read his work aloud—as he often did, despite his stylized reclusion. “Walking” debuted as a lecture in 1851. It is laced with humor and self-mockery. It seems likely that his stirring flights of eloquence were recognized by his audience as pieces of showmanship, appreciated as much for their theatricality as their content. Thoreau is generous with assertions. He goes on flights of imagery and speculation:

In an essay by Thoreau, the “I” is the measure of all things. All its experience can be brought to bear; no subject is too small to notice or too big to contemplate. Emerson wrote even more expansively and aphoristically, and in describing the transcend-dentalist he contributed the ultimate metaphor for the essayist’s relationship to the world: “I become a transparent eyeball.”

•

What gives you license to write essays? Only the presence of an idea and the ability to make it your own. People speak of the “personal essay” as a form, but all essays are personal. They may make sweeping pronouncements, but they bear the stamp of an individual mind. Original ideas, those hinges on which an era turns, are rare. It is unlikely that you will write
The Origin of Species
. Or that you will be Emerson. But originality and profundity are not identical. Profound ideas bear repeating, or rediscovery, and many original ideas do not. Essays are like poems in that they may confront old wisdom in a fresh way. That Shakespeare wrote of the bittersweetness of parting did not preclude Emily Dickinson from doing so, too. Essays illustrate the truth that, just as no word has an exact synonym, no idea can be exactly paraphrased. Essays often gain their authority from a particular sensibility’s fresh apprehension of generalized wisdom. But the point is not to brush aside the particular in favor of the general, not to make everything into a grand idea, but to treat something specific with such attention that it magnifies into significance. As Theodor Adorno says, “… the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.”