The Best American Essays 2015 (2 page)

Surely one of Montaigne's great achievements consists of the magical way he unites his unique compositional process with his infectious and mercurial personality. As he says in “Of Giving the Lie”: “I have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” He seems to want this notion of consubstantiality to be read as more than a metaphor. At least one of Montaigne's great students and supporters appeared to take him literally. In his brilliant essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes: “The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”

If the origin of the essay as a genre is French, the origin of the
essayist
is English. As Jean Starobinski, the author of what I consider the finest study of Montaigne (
Montaigne in Motion
), points out,
essayist
had a “pejorative nuance” when first used around the beginning of the seventeenth century. He cites the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson's complaint: “Mere essayists, a few loose sentences, and that's all!” So we are back to White's second-class citizens. From the experts of Montaigne's day to the specialists of ours—those whose work consists of original research, investigative fact-finding, and the formation of incontestable arguments—essays may seem slight and the essayist superficial. Known as an outstanding scholar, Starobinski admits that if someone declared him an essayist, he would feel “slightly hurt” and “take it as a reproach.”

So the essayist appears to pursue a paradoxical career. The quintessential essayist parades an enormous ego and yet does so in a modest setting, that is, within a genre widely acknowledged to be unequal to fiction, poetry, and drama. E. B. White was very aware of this and felt the public somewhat justified in regarding the essay as “the last resort of the egoist,” and said of himself, “I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.” A few decades earlier, the
Saturday Review of Literature
critic Elizabeth Drew argued more positively for the essayist's ego, regarding the “pure” or “perfect” essayist—writers such as Montaigne, Lamb, and Haz­litt—as someone who possesses the “secret of the essayist,” which she termed “creative egotism” as distinguished from a “trivial” egotism, which produces not great essays but recognizably mannered ones. Although she doesn't consider what I find paradoxical, Drew does recognize the peculiarity of major egos choosing to express themselves in a minor form. But it may be that the essay is the only form suitable for such expression.

You can teach someone many things about writing essays, but I wonder if you can teach anyone how to be an essayist. An essayist at heart, I mean. It may be that just as there are born poets and born storytellers, there are born essayists. This doesn't mean that they discover their genre early; in fact, I would guess that essayists recognize their special talents much later than do poets, novelists, and playwrights, a recognition that comes perhaps only after attempting the other genres. Then, too, there are the poets and novelists who also excel at essays and whose work frequently winds up in these books. That is why the series is called
The Best American Essays
and not
The Best American Essayists.
But that is a discussion for another time.

The Best American Essays
features a selection of the year's outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today's essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note: because of the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) will no longer be considered.

As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editor, Nicole Angeloro. I was fortunate that Liz Duvall once again handled production. I appreciate, too, the assistance of Megan Wilson, Mary Dalton-Hoffman, and Carla Gray. It was a pleasure to work this year with Ariel Levy, who has put together an impressive collection of essays that vividly shows why the genre is so difficult to define. Readers will find here an engaging diversity of moods, voices, stances, and tones, but all with a unifying spirit that reflects the special qualities of her own essays—the seamless dialogue of intimacy and ideas, the creative convergence of public issues and personal identity.

R.A.

T
HE PROBLEM WITH
ideas is that you can't decide to have them.

Certain kinds of nonfiction can be made to happen. The writer who is diligent, observant, and inquisitive enough can always find a story: you read the paper, you watch the world, you ask enough questions, and sooner or later, there it is. You have to write it, of course, but it exists with or without you. There are decisions to be made—how best to unfurl the information, what to prioritize, whose perspective to privilege. But you do not have to invent the story, you just have to tell it. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying it can be done.

An essay is another matter. Because whatever its narrative shape, an essay must have an idea as its beating heart. And ideas come to you on their own terms. Searching for an idea is like resolving to have a dream.

At least that's been my experience as a writer. Once in a while—a very extended while—an idea is there in my head, ready to become an essay, and I feel lucky and elated. (So long as I have a pen in my purse, that is. “I am always disturbed,” as the composer Igor Stravinsky said of his ideas for musical compositions, “if they come to my ear when my pencil is missing and I am obliged to keep them in my memory.” If he was forced to wait too long to write down his idea, Stravinsky went on, “I am in danger of losing the freshness of first contact and I will have difficulty in recapturing its attractiveness.”) For me, writing an essay is more pleasurable than any other kind of writing. Usually producing prose is like swimming: a test of will and discipline and fitness that feels good after you've finished doing it. But writing an essay is like catching a wave.

That ideas come as they please is just one of the challenges of writing essays, of course. To catch a wave, you need skill and nerve, not just moving water. As anyone can tell you who has paddled belly-down on a surfboard—frantic and futile as a windup tub toy pulled out of the bath—it is by no means a given that you'll be able to stand up and ride just because the perfect wave comes along. It takes practice and finesse and, not least of all, courage. Because falling off can make you look foolish, and it can hurt. Crafting a piece of writing around an idea you think is worthwhile—an idea you suspect is an insight—requires real audacity. It is an act of daring.

The pleasure of
reading
essays is that you don't have to wait for the waves. (And you don't have to paddle out and get dragged under and bonked in the face with your surfboard over and over until you're dizzy and bedraggled and enraged—which may have happened to me once or thrice.) You just lie back on your towel and gaze out toward the horizon.

There goes Roger Angell, whizzing across the sea! I am no less impressed that he can write an essay as brilliant as “This Old Man” at ninety-three years of age than I would be if I saw him shredding a ten-foot wave—when, as he is the first to admit, “the lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut country road, thanks to a herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me from Gary Cooper to Geppetto.” Angell's accomplishment here is significant: he has managed to turn kvetching about aging into a page-turner. (As he quite accurately puts it, “I am a world-class complainer.”) Ultimately, though, his essay isn't stunning because he wrote it in his tenth decade; it's just an astoundingly wonderful piece of writing. “‘How great you're looking! Wow, tell me your secret!' they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room,” he writes, “while the little balloon over their heads reads ‘Holy shit—he's still vertical!'” But it's not all funny. Looming over the essay is the “oceanic force and mystery” of loss. Angell's oldest daughter, Callie, took her own life. He has outlived most of his friends and contemporaries. Angell's wife of forty-eight years, Carol, died in 2012, and he still hears her voice in his head. Propelling the reader from Angell's first sentence to his last is an insight we are desperate to follow until it crashes on the sand: the amazing thing about getting old, Angell tells us, is that the “accruing weight of these departures doesn't bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming.”

Aging was a big topic in the essays submitted this year, possibly because the baby boomers are doing so much of it. Mark Jacobson, a champion word surfer, has the insight that becoming an
alte kaker
is no different from becoming middle-aged when you're accustomed to being a young adult, or from turning into a young adult when you've just gotten the hang of hormone-riddled adolescence. At sixty-five, “ear hair and all, I remain resolutely myself. I am the same me from my baby pictures, the same me who got laid for the first time in the bushes behind the high school field in Queens, the same me who drove a taxi through Harlem during the Frank Lucas days, the same me my children recognize as their father, the same me I was yesterday, except only more so by virtue of surviving yet another spin of the earth upon its axis. I was at the beginning again,” Jacobson writes. “A Magellan of me.”

Those are the ideas and words of two men who have been writing for a long time, and it's great fun sitting on the shore watching the pros do what they've been practicing for decades. But it's joyous in a different way to see someone who's just starting out get it right. That's how I felt reading Kelly Sundberg's elegant, haunting “It Will Look Like a Sunset.” The insight she gives us is that domestic violence happens “so slowly, then so fast.” (Which is to say that it is not as inconceivable as we—I—might imagine.) She spent years married to someone she found impressive and beautiful: “When our elderly neighbor developed dementia and one night thought a boy was hiding under her bed, Caleb stayed with her. When the child of an administrative assistant in Caleb's department needed a heart transplant, Caleb went to the assistant's house and helped him put down wood floors in his basement to create a playroom for the little boy.” Violence enters their life in little flashes—forgivable, far apart. “First he pushed me against a wall. It was two more years before he hit me, and another year after that before he hit me again.” Along the way, there was the creation of a home, the birth of a child, the invention of a shared adult life. And Sundberg takes us inside it. We are with her, in the texture of her days, in the sparkling intimacy of her early relationship with a young man who lived in a cabin in the woods that he built with his own hands. We experience her isolation when they move to be near his parents, and her disbelief as her only friend, the father of her child, becomes increasingly dangerous.

Her idea—like Angell's and Jacobson's and all the writers' ideas in this book—teaches us something, offers us a new way of thinking about a subject we may imagine we already understand. But her writing also lets us
feel
what it is like to be her. (An essay need not be in the first person, of course, and not all of these are. In Malcolm Gladwell's “The Crooked Ladder,” there is no “I”; the writer's presence is never acknowledged in the writing. But we feel him there all the same—his intellect and his empathy. His idea is enlightening, but it's his writing that makes us experience it as truth.)

For me, reading the essays in this anthology was as satisfying and invigorating as glimpsing a school of dolphins rippling in and out of the water: a privilege.