Essay and Opinion
Personal Essay
THE ESSAY HAS GOTTEN a bad rap for a while now. Let’s say the last century or so. Or whenever its first name became “student,” as in, the student essay, that soggy, apologetic attempt to please a secondary school teacher with the fewest possible words on an unwished-for subject stretched over the most inflexible framework available. It is sometimes called a “theme” in these matters, but if you look up “theme” in this context, dictionaries will tell you that it is a “student essay on an assigned topic.” The problem, to a large extent, is that the form is taught in terms of how to build it—rigidly, often—rather than of what it can achieve. Some of you will have learned that it should have five paragraphs (kind of limiting in itself, but we’ll pass over that), that its first paragraph should contain its main statement of purpose, called the thesis sentence, followed by its younger cousins, the topic sentences of each body paragraph, which paragraphs will feature, in exact order, the relevant sentences as their first statements, bringing us to a point of exhaustion where the sentences in question are repeated, in reverse order, in something quaintly called the conclusion, although point of exhaustion might be a better term. This soul-deadening exercise is designed not to teach good writing but to impose structure on the fourteen-year-old mind. Not every method of instruction is so brutalizing, but many come close.
Is it any wonder, then, that upon hearing the word “essay,” people run in horror? Who would want to read such a monstrosity?
The real essay, on the other hand, is one of the most sinuous, adaptable forms in all of literature. Only the novel can begin to compete with it for sheer variety. Essays can be formal or informal, objective or personal, philosophical or scientific or humorous. They have been around for centuries, and we can even date their first appearance, 1580, when Michel de Montaigne published two volumes he called Essais. He took the word from a Middle French verb, essayer, to try or attempt, and he took seriously the notion that these were trial pieces. So seriously, in fact, that he went back again and again to some of them, revising until his death. Since that time, most essayists have dropped the notion of endless change and improvement and regarded their published essays as finished products, so the form need not hold the threat of being an endless work loop for the creator. The idea caught on. Francis Bacon published the first English book to be called Essays in 1597, and by 1609, playwright Ben Jonson had given us the term essayist for one who essays in print. Such persons have stayed busy ever since.
And why not? You can do just about anything with an essay. Montaigne wrote his on topics as elevated as “Of Sadness and Sorrow” and “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die” and as lowly as “Of Smells” and “Of Posting” (letters in the mail). The idea that one can write essays about anything really caught on. Aldous Huxley, no slouch in this department himself, says in the preface to his Collected Essays (1958) that the beauty of the form is that it provides a platform “for saying almost everything about almost anything.” Who could object to that?
Some eras have embraced the form more than others. The English nineteenth century saw huge enthusiasm for the form in both the earlier, Romantic period (Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey) and the later, Victorian era (Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Walter Pater). The modernist period of the early-to-mid twentieth century was not a great age—everyone in the literary set was too busy writing manifestos or blowing up the traditional expectations for what their chosen genre could accomplish—but writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell produced remarkable work. Lawrence’s “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” and Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” are brilliant explorations of death and the hand we sometimes take in meting it out; it is well worth any reader’s time to make their acquaintance. Woolf’s fame as an essayist rests chiefly, but by no means exclusively, on her championing a woman’s right to write, A Room of One’s Own, but her essays on the state of literature, especially the modern novel, are provocative and ornery in their own ways. The later twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first have produced a remarkable array of essayists covering every conceivable topic. African American writers from James Baldwin to Martin Luther King Jr. to Alice Walker to bell hooks to Ta-Nehisi Coates have written brilliantly on race, as have Native Americans N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Janet Campbell Hale, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. But that is not the only subject. In fact, it is hard to find a subject that has not been touched by really interesting essayists, from poetry (Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Adrienne Rich) to art (Julian Barnes, Simon Schama) to computers (Tracy Kidder) to personal experience (David Sedaris) to feminism (Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem) to antifeminism (Norman Mailer) to belief and disbelief (Marilynne Robinson, Christopher Hitchens) to, well, you name it.
These writers range from the deadly serious to the maniacally comic and from the formal to the familiar. What all share is a deeply personal connection between the essayist and his or her work: the form and tone of the essay must fit the writer like a suit, even if that suit, as in Sedaris’s case, is that of a Christmas elf. We can all spot a King speech or essay within the first paragraph; some of us can hear Julian Barnes in an essay even with a wall between it and us—and will walk through that wall to read it. The combination of self-deprecation and sly derision would let us pick Sedaris out of a literary-police lineup. Writers tend to find what works for them and, having found it, return to the scene of their success. D. H. Lawrence’s hectoring tone and hammering repetition marks him out as being no one but himself. Woolf’s mannerisms, less confrontational, identify her just as surely.
By its very nature, the essay demands a special sort of attention. In the first place, we need to know how the author is placed vis-à-vis the material. Some writers take a sort of Joycean seat above and, as it were, behind the work, metaphorically paring their fingernails, as Stephen Dedalus describes it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Their detachment may be genuine or, as seems more common to me, theatrical; since the words are clearly coming from a writer, having the writer appear disinterested rings slightly untrue. Still, some can pull it off.
Others will be right in the thick of things, painting, as Seamus Heaney said of Francisco Goya, with their fists and elbows. They slug it out in full view of readers, the essayist not as impartial juror but as pugilist.
What should interest us, however, is not the degree of attachment but the reason behind it. We will get to John Henry Newman again when we discuss autobiography, but he also wrote some of the great essays of his or any other era. That his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), is intensely personal is beyond dispute, but the same can be said of The Idea of a University (1852, 1858), which makes no such overt nod toward his life yet rests entirely on his experiences and views of university life. A collection of essays called “Confessions”—and there have been quite a few since Augustine—is easy to see as personal, as is Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” But that is no less true for the vast majority of essays on all topics; this is me, they declare, this is what I think. Perhaps this quality no longer seems radical in an age when any semi-sentient creature with opposable thumbs can tweet out personal thoughts however ill informed or badly written at all times of day, but in its origins, the essay was radical precisely because it was personal.
Scholarship in the late Renaissance was inevitably written with careful attention to the past, to philosophical and religious antecedents. Thought bowed down before authority. Suddenly, along came this new thing, obedient to no institutional practice because it belonged to no institution, no tradition. The early essayists were inventing not only a mode of thought but a form in which that thought could be displayed. In doing so, their chief concern seems to have been establishing the self as the source of insight, a very modern stance. Pre-Enlightenment knowledge, like wisdom and power, was hierarchical: it came ultimately from God and not directly but via his messengers, from the Pope successively down until the local priest informed his parishioners. In such an environment the essay, in the sense that we understand it, makes no sense. Things began to change, though, with the Reformation, Protestantism finding it had less and less use for hierarchies sacred or profane. Nor did it take social philosophy long to catch up. The ultimate political expression of this Enlightenment insistence on the individual, the Declaration of Independence, is essentially an argumentative essay whose true audience is not the British crown but his American subjects. The essay, in fact, is the form by which the Enlightenment moved forward, and not merely because of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Adam Smith, Voltaire, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant were all accomplished, persuasive essayists. It is not unreasonable to assert that our world looks the way it does chiefly because of the essay. And no two of them, I promise, sound like each other.
That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? To think like oneself, write like oneself, to sound like oneself and no other. Is that ego? You bet it is. E. B. White got it about right when he said, “Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.” White was being cheeky here, and more than a little self-deprecating, since Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web notwithstanding, the bulk of his career was taken up with writing essays. That element of ego, however, does not make the essayist an egomaniac. It just doesn’t exclude one. Look, the point of the essay is to express the self. Someone, I can’t remember who, said that an essay should fit its writer as perfectly as a bespoke suit of clothes. In other words, it drapes itself around its writer, revealing his thoughts and being. Sometimes it shapes them. The British novelist E. M. Forster stated it best in a question, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” In its truest form, the essay is an exploration of the self and some aspect of the world. That aspect can be art or war or death or youth or model railroading. What the essay uncovers is how the self relates to that topic.
Contemporary British novelist Julian Barnes is one of the foremost practitioners of the essay-as-exploration. His topics are as varied as death (Nothing to Be Frightened Of, 2008), grief at his wife’s passing (Levels of Life, 2013), art (Keeping an Eye Open, 2015), his love affair with France (Something to Declare, 2002), writers who have influenced him (Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story, 2012). Indeed, he is so comfortable in this mode that several of his novels are assembled from pieces, some of which are essays in the characters’ voices. I read the final chapter of his defining novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), in the New York Times Book Review not knowing it was a novel chapter, and it worked just fine as a standalone essay. Later, when I had made the acquaintance of the book’s protagonist-narrator, it did work better. Part of Barnes’s charm is that he is, well, charming. His essayistic persona is friendly, engaging, humorous without being cutting, knowing. One critic describes his essays as “exquisitely humorous.”
We can contrast that approach with his friend Christopher Hitchens, whose work is brilliant, strident, at times painfully witty, and often derisive of those who disagree with him. Hitchens was a professional contrarian, seeming to require something to argue against—which was an asset when he was attacking the hypocrisies of organized religion in staking out his position as an atheist in God Is Not Great (2007)—and he found much in his world that demanded argument against it. He also came equipped with a lacerating wit and a will to use it. Among his admirers and, later, his opponents, the casual term “Hitch-slapped” came into vogue for the victims of his debate barbs that were designed to demean and humiliate. One cannot imagine someone being “Julian-slapped,” both because the term is so unwieldy and because that rhetorical mischief is so unlike Barnes. The rhetorical suit that fits Hitchens so well bags and pinches in unfortunate places on Barnes. And vice versa, of course.
The garment tailored for Marilynne Robinson would suit neither of them. Robinson, the award-winning American novelist, is also a prolific essayist whose calling card is earnestness, high seriousness of both moral and intellectual purpose. Her touch is not light, as with Barnes, nor cruel, as sometimes with Hitchens. Writing on the state of public higher education in “Save Our Public Universities” in the March 2016 edition of Harper’s, she begins by invoking both Emerson’s “The American Scholar” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (2 vols.,1835,1840). Hard to get much more high-minded than that. Her plan, however, involves more than merely seeking famous antecedents. She employs them as evidence that America was once an aspirational place, seeking to better itself by bettering its people; one of her chief data points is the Land Grant Act (officially the Morrill Act of 1862) that created the land-grant university system, one per state, for educating persons who in previous ages would have had no hope of higher education. Against this aspirational, which is for her to say spiritual, nature, she contrasts the countervailing materialist impulse in American culture. The resulting essay is wide-ranging as it touches on wage disparities, Henry Ford’s enlightened economic treatment of workers, the current disparagement of higher education that does anything but train workers for specific jobs, the decline of cultural institutions and traditional values, utilitarianism, and of course the plea to continue supporting public universities, among many topics. She makes a persuasive case. At the same time, hardly anyone will finish the essay and declare, “That was fun,” as might be the case with Barnes, or “That was shocking,” as with Hitchens. Uplifting, maybe, thought-provoking, certainly, even improving. And all of that would be fine with Robinson. Her aims are different from either of the other writers just named, and her means are very much her own. Yet each of them writes essays that other humans actually read with profit. How boring the world would be if all essays followed the same paint-by-numbers template that we have forced upon student “essayists,” whom we expect to do anything in the world except “essay” their subject or themselves.
One thing that great essayists never do is leave you in doubt as to what they think. The “thesis” may not reside where your English classes taught you to put one, but it will be in there somewhere that makes sense, early or late, and it will have several components:
There’s a lot aspiring writers can learn from where—and why—professional essayists position their theses. The world contains more possibilities than dreamt of in your five-paragraph theme.
What, then, should we make of this form that is so elastic, so widespread, yet so profoundly personal? We might begin by trying to see it not as something concrete but as an ideal, a goal toward which each writer strives according to his or her own lights. If we are to understand essays, we might need recourse to Ezra Pound’s triple criteria of criticism:
Come to think of it, we could do far worse than apply those in every artistic thing we seek to judge. I would expand the first question somewhat to something like, “What was the author trying to do, and how did she try to do it?” That larger question allows for not just aims but means. How does she structure her essay? What sort of voice does she adopt? What is her tone? What does the logic of the essay look like? And so on. From there, the expansion of the second question follows naturally from the sorts of questions we ask in pursuing the first. The third remains short and relatively sweet.
Our examination of individual essays and essayists will, over time, allow us to apprehend more fully the possibilities of the form which, as we already know, can say almost everything about almost anything.
Opinion
A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.
—Joseph Addison
There is a kind of writing that occurs only in nonfiction works. Fiction has no need of it, and in fact fiction writers are generally counseled to avoid it. Poetry can live without it, although it flirted with it for a spell in the eighteenth century. Newspapers have a lot of it, most magazines somewhat less. This kind of writing appears in the one place in a paper where objectivity holds no value, fairness is rather shaky. And in whatever form, by whatever writer, roughly half of the reading audience will disagree with the content.
We are of course speaking here of opinion writing, which term covers a multitude of sins and one or two virtues. Opinions come in various forms: editorials, columns, political cartoons, op-eds (trust me, they’re different), and expert commentary (sometimes called “punditry,” although that term has fallen into disrepute along with some pundits). Opinion writing tends to be the province of the news department, although a certain amount has always landed on the sports pages. Taken together, this category of writing is more loosely tethered to fact, more open to loose interpretation of events, more forgiving (even encouraging, some would say) of open bias, less governed by the strict rules of journalistic structure, yet still obliged to follow the general contours of nonfiction. That is, it can’t be (well, shouldn’t be) wholly invented, and for best outcomes, it should be approximately believable.
Back in the mists of journalistic time, the eighteenth century to be precise, the essay was opinion. Were we to ask Joseph Addison and Richard Steele if their writing in The Spectator was essay or opinion, they would have looked at us very strangely; for them, to essay was to express opinions—in their case, somewhat less political than those of the writers of The Federalist, James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, whose aim was Constitutional ratification. Men of the Enlightenment wore their opinions as they wore waistcoats: automatically, reflexively, comfortably. That we now regard opinion as a separate category is in some ways an accident of publishing history. The Spectator was a daily paper, but without “news” prefixing the noun. It brought daily observations on culture and morality—indeed sought to “marry wit to morality”—without any attempt to chronicle the doings of Parliament or the latest carriage crash. When daily journalism developed into reportage of events of note and then into something resembling objective coverage, there needed to be a place for essays carrying opinions, and eventually a firewall between the two, lest opinions and editorials appear to corrupt the fairness of the reporting. As we discussed earlier, this led to the Op-Ed page(s), the designated space for writing with a slant.
In America, the roster of departed opinion and crusading newspaper columnists is long and varied: Will Rogers, Drew Pearson, Andy Rooney, Molly Ivins, Jack Anderson, Herb Caen, Jimmy Breslin, Erma Bombeck, William Safire, and Mike Royko. Their subjects ranged from the distinctly political to the whimsical, from the international to the local. More than a few had reputations as cranks, which was part of their appeal. One of Mike Royko’s great themes was the iniquity of introducing the use of gloves into Chicago softball (played with a larger and slower-moving ball than that employed in the rest of the republic). You have to admire a man who takes a strong stand on so momentous a topic. Among current practitioners, the miscellany is nearly as great: Mitch Albom, Mona Charen, E. J. Dionne, David Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, Connie Schultz, Clarence Page, Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Paul Krugman, Cal Thomas, Michelle Malkin, and Leonard Pitts. Outside of advice and humor columnists, who find themselves on the other side of a different wall, the slant has been more decidedly political and the slants left or right sharper, although both have always been a component of opinion writing. There is almost nothing that can be said about all these personages except this: they have not been afraid to express their thoughts. Otherwise, they’re all over the place.
One area that should interest us especially is their approach to argumentative fairness. Only a fool would expect a political columnist to present the opposing side as fully and accurately as her own, and one thing I know about you is that you’re no fool (the jury is still out on me). But there are degrees of fairness. Some columnists—Charen, Thomas, Krugman—happily set up straw men, putting improbable words into the mouths of hypothetical liberals or conservatives, depending on the slant. For others it is a struggle; Goldberg falls into the pit of caricature, endeavors to climb out and aim for some sort of equanimity, but nearly always backslides.
Dionne suffers from something like the liberal version of this malady, although his slips are slightly more occasional, slightly less egregious. A few—Schultz, Parker, Brooks (mostly, with head-scratching exceptions), Page—generally play it down the middle, favoring their own viewpoint, naturally, but not being preposterous about the opposing side. It ain’t easy, folks. If you doubt that, try writing a few pieces in the style of your favorite columnist. Or the one you most despise. Either will work.
In attempts at equal treatment, many papers marshal opinion columns as binary pairs. One paper I sometimes read, the Dayton Daily News, has two opinion columns each day, one “From the Left” and one “From the Right.” Why two? Why not seven? Do differences of opinion exist only as dichotomies, polar opposites holding themselves in repulsive balance? I’m sure it has to do with the American two-party system, although that has the effect of reinforcing an idea that is far from inevitable. USA Today has one editorial that emerges from its editorial board each day, then one from an outside voice. Most commonly, that voice is in opposition to whatever the paper’s editorial stance proves to be. On May 22, 2018, the main editorial was on President Trump’s immigration policy and how, rather than pushing the more extreme and largely unworkable aspects of his aspirations, he should pursue a more centrist position and “focus on the doable.” The corresponding opinion was written by Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a hard-right, immigration-skeptic group (and favored source by Trump for “fun facts” about immigration) that has argued, among other things, that “birth tourism”—the practice of coming temporarily to the United States in order to have a baby on American soil and gain birthright citizenship—has been a growing phenomenon, a falsehood that has been debunked by multiple sources, including the fact-checking operation PolitiFact, that have shown that such births have actually been on the decline. Care to guess how much Krikorian agreed with the main editorial? Are those the only possibilities on immigration? Of course not. But they are as many as fit in the constrained space of the modern, mass-circulation newspaper. And so we get point-counterpoint.
If we are to read opinions and editorials with profit—that is, if we are to glean useful something from them beyond confirmation of our biases—we need to ask a few questions.
Practicing this sort of questioning of opinion-writing, of anything, really, won’t guarantee that we won’t get bamboozled, but it will make the likelihood somewhat less.
Whether they deal with the writer’s life, the essay and the opinion are two of the most revealing personal forms of writing. They reveal innermost thoughts, long-held beliefs, habits of mind, loves and hates. They reveal who the writer is. And they bring us into contact with the minds of others. We need more of that.