Although I suppose I am best known to readers as a fiction writer, I am also a great lover of the essay and have written hundreds of them. Everyone has heard of the “familiar essay,” in which the writer draws on personal life experience, ideas, and the world around him. But few know the term “unfamiliar essay,” where a god-awful amount of research has to be sweated through. All of the pieces in this book are familiar essays. I’ve written only one unfamiliar piece; although it is not included here, my experience with it is worth noting.
Some years back, Life magazine asked me to write about life on other worlds. In the course of my research, I collected hundreds of pages and dozens of tapes, all of which I dutifully studied, all of which drove me mad with details. I digested all these facts and tried to spit them out again in a piece called “Life on Other Worlds,” which I duly mailed off to the magazine.
Deeply displeased with my article, Life flew an editor to Los Angeles with scissors and paste to tear my article apart and put it back together. It was ultimately published, but it was dreadful—unfamiliar—work, and as a result is the least favorite of all the essays I’ve ever written.
All of my other essays were born of explosions of love and quiet passion.
For instance, at lunch with a number of Life editors some thirty years ago, I expressed my wild enthusiasm for trains.
“My God,” they said. “Why don’t you write an article on trains for us?”
“Wait here!” I cried, and ran across the street to my office, where I wrote the piece in a white-hot burst of love and returned to the luncheon table in thirty minutes. I sold the article during dessert.
If you read “Any Friend of Trains Is a Friend of Mine,” you can feel the difference between research that one commits in agony and the research of memory and love, which is the finest and the best.
The most successful of my declamatory essays is “The Ardent Blasphemers,” where I compare Melville’s mad Captain Ahab with Jules Verne’s saner Captain Nemo, viewing the dark of one as against the light of the other. My essay shows Ahab daring God to strike him, whereas Nemo plugs into the energy of the universe and ignites the seas.
Two years after this essay was published, two strangers knocked at my door, representing the United States Pavilion to be built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
“We’ve come,” they said, “to give you a fifty-million-dollar building.”
“Come in, come in!” I cried. “What’s this?”
“We’ve read your essay ‘The Ardent Blasphemers,’ ” they said, “describing the gap between crazed Ahab and the mild lunatic Nemo, and their creative blasphemy. It has convinced us that you are the proper one to plan the American Adventure in the United States Pavilion. Can you write a sixteen-minute-long script, accompanied by a full symphony orchestra?”
“I can!” I cried, and did.
So by committing myself to the passionately dramatic, by jumping in headlong and not agonizing over research, my life was changed yet again.
Since then, I’ve written essays only when they wake me at dawn and ask to be finished by noon.
Thirty-seven of those insistent, wake-me-at-dawn friends are included here. I had great fun poking through my files, pulling these essays out, dusting them off, re-meeting them. Some have been published; I have provided original publication dates for those. The others were written at various times over the years and, I’m afraid, I cannot remember their birthdays, and so they’ve been annotated as “undated.” In some of these undated essays, one can find hints as to the approximate time period in which they were probably written. For example, “I’m Mad As Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore!” is undated, but I must have written it in 1999, given the content of the piece. (On another note, it’s interesting to observe that in this essay, I refer to the videocassette as a “newborn vaudevillian.” Of course, if I wrote the essay today, I would probably refer to the DVD, which was introduced in the late 1990s, and not yet as ubiquitous as it is today.)
“Lord Russell and the Pipsqueak” is a panicked remembrance of my visiting Bertrand Russell and wondering just what in hell I could possibly say to the world’s greatest philosopher. Somehow I managed.
“The Affluence of Despair: America Through the Looking Glass” and “Beyond 1984” are rooted in my short story “The Toynbee Convector.” Surrounded for years by people who arose each morning on the dark side of their beds, I knew they looked upon me as a fool; I knew otherwise and wrote these two essays because I figured we—our country—would succeed far beyond our wildest dreams and ultimately solve most of our problems if only we kept looking forward, with hope. If you read these essays along with my piece on writing, “My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness,” you will find my soul’s blueprint.
In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.
Another of my life’s loves is France, particularly Paris, City of Light. On my way to Rome fifty years ago, my friend Lord Kilbracken urged me to have dinner in Paris, even though I had only ninety minutes between trains. I obeyed, had dinner, and almost missed my train connection south. From this came “The Sixty-Minute Louvre: Paris by Stopwatch.”
“Paris: Always Destroyed, Always Triumphant” concerns the revolutionary history of France compared to the reality of the most beautiful country and the most beautiful city in the world. The ironic difference between the real aesthetic and beautiful France and its political failures during two hundred years is amazing; I could not but write about it.
And, of course, I love my home city of Los Angeles. “L.A., How Do I Love Thee?” and “L.A., Outta the Way and Let Us Happen!” were written because so much of the rest of the country, particularly New York City, has beaten up on us over the years. The great thing about L.A., as indicated in the essays, is that there you have the freedom and opportunity and resources to find your way to become anyone you want. You don’t have to assume the attitudes or opinions of the rest of the country. There you find the delicious freedom, especially, to become the kind of writer you want to become.
“Mars: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars” positions us exactly where I think we are at this time in history. We have much to forgive ourselves for, and it all must be forgiven if we are to move forward. Those of us living now are, in my opinion anyway, the in-between generation. It’s been only a few thousand years since we emerged from our caves. We have to be patient with ourselves as we move on in our return to the Moon and onward to Mars. I think this is inevitable; it will happen, and we must not let our prejudices stand in our way.
On that final note, dear readers, I leave these familiar essays in your gentle hands.