Earlier this month, I wrote about my new-found respect for Phillip Lopate, regarded as one of the best living writers of thepersonal essay. I wanted to expand my knowledge of the genre — and I had never thought of it as that before, but as the way some writers opine on a variety of subjects with no overarching theme. At his suggestion, I picked up The Art of the Personal Essay, a thick book that wanders from the essay’s early iterations among the Greeks and Romans to the present day. Lopate edited it, although I’d use the word curate rather than edit. He has picked representative essays that show the form’s progression through time from something on the tenets of formal debate and argument, to the musing and wandering of the mind on a variety of topics that we associate with modern essayists like Sarah Vowell or Lopate himself.
In an email to Lopate, I admitted I’d never heard of most of the people he holds up as exemplars of the art: Montaigne and Hazlitt, for instance. Nor had I known that some of the people I had heard of — EB White, James Baldwin, Charles Lamb — wrote personal essays. I knew them for other reasons (Charlotte’s Web, anyone?).
It is a large book, and I’m only about half through it now — somewhere in the early 19th Century. Language is used in a more familiar manner than the earliest essays I read. I get some of the jokes. I recognize some of the names dropped (they did that then, too!). But it is kind of heavy reading. You can’t skim these essays. So at the same time I was wandering through the history of the essay, I picked up a book by one of the best modern practitioners of the art, David Sedaris’ latest effort, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.
I love Sedaris’ sense of humor, the irreverence with which he treats even dead relatives, and his wacky take on the world as it is today, or yesterday, or may be tomorrow. This isn’t his funniest book — I didn’t laugh out loud as often as I did in Me Talk Pretty One Day. But I’ve noticed his most recent work has less guffaw and more poignancy. Some of it elicits a sweet smile, even a little wistfulness.
What’s really interesting is I can see — having just finished the William Hazlitt section and entered the 1800s — the relationship between the old and the new. Hazlitt’s essay The Fight was entertaining, engaging, funny. Other of his works are long and meandering — On The Pleasure of Hating comes to mind.
Lopate says that there are a few exceptional essays to come — he mentions specific titles by James Baldwin and EB White. I’m curious to see if those who wrote in the last century are as relatable as Sedaris and the current cohort of essayists. I’ll let you know when I find out.
