The essay is a European form, originating in the writings of Montesquieu and Bacon, but of late it has come to seem something of an American speciality. Certainly, there is no equivalent of, say, John McPhee, writing in the UK (McPhee’s books aren’t even published in Britain). And a big-name popular novelist like Michael Chabon wouldn’t suddenly produce two collections of essays in rapid succession (Maps and Legends, 2008; Manhood for Amateurs, 2009).
I have puzzled over whether there is something peculiarly American in the writing of essays. Ever since the Puritans there has been a confessional strand in American writing that does not sit easily with British writers; maybe that’s it. It may not be entirely coincidental that America also has a tradition of very personal journalism (Hunter S, Thompson, new journalism) that never took off to the same extent in the UK; America even has the concept of ‘creative non-fiction’ (see Richard Powers’ superb novel Generosity) which is more or less a contradiction in terms on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe that’s it?
But I don’t think so. I think the difference comes down to nothing more than the availability of publication.
In the UK you can write a political essay for Prospect or the occasional newspaper, you can write a literary essay (though more usually a review essay) for The London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement or the Saturday Guardian. But that pretty much exhausts the options. We don’t have the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books or Atlantic or Harper’s or … or … Magazines like The Strand or Blackwells or the various magazines produced by Charles Dickens that provided such a wealth of short stories and essays throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, have virtually all gone. Nowadays we have Granta, but that is trying, alone, to do the equivalent job of MacSweeney’s and Conjunctions and The Mississippi Review and heaven knows how many other such journals across the States. Yes, of course, British writers who have made a name for themselves already are pretty welcome in most of these transatlantic journals, but there is no place for anyone who might consider starting out as an essayist. And even those writers who like the essay form (as I do, for instance) are far more likely to wait until commissioned rather than write an essay on spec.
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One of my Christmas presents this year was a copy of The Tree by John Fowles. It is a new edition of an essay originally published in 1979 to accompany a book of photographs. Fowles wrote a lot of such essays; I already possess volumes on Stonehenge and on Islands (the latter featuring photographs by Fay Godwin), but I had somehow missed The Tree.
Fowles is one of my two favourite mainstream novelists of the 20th century (the other is William Golding). I met Fowles once (at a party hosted by the formidable Livia Gollancz in the late-80s), but to my abiding regret, I never met Golding. Golding was am extraordinary novelist (is there anything to match The Spire or Pincher Martin?) but when he turned to the essay (The Hot Gates, An Egyptian Journal) the results are rather disappointing. Fowles was a similarly overwhelming novelist (The Magus blew my mind when I first read it, and The Ebony Tower remains one of my favourites) but when he turned to the essay he seemed to really find his métier. I had to read the novels first, but it was only when I discovered his non-fiction that I think I really began to appreciate not only the power and beauty of his prose but also the complexity of what he was trying to do.
(A word of warning: do not take these comments to extend to his volume of philosophical aphorisms, The Aristos, which easily beats out Mantissa as the worst thing he ever committed to print.)
The Tree is possibly Fowles at his very best, because it combines the two things that mattered most to him: nature and writing.
He begins by examining a distinction between himself and his father. Both of them loved growing things, but his father was besotted by his garden, an ordered and controlled place. There were trees in his suburban garden, apples and pears, that produced glorious fruit, but at the expense of being espaliered, pruned, trained. Fowles’ own garden in Lyme Regis was wild. There were trees, but they were left to grow at will. Whether the fruit was any good is irrelevant (he makes no mention here of ever reaping the harvest of his garden, though you do find references to it in his journals), it is untamed nature that he adores. He tells a story of when the family were evacuated to Dorset during the war: they had nature on their doorstep, filled with the trees and flowers that his father loved, but his father could not wait to run back to his tamed and ordered garden in the suburbs.
This distinction, between the wild and the tamed, between the natural tree and the espaliered tree, becomes the shaping metaphor of the whole essay. He extends this into a distinction between the act of acquisition and the thing acquired, between the act of creation and the thing created. And from this he goes on to talk about his own writing, which he sees as a wild and natural thing as compared to the pruned and espaliered writing of so many of his literary contemporaries.
Always the essay shifts, from that point on, between the wild place and the tended garden and writing. He tells about his father’s reaction to the success of his first novel, The Collector, a response full of doubt and uncertainty and distrust. Yet the father then produces a piece of his own writing, an attempt at a novel that John Fowles had known nothing about before. And it is, predictably, bad, too neat, too controlled, it is a garden not a wild place.
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Have you ever read Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. If you have not, you should do so. No, more than that, you should go away right this moment and read it now, I’ll wait.
Mythago Wood is one of the most significant works of the English fantastic, more significant, I feel, that Tolkien and all his clones. At the heart of Mythago Wood is a stand of primeval woodland still extant and untouched, and within the wood (which proves to be many times larger on the inside than it appears from without) are to be found the rough, crude, ill-formed figures who would be smoothed and softened into the familiar characters of English mythology. The wild, again, as opposed to the tame. It is a powerful work that draws you inexorably into a new appreciation of what the fantastic can do.
Mythago Wood began as a novella in 1981, was expanded into a novel in 1984, and then gave rise to a series of other novels that were tangential to the original theme. The last in the sequence, Avilion, appeared shortly before his untimely death in 2009.
I feel that Holdstock must have read Fowles’s essay, which first appeared in 1979. Because in the final section of the essay Fowles writes about Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor:
But then suddenly, like a line of hitherto concealed infantry, huddled under the steepest downward fall of the slope near the bottom, what we have come for emerges from the low grass and ling: a thin, broken streak of tree-tops, a pale arboreal surf. For me this secret wood, perhaps the strangest in all Britain, does not really rise like a line of infantry. It rises like a ghost. (85)
Already, in this introduction, this secret, strange, ghost-like wood has much of the atmosphere that would emerge in ‘Mythago Wood’ only two years later. But then, Fowles tells us a little more:
In scientific terms it is an infinitely rare fragment of primeval forest, from some warmer phase of world climate, that has managed to cling on – though not without some remarkable adaptations – in this inhospitable place; and even more miraculously managed to survive the many centuries of human depredation of anything burnable on the Moor. Culturally it is comparable with a great Neolithic site: a sort of Avebury of the tree, an Ur-wood. (87)
Holdstock knew of Wistman’s Wood. I know this because when I read this passage to my wife, she recalled Rob talking about it. He recalled going there once with the idea of filming something in connection with Mythago Wood, but he had forgotten one of the most salient features about Wistman’s Wood: the ancient oaks that make up this preserved woodland are all stunted, none grows higher than five metres.
I don’t know if Robert Holdstock ever met John Fowles, but they would have had much in common. Both had a love of wild places, of the woodland over the garden. So we are left with this intriguing thought: did Holdstock read this essay? And did it feed into the ideas for Mythago Wood?
Great post/posts. Mythago Wood sounds like something I need to check out.
And I’ve noticed the same thing you have in terms of American essay writing, and I wonder if you might be on to something with the American confessional streak thing vs. British stoicism. Availability has something to do with it, certainly, but surely there’s something so American about the wave of memoir and essay and reality tv with tell all, bare all spirit that maybe scares off everyone on the other side of the pond with aspirations in self-reflection–even the Montaigne-style essay being lumped in with all the rest as a kind of American cesspool of narcissism.
Thanks, and I do urge everyone to check out Mythago Wood. For anyone who thinks of fantasy as a safe, controlled, conservative literature, of good vs evil, of the rightful king restored, this novel will have a salutary effect. It is rough, crude, draws no distinction between good and evil, and goes right to the core of the human imagination.
As for the confessional essay, we’re less stoic than we like to pretend, but we are very nervous about revealing ourselves. But, as in so many things, that trend is coming in from America. We now have far too many reality TV shows clogging up far too much of our schedules, and consequently more and more people are willing to do the most ridiculous and demeaning things in order to appear on the box and hence, they think, become a star. Whether this urge to self exposure will also bring in its train a new fashion for essay writing remains to be seen, but I rather doubt it. Those who want to expose themselves on TV don’t seem to have any interest or ability when it comes to exposing themselves in print; and vice versa.
I really enjoyed the bit about Fowles and his father and his seemingly reactionary way of being in regard to his father.
Well, let’s not forget about Montaigne, whose Essais provides at least one major model for the contemporary essay. There’s a really great piece by Phillip Lopate in Harper’s (January, 2011), wherein he discusses the formative influence Montaigne had on Emerson. According to Lopate, Montaigne’s essays “meander conversationally,” while Emerson’s are “chiseled, taut.” He also goes to great length talking about how Emerson’s journals, more than his essays, reflect Montaigne’s “organic, improvisational approach.”
I think it’s accurate to say that the essay is used, and often abused, here in America, especially in its conventional so-called confessional modes. But for every hundred masturbatory tell-all there has to be at least one brilliant piece of literature by the likes of Lia Purpura, Annie Dillard, William Gass, Jenny Boully, Joan Didion, John D’Agata, and so many others, not to mention ones you can dig up from the grave from writers like David Foster Wallace and Guy Davenport.
And there, John, you lay your finger on so many of the points I was trying to make in the “attempt” portion of my own essay: you reference Harper’s, for which we do not have an equivalent, and list eight great American essayists (which list could be doubled, tripled, without breaking sweat).
No essays don’t have to be confessional (the best generally aren’t, though the best do usually have a very personal aspect); but providing a place for the confessional essay also provides a place for the other essays, the ones we most want to read.
It would be interesting to distinguish the difference between personal and “confessional”. Franzen wrote the most beautiful essay in the new yorker about his complicated relationship with his mother, her death’s affect on him, and bird watching. It was deeply personal, but not “confessional”.
I’d hate to try and quantify that. It’s a cop out, I know, but I think it’s one of those things where you know it when you see it.
Thanks Paul. It’s good to see Fowles brought up. I loved the Ebony Tower too, especially that mystery of the missing man. The story where the young ruffian burns the writer’s manuscript almost seems like a non-fiction piece. Did that happen?
I’ve had some friends read Daniel Martin, but I did not make it through.
[...] 1: The Rapture by Liz Jensen –- reviewed at SF Site 2: Slightly Behind and to the Left by Claire Light – I really didn’t like this, the writing was thin, I felt uninvolved (actually I felt like the characters, often first-person narrators, were uninvolved), and the situations were not explored to any degree that felt satisfactory. 3: The Secret History of Science Fiction edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel –- reviewed at Strange Horizons 4: Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman –- reviewed at SF Site and in Interzone 5: Finding Words by Karen Anne Mitchell –- occasionally fine writing put at the service of a schematic plot with a penchant for soft porn that the author seems to have explored in several books before this. I was distinctly underwhelmed. 6: Lifelode by Jo Walton –- reviewed at Strange Horizons 7: Ooku, volume 1 by Fumi Yoshinaga –- the joint Tiptree winner, and well worth it. 8: Ooku, volume 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga –- the joint Tiptree winner, and well worth it. 9: Ice Song by Kirsten Imani Kasai –- starts well, but gets progressively weaker as it goes along, becoming overly dependent on chance and coincidence to move the plot along. And to be honest I never believed in the sub-arctic setting or any of the characters, it seemed mostly an excuse to use fairy tales as a model for a non fairy story, and those sorts of things take a lot more skill to pull off than Kasai displays here. 10: Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts –- I’m not a great fan of Adam’s fiction, and though I enjoyed this a lot more than I usually like Roberts’s fiction, I still had major problems with it, mostly with the characters. There is one major character who suffers from a curious mash-up of asperger’s syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder; yet every character talks as if they have the same problem. There are no conversations in the book, people talk to display their own ironic cleverness not to listen to what anyone else has to say. And everything is over-emphasised. We have the central character going on with some variant on the excluded middle argument so repetitively that when the multi-worlds twist comes the reaction is not: oh, that’s a neat twist, but rather: oh, that explains why he was going on about excluded middles at such tedious length. 11: Under the Rose edited by David Hutchinson –- reviewed at SF Site 12: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon – reviewed at SF Site. 13: Cold Earth by Sarah Moss –- reviewed at Strange Horizons. 14: Makers by Cory Doctorow – reviewed at SF Site. 15: The Utopian Vision of H.G. Wells by Justin E.A. Busch – and 16: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells –- jointly reviewed at SF Site. 17: The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe –- reviewed in Interzone (along with an interview with Wolfe). Not, by any means, as bad as some of the early reviews have made out, but Wolfe is certainly going through a fallow patch at the moment. 18: Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson –- reviewed at SF Site. 19: Point Omega by Don DeLillo –- which I wrote about at Big Other. 20: Solar by Ian McEwan –- personally I prefer McEwan when he’s doing this stuff seriously (Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday) than when he’s repeating it all for laughs, mostly because McEwan is no more a natural comedian than I am. 21: Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt –- a pedestrian re-working of familiar time travel paradoxes. 22: Mind Over Ship by David Marusek –- which I wrote about here. 23: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer –- which I wrote about at Big Other. 24: Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville –- reviewed at SF Site. 25: A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow – in the end I think it revealed a man who was able, adept, and quite as clever as I had always imagined. 26: Pinion by Jay Lake –- reviewed at Strange Horizons. 27: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest –- covered in these posts at Big Other. 28: Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds –- reviewed at SF Site. 29: Cheek By Jowl by Ursula K. Le Guin –- and 30: Imagination/Space by Gwyneth Jones –- reviewed jointly at Strange Horizons. 31: Into Your Tent by John L. Ingham –- revied for Vector, I begin my review by asking do we need a biography of Russell, and if so is this the review we need. Let’s say I’m undecided on the first part and very decided on the second. 32: Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress –- It starts out derivative but interesting, then all the interest is frittered away. 33: Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson –- which I wrote about in these posts at Big Other. 34: News of the Black Feast by Brian Stableford –- and 35: Jaunting on the Scoriac Tempests by Brian Stableford –- and 36: Gothic Grotesques by Brian Stableford –- jointly reviewed for Science Fiction Studies, poorly proof read or copy-edited collections of often over-wrought reviews. 37: Metrophilias by Brendan Connell –- which I wrote about at Big Other. 38: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi –- which I wrote about in these posts at Big Other. 39: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang –- reviewed at SF Site. 40: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell –- which I wrote about at Big Other. 41: The Rocket’s Red Glare by David M. Peak –- which I wrote about at Big Other. 42: Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber –- reviewed in Interzone, and a reminder of just how good Leiber could be. 43: Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker –- a biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, practically the first woman in Britain to have books published under her own name, constant critic of the Royal Society, instigator of a rather eccentric theory of knowledge and author of the very eccentric science fiction novel Blazing World (1666). One of the more colourful characters from that extraordinarily colourful period the Interregnum and the Restoration, she was also highly intelligent and yet had to spend her whole life battling against the conception that as a woman she really couldn’t be that intelligent. Although not quite the groundbreaking proto-feminist that some modern commentators describe, she is still a fascinating person to read about. This biography (clearly based on a thesis) is rather pedestrian in its account of her life, but very good in its account of her ideas and her writing. 44: Wolfsangel by M.D. Lachlan –- reviewed at Strange Horizons. 45: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi –- reviewed for Vector, and a book I didn’t like anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to have. 46: The Legions of Fire by David Drake –- reviewed for Bull Spec, okay-ish but very predictable fantasy redeemed by a quite well done setting in a version of early 1st century Rome. 47: The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon –- I enjoyed (with reservations) his previous novel, but this one is rather too obviously trying to pull the same trick. It even has a return visit to that wonderfully Borgesian invention: the library of lost books. It’s a mixture of grand guignal and spirit of place, with the now rather commonplace conceit of being all about writing a mixture of grand guignal and spirit of place. In sum: it’s about 100 pages too long (the middle section in particular drags in places and could profit from trimming) but at its best, especially the first section, it is every bit as good as its predecessor. 48: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel –- which inspired this post at Big Other. 49: Sunnyside by Glen David Gold –- the long-awaited follow-up to Carter Beats the Devil, and I found, as with Zafon, that he is trying too hard to recapture some of the feel of the first book, with the inevitable result that it doesn’t quite work. 50: H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life by Michael Sherborne –- reviewed for LA Review of Books. I suspect Wells lived far too many lives to ever fit within the covers of one biography. Sherborne presents a narrative approach that tries to bring all the different facets of Wells together into one coherent tale, and though it works pretty well you still end up feeling that there are inevitably bits that get away. 51: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald –- reviewed at SF Site. 52: Return by Peter S. Beagle –- reviewed at Strange Horizons. 53: Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears –- which prompted this post at Big Other. 54: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers –- my annual Wimsey, not one of the best. 55: The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas –- I don’t really see why everyone went ga-ga over the book, it strikes me as a rather messy generic mash-up. The old bit of advice to crime writers used to be that when things slowed down, have someone walk in with a gun. Thomas seems to have updated that advice: when things slow down, have someone walk in with a new genre. For me the book was pleasingly but not brilliantly written, and the plot was incoherent. 56: Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos – the book that finally gave me a way in to my review of the McDonald. 57: Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction by John Rieder –- reviewed for Foundation. 58: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks –- reviewed in Interzone, overlong, vivid, readable and something of a mess. 59: Generosity by Richard Powers –- my book of the year, reviewed at Strange Horizons. 60: Sacred Space by Douglas E. Cowan –- reviewed for Bull Spec. A study of the idea of transcendence in science fiction (mostly sf film and television, though there is a very interesting discussion of the different approaches to religion in the novel and film versions of The War of the Worlds). There’s good stuff in here, but I was distinctly inclined to argue with it on a lot of points. 61: Bearings by Gary K. Wolfe –- reviewed at SF Site. 62: The Infinity Box by Kate Wilhelm –- which inspired this post at Big Other. 63: The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot –- which inspired this post at Big Other. 64: Defined by a Hollow by Darko Suvin –- reviewed for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, which I’ve described as the most difficult, the most troubling, the book I argued with and fought with from first page to last, but still my non-fiction book of the year. 65: An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley –- just one of the great plays. 66: Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan –- reviewed for Interzone, and another of my books of the year. 67: The Secret History of Fantasy edited by Peter S. Beagle –- and another big review for what is in one respect a superb collection of stories, but in another a very partial and flawed account of what fantasy is. 68: Nexus: Ascension by Robert Boyczuk –- reviewed for The New York Review of Science Fiction, a first novel that is very weak in the first half and quite a bit better in the second, though the plot still doesn’t make any sense. 69: Search for Philip K. Dick by Anne R. Dick –- reviewed for SF Site, a revised edition of the memoir that was a primary text for most of the biographies. 70: A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson –- which inspired this post at Big Other. 71: 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin –- reviewed for Strange Horizons, a sort of festschrift, the most interesting thing contained within it is what appears to be an extract from a biography by Julie Phillips. 72: Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages –- and 73: Stable Strategies and Others by Eileen Gunn –- two collections I’ve been meaning to read for ages, both by authors who are far less productive than they should be, even though in both collections you can see the same themes and approaches recurring. And both collections contain makeweight stories that the books could have done without. 74: The Tree by John Fowles –- which inspired this post at Big Other. [...]