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The Best American Essays 1999 ISBN 13: 9780395860540

The Best American Essays 1999 - Hardcover

 
9780395860540: The Best American Essays 1999
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This year's wonderfully diverse collection, which features such respected writers as Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Mary Gordon, and Arthur Miller. These essays range widely across the American landscape -- from a California monastery to a Manhattan apartment -- and along the way introduce us to a fine array of talented new voices. Called by John Updike "the best essayist of my generation," Hoagland has assembled a powerful volume that vividly showcases the art and craft of the contemporary essay. IN SEARCH OF PROUST by Andre Aciman, TORCH SONG by Charles Bowden, COMPRESSION WOOD by Franklin Burroughs, VISITOR by Michael W. Cox, LAST WORDS by Joan Didion, FOR THE TIME BEING by Annie Dillard, THE METEORITES by Brian Doyle, A LOVELY SORT OF LOWER PURPOSE by Ian Frazier, VICTORIA by Dagoberto Gilb, STILL LIFE by Mary Gordon, A WEEK IN THE WORD by Patricia Hampl, THE COUNTRY BELOW by Barbara Hurd, THE LION AND ME by John Lahr, MAKING IT UP by Hilary Masters, ON THE FEDALA ROAD by John McNeel, AMERICAN HEARTWORM by Ben Metcalf, BEFORE AIR CONDITIONING by Arthur Miller, AFTER AMNESIA by Joyce Carol Oates, THE IMPIOUS IMPATIENCE OF JOB by Cynthia Ozick, PLANET OF WEEDS by David Quammen, ON SILENCE by Daisy Eunyoung Rhau, BEAUTY by Scott Russell Sanders, HITLER'S COUCH by Mark Slouka, WHAT'S INSIDE YOU, BROTHER? by Toure, FOLDING THE TIMES by W. S. Trow.

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About the Author:
Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs African Calliope and Notes from the Century Before, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman s Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West. He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines including Harper s and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker, who now divides his time between Martha s Vineyard and his farmhouse in the mountains in Burton, Vermont.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Introduction: Writers Afoot

Essays are how we speak to one another in print - caroming thoughts
not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but
with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of
public letter. You multiply yourself as a writer, gaining height as
though jumping on a trampoline, if you can catch the gist of what
other people have also been feeling and clarify it for them. Classic
essay subjects, like the flux of friendship, "On Greed," "On
Religion," "On Vanity," or solitude, lying, self-sacrifice, can be
major-league yet not require Bertrand Russell to handle them. A
layman who has diligently looked into something, walking in the
mosses of regret after the death of a parent, for instance, may
acquire an intangible authority, even without being memorably angry
or funny or possessing a beguiling equanimity. He cares; therefore,
if he has tinkered enough with his words, we do too.
An essay is not a scientific document. It can be
serendipitous or domestic, satire or testimony, tongue-in-cheek or a
wail of grief. Mulched perhaps in its own contradictions, it promises
no sure objectivity, just the condiment of opinion on a base of
observation, and sometimes such leaps of illogic or superlogic that
they may work a bit like magic realism in a novel: namely, to
simulate the mind's own processes in a murky and incongruous world.
More than being instructive, as a magazine article is, an essay has a
slant, a seasoned personality behind it that ought to weather well.
Even if we think the author is telling us the earth is flat, we might
want to listen to him elaborate upon the fringes of his premise
because the bristle of his narrative and what he's seen intrigues us.
He has a cutting edge, yet balance too. A given body of information
is going to be eclipsed, but what lives in art is spirit, not
factuality, and we respond to Montaigne's human touch despite four
centuries of technological and social change.
Montaigne's Essais predated by a quarter-century Cervantes's
Don Quixote, which was probably the first novel. And the form of
composition Montaigne gave a name to would not have lasted so long if
it were not succinct, diverse, and supple, able to welcome ideas that
are ahead of or behind the blurring spokes of their own time. But
whereas a novelist is often a trapezist, vaulting from book to book,
an essayist is afoot. Not a puppetmaster or ventriloquist, he will
sound recognizable in his next appearance in print. There is a value
to this, though Don Quixote as a figure outshines any essay.
Imperishably appealing, he is an embodiment, not speculation, and we
can simply call him to mind, much as we remember Conrad's Kurtz, in
Heart of Darkness, and Dickens's Oliver Twist, although the regimes
up the Congo River and in London aren't now the same.
An essayist's materials are drawn primarily from his or her
own life, and he knits a skein of thoughts and impressions, not a
made-up tale. An epic drama such as King Lear is thus not his
province even to dream about. His work is humbler, and our
expectations of him are less elastic than of novelists or poets and
their creations. They can flame out in a flash fire, surreal or
villainous, if the story is compelling or the language smacks a bit
of genius. We accept different behavior from Céline or Genet,
Christopher Smart or Ezra Pound, than from Dr. Johnson. Norman Mailer
can stab his wife and William Burroughs can shoot his, and somehow we
don't blanch. They "needed to," one hears it said. Their imaginations
must have got the better of them. But if an essayist had done the
same it would have queered his legacy. He is supposed to be the voice
of reason. Though modestly chameleon as a monologuist (and however
much he wants to recalibrate it), he is an advocate for civilization.
He doesn't murder a foe in the street, like the sculptor Benvenuto
Cellini, or get himself slain in a tavern brawl, like the playwright
Christopher Marlowe, or gut-shot, like John Ruskin, in a duel. A
murderer or madwoman quarantined in a book on the bedside table can
provide excitation and cautionary reading, but an essayist, being his
own protagonist, should be faceted rather like a friend. We might
give him our keys and put him up in the guest room. He won't be
stealing the silverware and debauching the children, and, after
sleeping on our problems, he will sit at the breakfast table in the
morning sunshine and tell us what we ought to do. Or, at the outside,
if - like the master essayist Charles Lamb - his sister has
slaughtered his mother, he will devote the next thirty-odd years to
piecing together a productive existence for himself and her, not
despairing like an aficionado of the Absurd.
Essayists are not Dadaists, and in the endgame that may be in
progress - with our splintering attention span, our hiccuping
religions, staccato science, and spinning solipsism - they may prove
useful. Do we human beings have a special spark of divinity? And if
so, as we mince our habitat and compress ourselves into ever tighter
spaces, having always claimed that there couldn't be too much of a
good thing, how many of us are finally going to constitute a glut of
divinity? Judeo-Christianity hasn't said. Nor did "the Laws of Nature
and of Nature's God," which Thomas Jefferson invoked at the beginning
of our Declaration of Independence. Or Emerson's rapturous
prescription in Nature in 1836 (Emerson being the other founding
father of essay writing in America) that an intelligent observer
should become "a transparent eye-ball . . . part or particle of God,"
amid nature's ramifying glory. Now, man threatens to become a
divinity doubled, redoubled, and berserk ad nauseam. However, the
essay's brevity, transparency, and versatility should suit this age
of reconsideration.
Essays are a limited genre because the writer will suggest
that life is more than money, for example, without inventing Scrooge;
that brownnosing demeans everybody, without the specter of Uriah
Heep. Candide, Starbuck, Injun Joe, Moll Flanders and Becky Sharp led
lives more far-fetched than an essayist's, whose medium is mostly
what he can testify to having seen or read. Working in the present
tense, with common sense his currency, "This is what I think," he
tells the rest of us. And even if he speaks about alarming omens, we
feel he'll be around tomorrow, not leap headlong into life and burn
to a crisp at thirty-two or twenty-eight, like Hart Crane or Stephen
Crane, or wind up forlorn in a railroad station fleeing his wife, as
Tolstoy did when dying. The limitations are reassuring as well as
tethering.
James Baldwin didn't metamorphose into an arsonist or a
rifleman when he warned against race war in The Fire Next Time. And
George Orwell deconstructed colonialism in essays considerably more
nuanced than Heart of Darkness - supplementing though not supplanting
Kurtz's immortal line "The horror! The horror!" In a way, it's easier
to visit a headwaters area of the Nile or Congo and find conditions
not substantially improved since independence when you've read Orwell
as well as Conrad on human nature, because these nuances prepare you
better for disillusion. Conrad's picture was so stark, surely never
again would the world see comparable scenes!
Ripples sway us - traffic tie-ups on a cloverleaf, on-line
stock swings, revenge-of-the-rain-forest viral escapees - at the same
time that our proud provincialism is called upon to bend the mind
around Islam's surging claims, Latino vigor and disorder, chaos in
Africa, and a Chinese-puzzle future. In a famine belt along the upper
Nile, I've seen child-sized raw-dirt graves scattered everywhere
beside a poignant web of paths of the sort that starving people pace.
A scrap of shirt or broken toy was laid on top of each small mound to
personalize the spot; and hundreds of bony, wobbling children who had
survived so far ran toward me (a white-haired white man) to touch my
hands in hopes that I might somehow be powerful enough to bring in
shipments of food to save their lives. Their urgent smiles were giddy
or delirious in skulls already outlined under tightened skin - though
they were fatalistic, almost docile, too, because so many adults had
told them for so many weeks that there was nothing to eat and so many
people whom they knew had died. I interviewed the Sudanese guerrilla
general who was in charge of protecting them about what could be
done, but he was delayed a little that afternoon because (I found out
later from an Amnesty International report) he had been torturing a
colleague by pounding a nail through his foot.
Now, essayists in dealing with the present tense are stuck
with the nuts and bolts of what's going on. And what do you say about
that endgame on the Nile, which I believe was a forerunner, not an
anomaly? I expect an epidemic of endgames and disintegration in other
forms. Essayists will become "journeymen," in a new definition for
that hackneyed term: out on the rim, seeing what's in store. The
cataract of memoirs being published currently may be a prelude to
this - memoirs of a cascading endgame. Yet essayists are not
nihilists as a rule. They look for context. They feel out traction.
They have a stake in society's survival, breaking into the plot line
of an anecdote to register a reservation about somebody's behavior,
for instance, in a manner that most fiction writers would eschew,
because an essayist's opinions are central, part of the very protein
that he gives us. Not omniscient like a novelist, who can create a
world he wants to work with, he has the job of finding coherence in
the world that we already have. This isn't harder, just a different
task. And he usually comes to it in middle age, having acquired some
ballast of experience and tested views - may indeed have written
several novels, because of the higher glamour and freedom of that
calling. (For what it's worth, I sold my first novel at twenty-one
and wrote my first essay at thirty-five.)
"Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,"
as Picasso said; and to capture within an imagined story some petal
of human longing and defeat is an achievement irresistibly appealing.
Essayists, by denying themselves that license to extravagantly fudge
the facts of firsthand observation, relegate themselves to the Belles
Lettres section of the bookstore, neither fiction nor journalism,
because they do partly fudge their reportage, adding the spice of
temperament and a lifetime's favorite reading. And if an enigma seems
a jigsaw, they will tend to see a picture in it: that life therefore
is not an oubliette. The fracases they get into are on behalf of
democracy, as they see it (Montaigne, Orwell, and Baldwin again are
examples), and their iconoclasm commonly leans toward the ideal
of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," which
journalists used to aspire to. Like a short-story writer, an essayist
is after the gist of life, not Balzacian documentation. And, like a
soothsayer with a chicken's entrails, he will spread his innards out
before us to discern a pattern. Not just confessional, however, a
good essay is driven by the momentum of an inquiry, searching out a
point, such as are we divine? - an awfully big one for a lowly
essayist, but it may be the question of the coming century.
Essayists also go to the fights, or rub shoulders on the
waterfront, get divorced ("Ouch," says the reader, "that was like
mine"), nibble canapés, playing off their preconceptions of a
celebrity or a politician against reality. They will examine a
prejudice (is this piquant or ignoble, educated or soggy?) or dare a
pie in the face for advancing an out-of-fashion idea. Or they may
simply saunter, in Thoreau's famous reading of the word: ŕ la Sainte
Terre, to the Holy Land, or sans terre, at home everywhere - maybe
only to the public library to browse among dead friends. Although a
novelist can blaze along on impetuous obsessions and we will follow
if Scheherazade has set her cap to catch us (and then what
happened?), an essay is a current of thoughts corduroyed with sensory
impressions, an author afoot, solo, with no movie sale in the offing
or hefty hope of fame. Speaking his mind is likely to be a labor of
love, and risky because if a work of fiction flops, at least it's
nominally somebody else's persona that has been boring the reader.
A solo voice welling up from self-generating sources, or what
Thoreau once called an "artesian" life, has not been the dominant
mode of expression for the past half-century, so most of the best
essays have had to find a home in magazines of lesser circulation,
like Harper's, the Village Voice, the American Scholar, Outside, Yale
Review, or the Hungry Mind Review. The first-tier publications had
corporate styles and personalities, each one insisting upon its
editorial "we." But recently publishing has met with such a swirl of
confusion that even flagship magazines have been losing money or
grandiosity and wondering what tack to take. Essays are reappearing
in unexpected places, in National Geographic as well as The New
Yorker, and on the airwaves and in newspapers, as corrective colloquy
or amusing "occasionals." Paralleling the flood of memoirs that are
coming out, the essay form is in revival. And the two genres do
overlap, though for essays a narrative is not an end in itself, as it
can be in a memoir.
A sense of emergency, I suspect, is powering the popularity
of memoirs, the urge for quicker answers than we get from reading
novels: What's happening? How shall we live? Nature, which Jefferson
and Emerson regarded as central to the health of society, is lately
treated as a kind of dewclaw on our collective consciousness. This
will, I think, begin to change in the face of ecological
catastrophes, and essayists will be in on the action again - as they
have attacked so many problems before, from slavery to political
tyranny, in the struggle to preserve civilization from itself. (War
is a "human disease," Montaigne said.)
The most civil of the literary arts, yet also a "book of the
self," "spying on the self from close up," essays are versatile
enough that in the same piece, "Of Experience," in which Montaigne
says that "death mingles and fuses with our life throughout," he
tells us that he can't make love standing up and speaks considerably
about his kidneys, urination, and bodily "wind." Wholehearted,
supple, an essayist over time may tell you everything you might want
to know about him and stretch that measurement a bit, the way a
friend or spouse or partner gradually does, until nothing about the
living package of that person turns you off. If you know the anguish,
joy, and bravery somebody has experienced, you can also share their
episodes of shame and indigestion.
Like you, an essayist struggles with the here and now, the
world we have, with sore and smelly feet and humiliation, a
freethinker but not especially rich or pretty, and quite earthbound,
though at his post. Like Thoreau later on (according to Emerson's
report), ...

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