Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  The main reason I reread their work has to do with the way they think of themselves. The other night, Helen Simonson, a graduate of our program, gave a reading from her novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, which has become a great critical and commercial success. Helen was my student many years ago, and because she had a family to tend to, it took her all those years to finish her book. Before proceeding to read, she told the audience that what she cherished most about our MFA writing program is that the teachers made her feel like a colleague while she was becoming one. In that, she offered the best reason for rereading the students’ work. I simply want to show them that I think enough of them to dwell on what they write. All the teachers in our program do the same. Bob Reeves, who shapes and leads the program, has done many remarkable things, but none more useful than this—to encourage us to make the students feel alive and significant in a world that tells them they don’t count. A student in a novella class I taught a while back said to me, with a sort of wonder, “How do you remember all our stories? You seem to recall every character, every detail.” I may seem to, but after a semester is over, I rarely remember most of the things written for a particular class. For the time I am teaching them, however, I want the students to feel that their work is the most important thing on earth. When a few of them become real writers, they will know the deep abiding pleasure of hearing a stranger quote a line of theirs. I like to give them a foretaste of that.

  “How many novelists can you name?” I ask the group at our seventh meeting. It is endless March, the heart of the bleak season on eastern Long Island. Only the lights from the college buildings, blazing in the dark, suggest life. “How many novelists can you name?” Some of them are counting on their fingers.

  “Twenty,” says Inur.

  “Oh, you can name many more than that. Don’t you think you could name at least fifty?”

  “I suppose,” she says.

  “A thousand,” said Diana, full of mischief.

  “Go ahead, Diana,” says George. “And do it alphabetically.”

  “Aaron Aardvark,” says Diana. “The great novelist of the Antilles.”

  “Abyssinia,” Jasmine corrects her.

  “While we’re waiting for Diana’s novelists beginning with B, how many essayists can you name?”

  “You,” says Kristie.

  “That’s one. The last shall be first. Name another essayist.”

  “Bacon,” says Sven.

  “That’s two.” A long silence follows.

  “Emerson,” says Suzanne.

  “And his delightful walking companion, Thoreau,” says Diana.

  “So we’re up to four, if you still count me, and I wouldn’t. But I would count Montaigne. And Orwell. And G. K. Chesterson—you should read Chesterson’s ‘A Piece of Chalk.’ James Baldwin wrote some remarkable essays. Mary McCarthy, too. And Annie Dillard. And let’s throw in Twain. We’re up to a whopping dozen. My little point is that you can hardly name a dozen essayists in all of history, not because there weren’t a dozen, but rather because the essay is the weak sister of genres.”

  “But I like essays,” says Jasmine.

  “So do I. It’s just that if you had to be locked away with one piece of writing as your company, it probably would not be an essay.”

  “Why is that?” Robert asks. “Because the other forms are livelier?”

  “Beerbohm is pretty lively,” says George.

  “But not like Dr. Zhivago, or The Tempest, or anything by Yeats,” says Robert.

  What we’re saying about essays is true, but you can still approach them in ways that are fun for the students. In a course I teach exclusively on the personal essay, I have the students write essays in the form of a menu, a kiss-off letter, a school song, a stand-up comic routine, and a will and testament. “Let’s get down to cases. What is an essay?”

  “It’s not a short story,” says George. “We’ve been over that—how an essay deals with something that really happened.”

  “Oh, please let’s not get into that again,” says Suzanne, referring to a discussion that occurred at our third meeting in anticipation of their writing their personal essays. “I didn’t get the distinction the first time, and I won’t get it now. I just know an essay and a short story when I see one. Can’t we leave it at that? For once?” Everyone laughs.

  “You know, George, I used to feel sorry for Suzie, married to you. Now I’m beginning to see your side of the story.”

  “Of the essay,” says Suzanne.

  “It’s not a column, is it?” asks Inur.

  “No, it is not. And you’re smart to bring that up. Because people often call newspaper columns essays. They’re not essays. Picture an actual column, an architectural column—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. Remember them? A column in a magazine or a newspaper reads from top to bottom the way you might look at a stone column. It proceeds downward from its topic sentence, and you read it in a straight, unswerving line to its conclusion. There are no detours, no digressions. But an essay requires digressions, depends on them for total effect. A digression in an essay is like a riff in a blues song. It flies off from the basic theme or tune and then when it has created something wonderful out of itself, it returns to base, which in turn feels changed, heightened, because of the digression.”

  “Like comic relief,” says Donna.

  “Precisely like comic relief. Imagine King Lear without the Fool. At first you think, what’s this Fool sticking his Fool’s nose into the play? Then you see the play cannot go on without him. In a way, it’s the digression of the Fool that makes Lear tragic.”

  I ask if they recall the scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden attends a speech class. The teacher tells the kids to yell, “Digression! Digression!” whenever a student speaker wanders from his main topic. “What’s Salinger saying here?”

  “That digressions are the only interesting parts,” says George. In the novel he is working on, the hero’s name is Holden.

  “But you can’t just digress and digress,” says Ana. “You’ll lose the thread. You’ll fly off into space.”

  “Also like the blues,” says Kristie. “You can go away from the tune for just so long, but no longer. Otherwise you’ll forget the tune. So will the listener. So will the reader.” My thumbs go up again.

  “Whatever the subject, we always seem to come around to denigrating journalism,” says Nina. “That is, you do.”

  “I know. And I’d be ashamed of myself if I were capable of human feelings. And in fact I admire lots of journalists. But what they do is not what writers do. As you have already discovered, there’s a mystery to the act of writing. You write, yet you don’t always understand what you’ve written. And you’re not always understood. And you’re never fully understood. And this is a good thing—dwelling in and creating mysteries. But in a column, or an editorial, or a news article, you must be understood, clearly and completely. Your words convey a subject. They are about something. In real writing the words drift away from the subject. Journalism is communication. It delivers information, even in the form of ideas. If you only do that, you’re not writing.”

  “But don’t you think writers need to be in touch with the world?” asks Robert.

  I tell him I do think so, but that writers have their own way of being in touch. When Richard Wright wrote Native Son, he was certainly in touch with the world of racism, but what gives the book its lasting power is that it is a work of art, and not a polemic. The fact that Bigger Thomas semi-accidentally suffocates the Dalton girl makes him a target for all the categorical hatreds of the time. But when he murders his girlfriend and throws her down a shaft, he becomes a willing killer, and thus oddly more human. James Baldwin took Wright to task for his later books that were nakedly political, because they were too much in touch with the times, and they surrendered to them. The healthiest relationship between a writer and his world is a vague one, not tethered to specific incidents or specific causes, but rather one that uses those specifics to discl
ose an abstract truth. Pure thought is contaminated by the news, and by history, too. The real writer uses history only as a moral reminder. He is in touch with the world in his heart. And the world of events is of no greater or lesser inspiration to him than the wings of a katydid.

  “Look at the opening of Jasmine’s essay. It contains the world, but also so much more.” Jasmine reads her first paragraph aloud for us:

  As I sit in my modern English and Irish drama course, I discuss, in a detached manner, my paper topic—the importance of myth and metaphor in Yeats’s plays Cathleen ni Houlihan and On Baile’s Strand, and in Synge’s Riders to the Sea. A topic my professor says is too broad and would be more specific if I focused on the importance of the sea; fertile ground, if I decide to make it my master’s thesis. In a hushed way, I mention that I have already begun my master’s thesis, although not to the extent I should have. She asks me what my thesis is, and I explain it is on Adinkra symbols. “Where are they from?” she asks. “Ghana,” I answer. She muses a bit about how she’s never heard of the topic. I bemoan the work that will have to go into it, considering I have hardly started and it’s due in May. “You’ll have to go to Ghana.” She laughs, and as if I had not remembered myself, I say that I have, and that is where I got the idea.

  “That’s really great,” says Suzanne. “It gives everything about her, including attitude.”

  “It’s such a delicate piece of writing,” says Ana. “So clean and quiet. I love this essay.”

  “Okay,” says George. “So what is an essay? We’ve still not defined the thing itself.”

  “The word comes from France,” says Veronique. “As all good things do.” She puts on a French smirk. “Essayer—to try.”

  “Very good, Veronique. An essay is an attempt. What’s that all about? Poems, plays, novels, do something, accomplish something. But an essay only tries?” They are quiet.

  “Maybe the trying in an essay is what the writer wants to do,” says Sven. “He wants to show that he’s trying to work his way through something.”

  “A thought,” says Inur.

  “A thought. And that’s the feeling we get in reading an essay, is it not—that the writer is attempting to discover meaning as he goes along.”

  “It’s what Jasmine gives us, too,” says Robert. “The student working her way through the student’s life, perhaps toward something more important.”

  “So the genre is more modest than the others?” says Nina.

  “If not,” says Inur, “it certainly appears more modest.”

  “Good. Because there’s a bit of subterfuge here. Usually the essayist knows pretty much where he’s going at the outset. Virginia Woolf knew how big she was going to make her moth when she sat down to write. Yet she wanted to create the impression of learning as she went along.” The Woolf essay I refer to is “The Death of the Moth.” The Max Beerbohm essay George referred to is “On Taking a Walk.” I gave the students both pieces to read at the last meeting, along with Gayle Pemberton’s “Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?”

  “I think essays are a con game,” says Suzanne.

  “Definitely,” says Diana. “Look at the essays we’ve read for class. Beerbohm is making fun of those who say that walking is a profound experience. He says he never took a walk in his life, though he has been forced to take one. Woolf begins by saying the moth she’s observing is so insignificant, it doesn’t deserve the name of moth. It’s hardly worth her notice.”

  “They’re both setting us up,” says Sven.

  “That’s right,” says Inur. “Both writers are telling us they are not writing about anything that matters.”

  “Yet at the end of the diatribe against taking a walk,” says Ana, “Beerbohm says that the very essay we’re reading—‘such as it is’—was written during the course of a walk.”

  “And Woolf’s moth,” says Jasmine, “in its futile battle to stay alive, to stave off death, has grown to the size of a Greek hero.”

  “Is this what is meant by the attempt of an essay?” says Ana.

  “I think so. In the essays we most enjoy, we get the feeling—deliberately created by the essayist—that he is being taken on a guided tour of an idea, and that we are along—”

  “For the walk,” says Kristie.

  “Is Beerbohm’s essay a satire?” asks Donna.

  “You tell me. If it’s a satire, what is it satirizing?”

  “Walking?” says Robert.

  “Other essays about walking?” says Ana.

  “Who wrote a famous essay on walking?” I ask.

  “Thoreau,” says Veronique.

  “So is Beerbohm satirizing the serious advocates of taking a walk?” They ponder the matter. “What is satire?”

  “Making fun of something,” says Kristie.

  “That’s the start of a definition. But the satirist is serious too. He’s using laughter to get at the seriousness of something he truly believes. Look at Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Here’s the situation: The English are starving out the Irish. Swift, like others, was outraged, perhaps because he was both English and Irish. So what does he do? If he’d written a table-pounding tract on the immorality of the English, how effective would it have been?”

  “Not,” says Inur.

  “But offer up the proposition that if the Irish would just cook and eat their babies, it would put an end to the starvation problem, and everyone sees what is happening.”

  “Because of laughter,” says Suzanne.

  “Because of laughter,” says Robert. “Hard, bitter laughter.”

  “Yet the starvation of the Irish was an important issue,” says Diana. “Not like Beerbohm. Whether or not you take a walk is just a little joke, a poke at conventional wisdom.”

  “Aha. So let’s return to Donna’s question. Is Beerbohm’s essay a satire?”

  “No,” says Kristie. “The subject is too light.”

  “A satire should attack something important,” says Sven.

  “Which means,” says George, “the satirist must believe in something important the way an essayist does, yet turn it into a joke.”

  “Good for you, George. No, I don’t think old Max’s essay rises to the level of satire. He’s just having fun. But you’re right to make the connection of satire with the essay, because satire is an essay. Only it stands on its head, and sticks out its tongue.”

  I suggest that there is a fragment of an essay in every form of writing. At some moment in the making of a piece, the playwright, novelist, or poet must think his way through or into an action. He must explain something. He must take a breath to make sure he’s being clear, or that he himself understands what he’s saying. Shakespeare does this with soliloquies. Shaw disguised long essays as his plays. “Have you read Adrienne Rich’s ‘Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law’?” I ask the group. “It’s a very good poem, about being a woman. It moves from scene to scene, from snapshot to snapshot. And it piles wonderful images upon one another. But near the end of the poem, it becomes pure essay. It is as if the poet cannot help herself. After all the elliptical beauty of the snapshots, she must now say plainly what she means.”

  Suzanne’s essay, on her father, evokes a place and an era, which gives us everything essential about herself:

  For Dad, I was a boy camouflaged beneath a girl’s facade. Dad’s ninth birthday gift of boxing gloves and speed bag topped his other Christmas presents: a windup metal PT for the tub and a GI utility belt complete with canteen, bayonet, and combat helmet. Since he’d shown up in my life eight years late, our sparring was as natural as lava eruptions. After arguments Dad looked at me as if he saw an infinite overlay of images twin mirrors make when they face each other. Acknowledging my pugilistic talents, he decided training me in manly arts would develop our relationship. He explained he was just getting me “battle tough” to meet life and the advancing “Rooskie” menace. While converting Gramps’ root cellar into a shelter, a task somehow sensibly fitting between school air raid drills and H-bo
mb tests, he asked me to punch out the lights of neighborhood bullies. Preparing me to bloody boys’ noses was a thing so forbiddingly delicious I even forgot how silly red eight-ounce mitts with white trim and laces looked on me. The footwork part was exactly like all the dancing I’d done in Grandpa’s garage. Turned into my corner/cut man, Dad became the promoter for the only female boxer in anyone’s memory.

  Everyone likes Suzanne’s use of “camouflaged” in connection with the “canteen, bayonet, and combat helmet.” We also like the use of the twin mirror images, and its underlying implication. We cite her use of “Rooskie”—how complete a picture it paints of the time and her old man. “As for your new old man, now I understand why he’s so respectful of you.”

  “Bet your ass,” says Suzanne, holding her fists in a boxer’s stance.

  Suzanne’s essay depends on the power of memory. We discuss the idea of memory and how it affects and infuses the writing of personal essays. “Do we ever remember something as it really was? And when we discover that what we thought was an accurate memory turns out to be shockingly false and inaccurate—that left was right, green, brown, two weeks ago, ten years ago, and so forth—what does that mean?”

  “It’s more than that memory is unreliable,” says Nina; “there’s something deliberately distorting about it.”

  “As if what we remember never happened at all,” says Ana. “So a memory isn’t actually remembering anything. More like a story made up of something in the past.”

  “Like a better past,” says Jasmine.

  “No,” says George. “Because memories are not all good.”

  “Most of them are bad,” says Nina, “especially when memory involves our own behavior. It almost always returns as a reproach.”

  “Maybe we want them to be bad,” says Jasmine.

  “They’re never good,” says Ana glumly.