Unless It Moves the Human Heart (6 page)

“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-bomb 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.

“It’s certainly true that memory is no protection against pain,” Donna says. “It usually causes pain. But I’ve often wondered if this wasn’t a good thing, after all. Even if you dream up a painful memory, it’s only the facts you’re distorting, never the feeling. In some ways, I think we punish ourselves with memory, to feel as deeply as we can, to feel pain.”

“Like
The Pawnbroker
,” says Veronique, referring to the story of the former concentration camp prisoner who pushes his hand down into the long metal pike that holds store receipts, in order to feel anything again.

“But if memories are fiction and personal essays are made of memories,” says Inur, “then we’re back to no difference between short stories and essays.”

“Except,” says Nina, “that we
believe
our memories to be true. We don’t consciously invent them.”

“I think we may use memory in essays to appear better than we are,” says Sven, “even when we paint ourselves as fools or cowards. The recognition of foolishness or cowardice becomes an exhibition of bravery. We fess up. We look good.”

“So we create a sympathetic character in ourselves,” says Robert, “remembering ourselves as worse than we actually were.”

“I think memory is like the imagination,” says Diana. Veronique, George, and Jasmine murmur assent. “We remember some things the way we wish they had been, facts suiting our feelings.”

“We may be better off
not
remembering when writing a personal essay—at least not making the whole essay out of memory.” They ask me what a personal essay should be made of, if not memory. “Something new, something not seen by the writer before. If you try to write an essay about the house you grew up in, you’ll only get so far before you start to repeat yourself and run out of steam. But if you begin your essay in a new house, something you’re seeing for the first time, your writing will be full of surprises. It will be alive. After you’ve written about the new house, you then can go back to the old one.”

“That’s what happens in real life—whatever that may be,” says Suzanne. “You see something new and it triggers the memory of something in the past. But that’s mysterious, too. It’s as if you deliberately came upon the new site in order to bring something back.”

“ ‘The muffled mystery of lost paradises.’ ” They look curious. “It’s a phrase in Dan Halpern’s book about writers talking about painters. Camus is writing of Balthus. He says that the most ordinary daily things are heaving with past mysteries.”

“Not always,” says Diana. “Whenever I’m looking for a subject, I usually screw it up. I think: There must be something in that flower, in that bridge, to carry me into a thought. And as soon as I do that, I fail. The muffled mystery to me is what we were talking about with our short stories—how subjects come to you out of nowhere.”

“Because we trust invisible things,” says Veronique.

“You know,” says Robert, “in reading my classmates’ essays, I found that I liked them as people. And I wondered if that was important in the writing of personal essays—to establish yourself as likable.”

“Well, you wouldn’t want to confuse the charming, delightful, brilliant first persons in your essays with the despicable idiots who wrote them . . .” A round of boos and hisses. “But yes, definitely. If you create a likable ‘I’ in your essays, the readers will trust you. After that you can take them anywhere.”

“There are several ways to be likable,” says Inur. “You can be strong-likable, intelligent-likable—”

“Weak-likable,” says Jasmine.

“You mean human, frail, vulnerable? You’re so right. There’s nothing like the confession of human frailty to draw the reader straight to you. Any of you ever read Edwin Muir’s
Autobiography
?” They have not. I urge them to get it, not only because Muir writes about himself so gracefully, but also for its appeal to common human frailty. Reluctantly, Muir undergoes psychoanalysis. But through it he finds out something indispensable and right: “I saw that my lot was the human lot, that when I faced my own unvarnished likeness I was one with all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs.”