Essays: Montaigne, Addison, Hazlitt, RLS, Chesterton, Orwell, & More

[Extollager]

This subforum is dedicated to Literary Fiction, but I don't think we have a better place to start a thread on essays.

By essay I'm referring to prose pieces short enough to be read comfortably in an hour or so, usually less. The tone is generally informal; an essay doesn't sound like an oration in print although it may be very serious. But it might be chatty. An essay isn't simply a book review, but a book review might turn into an essay if the author takes the book as the point of departure for the essay. I'd suggest that an essay isn't an editorial column focusing on a specific news item of the day. I'd hesitate to say that an essay may be a manifesto. Is Geoff Ryman's "Mundane Science Fiction Manifesto" an essay?

I hope that the above paragraph is reasonable even thought it is a bit tentative. I've chosen not to look up a definition of the word.

Interested? Let's get started ... somehow.

We have some Chesterton admirers around here -- perhaps they would like to suggest essays by GKC.

Graham Greene wrote "The Lost Childhood." If you've read it, do you remember this passage?--

---“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? . . . It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.”---

Orwell wrote memorable essays. Everyone should know "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language." I'm very fond of "The Moon Under Water" and "A Nice Cup of Tea," which will surprise people who think of Orwell just as an author of terribly grim books. Below are links for "A Hanging," which is fairly grim, and for "A Nice Cup of Tea."

Lord Northbourne was a pioneer in organic gardening. His essay "Flowers" appears to be available only in part, online. See link below. This would be an example of an essay that I've come back to repeatedly.

Among living writers, I'd mention Joseph Epstein as a notable essayist. Below you'll find a link for "Why Madame Bovary Couldn't Make Love in the Concrete."

Epstein's Madame Bovary essay:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/why-madame-bovary-couldnt-make-love-in-the-concrete/

Northbourne's "Flowers," Part 1:

http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/public/articles/Flowers-Part-1-by_Lord_Northbourne.aspx

Orwell's "A Hanging":

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/hanging/english/e_hanging

"A Nice Cup of Tea"

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/tea/english/e_tea

Hazlitt's "My First Acquaintance with Poets":

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/hazlittw/poet.htm

Ryman's Mundane SF Manifesto:

https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Thanks for the link. Orwell's essays are a model of clear writing. I would also say this about C. S. Lewis. (Although those two authors would otherwise agree about hardly anything, I think each would admire the other's avoidance of jargon and vague words.)

This might be a good place for me to discuss my recent reading of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) by Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the Supreme Court Justice of the same name.) This is a very unusual book. It takes the structure of a series of monologues from an unnamed speaker during the morning meal at a boarding house. Once in a while some other inhabitant -- a professor, a schoolmistress, a divinity student, or even a servant -- interrupts with a question or remark. These informal pieces deal with a wide variety of subjects, often changing from one to another with no transition. Often the speaker adds a poem, sometimes of his own or supposedly written by the professor or another fictional person. (These include famous verses such as "The Chambered Nautilus" and "The Deacon's Masterpiece.") Although the author is fond of elaborate metaphors and flowery language, he also deflates his own pretensions by throwing in silly jokes, puns, and sarcastic comments from a young wise guy at the breakfast-table. Eventually the collection of essays actually develops a plot, as a romance develops between the speaker and the schoolmistress. It's a unique, charming book.

Complete text here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/751/751-h/751-h.htm

 

[j d worthington]

This certainly couldn't be read in an hour, or even several... but it is in many ways one of the most stimulating "essays" I've encountered:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030735818;view=1up;seq=15

And there are always the Essays of Elia:

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10343/pg10343-images.html

(The avid reader of Lovecraft may want to look up in particular "Witches, and Other Night-Fears" here)

And Borges is also to be overlooked.

 

[Extollager]

This might be a good place for me to discuss my recent reading of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) by Oliver Wendell Holmes .... It's a unique, charming book.

Thank you for remembering to comment on this. It sounds appealing.

 

[Extollager]

J.D., my omission of Lamb from even such a short indication -- or gesture -- towards who wrote essays, was regrettable! How could I forget? But I did forget.

I'll have to look into Borges as an essayist. I tend to think him overrated as a short story writer, but still --

Cabell probably wasn't the first to write a book-length "essay," but I think usually the description I've suggested would fit. Not to say Cabell's book shouldn't be mentioned.

 

[j d worthington]

I qualify "essay" because of the nature of the beastie in this case. But most of the material was originally published as separate essays on literature, but they address life in general through that threshold....

 

[Randy M.]

I won't say it's the greatest essay ever written, but it may be the most entertaining essay I've yet to read:

The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper

I'm also partial to E. B. White, though I'd need to reread to remember why.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

I'm also partial to E. B. White, though I'd need to reread to remember why.


Randy M.

He gets named as one of the great essayists, so if you have suggestions for reading and other comments, please share them. Is he the guy who wrote something like "Once More to the Lake"? And an essay about how amazing it is that New York doesn't break down?

 

[Randy M.]

I'll see what I have. I think shortly after he died a massive retrospective was published. I recall a parody of Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees titled "Across the Street and into the Bar." He also co-wrote Is Sex Necessary? with James Thurber, a book that as I recall pretty much avoids the subject of sex and still manages to be quite funny.


Randy M.

 

[galanx]

I would add the collection "Two Cheers For Democracy" by E. M. Forster.
A very funny essay referring to an incident involving Samuel Johnson is Max Beerbohm's "A Clergyman", available online.

 

[GOLLUM]

Good thread. I have several essay collections I'll list in the coming days.

 

[GOLLUM]

And Borges is also to be overlooked.

Huh?... I'm sure you meant Borges is worth reading...at least I hope you did. I have his "collected library" of non-fiction (penguin edition) as well as several other non-fiction works. Borges was one of the greatest thinkers there has been when it comes to literary analysis.