A Personal Essay about a Personal Essay on Personal Essays, or Mankad on Lopate on Montaigne

In his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Phillip Lopate attempts to define the form while using the form.

Lopate briefly considers “certain worrisome distinctions” between types of essays. He consults Holman Harmon’s A Handbook of Literature who asserts a difference between formal and familiar essays, and further between familiar and personal essays. Lopate is dismissive: “The difference, if there is any, is one of nuance, I suspect. The familiar essay values lightness of touch above all else, the personal essay, which need not be light, tends to put the writer’s ‘I’ or idiosyncratic angle more at center stage.” Lopate’s introduction itself is an example of a heavy exploration where the writer’s “I” has a strong presence. The way he deals with Holman is a bit intimate, an admission of not being able to follow a distinction. We see the process of this thinking.

Lopate goes on to essai a description of the personal essay and explain his choices of what to exclude from the anthology. The piece is divided into thirteen sections: The Conversational Element; Honesty, Confession, and Privacy; The Contractions and Expansions of the Self; The Role of Contrariety; The Problem of Egotism; Cheek and Irony; The Idler Figure; The Past, the Local, and the Melancholy; Questions of Form and Style; Quotation and the Uses of Learning; The Personal Essay as Mode of Thinking and Being; The Rationale and Arrangement of This Book; and Principles of Selection.

Well. I can’t systematically go through those sections and still claim the personal essay form. Instead, I’ll talk about myself, though hopefully with pleasurable egotism, not irritating egotism. (According to Lopate’s quote of the English writer Alexander Smith, the good kind of egotism is modest and the second kind is boastful.) Back in 1984, when I was a little brown fifth grader growing up in the West-side suburb of Mobile, Alabama, one night my father found me up in bed panicking with a piece of paper and pencil in hand.

“Did you not finish your homework?” he asked.

No that wasn’t it. I had heard about a city-wide essay competition that I wanted to enter, but I had procrastinated and the deadline was the next day. The topic was, “Why I want to be President of the United States.” I was on the verge of tears.

My father didn’t shush me off to sleep or scold me. Instead, he took me downstairs, through the family room with its synthetic wood paneling, acoustic ceiling, blue carpet with matted piles, red couch, and vacuum tube TV sans remote control. We went down a hallway, which at the time seemed quite long, to the “study,” the home of our precious Apple IIE. Dad sat at the keyboard and I sat next to him telling him all the reasons I wanted to become the most powerful man on earth. My main preoccupation was with the switch by the president’s desk that could set of nuclear war with Russia and annihilate everything. I was pro-disarmament. I also noted the country had not yet, in 200 plus years, elected a person of color as its leader. My dad helped with the phrasing and coaxed my reasoning, but the essay clearly was a product of my thinking. He printed it with our dotmatrix printer and tore off the edges at the perforated line. We mailed it in, either to the city or to Dillard’s, the clothing store in Bellaire Mall sponsoring the competition.

I won third place. First and second went to 8th graders. My picture at the Dillard’s award ceremony appeared in the Mobile Press-Register. My dad mailed a copy to Jessie Jackson, who wrote back, or someone wrote back on his behalf in his unmistakable style. He referred to me as a “faith grader” and signed off with a “Keep Hope Alive!” I think it was printed on the letterhead of the Rainbow Coalition (one rainbow we have since learned most definitely does not include gays.) My dad and mom framed the essay, Jesse Jackson’s letter, and his signed photograph.

How do I segue in the intimate, cheeky, anti-systematic, playful way of the personal essay — the “loose sally of the mind” as Lopate quoted Dr. Johnson putting it — to the central exploration of what is a personal essay? (I’m sorry for the reflexive jokes.) Let me just ask whether my Why-I-Want-to-be-President essay was personal enough to count as a personal essay. I didn’t mention how I was treated as an outcaste by my classmates, for example. I did use “I.” It wasn’t scholarly or formal in diction. Maybe it was hermaphroditic, which is how Lopate describes George Orwell’s writing. I suppose a five-paragraph piece by kid doesn’t really work out as an example.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that many of the books listed in the Personal Essay section of the Nonfiction Comprehensive exam at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program would not hold up to Lopate’s views. Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son are, for the most part, formal and critical works of scholarship, and only nominally personal. They would belong more on a fiction list or 20th-century American list as critical texts. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood belongs on the personal essay list only as the antithesis of the personal essay. Capote goes to extraordinary lengths to present the killer’s interiority as if the book were a novel written with a close omniscient narrator. His “I” is glaringly absent. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer is not a book of personal essays, it is a set of craft talks prefaced by a polemical, strawman attack on critical theory. Lopate’s anthology on the Personal Essay is strangely not on the list.

Michel de Montaigne does belong of course. He is the patron saint of the personal essay, though I have to count myself among those (undergraduates) Lopate encourages to be patient and stick with Montaigne as we keep “looking for a connecting argument, a through-line, where there may not be any” until we “surrender” and “dive into the ocean of his thoughts and bob around in that undulating, fascinating mind for the sheer line-by-line reward of it.”

Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb

Flynn doesn’t write his memoirs as much as he assembles them. They are accumulations of fragments, sketches, musings on books, confessional vignettes, scraps of unfinished prose poems, descriptions of family photographs, memories of his parents, chopped-up pieces of a story only he knows. His go-to move is to find some gem of mysticism from a film, from a student’s poem, from a spiritual leader, from a myth, some koan, and turn it over and over, remark on all the facets of it, and then put it down. He finds meaning in everything.

This is essentially an essayist’s move. Joseph Epstein calls this a “magical trick,” as writes in the Norton Book of Personal Essays.

Turning the small into the large has been well described by the essayist Phillip Lopate in a nice reversal of an old metaphor. “The personal essay is the reverse of that set of Chinese boxes that you keep opening, only to find a smaller on within. Here you start with the small … and suddenly find a slightly larger container, insinuated by the essay’s successful articulation and the writer’s self-knowledge.” (20)

It is a “magical trick.” So you have to wonder whether Flynn is a mere illusionist or a conjuror. Have we been fooled? Or has there been a real transformation?

And I wonder, too, if Flynn’s books are about him or about the world. Does this display of personality make the reader feel pity and awe for the displayed personality? Or does it make the reader feel pity and awe in general in a new way?

This might have more to do with a reader’s generosity than it does with a book’s quality.

I’m torn. I can’t help thinking of Sylvia Plath, right now. Do we learn something about the world, when we read her poems? Or do we learn something about her?

But isn’t learning something about her learning something about the world? A writer like Plath who can articulate in strange and inventive ways her interior life helps others articulate their own interior lives. Before we had her poems we had fewer ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves.

Does it follow, then, that before we had Flynn’s memoirs we had fewer ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves, our families, and our place in the world?

Logically it follows. Logically. But. But!

Flynn’s books, I realize, make me confront something I feel squeamish about already. It is not clear to me that memoir, autobiography, and personal essays aren’t inherently and finally selfish, narcissistic exercises. It is not clear to me that writing about oneself is for others and not just for oneself.

This is something E.B. White touches on in his introduction to his Essays. He writes, “Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.” He goes on:

I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor. (x)

This was in 1977! Imagine what White might have thought in 2007. It’s as though we’ve all broken off a piece of Montaigne’s mantle and keep it in our underwear drawers. And maybe we’ve reduced the whole project, chipped away the original nobility and made it smaller and shabby.

It is a live question, of course. But invoking Montaigne, the grandfather of autobiographical writing, shirks it. As though we are all excused from having to answer just because others never answered. This feels like the inverse of original sin. Not: Don’t eat that. But: Go ahead and eat that.

I did, and it was delicious.

Do Montaigne, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Woolf, White, Orwell, Mailer, Didion, Rich, Steinem, Lopate, Franzen, et. al., et. al., give us permission to write nonfiction about ourselves?

What about Whitman, Auden, Stevens, Eliot, Plath, Sexton, Lowell, Berryman?

It might be a false dilemma. But either a writer invents who he writes about or selects who he writes about. (If I may invoke Aristotle.) Of all the ways we can persuade, of all the materials available to us, we can either invent new ones for our purposes or select given ones. We can make it up, or we can write it down.

Which will it be?

The truth is that as we write it down we make it up.

But I refuse to reconcile the dilemma, and I refuse to invoke Montaigne (at least until I read all of him, if I ever managed to do so) to let myself off uncritically and unjustifiably. I don’t have a defense of either choice. Is making it up frivolous, when there is so much that is so real that is worth reporting and writing about and reading?

But then I wonder whether writing it down is a way of capitalizing on other people’s lives. Thanks for the interview. Good luck with all your hardship!

Can it be braver, more noble, in the face of all this criticism, to make yourself the object of this? To report yourself? To make yourself vulnerable? To say, This is my story, and it is mine to tell.

I don’t know.