- Somewhere there's a man a year or two younger than I (let's put us in our
mid-forties) who has a memory, I would assume, of being inadvertently kneed in the
balls by another kid (me) on the playground.
My own memory is pretty vague: some sort of summer-camp-type-thing, probably
one of the two or three church camps I attended, since my parents couldn't afford to
send me anywhere else; some kind of swinging, circular piece of playground equipment
that got you going fast; a neatly-dressed little kid, younger and smaller than I, who
would probably, in a few years, be the idol of all the girls; and an awkward or over-
aggressive move on my part that left my knee in his crotch; him flat on his back in
the dirt next to the circular-whatever; a male adult supervisor lifting him up
rhythmically by his belt to ease his pain; girls standing around curiously, not quite
knowing what was going on; me only knowing a little more of what was going on and
telling him I was sorry; and him finally getting up and saying it was okay.
Perhaps the victim of that little incident doesn't even remember it, or
remembers it less clearly than I, or more likely, more clearly. Perhaps he remembers
it differently, with different details high-lighted, or perhaps his whole angle of
memory is different: "I'd been kicked in the balls by a kid on the school playground,
and the nurse was this dark-eyed beauty who gave me the first sexual stirrings I'd
ever felt. Here my groin is still aching, and I'm feeling lust for the first time."
Maybe it was the school playground and not summer camp. Maybe it was
my foot and not my knee. Maybe we were playing soccer, as we often did at recess, and
the circular-whatever is a piece of some other memory that somehow wandered into this
one and decided to stay.
Maybe I was the one who was kicked.
Maybe it never happened at all.
We've all had the experience of recounting with another person some incident
from the past, and hearing or saying, "That's not how I remember it." Our memories
are of course imperfect, and they're also viewed through the lenses of our individual
points of view and sensibilities, which can radically change the complexion of what
"really" happened. Decades later write it down and the memory is changed further
still-into words and the writer's choice of which words to use. Add to that another
choice, the choice to "improve" that hazy memory-make it more tangible, more "real"-by
clarifying details and filling in the gaps, and you complicate things philosophically
even more.
But I'm no philosopher, so I'll spare you my epistemological ruminations on
how and what it is possible to "know," and just stick to writing.
How would a fiction writer, someone using that anecdote as the starting point
or principal scene for a story, or the story itself, "work it up" to suit his purposes?
First, at the very least, he would have to make it into an anecdote, for it's
just an exceedingly dim recollection-the merest shadow of "this is what happened"-as
I've presented it. He'd give his "characters" names, make it school or summer
camp, describe the incident, name that piece of playground equipment. The
larger the role of the incident, the more detail it would be given-from anecdote to
scene to entire story.
Then there's the question of point of view. In third person, our writer would
never admit to not knowing the basics* ("The one boy, um, somehow kicked the other boy
in the crotch, and then, well, it seems the second boy was on the ground, and..."), and
in first person, though the narrator, for reasons the writer has chosen, may not "remember"
all the details (that's more "plausible," more "realistic"), he'd almost certainly remember
more of them than do I. (I'm drawing distinctions here, of course, and distinctions are
never perfect, and I can imagine a narrator whose recall is as bad as my own-again,
for writerly reasons-but on the whole first-person narrators have pretty good memories,
else where's the story?)
An essayist, on the other hand, isn't obliged to know more than he does. He is
his narrator, after all (well, perhaps not exactly, but more about that in due time), and
he can't know more than he does, unless he lies to you (which he might, but let's
save that till later also), or learns what he doesn't know through some other source.
If he tells you, "That's all I remember," you believe him, and you don't fault him for
not telling you more, for this isn't fiction, he's not "making it up." He's just a
person, like you, and must work with the facts he's given, and you believe him because
he admits to being fallible.
It is the person of the essayist, not "first" or "third" but the person doing the
telling and the writing, that most distinguishes this nonfiction form from its
showier and more attention-grabbing cousin, fiction. More than any other literary form,
with the possible exception of lyric poetry (yes, we all know not to confuse the poet
with the speaker, but secretly we usually read them as the same), the essay disposes of the
writer/narrator distinction, and the first-person narrator speaking is the writer writing.
Who is the speaker in E.B. White's brilliant "Once More to the Lake" if not White himself,
and how does it advance our understanding of this essay to say that he's not? He gives
himself no fictional name; no "tension" is evident between the speaker's observations and
some writer-behind-the-scenes; and for what it's worth, his essay tells us, "This
happened to me." We don't "suspend" our disbelief when we read the essay as we do when
we read, say, Charlotte's Web; we take what White tells us at face value the same
as we would were he telling us in the flesh. In an essay, the writer speaks directly
to his reader, without the buffer of an invented middle-man narrator. He risks being
candid, risks being himself-risks, most of all, not being believed.
When the essayist is believed (as we always believe White, whether he's
fishing with his son on a lake in Maine or mourning the death of a pig), the effect is a
feeling of kinship with the writer himself that we rarely experience with other, more
overtly "artful," forms of literature. The essayist isn't posing, and he isn't setting
himself apart. He speaks to us as equals, and flatters us with the notion that we are at
least as intelligent as he. He doesn't sit in his director's chair and dictate every move.
He's one of the actors, like us, and he never upstages us, and frequently is content with
a lesser role. So seductively subtle are his talents that when he's grumpy, like Hazlitt,
we feel grumpy too, or feeling lazy, like Stevenson, nothing could interest us less than
odious work. Even when "he" is talking with us about matters of which we may have no
experience whatever, like Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher on Swiss inns or Provence food, we
nod and say to ourselves, "Yes. That's right." For that's what the essayist does best:
talk with us, talk with us, one on one, with such ease. And that's the
essayist's downfall: his tact and grace.
Surely an art form that's just "talk," that's just a stringing-together of
"thoughts," isn't to be taken seriously as an art form at all. Who can finally respect a
genre that doesn't respect itself, that seems so bent on being "only" casual reflection?
If all he's doing is musing, following a train of thought wherever it leads him without
regard to aesthetic concerns like balance and shape, the essayist isn't creating what we
call literature. He's just writing, not composing, just saying what comes to mind, and
his genre deserves its reputation as a minor form.
The word itself, "essay"-a "test," an "attempt," the old college try, if you will,
since "essays" are what college freshmen write-and its inventor Montaigne's insistence that,
"Hey, all I'm trying to do is figure a few things out," have contributed to the misconception
of the essay as a second-rate form. The essayist is the victim of his own success at
convincing us that his efforts are "only" tentative trials. The paradox is that in beguiling us
into believing that he isn't posing-"No subterfuge here, reader. Just me, Joe-essayist, and
you."-he has managed to fashion the craftiest pose of all. But a crowning paradox is the result:
having been mesmerized into believing that an essay is "just talk," we are therefore certain
of the essay's inferior status.
Let's make like Montaigne for a minute and meander back to a point previously made: the
disappearance in the essay of the writer/narrator distinction.
Well, all right, maybe that isn't quite how it works.
There is a narrator of sorts in an essay, a speaker who isn't the writer, but he so
closely resembles the writer, is so completely suffused with the writer, that it's virtually
impossible to tell them apart. "Narrator" overstates it, so does "persona," even "alter ego":
he's the writer's almost imperceptibly better-looking clone. Was E.B. White the man really
as irremediably charming as the writer who comes across to us in his essays? And yet the writer
was the man, and the man could be the writer, and the man-as-writer-as-man is this dazzling
voice. The best essayists speak so well in whatever voice they have chosen that we assume it is
their voice, and it is, but it's chosen. It is every bit as meticulously wrought as a fictional
narrator's voice, except that it isn't a narrator's voice, it's the writer's.
The essayist's special talent is making it all look so easy, and then we assume it has
been easy and we disparage his efforts. We glide along with White, for example, in "Once More to
the Lake," barely noticing his finely-woven motif on time and mortality (which is everywhere
in the essay when we read it a second time...and a third...and a fourth...how did we miss it?...who's
the Joe? "Yes, how nice...fishing on a lake with his son...such pleasant reading..."), and
then we're shocked, jolted awake (as he knows we'll be, for he's set us up, lulled us to sleep, that
fox), when the essay ends so abruptly, cuts itself off at the knees, with that line, "...suddenly my
groin felt the chill of death." The seeming ease with which the pattern of thought in an essay unfolds,
and the often meandering trail of that thought-creating the illusion that the writing lacks form-is
the same "ease" with which a river chooses its course: there's no appearance of design, it may
look undirected, but in fact no other possible course exists. "Formlessness" is the river
running uphill, leap-frogging boulders, hanging a left instead of tumbling over the falls. "Form"
is very carefully, one phrase at a time, linking sentences together that forge a route over the
topography of mind.
Does not good jazz possess form? Isn't the musician ever mindful, regardless of how
distantly he may stray from his opening theme, of that theme's constant presence, and doesn't he
always find his way back, and to the listeners' pleasure? Essays are literary jazz, sometimes
improvising their way into realms that even the essayist could not have predicted in advance were
there, but always-later or sooner-coming back to the riff.
Yes, but essays are nonfiction, harnessed always to fact, and that limitation is
what consigns them to a lower rank. Without the freedom to create absolutely, to mold men from
mud, the essayist must remain a minor player.
But facts are just a medium like any other-the essayist's musical scale, his oils and
acrylics, his steel or granite or clay...his mud. He radically changes the facts, first of all,
just by changing them into language, and he isn't prevented from stopping there-he can reconstitute,
rearrange, reconfigure. White again: the thunderstorm at the end of White's essay doesn't/didn't
erupt on the last day of fishing but "one afternoon," and yet he uses it as his conclusion. And what
if it did happen at the end, but he doesn't say it happened at the end, because that would have been
too perfect, not "believable"? And did that moment of watching his son pull up those "soggy, icy"
swimming trunks actually occur after the storm, or might it have happened at some other point and
White placed it after the storm in order to create the effect he wanted to achieve? Can we
say for sure that it happened at all? Might he have "made it up," having witnessed a similar act
some other time, or even never having seen his son pull up his trunks? A student of mine once
expressed dismay at my suggestion that an essayist might play with the facts, because then, she said,
the essay wouldn't be "true." But "not fiction" no more means "fact" than "not guilty" means
"innocent," and sometimes truth is better served with some kindly assistance. It takes balls to
jump in that river not knowing precisely where you'll end up. It takes balls to leave the riff
and trust that somehow you will make it back. It takes balls to tell the truth and hope for
belief. Maybe it even takes balls to work in a form that gets little respect, that everyone
out there knows is small potatoes.
So do I really remember that playground scene as vaguely as I have described it? Did I
make it "vague" for my purposes here? Is my memory in fact crystal clear, and his name was Todd,
and Mr. MacKenzie, the assistant minister, was who came to his aid? Or was I the one who was kicked,
and the little bastard did it deliberately, and yes, that nurse was a beauty? Or did I invent
everything I've told you?
You'll never know.
This essay was published in the Literary Magazine Review.
Contact Mike O'Rourke