Excerpts from three essays on The Essay*

Edward Hoagland, 1976

“The best essayist of my generation.” - Updike

We sometimes hear that essays are an old-fashioned form, that so-and-so is “the last essayist,” but the facts of the marketplace argue quite otherwise.  Essays of nearly any kind are so much easier than short stories for a writer to sell, so many more see print, it’s strange that though two fine anthologies remain that publish the year’s best stories, no comparable collection exists for essays.  Such changes in the reading public’s taste aren’t always to the good, needless to say.  The art of telling stories predated even cave painting, surely; and if we ever find ourselves living in caves again, it (with painting and drumming) will be the only art left, after movies, novels, photography, essays, biography, and all the rest have gone down the drain – the art to build from.


E.B. White, 1977

I think some people find the essay the last refuge 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.


William Gass, 1982

"Though he has been taken to task in some critical quarters for linguistic overexuberance...three of the essay collections...have won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award."  - Sven Birkerts

The essay is obviously the opposite of that awful object, “the article,” which, like items picked up in shops during one’s lunch hour, represents itself as the latest cleverness, a novel consequence of thought, skills, labor and free enterprise; but never as an activity – the process, the working, the wondering… [T]he article pretends that everything is clear, that its argument is unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit inferences, no illegitimate connections, it furnishes seals of approval and underwriters’ guarantees; its manners are starched, stuffy, it would wear a dress shirt to a barbecue, silk pajamas to the shower; it knows, with respect to every subject and point of view it is ever likely to entertain, what words to use, what forms to follow, what authorities to respect; it is the careful product of a professional, and therefore it is written as only writing can be written, even if, at various times, versions have been given a dry dull voice at a conference, because, spoken aloud, it still sounds like writing written down, writing written for its immediate burial, in a Journal.

. . . 

Articles are to be worn; they make up one’s dossier the way uniforms make up a wardrobe, and it is not known – not is it clear about uniforms either – whether the article has every contained anything of lasting value.

* All from the very fine Essayists on the Essay (link)