by David Brooks
Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things, but at the core of the genre is an unmistakable receptivity to the ever-shifting processes of our minds and moods. If there is any essential characteristic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest examples of the form enact that ever-shifting process, and in that enactment we can find the basis for the essay’s qualification to be regarded seriously as imaginative literature and the essayist’s claim to be taken seriously as a creative writer.
The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.
To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.
Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays (with full citations) to the address above.
I’d like to dedicate this volume to Jon Roberts, poet, critic, devoted teacher, and dear friend, who died suddenly at age fifty-one in April. A voracious reader, Jack was a great help to me when I was working on the first book in this series back in 1986, and every year thereafter he generously offered suggestions and recommendations. As always, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt staff has done everything to bring so many moving parts together in so short a time, and I once again appreciate the efforts of Deanne Urmy, Nicole Angeloro, Barbara Jatkola, Liz Duvall, and Megan Wilson. It was a great pleasure to work with David Brooks. He is one of our outstanding writers and thinkers, and this collection amply displays his wide-ranging concerns and his interest in all aspects of American society.
R.A.
Introduction
WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRAD at the University of Chicago, I attended classes with a moderate degree of diligence, but my most profitable hours came in the evenings when I’d put off doing my homework by wandering around the stacks of the Regenstein Library.
I’d invariably make my way over to the section where the old periodicals were kept. I was then reading books by the historian Richard Pells, which gave me the impression that between the Progressive era and Woodstock, all of world history was run out of the editorial offices of the New Republic. Whatever Walter Lippmann and Malcolm Cowley said went.
I would leaf through the old New Republics, then sample, in turn, the American Mercury, the Smart Set, Vanity Fair (the original one), Partisan Review, and a bunch of other magazines before ending up with the New Masses, which I remember as the most visually striking of them all. At the time my ambition was to be Clifford Odets, an engaged lefty playwright, but if that didn’t work out, I thought it would be great to be a cross between Lionel Trilling and Calvin Trillin—writing lofty essays about the state of Our Culture filled with one-liners.
That magazine browsing turned out to be my version of med school—the technical training I would need to do my job. Over the years, I became familiar with some of the classic essayists: Montaigne and Addison and Steele. But the earliest essayist who seemed like a friend—and the job of an essayist is to seem like a friend—was Walter Bagehot.
Bagehot, the editor of the Economist between 1861 and 1877, lived in an era of high pomposity. But he was a casual, warm, and learned essayist. He wrote on everything from Gibbon to Islam to banking procedures. He could throw off wisdom on the most unlikely subjects: “No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist: he is much more likely to be sorry for his life.” He could summarize entire policy disputes in one sentence: “Any aid to a present bad bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good bank.”
He had a modern eye for the counterintuitive. He wrote on the value of stupidity, especially in those who grapple with world affairs. He wrote in praise of dull government. Most important, his writing implied a winning persona. He understood a key fact about essay writing: that essays rarely persuade directly, but they often transform readers obliquely, by holding up a model for how to feel and enjoy. Bagehot believed that essayists persuade most by pleasing most. He wrote:
Give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts (and perhaps this is as well—you may be able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of the dignified dullness of politics); but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned—try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy the state of things. Over the “Cavalier” mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the “regular thing,” joy at an old feast.
Bagehot edified by having fun.
I didn’t read too many nineteenth-century essayists. The Carlyles of the world are just too leaden. I could read through acres of Emerson without having one of his hortatory phrases lodge in my brain. His narcissistic self-reliance shtick is demonstrably bad advice and pseudomacho show.
Before long I was stumbling into what I have come to think of as the golden age of American nonfiction—the thirty years between 1935 and 1965. That was the moment between Victorian pomposity and modern academic professionalism.
There were many great nonfiction writers in those years: Jane Jacobs, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Digby Baltzell, William Whyte, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and on and on. They often wrote for little magazines, but they had wide followings, because the mass middlebrow audience still felt it was important to pay attention to what these people said. Many of these serious writers had bestsellers. Time magazine put Riesman on its cover.
The best essays of those years had lost the old pomposity while retaining some grandeur and scope. They were rigorous without being narrow and academic. They were polemical without being partisan. They were countercultural without being sloppy. They were reckless but also learned.
Today, George Orwell is the most revered of the lot. I tell college students to read Orwell (and C. S. Lewis) just so they can mimic their prose styles. Orwell’s particular genius was the arresting first sentence. Here are a few:
From his essay on the Blitz: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
From his essay on Gandhi: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.”
From his memoir of his school days: “Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into my routine of school life) I began wetting my bed.”
There are few writers who can match firs
t sentences like that, although maybe at their best S. J. Perelman and Robert Benchley can. Here is a typical opening line from Benchley: “It is not generally known that the newt, although one of the smallest of our North American animals, has an extremely happy home life.”
Sentences like that mock grandiosity, and many of the midcentury writers did that. Still, they were grand. They took on big, sweeping topics, gave it their best shot, and expected other people to come up with big, sweeping rebuttals.
Along the way they sent out shafts of insight that sound like the bits of wisdom you hear at a good dinner party. Walter Lippmann, who began his career as a member of Harvard’s famous class of 1910 but lingered on through the century, noticed an essential truth about American politicians—that while blowhards in public, they are generally smarter and more reasonable in private: “They flaunt their vices to the public; they shiver and quake at the thought that some indiscreet journalist will expose them to the world as men of virtue and common sense.”
Others provided an entire worldview, which could serve as a guide through life. In “Rationalism in Politics,” one of the best essays of this period, the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott dissected the rationalist mindset that would lead to such mischief in Vietnam and in the technocratic dreams of twentieth-century social engineers.
The most sweeping and profound essay of them all, in my book, is Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” That essay not only gave us a useful and overused way to describe different sorts of intelligence, but it contains a beautiful description of what you might call tacit wisdom, or canny good sense, or, in Berlin’s words, a sense of reality: “Wisdom is the ability to allow for the (at least by us) unalterable medium in which we act . . . It is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described and calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb—the ‘immemorial wisdom.’”
Writers took their work seriously and treated an important essay as a history-altering event. Sometimes they took themselves too seriously. Just before he died, one essayist of the day told me about a frantic call he got after a journal editor had committed suicide by sticking his head in a gas oven. He rushed over to the man’s apartment and found the body in the kitchen. Soon other writers rushed over and contemplated the corpse. Pretty soon they broke out his booze. Soon after that a cocktail party had formed, with the writers discussing one another’s reviews while the body still lay in the kitchen and the police and coroner went about their business.
Niebuhr wrote a book called The Nature and Destiny of Man, which covers a lot of ground. Trilling wrote an essay called “Reality in America,” which is also pretty broad in scope. It’s a brilliant one, too—an attempt to revive complex emotional depth amid the usual pragmatic forces of liberalism and life.
Writers weren’t as specialized then. Irving Kristol could write about everything from Auden to Maimonides to John Foster Dulles. When these writers wrote about politics, it was with a literary perspective, as if they were doing high criticism, or else they saw it from a distance, as the clash of world historical ideas.
They wrote about pop culture with that sense of loftiness, too. In the highbrow Partisan Review, for example, Robert Warshow published a great piece called “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” “The gangster is the man of the city,” Warshow wrote,
with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world—in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and brightly lit country—but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.
Back in those days, you couldn’t be an educated person unless you knew what they were reading in London, Paris, and Berlin. It was harder to communicate across oceans, but taste was less parochial than it is now. One of the positive byproducts was that British essayists had greater influence over American ones than they do today. My crackpot theory is that British essayists all descend from Samuel Johnson—they are casual, conversational, and a bit loose. American essayists descend from Emerson or Thoreau or Lippmann. We are more earnest, self-absorbed, and stiff. Back then, however, an American reader might have been familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s tremendous essay “Well-Informed Circles . . . and How to Move in Them.” It’s a little guide about how to bluff your way through a dinner conversation filled with poseurs, and how to out-poseur them all. Here’s a sample:
Those who seek admission to this honorable corps [the circle of those with inside knowledge] must have travelled a little in the Near East and, if possible, beyond. They must exhibit an interest in languages—a different and vastly easier thing than a knowledge of them. If, for instance, you are caught out by the menu, say blandly, “I’ve never been able to pay much attention to the Latin languages,” or better still, “the Romance Group”; and to such direct questions as, “Do you speak Magyar?” answer, “Not nearly as well as I ought.” It is a good policy to introduce linguistic questions whenever possible; for instance, if someone says he has spent three weeks in Cairo, instead of asking about the hotels, say, “Tell me, is much demotic Armenian spoken there now?”
Malcolm Muggeridge was another essayist from England who had a wide and positive influence on a thousand wannabes. He wrote a fine essay, for example, called “Down with Sex,” about the role sex played in Western culture. Sex was once a mystery, Muggeridge wrote, but one day D. H. Lawrence decided sex’s mission “was to fertilize a spent civilization, reanimate the wilting bodies of an unduly cerebral generation of men and generally restore to our mid-twentieth-century lives the joyous fulfillment of happier and more innocent times.” This put too much of a burden, Muggeridge wrote, on sex. It was asked to bear more psychological weight than it could handle. “Sex has become the religion of the most civilized portions of the earth. The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment . . . Sex is the mysticism of materialism. We are to die in the spirit to be reborn in the flesh, rather than the other way around.”
I’m not sure I agree with that, or at least I’m not sure it’s true anymore, but it gets you thinking about the role sex plays in modern thought in new ways.
This whole essay culture came crashing down, and oddly it was essays that killed it. Intellectuals decided that this upper-middlebrow form was revolting. Some thought it was revolting because it wasn’t sufficiently academic and technical. Others decided it was revolting because it wasn’t sufficiently gritty. Dwight Macdonald wrote an essay called “Masscult and Midcult” that savaged the way mass culture sanitized art, music, and ideas.
Irving Howe wrote an essay for Partisan Review in which he lamented, “What is most alarming is that the whole idea of the intellectual vocation—the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization—has gradually lost its allure.” Howe argued that writers prostitute their talent when they write for general-interest magazines. Writers who contribute to The New Yorker become trivial and frozen, he asserted. And yet the commercial pressures compel them to sell out in this way. “Writers today have no choice, often enough, but to write for magazines like the New Yorker—and worse, far worse. But what matters is the terms upon which the writer enters into such relationships, his willingness to understand with whom he is dealing, his readiness not to deceive himself that an unpleasant necessity is a desirable virtue.”
Howe probably thought that the flight from the upper middlebrow would lead writers to pen bracing essays for Dissent. In fact it led them to pen
impenetrable, jargon-laden essays for tiny academic journals that only nine people can understand, essays that, if they were written in plain prose, would seem incredibly banal because the ideas underlying them are so unimaginative.
The essay hit a bad patch for a little while. Yet today I think it’s coming back. The age of academic jargon is passing. The Internet has paradoxically been a boon to essayists. Yes, there is Twitter and blogging and hysteria on the Internet and all the things Jonathan Franzen says he doesn’t like. But the Internet makes far-flung essays so accessible.
Anybody in his or her pajamas can go on websites such as Arts & Letters Daily, the Browser, and Longform.org and read essays from little magazines they have never heard of. These sites have their own ideological axes to grind—the Browser has gone from being perfectly eclectic to predictably left-wing—but they introduce you to things you would never have seen.
More important, the Internet has aroused the energies of hundreds of thousands of intelligent amateurs. There are dumb bloggers, but there are also astonishingly brilliant ones. One of my favorites is Tyler Cowen, who blogs for Marginal Revolution. He is an economist at George Mason University, but he blogs knowledgeably about ethnic foods, chess, the culture of northern Europe (and everywhere else), novels, politics, cognition, and on and on. People like that now have an occasion to vent and realize their skills. They have brought us back to the era of the amateur, the era of the essayist as friend. And they are not just blogging. Periodically, they turn their blog posts into essays.