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.
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I would like to dedicate this book to a very close friend who died as I was at work on this foreword, Bruce Forer. Bruce and I edited several books together, and he helped me conceptualize this series back in 1985. This will be the first foreword he didn’t get a chance to read. As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editors, Deanne Urmy and Nicole Angeloro. I was fortunate that Liz Duvall once again handled copyediting. I’d like, too, to thank my son Gregory Atwan for calling my attention to a few of the outstanding essays that appear here. It was a great pleasure to work with John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose 2011 essay collection Pulphead has helped revitalize the genre and sent the essay spinning in new directions. The prose energy that can be found in Pulphead—the way Sullivan brilliantly maintains the momentum of a story while casually slipping surprising information into traditional forms—can also be seen in this impressively diverse collection of essays, one that is simultaneously intense, intellectual, and inventive.
R. A.
Introduction: The Ill-Defined Plot
For Scott Bates, 1923–2013
A BIT OF ETYMOLOGICAL TRIVIA noted in certain dictionaries is that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French. We said it first, for some reason, by not just years but a couple of centuries. France could invent the modern essay, but the notion that someone might seize on the production of these fugitive-seeming pieces as a defining mode was too far-fetched to bear naming. Rabelais had written Pantagruel, after all, and people hadn’t gone around calling themselves Pantagruelists (in fact they had, starting with Rabelais himself, but the word meant someone filled with nonjudgmental joie de vivre). Had a Bordelais born with the name Michel Eyquem titled his books Essais in the 1580s? Fine—Montaigne was Montaigne, a mountain in more than name. One didn’t presume to perpetuate the role. France will cherish his example, but the influence it exerts there is partly one of intimidation. In France the essay constricts after Montaigne. It turns into something less intimate, more opaque, becoming Descartes’s meditations and Pascal’s thoughts. It’s said that even a century and a half after Montaigne’s death, when the marquis d’Argenson subtitled a book with that word, Essays, he was shouted down for impertinence. Not a context in which many people would find themselves tempted to self-identify as “essayists.” When the French do finally start using the word, in the early nineteenth century, it’s solely in reference to English writers who’ve taken up the banner, and more specifically to those who write for magazines and newspapers. “The authors of periodical essays,” wrote a French critic in 1834, “or as they’re commonly known, essayists, represent in English letters a class every bit as distinct as the Novellieri in Italy.” A curiosity, then: the essay is French, but essayists are English. What can it mean?
Consider the appearance of the word in English—which is to say the appearance of the word—in the wintertime of late 1609 or early 1610, and most likely January 1610. A comedy is under way before the court of King James I of England, at the Palace of Whitehall in London, or maybe at St. James’s Palace, where the prince resides, we’re not sure. The theaters have been closed for plague, but there must be diversion for the Christmas season. Ben Jonson has written a new piece, Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, for his favored company, the Children of the Whitefriars, boy actors with “unbroken voices,” several of whom have been “pressed”—essentially kidnapped (sometimes literally off the street, while walking home from school)—into service for the theater. For most of them it’s an honor to number among the Children of the King’s Revels. They enjoy special privileges.
January of 1610: James is forty-three. The biblical translation he has sponsored is all but done. John Donne holds a copy of his first published book, Pseudo-Martyr, and gives it to James, hoping in part to flatter him into forgiving past wildnesses. “Of my boldness in this address,” he writes, “I most humbly beseech your Majesty to admit this excuse, that, having observed how much your Majesty has vouchsafed to descend to a conversation with your subjects by way of your books, I also conceived an ambition of ascending to your presence by the same way.” Galileo squints at Jupiter through a telescope he’s made and finds moons (he can see them so faintly they look like “little stars”) that evidently obey no gravity but Jupiter’s own, proving that not all celestial bodies circle the earth, a triumph for proponents of the still-controversial Copernican theory of heliocentrism, but one suggesting an important modification to it as well, for Copernicus had placed the sun at the center of the world, whereas Galileo was sensing that there might be no center, not one so easily discerned. James receives a dispatch about it from his Venetian ambassador. “I send herewith unto His Majesty the strangest piece of news,” it reads, “that he has ever yet received from any part of the world,” for a “mathematical professor at Padua” had “overthrown all former astronomy.” What is opening is the multiplicity of worlds. Sir Walter Raleigh sits in the Tower writing his Historie of the World, begging to be sent back to America, saying he’d rather die there “then to perrish” in a cell. We’re at the court of the Virginia Company, which days before has published a pamphlet, a True and Sincere Declaraccion, extolling the virtues of the new colony, that “fruitfull land,” and struggling to quiet horrific accounts that are starting to circulate. Across the Atlantic in Jamestown it’s what they’re calling “this starveing Tyme.” Of roughly five hundred settlers, four hundred and forty die during this winter. Survivors are eating corpses or disappearing into the forest.
James draws our notice here not for being king—not as shorthand for the period, that is—but because he plays a significant if unmentioned part in the evolution of this slippery term and thing, the essay. All his life he has loved learning. We may imagine him as a stuffed robe-and-crown who gives a thumbs-up to the Authorized Version and fades into muffled bedchambers, but James was a serious man of letters. He fashioned himself so and was one, in truth. Not good enough, perhaps, to be remembered apart from who he was, but given who he was, better than he needed to be. He held scholarship in high esteem, while himself indulging certain sketchy ideas, among them the power of demons and witches. In his youth, in
Edinburgh and at Stirling Castle, he’d been at the center of a loose-knit and blazingly homoerotic band of erudite court poets, dedicated to formal verse and the refinement of the Middle Scots dialect, his native tongue. Most of what King James wrote had to be translated into plain English before being published, but one text—because it took for its subject partly the use of Middle Scots for poetic purposes—got published in the original language. It consisted mainly of poems but contained also, in the most remarked-upon part of the book, a nonfiction “Treatise” of twenty pages, laying out “some reulis and cautelis”—precepts and pitfalls—“to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie.” The title of James’s book? Essayes of a Prentise.
This book was first published in 1584, a full thirteen years before the appearance of Francis Bacon’s famous 1597 Essayes, traditionally held to mark the introduction of the essay as a formal concept into English writing. Granted, Bacon doesn’t quite hold up as the first English essayist even when we do omit James: some person—we’re not positive who, but almost certainly an Anglican divine named Joseph Hall—had published a collection of essays a year before Bacon, titled Remedies Against Discontentment,1 and it’s likely that one or two of the “later” writers—William Cornwallis or Robert Johnson or Richard Greenham—had already begun writing their pieces when Bacon’s book came out. Even so, Bacon is the greatest in that little cluster of late-sixteenth-century English essayists and would seem to possess the clearest claim to the word in English. Yet King James’s book had preceded them all by more than a decade. Indeed, when James published his Essayes of a Prentise, Montaigne was still publishing his own Essais (the Frenchman was in between volumes I and II).
The most available conclusion for leaping to is that James is using the word in a general sense. An “essay,” we’re frequentl y told, means an attempt, a stab. Perhaps King James had been saying, self-deprecatingly, “I’m a mere prentise [an apprentice] here, and these are my essays, my beginner’s efforts.” It makes sense.
A problem is, essay wasn’t supposed to be used that way either in the 1580s. If we were to impute that meaning to James’s use of the word, it would mark the first occurrence of that particular sense in English (or Middle Scots), which is not proof that we shouldn’t do it. That may be precisely what’s going on. But whatever James means by essay, he means something new by it, new in English. That we know.
Could James have meant something closer to what Montaigne did? On the face of it, the idea seems far-fetched. Montaigne’s book had been published just a few years before James finished his. An English translation would not appear for another twenty years. Doubtless there existed English men and women who’d already heard about the book, perhaps even seen it, but what are the odds that one of them was the eighteen-year-old king of Scotland?
Rather good, believe it or not. James’s tutor in the 1570s, the years during which Montaigne was composing his first volume of pieces, happens to have been a man named George Buchanan, a Scottish classicist and Renaissance giant who’d spent part of his life in France, where his poetry was much admired (“Easily the greatest poet of our age,” said his French publishers, an opinion echoed by Montaigne, among others). Buchanan was placed in charge of young James’s education and made on his pupil a lifelong impression of both respect and fear, deep enough that decades later, when James saw a man approaching him at court who looked like Buchanan, he started to tremble (Buchanan had drunkenly beaten the hell out of the boy James on at least one occasion).
Why does this matter? Because James was not the only pupil of Buchanan’s who never forgot him. There had been another, in France, in the 1530s and early ’40s. For several years George Buchanan had taught at the Collège de Guyenne, in Bordeaux, and one of his students there, a young boarder who also came to him outside of class for private instruction, was a local boy named Michel Eyquem. The boy, whose precocity in Latin astonished his professors, was also a talented actor and performed in a few of Buchanan’s plays. Buchanan even considered him something of a favorite student and, running into Montaigne at the French court many years later, honored him by saying that their time together had inspired certain of Buchanan’s subsequent theories of humanistic pedagogy. Montaigne returned the compliment by praising his former teacher more than once in the Essais. They were well aware of each other, these two men, and remained so. And precisely as the younger was starting to publish in France, the elder became the tutor in Scotland to King James. Who, four years after Montaigne’s Essais were published, published his own Essayes.
What was it, then? Could this appearance of two books titled Essays—the first two ever titled that way in any language, and within a mere few years of each other, and written by two men who shared a childhood teacher—really be a coincidence? Or was it the case, as seems vastly more plausible, that the two were connected somehow—that King James knew of Montaigne, or at least knew of his book (but probably both), and was appropriating the word from him? And if that’s true, why is James’s book rarely, if ever, cited in histories of the essay form, from England or France?
Partly it’s that the work consists mostly of poems, so it wouldn’t have jumped into anyone’s mind to link it with Montaigne, apart from the title. On the other hand, the book does include, as mentioned, a piece that today (or in 1600) would be described as an essay, the “Reulis and Cautelis” treatise. And that piece—unsurprisingly, given the bare adequacy of the king’s poetry—became by far the best-known part of his book. In fact, at some point later in the sixteenth century, the work appears to have been republished (or rebound) not as the Essayes of a Prentise but instead as Reulis and Cautelis, such that its true title could have remained unknown even to one who spotted the work in bibliographies or catalogues.
I wish to argue—or should say, this being an essay, float the suggestion—that something other than either coincidence or appropriation is going on in James’s use of the word as a title. Namely, misinterpretation. Or maybe it’s more correct to say simply interpretation. James had an acknowledged gift for languages, after all, and the greatest teachers in the world. No one is accusing him of not knowing what essai meant in French. The problem is, it meant lots of things—in French, and already in English by then too—but the king in his title seems to have battened on and emphasized one sense above all others, winding up with a usage of the word that differed slightly from what Montaigne had intended. The choice can be seen to have exercised an invisible but crucial effect on the evolving English conception of the essay.
French scholars have been debating what precisely Montaigne meant by essai for going on half a millennium, and I don’t pretend to be qualified to intervene in that discussion. I’ve read a lot about it, but as an interested and biased practitioner, not a linguist. Rest assured that when the French see us walk up to the front of our classrooms and intone the familiar explanation, “An essay . . . from the French essai . . . meaning ‘attempt’” (as I have watched professors do, as I have done in turn before students), ruthless Gallic laughter is occurring on some level.
You can read about the Latin roots of the word, exagere, exagium, words that come from the context of Roman coinage, which have to do with measuring and weighing. A sense of “drive out” or “swarm” supposedly knocks around in there somewhere (a swarm of thoughts, like bees, fast and done?). There was the phrase “coup d’essay,” meaning, according to a contemporary bilingual dictionary, the “maister-peece of a young workeman.” And yes, there was also, simultaneously, King James’s sense, of “a beginning, entrance, onset, attempt . . . a flourish, or preamble, whereby a tast[e] of a thing is given.” That was undoubtedly present, in both Montaigne’s France and his title—but it was not the primary shading, not what Montaigne had foremost in mind (in his ear) when he took that word, essais, as a description of his work.
We know what the primary meaning was not only because it comes first in period dictionaries (though it does), nor because it pops up most frequently in period usages (though it does), b
ut also because it’s the sense Montaigne himself, when using the word outside of his title—that is, elsewhere in his books—tends to employ, not in every single case but in the vast majority of them. It’s the sense of “a proofe, tryall, experiment.” To test something—for purity, or value (going back to coinage; the essayeur was “an Officer in the Mint, who touches everie kind of new coyne before it be delivered out”). There was the essay de bled, the “trial of grain,” in which the wheat was carefully weighed, a custom Montaigne may have had in mind when he wrote: “Je remets à la mort l’essay du fruict de mes estudes” (“I put off until my death the essay of the fruits of my studies”). The Rabelais scholar E. V. Telle, in a 1968 essay titled with delightful transparency “A Propos du Mot ‘Essai’ Chez Montaigne,” pointed out that the usage most ready to mind for many of Montaigne’s readers would have come from a university context, in which before a candidate’s examination for some degree, placards would be posted reading ESSAI DE JEAN MARIN or whoever it was. The students were tested, probed, essayed, to find out if they really knew their shit. Montaigne was toying with that meaning too—he would essay himself and his own “jugement” (as he repeatedly writes), become his own essayer. Wasn’t this his great guiding question, Que sçay-je? (“What do I know?”) Which he seems to have meant both literally and in our idiomatic sense (You really think I’m gonna die? “Seems like it, but what do I know?”).
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