Reading in Bed, Updated Edition

by Brian Doyle

  Naaaah.

  Or here’s another example. My grandfather John Francis Clancey, who was raised in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, not far from where we sit today, had a heart attack on the train one day, and I always wanted to try to write about that, and I tried to write it as fiction, but fiction was too mannered and arty and remote for me somehow, so finally I tried to write it like it really and truly happened, and I couldn’t write it as straight reportage because it sounded too flat and confessional, but thank God Plutarch invented the essay, because I could come at it in an essay, like this:

  “…a savage raging pain explodes in his chest so suddenly and cruelly that it knocks him to his knees and only by shooting his arms out blindly and landing on his hands does he avoid smashing his face on the floor o god o god he he thinks faintly from far far away he can’t breathe uh uh uh uh uh uh gasping uh uh uh uh but desperately raggedly he gains a half a breath uh uh uh and gulping uh uh a whole one uh uh then another uh and greedily aah he fills aaah his lungs as deeply as he can aaaah he would eat all the air in the world if he could aaaaah he would suck it dry the blessed air aaaaah and somehow the friendly air aaaaah forces the fire in his chest down aaahh and the rage retreats snarling aaaaah and he kneels there aaaah breathing aaah his shoulders shaking aah his knees throbbing ah his sweat dripping freely to the floor ah his mind whispering o god o god o god…”

  You see what I mean? The essay gets there on the express train, you know? I mean, fiction can get there too, but there’s always a polite conductor standing there with fiction; the gatekeeper, the man you cannot ignore, the guy who whispers this is all made up, remember that, even as the very best fiction, while invented, is utterly true. It’s a puzzle, eh?

  The essay is a jackdaw, a magpie, a raven. It picks up everything and uses it. It borrows everything and bends everything to its nefarious porpoises. The quick sketch of character and moodiness and evocativeness and action of fiction, the musicality and cadence and swing and rhythm and crisp imagery and line-cracking power of poetry, the play and banter and battle of voices of the theater, the camera eye of film, the shapeliness of sculpture (I always wanted to write an essay about weight that would actually get skinnier as you went along, with occasional binges where it bulges out again, wouldn’t that be cool?)(or an essay about mountains that parades up and down alpinically, or an essay about caribou migration, say, that goes along for fifty pages but only two inches high, or an essay about windows with windows in it, seems to me you have a bigger playing field physically with essays than you do with poems), the athleticism and grace of dance, all these things are meat for the essayist — and the essay because of its form and size lends itself more to playfulness in terms of speed and pace and timing than other written forms — poems are bursts (and really, if we are being honest, all long poems, especially book-length poems, don’t really work as poems, do they? they’re just too…looooooong, you know? I mean, who really thinks of the Odyssey or the Illiad or God help us all that incredibly boring prison sentence called Paradise Lost as a Poem?), plays and novels and nonfiction books are long. Songs are playful — think of Joe Cocker’s ‘You Can Keep Your Hat On’ — but songs, when you think about it, are two art forms married to each other. Which is why music with lyrics is perhaps the greatest art form of all, seems to me; but of written art, I think essays are the coolest widest broadest biggest form. Everything fits in the essay, and it’s nearly naked.

  Right about here scholarly-type people will say yeah, well, got any examples, got any documentation, got any illustrations? And being a happy student of the glory of the essay in the greatest of hands I say sweet Jesus yes, think of Natalie Ginzburg’s chant and cadence and swing, the tennis match of her great essay “He and I” — “He is hot and I am cold. He loves libraries and I hate them. He loves travelling. I would like to stay at home all the time…” She steals litany and music from poetry. Or think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s glorious furious “Open Letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde,” the blunt terse judicial accusatory tone — you you you — echoes of the courtroom speech, the case for the prosecution — and then it flies up and away into an extraordinary prayer at the end, one of the greatest closing passages in the history of essays, bless his soul, that poor man, dead at forty-four. He crams fury and spiritual genius into what seems for a while like straight reportage or notes from a deposition and makes it dance, yes? Or the genius Annie Dillard, with her broken-whiskey-glass-and-ten-packs-of-cigarettes-day voice, in her extraordinary essay “Living Like Weasels,” which begins like any old “nature essay” (man, what a reductive and thus dismissive term that is) about paying attention to that which we hardly pay any real attention to (this being the subject of all essays, really), and suddenly goes flying into the brain and soul of the weasel, o my god o sweet jesus wow. Doesn’t she steal the imaginative fire of the best fiction, in a hundredth of the space, and make a dart to the heart?

  And, you know, not to be rude or anything, and not to try to start a fire, but just to try to gently say, hey, are we totally sure the emperor is wearing his undies today, isn’t one of the great virtues of the essay that it’s short? I mean, with total respect for doorstop novels, and muscular nonfiction epics like Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard or Jan Morris’ brilliant Pax Brittanica trilogy, isn’t short almost always better than long? I hear everyone gasping with horror, but c’mon, let’s be honest, isn’t an arrow better than a tank when it comes to hitting hearts and heads? And isn’t hitting hearts and heads the point? And isn’t using the arrow that might hit the most hearts quickest perhaps the best idea? So if lots and lots of people will read a brief talkative odd funny pointed cheerful testy voice talking at them from a page, or a screen, or a radio, or whatever cool toy our children will invent next, but not so many people will spend a week with a really big book, or try to decipher a poem, or endure the dental work that is an awful lot of journalism, or see through the glittering neurotic screen that is so much short fiction, well, doesn’t that mean perhaps that the essay is the form with the most pop and verve and connective electricity? Could that be? Could it be that we are gathered at what today is actually team meeting for the form that could maybe most change the universe as we know it? Could it be that maybe I am right for a change, and for once am not a complete and utter doofus and bonehead?

  And a last note about shapeliness. If we grant for a moment that I am right that essays are glorious because they are for the most part unfiltered, and so a direct and unadorned and naked form, which is good; and we grant also that the essay is the closest form to the human voice, which is good, because we listen to easily and naturally to voices, and don’t have to strain and labor and work and digest, we just dig the voice, as we were trained to do since even before we were born; and if we grant also that the essay is particularly cool because it’s short and direct and a dagger and a dart rather than an epic or labor or doorstop or something you really are going to get around to next summer when you have time which you won’t — that still leaves that nagging question that I get all the time from smart-ass high-school sophomores, what’s the difference between an article and an essay? Hey, Mister, all these cool things you say about essays, don’t they apply to articles in the best hands, articles written by great storycatchers and storytellers like Mike Royko and Murray Kempton and Dexter Filkins and Anna Quindlen and the late great Molly Ivins? To which I say, well, yes, except that journalism in general has to stay on a road, has to have an aura of information, has to at least pretend to be reasonable, whereas essays run anywhere they like; and essays, I would maintain, are also shapelier, more attentive to beginning and middle and end, more attuned to the ways and means by which we tell stories. Essays maybe are a little more carpentered, you know? and more liable to be more vehicles for discovery rather than mere knowledge. Think how many times in your own work you were typing along happily, cursing and humming, and suddenly you wrote something you didn’t know you felt so powerfully, and maybe you cried right there b
y the old typewriter, and marveled, not always happily, at what dark threads your typing had pulled from the mysterious fabric of your heart. Maybe that happens the most with essays. This could be.

  To return to the original thesis: the essay is the most playful and coolest form because it is the most naked. It is without much artifice, in the end; only enough to build a lean-to on the page for the reader and the writer to live in, for a few minutes. It is not a song by the fire, as poetry is, as poetry was certainly born as; it is a not a vast house in which are many mansions, as novels and other prose tomes are; it is not the terse ostensibly neutral (or neutered) reportage that journalism is, or the casual shaggy gossipy confessional that a letter is as its best; nor is it a song, a rant, a note, a blog, a speech (although a great speech is sometimes eerily close to a great essay, yes?), and along with all that it is not, it is not usually disguised or mannered in any way. As a general rule the essay is a clap on the back, a hand outstretched to be grasped, a blunt voice in your ear. Every other genre has some filter, some jacket it wears, some attitude it is supposed to have, some definition that hovers around it like a nimbus, but not the essay; the only definition that applies to the essay is that it be an adventure, a walk in the woods, a idea pushed and prodded and poked and played with. If an essay leans too much toward the scholarly, it becomes a doddering avuncular article; too far over toward mere parade of facts, and it smells like journalism; too stern and instructive and scoldacious, and it morphs into lecture and sermon and homily; too spitting mad and uncontrolled and it is a rant, or Ann Coulter’s diary; too uncontrolled and wandering and it is perhaps a blog entry, a letter, notes for an essay to be made. Direct and unadorned, for the most part — that is the essay. No frills, no filters, no manners, no capering motley, not much ego, it is not only closest to the speaking voice, which is why I love it so, but perhaps closest to the inner voice we all have in the deepest chambers of our hearts. Maybe that is why it is finally such a powerful form, the essay; not because it’s closest to us, but because it is us.

  No

  The most honest rejection letter I ever received for a piece of writing was from Oregon Coast Magazine, to which I had sent a piece that was half bucolic travelogue and half blistering attack on the tendencies of hamlets along the coast to seek the ugliest and most lurid neon signage for their bumper-car emporia, myrtlewood lawn-ornament shops, used-car lots, auto-wrecking concerns, terracotta nightmares, and sad moist flyblown restaurants.

  “Thanks for your submission,” came the handwritten reply from the managing editor. “But if we published it we would be sued by half our advertisers.”

  This was a straightforward remark and I admire it, partly for its honesty, a rare shout in a world of whispers, and partly because I have, in thirty years as a writer and editor, become a close student of the rejection note. The shape, the color, the prose, the tone, the subtext, the speed or lack thereof with which it arrives, even the typeface or scrawl used to stomp gently on the writer’s heart — of these things I sing.

  One of the very best: a rejection note sent by the writer Stefan Merken to an editor who had rejected one of his short stories. “Please forgive me for not accepting your rejection letter,” wrote Merken. “At this time I cannot accept a rejection of my short story. I accept more than 99 percent of the rejections I receive. Many I don’t agree with, but I realize that accepting a piece of fiction for publication is a very subjective judgment call. My acceptance of your rejection letter is also a subjective process and therefore I am returning your letter to you. I did read your letter. I read every letter I receive. Your letter was well-written, but due to time constraints from my own writing schedule, I am unable to make editorial comments. I do make mistakes. Don’t you, as an editor, be disheartened by this role reversal. The road of publishing is long and tedious. You need successful publications and I need for successful publications to print my stories. I will expect to see my story in your next publication. Good luck in the future.”

  The range and scope are astonishing. I have twice received two-page rejection letters from magazines, one an epic and courageous deconstruction of my essay and its many flaws and few virtues, and the other an adventure in sophistry that I still marvel at, in the way you admire a deft bank robber from afar — such astounding creativity, turned to such empty enterprise. In the early days of my own career as an editor I took rejecting pieces very seriously, and tried, as much as possible, to write a thoughtful note explaining why the piece was not quite something for me to accept and pay for. But as all new editors learn, such earnest letters from editors very often are taken by writers as invitations to amend and resubmit pieces, or worse, to argue and debate, and most editors come round eventually to terse generalities simply to defend their working hours and shreds of sanity. Plus I learned that debating poets in particular was painful, although it did give me the chance to daydream about a series of rejection notes designed specifically for poems, which would fault rhythm, meter, cadence, swing, image, line-breaks, verb choice, elusiveness, allusiveness, self-indulgence, self-absorption, liability to lust, and too much muck about love. I nearly had the card printed up that way, with little boxes you could check, like Edmund Wilson’s famous EDMUND WILSON REGRETS THAT HE CANNOT…, or the lovely form letter that Ursula Le Guin sends to this day, but I got sidetracked by a torrent of devotional poetry that I had to reject post-haste, and never got around to it.

  Many magazines lean on a form letter, a printed note, a card, and I study them happily. The New Yorker, under the gentle and peculiar William Shawn, sent a gentle yellow slip of paper with the magazine’s logo and a couple of gentle sentences saying, gently, no. Under the brisker Robert Gottlieb, the magazine sent a similar note, this one courteously mentioning the “evident quality” of your submission even as the submission is declined. Harper’s and The Atlantic lean on the traditional Thank You But, Grand Street among other sniffy literary quarterlies icily declines to read your submission if it has not been solicited, The Sun responds some months later with a long friendly note from the editor in which he mentions that he is not accepting your piece even as he vigorously commends the writing of it, The Nation thanks you for thinking of The Nation, and The Virginia Quarterly Review sends, or used to send, a lovely engraved card which is worth the price of rejection. The only rejection notice I keep in plain view is that one, for the clean lines of its limbs and the grace with which it delivers its blow to the groin.

  I am no poet, as friends of mine who are poets are quick to remind me, darkly, but here and there I have inflicted poems on various and sundry small quarterlies, and I have come to love the bristle and bustle with which they reject work. I mean, it takes brass balls, as my brothers say, to reject a batch of poems with a curt note while including a subscription form to the review in the same envelope in which the rejection huddles. You have to admire the defiant energy there, the passion for persistence. The sheer relentless drive of the small to stay alive is more remarkable, in the end, than the grandeur of the great, no?

  Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (NO WAY), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleagenous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), and etc.

  On the other hand, what if my lovely and mysterious spouse issued me a rejection slip on the wind-whipped afternoon when I knelt, creaky even then, on a high hill over the wine-dark sea, and stammered would would would will will will you you marry me? What if she had leaned down (wel
l, not quite leaned down, she’s the size of a heron) and handed me a lovely engraved card that said WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT WE CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSAL, DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS MERITS? But she didn’t. She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse. Anyway there I was on my knees for a while, wondering if my lovely and mysterious paramour had actually said yes, while she railed and wailed into the wind, and finally I said, um, is that an affirmative? because my knees are killing me here, and she said, clearly, yes.