SOURCE: "The Essay Lives—in Disguise," in The New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1984, pp. 1,47-9.

[Lopate is an American author who has published in a variety of genres His collection of personal essays, Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis (1981), derives its title from Lopate's feeling that his perceptions are shaped to a great degree by his marital status. In the following essay, Lopate discusses current popular forms of the essay and how they differ from the traditional essay form.]

The informal or familiar essay is a wonderfully tolerant form, able to accommodate rumination, memoir, anecdote, diatribe, scholarship, fantasy and moral philosophy. It might have an elegant form or an amoebic shapelessness, held together by little more than the author's voice. Working in it liberates you from the structure of the "well-made" short story and allows you to ramble in a way that reflects the mind at work. You have an added freedom at this historical moment, because no one is looking over your shoulder. Nobody much cares. Commercially, essay volumes rank even lower than poetry.

I know, because my last book, a personal essay collection called Bachelorhood, received lovely critical notices but was less welcomed by booksellers, who had trouble figuring what niche or category to put it in. Autobiography? Short fiction? Self-help? I felt like telling them, "Hey, this category has been around for a long time—Montaigne, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, remember? I didn't invent it." Yet, realistically, they were right: what had once been a thriving popular tradition had ceased being so. Readers who enjoyed the book often told me so with some surprise, because they didn't think they would like "essays." For them, the word conjured up those dread weekly compositions they were forced to write on the gasoline tax or the draft.

Essays are usually taught all wrong: instead of being celebrated for their delights as literature, they are harnessed to rhetoric and composition, in a two-birds-with-one-stone approach designed to sharpen the students' skills at argumentative persuasion. Equally questionable is the anthology approach, which assigns an essay apiece by a dozen writers along our latest notion of a representative spectrum. It would be much better to read six apiece by two writers, since the essay (particularly the familiar essay) is so rich a vehicle for displaying personality in all its willfully changing facets.

Essays go back at least to classical Greece and Rome, but it was Michel de Montaigne, generally considered the "father of the essay," who first matched the word to the form around 1580. Reading this contemporary of Shakespeare (whom the Bard himself is rumored to have read), we are reminded of the original, pristine meaning and intention of the word, from the French verb essayer: to attempt, to try, to make an experimental leap into the unknown. Montaigne understood that, in an essay, the track of a person's thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure. The essayist must be willing to contradict himself (for which reason an essay is not a legal brief), to digress, and even to end up in an opposite place from where he started. Particularly in Montaigne's magnificent late essays, freefalls that go on for a hundred pages or more, it is possible for the reader to lose all contact with the shore, ostensible subject, top, bottom, until there is nothing to do but follow the companionable voice of Montaigne, thinking alone in the dark. Eventually, one begins to share his confidence that "all subjects are linked with one another," which makes "any topic equally fertile."

It was Montaigne's peculiar project, which he claimed rightly or wrongly was original, to write about the one subject he knew best: himself. As with all succeeding literary self-portraits-—or stream-of-consciousness, for that matter—success depended on having an interesting consciousness, and Montaigne was blessed with an undulatingly supple, learned, skeptical, sane and self-attentive one. In point of fact, he frequently strayed onto other subjects, giving his opinion on everything from cannibals to coaches, but we do learn a lot of odd things about the man, down to his bowels and kidney stones. "Sometimes there comes to me a feeling that I should not betray the story of my life," he writes. On the other hand: "No pleasure has any meaning for me without communication."

A modern reader may come away thinking that the old fox still kept a good deal of himself to himself. This is partly because we have upped the ante on autobiographical revelation, but also partly because Montaigne was writing essays, not confessional memoirs; and in an essay it is as permissible, as candid, to chase down a reflection to its source as to confess some past misdeed. In any case, having decided that "the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being," he did succeed via the Essays in learning to accept himself, by making friends with his mind.

Montaigne's generous development of the essay form, taking it to its outer limits right away, was also daunting. Afterward came an inevitable specialization, which included the very un-Montaignean split between formal and informal essays. It is difficult even now to draw a firm distinction between the two, because elements of one often turn up in the other, and because most of the great essayists were adept at both modes. However, the official version states that the formal essay derived from Francis Bacon and is (to quote the New Columbia Encyclopedia) "dogmatic, impersonal, systematic and expository" and written in a "stately" language, while the informal essay is "personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational, and frequently humorous."

Informal, familiar essays tended to seize on the parade of everyday life: odd characters, small public rituals, vanities, fashions, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, going to plays, walking the streets. It is a very urban form, and it enjoyed a terrific vogue in the coffeehouse London society of the 18th and early 19th centuries, when it enlisted the talents of such stylists as Jonathan Swift, Dr. Johnson (in his "Rambler" series), Addison and Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and the visiting American, Washington Irving. This golden age of the familiar essay was given a boost by the phenomenal growth of newspapers and magazines, all of which needed "smart" copy (of the kind inaugurated by the Spectator papers) that functioned as instructions on manners for their largely middle-class readership.

Much of the casual, feuilleton journalism of this period was not as memorable as Addison and Steele—it was, in fact, cynical hackwork. However, the journalistic situation was still fluid enough to afford original thinkers a platform within the public press. The British tolerance for eccentricity seemed especially to encourage their commentators to develop idiosyncratic, independent voices. No one was as cantankerously marginal, in his way, or as willing to write against the grain, as Hazlitt. His energetic prose registered a temperament that passionately, moodily swung between sympathy and scorn. Anyone capable of writing such a bracingly candid essay on "The Pleasures of Hating" could not—as W. C. Fields would say—be all bad. At the same time, Hazlitt's enthusiasms could transform the humblest topic, such as going on a country walk or seeing a prizefight, into descriptions of visionary wholeness.

What many of the best essayists have had—what Hazlitt had in abundance—was quick access to their own blood reactions, so that the merest flash of a prejudice or taste-discrimination might be dragged into the open and defended. Hazlitt's readiness to pass judgment, combined with his receptivity to new impressions, made him a fine critic of painting and the theater; but he ended by antagonizing all of his friends, even the benign, forgiving Charles Lamb. Not that Lamb did not have his contrary side. He too was singled out for "his perverse habit of contradiction," which helped give his prose its peculiar bite. Lamb's "Elia" essays are among the most pungent and funny in the English language.

How I envy readers of the London Magazine, who could pick up a copy in 1820 and encounter a new essay by Hazlitt, Lamb, or both. After their deaths, the familiar essay continued to attract gifted practitioners, like Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas DeQuincey and Mark Twain, but somehow a little of the vitality seeped out of it, and by the turn of the century it seemed rather toothless and played out. As Stevenson confessed, "Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt." Perhaps the very triumph of the early essayists in exploiting the familiar essay form so variously contributed to its temporary decline.

The modernist esthetic was also not particularly kind to this sort of writing, relegating it to some genteel, antiquated nook, "belles lettres"—a phrase increasingly spoken with a sneer, as though implying a sauce without the meat. If "meat" is taken to mean the atrocities of life, it is true that the familiar essay has something obstinately nonapocalyptic about it; the very act of composing such an essay seems to implicate the writer in rationalist-humanist assumptions, which have come to appear suspect under the modernist critique.

Still, it would be unfair to pin the rap on modernism, which Lord knows gets blamed for everything else. One might as well "blame" the decline on what happened to the conversational style of writing. Familiar essays were fundamentally, even self-consciously, conversational: it is no surprise that Swift wrote one of his best short pieces on "Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation"; that Addison and Steele were always analyzing true and false wit; that Hazlitt titled his books Table Talk The Plain Speaker and The Round Table, that Montaigne wrote his own "Of the Art of Discussion" or that Oliver Wendell Holmes actually cast his familiar essays in the form of breakfast table dialogues. Why would a book like Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a celebration of good talk that was so popular in its time, be so unlikely today?

I cannot go along with those who say, "The art of conversation has died," because I have no idea what such a statement means. If it did pass on, it happened long before I came on the scene; and I hope I may be forgiven by those with longer memories for not knowing the difference between the real article and those pleasurable verbal exchanges in my life. No, conversation grows and changes as does language; it does not "die." What has departed is conversationally-flavored writing, which implies a speaking relationship between writer and reader. How many readers today would sit still for a direct address by the author? To be called "Gentle Reader" or "Hypocrite lecteur," to have one's arm pinched while dozing off, to be called to attention, flattered, kidded like a real person instead of a privileged fly on the wall—wouldn't most current readers find such devices archaic, intrusive, even impudent? Oh, you wouldn't? Good, we can go back to the old style, which I much prefer.

Maybe what has collapsed is the very fiction of "the educated reader," whom the old essayists seemed to be addressing in their conversational remarks. From Montaigne onward, essayists until this century have invoked a shared literary culture: the Greek and Latin authors and the best of their national poetry. The whole modern essay tradition sprang from quotation. Montaigne's Essays and Robert Burton's The Anatomy Of Melancholy were essentially outgrowths of the "commonplace book," a personal journal in which quotable passages, literary excerpts and comments were written. Though the early essayists' habit of quotation may seem excessive to a modern taste, it was this display of learning that linked them to their educated reading public and ultimately gave them the authority to speak so personally about themselves.

Such a universal literary culture no longer exists; we have only popular culture to fall back on. While it is true that the old high culture was never really "universal," excluding as it did a great deal of humanity, it is also true that, without it, personal discourse has become more barren. Not only is popular culture not strong enough to cleanse the air of narcissism, but the writer's invocation of its latest bandwagon successes, be it "Indiana Jones" or cabbage patch dolls, comes off as a pandering to the audience.

The average reader of periodicals becomes conditioned to digest pure information, up-to-date, with maybe a smattering of viewpoint disguised as objectivity, and is ill equipped to follow the rambling, cat-and-mouse game of contrariety played by the great essayists of the past. Very few American periodicals today (shall we say none?) support house-essayists to the tune of letting them write regularly and at comfortable length on whatever topics they may choose, however non-topical. The nearest thing we have to that are columnists. The best of these, like Russell Baker, Ellen Goodman and Leon Hale, are in a sense carrying on the Addison and Steele tradition; they are so good at their professional task of hit-and-run wisdom that I only wish they had the space sometimes to try their essayistic wings for real. The problem with the column format is that it becomes too tight and pat: One idea per piece.

Fran Lebowitz, for instance, is a very clever writer and one not afraid of presenting a cranky persona; but her one-liners have a cumulative sameness of effect that inhibits a true essayistic movement. In the future, I hope, her structures may become more receptive to self-surprise, so that she might say, with Lamb, "I do not know how, upon a subject which I began treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful."

From time to time, I see hopeful panel discussions offered on "The Resurgence of the Essay." Yes, it would be very nice, and it may come about yet. The fact is, however, that very few American writers today are essayists primarily. A good number of the essay books issued each year are essentially random collections of book reviews, speeches, articles and prefaces by authors who have made a name for themselves in other genres. The existence of these collections owes more to the celebrated authors' desire to see all their words between hard covers than it does to any real devotion to the essay form. A tired air of grudgingly graceful civic duty hovers over many of these performances. Still, there are exceptions, like Cynthia Ozick, who seems to have brought her freshest energies to the essays in Art and Ardor.

I do not want to overstate the case for decline. While any boom in the essay will be held back by its commercial sluggishness, at the same time the form seems to have powerful attractions, esthetically at least, for many good writers working today. The essay offers the chance to wrestle with one's own intellectual confusion and to set down one's ideas in a manner both more straightforward and more exposed than in fiction (where it is always possible to attribute opinions to the characters or narrator instead of the author).

As for the familiar essay, it is very much alive today, if you choose to track it down under its various disguises. Shards of the form, more or less complete, appear in the work of newspaper columnists, as mentioned; under the protective umbrella of New Journalism (Joan Didion being the most substantial personal essayist to emerge from that training ground); in autobiographical-political meditations (Richard Rodriguez, Adrienne Rich, Ntozake Shange, Norman Mailer); naturalistic and regional essay-writing (John Graves, Wendell Berry, Lewis Thomas, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard); humorous pieces (Max Apple, Roy Blount Jr., Calvin Trillin); literary criticism (Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Vivian Gornick, Seymour Krim); and travel writing (Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark and Paul Theroux). E. B. White is in a class of his own, as was the late William Saroyan. I am sure I have left out some other first-rate essayists and regret not having the space here to analyze the individual contributions of those listed; the point is, however, to indicate the range of activity and continuing viability of the form, especially when linked to a compelling subject that makes the reader temporarily overlook his or her hostility to essays.

In Europe, the essay stayed alive by taking a turn toward the speculative or philosophical, as seen in writers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Simone Weil, E. M. Cioran, Albert Camus, Roland Barthes, Czeslaw Milosz and Nicola Chiaramonte. All are offspring of the epigrammatic, belletristic side of Nietzsche, in a sense. This fragmented, aphoristic, critical tradition of essay writing is only now beginning to have an influence on American writing. One sees it, curiously, in much of the experimental new fiction—in Renata Adler, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Barth. Their novelistic discourse often reads like a broken essay, personal and philosophical, intermixed with narrative elements. The tendency of many post-modernist storytellers to parody the pedantry of the essay voice speaks both to their intellectual reliance on that tradition and their unsureness about adapting the patriarchal stance of the Knower. This is why the essay must remain "broken" for the time being.

In one of the most penetrating discussions of the essay form, Georg Lukacs put it this way: "The essay is a judgment, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging." Uncomfortable words for a nonjudgmental age. The familiar essayists of the past may have been non-specialists—indeed, it was part of their attraction—but they knew how to speak with a generalist's easy authority.

That is precisely what we contemporary essayists have a hard time doing; we are too well aware of the superiority experts have over us in technical information. The last generalist-essayist who seemed able to write comfortably, knowledgeably, opinionatedly on everything under the sun was Paul Goodman; we may not see his like again soon.

Still, the willingness of contemporary writers to try the form, if not necessarily commit themselves to it, speaks well of its chances for survival. If we do offend, we can always fall back on Papa Montaigne's "Que scayje?": What do I know?