Essays are often viewed as a kind of supplement, something that novelists and poets do with the leftover thoughts and stray impulses and bits of material that won't fit into their “real” work. Several aspects of the books under discussion here support this theory. One of them begins with an essay that the author breezily confesses having pieced together out of fragments from his commonplace book. And while dust-jacket notes are hardly to be trusted, if we take these at their word we learn that none of these authors is before all else an essayist. Of the whole group, only Sam Pickering is not more widely known as a poet or fiction writer, and even he, like David Brendan Hopes and Nicholas Delbanco, is described as a professor and then as an author. Turning to the others, we learn that Marjorie Sandor has won prizes for her short fiction and is also a professor, and that Hilary Masters has written eight novels. Even in their subject matter these books foreground issues related to writing fiction and poetry much more often than those related to writing nonfiction prose. Why are these authors, all of them quite capable essayists, seemingly reluctant to present themselves as essayists, and seemingly diffident as they offer their books for our attention?

I offer that question only for your contemplation. But as I read these books I found myself fascinated with closely related issues: just how writers present themselves, how they engage and contend with different registers of experience and inquiry, what particular elements of the world seemed to concern these novelists and poets and professors when they turn their hand to the essay. This sample is too small to be reliable, but these collections offer some tantalizing clues as to what literary artists who think of themselves as particular kinds—poets, fiction writers, or memoirists—find especially interesting and important, and to what uses they tend to put their materials.

We may view essays as mere supplements, but we also tend to have expectations about their being “true” that we don't have for fiction or even poetry. The current popularity of the unwieldy term “creative nonfiction” suggests some ambiguous balance of invention and truth, and the ways essayists handle these elements are crucial. The books under review all drew my attention to the ways their authors selected, arranged, and improvised upon the facts of their lives and interests. In what follows, then, I hope to explore how writers who define their primary identities quite differently seem to handle “the truth,” even as their handling becomes itself a part of their quest for self-definition and literary creation.

Nicholas Delbanco's The Lost Suitcase offers an unusual combination of texts: centered among eight essays on “the literary life” we find the title novella, a reimagining from multiple perspectives of the famous anecdote of the missing valise full of Hemingway's early manuscripts. Both the novella and the essays take up questions of literary accomplishment, judgment, and strategies in a confident, almost magisterial manner. Delbanco knows his craft and how to make even rather loose connections seem natural enough. I have already mentioned that the opening essay, “Travel, Art, and Death,” pieces together quite disparate entries from a commonplace book; yet by its end we believe that travels in Greece, old photographs, the deaths of Wallace Stegner and John Hersey, and the odd story of a friend—who passes his oral exam to graduate summa cum laude at Harvard because he happens to have memorized the first three hundred lines of Paradise Lost—all somehow belong together.

Lively, canny observations and anecdotes about the necessary but difficult relations among artists and their peers and mentors run through this book. Ruefully, Delbanco repeats the famous maxim that there is no arguing about taste, and he then notes the contradictory reality that those of us who teach writing or aspire to be writers must, in one way or another, spend our lives making and pressing others to make such judgments. We have to argue about taste; its vagaries and mysteries must be explored and examined even when they cannot be neatly summarized. One fine story tells of cellist Bernard Greenhouse studying with the master Pablo Casals until he can play a Bach suite exactly as Casals does. At this point, Casals plays through the piece once more, changing every detail and nuance of his performance. “Now you've learned how to improvise in Bach. From now on you study Bach this way.”

For novelists grappling with the problem of historical accuracy, Delbanco offers the intriguing operating principle of “lazy historicity” he devised while writing a novel about the nearly forgotten Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. “[I]t seems to me that the domain of research in historical fiction is strangely delimited: you need to get things right but need to stop your study when imagination starts. It's a kind of starter motor: you turn that particular key until the true engine kicks in.” Such a principle may trouble historians, but those concerned with the alternate avenues toward truth that fiction provides—and daunted by the nearly bottomless swamp that waits for those who pursue complete historical authenticity—will find it useful.

The essay “Telephone” provides some historical background in preparation for the title novella. In the standard version of the incident (Hemingway's first wife Hadley packed the suitcase to bring to him in Switzerland, and it was lost somewhere on her train journey), the loss of the early manuscripts “became an emblem for what proved irretrievable: [Hemingway's] hopeful youth, his marriage, his sense of possibility, his early close wrangling with words.” Yet Delbanco resists the tragic view of the incident, pointing out that the lost work could have been “mere penny-ante prose,” that surely Hemingway could have reconstructed much of what was worth saving, that Hemingway just may have, in fact, reworked some of the “lost” stories into A Moveable Feast.

Whatever the truth might be, “The Lost Suitcase” works a series of dazzling, virtuosic variations upon the story. Hadley (Delbanco calls her Anna-Lise) is naïve and earnest in the first version, a world-weary libertine in the next; in another she reads the pages and discovers, to her horror, that

this language of his is atrocious, so very much a schoolboy's prose she cannot bring herself to think of it as Edward's work or the work of someone who could ever be a writer.

There are pages about football and baseball and boxing.

There are pages about fish.

That which she tried to teach him he has failed entirely to learn; that which he knows is not worth knowing, but bathetic and mannered and cheap.

This is crafty stylistically as well as thematically, paying a kind of parodistic homage to Hemingway's famous prose style even as it undercuts it. Strikingly, throughout the many variations AnnaLise is a far more varied and intriguing character than Edward, who remains relatively consistent, and more or less an arrogant dope. One senses Delbanco's delight in having the master exactly where he wants him, in his own ability to retell the story with any spin he pleases, and especially in making the soon-to-be-spurned first wife the more interesting and talented character.

Yet the story's interest goes beyond the characters into the metanarrative that develops around, above, and below the kernel of incident. With the return to realism that has dominated fiction in the last twenty years or so, such postmodern maneuvers have fallen out of fashion, but Delbanco defies the currents and improvises happily, questions his own knowledge and motives, meditates on the difficulties of making fiction, and offers a droll series of lists: thirteen ways of looking at a suitcase, thirteen ways of hiding a suitcase, thirteen ways of looking for a suitcase, etc.

“Letter to a Young Fiction Writer” similarly pays homage to Rilke and his Letters to a Young Poet while drawing back a bit from the youthful admiration Delbanco once felt for the German poet. He now finds “the roses and the maidens and the lighthouses and the Orphic utterances” to be “a little humid.” His own advice includes a defense of the teaching of writing: “the worst that's done is not much harm and the best is a good deal better than that.” He notes the difficulty of finishing a book, of coming to terms with it as merely an “inert cultural object” rather than “fancy's flesh and bone.”

The last essay of The Lost Suitcase deals directly with the issue of why writers write. Its highlight, and a good measure of Delbanco's method and approach, is a brief transcription of the Beaux Arts Trio in rehearsal, with commentary. The musicians speak in a kind of polyglot, shorthand babble that is both hilarious and surprisingly revealing about the process of collaborative creation:

Nun, take it from D. Wubba wubba wubba wubba. Ich habe quasi improvisatore ici. You follow my bowing and I follow yours. Wubba wubba. You lose the whole effect of that piano after playing forte for fourteen bars through. Last night I tried going up, today I go down—the takeover shouldn't sound as if now it's me—but lead up, please.

Delbanco comments that his role was “to evoke the nature of the enterprise in a language faithful to the original but sufficiently distant from it to be more than mere transcription. This was a particular problem of reportage and, perhaps, extreme. But it seems to me an emblem of the novelist's ongoing task: we witness and translate.” Surely he is right; yet his own practice suggests that writers must create what is effectively a new reality, in what is quite nearly a different language, as they move from the rich, multilayered symphony of the live situation to the comparatively flat, single instrument of the written text. Wherever that lost suitcase may be, we are fortunate to have this book about it.