personal essay

On the Essay

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So, here I am writing an essay. An essaie. A trying out of thoughts and ideas. I’m nervous. Is that obvious? Perhaps the blunt Hemingwayesque short sentences are a giveaway. It’s not my usual genre. An escape into fiction is easier. There, I can hide behind another voice, another life, a different kind of truth. There, it’s a truth that sidles up, unannounced, or leaves chasm-like gaps for the reader to leap over – or plunge into – and it comes from somewhere only half-understood or consciously planned.

Essays should be planned, shouldn’t they? That’s what you’re told at school. You make a list of points, you think through your arguments, you construct a logical sequence and decide where to place your strongest points, your knock-out quotation, your rhetorical flourishes. You follow your plan through. The problem is planning’s not my thing. I like to just get started and see where that takes me. I write to think, and think as I write. Open-endedness, an uncertain path, the lack of a map, the thrill of the unknown, the change of route along the way all seem to get me there in one way or another (eventually) and the journey has usually been an adventure. Writers differ hugely on this, I know, but for me the thoroughly planned writing route is a dull, wearisome plod.  My freshest thoughts appear on the trail, unexpectedly, as if from nowhere. The fog lifts, I reach the brow of a hill and a surprising new vista opens up.

And here’s another thing. If an essay is a trying out of ideas, what about feelings? Can feelings be ‘tried out’ too? An essay on feelings seems perfectly fine, but what about an essay of feelings, where feelings are the substance, where they do the heavy-lifting, rather than simply providing the content? Can my pulse race in an essay? Can I pause to look at that stunning pink and gold sunset, or, on a hike, feel the squelch on the soles of my boots, sucking me into the mud, or choke back the tears in a darkened room, as a father films his daughter on a camcorder at an airport, playing hide-and-seek with him for the last time?

These questions aren’t rhetorical ones – I’d like answers. And the route to these answers is in reading other people’s essays – not school essays but the kinds of essays that are published in book form.  If I ask, ‘can an essay do x or y or z?’ then going to essayists should help me find out. So here are a few observations about essays I’ve read in the past and more recently.

First, for me, some of the best essays are by brilliant thinkers, people who know a lot about something and think in exciting ways about that subject. Take Susan Sontag, for instance, writing about changes made by photographic images on our world and perceptions of that world in the collection On Photography in 1971.  It takes just five sentences in the first essay for her to come up with a stunningly insightful take:

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar, and even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Was this the first appearance of the idea of ‘reading’ visual images that have their own special ‘grammar’ – the metaphor of the written word being adopted for the visual in a highly illuminating way? Is it where the idea of ‘visual literacy’ originated. I’m not sure, but it’s a startling opening to a highly influential book. And the ‘ethics’ of seeing too. That’s an extraordinary phrase. It’s original thought encoded in surprising conjunctions of words that make one think afresh.

But not every great essayist is pithily constructing abstract new philosophies or highly intellectual ways of framing, or re-framing, the world. George Orwell is one of my favourite essayists and he generally follows one of two approaches. The essays are either a bit like a plainly stated, and carefully argued and exemplified, manifesto, or, in another style, more like a powerful story with a message – ‘Politics and the English Language’ is an example of the former, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the latter. I like both. Both have a strong thesis, usually a political argument to be proved, and the engine of the essay never stutters or splutters but powers ahead full throttle.  This extract from ‘Shooting an Elephant shows Orwell being quite explicit about how the story he’s going to tell will throw light for the reader, as it the episode did for him, on some significant political idea, such as poverty, inequality, socialism or, in this case, imperialism:

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out.

More recently, new genres of essay-writing seem to have sprung up, alongside the more conventional forms and perhaps these show how the essay can be something looser, more complex, with feelings and experiences allowable, and other things too. Annie Dillard’s collection The Abundance was gifted to me by Secret Santa, a collection of essays. That’s what the reviewer on the back cover calls it, and that’s how it’s billed. And yet it defies easy categorisation as such. There’s no thesis in the essays, no explicit argument, no explanatory voice, no concluding thoughts. Sections are not connected with each other, thoughts and feelings jostle with each other, sometimes randomly. There are stunning descriptions of landscape and wildlife and disturbing moments of alienation and confusion. Are they memoir? Writing from life? Are they, perhaps, even poetry? What exactly makes them essays? In the introduction to the collection Geoff Dyer talks of a recognised genre called ‘genre-resistant non-fiction’ and seemingly Dillard has been doing this since the 1970s, resisting convention and ‘essaying’ a different way of writing. Her focus is often, though not always, on the natural world, and herself in it, on trying to understand who we are and what our experiences in nature, and nature’s experiences of itself, might mean. So, in one essay she writes about an encounter with a weasel, about what it thinks and what she thinks and what that can tell her about both it and her.

‘Please do not tell me about ‘approach-avoidance conflicts.’ I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes – but the weasel and I for a sweet and shocking time, both plugged into another tape altogether. Can I help it if it was a blank?

What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.

Dillard’s essays are metaphysical and philosophical and often quite strange, a bit off-the-wall. They leave you with powerful thoughts but few conclusions. If the essay has to have a conclusion, Dillard defiantly refuses to give you one.

To conclude, (or should I say thus, therefore, so, to sum up, or what you will) essays, these days, can be pretty much anything that is short, written in a writer’s own voice (I’ve come to this conclusion late on in my conclusion, for which apologies) and rooted in non-fiction. It can be poetic, it can tell a story, it can be brilliant philosophising (or not). It can follow strict rules or none. Perhaps it does have to have that element of ‘essaie’ of trying out something – trying out a thought, a position, a viewpoint, a way of understanding experiences. And the provisional, questing, enquiring nature of the name might help the reader to see it as something to enjoy for this very reason – that it allows us access to someone else’s mind, and their efforts to think things through, in a valiant literary attempt at something…whatever that may be.

Barbara Bleiman

April 2023

On Reading the Farm

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I’m staying with my sister in Canada, find on a shelf one of my favourite books from childhood. One I read avidly (or so I thought). It was always my book: Jane’s Country Year. A young girl spends a year away from the city on a farm. I’ve carried an image of that farm safely through all those years, or thought I had.

I’m with my brother-in-law; we’re driving through Northern Alberta on our way to visit a real working farm. Our view is flat: sky, prairie, a few abandoned grain elevators. We’re going to collect furniture fifty miles beyond Beaver Lodge. I tell him what I’m expecting to find: a farmhouse in a green valley. Not this one, he says. It’s just a barn I rent.

But there would be a farm? He grunts, yes. He doesn’t seem curious about my book discovery so I don’t confess that I’ve already put it in my suitcase. Did any other story I read as a child have a farm? I read or was read to, and can vaguely remember a few things. There were themes the stories seemed to hold in common: an escape from somewhere not described. Out of the city? To the mountains or the countryside and security. Or Wind in the Willows. Follow Mole and be safer underground.

These were stories of houses, homes, burrows, cottages, farms, isolated in the countryside. Those accounts, those cosy illustrations of rural idylls, webbed into each other. Yet their content has slipped away leaving a sense of comfort in the strangeness. What did they add up to? A farm, a house I wanted as home – kettle on the stove, welcoming grown-ups, warm range, red-check table-cloth, jugs of milk.

He says we’re nearly there. I tell him that I’d just rescued from their shelves my favourite childhood book. He grunts. Our van bumps over potholes. Jane’s Country Year. I add that I’d remembered a cottage embossed in the centre of a green cloth cover but when I’d checked the cover I found it was not a cottage; it was a tree. So, not after all, a cottage deep down in a valley. He grunts again.

I’ve forgotten so much. When I found the lost book on their bookcase I’d remembered other titles that might have an image of that cottage, that valley. I’d googled and found an Enid Blyton with 1950s red-cheeked children: The Family at Red-Roofs. But this wasn’t the one I remembered where a wren was nanny to four children, making egg sandwiches. And was she really an overgrown bird? This one featured a cottage with red roofs but no chubby wren seemed to be catering?

Surely there was a farmhouse in a valley; there were barns and trees. I remember looking down from a height, that there below us was a house? I checked Jane’s Country Year again. It was there, inside, in an illustration. Not as I remembered it but certainly looking down at a valley, farmhouse, several barns. A year. Events like delivering baby lambs only came round once and then something else amazing to witness and then the child was gone away. Or did they invite her back? I must have checked the end of the story? I still could, now that I have the book. Or was it like Heidi with Grandfather? Seduced by the mountain slopes to go back and to keep returning. Whatever was left behind in the town was a longing and a blur. Or was it some threat that Heidi had to escape? Here and there, mountains, snow and a summer with the same vast extent of green.

Not magic but common sense. Down to earth. Like Mole and Ratty. There was food throughout that year, in all the stories. There was a journey there. And a leaving. But that was all right. While I was immersed in reading, it became my year in the countryside, nothing to do with ‘that girl’ at the centre of the story. A farm in a valley surrounded by the seasons, a range, a kitchen, a comfort. Each month accounted for.

As I started to read it again I realised I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to track down and re-read any of my childhood favourites. If I imagined myself back to that ‘Jane’s’ world, I might lose the security of that changing landscape. The warmth of hay in the barn. The cows swaying indifference as they crossed the yard. The steam popping from the cowpats. I didn’t want to relax any more in Mole or Ratty’s kitchen. What was it really like to be cuddled by Jenny Wren? Hardly comfortable.

The adults in the story didn’t consume the children but kept them fed and safe. It was a year that was built round that seasonal year of change. It was secure in the valley. As I read I could hear the conversations, I could hear people that sounded much like my imagined voices for Grandfather and Ratty as they described the workings of the farm. I was shown that countryside so it would never be lost to me. Always isolated, always in a green valley that surrendered to the seasons – bucolic, cows swaying their indifference on their way to the milking-shed. I was given the countryside as if that world was open to me.

That place was in a story, a picture and a feeling and all held in one year. The cycle. A small image embedded into the centre of the green cloth cover of a farmhouse and trees. Looking down from the height, there below us. Ok, it was actually just one tree embossed into the cover.

It was the year. Things only came round once and then she was gone. Or did they invite that girl back? I can’t remember and don’t want to check the book to see. Was it like Heidi with Grandfather, seduced by the mountain slopes? The same extent of green. Down to earth. Like Mole and Badger. There was food. There was a journey there. And a leaving. But that was all right.

My year in the country. All imagined. A farm in a valley surrounded by the seasons, a range, a kitchen, a comfort. Each month accounted for, it was such a long time that it stretches to now. If I go back there, I might lose the security of that changing landscape, the warmth of the hay heaped up in the barn, the cows’ udders swaying as they crossed the yard.

I was given a home in that book but I remember nothing about the young girl at the centre. She was probably too good and sweet to be true. It was the structure of the story that let me imagine my own adventures. It was secure in the valley but mainly I wanted to be back inside, in that warm kitchen. I didn’t always want the open road with Toad, I sometimes wanted to burrow down. Badger’s home in the middle of the Wild Wood would have been welcome.

My brother-in-law takes a sharp turn to the left. He says we’re there and I look out at yet more prairie. We rattle and bump down a track; a gate has been left half connected to a broken fence. We bounce and judder to a halt.

Suddenly I can see nothing. Not only is there no farm, no gentle cows, there is no anything. I don’t move. My brother-in-law has got out into a madness of mosquito and buzzing and is quite lost to me. There are denser shapes walking around that might be animal. A different buzz of energy seems human shaped, it breaks up into a couple who have come out of what must be the farmhouse.

They stand together in the front doorway in a daze of buzzing killers, their arms are crossed over their chests and they are watching. They seem sullen. I had started to get out of the van, not to be a coward, but am immediately covered and stung by these angry packets of hate. I get back in and wait while he loads up the back.

He does a thumbs-up to the blur that is the couple. They do not move; he gets into the van. You ok, he says?

I nod and we reverse, drive back down the track, take the road away to the town.

Jane Kirwan