The American Scene; The Literary Essay

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent doing the arts for Illinois Institute of Technology in the American scene. I imagine the subject that announced to you today, the literary essay is not one that caused you to leap in the air with joy and to get all excited and say this is one of the most exhilarating subjects one could discuss. But let me hasten to assure you that it is an interesting subject. And it's a subject which is much neglected, especially neglected in our time. And when you recall the great essay as of the past, who have indulged in what we call the literary essay, people like Dr. Johnson, Thorough, which we whom we have had here before, and in our own time, James Thurber, E .B. White, Haslet, Addison, Steel, or you make up your own list, you realize that there's a very great tradition and a very attractive tradition of the

literary essay. Maybe one reason we don't have more of it is because it's so difficult to do. Well that's neither here nor there for the moment. But in order to discuss this interesting but neglected subject, I have asked a friend of yours to come down, man well qualified for this discussion. I say a friend of yours because great many of you read his, have been reading his regular contribution to the Chicago Tribune magazine of books, where he has had a series of essays on books, different authors, different titles over the last few years. And these essays have been collected in this book which you saw at the beginning of the program. You're a literary heritage, published by Lippincott and just recently released. It's now selling long, you can buy it in your bookstore. It's a collection of some of the large number of these essays, which you have many of which you've already read in the Chicago Tribune. Now those are you who have read some of these essays. Know what to expect in our speaker today. These essays

as you recall are in the very best sense of the word, Urbane. I have known Dr. Farrity for many years, not only is capacity as formerly chairman of the Department of English out at Northwestern University where he's now one of the distinguished professors out there in Victorian Literature. I knew him as years ago as a student. We were fellow students together in an Eastern school. And even then he was an Urbane Swav gentleman, extremely well read. And this well -digested, disciplined reading of his has made him into a good exemplar of the literary essay himself. And this book, your literary heritage, is a group of literary essays. So we will not merely be talking about the literary essay as a type, but we will be talking about Dr. Farrity's own essay. Dr. Farrity, to begin with, I think we might well

define. Define what a literary essay is. And could you start off on that? I think I can, Dr. Vincent. The literary essay has now, as you implied, been practiced for three or four centuries by some of the most distinguished writers in the modern literature, not only American and English, but French and Russian and German and so on. And out of all this, I think something of a definition can be extracted out of these hundreds of essays that have been written. And primarily, an essay is what the word itself implies in its other uses also, as well as in literature, an excursion into a subject, a brief but not an exhaustive treatment of a subject. And while it doesn't exhaust the subject, neither should it exhaust the reader. That's one of the main elements in an essay.

It should be attractively enough written and be appealing enough in its general tone and word of its whole technique so that the attention is caught and kept until the brief subject is fully discussed in so far as the brief treatment allows. The difference is between a cocktail and a long drink. This is the cocktail. This is a cocktail. The pint has been, and that's a very good comparison, it seems to me, it has been compared so far as literature is concerned to the lyric in poetry. And I think that's a rather good parallel to draw because it has, in its development and techniques in its form, everything about it, many of the qualities that a lyric had, being brief and spirited and remarkable for its insight, but not necessarily for the closeness of the argument or the logic of its development and so on, but remarkable for

other, in some cases, lighter qualities, but likeness is not the only element in it. You can have something profound but treated with grace and with deafness so that a feeling of lightness emerges. You have quite a range in from the compactness, the concentration of, say, Lloyd Bacon's essays, to the souffle of E .B. Wright maybe at times. Yes, and that gives you a very remarkable range in date. Now the man who has given credit usually for inventing this form is Monten, and I think he does. He deserves to be called the inventor of the form in that he, for the first time, gave it a sort of format, and he emphasized right there at the start one of the things which chiefly distinguishes the essay, the literary essay as a form, and that's the emphasis on personality,

on individuality. In his essays, there are translated in a number of books, there are 107 different titles, but amusingly enough, not only humility, but interestingly, not only one subject, and that is himself. In these essays, he views himself from 107 different angles, and by longings does justice to himself, even so. And for all of us, there are at least 107 different angles from which we can be approached, and the number is infinite and can be carried out. And he had the insight to say that these various facets were all possible, each one lending itself to an individual essay. Well that explains well, this is part of the modernity of Monten. He's extremely modern man. This psychological penetration, the awareness that it is we who create the world, and so you have a hundred seven different subjects, but it is the the inus of Monten, which finally makes that world,

as you say. And also there's another point, it seems to me that it's not merely that you have dealing with himself, but giving it the eye quality, admittedly, openly, that that is what we have in the essay, as you can see, the Greek essay, the early Greek essay, right? Yes, it is the emphasis on the personality that distinguishes the essay, and that's what makes it so charming a work of art. And as you take a look over the list, and a highly distinguished list it is, of the English essayists from Bacon down through Samuel Johnson, Henry Haslet, Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Matthew Arnold, and so on to the present day people like Virginia Woolf, you have in each instance a man or a woman who in herself or himself was an interesting person. And though they treat such subjects, take Ralph Aldo Emerson, for

instance, his subjects are the soul, honor, justice, truth, and he does discuss those subjects. But in each case, it's Emerson, the man that we are really interested in, as a matter of fact, his essay is managed to catch the very naturalness and the rhythm and the idiom of speech itself. And that isn't remarkable in his case because he aren't as living as a Lyceum lecturer. And on the platform from Massachusetts to Mississippi, he appeared annually, time after time, was said in his day that people came not to hear what Emerson said, but to hear Emerson. And I think that was probably correct, probably true. In his essay is, this feeling of Emerson, the man speaking, is caught. It's caught, I believe, through style. And that's a second feature in the literary essay. It's dedication to style. And if it

doesn't have style, it isn't a good literary essay. I don't seem to me. You're implying, for instance, some of the novels we know about are great and massive things. Without style, you might argue, just to offend a few people, you might argue, that Thomas will. No style. He just charges ahead and writes great chunks of things. But in the essay, you can't do that. Quite right. Somerset mom in his collection of ten great novelists makes the point in his introduction. For instance, that the ten greatest novelists, people like tall star and bowler's act, take only two and both might serve also, since you bring him up, these men were remarkable, chiefly far gusto for zest in life and for range of experience. But in the most cases, they were bad writers. And he himself, mom has a great reputation, the short story writers, the dramatist of the novelist and so on, he himself confesses that he doesn't write too well. I think he does write extremely well. But he says that one of the best writers he ever knew was an English professor with whom he

lived for a while in London. And he cite some instances of it. But to return to Emerson in the matter of style, style, as the French proverb has it, is the man. And if that's true, how many of us are damned? But the essay. Treat every man a car. Treat every man a car. And who would escape panning? Who would escape panning? Quite right. Or are whipping. But the essayists would not hang because they do. For greatest love. Well, if they don't have it, their essays aren't going to be preserved. That's the fact, great. You can somehow have a kind of massive content in the novel or even in the plays. Look at the O 'Neill could never have written a good essay. He could write massive plays like Morning Becomes Electric. But imagine his trying to do an essay and you just burk at the idea. Quite right. Now the essay, since it is all done, whatever is done is done in brief compass. You have only a few pages that you're disposal. And the requirement is that you catch the

attention at the very start, that you keep it to the very close, and that all be condensed and distilled and compact. And yet this compactness should not be got at the expense of grace or informality. In that the rule of journalism and opening a new story should have catch the attention. But they can do it by tricks, which may lack grace, whereas you must have the grace. Well, here's one in your own book. If I may embarrass you a little bit by, but this struck my eye and I was reading. For Plutarch, the greatest of biographers, there's no adequate biography. Now the wit of that is very charming and it sets a tone there for the whole thing, doesn't it? I hope so when I wrote that sentence and I am delighted that you catch it and even that you approve it. The fact is that that sentence is written according to a formula and or most of my A .T .S .A .s in this book are

written according to a prescription laid down by Samuel Johnson, who in his own practice gives examples of the carrying into execution of his concepts. And according to Johnson, you must at the very start catch the attention. Now he himself did it by the use of paradox very often or by an aphorism at the start. Some challenging statement, which catches the eye and holds the mind. Now I tried to do that in this work of mine. Well, let me give another example here. It's one on Balzac's father, Gorial. Creating, creating. I am always creating that honorate a Balzac of himself and add it irreverently. God created for only six days. That is an irreverent statement. But it catches the attention of the reader. Yes, it does. I part out later in the paragraph that he wore at his heroic labors in Muck's Gown, usually. So the irreverence has carried on even a little bit more, putting these. The creator has got himself concept, yes. It's a very common one,

of course, in the 1920th century. Take one other instance, the case of Count Leo Tolstoy. I have an essay on him. I part out, since I want to discuss Anna Karenina, I take the opening sentence in that book. I say it Tolstoy at the age of 84 ran away from home. Thereby illustrating the truth of the opening sentence of the book we're going to discuss Anna Karenina. And that sentence runs, happy families are all alike. But every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Now it is possible to take a provocative statement of that sort and use it as the thread on which to hang all your thought. And that was another of Johnson's ideas. An essay's is brief can treat only one idea and do it adequately. But to treat that one idea with sufficient illustration and underlining the emphasis and so on and drawing to a proper conclusion

is something of a feat, which Johnson himself carries off magnificently. Yes, only. I don't know. Johnson is not the essay as for a younger person. It's for a mature person who can see beneath this magniliquant style. It's sort of heavy going. I won't say it's ungrateful. It has its own majesty. But it's an older kind of style, isn't it? Yes, you're quite right. It's an 18th century style. It's distinguished for its balancing of clauses and for its setting of opposites against each other. It's building up clause on clause to a sort of climax, the periodic Ciceroanian sentence, that kind of thing, which today we don't go in for and it has a touch of rhetoric about it. And it's literature in that pejority that's the French Empire. It's an 18th century, for 18th century, did have Addison who did it with grace and

it did have lines, well, he didn't write short essays, it's true, but you could take any one of his chapters and make a kind of essay out of Stern in quite different styles. Yes, you're quite right. Stern catches the ease and the naturalness of conversation. That's one of his distinctions. Even to the breaking off of sentences, giving you just enough so that you know what it's about and can finish the thought for yourself. Now, Addison doesn't do that. His is a Ciceroanian with top styles as implied. But nonetheless, his essays have all sorts of neat in them. I admire him for being a four -square solid man with some thought and some profundity and for a serious person who wants neat for men and not milk or packed for babies, Samuel Johnson cannot be surpassed. All right, that's true, but let's take another example. The one you started with, Monten. Monten can be just as profound and I would say even more profound than the great doctor for whom I have admiration, but he is

also as a kind of lightness. Yes, it is. I grant that. My love of Monten's essays in English though, we don't have to go to the French. You can take them out like Henry Houselot, for example. Yes. Not Henry, I'm a present -day man, but William of the last century. And he says in the introduction to a series of his lectures, something that applies also to his essays, and I think might to most informal literary essays of the sort we're now discussing, he says, I, and my lectures, propose to go over and author or a subject, as I would go over something with a friend. Yes. That idea of a friendly relation with the reader is caught in his lectures and also in his essays. He says, I do not come to a book or a poem with a compass or a ruler to tell you whether a poem is round or square. I like that informal and easy and

graceful approach. And in my own book of essays, I attempted at least to adopt that as a nothing, but it's a very difficult thing to do to give serious thought and to do it with sufficient deafness, lightness, and bravery, and still not be sententious or platitudinous or heavy, as you say, Johnson too often. Yes. There's a very difficult thing. It's a very fine rope along which you walk. It is, it is. And I think in English, Houselot has done it supremely well, and among 20th century authors, my own favorite is Virginia. Yes. Exactly. Two volumes of the common reader. It seems to me she takes hers, hers are really book reviewers. Yes. Yes. And I might pause right here and say that I believe that the book review properly carried out is one of the highest forms of art. And certainly in the field of the literary essay, it's a kind of culmination. And all the best qualities that the essay

ought to have can be employed in a good book review. Yes. Yes. Sometimes, yes. But that depends in good part upon space because you know how often you are allowed in a book review, 400 words. Well, you can do a graceful paragraph, but that doesn't do it. You've got to have time to review. You do. And that's where, in the, say, to the 19th century and to the big writers of the 20th century, they give them the space. Virginia Woolf was given a whole page of the TLS. Yes, she was. And that gave her ample opportunity to develop her ideas on her sense of style. And she was thinking out of the eight pounds, the mirror, $32, which they paid her, or $40, which they were paying her. She was thing knowing that this was going to be part of also a book of hers later. Quite right. I admire her work tremendously in the field of the essay, particularly because it keeps alive the literary essay, so -called, a distinguished from the essay proper. And because, unfortunately, the essay through the 19th century declined in importance. In the

beginning, as we pointed out with Monten and Bacon, the emphasis is on individuality and on the personality of the author. And that still is a chief requirement in an essay, but I would have the subject, the personality of the author, must come through. And yet, you can't be ostentatious or a braggart in these matters. You have to do it, you have to do it. By the end of the book, most monastery. And that's what Virginia Woolf is able to do, and has what was able to do, and DB White is able to do it all. Well, first, to the very fact that you're putting out a book, a book review, our series of statements about a book, isn't it a statistical fact anyhow? Yes. You're daring to say, I can give you certain answers and guides, which will help you. And that's assuming you're kind of, which one must do and should do, because one is qualified often. That's just it. Now, the difficulty in so brief a piece as an essay, you can't do that and give something worthwhile without seeming dogmatic often. And that's one of great dangers in book reviews and essays on literature, the literary essay proper, as trying

to keep from being dogmatic, to have your mind open, and to allow some opposition to your point of view, and to imply that other views are possible, and if suppressed, sustained with sufficient enthusiasm and sufficient logic, and insight might well be better than one's own. Now, I believe that the best essays have done that, and Virginia Woolf manages to do that extremely well, seems to me, in these essays of hers. But in the 19th century, a part I was going to make was that, yes, I really died, died of too much gentility. Since its ancestors on style, part, cuteness to, acquaintance, their work. Yes, yes, cuteness to good term part, but the magazines, women wrote great many albums, and it took on a kind of feminine quality, unfortunately. Hoffman says it was damned female scribbley. Yes, and

ministers emeritus, so lacking energy to pursue some longer and solid work, turned to the essay, thinking that its requirements were less exact and difficult. In fact, they are more difficult to meet, and the result was that the essay lost out. They sissified it. They did, and furthermore, the subjects that essay has treated like honor and truth and justice and so on, were taken over by the sociologists and historians, by the compilers of charts and the makers of graphs, and beauty of style didn't come. Please, we have a big public program here. We must mention such things on the air, you know. We were protected, we were sociologists and so on, because you have ever read their writings, they don't know how to write the English language. This is a dogmatic statement, but let me get it down. They come so strong, they rely on jargon and mystification, and impress the public thereby, and they scorn mirror style, and

to say a thing well is beneath their dignity, and they give it no effort, whatever. Now how, against such strong forces, which now prevail, can a beautiful thing, like the little essay that's best hold its place. London, I don't want to be flippant here, but it seems to me that one of our bullwarks, or right now, one of our protections of the literary essay, is in work that's being done in the magazine, like the New Yorker. Yes, not only in their own town, not only in their essays, but in their attack at this gobbledy book of sociologists and so on, as they carry on in little ways all the time, and the clarity of their style. Of course, New Yorker is really a 20th century version of the spectator, isn't it? Yes, in many ways. They picked the makers of jargon behind and before, and I hope they will not grow weary in their well -doing, that it's performed a very real service for the language, it seems to me, I'm for the good of you.

I know there are people who object to the New Yorker in the New Yorker style, et cetera, but it doesn't perform that function magnetically. It does, it does, and the time literary supplement, I want to put in a plug for that. Yes, oh my goodness. Shapes, which comes up weekly, the essays there on books are often better than the books they discuss, and in part of style and point and form, far surpass. The TLS, compared with any of our literary reviews, has a majesty about it, in a sense, what the French call Magistral, and it speaks with authority, and yet it's not dull. It's not dull to a dull person. It's most impressive, and one of the reasons is that they all are a little more space, quite a bit more space than the newspapers all here in the United States. Now, what's happened to the essay in our time? There is some essay, today writing. I can think of one who is one

of your competitors, and I think he does a splendid job. I know a high brass hard look down, and I know it's that, but they are wrong, and I don't have time to defend it, that's Gilbert Hyatt. Oh yes, I admire his work very much. Beautiful writing. Yes, he writes with real grace, he has something to say, something to say. He's a cultivated man, enormously well -read, deeply read, in fact, in a number of literature, classical on, down, and widely traveled, and out of all this experience, and all this reading, he rakes together all sorts of interesting and curious information, which he presents in a very graceful style. He's quite good, and I admire his work very much. I think Edmund Wilson does very well too, is one of our better critics without any question. There are still people who practiced this difficult and too much neglected form, and in this number, I should love to count myself. In fact, he turned out a book to prove that I am of this, my part of the literary book, is the proof that I hope it will be, it was meant as such. I believe the farm should be

revived, and that it has much to give, particularly in the way of style, because style and the way things are said, that sort of thing is too much neglected today, it seems to me. In the last analysis, the style is the thing itself, and you can't separate the two, and if the thing is not well said, clearly said, forcefully said, the thing itself has not come through. No, no, not at all, dead. No, you've done it here, there's no question of it. When I mentioned Gilbert Hart, I said he's your brother, and he's actually doing the same thing. We may not be paid the same penny at the end of the day to carry out this parable from the Bible until this last. Well, I hope that not only has this stirred up interest again in all our listeners in the literary essay, but I hope that they'll all run out to the bookstore and buy your literary heritage by Frederick E. Favardy sitting here on my right, on your left, and that you will

enjoy this, I know you will enjoy the book, and that you will then go ahead and read further in the literary essay with new appreciation, new insight, and what's going on, that you hopefully will accomplish all that in these. If we have, I will be more than satisfied. Well, thank you very much, Fred Favardy, for coming and joining us here on the American Scene, Viewing the Art. Thank you, Dr. Bamser.