The Best American Essays 1986

With any good essay, you need to let it sink in after a first reading. Frequently, you may need to read the piece, or a portion of it, a second or even third time, to really take it all in and gain the effect of which it was intended. I found this to be true with "The Best American Essays 1986." Initially, I read several pages of some of these pieces, decided they jumped around too much, and stopped reading. But over time, I returned to them, giving each another chance. At a repeated consideration, I was overwhelmed by their transcendental quality. Joseph Brodsky's "Flight from Byzantium" is rich with exotic references to classical history, mysterious geography, and personal journey. This fabulous work got me to read several fine anthologies of Brodsky's work, including the considerable "On Grief and Reason." Edward Rothstein's dreamy "The Body of Bach" exists ostensibly to equate the various anatomical peculiarities of the great composer (J.S.) with the corpus of his work. But it becomes much more, demonstrating Rothstein's special understanding of music, history, and the namesake of the piece. He references estimable authorities, including Christoph Wolff, a leading Harvard musicologist, which moved me to go to writings by even greater sources. Robert Fitzgerald's remembrances of working at The New York Herald in the thirties is a spectacular bit of wisteria, created with a dulled amber sheen of nostalgia about life in New York during the gilded age. His descriptions of traveling to the city by train, switching in Altoona, PA, and likening the gothic skyline over the East River to something out of Asgard, are pure revelations. Cynthia Ozick's similar remembrance of NYU in the fifties is short, redolent with sweetness, like her reconstructions of the goings on in the local Chock Full 'o Nuts of the period. Gerald Early's discussion of Stitt, Monk, and Mingus, is musical scholarship as are his characterizations of psychological dispossession of inner city Philadelphians in the 1950s. Alexander Cockburn's vignette of Heatherdown boy's school in England at mid-century swells with beauty as well, making deft mentions of Richard Hannay from the brilliant "The 39 Steps" as a John Buchan masterpiece before the splash it made as a filmic Hitchcock jewel. So what's not to like? This little compendium is so chock full of delight, memory, and transcendental writing, I can't imagine why other reviewers were disappointed in it. Maybe it takes another reading.

This is the first volume of 'The Best American Essays' series . This volume was edited by Elizabeth Hardwick. The Series Editor is Robert Atwan. Both editors have introductory essays. I found Atwan's far more illuminating and interesting. He talks about the Essay as a genre beginning in Aphorism with Hippocrates being the first to use the word. He points out that today many different kinds of writing come under the rubric 'essay' "celebrity- profiles, interviews, political commentary, reviews, reportage, scientific papers, scholarly articles, snippets of humor, and those thin750 - word rectangles appropriately called "columns" But of course to get at the heart of the essay he discusses too the writer whose practice gave the form its name and reputation, Montaigne. Atwan says "Even Montaigne who , who named the genre four hundred years ago , stopped short of definining it. He saw the strange eccentric stuff he wrote mainly in terms of literary production, as an active verb- he attempts, he tests, he tries, he 'essays'- and not in terms of literary consumption- the finished composition. The writing spirit not the writing matter. Montaigne must have been the first writer to invite the reader to watch him in the act.'Watch me thinking. Watch me writing.'" Atwan is of course to be commended for giving his attention to the Essay, for seeing that the form should be appreciated as a major literary one, should have its own 'best of the year' series as short- stories and poems do. This particular collection is however not one of the best. I found most stimulating Joyce Carol Oates reflections on Boxing . I have not gone very deeply into her considerable fiction but consider her one of the finest of all essayists writing today. She has originality of insight and brilliance in expression. I also liked Stephen Jay Gould's essay on 'nasty little facts' and his illustrating how they can confound very big theories. Kai Erikson's piece which deals with the dropping of the atomic bombs raised a question about the U.S. not having provided a kind of 'warning- test- example' to the Japanese before dropping the two bombs. Julian Barnes has an interesting piece on the way writer's are misworshipped by their readers, and provides his own private example in his obsession with Flaubert. Again not the best collection but worth seeing especially for Atwan's preface to the whole Series.