What the essay is (not)

"The Grub-Street Hermit"; illustration from The Book of Days by W. R. Chambers, c.1870

By THEA LENARDUZZI

The second round of Notting Hill Editions' biennial Essay Prize is underway. A compelling discussion took place last week at King’s Place NW1 on the constitution and health of the genre. Michael Ignatieff, whose essay on Raphael Lemkin – the man who coined the term genocide – won in 2013, and the essayist, novelist and poet Phillip Lopate joined Adam Mars-Jones – Chair of Judges for this year’s prize – to tweak and elaborate on the opening gambit that (in the words of Mars-Jones) "writing an essay can be a way of taking an idea for a walk”.

But one man’s walk – and Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion and Leslie Jamison were nodded to only in passing – is another’s saunter, trot or stumble. (Incidentally, as Matthew Beaumont points out in his new book on nightwalking, the adjective “pedestrian” originally referred metaphorically to “prosaic or uninspired writing”, only taking on the more literal significance of travelling by foot in the 1740s.) One of the few points on which Ignatieff and Lopate were in step was that the essay is, perhaps above all (though only just so and with umpteen qualifications), a personal journey.

So the next question is concerned with the nature of the tour guide. For Ignatieff, the essayist is a steady, honest and moral being, responsible for delivering his ward from A to B; for Lopate, he can be one of many versions of the self. Doesn’t this amount to the donning and dropping of personae, and doesn’t that leave the door open to unreliable narrators? (Indeed, to return to Beaumont: historically, as a noun, “pedestrian” has carried a whiff of poverty, even moral corruption.)  Ignatieff seemed shocked by the very suggestion. Lopate wryly recast his point: “there is a knob I can tune up or down” – but the result is always a true expression of self. So far so slippery.

Next comes the question of how he relates to us, and, indeed, who “us” is. Where Ignatieff envisaged a Woolfian “common reader”, Lopate saw no such a thing, but rather reading tribes – readers of essays, readers of fiction, readers of history, and so on. The thing about the essay, Ignatieff said, is that, for structural reasons, being neither academic nor journalistic, it doesn’t belong to any one school. The form emerged on Grub Street and is thus, by definition, extra-institutional. (Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for it within the institutions . . . .)

The tone should be confiding but not confessional – “it shouldn’t be an opening up of the veins”. And yet some of the greatest essays (“greatest” being a hopelessly greasy term) are drenched in blood, guts and fury. Think of Nietzsche and Baldwin. The key is that their themes were universal; there was always a narrative arc, a journey of (self) discovery, steered from a position of earned perspective, or wisdom.

“Wisdom? Really? . . . Does that make essay-writing age specific?”, asked Mars-Jones. The question was left hanging, though one couldn’t help but feel the speakers had a vested interest in concluding one way rather than the other. Does wisdom preclude humour? Ignatieff suggested that there can be few things as funny as a person on his high horse.  (An image for which I was grateful: I love the idea of a panel in which the ubiquitous black pleather sofas are replaced by ornate, oversized fairground horses.)

Should there be an element of surprise? Not necessarily, but the most successful essays are often those where the reader (and perhaps the writer, though that is more difficult to gauge honestly) doesn’t know quite what they’re walking towards until it smacks them in the face.

Indeed, the closer the panel looked at the genre the more futile the idea of pinning it down became, beyond the formal constraints laid out in Notting Hill Editions’ submission guidelines that the piece be “between 2,000 and 8,000 words” and that it aim to “communicate with a wide audience”.

After the discussion, Mars-Jones opened the floor to questions. "Can we stick to the definition of a question as a short sentence that ends on an interrogative point?", asked Ignatieff. It turns out we couldn't even agree on that.