EDWARD HOAGLAN - On Essays

EDWARD HOAGLAN

Born in New York City in 1932, Edward Hoagland is a confirmed city dweller who still lives in the city of his birth. After graduating from Harvard College in 1954, Hoagland served in the Army for two years and published his )karst novel, Cat Man, in 1956. He is especially interested in the North American wilderness and has written books of essays concerning the animals of the wild as well as the wilderness itself. Hoagland has also written a number of short stories although he is probably best known as an essayist. During his professional career, he has, on occasion, taught writing at various colleges in the New York area as well as in the well-known creative writing program at the University of Iowa. "On Essays" was first published i 12412d37m n 1976 and is included in Hoagland's book, The Tugman's Passage (1982).

On Essays

We sometimes hear that essays are an old-fashioned form, that so-and-so is the "last essayist", but the facts of the marketplace argue quite otherwise. Essays of nearly any kind are so much easier than short stories for a writer to sell, so many more see print, it is strange that though two fine anthologies remain that publish the year's best stories, no comparable collection exists for essays. Such changes in the reading public's taste aren't always to the good, needless to say. The art of telling stories predated even cave painting, surely; and if we ever find ourselves living in caves again, it (with painting and drumming) will be the only art left, after movies, novels, photography, essays, biography, and all the rest have gone down the drain - the art to build from.

One has the sense with the short story as a form that while everything may have been done, nothing has been overdone; it has a permanence. Essays, if a comparison is to be made, although they go back four hundred years to Montaigne, seem a mercurial, newfangled, sometimes hockey affair that has lent itself to many of the excesses of the age, from spurious autobiography to spurious hallucination, as well as to the shabby careerism of traditional journalism. It is a greased pig. Essays are associated with the way young writers fashion a name - on plain, crowded newsprint in hybrid vehicles like the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, the New York Review of Books, instead of the thick paper stock and thin readership of Partisan Review.

Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am. Autobiographies which aren't novels are generally extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the human voice talking, its order the by Edward Hoagland. Reprinted by permission of' Random House, Inc. Mind's natural Row, instead of a systematised outline of ideas. Though more wayward or informal than an article or treatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real centre, even if the point couldn't be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used.

Essays do not usually boil down to a summary, as articles do, and the style of the writer has a "nap" to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and cannot be brushed flat. Essays belong to the animal kingdom, with a surface that generates sparks, like a coat of fur, compared with the flat, conventional cotton of the magazine article writer, who works in the vegetable kingdom, instead. But, essays, on the other hand, may have fewer "levels" than fiction, because we are not supposed to argue much about their meaning. In the old distinction between teaching and storytelling, the essayist, however cleverly he camouflages his intentions, is a bit of a teacher or reformer, and an essay is intended to convey the same point to each of us.

This emphasis upon mind speaking to mind is what make essays less universal in their appeal than stories. They are addressed to an educated, perhaps a middle-class, reader, with certain presuppositions, a frame of reference, even a commitment to civility that is shared -- not the grand and golden empathy inherent in every man or woman that a storyteller has a chance to tap.

Nevertheless, the artful "I" of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction; and essays do tell a story quite as often as a short story stakes a claim to a particular viewpoint. Mark Twain's piece called "Corn-pone Opinions", for example, which is about public opinion, begins with a vignette as vivid as any in Huckleberry Finn.

Twain says that when he was a boy of fifteen, he used to hang out a back window and listen to the sermons preached by a neighbour's slave standing on top of a woodpile: "He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergyman of the village, and did it well and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards he was overlooked. He interrupted his preaching now and then to saw a stick of wood, but the sawing was a pretense - he did it with his mouth, exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood.

But it served its purpose, it kept his master from coming out to see how the work was getting along. A novel would go on and tell us what happened next in the life of the slave - and we miss that. But the extraordinary flexibility of essays is what has enabled them to ride out rough weather and hybridise into forms that suit the times. And just as one of the first things a fiction writer learns is that he needn't actually be writing fiction to write a short story - that he can tell his own history or anybody else's as exactly as he remembers it and it will be "fiction" if it remains primarily a story - an essayist soon discovers that he doesn't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he can shape or shave his memories, as long as the purpose is served of elucidating a truthful point.

A personal essay frequently is not autobiographical at all, but what it does keep in common with autobiography is that, through its tone and tumbling progression, it conveys the quality of the author's mind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are directly concerned with the mind and the mind's idiosyncrasy, the very freedom the mind possesses is bestowed on this branch of literature that does honour to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the essay.

Questions for Discussion

What does the author mean by the following statements:

(a)    "A personal essay is like the human voice talking, it orders the mind's natural flow, instead of a systematised outline of ideas". (Paragraph 3)

(b)    "But, essays on the other hand, may have fewer "levels" than fiction, because we are not supposed to argue much about their meaning". (Paragraph 3)

(c)    ".an essayist soon discovers that he doesn't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he can shape or shave his memories". (Paragraph 6)

How does the author distinguish between essays and works of fiction?

According to Hoagland, what is the main purpose of all essays?

What advantages, if any, does the essayist have over the short story writer?

Exploring Ideas

Do you agree with the author that essays cannot be reduced to a summary, as in a single sentence? Give reasons for your answer.

How would you define the essay? What makes an essay good or bad?

The author says that "essays are directly concerned with the mind and the mind's idiosyncrasy". How have you found this to be true in your reading of essays?

Agree or disagree with the statements discussed in question one of "Questions for Discussion".

Optional Activity

Make a list of vocabulary items or expressions that you feel contribute in a positive way to the style of the author.

Write an essay of your own in which you expand upon Hoagland's closing statement in Paragraph 6.