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A Witty and Original Writer Shares His Love for the Essay
Every year, 30,000 tons of cosmic material passes through the atmosphere and drizzles down to earth. Only in the Arctic, or at the bottom of the deepest seas, can it be found unadulterated: a powder of asteroid and comet particles. Everywhere else this stardust mingles with the earth, with us. We wear it in our hair, carry it in our pockets.
“Shall we take dust as the founding metaphor by which to broach the unruly topic of the essay?” the Irish writer and critic Brian Dillon asks in his new book, “Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.” Like these extraterrestrial particles, he says, essays drift and disperse. They are an ever-changing form, ancient and otherworldly. “Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing.”
Dillon is a mournful, witty and original writer. His subjects have included hypochondriacs, photography, memory and, invariably, failure of some sort. In 2012, he wrote a book-length essay in 24 hours, in front of an occasional audience, called “I Am Sitting in a Room.” He celebrates the essay as a form born of contradictions between tradition and innovation, fragmentation and wholeness, autobiography and artifice. It is a beautiful container for irreconcilable desires and impossible ambitions. The book begins with the improbable list of topics the great essayists have addressed: the death of a moth (Virginia Woolf), falling off a horse (Montaigne), an inventory of the objects on one’s desk (William Gass).
Much of the book, however, is a rosary of refusals. Dillon will not offer a history of the form, he warns. Nor will he revisit the usual debates: “I know too well how that particular essay on essays gets written, what are its touchstones, where its arguments directed.” He will not offer defense, apology or manifesto of any kind (“I find myself allergic to polemics”). Dillon demurs even to define the essay too narrowly as a “stable entity or established class.” In fact, jettison hope for a real line of reasoning: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument,” he writes.
Dillon’s mode is rhapsody, not analysis. He invites us to gawk at his intellectual crushes — their shapely sentences, wily inversions, daring transitions.
What catches Dillon’s eye is always some measure of alluring oddness. “Camera Lucida,” Roland Barthes’s treatise on photography — the book that made him as a writer — is “a distinctly odd volume.” Sir Thomas Browne is described as crafting “the oddest, most alluring prose of his century.” Maeve Brennan’s prose is remarkable for its “intensity and oddness.” Susan Sontag’s early diaries are “filled with winningly odd insights.” A paragraph in Elizabeth Hardwick is “certainly ‘well written,’ which means: quite oddly written, but subtly so.”
Is Hardwick’s oddness the same as Sontag’s? As Montaigne’s? We never linger long enough to find out. Dillon venerates essays that drill into a subject, that “pay the minutest or most sustained attention to one thing, one time or place” — T.J. Clark on the paintings of Poussin or Joan Didion on the Hoover Dam — but he moves with a hummingbird energy, flitting to the next writer, the next effect he loves.
He often writes in generalities — but they bristle with clues, with suggestive and, yes, odd language. His tenderness for the essay is for the moment when its reach exceeds its grasp. “The essay is diverse and several — it teems. But of course it also tries — and gives up,” he writes. “Essays are intact and seamless and well-made — except when they are not, when they fracture and fail.” What else is intact until it isn’t? What else fractures and fails? Dillon’s explicit subject might be the essay, but he is deeply concerned with the vulnerability of bodies and minds.
Death and depression stalk this book. Dillon’s mother suffered from terrifying depression and died young, when he was 16. His father died of a sudden heart attack five years later. We learn that essays kept Dillon alive — first reading them, in the form of music reviews, and then writing them. Dread was beaten back with words — “words about any subject at all.” This book was gouged out of the wreckage of a relationship and conceived as a stay against self-destruction. “Each day I sat at my desk in an office at the end of the garden and cried and smoked and tried to write — tried to write this book — and each day finally gave myself up to fantasies of suicide,” he writes. “I would walk out of this suburb along country lanes to a secluded stretch of railway line and lay my head on the track in the moonlight.”
Out of that disarray come these crystalline pieces — and a sense, never belabored, of the stakes of creating essays and the consolations of loving them. As Dillon writes: “‘I like your style’ means: I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness.”
An earlier version of this article misidentified the nationality of the writer Brian Dillon. He is Irish, not British.
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Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.
Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction
By Brian Dillon
171 pages. New York Review Books. $15.95.
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