Why Do Folks Write Essays?

Brevity suits our barraged and addled hour

An idealized me amidst my pantheon; Henry supervising

“I did not feel myself equal to the writing of history; I thought that I had not sufficient erudition for essays; poetry I had never attempted. But I thought that I could write novels, and that in them I might be able to interest readers.” – Anthony Trollope, Autobiography

Trollope’s posthumous reflection got me thinking about media – whether they choose us or we them. Having published more than five thousand essays, by my count, I guess I’m an essayist. I’ve scribbled a few novels, memoirs, and tomes of poems and journals, few of which have seen the light, but essays I’ve been exuding for almost sixty years, numerous as beads of sweat. Why, I wonder?

Not for the money. I’ve seldom written for money and don’t mean to. That, for me, would be like praying for money, smearing the transaction. If anyone had been eager to pay me for my words, I might have thought differently; these days, especially, I liken my urgency to lovemaking. I write – and you read – because we choose to, not because either must.

Partly I wrote essays because I’d relished reading them. Thoreau came first – Walden is a linked series of essays; then Emerson, Dr. Johnson, Montaigne; eventually most who made a name in the form. Lonely, I liked getting to know them. My loneliness arose from an absence not of company but conversation. Many in my boyhood home talked at me, but nobody except my grandmother – my father’s widowed mother – talked with me. I was told, I wasn’t asked. Conversation became my Elysium, the mingling of minds no less rapturous than that of bodies (and a lot easier to arrange!). Once I learned to write, I commenced a long lively conversation with myself, but that came later. Before age twenty, I was convivially companioned by favored essayists: they were my pals.

Essays were my flirtation. All art is seductive, an enticement to embrace; discursive prose gave me my best chance. I loved poetry, but nobody I knew read it. I loved novels but wanted inventive power. The stories I managed were all about me, and the disguise proved tiresome. In my journals I could be weepy, cranky, flailing – not someone to invite home, even for a one-night stand.

In an essay, with any luck, I could be as adorable as the essayists I adored. In person, I may not have liked my essaying chums, but on paper they delighted. And (crucial to me, as it was, I suspect, to them) I could control our interaction. At intimate relations, I was clumsy; I bobbled courtship (ask Jane). But on the page, I could tidy up, emphasize my attractive aspects, deprecate my deficiencies, put my best foot forward.

When I began these missives, I decided, like old Procrustes, to enforce a uniform length – of six hundred words, give or take. I did this to shut myself up. Get me talking and I’m hard to stop, till hearers start eying exits. My limit spared me garrulity and my visitors the anxiety of unpredictability. Brevity also suited our barraged and addled hour. One must be busy indeed to lack time for six hundred words.

Trollope’s concern that essays demand erudition reflects his own colossal insecurity, not the form’s insistence. Essays suit my lazy aleatory intellect. Much as I love knowing, I hate studying. In six hundred words, you can’t say much, so I needn’t study much. And tomorrow, this bumblebee brain can sip a different flower.