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The art of the personal essay.

Phillip Lopate

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1994

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The Art of the Personal Essay Reader’s Guide

By phillip lopate.

Category: Essays & Literary Collections | Reference | Writing | Literary Criticism

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Introduction, questions and topics for discussion.

1) In his introduction, Lopate suggests that the personal essay implies a "certain unity to human experience." Does this principle of universality apply across different eras, different cultures? * How does a contemporary reader find meaning in such essays as Seneca’s "On Noise" and "Scipio’s Villa," Montaigne’s "Of Books," or even Orwell’s "Such, Such Were the Joys…"? Can you read your own concerns and experiences into the framework of these essays? * Choose an essay (or essays) from the "Other Cultures, Other Continents" section. To what extent does its theme have meaning for you despite the aspects of its content that may be alien to you?

2) Tanizaki’s "In Praise of Shadows" is a value-inverting essay, meaning that the writer takes something usually denigrated or despised and shows its worth–or takes something usually valued and cuts it down to size. Compare Tanizaki’s approach with other value-inverting essays: Montaigne’s "Of a Monstrous Child," Cowley’s "Of Greatness," Hazlitt’s "On the Pleasure of Hating," Stevenson’s "An Apology for Idlers," Chesterton’s "On Running After One’s Hat," Beerbohm’s "Going for a Walk," Lopate’s "Against Joie de Vivre." What elements and/or techniques seem common in this type of essay?

3) On page xxix of the introduction, Lopate probes some of the differences between autobiographies and personal essays. With these distinctions in mind, think about the pieces listed in the Contents by Form under "Memoir." How (other than in economy of space) do these pieces differ in focus from traditional memoir writing? When you tell a story from your own life, do you use similar techniques?

4) How do the authors of memoir essays (or any that take their own lives as their subjects) keep from sounding egotistical and self-absorbed? Do they ever seem self-indulgent to you?

5) In "Once More to the Lake," E.B. White presents a more or less idyllic picture of an American boyhood tinged with innocence. Compare to the boyhoods in Stevenson’s "The Lantern-Bearers," Orwell’s "Such, Such Were the Joys…," and Baldwin’s "Notes of a Native Son."

6) Many of these writers (quite self-consciously) use contradictory arguments to make their point. How do you see this technique used in Montaigne’s "On Some Verses of Virgil," Lamb’s "A Chapter on Ears," Stevenson’s "On Marriage," Tanizaki’s "In Praise of Shadows," and Hoagland’s "The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain"?

7) In a slight variation on the above technique, an essayist may adopt a tone that seems inappropriate to his or her subject, even perhaps to the point of undermining it. Consider Cowley’s sincerity in "Of Greatness," Edgeworth’s in "An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification," Hazlitt’s in "On the Pleasure of Hating," and Beerbohm’s in "Laughter." In each case, does the essay’s tone provide an implicit commentary on its content? What effect does this tactic have on you?

8) Compare White’s description of a spectacle in "The Ring of Time" with Hazlitt’s "The Fight" and Turgenev’s "The Execution of Tropmann."

9) Compare Didion’s way of handling a physical problem (discussed in "In Bed") to Lu Hsun’s illness, Fitzgerald’s crack-up, and Hoagland’s stuttering.

10) Examine the personas of one or more of these essayists. What sort of man does Montaigne strike you as being? How does Lamb present himself to the reader? (How about Thoreau or McCarthy?) List their traits and characteristics: Which of these does the author admit to and which do you deduce by reading between the lines? Do you find these personas sympathetic or unappealing?

11) In any given essay, how does what the author conveys to you about him or herself affect your reading? How important is it to you to find the author sympathetic?

12) "The enemy of the personal essay is self-righteousness," writes Lopate. How does the essayist put forth a strong opinion without falling back on this vice?

13) Compare Thoreau’s approach to nature in "Walking" with Hoagland’s in "The Courage of Turtles," Berry’s in "An Entrance to the Woods," and Dillard’s in "Seeing."

14) Lopate finds ample support for his description of the personal essayist’s "idler" persona in the many essays included in this anthology simply on the subject of walking. Compare the content and tone of these essays by Steele, Hazlitt, Stevenson, Beerbohm, Woolf, and Thoreau.

15) Unlike the more meandering tone of some of these essays, a number of them begin very suddenly, with a strong first line that grabs the reader’s attention immediately. Look at the beginnings of such essays as Seneca’s "On Noise," Mencken’s "On Being an American," Fitzgerald’s "The Crack-Up," and Sanders’s "Under the Influence." How might you read these differently from the other pieces in the anthology?

16) What other contemporary authors have you read whose writings might be called personal essays? What qualities do their pieces have in common with the essays in this anthology?

17) If you were to write a personal essay, what topics would you consider appropriate or interesting? Do you see it as a format for light, diverting commentary or for more weighty issues and assertions (or both)? What experiences of yours might you draw on to get your point across?

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The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Summary Phillip Lopate

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The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Summary

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present by Phillip Lopate is a book that compiles dozens of essays from writers that come from different parts of the world and different eras in time. Each of these essays has been picked for their influence on the way the personal essay has evolved throughout history.

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• Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction

Roundtable: The Art of the Personal Essay

• Michigan State University Press
• Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2001
• pp. 206-207
• 10.1353/fge.2013.0434
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The Art of the Personal Essay Hardcover – January 1, 1994

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• Print length 777 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Doubleday
• Publication date January 1, 1994
• Dimensions 6.75 x 2 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0385422989
• ISBN-13 978-0385422987
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"Packed with personality and beguiling first-person prose... of reminders of the perils and pleasures of the craft." -- The Wall Street Journal .

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday (January 1, 1994)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 777 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385422989
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385422987
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 2 x 9.5 inches
• #204 in Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism (Books)
• #210 in Rhetoric (Books)
• #1,001 in Essays (Books)

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The Daily Round

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By Morris Dickstein

• March 1, 2013

The personal essay has always been a stepchild of serious literature, seemingly formless, hard to classify. Lacking the tight construction of a short story or the narrative arc of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure without winning cultural respect. Written in a minor key, they could be slight and superficial, but their drawbacks could also be strengths. The style of the first-person essay tends to be conversational, tentative — in tune with our postmodern skepticism about absolutes, the trust we place in multiple perspectives. Few writers have pursued this more resourcefully than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994).

Lopate belongs to the generation — my own — that came of age in the ’60s, a dec­ade that gave a huge push to all sorts of self-expression, including the essay. Suddenly everyone seemed to have a story to tell, and it could be told directly, not dressed up as fiction. But this avalanche of essays and memoirs began falling into predictable patterns: politically shaded accounts of victimization, self-help homilies, therapeutic tales of abuse and recovery. The immediacy of personal witness got bogged down in self-absorption or social protest.

Lopate’s essays have taken a different course. His gods are Montaigne, the father of the essay, whose field of research was his own mind, and William Hazlitt, who, besides being an incomparable literary critic, sketched vehement novelistic impressions of what no one else thought worth noticing, from boxing matches and Indian jugglers to “the pleasure of hating.” Lopate’s three earlier collections and his book-length essays match Haz­litt’s promiscuous host of interests with Montaigne’s piercing attention to his inner life, his quicksilver thoughts and fugitive impressions. No other writer could have written books on both Susan Sontag (“Notes on Sontag,” 2009) and the Manhattan shoreline (“Waterfront,” 2004), each of them exhaustively well informed yet disarmingly subjective. Lopate’s new collection, “Portrait Inside My Head,” gives full play to an even wider range: immensely readable essays on his family, on remaining a baseball fan, on his sex life (“Duration; Or, Going Long”), on the tense romance between movies and novels, on old and new features of New York’s urban landscape, and on elusive writers like James Agee and Leonard Michaels, themselves bold essayists who blurred the lines between fiction and nonfiction.

To get such a mélange published, most writers would have grasped at some theme to give the appearance of a “real” book. Lopate’s introduction takes the opposite tack, making a case for this “motley collection” as a frank miscellany. What holds it together is an engaging voice, the projection of a curious, appealingly modest, sometimes self-mocking character behind that voice, and “the fluent play of a single consciousness.” He’s gifted at staging his inner conflicts, radiating intimacy without descending into the confessional. Again and again Lopate writes less about a stable subject than about his own constantly evolving views of it. In an ingenious essay, “On Changing One’s Mind About a Movie,” he writes: “The ultimate question may not be, What is the correct critical judgment to make of a particular film? but, What are our different needs and understandings at various stages in life?” With a wealth of examples of movies that felt different for him when he was younger, he serves up an oblique sliver of autobiography, taking the measure of his middle-aging self through the movies that formed him.

The personal essays that open the book are like snapshots, a memoir by glimpses, each from a different angle: his parents’ ill-fated camera shop in their mostly black and Hispanic — and poor — Brooklyn neighborhood; his loving but competitive relationship with his older brother, Leonard, the well-known radio host; an embarrassing episode as a youthful Hebrew tutor, sliding down “the slippery slope of disbelief,” behaving badly, losing his small store of Jewish faith; and best of all “The Lake of Suffering,” a wrenching account of a grave illness that kept his baby daughter in the hospital for many months after her birth. These last two, one comic, the other near tragic, are as riveting as short stories, with arresting openings, sculptured scenes worthy of fiction, introspective passages fingering his own feelings, and haunting conclusions that resonate with everything that came before.

Lest we miss the craft that shapes these pieces, Lopate has brought out a second collection of essays, “To Show and to Tell,” that gives away all his trade secrets — a thoughtful guidebook for writers of literary nonfiction that could serve as a commentary on his essays. It threads its way around the pitfalls of personal writing: the need to turn oneself into a character; to write honestly, assertively about friends and family; and to find exactly where and how to sign off. From experience he counsels writers to “make lots of friends, because you are bound to lose a few,” and “for the same reason, try to come from a large family.”

Lopate’s sensible advice, like his own practice as a writer, often conflicts with received wisdom. He exhorts first-person essayists not simply to stay in the moment, the time they’re writing about, but to play off their raw recollections against what they have now come to understand. Upending the mantra of most writing programs — “Show, don’t tell” — he urges them to season their memories with research, ideas, analytic thinking and argument: tools borrowed from more formal essays. He reaches back to older traditions in essay writing and concludes both books with studies of literary masters (like Hazlitt and James Baldwin), pieces that, as reflections of his own sensibility, are just as personal as those on his family.

Academics love to theorize, but Lopate, though he has taught writing for many years, remains “a storyteller at heart” who can liven up any subject with nimble anecdotes from his life. Even his critical essays never stray far from narrative. He turned away from poetry because he lacked feeling for the timeless, the transcendent, the apocalyptic. When he took up writing essays, he says, “I threw in my lot with ordinary life, ‘the daily round.’ ” Yet some of the discipline of poetic writing stayed with him. He invariably drives home a point with a punchy aphorism or puts a spin on a sentence with a colloquial phrase, an unexpected word. When he says of Michaels’s abrupt, impacted style that he could really “goose a sentence,” he is showing us exactly what he means, just as when he notes tersely, “What is wit, if not the formulation of a behavior pattern in a pithy sentence?” In the stark coda to “Portrait Inside My Head,” he tells us, “It is only when writing that I begin to exist,” while “getting through daily domestic life” is a chore.

Lopate’s feeling for form comes out in how he shapes these volumes, saving some of the best essays for last. Perhaps the most surprising piece in “Portrait Inside My Head” is cast as a long letter to an editor on why, after one unpleasant try, he refuses to read any more of the bitter, misanthropic fiction of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. As a young man Lopate had invariably chased difficult modernist works, addicted to the next big thing, the darker the better. Now he recoils: he resists “the blackmail of the avant-garde,” nor can he convince himself that “tedium was a necessary prelude to ecstasy. . . . If Bernhard extended Beckett, did that alone make him worth reading?” Here, as in the delightful essay that follows, tracking his mixed feelings about Stendhal’s “Charterhouse of Parma,” Lopate links his reading experiences (like his fluctuating taste in movies) to the passage of time, the twists and turns in his life, the ages of man. This is the ultimate subject of all worthwhile memoirs, even those that come disguised as a motley gathering of essays.

PORTRAIT INSIDE MY HEAD

By Phillip Lopate

292 pp. Free Press. $26.

TO SHOW AND TO TELL

The craft of literary nonfiction.

225 pp. Free Press. Paper, $16.

Morris Dickstein teaches English and film at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book is “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.” He is completing a memoir.

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