Essays, Elizabeth Hardwick writes, are “just thought itself in orbit.” Writers who know how earthbound most thoughts are, who have struggled to heave, inflate, or prestidigitate an idea into self-sustaining flight, will quarrel with the word “just.” Otherwise, it is an apt description.
Nor can an essay be defined by style, although several of our present contributors have the knack for the deft phrase. (William Gass on cyclists in Beijing: “Cyclists are the street as water is the river. . . .”) But others impress by dint of argument or common sense rather than style. (Gould and Kennan belong on this list; both honor essentially 19th-century models.) Hollander undertakes to explain the new (active sports clothing as the current expression of a pastoral vision glimpsed in the 1960s that found “erotic appeal in the perceived androgyny of childhood”); Gerald Early reconsiders the old (in his case the old guard of jazz); while Donald Barthelme considers the ineffable: “If I wrench the rubber tire from the belly of Rauschenberg’s famous goat, to determine, in the interests of a finer understanding of same, whether the tire is a B.F. Goodrich or a Uniroyal,” he writes, “the work collapses, more or less behind my back.”
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Many of the compliments he pays the Frenchman we may also pay Davenport. Like Montaigne, his “curiosity is omnidirectional.” In addition, Montaigne “read everything, quoted everybody, and sported an erudition that clearly had for its message that although he lived at a great remove from Rome, Alexandria, and Athens, nevertheless we Bordelais are right up with everything.” Substitute New York, London, and Paris for the ancient capitals of learning, and “Lexingtonians” — Davenport teaches at the University of Kentucky — for “Bordelais,” and you have fairly described friend Davenport.
A talent for aphorism is not a dependable clue to wisdom, but it does suggest qualities of mind, if not qualities of thought. Some examples from Davenport:
“Napoleon, when the British nabbed him, was on his way to become an independent American farmer. I like to imagine him as having made it, as mayor of Cincinnati.”
Which brings us to the pivotal issue of audience. It seems silly to worry about the death of the essay at a time when it enjoys a commercial renaissance. In fact it may be the form of the age, skeptical of fact and naively trusting of testimony, since it is personal, idiomatic, and argumentative. But the essay as a form of civilized conversation may indeed be in peril.
