I
opened a veritable Pandora’s Box of personal memories this week – with the post
on memoirs……..
Then
remembered a stack of large notebooks I had used in the 1980s to record both
initial scribbles and final typed-up papers as I had struggled to make sense of the nature of the organisational venture I was then engaged in - trying to reshape
a large bureaucratic system in the West of Scotland.
As
I dipped into them, I realized that I now write much better than then – indeed
that I think more clearly……And how much of this I owe to my nomadic lifestyle
of the past 25 years.
In
central Europe in the 1990s I needed to speak more slowly (generally through
interpreters); had the time in the pauses, as the interpretation was being done, to think carefully about both what I should be saying - and how to say it. And, under questioning, I was having to explain more clearly what I thought my concepts actually meant!!
Far
from being a nuisance, it helped me see things from other people's point of view. I
was having to “relativise” – to be aware that the experiences and images
certain words and concepts brought to my mind generally aroused very different
images in my interlocuteurs’ minds – and to try to deal with this…..
I was able to produce a detailed analysis of the 1980s venture only nine years later - thanks to the greater "distance" my nomadic work had helped me develop. A short Urban Studies fellowship in the mid 1990s in my old University (Glasgow) also helped. You can see the result in Organisational Development and Political Amnesia
All
relevant to the flood of books which hit me this week – mainly collections of
essays – a genre I have loved since my schooldays when Francis Bacon
and Charles
Lamb were
favourites. The
literary canon, apparently, distinguishes various
forms of essay and “personal essay” is evidently the more precise
term for the type I like. The Art of the Personal
Essay is a 770-page collection with a superb introduction to the
genre by Phillip Lopate who writes…….
The hallmark of the personal essay is its
intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding
everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires,
complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the
reader, a dialogue -- a friendship, if you will, based on identification,
understanding, testiness, and companionship. (xxiii)
The personal essayist must above all be a reliable
narrator; we must trust his or her core of sincerity. We must also feel secure
that the essayist has done a fair amount of introspective homework already, is
grounded in reality, and is trying to give us the maximum understanding and
intelligence of which he or she is capable. . . . How the world comes at
another person, the irritations, jubilation’s, aches and pains, humorous
flashes -- these are the classic building materials of the personal essay. We
learn the rhythm by which the essayist receives, digests, and spits out the
world, and we learn the shape of his or her privacy. (xxiv-xxv)
The
collection makes quite an interesting contrast with the other 700 page anthology
which landed with a thud this week - The Lost Origins of the Essay by John D'Agata.
Both volumes are international in scope (unlike John Gross’s 704 page classic The Oxford Book of Essays
edited
some decades ago which looks only at English writers) but D’Agata’s seems to
have more focus on longer, Eastern works. Lopate’s gives us the range and
writers we expect. Both are large and handsome but the Gray Wolf Press edition
of The Lost Origins of the
Essay is a real example of
sensual work – with great quality paper, typeface and a delicate folding cover. And interesting background piece on that publisher here
Three
of Clive James’s explosive collections also await - Cultural Cohesion: The
Essential Essays, 1968-2002; A Point of View; and The Revolt of the
Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008. But
And
I’m tempted to order George Orwell’s Collected Essays which I have been without
for the past 4 decades….. talk about making up for lost time……
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