“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer’s best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose. Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as popular as Montaigne’s own.” If pressed to name my favorite literary form I would choose the essay, the form without a strict form, seemingly designed for free spirits with brains and emotional depth – “a knowledge of men and of books,” as W.E. Henley puts it above. The most unlikely things can be successful essays – reviews, memoirs, scientific papers, recipes, fiction. The best ones have a point, even an argument or lesson, but never hector or harangue the reader. An essayist confides. Without condescending, he puts his arm around your shoulder and talks softly, turning you into the sole member of his audience, a person worthy of his trust.   Sure, Montaigne started it all (except for Plutarch and Seneca), but the English came to perfect it – Johnson, Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson, Chesterton, Beerbohm and the rest. William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) will never be a member of that front rank. He was a poet, lauded in his day, and will always be remembered for a poem my eighth-grade English teacher had us memorize sixty years ago: "Invictus." It’s a natural for recitation, up there with Kipling.   The passage at the top is taken from Henley’s “Essays and Essayists” collected in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1892).He writes:   “Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function ‘to speak with ease and opportunity to all men.’ He must be personal, or his hearers can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable.”   Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849. His friend Stevenson, who based the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883) on the one-legged Henley, wrote him a letter from Nebraska on August 23, 1879 -- the poet's thirtieth birthday. Stevenson writes a brief, impromptu essay from Willa Cather's (b. 1873) future turf:   “I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to pump water. When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight travel together, the kine first, the men after, the whole plain is heard singing with cicadae.”

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources” — that is, intuition, the analytical prowess to evaluate the fruits of intuition, and a rich reservoir of… read article

Notes from the margins of my research.

Robert Penn Warren in Democracy and Poetry (1975):  “The will to change: this is one of the most precious heritages of American democracy. We have the story of the young Washington, who studied surveying and could, by the exercise of his skill, buy ‘Bullskin plantation,’ his first one, at the age of sixteen. Thus far he had merely changed his condition. But he had the will to change himself as well, and with the same furious energy, he studied the Roman Stoics that he might achieve the admirable character he desired.”   This is part of the folklore I grew up with, like the story of young Washington and his cherry tree. I don’t consciously remember learning any of this. The lives and thought of the early presidents were like holy writ, to be studied and emulated. The first book I wrote as a kid was a collection of presidential biographies (through Kennedy), each one-page long, handwritten on lined paper, happily cribbed from encyclopedias. Perhaps this accounts for my enduring sense of patriotism, a devotion to the American ideals, despite all our all-too-human errors. Warren continues:   “So we have the long list of autodidacts, including Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Dreiser — men who, with all their failings and complications, willed a change deeper than that of an objective condition. We admire those autodidacts, but the will to change the self is not now deeply characteristic of our democracy.”   All too true, even half a century ago. The embodiment of the autodidactic approach to life for me is Eric Hoffer (1902-83). He started as a migrant worker in the West, worked as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco and wrote The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), an essential guide to the world we inhabit today. I first encountered him at age fifteen. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, and moved on to his books. My father was an ironworker and high-school dropout; my mother, a tax clerk. No one in my family had gone to college. I felt an immediate personal identification with Hoffer. He was my first model of autodidacticism, proof that education was up to me.   I’m reading Daniel J. Flynn’s Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (ISI Books, 2011). Flynn devotes a chapter to Hoffer, calling him “the definitional autodidact.” He wrote prose that got “straight to the point. Efficient and crisp. Hoffer’s words stood out against the opaque, verbose, circuitous style that increasingly characterized the prose of intellectuals. If readers found his style original it was because they had never come across French writers—Pascal, Montaigne, Renan, de la Rochefoucauld—whom he imitated.”   Hoffer was part of the reason I wanted to write and why I became a newspaper reporter. He was no snob. He seemed from the start like the kind of guy I could talk to.

Here’s to the English writer who waited until her ninth decade to finally experience fame in America The post The Patient Penelope Fitzgerald appeared first on The American Scholar.