Essays

‘Read slowly, word by word, if you wish to understand what I am saying.’ Despite appearing in Essays Two, the latest non-fiction collection from Lydia Davis, this exhortation is by the Norwegian author Dag Solstad; yet the approach is apt for Davis’s work. This is not because Davis, a feted translator and writer who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, is incomprehensible but because her work is often so short — a couple of lines or a couple of pages. It demands to be savoured slowly.

Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As James Morris, the only journalist to cover the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953, he described Edmund Hillary returning from the summit as huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic… It was a moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that hot tears sprang to the eyes of most of us. Morris, who died last year, was married to Elizabeth Tuckniss for 71 years and had five children, one of whom died in infancy. She transitioned to live as a woman in 1964, one of the first high-profile people to do so. Her subsequent memoir, Conundrum, was a bestseller.

It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing treatment for recurrent pancreatic cancer, came to be living in the basement of the American novelist Ann Patchett and her husband Dr Karl VanDevender. How it happened is told in the title story of These Precious Days, Patchett’s second collection of essays. Asked to endorse Hanks’s short story collection, Uncommon Type, and then to interview him on stage during his tour, Patchett first meets Sooki in the wings of a Washington theatre. Hanks, by way of reciprocation, agrees to do the audio recording of Patchett’s eighth novel, The Dutch House, and a ‘sporadic email exchange’ between Patchett and Sooki develops into a friendship.

E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to read it as a teen-ager, and it has prompted multiple reconsiderations over the years — as acknowledged by the editors in their introduction to this book. Reappraisals and conferences on ‘What is History?’ are launched with regularity. (One of the editors of this volume is Carr’s great-granddaughter.) Aside from the reappraisal of Carr’s original work, the fact that books like this continue to be produced in academic history says something about the slipperiness of defining it in the first place — and the discipline’s own anxieties.

In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women made from latex and circuitry can learn to talk back and say no. Or, alternatively, that their ‘love dolls’ — in the current marketing-speak — have been hacked by anarchist feminist programmers. Please enjoy the next, cyborg-mediated stage of the war of the sexes. Some men, of course, still believe that women are inherently no good with computers, a dumb prejudice that Jeanette Winterson ably rebuts in this collection of interlinked essays, with stories from early computing history and several outbursts of amusing ire.

What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to geographic context’ of the circus? How can we ‘codify’ equestrian performance in the ring? With the publication of The Cambridge Companion to the Circus, this artform has tumbled out of the Big Top and into the library and lecture hall. It’s a recent arrival to lofty, learned spaces. When Vanessa Toulmin of Sheffield University, widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on circus and fairground history, first ventured into academia, she did so under the guise of an ‘early film historian’, as circus wasn’t regarded as worthy of study.

The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding golden plovers’ nests. As he walked across the featureless moor, ‘the gaze’, he wrote, had to be ‘concentrated as far ahead as possible, not in one place, but scanning continuously over a wide arc from one side to the other and back’. Should you look down at your feet, or allow yourself to be distracted for a second, chances were that this elusive wader would slip off its eggs and you would never work out whenceit came. Reading Richard Dawkins strikes me as requiring a similar kind of disciplined attention.

I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. So, as it happened, I had read nearly all of Languages of Truth before I arrived at the second piece in the book, ‘Proteus’, and came across the Salman Rushdie I had been looking forward to: the worst Rushdie, the infuriating, humble-bragging, know-all, preposterous and tone-deaf Rushdie. Up until then I had been going through the book, pencilling marginal notes which were saying, essentially, ‘oh, this is rather good’, ‘excellent point’, or ‘very well put’. It was all getting a bit too chummy between Salman and me.

Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to read the international press. ‘I read the French and German press most days, and sometimes the Italian and Spanish press as well.’ Some might think the retired Supreme Court justice was showing off. But these remarks were addressed to a group of German judges at the end of 2019. His message to them was that the British people might have been wrong to vote for Brexit — but they were not, as reported in the continental press, ‘at best naive and at worst mad’. That’s good to know.

Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and the other is that they are, perversely, far too coherent. The pieces are pulled from their original contexts — newspapers, magazines — and thrown together with others they have no relation to beyond a common author. But (the too-coherent problem) most authors only have one or maybe two ideas to work through, so you end up doing the intellectual equivalent of walking a dozen rounds of the garden when you had hoped to be hiking off into a grand new landscape. I don’t know what Joan Didion’s one or maybe two ideas are, and I’m not sure she could even be boiled down to anything like that.

The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque, is explained in the text. It’s from Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser and is quoted by Claire Messud in the title essay: ‘We study a monumental work, for example Kant’s work, and in time it shrivels down to Kant’s little East Prussian head.’ As a novelist, she explains, she strives to resist that shrivelling — to avoid being condensed into a ‘little American head’, to retain and convey all the detail of life. The problem is with the claim that this is an autobiography through essays. It isn’t.

One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all, are we supposed to make of all these wikinovels? I mean novels that leap from subject to subject, anecdote to anecdote, so that the reader feels as though they are toppling like Alice down a particularly erudite Wikipedia rabbit-hole. The trouble with writing such a book, in an age of ready internet access, and particularly Wikipedia, is that, however effortless your erudition, no one is any longer going to be particularly impressed by it. We can all be our own Don DeLillo now; our own W.G. Sebald.

When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes, she would imagine and count through the layers of the earth that lay beneath her, and then the layers of atmosphere above her. ‘It had something of the power of incantation,’ she writes in Vesper Flights, an essay originally published in the New York Times Magazine and now the title piece in this new collection of essays. Much like her previous book H Is for Hawk, this volume sees Macdonald weave together personal reflections, natural and human histories and fragments of autobiography to create nature writing that is at once intimate and expansive. Some of the essays in Vesper Flights take Macdonald to extraordinary places.

Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete penury, he would dress in perfectly tailored cashmere and, with a shawl swept over his shoulder, fix his attentive listeners with a glittering eye and a voice that could sweep dangerously low when he was about to cast aspersions on someone else’s cooking or scholarship. As this affectionate compilation of tributes by friends and admirers shows, Bruce himself ‘not only spoke Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili, be amiable in Amharic, Spanish and Greek and could lecture in French, Italian or German’.