On my bookshelf is Joyce Carol Oates’s collection of Best American Essays of the Century — which is to say, the 20th Century. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I’ve had the book for more than 20 years and never read. It was a thoughtful gift — and it was always my intention to at least dip into on occasion. But way leads on to way, and book to book. So I found myself staring at it some weeks ago and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled the hefty volume off the shelf, opened to the table of contents… and off I went on an adventure into the past.
I think my attraction to the book is partly a reaction to the current state of affairs. These days were supposed to embody the kind of progress and enlightenment that, back in the late 20th century, so many of us imagined coming. But it didn’t come. Instead, we’ve got this confusing mash-up of cultural battles, a killer pandemic, continuing war around the globe, a growing divide between the haves and have nots in America and elsewhere, the tail-wagging-the-dog technology, and a human-damaged world environment that may just swallow us whole someday.
So taking a trip back into the writing of some of the 20th century’s best American minds seemed like a good place to go. And, of course, what I found there is astoundingly good — moving, powerful, engaging, heartbreaking, hopeful, and more.
I want to write about this reading experience for three reasons. One, it feels great to escape the loud, in-your-face, constantly streaming, always-anxious-making media noise. Even some of the clearly important contemporary writers whose work matters a great deal have been hard to read lately. It’s the sheer volume of daily “must-read” pieces about our tangled world that can feel so exhausting at times. Instead of Medium, instead of Substack, instead of Facebook and Twitter and the news feeds and the New York Times features and the long, important articles in The Atlantic, Harpers’, The New Yorker, and so on — I settled into reading thoughtful, slower-paced essays from the past that spoke to and of their day.
Two, I was impressed to see how the essay also speak to us today in ways we generally don’t hear from our contemporaries. Many of them challenge us to reconsider what we’ve done and what we’re doing. They ask all audiences to pay attention, to consider life on a deeper level.
Three, it’s just a pleasure to reconnect with these writers again, many of whom I’ve read in the past, but from whom I have drifted away in the currents of life — from Mark Twain to E.B. White, W.E.B. DuBois to Saul Bellow, Rachel Carson to Annie Dillard, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxine Hong Kingston. Whatever flaws these writers may have had, they were — some are still — deeply dedicated to their art.
Among the obviously essential works in the collection are James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” — two remarkable essays that distill the whole history of America (and maybe all of Western Civilization) into thoughtful pleas for racial justice, for clear and obvious social change. That things are about the same or worse when it comes to race in America today is heartbreaking. But it’s also worth it for all of us to re-read these two pieces and figure out how we can regroup now and find ways to deliver on the clear promises of social and racial justice threaded into our founding documents. W.E.B. DuBois’s “Of the Coming of John” — a parable of how we divide what should not be divided — and Richard Wrights’ painful “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” also remind us of the terrible place we had been and why, again, the civil rights movement must continue until we’ve reached an age of true racial equity.
But there are other essays in the book that are moving for different reasons. I know it makes little sense to offer a brief summary of each essay (there are 55). I know readers will find their own connections. A few stand out for me.
Eudora Welty’s wonderful essay, “A Sweet Devouring,” on being a young reader and finding only traces on deep engagement and more than a bit of frustration with the pop literature of her day. What one feels is her remarkable youthful enthusiasm that comes dangerously close to giving up on books… until, as she writes, she found Mark Twain.
William Manchester’s “Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All” retells the horrors of the American attack on Okinawa in World War II, which led to the deaths of more 200,000 Americans, Japanese, and Okinawan soldiers over the course of 82 days. Manchester is clear about the dangers of romanticizing war and creating “the glowing aura of selfless patriotism.” And he should. He was there in this “wet, green hell,” and was wounded twice.
Loren Eisley’s moving essay “The Brown Wasps” explores the notion of home — and the loss of home — through the human and animals lens. It’s rare that I find myself having to stop while reading to fight back tears. But this was one of those essays that stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps it touched me deeply because, like Eisley in the essay, I’m looking back from my 60s to a younger life and a younger world, and I find I identify deeply with his notion that we are all in need of, in search, desiring to get back to that place we call home.
But this essay also reverberates deeply in a time of steady species lost, in the continuing human overdevelopment of the planet. Eisley, without being didactic, lets us know that indifference to the natural world is not only a form of cruelty but will also not bode well for any species, ourselves included.
There’s also something moving about Eisley’s essay arriving as it does in the 1950s — and anticipating so much of the loss of “home” that grips the sentient world today.
I was taken in by Joan Didion’s “The White Album, ” too — her ability to write on a personal and political level simultaneously. Didion writes so calmly and clearly. But, oh, how hard it is to read about the cultural tensions and the disintegration of the ideals of the 1960s, as witnessed in LA.
In “A Law of Acceleration,” I like how Henry Adams describes both metaphysics and theology as “violent stimulants of the mind” — and, again, what that tells us about contemporary times. It’s fascinating how, in 1900, he could see so clearly the coming problems of human existence in the 20th century and beyond. I don’t think he’d be at all surprised about where things stand today. What I found myself thinking, however, is how Adams doesn’t see the way art has acted, and will continue to act, as a counterweight to such tensions.
Then there’s E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” an essay I’ve read maybe a half dozen times. Besides being an excellent model for how to write a personal essay, it never fails to carry me back to childhood life in summer and those rare days by any lake, when body and mind felt connected to the world and time moved more slowly.
If this were a book review, I might point out writers who I think are missing from the collection, or note that some of the essays feel included only to ensure a particular writer is represented. But I’m happy enough to take the collection for what it is. So many of the essays are beautifully written — as one would expect from a “Best of” collection. But what struck me more is that there’s also a clear feeling that these essays are not of our current century. They feel of the past. Which is to say, they are more patiently written than most today. They don’t reach for five or eight or ten bullet-point lessons or any key takeaways. They aren’t as steeped in the maddening politics of division. Collectively, they speak of the human experience in America. Even when they dip into politics they do so with a different sense of the world, of possibility, of hope — of that place where we should be by now. They also speak eloquently of the craft of writing.
I didn’t know I needed to make this journey. But now I know. As Joyce Carol Oates would say, it always helps to know where you have been in order to know where you are going.