The Best American Essays 2019
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
RABIH ALAMEDDINE: Comforting Myths
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: We Are Not the Resistance
HEATHER ALTFELD: Obituary for Dead Languages
MARIO ALEJANDRO ARIZA: Come Heat and High Water
JABARI ASIM: Getting It Twisted
ALEXANDER CHEE: The Autobiography of My Novel
CAMILLE T. DUNGY: Is All Writing Environmental Writing?
MASHA GESSEN: Stories of a Life
JEAN GUERRERO: My Father Says He’s a “Targeted Individual.” Maybe We All Are.
LACY M. JOHNSON: On Likability
WALTER JOHNSON: Guns in the Family
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: How to Write About a Vanishing World
J. DREW LANHAM: Forever Gone
LILI LOOFBOUROW: Men Are More Afraid Than Ever
TERESE MARIE MAILHOT: Silence Breaking Woman
DAWN LUNDY MARTIN: When a Person Goes Missing
KAI MINOSH PYLE: Autobiography of an Iceheart
GARY TAYLOR: Death of an English Major
JIA TOLENTINO: The Rage of the Incels
DAYNA TORTORICI: In the Maze
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018
Notable Special Issues of 2018
Read More from the Best American Series
About the Editors
Connect with HMH
Footnotes
Copyright © 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Solnit
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Introduction: Lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962, copyright © 1955 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
“Comforting Myths” by Rabih Alameddine. First published in Harper’s Magazine, June 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Rabih Alameddine. Reprinted by permission of Rabih Alameddine and Aragi Inc.
“We Are Not the Resistance” by Michelle Alexander. First published in The New York Times, September 21, 2018. © 2018 The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
“Obituary for Dead Languages” by Heather Altfeld. First published in Conjunctions, Issue No. 70. Copyright © 2018 by Heather Altfeld. Reprinted by permission of Heather Altfeld.
“Come Heat and High Water” by Mario Alejandro Ariza. First published in The Believer, December 2018. Excerpt from Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza, copyright © 2020. Reprinted by permission of Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
“Getting It Twisted” by Jabari Asim. First published in The Yale Review, October 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Jabari Asim. Reprinted by permission of Jabari Asim.
“The Autobiography of My Novel” by Alexander Chee. First published in The Sewanee Review, Spring 2018. Reprinted from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays. Copyright © 2018 by Alexander Chee. By permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
“Is All Writing Environmental Writing?” by Camille T. Dungy. First published in The Georgia Review, Fall 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Camille T. Dungy. Reprinted by permission of Camille T. Dungy.
“Stories of a Life” (originally titled “To Be, or Not to Be”) by Masha Gessen. First published in The New York Review of Books, February 8, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Masha Gessen. Reprinted by permission of Masha Gessen.
“My Father Says He’s a ‘Targeted Individual.’ Maybe We All Are.” by Jean Guerrero. First published in Wired, October 25, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Jean Guerrero. Reprinted by permission of Jean Guerrero.
“On Likability” by Lacy M. Johnson. First published in Tin House, October 11, 2018 (online). Copyright © 2018 by Lacy M. Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Lacy M. Johnson and Tin House.
“Guns in the Family” by Walter Johnson. First published in The Boston Review, March 21, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Walter Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Walter Johnson.
“How to Write About a Vanishing World” by Elizabeth Kolbert. First published in The New Yorker, October 15, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Kolbert. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Kolbert.
“Forever Gone” by J. Drew Lanham. First published in Orion, Spring 2018. Copyright © 2018 by J. Drew Lanham. Reprinted by permission of J. Drew Lanham.
“Men Are More Afraid Than Ever” by Lili Loofbourow. First published in Slate, September 18, 2018. Copyright © 2018 The Slate Group. All rights reserved. Used under license.
“Silence Breaking Woman” (originally titled “Surviving Racism”) by Terese Marie Mailhot. First published in Pacific Standard, May 8, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Terese Marie Mailhot. Reprinted by permission of Terese Marie Mailhot.
“When a Person Goes Missing” by Dawn Lundy Martin. First published in n+1, Winter 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Reprinted by permission of Dawn Lundy Martin.
“Autobiography of an Iceheart” by Kai Minosh Pyle. First published in Prism, Winter 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Kai Pyle. Reprinted by permission of Kai Pyle.
“Death of an English Major” by Gary Taylor. First published in Tampa Bay Times, November 9, 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Gary Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Gary Taylor.
“The Rage of the Incels” by Jia Tolentino. First published in The New Yorker, May 15, 2018. Copyright © 2018 Condé Nast. Reprinted with permission.
“In the Maze” by Dayna Tortorici. First published in Issue 30, n+1, Winter 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Dayna Tortorici. Reprinted by permission of Dayna Tortorici.
Foreword
It is not possible to extricate yourself from the questions in which your age is involved.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fortune of the Republic” (1878)
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.
—George Orwell, “Why I Write” (1946)
For many years George Orwell avidly collected political pamphlets. After his untimely death at age forty-six in 1950, his collection of some 2,700 pamphlets from across the entire political spectrum (dating roughly from World War I through World War II) found its way to the British Library, where i
t has since supplied a wealth of information to scholars and historians of those turbulent times. In “Pamphlet Literature,” a brief essay contributed to the New Statesman in 1943, Orwell describes a small representative sample of his collection, identifying nine trends of the pamphleteering “revival” he had been following since 1935; he labels these Anti-left and Crypto-fascist, Conservative, Social Democrat, Communist, Trotskyist and Anarchist, Non-party radical, Religio-patriotic, and Lunatic. He also refers to a ninth category, Pacifist—but claims he has no samples of this trend handy to comment on. He then says amusingly that all these headings could be roughly reduced to two main schools, Party Line and Astrology.
Orwell wrote the essay, despite its title, mainly to complain about the decidedly “unliterary” nature of political pamphlets. They were not merely disappointing to a novelist and essayist whose literary goal was “to make political writing into an art,” but Orwell thought they were undeniably “rubbish”: “There is totalitarian rubbish and paranoiac rubbish, but in each case it is rubbish.” He considered this especially disappointing because of the times. The pamphlet, he said, “ought to be the literary form of an age like our own.” “We live in a time,” he continued, “when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organized lying exists on a scale never before known.” He blamed the publishing and literary worlds for not making the public more aware of the necessity of pamphlets, which are haphazardly printed and rarely advertised or reviewed. As a result, most good writers who have something they passionately want to say don’t know how to go about publishing a pamphlet and so they leave the genre to either lunatics or political hard-liners. Orwell then shows his hand: “The normal way of publishing a pamphlet is through a political party, and the party will see to it that any ‘deviation’—and hence any literary value—is kept out.” For Orwell, literary value apparently depends on some deviation from party lines.
As we know from such popular books as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, and Homage to Catalonia, Orwell staunchly opposed totalitarianism and fascism. Other books like Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier show his passionate identification with working-class values and culture. Essays like “The Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant” disclose his fierce hatred of imperialism. Orwell was in no way politically neutral. After his military experiences at the front in the Spanish Civil War—where he had been shot through the neck—he declares he is a socialist; he writes in 1937, “I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.” Prior to his experiences with the Spanish revolutionary forces, he thought socialism was a “theory confined entirely to the middle class.” He was embarrassed once while writing Wigan Pier to be called “comrade.”
Orwell was one of those individuals who pushes harder against his own beliefs than the ones he ostensibly opposes. Like John Stuart Mill, he found it intellectually necessary to continually interrogate his own cherished opinions so that they didn’t become automatic, stale, and orthodox. This tendency—as well as his distrust of abstractions, general discomfort with labels, and relentless self-criticism—makes Orwell hard at times to pin down ideologically. In Homage, he is amused by all the political distinctions and rival groups within the revolutionary parties but also dismayed by how all the petty, doctrinal differences can distract a justified movement from its primary goals. Early on in Spain he felt most attracted to the anarchists. His antifascism, however, was unwavering, and he thought that fascism could never be defeated by bourgeois democracy, because that would be a “fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second.” Orwell seems an antifascist first and a socialist by default. We can find many ways to interpret the various inconsistencies of Orwell’s politics as they altered over time, but I think in the main we can say that he had two unswerving positions: he hated fascism and he loved the working class. And he thought—though it may seem delusional today—that it was only the working class that could fully resist fascism. Perhaps one quotation makes his political instincts clear: he writes in Homage that “when I see an actual flesh and blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
But as the radical Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid might have said of Orwell, he “was for, not of, the working class.” Born into relative privilege, the Eton-educated Eric Blair could become the socially conscious, prolabor, antifascist writer George Orwell only after renouncing his membership in the British administrative class. But all his life, even though his sympathies were overwhelmingly with the workers, he struggled with a double-consciousness; he wrote often as both outsider and insider, observer and participant, and this is what I think gives his nonfiction books and essays their appealing authenticity and enduring vitality, though he knew he had to be careful not to allow his feelings for the working class to turn into a sentimental idealization. He had learned from experience that it was far easier to recruit Marxists from the middle class than from the people.
Orwell’s mode of double-consciousness carried over into the act of writing as well. In “Why I Write” (1946) he claims that, aside from “the need to earn a living,” there are “four great motives for writing”: “Sheer egoism” (the desire for notoriety, fame), “Esthetic enthusiasm” (a pleasure in composing good prose), “Historical impulse” (to report accurately about the world for posterity), and “Political purpose” (to promote a world view and a better society). He believes all writers feel such contradictory and fluctuating impulses all the time. He also feels that had he lived in more peaceful times and been allowed to follow his natural bent, his career would have taken a different turn and he “might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.” But he goes on, “As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
It is difficult to assess the mood of this very personal (almost confessional) essay by such an accomplished writer. Would he have preferred to write “ornate” books, perhaps under his family name, and not to have been “forced” by the times to be a “pamphleteer” (producing “rubbish”)? Did revolutionary times compel him to sacrifice literature for polemics? Or is he actually satisfied with the value of his political writing, as he seems to suggest in the following eloquent passage:
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
So much for the “pamphleteer.” And he reassures his readers (or himself) by adding, “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an esthetic experience.”
“Why I Write” is fascinating both for its comments on political writing and for its disclosure of the deep internal conflicts Orwell faced in his attempts to balance his political commitments with his self-imposed aesthetic demands. Animal Farm was rejected by several publishers in 1944; the Soviet Union was still an ally, and some worried about the book’s transparent anti-Stalinism. But as our wartime friend soon became our Cold War enemy, the fable became an enormous bestseller. His masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, written largely while he stoically endured the final stages of tuberculosis, was an instant success when it appeared in 1949 and has persistently remained the finest example of dystopian vision in our literature. (It again soared in popularity when Donald Trump assumed the presidency in 2017.) But these two influential books that made Orwell into an international literary celebrity also damaged his reputation on the radical left. Orwell had always been anti-totalitarian,
but these two popular books transparently identified totalitarianism with Soviet communism, thus appearing to endorse Western capitalist society. American neoconservatives could admire much in these books and often cited Orwell as a friend, despite Orwell’s long attachment to worker-based socialist values. As often happens in political debate, nuance gives way to hardened positions, multiplicity surrenders to reduction. Once a crisis is defined, we are left with only friends and enemies.
Writing in 1971, the Marxist critic Raymond Williams evaluated Orwell’s political and literary legacy. Though generally admiring of Orwell, especially his socially conscious nonfiction like Wigan Pier, Down and Out, and Homage, Williams didn’t much care for Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four and makes his reasons clear: Orwell wrote with too many contradictions and, since he could never fully escape his middle-class upbringing, often reverted to type. We see this most, Williams argues, in his later work, where he often appears discouraged, disillusioned, defeated (“defeatism” being one of communism’s mortal sins). A staunch New Left intellectual, Williams regrets that Orwell came to substitute communism for fascism as his model of totalitarianism, and that his later work appears to deny the “possibility of authentic revolution.” Williams thinks that Orwell eventually betrayed the faith, and in his last two “pessimistic” books made an “accommodation to capitalism,” thus capitulating to the anticommunist sentiments of American Cold War ideology. In the conclusion to his brief biographical study of Orwell, Williams sadly suggests how we should regard Orwell’s legacy: “The thing to do with his work, his history, is to read it, not imitate it.” We’re left to wonder had he lived into his early eighties what Orwell’s politics would have been when the real 1984 came around.
And what would he think now? Would he embrace today’s progressive movement? Would he still consider himself a democratic socialist? Would he oppose Brexit or sympathize with the older working class who voted leave? And from an essayist’s standpoint, would he agree with Williams that the writer in him unfortunately “had to split from the political militant.” All his career, as we’ve seen, Orwell hoped to fuse his art with his politics. Williams believes he ultimately failed, and that failure had serious political implications. I’m left thinking that for the sake of politics, Williams—no matter how much he admired the writer and his struggle—would have preferred Orwell the party-line pamphleteer to Orwell the literary artist.