The Best American Essays 2019 Page 2

  The issue here—as should be evident—is about the uneasy relation of the essay to the political world. And a part of this comes down to how much “deviation” writers are allowed before they cross the inevitable line that separates the true political believer from the apostate. The “deviation” can take many forms—a skeptical voice, inappropriate irony, a partial criticism, a suggestion of alternative perspectives, insufficient identification with the cause, a questioning of ideological goals, a contrary opinion, even a muted nonmilitant tone. In times of crisis (assuming we don’t now live in a state of permanent emergency), political writing becomes a minefield where one incorrect phrase or sentiment, or even something unsaid, could result in a writer’s permanent self-destruction. Once entering the political arena, the essayist can only at personal risk take advantage of the genre’s long-established affinity for free inquiry, unrestricted opinion, and open-mindedness.

  Dayna Tortorici’s splendid essay, “In the Maze,” reminded me that F. Scott Fitzgerald also understood the affliction of double consciousness. He famously wrote in 1936 that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” First-rate writers now, in many ways, face a similar test: Can they hold opinions and at the same time question those very opinions? Can they maintain certain beliefs while trying out alternatives? In short, can they be at the same time politically committed and open-minded? But I can’t express this current literary situation any better than does Rabih Alameddine in this collection’s opening essay. An essay that does something Orwell (rightly or wrongly) thought essays should do: essay.

  The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

  To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Note that abridgments and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series, but if considered significant they will appear in the Notable list in the back of the volume. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

  Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to:

  The Best American Essays

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  125 High Street, 5th Floor

  Boston, MA 02110

  Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions from print magazines must be directly from the publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit clear printed copies of the essays to the address above. Please note: due to the increasing number of submissions from online sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact information, etc.) cannot be considered. If submitting multiple essays, please include a separate cover sheet with a full citation for each selection.

  The deadline for all submissions is February 1 of the year following the year of publication; thus all submissions of essays published in 2019 must be received by February 1, 2020. Writers should keep in mind that—like many literary awards—the essays are selected from a large pool of nominations. Unlike many literary awards, however, writers may nominate themselves. A considerable number of prominent literary journals regularly submit issues to the series, but though we continually reach out with invitations to submit and reminders of deadlines, not all periodicals respond or participate, so writers should be sure to check with their editors to see if they routinely submit to the series. There is no fixed reading period, but writers and editors are encouraged to submit appropriate candidates as they are published and not wait until the final deadline.

  I would like to commemorate here three major writers, two of them outstanding poets, who died recently and whose work appeared in this series over the years: Mary Oliver (January 2019), who not only had several essays selected for the volumes but served as guest editor of the 2009 book; Tom Wolfe (May 2018); and Donald Hall (June 2018). Their work endures.

  I warmly thank Valerie Duff-Strautmann for her generous and invaluable assistance at various stages of this edition, the thirty-fourth in the series. Once again it’s a pleasure to acknowledge Nicole Angeloro’s editorial skills and her amazing capacity to juggle all the fast-moving parts of an annual book. And for their expertise, a heartfelt thanks to others with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who help make this book possible—especially Larry Cooper and Mary Dalton-Hoffman. I also thank my son, Gregory Atwan, for his expansive knowledge and steady help throughout every edition. For this year’s Notable list, I appreciate the fine suggestions I received from students of Ander Monson’s University of Arizona course “The Art and Work of Literary Anthologies”: many thanks to Samantha Jean Coxall, Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell, Hannah Hindley, Natalie Lima, Matthew Morris, Kevin Mosby, Emi Noguchi, Maddie Norris, and Margo Steines.

  It was especially enjoyable to work on this collection with Rebecca Solnit, whose own remarkable essays have unflinchingly confronted the most difficult and urgent problems facing our world today.

  R.A.

  Introduction

  1

  The essayist’s job is to gather up the shards or map them where they are, to find the pattern out there or make one with words about the disconnections and mysteries. This reading of the world is a form of travel, questing and searching and gathering. Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship, how intuitive and scholarly knowledge can cook down together, how discovery can be a deep pleasure.

  When you read for a book called The Best American Essays, you have to decide what an essay is, or in my case, definitions emerge as you read. Some excellent writing fell by the wayside because it was too purely personal history, and some because it felt too like feature-writing journalism. A very few pieces were at the other end of the spectrum, too purely philosophical inquiry and analysis. These writings reminded me what essays in particular do and what I want them to do, which is to be a meeting ground. A place where the experiential and the categorical, the firsthand and the researched, converse, question, or just dance in each other’s arms for a while. Where the patterns and relationships we didn’t suspect reveal themselves, or where those patterns and phenomena we thought we knew take on new meanings and depths or turn out to be strangers we are meeting for the first time. Where the writer moves between people, places, things, and events, and contemplation of what they mean, why they matter, what they have to tell us. Where the writer goes on to philosophize a little, to draw conclusions, to share a little of her own views about it all.

  Essay writing is reflective; it doesn’t just want to recount things that happened, but contemplate what they mean, and often what they mean is really about how they fit into the pattern, which is how the particular connects to the general. Often this means making ethical statements, and though sometimes an ethic is explicit, sometimes it’s implicit in what the writer chose to pay attention to or how she read it. (People who think overt principles are always propaganda often mistake the status quo for a neutral place, rather than one with its own ethical strictures and ardent propaganda.)

  That quest for meaning takes many forms. Gary Taylor writes about the murder of Maura Binkley, one of the students in the English department he chairs: “These men were all trying to kill generalities. The man who stands accused of murdering Maura was not seeing a luminous living individual; he was seeing a specimen of the category ‘woman,’ a category he hated. From his perspective, the category ‘woman’ owed him something, something he as a ‘man’ was entitled to have. The category ‘woman’ had no right to choose to refuse him. Before the gun killed Maura, the generalization did.”

  Taylor takes a stance against the inability to see particulars, and argues, “What we do, in English, and in the humanities more broadly, what we teach, what we celebrate and investigate, is human particularity.” Though I was moved and impressed by his essay’s deep humanism as he grapples with the crime, I don’t actually agree with him, because seeing patterns is seeing what we have in common, and he does it himself: “These men were all trying to kill generalities” tries to understand the mass shooting in which Binkley died as something that happens too often, and arises from a set of beliefs and entitlements. That is, this one killer typifies misogynist mass shooters.

  It’s the relationship between generalities and particulars that matters, and often the work an essay does is taxonomical: here’s how this particular fits into this cate
gorical reality. Here’s how this young woman died as a result of a set of widespread beliefs and values. Here’s how to restore what may seem like an anomaly to its natural habitat in the order of things. Here’s why this thing matters: because it is a type specimen of the species, and here is why this species matters or threatens us or is in trouble. Here’s how what happened to me happens to us, or has happened before and will again.

  It takes a certain kind of confidence to reach a conclusion. You have to take a stand, believe in yourself. You have to go past reporting or recounting. But it also takes a desire to understand, to contextualize, to situate the incident in the principle that governs it, and every essay is a journey of sorts from what we’re given to what we make of it, “we” being the writer and the readers who go on the journey with her.

  Jia Tolentino covers similar ground to Taylor’s in “The Rage of the Incels,” at least thematically, since her particulars are so different in this essay prompted by a whole different slaughter directed at women. She writes, “It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for. It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace.” She’s contextualizing the men who think women owe them sex by contemplating the other people who are not having sex and who yet don’t feel enraged and homicidal about that. It’s full of her usual startling insights, briskly delivered: “These days, in this country, sex has become a hyperefficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyperefficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad.” But then she goes further, to explore how what incels want is not really sex, or that sex is just the form in which they demand supremacy. It’s an ethical essay, and its ethics might be called feminism. As might Lili Loofbourow’s essay interrogating the excuses so often made for men, and the latitude to destroy they’re given.

  Terese Marie Mailhot does something similar with racism and then with violence against women, but she also tells us of the mythologies, beliefs, and ways of living of her mother, and of how “there is power in the reclamation of story—in the remembrance that these stories are real and tangible things, like my mother . . . I look at myself and see a lineage of monstrous desire and compulsion and beauty and power. When my mother said I was born to Thunder, she believed life would be hard for me, because Thunder is a liberator, and liberating is hard and thankless work. She believed I would disrupt things, but the world would be better for it.” Mailhot finds a cosmology that can accompany her through insults and obliviousness and shows us something of it.

  In “My Father Says He’s a Targeted Individual. Maybe We All Are.,” Jean Guerrero tells us about her father’s fears about surveillance and some of the conduct that fear has prompted and the ways that it impacted her and her family. That could be the stuff of memoir, but she goes further, to think about the ways that people who are dismissed as paranoid or conspiracy theorists are right, or have become so. With that she brings us to face the monstrous invasiveness of the new technologies and networks and the fact that all of us now live under conditions that were once supposed to be the stuff of paranoiac delusion. They are watching you. And us. If she’d only reported on the latter, her piece would be journalism, just as it would have been memoir had it only been the former, and since there is no such genre as investigative memoir, nor any such thing as the personal editorial, it’s an essay.

  “Only connect” may have emerged as the dictum underlying E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, but it’s the main instruction for writing an essay. Not connecting people emotionally, but connecting ideas and meanings, which are the protagonists in essays, as human beings are in novels, the subjects who must reveal themselves and evolve through the writing.

  2

  Threaded through all the crises of this era is an absence of a certain kind of sense perhaps too rare to call common. This sense arises from an ability to deal in facts but also in meanings, to situate the particular in the general, and to extricate oneself from generalizations by means of directness and detail, to move back and forth from the personal to the political, to know where we are and how we got here and why that matters. Patience, attention to detail, devotion to accuracy and precision, interest in patterns and overarching orders, and concentration that doesn’t flicker from the main event are the soil in which that sense grows.

  This is the work essays have done more than any other kind of literature, though virtually all literature has done it by asking people to sit quietly alone and engage with what a stranger thought, perhaps one long ago or far away or unfamiliar in some essential. This thoughtfulness of the writer and the reader who meets her is itself an act of self-definition and of being in the world in ways that don’t comply with hasty, networked, distracted time.

  William Carlos Williams wrote in one of his most famous passages about the difficulty of getting the news from poems, “yet men die miserably every day . . . for lack of what is found there.” Just before that oft-quoted clutch of lines, the poet says,

  My heart rouses

  thinking to bring you news

  of something

  that concerns you

  and concerns many men.

  It seems to be some kind of objective information he’s referring to, some practical or political information (and he keeps addressing himself to men as a synecdoche for humanity, though he’s speaking to a beloved who is his wife of forty years, because women still didn’t quite exist in the fifties, speaking of patterns that erase, or patterns we’re trying to shatter). Actual news, perhaps of the kind found in newspapers, or perhaps news in the larger, vaguer sense of what just happened out there, whether it’s the sun breaking through the clouds out the window or the diagnosis just phoned in. And then come those famous lines informing us that poems don’t deliver the news, but they deliver something essential.

  So does the news, of course, and essays deliver both and maintain the diplomatic relations between journalism and poetry, owning something from both territories, or functioning in both. Curious about the lines I had read so many times, I looked up the poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” and when writing about it I found this from poet and professor Ann Fisher-Wirth: “A bout with depression was exacerbated both by the recent stroke and by the injustices surrounding Williams’ appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. The position was first offered, then withdrawn owing to allegations of Communist sympathizing, then offered again contingent upon further loyalty investigations, which were conducted but never evaluated, so that the year’s term was up before Williams was able to serve. The situation tormented him with feelings of rage, powerlessness, and humiliation.”

  Fisher-Wirth writes that the crisis drove him to put himself in a mental hospital for a couple of months, and it was in this phase of his life he wrote the poem. Maybe it’s this news “of something that concerns you” he was thinking of. I hadn’t known that McCarthyism had impacted Williams, too, and it changed the poem for me to know that it had been written in duress that was not only personal but public, the vicious anticommunism that turned into a right-wing enthusiasm to punish and control all dissenters and leftists and then homosexuals and everyone, anyone. Millions lived in fear they might be targeted, whatever their political alliances past and present.

  How do you think about this poem to his wife, with its intimate imagery of flowers and domesticity, when you find out it’s from a man devastated by the national crisis of McCarthyism—that is, by the threat of an inquiry that is not a desire to know the person but to hunt for grounds to punish him in an act that oversimplifies the past and lumps many positions in the same category and attempts to banish certain kinds of thought and politics?