Ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed fences establishing any number of opposed centers of stillness.
—William Carlos Williams, “An Essay on Virginia”
Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum is an installation artwork comprised of 385 curious objects collected and displayed in a black room-sized enclosure in the shape of a Mickey Mouse head. Documentation of its most recent installation includes photographs of the objects within, which Oldenburg arranged in austere, lit cases. One contains a grouping of frothy plastic sundaes. Another displays a scattering of lime green letters, a miniature ladder, a necktie, a panel of mounted peanut shells, a pack of Winston cigarettes, a rubber hamburger, and what appears to be a double-headed dildo. Mouse Museum is a Wunderkammer of twentieth-century American material culture. I wonder if it was this dimension of Oldenburg’s work that captured Brian Dillon’s attention when he wrote about Tacita Dean’s documentary film of the elderly Oldenburg in his studio, dusting his curios with a paintbrush. [1]
A professor at London’s Royal College of Art, Dillon is an inveterate journalist, essayist, reviewer and the UK editor of the literary magazine Cabinet. He has written, curated, commented, and edited works on art, illness, ruin, loss. He comes to his most recent book, Essayism, at midcareer, having trained his life on writing “at the expense of more than one sort of security.” He counts 1,174 files on his computer — “responses to the world of things and books and pictures and places and memories. What is it all for, exactly?” he asks. In Essayism, Dillon examines the emotional and intellectual dimensions of the organizing impulse itself.
If there were a governing metaphor for Dillon’s work, until now, it would be the cabinet of curiosity, that Renaissance instrument of knowledge and order. Dillon over and over again takes an object, a gesture, a place, a photograph, and places it in a constellation of objects of attention. In his introduction to his essay collection Objects in This Mirror, he writes, that an artist “once said to me that her job as she sees it is to simply pay closer attention to the world than others do, and that seems to me the essayist’s task as well … The result may not be quite an oeuvre in the traditional sense, but something closer to a cabinet of curiosities in both the active and artifactual senses of curiosity.” It’s this concentration manifest in sentence-making that Dillon investigates in Essayism.
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The essay and the cabinet are historical siblings. Both emerged at a moment when the closed system of the medieval world was dissolving, its universalisms and coherences falling apart in the age of discovery. The antecedent to order is chaos.
Dillon is familiar with a different sort of dissolution. Essayism comprises 26 unnumbered sections. On the face of it, the subjects of these reflections are the essay and essayists themselves, many of them women. Penetrating reflections on William Gass, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion, Maeve Brennan, Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Susan Sontag, and others — how they use lists, commas, how they fashion thinking and feeling in sentences to survive the random inflictions of living. Beneath Dillon’s philological bent on aphorisms, on sentences, on the very meaning of style is a searching tenderness. Four of the sections are titled On consolation.
I overestimate your power, loved writer, beloved essayist. What is it I want from you? Not quite comforting. Consolation. Is it consolation? A model of how to survive? The worst, most painful truth spoken as eloquently — or is it as strangely — as possible. The vantage it seems to me you have acquired. Of course I admire it because it seems to take you as writer, me as your reader, closer to truth. By indirection find direction out. And so on: other clichés of the writing life. The problem is essentially this: I want control, and I want to let go, but neither in itself is art, and how on earth do you find a way between, a way to direct all this ecstasy and ache? And still notl ose it?
Shot through Essayism is a tension between part and whole, fragment and assemblage, atomization and coherence. How to describe a sentence written on the edge of a knife? How to write one? How to just keep it together? He is writing about sentences but he is also writing about the thinking, feeling self and its accumulating grief. How do we compose ourselves?
For now it’s enough, I hope, to acknowledge that what I desire in essays . . . is this simultaneity of the acute and the susceptible. To be at once the wound and a piercing act of precision: that makes it sound as though all I care for is style, that old-fashioned thing. It might well be true. But isn’t style exactly a contention with the void, an attitude or alignment plucked from chaos and nullity? Style as the prize, not a rule of the game. Style as a sport in another sense too: botanical anomaly or innovation, avant-garde mutant. But don’t sports get assimilated in the end? Aberrations accommodated, rogues, freaks and rarities corralled and tamed? Curiosities neatly labelled, safely immured in vitrines and cabinets.
If Dillon’s writing has been to this point aligned with the 16th-century cabinet, Essayism is the work that doesn’t fit. The word essayism comes from Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities, in which the etymological origins of essay as trial or attempt are called vague. The essay, writes Musil, is not provisional or incidental, but something more permanent: “an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought.”
How interesting to invoke the essay as unalterable, decisive. Dillon, a master of indirection, never actually says this, but there is a precision in the ruined poise he so admires. Could this be a riposte to the light and breezy ruminations on feeling and personal experience that fail to reach beyond the anodyne? A way to say, I want more from sentences. Maybe the essay has more in common with cut glass than a drawer containing a fragment of narwhal tusk mistaken for the horn of a unicorn. Dillon chose to bookend Essayism with quotations from William Carlos Williams’s odd (and decisive) “An Essay on Virginia.” The cabinet is perhaps too dark. The Mouse Museum maybe a bit too flatly lit. What Dillon wants is the jelly stand.
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“An Essay on Virginia” first appeared in 1925 in the inaugural issue of This Quarter, a short-lived modernist literary magazine published in Paris. Williams’s essay is itself a work that makes a whole out of many parts. In the fall of 1923, Williams visited Virginia with his wife; many of the observations and experiences on this trip became the material for the essay. Through these things in and about Virginia, Williams wages an argument for American art. Ned Stuckey-French’s excellent study on the subject gives the historical context for Williams’s battle against the homogenizing cultural forces at work in the United States at the time. [2] This was, for Williams, a particularly American problem written into the origins of the country: out of many, one.
Dillon closes Essayism with a key passage from Williams’s essay. In Virginia, writes Williams, “Often there will appear some heirloom like the cut-glass jelly stand that Jefferson brought from Paris for his daughter, a branching tree of crystal hung with glass baskets that would be filled with jelly — on occasion. This is the essence of all essays.”
This image struck me so that I went to find the jelly stand. I wanted to see what Williams was looking at — its shape, form, material. I contacted Monticello and the helpful curator explained the only objects for jelly are trumpet shaped glasses Jefferson probably bought in New York in 1791. I had spent a good amount of imaginative energy visualizing the quality of light passing through a wine jelly held in William’s jelly stand before the curator corrected me. Wine jelly would have gone in the trumpet glasses. The object I was looking for, she said, was probably an epergne, a centerpiece made of crystal baskets that would have held nuts, candies, and what she called “little sweeties.” The epergne entered the Monticello collection in 1952, decades after Williams would have seen it in 1923. The family claimed the crystal centerpiece had been given to the second wife of Jefferson’s daughter’s widower. It likely came from England, but the provenance of the object is, the curator explained, blurry.
Which brings me to the reference to crystal or cut glass and the cubist preoccupation with fracture, fragmentation, dissemblage. When I read Dillon’s reference to the jelly stand, I couldn’t help but imagine the cut glass baskets, the light that would refract through their beveled edges, the mottled color of whatever they might hold. The essay holds a thing in its particularity: the clear but distorted prism effect of crystal. Jefferson’s fourteen little glass baskets arranged on a crystal tree “hold permanent by fracture.”
Looking back on my marginalia in my copy of Essayism, I find myself arguing with and delighting in Dillon’s readings of other essayists and the sentences he writes to respond to them. He has done more than offer us yet another book on the essay and other essayists. He has advanced the conversation of what form is and what form can do in concert with a restless, grieving intellect, looking for what is strong and light enough to contain us.
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[1] Brian Dillon, Marina Warner, Roger Malbert, eds., Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing (London: Hayward, 2013).
[2] Ned Stuckey-French, “An Essay on Virginia: William Carlos Williams and the Modern(ist) Essay,” American Literature 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 97–130.
Photo of the epergne courtesy of Thomas Jefferson Foundation, © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
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[Published by New York Review Books on September 18, 2018, 176 pages, $15.95 paperback]