Best American Essays

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

If there were one thing I could get everyone to buy, it would be the annual Best American Essays anthology put out by Houghton Mifflin Company.  I’ve been getting them every year since 1992, and they have some of the best writing in the genre of the personal essay you will ever read.

Some of these clips are funny, some serious.  These are essays that, once read, I have never forgotten.

First, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison‘s 1992 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “P.C. On The Grill: The Frugal Gourmet, lambasted and skewered.”  Grizzuti wrote this before the Frugal Gourmet’s nasty personal life came out; she just really really really hated him.  This is one of the funniest essays I have ever read.  It’s available on the Harper’s Webite here if you have a subscription; it was also reprinted in Best American Essays of 1992.

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I will never “find [myself] using Serbian Pork Seasoning regularly,”and do not expect on many occasions to buy “one large fresh octopus leg, about two to three pounds.” But, oh! He makes me so happy, in an imbecilic kind of way; he gives me leave to hate wholeheartedly while roaring with laughter-an antiseptic kind of hatred for which I ought, I suppose, to be grateful to him: a noncorrosive hatred that is the opposite of toxic. In him I encounter viscerally the P.C. culture in all its ragged absurdity; and I find the encounter mind-scouring-although, I admit, it took me six months of concentrated watching (and reading) before I understood that I was engaged in more than just a random exercise in masochism. Generally speaking, I am not attracted to that by which I am repulsed; he is the exception that preposterously proves the rule.

— snip —

His factoids are the kinds of things that make you gnash your teeth when you hear them from lazy, ill-informed tourists who take pride in never having eaten in a tourist restaurant (Stay out of those tourist restaurants, just stay out of them! he says. Why?) or from the mouths of terminally dopey know-it-alls:

“The Japanese do everything in the most elegant manner possible. Everything is so aesthetic!”

“In Rome they love artichokes more than anything else.”

“I consider the Chinese the greatest chefs in the world and the wise ones behind noodles; they do more with the noodle than anybody else.”

“Venus de Milo’s bellybutton was the pattern for tortellini.”

“Have you ever thought of the influence Rome had on the Western world?”

George Washington ate one of Martha’s hams every day at three o’clock..He also “treated his slaves quite well.”

“There are more chickens in the world than there are human beings.”

“It is rare that you meet a fireman who is not a very kind person.”

He doesn’t like flamingo brains. He’s on reasonably sure ground there.

From Best American Essays 1998, “Will You Still Feed Me?” by Joeseph Epstein, originally in The American Scholar.  It starts like this:

I know it’s no great achievement — I realize people are doing it every day — but I am rather smugly pleased to have reached the stately age of sixty.  I am pleased because, while the actuarial tables suggest I ought to have made it, nonetheless I have “the imagination for disaster,” in the phrase of Henry James, who claimed to “have seen life as ferocious and sinister.”  I am always not so secretly delighted when the worst doesn’t happen.  James also called death, at his final illness, “the Distinguished Thing.”  The Distinguished Thing has not come knocking on my door, at least not yet, though it regularly pays check-out calls on people my age and much younger: Harold Ross at fifty-nine, Whittaker Chambers at sixty, and Francois Truffaut at fifty-two were required to pack their bags.

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As I clicked off the decades in my own life, I made note of what they are supposed to represent: thirty — the end of young manhood; forty — the onset of true ernestness; fifty — midlife, the halfway point (though, chronologically, not really), the age that evokes all sorts of empty symbolism.  But sixty, sixty I think is fairly serious.  There is nothing ambiguous about being sixty, the way there is about being in one’s fifties.  If one takes to chasing young women in one’s sixties, for example, one is, officially, a dirty old man.  At sixty it is too late to undergo that greatest of all masculine psychological cliches, a midlife crisis.  If one does so, one is not in a crisis but is merely being a damn fool.

— thirteen-page snip to end —

Not that I am ready to pass these dice along.  Ten years ago, in Florence, in a shop outside the Church of San Lorenzo, I purchased an ascot — brilliant blue, niftily splashed with red, and flecked with gold.  I have yet to wear it, thinking it too pretentious even for me, who normally doesn’t mind a touch or two of pretention.  How much longer do you suppose I have to wait to get away with wearing an ascot?  My neck, already aflap with loose skin, is certainly ready, but am I?  Not quite there yet, I feel.  Perhaps in another decade.

Yes, at seventy, if I get there — I have just touched wood — I shall be ascoted and ready to roll.  You will see me coming.  You will not be able to miss me.  I shall be this old dandy, Italian silk at his throat, looking a bit distracted because he is still thinking of the future while living in the past — and wondering where all the time has gone.

Gerald Early, “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant”, originally in The Kenyon Review, collected in Best American Essays of the Century and Best American Essays of 1991.  Early describes the meaning and significance of black female beauty, and the frustrations and tenuous joys of seeing it celebrated and dismissed in American culure over the years.  It ends:

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A few days after the contest I watched both of my daughters playing Barbies, as they call it.  They squat on the floor on their knees, moving the dolls around through an imaginary town and in imaginary houses.  I decided to join them and squatted down too, asking them the rules of the game, which they patiently explained as though they did not mind having me, the strange adult, invade their children’s world.  I told them it was hard for me to squat and I asked if could simply sit down, but they said that one always plays Barbies while squating.  It was a rule that had to be obeyed.  As they went along, explaining relationships among their myriad dolls and the several landscapes, as complicated a genealogy as anything Faulker ever dreamed up, a theater as vast as the entire girlhood of the world, they told me that one particular black Ken doll and one particular black Barbie doll were married and that the dolls had a child.  Then Rosalind held up a white doll that someone, probably a grandparent, had given them (my wife is fairly strict on the point of our daughters’ not having white dolls, but I guess a few have slipped through), explaining that this doll was the daughter of the daughter of the black Ken and Barbie.

“But,” I said, “how could two black dolls have a white daughter?”

“Oh,” said Rosalind, looking at me as if I were an object deserving only of her indulgent pity, “we’re not racial.  That’s old-fashioned.  Don’t you think so, Daddy?  Aren’t you tired of all that racial stuff?”

Bowing to the wisdom which, it is said, is the only kind that will lead us to Christ and to ourselves, I decided to get up and leave them to their play.  My knees had begun to hurt and I realized, painfully, that I was much too old, much too at peace with stiffness and inflexibility, for children’s games.

Mary Oliver, “Building the House,” from Shenandoah, collected in Best American Essays 1999.  Oliver is a semi-famous nature poet.  In this essay, she describes building her own house, in the woods.  It ends:

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For myself, I pass him by and have gone into the woods.  Near the path, one of the tall maples has fallen.  It is early spring, so the crimped, maroon flowers are just emerging.  Here and there slabs of the bark have exploded away the impact of its landing.  But, mostly, it lies as it stood, though not such a net for the wind as it was.  What is it now?  What does it signify?  Not Indolence, surely, but something, all the same, which balances with Ambition.  Call it Rest.  I sit on one of the branches.  My idleness suits me.  I am content.  I have built my house.  The blue butterflies, called azures, twinkle up from the secret place where they have been waiting.  In their small blue dresses they float among the branches, they come close to me, one rests for a moment on my wrist.  They do not recognize me as anything very different from this enfoldment of leaves, this wind-roarer, this wooden palace lying down, now upon the earth, like anything heavy, and happy, and full of sunlight, and half asleep.