Last week, I watched an old television interview with the American writer Gore Vidal where he insisted (Vidal always insisted, whether writing or speaking) that the essay would endure longer than the novel as a literary form. In other words, Montaigne would outlive Updike.
Gore, who loved to provoke, had once written, “Montaigne will survive because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel by at least a thousand years.” Updike he dismissed as a “middlebrow” writer. It is the worst of the brows, high and low being the others.
Gore himself might be a good example of his theory. His novels haven’t aged as well as his essays have, although the former are mainly historical and the latter were mainly topical in his time. Perhaps that is a personal bias – I read his collections of essays eagerly but couldn’t finish any of his novels, from Myra Breckinridge to Burr to The Judgement of Paris. His essays were deliciously pugnacious, judgements unfiltered by good manners.
My personal preferences are no guarantee of literary longevity, of course, but I see the old bias emerging again as I read A Memoir of My Former Self. This is a collection of occasional essays by Hilary Mantel, a far superior writer to Vidal (and a far inferior self-promoter). Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy intimidated me by its sheer size, 2,112 pages in all, and by the remoteness of its subject matter, 16th century England and the rise of Thomas Cromwell.
But the essays are another matter. There is depth and unexpectedness, passion and compassion, and the writer shines through as a human being and friend. Fiction tends to mask the writer, who has to speak in the different voices of her many characters. The essays are as much a journey of self-discovery as it is an exercise in exposing oneself. “Anything I have achieved has been in the teeth of the disease,” Mantel once said, referring to her struggles with endometriosis, from the delayed diagnosis to the botched surgery that followed.
Most novelists look down on their journalistic writings. “I think of writing journalism and criticism as writing left-handed,” said the British writer Martin Amis, “where the connection isn’t to the part of me where novels come from.”
It is tempting to think of the novel as Test match cricket and the essay as a limited-over game meant for quick consumption. But go deeper, and you realise that each format, writing or cricket, has its own rhythms, its own techniques, and its own rewards.
“Fiction isn’t made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose,” Mantel writes in the inaugural piece in her new collection. “Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It’s about the particular, which suggests the general…”
Gore Vidal might not have agreed. Or then again, being the contrarian he was, he might have.
