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.
