I meet writers through their essays; a coincidence that became a pattern. Dad bought me The Fire Next Time and I obsessed over James Baldwin, winding through wide swaths of essays. Eventually, I lost myself in the pages of Go Tell It On the Mountain and Giovanni's Room. Next came Joan Didion. With a massive anthology of her nonfiction, I devoured the journalism and contemplation of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, along with more cohesive works like Where I Was From and After Henry. I ended up with A Book of Common Prayer and The Year of Magical Thinking. Dad got me The Adventures of Augie March for Christmas one year and I followed it up, not with Henderson, Herzog, or Mr. Sammler, but an anthology of Saul Bellow's essays and criticism. I followed Music of Chance with Paul Auster's Collected Prose; Sisyphus and "Tipasa" preceded The Plague; "Living With Music" set the stage for Invisible Man. I never went for Ernest Hemingway until I saw, sitting on a curated table at The Strand, a copy of Death in the Afternoon. I enjoy nonfiction and I write essays of my own. Upon deciding to explore a writer further, I seek out essays, but the fascination reaches deeper than just an interest in the medium.
I read 1984 and Animal Farm in high school but passed on George Orwell's essays until ten years later. Those two most famous of his books illuminate the destructive power of government, socialism, demagoguery, and surveillance. Countless readers draw from them conclusions about the author's politics; namely that he was anti-socialist and skeptical of government. But his politics, revealed in his enormous body of nonfiction, were richly complex, contradictory and varied. An avowed socialist, he stridently criticized communism and left-wing politics. The mythological nationalism of fascists turned his stomach but he lambasted the British elite for ridiculing patriotism. He was hopeful the ability of government to redistribute wealth and help its citizens but ceaselessly wary of the damage it could do. A radical critic, he spoke when he had something to say and razed artists and poets as often as politicians. The novels don't illuminate those subtleties. Even my worshipful eye sees them as particularly on the nose. A reader might misunderstand the Orwell expressed in their pages.
Authors use essays to satiate curiosity or exorcize a compulsion to observe or comment. They're less thoroughly draped in metaphor or allegory than works of fiction. Eloquence and brilliance, art and sublimity, humor and wrath flash over the pages but the author says about the world what he or she thinks. Writers contemplate history, politics, culture, the writing process, their own work, and that of others. Reading the essays of a fiction writer, knowing the author's mind in that way, can be complicated; words should be allowed to mean what they mean without the hands on the typewriter interfering. But I relish that cognitive dissonance: words might mean what they mean, not just without interference from, but altogether in spite of the hands on the typewriter. That dissonance deepens fiction even as it becomes somewhat more difficult, less pleasant, more complicated. That dissonance is complicated, in part, because our minds can be exceedingly simple.
I finished Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet en route to my work at a restaurant in Manhattan's Flatiron district. We often sample wines before dinner service and everyone broadcasts what they smell and taste. Bell peppers. Baking spice. Black pepper. Shoe leather. Straw. Cream cheese. Plums and black-fruit. Strawberry jam. Cranberries. Citrus. I'm new to it. I taste—just wine, the aromatic sharpness of grapey alcohol. But when someone mentions rubber chips, they materialize suddenly on my tongue and circle through my sinuses. Only when I realize the scope of options—really, shoe leather and rubber chips—do I notice tastes on the palate. No impression is incorrect and fiction is no different. Freudian psychology. The decay of urban life. Generational change. The uncertainty of space travel. Bystanders and passivity. The taking of life. It's all there, but a mind is hard to restrain when it chases a thread; suggestable and eager to follow the first tangent. Toasted pecan! I taste it. Middle-class decadence collapsing in on itself! I read it. Would I have noticed either if I hadn't been told to look?
The ideas, contemplations, preoccupations, obsessions, foibles, and observations of essays can reveal in a novel cracks, colors, and shimmering little apertures that I may otherwise miss. But it's difficult to discern brown sugar and pineapple with the idea of rubber on my tongue. One notion crowds out the rest. Allowing the crowding, the invasion of something compelling, is valuable in itself. Dissonance is a skill. We all believe things, think ideas, form shapes and images in our minds constantly. As a general rule, we're wrong, misguided, misshapen, incomplete. Holding up a belief against one older, an idea beside something radical, a circle against a square, a photograph opposite a drawing, requires that we treat entities in conflict as simultaneously valid. Sharpening thought requires peace with constant contradiction.
Context also distracts, even as it enriches. Mr. Sammler, for example, is an unpleasant old man, filled with crusty prejudice, strange ideas, sexual preoccupations, and bitter judgments. When I flip through his planet I wonder at the creation of such an ornery and bizarre little intellectual creature, furrow my brow and scour pages for intention. When I read Bellow's nonfiction, I wonder if Sammler echoes the preoccupations of the author. Of course he does. It's a difference of quality and little more. The author lives in anything to which he or she put a pen. Fiction is imaginative work—a dreamscape littered with, sewn from, built upon the sparkly, piffling curiosities of the conscious mind—and essays are as close as I can come to a conversation. What's in your head? What do you collect when you rummage through closets, kick cans down the sidewalk, root through bins at the curb?
Personalities invade their creations. Knowing how or why a piece of art was produced carries freight, can strip it of significance or our ability to enjoy it. But lately, we're better at splitting the glossy indulgence of a Wagner orchestration from the abhorrence of the man himself, though with the benefit of a century to thread that needle. Still, that The New Yorker can publish favorable reviews of the Bayreuth Wagner festival's radical interpretations of an antisemite's problematic body of work suggests hope. Wagner doesn't deserve appreciation and we're under no obligation to give it, but he also doesn't deserve to rob us of art we enjoy and more artists than ever force us to make similar choices.
Artists are people, capable of prejudice and hate like the rest. I couldn't enjoy much if it weren't possible to briefly silence or separate its creator. Dissonance—to accept parallel incompatible thoughts, value work and loathe its creator, consider that its creator might be a wretched person but that such wretchedness may illuminate in fascinating ways —is a matter of survival. But it's possible. Strange thoughts and awkward ideas can sprout lovely words. The same Sammler who dwells luridly on the length of his niece's skirt reads of the impending moon landing and muses that, one day, "men would set their watches by other suns than this." The same Bellow who built from nothing the likes of Artur Sammler also summoned, from the slums of Chicago, the wild and pensive Augie March.
Reconciling the beauty of fiction with the foibles, prejudices, distasteful views, repellent thoughts, preoccupations, musings, odd processes, and anxieties of the author's essays provide the challenge in its most acute form. Contradictions collide with my own impressions and force me to consider work from multiple unpleasant angles. The unalloyed ramblings of a brilliant mind require dismissing one taste in order to experience the full range, holding one idea in limbo while others fill the void, testing each for value, being contradicted or doing the contradicting.
Bellow's essays force me into his wild and conflicted mind. His fiction overflows with his own experiences and characters bristle with his barbs. Artur Sammler runs eagerly to Israel to witness the Six Day War just as Bellow did. Sammler notes burned-out tanks, contemplates blacked and bloated bodies on the road through the Sinai Desert, wears a sear-sucker jacket, and has a conversation with an Israeli man in Spanish who immediately pegs him for American—all just as Bellow describes in the essay he produced during his own trip. His other essays describe youthful fascinations with Freud and Marx that reflect Sammler's bizarre intellectual self-image and twisted relationship with his own world. Bellow explores an alternate self, arrested in the self-satisfied intellectualism of his youth. He reveals autobiography in many characters alongside the possibility that their neuroticism, chauvinism, and unpleasantness pull from his own personality.
But Bellow wouldn't give this all too much weight. He sees excessive analysis as a shelter from reality; beauty, ugliness, passion, evil, love, and rage. He argues that readers "prefer meaning to feeling," and writes of a former student's attempt at drawing symbols and significance from Achilles's ride about Troy with Hector's body in tow:
"The reason the schoolboy takes refuge in circles is that the wrath of Achilles and the death of Hector are too much for him. He is doing no more than most civilized people do when confronted with passion and death. They contrive somehow to avoid them."
Bellow speaks of passion and death, but could also refer to the hypocrisy of those we respect, disgust for those we hope to love, prejudice of those we thought fair, and dismissal by those we deemed appreciative. In contriving to avoid, we avoid the work as a whole. To Bellow, a story is a story and characters just people, ambiguous and unsatisfying, multifaceted and infinitely malleable in the determined palms of an attentive reader. Author and intention should form a world in which the reader grows lost and discovers whatever the imagination makes available. To read an author's thoughts is to illuminate corners I could never see without a lamp, to bathe not only high ceilings and elegant appointments but dusty places under the bed and behind the refrigerator in warm liquid light. They shouldn't overwhelm everything else.
In one of his own essays, George Orwell dissects a poem and, upon finishing his analysis, wonders aloud if there was any point to the exercise. He concludes that there was, is, and always will be:
"Men of science can study the life-process of a flower, or they can split it up into its component elements, but any scientist will tell you that a flower does not become less wonderful, it becomes more wonderful, if you know all about it."
I'm certain that, if confronted with the possibility of contradiction or unpleasantness, neither he nor his scientists would reconsider.
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