P.S. Elsewhere in the world, people have believed that cranes dance at night when no mortals are around to transform themselves into human forms; then they choreograph their courtship, wooing and wooed. Mysterious and ancient, a crane is a bird of the misty past, of the uncertain present, and of the unknown future. Its regal poise makes wherever it stays a heavenly palace and entrances me into the whirlwind of Magic and Myth.
I’m thrilled to read good stuff- I mean a real good one!
Oscar Wilde, the wonderfully strange writer with a keen eye on the panoply of human behaviors, knew about voyeuristic streaks on human nature when he said thus: “One must keep a diary when traveling anywhere by train or coach to read something sensational.” Maybe that’s why people like to read the lives of others. Maybe that’s why the memoir, which I regard very much as a diary written backward in time, always bestride the bestselling list of nonfiction of TheNewYorkTimesBookReview, which has become a formidably profitable genre of American literature. Admittedly, it’s awe-inspiring to read a success story of one whose hardscrabble background is a fortiori certifiable and renders a kind of feel-good sentiment with something of a vicarious experience to the reader sharing similar constraints of life in one way or another, or it may seem so. Frankly, any of the best-selling memoirs can hardly be less a modern version of Cinderella story than it seems to me, which is nothing but a proud exhibition of achievements by a select few (“The Chosen”) in the melee.
I might be cruel, only to be real. I am all the more respectful of anyone who has risen above biological/social inhibitions in his/her own fashion. But this topic of Triumph of Will over difficulties has become a literary fad, as though anyone who had rough and tough times in growing up somewhere in the backwater of downtrodden south or mid-western regions were suddenly in a zealous Olympic competition of writing the most heart-wrenching personal story on one cardinal condition: that the writer must have a very good career that provisions him/her with a nice place to live and loving, understanding significant other into the bargain. That is, unless a would-be writer of memoir is well-established in society, it’s not worth the writing of the story because after all, who’s gonna read your story if you still live among the melee with some ordinary, if not nondescript, job with meager income to barely get by despite your noble resilient spirit and evergreen hope to better yourself?
It’s all derivative of one model!
For example, the October 7, 2018 issue of TheNewYorkTimesReview carries an elegant book review of “Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt With Family Addiction”, a newest memoir of a certain popular illustrator-writer of children’s books named Jarrett Krosoczka, hailed as another survivor of economic and social determinism. The review presents the book as a courageous live-to-tell account of his childhood shadowed by his mother’s drug addiction and of his triumphant accomplishment as a successful artist who can presumably inspire many kids unfortunately mired in disadvantaged surroundings through no faults of their own. The spirit is commendable, but the gist is visceral. According to the elegant summary of the book, Krosoczka was better off than many other kids in his station because he had lumpish but loving grandparents who took care of him and encouraged his artistic inclinations, plus a cast of odd but good characters that complemented the other void of affectionate attention needed for a child. Back in our real nonfiction contemporary life, how many kids are fortunate to be endowed with the luck he had, and what if a kid struggling to escape from the plight with his intelligence and industry turned out to be just an ordinary adult still laboring to make the ends meet, while still secretly entertaining the thought of becoming somebody in his solitude? Would you think that his life is a failure? The memoir of this kind is more of a resume of individual experiences and achievements that, in a twist of irony, provokes a sort of catharsis in the reader as if he were watching a television drama that would made him feel like living in a holistic virtual reality.
In all fairness of my acerbic and arbitrary opinion on the review of the aforesaid memoir, it goes against the grain not to point out other popular memoirs perching on the best-selling list: Educated by Tara Westover is about her story of how she got away from her bohemian parents to immerse herself in scholarship; Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, another one by a Yale Law School Graduate recounting the struggles of the white working class struggles through the story of his own impoverished childhood; Heartland by Sarah Smarsh, a daughter of a poor wheat farmer in Kansas telling her poverty-stricken childhood into adolescence and the hard lives of the working class in the Mid-West; and finally, Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, revealing her errant childhood and her struggle to be away from the rabble that led her to a gainful literary success. And I suspect that there will be more memoirs to be published in future like new soppy television movies in production.
Am I being too acerbic? But that is how I feel.
As someone who regards Courage, Endeavor, and Resilience as great American drama in three acts, I am all for reading about someone who would continue his/her secret aspiration, while keeping the foot firmly grounded in reality, such as Laura Ingalles Wilder, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte, all of whom continued to tend their ordinary daily duties and responsibilities even after their literary success. To say it’s an anachronistic and antediluvian mode of thinking in the 21st century is to depreciate their literary geniuses and modus vivendi peculiar to the ethos of their times. However, the love of the writing must not corrupt into the worship of the hero. It’s the sense of the writer’s spirit that addresses the spirit of the reader, not the pageantry accolades of material successes that seem to be the bedrock of the memoir riding on the crest of popularity of rags-to-riches telltale revelations. We might live in an Orwellian world of reality prioritizing the ostentatious display of wealth or power, but we shall not devalue the truthfulness and value of ordinary life where the meaning of life depends upon whether or not we fulfill the demands placed upon our daily tasks however insignificant or trifle they may seem. For this reason, I don’t subscribe to the popularity of the best-selling Cinderella memoirs in which the sacredness of ordinariness in combination with the peculiar magic of literature is conspicuous by its absence.
As days of Indian Summer seem to be fading away with the arrival of fall in earnest this week, so do the halcyon park days of Henry Bovine, a tram operator of thirty years and a decorated veteran of the Abracadabra Campaign, whose pastimes include reading his periodical subscriptions and writing his essays and reviews in his weblog basking himself in the sun alone or sometimes with his good errant friends enjoying their temporary free times away from their homes in reminiscence of their bachelorhood. Wasn’t it Francis Bacon who also lamented the pathos of a married man with children? “A man with his wife and children gives hostages to the goddess Fortuna,” was his philosophical utterance. It’s not that all the married men in Avonlea regret their conjugal ways of life, but that they inevitably have to sacrifice some of their personal times for the sake of families. Surely, John and his chum Randy Beaver, the wonderful chef at the fabulous French restaurant called LaBoum (meaning “The Party” in English) are aware of their duties as married men and rights as individuals who do not forego their weekend sovereign pastimes.
“Hey, Henry. What’s new today? What’ re you writing about? Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, I think. That means your writing is worth the reading in my part.” Anything coming from Randy is not flattery of a sycophant or an empty approbation of a busybody. He means it with all his heart and with all his mind. Knowing this makes Henry a fortiori pleased and appreciated, and because Henry is a very reticent man who tends to dissimulate his realm of thoughts, unless otherwise he trusts one to become his confidante over a long period of probation to test the character of the would-be confidante. “Hi Randy. Instead of writing, I am reading this week’s edition of The Watcher that mostly deals with the issues arising out of gender dysphoria in elementary and middle schools. For goodness’ sake, I could not have imagined to read such articles a decade ago. I guess I am falling by the wayside of the epochal changes and stuck in forgeyism,” says Henry with a wry smile. “Oh, cheer up, Henry. For what it’s worth, the world is not such a bad place to live. Life is like a voyage of Odyssey, packed full of vicissitudes of fortune,” declaims Randy against Henry’s self-effacing disservice to himself. “Shakespeare said it a personal play, but I call it a voyage because it seems more daringly venturesome. You know that between the devil and the deep sea, there was a strait where one of the most endearing and exciting adventures of Odyssey happened? Vide our own lives in that perspective!”
Randy’s passionate delivery of philosophical speech brings the grist to the mill for Henry’s reservoir of writing and enlivens his otherwise gloomy spirit with a visceral feeling of hopefulness and good-humorousness, of which Henry is in need. Ever humane and munificent, Henry wants to treat Randy with nice homemade styled lunch at Snoopy. Randy is, of course, glad to lunch with his intellectual friend who understands what he has read, ranging from the Classical to the contemporary, and what he talks about with verve and gusto. Isn’t it wonderful to have a kindred spirit in life? But in case Fortune has not yet revealed such spirit to you, do not be disheartened, for you can dispel your gloomy spells by trying to braving the world outside your comfort zones little by little: walking in the hustle and bustle of the center of town with no particular destinations in mind, followed by enjoying a coffee time with a journal to write and a book to read at your favorite coffee shop, will surely frame your mind to mirth and merriment that can make you immune from a thousand harms for the day. At the end of the day, Petula Clark’s “Downtown” will sound apposite to your day’s adventure, or it will seem.
Hunter and hunted, quiet and questing,
Tamed and wild, chaste and insatiable,
It’s man and woman at its will shifting
Its nature but the beauty still admirable
As the Unicorn fell from a noble creature
To a profane beast with Death of Adventure.
P.S. The divinity of the unicorn suddenly declined during the Renaissance period (14th~16th centuries) and like Lucifer, the Fallen Angel, it became a symbol of bacchanalian debauchery associated with lust and a harbinger of moral corruption. Even J.K. Rowling’s unicorn is devious and ghoulish, which is antithetical to my perception of unicorn as a divinely beautiful being evoking a wide arc of imaginations in my mind’s eye that has become sore to the dreary sights of the existential vertigo I sometimes stumble into.
The essay as a respectful literary genre has not yet established its firm meritorious footing in American intellectual society where the novel, poetry, and journals featuring de rigueur social/political issues with gravitas, surrealistic individualism, or puritanical heroism that has recently morphed into a rags-to-riches memoir are the only select legitimate royalties worth being decorated with a laurel. Perhaps it has something to do with the level of American intellectualism being at its still developing stage in consideration of its relatively “youthful” history. For what is worth, despite its general cold reception from the literary hierarchy, E.B. White is nonetheless a quintessential American English writer and a very fine essayist of the twentieth century in the English language into the bargain. In this collection of his essays published in various magazines over the years (from 1920s to 1970s), Whites recorded the overtones of humanity, democracy, and social concerns in ordinary things and experiences described in elegant and crisp prose style that resembles none other than his, thus making him one of the central figures in the canon of American literature without dispute.
Being an essayist means something of a modern day literary troubadour, an independently-minded man with childlike streaks of artless interest in all things worldly and unworldly and innocent belief that everything he thinks about and everything that befalls him is of general interest. In a way, he’s a likable egoist with venturesome effrontery and verve to write a very egoistic essay on his whims and caprice. However, Whites gently rebukes us for our general perception of the essay as an expression of exalted rootlessness without self-discipline and an intellectual basis; rather, it is a panoply of sensibilities, senses, and intelligence, all broken loose from the hidden private closet of the essayist. For this reason of being egoistically concerned in a panorama of contemporary daily that many serious writers of the other literary genres tend to downplay, an essayist should accept his self-imposed role of small-fry writing gentry in the class of scribe, advised White with a kind of avuncular manner. However, it is this estate of an essayist Whites feels exhilarated about; it provides him with a valve of the emotional influx and outflow, so that he can wield his pen across a page in an expense of his curiosity, conviction, observation, and self-discipline, producing a dazzling delight of literary pleasure in its simplicity of language and subject.
To illustrate, White’s subjects of his essays vary from his experience of moving from New York City to Maine as in “Goodbye to forty-eighth street,” to the humorous political essay of “Bedfellow,” featuring his canine family member Fred, and from his keen and humane observation of a circus girl rehearsing her show in “The Ring of Time” to his youthful poetic experience of working as a waiter on a ship to Alaska in “The Years of Wonder.”All of the aforesaid deal with a cast of everyday character and contemporary daily life written in simple but perspicacious words to contextualize the inner realm of White. There’s no priggishness or pomposity in his prose style, which I find very appealing and endearing. For someone who’s as erudite and intelligent as White, such simplicity of writing betokens that he wears his knowledge lightly with a general reader in mind. In fact, White thinks it his duty as a writing man to record all items as though he would be held personally responsible if it were to be omitted. This idea of a writer as general secretary of humanity parallels the reasons of writing as posited by George Orwell: It serves as a platform of expressing our sheer egotism, aesthetic pleasure, political evidence, or historical record. A priori, both of the great essayist of the English languages strike the mutual writing chords in their hearts.
At the heart of the essays lies White’s love of the world where he collected the flotsams and jetsam of what our contemporary human life could bring to us, which were washed up by the waves of time and memories. This collection of essay by White, I think, bestows in spades its sovereign royal heritage of its own on the American essay that merits its own section in nonfiction aisles across the country. That is, in a wide stretch of literary imaginations imbued with historical evidence, the book has made itself the founder of new royal blood in a way that reminds me of William the Conqueror’s becoming the first Norman king of England by establishing a new royal bloodline in 1066. With a variety of topics, and the practicality of language, this book is a gem that holds the reader’s attention throughout the pages including the unforgettable cover featuring Fred and the author himself, which so fittingly and wittingly demonstrates the Element and Style of Essays of E.B. White. It’s a lovely read that warms your heart and piques your curiosity of the inner world of the writer whose thoughts and feelings chime the bells of ours own in one way or another because White is ageless in his writing and his writing timeless in his essays.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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