The Best American Essays 2022, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Abasement by Brian Blanchfield
Drinking Story by Elissa Washuta
Fire and Ice by Debra Gwartney
Ghosts by Vauhini Vara
The Wild, Sublime Body by Melissa Febos
Baby Yeah by Anthony Veasna So
The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’État, and the Small Dreamers by Jung Hae Chae
It Had to Be Gold by Justin Torres
Futurity by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Her Kind by Naomi Jackson
Ghost Bread by Angelique Stevens
The Gamble by Lina Mounzer
The Wrong Jason Brown by Jason Brown
Between These Lives, Azeroth by Tanner Akoni Laguatan
Among Men by Calvin Gimpelevich
China Brain by Andrea Long Chu
What She Would Always and Should Always Be Doing by Kaitlyn Greenidge
My Gentile Region by Gary Shteyngart
Anatomy of a Botched Assimilation by Jesus Quintero
Mother Country by Elias Rodriques
At the Bend of the Road by Aube Rey Lescure
If You Ever Find Yourself by Erika J. Simpson
The Lost List by Ryan Bradley
Contributors’ Notes
Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2021
Notable Special Issues of 2021
About the Editors
Guest Editors of the Best American Essays
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
WHEN I WROTE the first foreword for this series, back in 1986, I began with a quotation from E. B. White that I’ve relied on many times over. I cited it warily—perhaps defensively—as it clearly represented a serious obstacle to the idea of publishing an annual collection with a single objective: we—my editors and I—hoped the new series would showcase the essay as a serious literary genre. We thought the time had come. Yet, apparently, White—surely the best-known American essayist at the time—did not agree. In his foreword to Essays of E. B. White, he noted, rather sadly, in 1977: “I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-century American letters—it stands a short distance down the line. The essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.”
White died on October 1, 1985, at his saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine. At that time, I was in the midst of putting together the first volume of this series with our first guest editor, Elizabeth Hardwick. Stricken with rapidly accelerating dementia since the fall of 1984, White apparently published nothing in the months before he died, but had he, I doubt he would have been selected by Hardwick, who considered his work “middlebrow.” She leveled this judgment at lunch one afternoon when I brought up White. I had to agree with her assessment, but not entirely. I felt obliged to add that I thought he managed to write over a long career a handful of extraordinary essays.
White is a strange case. Buried deep inside his self-deprecating remark may be a chronic self-doubt, a recognition that it may not be the diminished stature of the essay in American letters but his own minor literary reputation that marked him as a “second-class citizen.” It’s true—as I’ve often noted—that the essay had fallen out of fashion, not only among publishers but in the important world of academia and criticism, where literary reputations are largely made. Though not an academic, Hardwick was just one of many highly respected critics at the time who didn’t regard White as a significant literary figure. To many, he remained a New Yorker humorist of lesser talent than S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, or Dorothy Parker and a popular children’s book author. The work he thought of as his best—his essays—was not the subject of serious criticism or “close reading.” I think it’s fair to say that his essays are rarely read as literature.
With the exception of his three bestselling children’s books, White surprisingly garnered only a few literary awards throughout what many writers, especially those with an eye on numbers, would consider an enviable career. (The children’s books alone have sold millions of copies.) In his 1977 foreword he also noted that a “writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a play. . . .” Essays wouldn’t get you there. Perhaps that comment inspired the Pulitzer jury to make up for its previous neglect and honor him a year later with a “special citation . . . for his letters, essays, and the full body of his work.” Was his lack of critical acclaim due to the diminished status of the essay in general or was it a direct result of work that didn’t strike many as worthy of literary fame? In her quick indictment, Hardwick, a fine essayist herself, was responding to White’s talent and not his preferred genre.
Yet White had achieved some level of literary fame in one small corner of academia: first-year writing programs, often known then as Freshman English. When I began teaching such courses in the mid-1960s, I didn’t think it possible to find a textbook or any of the numerous anthologies we used at the time to introduce students to “prose models” that did not include an essay of E. B. White’s. (It didn’t hurt that White was also well known as the coauthor, with William Strunk Jr., of the perennially bestselling The Elements of Style, a little book often recommended to writing students at all levels and that still sells well.) In the college publishing industry, White’s essays were known as “chestnuts,” selections that anyone assembling an anthology must include. As far as I can tell, “old chestnuts” was British slang for tiresomely repeated jokes, and the word may have been popularized by vaudevillians. I’m not sure editors today are familiar with the vintage metaphor, but anyone in charge of publishing an anthology at the time knew which essays they could not avoid.
The sine qua non of those chestnuts was E. B. White’s short personal essay “Once More to the Lake.” Open any first-year writing anthology and there it was. In the 1950s, an entire family probably could have lived happily on the reprint fees from that essay alone. Yet, though it may have become an inside-publishing joke, this “chestnut,” in my opinion, has deserved its long shelf life. An essay about identity, it has little to do with how that term has been refashioned in our time. On its surface, it seems to reinforce the “middlebrow” values that have long compromised White’s reputation. When critics judge some works (or a body of work, like White’s) “middlebrow,” they usually mean that they embody a cluster of what gradually came to be considered ersatz values—derivative, sentimental, complacent, pretentious, inauthentic, conventional. Today, that essay—if anyone still teaches it—is probably discussed as a central document of “white privilege” (pun unavoidable).
I suppose if there were to be an illustrated edition of “Once More to the Lake,” the most likely artist would be Norman Rockwell: a father suddenly stricken with nostalgia decides to take his five-year-old son on a fishing trip to the same Maine lake where his father had taken him fishing nearly forty years earlier. Who better than Rockwell to convey the tranquil satisfactions of a middle-class summer vacation? But the way I read the essay, I think the more appropriate illustrator would be Edvard Munch. The essay is anything but serene.
White constructs “Once More” around a central “illusion” that envelops him as soon as he and his son arrive at the lake in the summer of 1941. Time has stopped; it has “dissolved”; nothing at “this unique, this holy spot” has changed. “There had been no years,” he repeats several times, repetition (“once more”) being one way to thwart the passage of narrative time. Yet, oddly enough, White doesn’t seem determined to reinforce this key illusion. Instead, he frequently points out small details that challenge it: for one thing, the lake is far noisier than it was in 1904, thanks to outboard motors having replaced the sleepy-sounding old one- and two-cylinder inboard engines he fondly recalls. “This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving.”
But noise is just one break in the illusion. The roads are now tarred; the waitresses “were still fifteen” but now “their hair had been washed,” as “they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair”; arriving at camp now lacked the excitement it once had when the farmers’ wagons waiting at the train station dropped you off after a bumpy ten miles (now you simply drove in and parked); the road leading up to the farmhouse for dinner once had three tracks—one for horses—but now has only two: “For a moment I missed the middle alternative.” Things look the same . . . except. Inside the camp’s general store, “all was just as it had been, except there was more Coca-Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla.”
These small but noticeable changes, all brought about by twentieth-century progress—like the earsplitting outboard motors—have the effect of disrupting the illusion of stopped time, the fantasy that the now forty-something White is enjoying the very same magical lake he loved as a small boy. As he insists on the odd feeling that nothing has changed and minimizes the changes he fastidiously observes, we slowly realize that we’re not meant to ignore them as he seems to do. Earthly time doesn’t ever stand still; it moves forward, or, in terms of human life, it oscillates between forward and backward as we live both in the moment and in our memories. White subtly reminds us of these back-and-forth oscillations when he recalls how as a boy he learned to master his old one-cylinder inboard. By getting “close to it
As we move deeper into the essay, we realize that White is not recounting a nostalgic journey back to a vanished world, to a sacred place cherished in his memory. White’s revisit to “old haunts” actually comes closer to a nightmare, as he experiences throughout the week a series of disconcerting and uncanny sensations resulting from the initial illusion that the passage of time has somehow dissolved. Other things are dissolving as well. First of all, the boundaries of personal identity. No sooner do they settle in at the camp than White recognizes a “creepy sensation” in seeing his son: “I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, I was my father.” He starts to feel that he’s living a “dual existence.” “Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, or the one walking in my pants.” The loss of boundaries seems everywhere; at one point, White notices that the line tape of the camp’s tennis court had “loosened along the backline.” Even the official boundaries of the tennis court are dissolving.
The penultimate paragraph introduces us to a medley of indistinct boundaries. An afternoon thunderstorm has rolled in and the air is full of friction. White sees this, too, as part of the unchanging nature of the lake, as this storm unfolds like every storm he remembers. First, the sky darkens, next a breeze picks up from a new direction, causing the boats to turn the other way at their moorings, and then “the premonitory rumble.” It is all so predictable, it seems artificial: “Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then cracking light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills.” And then with the inevitable calm, the campers return to the lake with “their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched.” Swimming in the rain is as good an example as any to demonstrate the dissolution of sharp outlines, and—as the children enjoy this new sensation—the shared old joke itself momentarily dissolves the boundary of generations.
The essay ends with a striking epiphany. Many personal essays, in my opinion, are marred by what I call “unearned epiphanies,” a suddenly I realized moment that seems unwarranted or gratuitous, the result more of an artificial writerly convention than a genuine shock of recognition. But this epiphany has been mounting from the opening sentence and comes as the culmination of all the creepy sensations of time and identity that persisted during White’s return to the lake.
His son decides to join the cheerful swimmers and pulls his rain-soaked trunks from a clothesline and wrings them out. Not going in himself, White sees the boy “wince slightly” as he pulls “up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment.” And then in the final sentence he realizes what has been troubling him the entire time. And it is a literal “shock” of recognition, an intense physical sensation transferred from his son’s “vitals” (the perfect word) to his own: “As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”
I vocalize that final sentence with an emphasis on “my.” By transferring the unpleasant physical feeling of the icy trunks to his own “vitals,” White once again blurs the distinctions between his son and himself, himself and his father. But this time the uncanny sensation hits home with a profound difference. The eerie feeling that time has stopped has all along alleviated a core anxiety—namely, a growing fear of his impending death, or what psychologists call “thanatophobia.” White, it seems, returned to the lake hoping therapeutically to suspend the passage of time, and the lake almost supplied him with the necessary anodyne. Though “creepy,” the illusion of his “dual existence” temporarily camouflaged his inescapable anxiety. Hardly the idyllic account of a father-son fishing expedition, “Once More to the Lake” opens with illusion and evasion, struggles with contradiction and self-delusion, and ends in panic.
The mental distress documented in this “chestnut,” despite its picture-book setting, can hardly be called “middlebrow.” This eerie return to a magical childhood spot records no pastoral excursion. White suffered all his life from incapacitating anxiety disorders. A very private and shy individual—perhaps much too reticent for what the autobiographical essay would become—White was never one to advertise his anguish. One of the few literary figures who recognized White’s darker side was John Updike, who, in a brief foreword to the revised edition of White’s Letters in 2006, focused his remarks on White’s uneasy mental state: “Uneasiness was, in old age and youth, White’s element.”
“Once More to the Lake” became part of White’s 1942 collection, One Man’s Meat, which Updike considers his “very best book.” Most of the essays in that book amount to a journal that reflects the start of a new life, as White, tired of both New York City and The New Yorker, moved to Maine in the summer of 1938 and began writing a column for Harper’s Magazine. The column, “One Man’s Meat,” had a Thoreau-like dimension—covering nature, farming routines, daily errands, philosophical musings. Like many Walden enthusiasts, White saw Thoreau entirely as a philosopher of simplification and took no notice of his spectacular complexity of language. The collection contains many echoes of Thoreau—and even includes an essay on Walden Pond that takes the humorous form of a letter dictated to “Dear Henry.” In 1944, White published a new and enlarged edition, the last essay composed in January 1943. Later, that fall, as Updike notes, White experienced what he called a “nervous crack-up.” This mental crisis rubs against the grain of the many idyllic essays that contribute to the dominant tone of One Man’s Meat.
In “Once More to the Lake” (and in a small number of other essays and stories) one can sense the impending “crack-up” and the eventual need for psychiatric help. Updike mentions that a few years before his death White supplied his authorized biographer, Scott Elledge, a list of items he should take into account. One of them was: “My panic fear, as near as I can make out, is not of death. It is an amorphous fear, lacking in form.” “Once More to the Lake” was, indeed, as Updike says, “ominous”: “This fear . . . was his deepest topic.”
White would have been a greater essayist, deserving of the “earthly triumphs” he regrets never having attained, had he devoted more of his talents to confronting that “amorphous fear” than to suppressing or evading it. He was especially adept at that popular nineteenth-century form that blended (often with a hallucinatory twist) the personal essay with the short story—a hybrid then commonly known as the “sketch.” But it’s a shame he didn’t absorb more of what his great predecessors—Poe, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain—accomplished in that genre. Instead, White adapted his sketches to the familiar style and register of the so-called genteel essay that by the 1930s was already obsolete. White was perhaps too complacently the victim of his own audience; one wishes he had taken more risks, inspected more deeply the cracks and flaws in the foundation, revealed more of the “uneasiness” he frequently endured but only reluctantly addressed. Still, when he did address it—as he allowed himself to do in “Once More to the Lake”—he did so resplendently.*
The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.
To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay (not an excerpt) on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical (or an English-language periodical with a strong US presence) during the calendar year. Note that abridgments and excerpts taken from longer works and published in magazines do not qualify for the series, but if considered significant they will appear in the list of notable essays. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.
