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The Best American Essays 2011.
Edwidge Danticat.
Foreword: Confessions of an Anthologist.
WHILE SPEAKING AT A PANEL devoted to the essay a few years ago, I was surprised to be introduced as one of America's noted anthologists. No one had ever called me that before, nor had I ever thought of myself that way, but afterward I began to reflect on the unusual compliment, which I a.s.sume it was.
I had never considered anthologizing as a special talent, but, I admit, I have compiled quite a few. Not just this annual-which is now in its twenty-sixth edition-but numerous collections of short stories, poems, political and cultural commentary, memoirs of movie stars, even historical advertis.e.m.e.nts. Had my early submissions of poems and stories met with more receptivity or had my first publication, a 1973 college anthology called Popular Writing in America (the t.i.tle is still in print), which I coedited with a very good friend, Don McQuade, not been a success, I may not have risen to the esteemed rank of a ”noted anthologist.” But in publis.h.i.+ng (as in so many industries) a success in one endeavor is often followed by an invitation to do something similar, and so one anthology followed another, but not always successfully.
I'm certain that no one ever set out to be an anthologist. It is hardly a conventional career path. ”What would you like to be when you grow up, kid?” ”That's easy, sir-a noted anthologist.” But I did possess the one important characteristic that qualified me for the job. As far back as first grade, I enjoyed reading anything and everything. I even loved to read the required Baltimore catechism with its endlessly fascinating questions-”Why did G.o.d make us?-and all the textbooks the good sisters pa.s.sed out to us on the first day of every school year. On the opening day of third grade I brought our reader home and finished it that night. Given the typeface and all the ill.u.s.trations, it was hardly a challenge; I would realize in time that as the books got harder, the print got smaller.
I was not just a voracious and indiscriminating reader, I was an obsessive one. This sometimes worried my father, who never read anything other than the New York tabloids and daily racing sheets, which of course I devoured as well once he was done. He was concerned that a kid who always had ”his nose in a book” would grow up unfit for the rough-and-tumble conditions of our sketchy environment. So I reduced his worries by playing baseball, though there were many times while standing alone out in center field inning after inning waiting for a fly ball that I wished I had hidden a Zane Grey paperback inside my perfectly oiled Rawlings.
I'm not usually sold on epiphanies, especially of the life-transforming type. I'm more interested in the opposite experience: not those rare moments of startling insight or realization, but-what I suspect are more common-those sudden flashes of anxious confusion and bewilderment. I distinctly recall experiencing one of these reverse epiphanies (is there a word for these?) shortly after I began high school. Before then I had been a regular visitor to our cozy, storefront branch library, where I borrowed book after book, usually biographies of Hall of Fame baseball stars, all through the summer months. But during the first week at St. Joseph's High School, one of the nuns suggested we obtain a card from the main branch of the Paterson Free Public Library. I had never set foot inside this imposing building with its stately columns that looked a little like the Lincoln Memorial (and no wonder-the same architect, I would later learn, had designed both). I entered the expansive lobby with some trepidation, not yet feeling a sense of belonging; libraries had not yet become the convivial community centers they are today. Libraries then were all about books, and librarians were the stern guardians of those books. An intimidating decorum of absolute silence prevailed as I timidly glanced about, astonished to find more books in one place than I had ever pictured, awed by the gleaming mahogany card catalogues that looked longer than the Erie Railway boxcars that click-clacked by our house hour after hour. As I walked out past the columns and cautiously down the steps, now a card-carrying member of this humbling inst.i.tution (and, by some sort of worrisome magical extension, an adult), I rejoiced that with so much available to read, I would never be bored in my entire life. And yet with a dizzying sense of unease, I simultaneously felt a terrifying rush of unknown possibilities.
The word anthology derives from the Greek antholegein, which literally means to gather (legeiri) flowers (anthos). The anthologist in a sense gathers a literary bouquet. Or as the founding father of all anthologies, Meleager of Gadara (now the city of Umm Qais), and apparently my ancient countryman, called his first-century B.C. compilation of short verse, a garland. Despite its unusual etymology, one that very few readers probably know, the anthology has remained a popular publis.h.i.+ng product for over two millennia. So we anthologists possess a long literary tradition, though I know of no history that charts our endeavors or the progress of Meleager's Garland into the Norton Anthology of Poetry.
The first anthology I remember owning was Oscar Williams's Pocket Book of Modern Verse. I acquired this while a high school senior and read it for years until it finally fell to pieces. Williams became one of the nation's most influential promoters of poetry, and his inexpensive paperback collections could be found in the 1950s and '60s in every bookshop, on drugstore racks, and in countless college cla.s.srooms. They are still being sold on Amazon.com, to the accompaniment of many warm and nostalgic reviews, a few of which informed me that my copy was not the only one read to pieces. Any hist ory of the modern anthology would need to include Oscar Williams, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, born Oscar Kaplan. Williams was also a poet about whom Robert Lowell wrote, ”Mr. Williams is probably the best anthologist in America today.”
Although The Pocket Book of Modern Verse was well thumbed and well loved by thousands of readers, it did not approximate the literary impact of Harriet Monroe's famous 1917 collection, The New Poetry: An Anthology. That authoritative book proved to the public that something indeed had happened to poetry around the start of the century's second decade. Monroe's collection was the literary equivalent of the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show, a visual ”anthology” that mapped the enormous changes occurring in the world of art. By gathering a large sampling of the emerging poets of her time, Monroe (who included a dozen of her own poems) was able to demonstrate-as no single collection by an individual poet could-that a distinct movement was afoot and that modern readers had better start to swim with Ezra Pound rather than sink with Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
I've mentioned two influential poetry anthologies and I could mention others. Poetry movements have often been accompanied by anthologies that serve as manifestoes. But what about essays? Although there have been a number of excellent essay collections, mostly with a historical sweep-the best of which is Phillip Lopate's comprehensive and indispensable The Art of the Personal Essay (1994)-I can think of no dedicated, single-volume twentieth-century essay anthology that did for the modern essay what Harriet Monroe's book did for modern poetry. That might be because the essay was so slow in coming to terms with modernism: as I've written before, the essay, with very few exceptions, was the vehicle for understanding modernist literature, not a key part of that literature. Perhaps the most important anthology to showcase essays with a new voice and edge was Alain Locke's 1925 landmark collection, The New Negro: An Interpretation, which served as the major statement of the Harlem Renaissance. Though multigenre, the collection featured a preponderance of essays that clearly disa.s.sociated the form from the popular genteel essay and positioned it solidly in the new century. Another collection that would give voice to a new movement, not essayistic yet closely related, was Tom Wolfe's and E. W. Johnson's The New Journalism, the 1973 manifesto/anthology which celebrated a new style of nonfiction prose that had grown out of the ashes of the finally deceased novel.
But unlike The New Poetry or The New Journalism, there was no twentieth-century anthology ent.i.tled The New Essay, no gathering of key selections from a single period that demonstrated a vital literary movement gaining momentum. But as the twenty-first century opened, one young essayist, John D'Agata, noticed a new, hard-to-label form of essayistic prose that didn't resemble the traditional personal essay or nonfiction narrative or literary journalism. He collected these in a 2003 anthology that he called The Next American Essay. To be sure, some of these essays went back a few decades (such as John McPhee's brilliant 1975 New Yorker piece ”The Search for Marvin Gardens”), but all the selections had something in common: a determination by their authors to push the genre into new territory, to feature prose that-to put it quickly-depends more on poetic fragmentation than rhetorical coherence and discontinuous narrative than straightforward self-presentation. The trick, of course, is to employ innovative forms without sacrificing ideas, substance, or urgency.
This annual anthology represents no movement or literary agenda and is wholly receptive to the ”next” American essay, as can be seen by the fact that nearly half of the authors collected in D'Agata's fine anthology have appeared in this series. In the 2011 volume readers will find essays of lyric power as well as those that are more dependent upon reflection and reporting and that do their literary work within more conventional parameters. We will wait and see whether the second decade of the twenty-first century will resemble that of the previous century and introduce seismic changes in the arts, though it is difficult to imagine the disappearance of time-honored essays that narrate compelling personal stories or engage head-on with controversial issues or ruminate about ideas both large and small.
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 a.s.sortment 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 on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholars.h.i.+p), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today's essay is a highly flexible and s.h.i.+fting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.
Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to: Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essays, P.O. Box 220, Readville, MA 02137. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in ma.n.u.script or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not a.s.sume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays (with full citations) to the address above.
I'd like to thank my a.s.sistant, Kyle J. Giacomozzi, once again for all his help throughout every phase of this book, and I wish him well-deserved success as he now departs to pursue an MFA in nonfiction. As always, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt staff did everything to bring so many moving parts together in so short a time, and I once again appreciate the efforts of Deanne Urmy, Nicole Angeloro, Liz Duvall, and Megan Wilson. Working on this volume with Edwidge Danticat was a delightful experience, and I believe the 2011 book represents one of the most diverse in the series, both in its range of writers and in its exciting array of themes and topics. Given the remarkable reach of her own fiction and nonfiction, this should come as no surprise.
R. A.
Introduction.
THROUGH RECENT EXPERIENCES with both birth and death, I have discovered that we enter and leave life as, among other things, words. Though we might later become daughters and sons, many of us start out as whispers or rumors before ending up with our names scrawled next to our parents' on birth certificates. We also struggle to find, both throughout our lives and at the end, words to pin down how we see and talk about ourselves.
When my brothers and I first learned, in the fall of 2004, that our father was dying, one of my brothers bravely asked him a question which led to my father narrating his life to us.
”Pop, have you enjoyed your life?” my brother wanted to know.
Stripped bare of any pretense and fully vulnerable, my father gifted us with his life experiences to do with as we pleased. We could use them, as such statements are often said to do, to inform, instruct, or inspire ourselves, or we could simply revel in them, or in the fact that he was even sharing them with us, then move on.
Seven years later, we have still not moved on. I can't say that I remember every single word my father uttered on his deathbed, but every story somehow feels like it's still within reach.
Such is the power of the stories we dare tell others about ourselves. They do inform, instruct, and inspire. They might even entertain, but they can also strip us totally bare, reducing (or expanding) the essence of everything we are to words.
Having written both fiction and nonfiction, I sometimes have my choice of the s.h.i.+eld that fiction offers, and perhaps bypa.s.sing it, when I do, leaves me feeling even more exposed. As most people who take on this task know, along with self-revelation often comes self-questioning of a kind that is perhaps more obvious in some essays than others. When we insert our ”I” (our eye) to search deeper into someone, something, or ourselves, we are always risking a yawn or a slap, indifference or disdain. How do we even know that what interests or delights us, alarms or terrifies us, will invoke a raised eyebrow in someone else? Perhaps the craft, the art, in whatever form it takes, is our bridge. We are narrating, after all (as my father was), slivers of moments, fragments of lives, declaring our love and hatred, concerns, and ambivalence, outing our hidden selves, and hoping that what we say will make sense to others.
The beauty of this series is that it reminds a handful of the many persistent and gifted pract.i.tioners of the various forms of this craft that they are being heard. Essayists, it seems, occasional or regular, are a bit more vulnerable these days, and as if the backlit screens of computers or smart phones were a metaphor for this, essays are now read under an even more glaring spotlight. This also forces us to push beyond certain boundaries, to be less formulaic and stereotypical, however that might manifest itself. But essentially we are guided in part by what Ralph Ellison in his groundbreaking essay ”Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience” calls ”art hunger,” and what he defines as our urgent desire to put faith in our ability to communicate with others both directly and symbolically.
The Best American Essays 2010 guest editor, Christopher Hitchens, who is a contributor to this year's edition, recently wrote a moving essay about what it means for a writer to have a ”voice” when he has lost his ability to speak. ”The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. I hope you feel, as I did, personally addressed by each of these essays.
In the beginning, it is biblically said (not a flawless transition from Mr. Hitchens), was the word. And no matter where we are along the span of our existence, we are perhaps all searching for that word, the one that is sometimes conciliatory and sometimes contrarian, enlightening or disturbing, the one word that will launch us stumbling into a sea of other words, most of which we will discard and some of which we will keep, as we write ourselves anew.
On, January 12, 2010, I was home in Miami-as I am most days-trying to get a bit of writing done while looking after my two young daughters. If thirty-five tumultuous seconds had not rattled Haiti, the country of my birth, at 4:53 P.M., that day would probably have blended into all the others, except that my girls and I had been scheduled to take a photograph that afternoon.
I did not want to take the photograph. I had grown photo-averse because of some baby weight that I just couldn't seem to shake. My girls, however, were very excited. A friend had given them identical embroidered white dresses and they wanted to wear them. (At least the older one did; the one-year-old did not get a vote.) So off we went that afternoon to a photographer neighbor's studio to get our picture taken.
Of all the pictures we took, my favorite is one of my five-year-old leaning her head ever so gently on my shoulder as her younger sister tries to choke me by yanking the heavy necklace around my neck. When I look at that picture now, it further deepens for me the sadness of that day. Looking at our serene, half-smiling faces reminds me how much we instinctively trust the ba.n.a.lity and predictability of daily life. Until something larger shatters our world.
After the photo session, I drove to a supermarket in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood and picked up a few things for dinner. As soon as I cleared the checkout aisle, my cell phone began to ring, and from that moment on the lives of 10 million Haitians and others, and to a much lesser extent my own life, have never been the same. Losing two family members and countless friends who had no time for last words was the least of it. Watching hundreds of thousands of others continue to struggle to survive adds daily to the weight of those losses.
”We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die. And at any moment these stories can change.
In ”Port-au-Prince: The Moment,” Mischa Berlinski recalls surviving the January 2010 earthquake. However, his essay, which poignantly and powerfully describes the height of disaster, echoes an instinct we might also display even as we attempt to capture the quietest, most predictable moments: our yearning to preserve our words. Berlinski was working on his novel when the earthquake struck. When his chair began to roll, his first thought was to press Control+S on his laptop keyboard and save his novel. He started leaving with his laptop, then went back and put it on the table, reasoning that the book would be safer inside than outside. Though we might disagree on some things-that, for example, ”without the presence-and the guns-of the United Nations, the [Haitian] government would have been nothing but a band of refugees and exiles”-reading, like writing, is never a dispa.s.sionate act. Essays, in the end, are not monologues. Whether we are nodding our heads or shouting back or writing protest letters in response, the most compelling essays often demand a reaction, either instantly or much later, when the words have settled inside us, under our skin, within us.
In ”A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay,” Christy Vannoy writes, ”I am a Personal Essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother.” Thankfully, essays like the twenty-four included in this collection are brilliant examples that the essay, port-wine-stained or otherwise, continues not only to survive but to thrive.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT.
Buddy Ebsen.
Hilton Als.
FROM The Believer.
IT'S THE QUEERS who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who-in the same car-asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door, and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman's locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person's instructions, in my now-dead aunt's little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own a.s.s-”gay cancer.” Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith-he sat in the front seat, I in the back-and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: they said we looked suspicious; we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else.
It's the queers who made me. Who didn't get married and who said to one woman, ”I don't hang with that many other women,” even though or perhaps because she herself was a woman. Who walked with me along the West Side piers in 1980s Manhattan, one summer afternoon, and said, apropos of the black kids vogueing, talking, getting dressed up around us, ”I got it; it's a whole style.” Who bought me a pair of saddle shoes and polished them while sitting at my desk, not looking up as I watched his hands work the leather. Who knew that the actor who played the Ghost of Christmas Past in the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol was an erotic draw for me as a child-or maybe it was the character's big beneficence. Who watched me watching Buddy Ebsen dancing with little s.h.i.+rley Temple in a thirties movie called Captain January while singing ”The Codfish Ball,” Buddy Ebsen in a black jumper, moving his hands like a Negro dancer, arabesques informed by thought, his a.s.s in the air, all on a wharf-and I have loved wharfs and docks, without ever wearing black jumpers, ever since.
It's the queers who made me. Who talked to me about Joe Brainard's I Remember, even though I kept forgetting to read it. Who keep after me to read I Remember, though perhaps my reluctance has to do with Brainard's a.s.sociation with Frank O'Hara, who was one queer who didn't make me, so interested was he in being a status-quo pet, the kind of desire that leads a f.a.g to project his own self-loathing onto any other queer who gets into the room-How dare you. What are you doing here? But the late great poet-editor Barbara Epstein-who loved many queers and who could always love more-was friendly with Brainard and O'Hara, and perhaps the Barbara who still lives in my mind will eventually change my mind about all that, because she always could.