Brian Dillon (1) (1969–)

The Difference between Essays and Journalism

This is an intentionally loosely conglomerated collection of two- to four-page essays on the idea of the essay. Self-contained pieces on individual writers and books alternate with autobiographical pieces on the author's depression and suicidal thoughts.

For long stretches this book reads as a list of my own interests: the idea and problem of writing about essays in an essayistic way; the lure of "essayism"; the nature of lists; questions of style, taste, melancholy, the fragment, the detail, aphorisms—those are all the titles of sections. Page after page, the authors Dillon mentions are ones I have read, taught, and written about: Gass, Adorno, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Wilde, Sontag, Deleuze, Stein, Derrida, Starobinski, Barthes, Clark, Perec, Browne, Wallace.

He wonders, as I have, what constitutes an essay, and he looks at many of the same sources. (Mine: tinyurl.com/theoriesofessays.) He has some excellent set pieces, which may be among those adapted from previously published reviews, on Maeve Brennan, Cyril Connolly, and Elizabeth Hardwick.

Despite these promising and surprising similarities, the more I read the lonelier I felt. Dillon's treatments of the authors are too quick. If an essay is anything, it's an unspooling of thought. As Montaigne knew, thought wanders. Even in Adorno's very tightly worked essay on the essay, form is deliberately elusive, and excerpts especially unrepresentative. What happens in this book belongs more to the world of journalism, where two to four pages corresponds with a feature or a five-minute read. Dillon surveys each book or author, finding interesting places to pause, raising questions, and then letting them stand as stated. It's like being introduced to interesting people at a party and then walking away while they're still talking. It's a kind of nonstop tour that works best in journalism, where evocation and enthusiasm matter and there may be no promise of slower forms of thought.

He skims over Sontag, mentioning her diaries, but in comparison to books on her (for example Lopate's) his excerpts are inconclusive. He switches rapirdly from Musil to Woolf. He dispenses with Robert Burton in a page-long parenthesis of abbreviated and inconclusive praise. He does not consider the paradoxes or challenges of Adorno's essay. Occasionally the short form is just right, for example in three excellent pages conjuring Gass's "On Being Blue," but usually it's glancing, as in the single page on Sebald or the few pages on Barthes's "Camera Lucida." Reading these I felt lonely: there are many passages that he must have felt adequate for his purposes—conjuring a problem, picking an evocative passage—where I had the impression I was being led away before the interesting questions had even arrived. It's as if we actually read different authors.

I wonder if the real tension in this book is not between "essayism" and the author's depression—a theme he entertains in several passages—but between essays and journalism. Near the beginning he runs through several of the dozens of available definitions of essays. The only odd notes I saw are passages that conjure the idea that essays should have "a sort of polish and integrity" (p. 18), "a smooth and gleaming surface," (p. 32), or be "seamless and well-made" (p. 21). I wonder where those came from, since I haven't run across them in reading essays about essays. Could they be the moments when an ideal of journalism surfaces? Even though Dillon identifies himself as a journalist, who wants "only to make a living" from writing (p. 33), journalism isn't otherwise presented as an ideal separable from essayism—and yet for me, in this book, it is.

A letter to the author
Dear Brian Dillon,
I've always had a bad habit on Goodreads of writing in such a way that I can never show the author what I've written. I doubt you will ever see this—the internet is fabulous at burying people's voices—so let me do the inevitable, impolite thing and suggest my own book, "What Photography Is," a full-length answer to "Camera Lucida." It's far from perfect, but I tried to follow the consequences of some of the questions you raise in regard to Barthes's book, regarding problems caused by theorizing, writing a memoir, and using images, all at once. I am not sure what that book is, but I think of it as being on the far side of journalism.

Postscript
For people who have been following these notes on Goodreads: I have been revising and rewriting these more or less continuously, but this is the first original post for about five years. It's not that I've stopped writing notes on books: it's that I've been reading only two books during that period, "Finnegans Wake" and "Bottom's Dream." If you'd like to join the reader's group on that second book, just send me a message.… (mer)

This book benefits from a good writer who chose interesting subjects. There are many more famous hypochondriacs, I am sure, but the ones he selected were a good cross section. As my husband remarked when I told him The Mary Tyler Moore Show was Glenn Gould's favorite TV show, you read books like this to find out that sort of information, the information most people don't consider important enough to report. The interesting thing was that many of these famous hypochondriacs actually did have some form of medical problems, such as Warhol, who died of the one problem he wouldn't acknowledge having. I will look for more by this writer.… (mer)