The Art of the Personal Essay

I read:
- For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business by Seymour Krim
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- Split at the Root by Adrianne Rich

I read Krim's essay because I thought reading about other people reflecting on their own failures would uplift me. But Seymour Krim, “At 51, ... I've published several serious books. I teach at a so-called respected university.” He taught at Columbia and Iowa. In this day and age, getting a[n academic] job? And thinking of himself as a failure? This turns out to be just another woe-is-me that I had little patience for.

James Baldwin's essay was interesting, because it was so angry. Mainly to his father, “On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.”

I had never read Baldwin before, but I've heard of the praises others heaped on his work [Adrienne Rich, a dozen pages later: “In the 1950s, I had read all kinds of things, but it was James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir who had described the world–though differently–in terms that made the most sense to me.”], so my expectation was high. Too high.

Adrienne Rich's essay stayed in my mind for days. The subtitle was, “An Essay on Jewish Identity.” She began, “For about fifteen minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to me so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary. These are stories I have never tried to tell before.” I'd like to write an essay like this.

“In a long poem written in 1960, I described myself as ‘Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, Yankee nor Rebel.' I was still trying to have it both ways: to be neither/nor, trying to live with my Jewish husband in the predominantly gentile Yankee academic world of Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Knowing we shared a city this made me more intrigued. She went to Harvard, married a man who later became an economics professor at the university.

“I was married in 1953, in the Hillel House at Harvard, under a portrait of Albert Einstein. My parents refused to come. I was marrying a Jew, of the ‘wrong kind' from an Orthodox Eastern European background. My father saw this marriage as my having fallen prey to the Jewish family, Eastern European division. Like many women I knew in the fifties, living under a then-unquestioned heterosexual imperative, I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family.”

“By the time I left my marriage, after seventeen years and three children, I had become identified with the women's liberation movement. The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs and her first full-fledged act was to fall in love with a Jewish woman.”

“Some time during the early months of that relationship, I dreamed that I was arguing feminist politics with my lover. I had been, more or less, a Jewish heterosexual woman; but what did it mean to be a Jewish lesbian? ... `Can a Woman Be a Jew?' I saw Judaism, simply, as yet another strand of partriarchy; if asked to choose I might have said: I am a woman, not a Jew. (But, I always added mentally, if Jews had to wear yellow stars again, I too would wear one. As if I would have the choice to wear it or not.)”

“I would have liked, in this essay, to bring together the meanings of anti-Semitism and racism as I have experienced them and as I believe they intersect in the world beyond my life. But I'm not able to do this yet. Nothing has trained me for this. My ignorance can be dangerous to me, and to others. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”

“This essay, then, has no conclusions: it is another beginning, for me. It's a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability. I know that in the rest of my life, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged.”

The book is available at: https://archive.org/details/PhillipLopateTheArtOfThePersonalEssay/