‘Letters to an Unknown Friend’ - Australian Book Review

COMMENTARY

‘Letters to an Unknown Friend’

by Robert Dessaix

What a wonderful thing is the essay! What and that’s something I often want to communicate.’
a hymn to the human mind and its vagar- It’s a great shame, I think, that Hirst chose art to do it
ies and cogitations – to its humanness. All through.
honour to Australian Book Review and the Cultural
Fund of Copyright Agency Limited for celebrating it Georg Lukacs even thought that the smallness of
with the Calibre Prize – and, of course, to our prize- the essay – or rather, the essayist’s need to give up his
winning hymnists. hopes of bigness while explaining his most profound
ideas: the essayist’s ‘ironic modesty’, as he calls it – is
To celebrate the essay with this degree of fanfare essential to its status.
shows a certain amount of chutzpah, I think – of
‘courage’ in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the But, but, but, you will object – and I do take your
word. (‘A courageous decision, Minister.’) point – there are essays aplenty on grand subjects: on
Aboriginal deaths in custody, on global warming, on
After all – and I hope you’ll allow me to be brutally nuclear non-proliferation, adultery in the French novel
frank, writing them myself as I do – nobody ever won and every other matter of consequence you can think of.
the Nobel Prize for writing essays. Nobody says: Ah, yes, Of course there are – they’re not all about a man chasing
Virginia Woolf, or Robert Louis Stevenson, what his hat or bed-wetting or going out for a walk to buy
superb essayists they were. No, they talk first about To the a pencil – although some of the most memorable have
Lighthouse and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There is some- been. And these essays on grand subjects will appear
thing, in our culture, of the country cousin (of good in important newspapers, in the Times Literary
family, mind, and well-spoken, but not quite first-night- Supplement and the New York Review of Books, and be
at-the-opera) about the essay. anthologised in much remarked-upon tomes – and
deservedly so. This is good. They need no defence from
All too often it’s thought of as a bit of harmless me. These are the oils in the National Gallery.
throat-clearing (smelling of dry almonds, according to
one commentator) useful for filling in a puzzling silence But what I would like to gossip about today is the
between novels. A novel: now there’s something you standing of the more fugitive form in the twenty-first
can take seriously. A novel is storytelling, which is what century: the perfectly judged watercolour, the more per-
culture is – plus folk-dancing and cooking. An essay sonal kind of essay, the sort of thing we write just because
is just commentary. Write a novel or three and they’ll we want to tell someone something, something we must
sit up in Stockholm; a single novel in the shops and find the words for now, before the moment passes.
you’ll be strutting your stuff at Adelaide Writers’
Week in no time – or Vancouver or Hay-on-Wye. On Montaigne, they say – Michel de Montaigne, the
the other hand, when your publisher asks you what sixteenth-century French essayist, often thought of as
you’re working on next and you tell him a book of the father of the personal essay, though he wasn’t really:
essays, watch his little face fall. the Romans were doing it brilliantly a millennium and a
half before he thought of it – Montaigne began writing
A novel is grand, even if we no longer believe in his essays after his much-loved friend Étienne de La
grand narratives – at least, not officially. Novels have Boétie died suddenly and he needed someone to talk to.
sweep. Essays are so small. As each of us is small, of So he talked to his unknown friend, his reader – wrote
course, when all is said and done, even Seneca or letters to him. About anything that came into his mind,
Susan Sontag, not to mention Oprah Winfrey or the really – and a lot of things did (friendship, drunkenness,
queen, which is why I think that the essay is vital to cannibals, Heraclitus, prayer, kidney stones and so on),
a civilised life. often in Latin, his first language, or so we’re told (I find
it hard to quite believe, in rural Gascony in the 1530s,
And in turn it’s why a book like Alan Bennett’s with only his tutor to talk to, but we’re assured it’s
An Uncommon Reader – did you ever read it? It’s about true). It’s the intimacy with me, whom he doesn’t know,
the queen taking to books – is such a joy: she may be that still astonishes and disarms. Nowadays, when
grand, but she’s also small, like us. But I digress, being the vast bulk of the population never seems to stop
an essayist at heart. Oh, I’ve called a couple of my books talking and being talked at – on public conveyances,
‘novels’, but deep down I’m just a gossip. In Damien at home, in the office, even face to face, if pressed –
Hirst’s words: ‘Sometimes I feel I have nothing to say,

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nowadays Montaigne’s predicament when La Boétie something that gave rise to Lamb and Hazlitt and
died is almost unimaginable. Nowadays the intimacy is Chesterton and Orwell and Woolf and numerous
faux. I read last week that the average American teenage others. They went all formal during the Victorian era,
girl (twelve to seventeen) sends eighty text messages a it’s true, but then, last century, returned to a quirkier,
day – that’s five every waking hour. And she also phones, more self-revealing form with a sigh of relief.
emails, tweets, and pops on and off Facebook. This is to
live out life’s banality, not redeem it, as the essayist seeks But it’s not just the second-class status and ill-health
to do. You may be wondering why Montaigne didn’t talk of the conversational core of the essay (and the personal
to his wife, whom he married when La Boétie died, faute essay in particular) that make me wonder if it’s quite
de mieux, but the thought never occurred to him, and suited to our times. Of course, as an essayist of sorts,
would no doubt have left her nonplussed as well. No, I would say that, because traditionally essayists tended
no, you talk about the things that matter to an equal, to bemoan something, frequently looking to the past
not to your wife.And we can be grateful that it was so.We and resisting the idea of being up-to-date. Let me
can now imagine ourselves, five hundred years later, as quote Charles Lamb, for instance, who spoke of his
Montaigne’s unknown friend and relish the intimacy. ‘tender regret’ in his essay on New Year’s Eve – and the
passing of things:

The art of conversation – the rapidly disappearing I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books,
art of intimate conversation in this blogging,
texting world of ours – is somehow central to new faces, new years – from some mental twist which
the health of the personal essay, the kind I think does
need some defence, unlike its more impersonal cousin. makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have
Given that for Montaigne conversation was ‘at the top
of the pyramid of all human activities: above writing almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the
and far above reading’, you might have expected the
essay (of the ‘familiar’ kind) to flourish in France. prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone

In fact, it first came into its own in its modern form visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past
in England, pre-industrial England, and some even
believe that the reason it did is that it grew out of the disappointments … I play over again for love, as the
culture of conversation in London coffee houses in the
eighteenth century over newspapers – a culture now gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear.
seriously under threat. A friend of mine, for instance,
just back from Valparaiso, sent me a brief email recently: (Charles Lamb, whom I once read at school in North
‘Just been to Valparaiso. You’d love it. See my blog.’‘No,’ Sydney, where now I suppose they compare ads for
I wrote back, a little too testily perhaps (but essayists Harvey Norman with ads for Clive Peeters. It’s all text,
are often testy, it’s part of being an essayist as opposed after all, isn’t it?)
to being a poet or novelist), ‘no,’ I said, ‘I won’t see your
blog. I am not interested in Valparaiso, I am interested But it’s not that, either – not just the common
in having a chat with you – just you and me – even about tendency of the most celebrated essayist to be slightly
Valparaiso, if you wish. I am interested in the chat. Or behind the times in this frantically up-to-the-minute
write it up for The Monthly – I am also interested in era – that makes me uncertain about the essay’s fate in
transfiguration.’ Relations have cooled. But I won’t the years to come. Youth is the current obsession within
read his blog. Valparaiso, like Montaigne’s cannibals, Western culture. Youth may not have power (that’s
is quite beside the point. a different matter), but youth is what the spotlight
is on, everywhere from New Idea and Marie Claire,
Fielding, Boswell, Johnson, Swift, Dryden and all to Channels Seven, Nine and Ten and the David Jones
the others went to the coffee house every day and read menswear department.
the papers, drank coffee and offered their polished
company in conversation. It was like sheet lightning in If it’s not in the spotlight, it whines like an unruly
summer, apparently; the atmosphere was set alight. It child until it is. Youth – its fantasies, tastes, diseases,
was human, it was friend to friend. Disputatious often, values, fashions, humour, language, obsessions, ambi-
yes, and full of raillery, but friend to friend. And out tions and needs – leads the parade on main street these
of these encounters grew the essay, friend to unknown days. And why shouldn’t it? Youth has hope. There are
friend. And although coffee houses and clubs went into hopes for it. Historically, however, essays (of the kind
a decline eventually, like the newspapers – well, I’m I’m talking about) were written by older writers who,
just back from Melbourne, where the cafés are full like Lamb, had ‘almost ceased to hope’. Youth, by and
of people texting, typing on laptops or concentratedly large, has better things to do with its time than write
eating, as if that were why one went to a café – despite personal essays – it’s actually quite hard to think of
this decline, something had taken root in England, many widely read essays by young writers – although
now and again they may pen formal essays.

It simply takes time to come up with that ‘soloist’s
personal signature’ (to quote Elizabeth Hardwick)
that typically characterises the accomplished essay. It is
hard, until you have reached your mature years, to have
the sense of a well-integrated self unafraid to embrace
its own uncertainties and frailties – its humanness –

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that essay-writing requires. Not impossible, but hard. are usually more like casual rendezvous than aimless
As someone or other has observed, the young are strolls – I was, after all, at least christened a Presby-
better at poetry and mathematics. The older among terian. All the same, these sallies are not study tours.
us may sit in their towers like Montaigne and write When I write I am not interested in Truth – anything
letters to unknown friends about thumbs, say, or universal, really. My eye is caught by particularities.
smells or rereading Virgil, but they will do it in the Truth I leave to God and Phillip Adams.
half-light nowadays. It’s not their era.
But it’s hard for anyone in the modern world, I think,
But there’s more to it than even that, and I can sum to wander haphazardly any more, and that’s what idle-
it up in one word, beloved of essayists from the Romans ness entails, even if the wandering is just in your mind.
to Montaigne to Johnson to Robert Louis Stevenson to This is the age of ambulance-chasing, not ambling about.
the present day – beloved, indeed, of the curator of a It’s hard to take a break from self-consciousness,
recent exhibition on the subject at the National Portrait as Sarah Engledow, the curator of the Idle Hours
Gallery in Canberra. That word is ‘idleness’. Without exhibition, put it: a break from performance, to quell
a capacity for idleness you cannot follow in Montaigne’s restlessness and the longing for entertainment, to take
footsteps. Idleness is not indolence, mind. Idleness is an pleasure in what she called ‘unremarked moments’.
art, and it’s an art that’s not always practical to cultivate
in your younger years, once you’ve left childhood behind. Unless you have a developed spiritual consciousness,
Your mind might bolt like a runaway horse as idleness it’s difficult to allay the fear that, if you turn inwards to
settles, as Montaigne said his did, but you begin with an see what you might see, you will find nothing. Once upon
idle moment. Let me sing a song of praise to idleness. a time there was at least the suspicion that you might
find God lurking there, or the Kingdom of Heaven.
Dogs do it best, obviously. I’m not sure about
cats – I think cats very often do confuse it with Now, interestingly, most of the people in the paint-
indolence. But a dog has that perfect combina- ings in the Idle Hours exhibition were women – women
tion of an unhurried appreciation of the moment and or children. You’d think, given our new-found interest
alertness to stabs of narrative – nothing grand – in what women have to say, that this would be a plus in
that make for fine essays. A dog has no concept of what the modern era. There was a man watering the garden,
‘in toto’ means, and nor does an essayist (of the kind for instance, and another man reading the paper at a
I’m talking about). A dog – you can tell by the eyes – window, and another man lying on the floor listening
has many ‘tender regrets’. And I tenderly regret that to music, but the rest were mostly women, chatting,
they can’t write essays. knitting, snoozing, drinking tea or, like Bonnard’s wife,
just contentedly sitting. Do women, like children and
To write about sleep or laughter or riding in dogs, have a special aptitude for enjoying idle hours,
coaches, as Montaigne did, you need to know how to be or have they simply had to adapt for social reasons over
idle. Yet, in Australia in the twenty-first century, we centuries – at least women of a certain class – to leading
do not live in a society that values idleness. We value contented lives without being the slaves of ‘industry’?
industry – industriousness, productivity, busyness. Whatever the reason, it seems plausible to suggest that
women are better at idleness (at leisured pensiveness,
‘I expect you’re very busy,’ people say to me. ‘No, not at stillness and at taking pleasure in the ordinary) than
busy at all,’ I say. ‘Preoccupied, but not busy.’ Nobody men are.
these days knows how to take in this information;
it’s like admitting that you detest children. But here’s the paradox: traditionally, they write few
essays. They’re perfectly placed to write them, but do
Our world not only insists that we be unendingly so far less often than men do. The modern editor of an
industrious; it also demands, as never before, that we essays anthology will usually go out of his or her way to
pay attention to the products of others’ industry. ‘Pay make sure that half the essays are by women (I strove for
attention to me!’ it shouts at us, ceaselessly. ‘Buy me! gender balance myself when editing The Best Australian
When you’re not working, shop!’ In this noisy world Essays), but I can guarantee that any broad survey col-
of productivity and buying, the essayist is a foreigner. lection you pick up, even for recent decades, will draw
He – or she, but it’s traditionally a he – is a rambler overwhelmingly on male essayists. Some of you will see
– a flâneur, I suppose, if you want to be snooty about the patriarchy at work here, some of you other social fac-
it – jotting down for the delectation of his unknown tors, but for me it’s a paradox I can’t quite fathom. It’s
friend a trail of observation on whatever he passes: as if women have found other things to do with their
Cato the Younger, liars, fasting; anything, really. He’s time; things more to their liking than writing essays.
wily, of course. His idleness is partly feigned, he’s
pandering to the leisured aristocrat inside himself, One commentator, Phillip Lopate, has suggested
never the peasant – well, Montaigne was an aristocrat, that it has something to do with what he calls the tone
but few of us are – and his itinerary is never quite as of gentlemanly authority, the sense of ‘natural’ author-
random as he would have us believe. ity, that the authors of the traditional essay have tended
to enjoy, even when affecting self-doubt. This is a tone
My own sallies into the world, if you’d like to know, that, until very recently indeed (and even then it won’t

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be ‘gentlemanly’) fewer women than

men are likely to have mastered. ‘Lady-

like authority’ won’t quite do, will it – it

sounds too headmistressy, too prim, too

performed.

I’ve been wondering if Lopate’s sug-

gestion could be phrased in another way.

I’ve been wondering if women are as

likely to want to address unknown friends

as men are; if they might not be in general

more comfortable addressing friends they

know. Perhaps women do not dawdle

in public, as the personal essayist does.

Perhaps women indeed only have friends

they know, so perhaps the whole idea of

revealing yourself to ‘unknown friends’

seems odd to them. A woman intent on

revealing herself, in other words, might

more naturally turn to other genres – the

short story, for instance, or the novel,

the memoir, the autobiography – in

which nakedness is more acceptable, like

nudes in the Vatican Museum. Here

nakedness is art. And make no mistake:

the personal essay (unlike its more imper- Robert Dessaix (top centre) with six of the seven Calibre Prize winners, at the National Library

sonal cousin) is a remarkably naked form. of Australia, following the symposium Essaying: The Calibre Prize, on 30 April. From the left:

Your peculiarities, your frailties and Brian Johns (Director, Copyright Agency Limited), Lorna Hallahan (joint 2010 winner),
quirks, your impotence in the face of David Hansen (2010), Rachel Robertson (2008), Elisabeth Holdsworth (2007),
life’s vicissitudes, your predilections, your Mark Tredinnick (2008), Jane Goodall (2009), Morag Fraser (Chairperson, ABR) and
old wounds, your creaking bones are all Peter Rose (Editor, ABR). Photographer: Loui Seselja (courtesy of the National Library)

not just there for all to see, but are your stock in trade. afternoons – almost anything will do. Well, anything

In other words, you must be adept at idleness, but that the voices in my head habitually talk about with

you must also see it as your right – almost your birthright passion. Not cats, obviously, or Old Uzbek poetry.

(playing on the notion of aristocracy) – if you want to Well, have I nailed my target? I’m uncertain – but

be free to ramble through the world remarking at your then uncertainty, except about matters of taste, is one

leisure on the unremarked-upon. The essayist revels of the flags that fly from the essayist’s masthead. We’re

in a kind of ownership of the world. And this still not averse to stabbing people in the back at times, but

has, I think, the whiff of gentlemanliness about it. But otherwise thrust is foreign to us. We circle, look over

perhaps this will fade. our shoulder, pause to greet passers-by, sniff the air and

Meanwhile, as you’ll have gathered, I can’t help lurch a lot. For us the underlying air of incoherence

wondering if the essay – at least in its more personal that characterises our thought is something to be joy-

form: the polemical essay is, I’m sure, quite safe – fully acknowledged – it’s what makes us who we are.

might be not quite of these times (a bit like singing We don’t want our dentist to be incoherent. But then,

‘God Save the Queen’, or fondue dinners). That air of we’re not dentists.

the aristocratic amateur that the essayist affects is out And for us, at root – and let me quote Michel de

of favour. We don’t approve of aristocrats and we despise Montaigne one last time – the greatest thing in the

amateurs. I doubt, for instance, that Charles Lamb world is to know how to belong to oneself. 

would find a publisher for his essays today, unless, as

a friend of mine put it, he wrote a celebrity piece about Robert Dessaix’s ‘Letters to an Unknown Friend’ was

his crazy sister stabbing their mother to death. the keynote address at Essaying: The Calibre Prizes,

I’m selfishly concerned about the fate of the personal a symposium held at the National Library of Australia

essay because it’s what I most naturally do. I’m not a ce- on 30 April.

lebrity, and well-researched trumpet-blasts on the state

of the world are not my strong point. I have rendezvous Robert Dessaix is a writer, translator, broadcaster

which ignite in me a desire to wheel around a target, and occasional essayist. His books include A Mother’s

affecting a nonchalant saunter, until I think I’ve nailed it. Disgrace (1994), Night Letters (1996) and Arabesques

Vladivostok, the subjunctive, swearing, silence, Saturday (2008). In 2009 he published On Humbug (MUP).

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