Portrait of My Body (1996)

After publishing his large (and essential) anthology of personal essays, Phillip Lopate went to work on his own third collection of them. This time, he says in the introduction, he thought he had to be more careful to include only personal essays—no "literary essays, film and architectural reviews, magazine articles about urbanism and travel, ephemeral 'relationship' pieces.... The dread of all publishing companies is to be caught publishing a random collection of pieces." Accordingly, some of the 13 pieces here are winsomely personal: about shushing in movie theaters, remembering Greenwich Village, and the title piece, equal parts candor and dry wit about his body parts. He likes his legs a lot, for example, because he likes being tall. Many of the pieces touch on his marriage and child. It's a grand joke in his circles that his first collection was called Bachelorhood. His second was Against Joie de Vivre, leading to conjecture this one would be called Against Bachelorhood, a kind of apologia. It may be somewhat awkward for him but I like the sound of the marriage and family here. Speaking of being against things, Lopate notes a theme of "resistance" that runs through these pieces. It's perhaps most explicit in "Resistance to the Holocaust," which is less a personal essay and more a personal opinion—or even polemic—but a useful and interesting one. That's not least because, writing in 1989, he has some air of authority and prescience on the topic. Essentially his argument is that by making the Holocaust a unique event in history, which cannot be compared with other genocides, it must be removed from history and the sphere of critical examination. Lopate is very careful to detach himself from deniers—as a Jew himself, he makes clear he understands all the stakes. It's a subtle point, his resistance. It's more about sentimentality and hagiography obscuring the truth. In some ways, in these various themes of resistance, Lopate comes across more like a basic contrarian, a position with which of course I have much sympathy. If so many people are for it, in the world of human psychology herd instinct, then how can it possibly be any good? At the most fundamental level, this is the attitude all good writers should bring to the party, not just personal essayists. Good stuff again.

In case it's not at the library.

The Art of the Personal Essay (1994)

This is one of my very favorite books, a desert island pick for sure, and recommended to anyone with the least interest in nonfiction writing and all that it can do, which is a lot. Editor Phillip Lopate is a tireless advocate for a specific branch of nonfiction—the personal essay, which he characterizes (correctly, I think) as "one of the most approachable and diverting types of literature we possess." He then proceeds to make his case, in a book that clocks in at nearly 800 pages in trade paperback, with a number of usual suspects: Michel de Montaigne, Addison & Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Walter Benjamin, Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White, M.F.K. Fisher, Joan Didion, etc., etc. What I liked best were the unusual picks, uniformly so good that they sent me off time and again looking for more by many of the writers included—as often as not, Lopate's picks turned out to be the best of many, many lots, but don't hold that against him. I first encountered this anthology more than 15 years ago and I'm still using it as a reference. The thought and care that went into it is a constant feature. For example, the table of contents also includes separate listings by theme (ambition, city life, country living, death, disability and illness, drugs and alcohol, education, family ties, food, friendship, growing up, habitations, hatred and opposition, leisure and idleness, love and sexuality, marriage, music and art, nature, perception, politics, race and ethnicity, reading and writing, solitude, "theater, film, and other spectacles," thresholds, walking) and by form (analytic meditation, book review, consolation, diary/journal entry, diatribe, humor, list, lecture, letters, mosaic, memoir, newspaper column, portrait, prose poem and reverie, reportage, valediction). I suggest reading it cover to cover, as it hurtles through the years from ancient Greeks and Asians to latter-day examplars such as Gayle Pemberton, Richard Rodriguez, and Lopate himself (and why not?). There's also an annotated bibliography that stacks the to-be-read piles high—and, again, my experience has been that the references are as useful as the material between the covers itself. This is an absolutely solid work, with a sensibility and utility that goes well beyond its marketing thrust as a kind of freshman composition textbook. It's a big fat thing but reading it whole passed in a snap and left me wanting more where this came from. I wish he'd do another, or at least another edition of this double or triple the size. You just can't go wrong with it, really.

In case it's not at the library.

Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays (1989)

Phillip Lopate's second collection of essays, eight years after the first, is more explicit about his ambitions, signaling it from the subtitle and opening the front further with a piece entitled, "What Happened to the Personal Essay?" Indeed, if Amazon reviewers are anything to rely on as cultural barometer, it is a clear case of mission accomplished. "If anyone has an inkling of reservation about the form personal essay, they need to read Lopate," writes one of them. "He's a master of the form." To which I can only add: ☺LIKE. But while Lopate does drop a number of useful names in that meditation on the form (Montaigne, of course, and Jonathan Swift, Dr. Johnson, Addison and Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, etc.), most of us tend toward agreement that the piece "Chekhov for Children" is the best one here, and likely one of the best he's ever done, a simple and straightforward account of his experience staging Uncle Vanya with a group of 5th- and 6th-graders. From the primary expectation that the material could well be over the heads of its players to the concrete problems of memorization and the usual chaos of putting on a show, Lopate teases out all the intriguing detail and troubles and unexpected successes of the project. Anyone who likes Chekhov and those who don't know him but have an interest in the arts and sciences of pedagogy will find much to fascinate and even move them in this account. One only wishes to have been present for either of the two performances, especially the second one, which Lopate found successful beyond his wildest hopes. All the intricacies of casting, managing bored, impatient children, and just plain taking a big chance are chronicled with Lopate's usual wry, clarion language. And that goes for everything else here as well. Much of the self-involvement that occasionally marred Bachelorhood has been cleaned up, no poems are included this time, and Lopate's choices of topics are loose, wide-ranging, and searching, whether it's opening up more about his lifelong career as a cineaste, or the politics of landlords, or smoking, or patience, or more of his experiences both as writer and teacher. It's a perfect pleasure front to back.

In case it's not at the library.

Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis (1981)

Phillip Lopate's first essay at a book of essays would fairly have to be qualified a success. At that time poised about equally between poet, novelist, and essayist, Lopate's attractions to the form—certainly within the context of his aesthetics, which he gets into some here—are palpable. This allows him to waver naturally over the commonplace and everyday, which he so clearly prizes. Are there various sins of narcissism here? Yes, one would have to say yes. Too many girlfriends. Too much talk of dating. And self-consciously making "bachelor" a concept within which he invites us to live with him does not necessarily excuse forays into confessionalism. But he knows when to pull back or withdraw silently, and he is always brisk and charming to read. He is clearly still feeling his way into his voice—he includes a handful of poems and a handful and more of very short pieces, which are not hard to think of as "prose poems" (eternally mystifying term). When they work they remind me a little of Harvey Pekar's very short pieces, blunt and elliptical all at once. This makes me wonder how familiar Lopate may have been with Pekar at the time most of these pieces appear to have been written, in the late '70s and early '80s. The longer pieces are entirely different animals, often playing Lopate's cards very close to his chest. There's little here, for example, to suggest the depths of Lopate's cinephilia, though some clues exist. His memoir of Lionel Trilling is an interesting look at the mid-century academic and literary critic (whom I've never read) and his milieu of the '60s and '70s Columbia, and a touching story of a connection between a teacher and his student, which is enriched with the fabric of literary life well loved. If it was not yet apparent how much Lopate would ultimately bring to the project of restoring the personal essay to the more prominent position that it deserves, it's plain enough how much it means to him, as he begins to dive into the topic in another long piece, "Bachelorhood and Its Literature." Names such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Cesare Pavese, Sei Shonagon, and Walter Benjamin come up for perhaps the first time in print by Lopate here—the first time, but not the last.

In case it's not at the library.