Inter-Review

The Intimacy of The Personal essay

Richard Hoffman and Steven Harvey

Steven Harvey, The Beloved Republic

Wandering Aengus Press, 2023. 228 Pages, Paper, $20.00

 

Richard Hoffman, Remembering the Alchemists

The Humble Essayist Press, 2023. 270 Pages, Paper, $19.00.

 

Richard Hoffman [RH]: I’m eager to talk with you about our two books in relation to one another. You are among a group of essayists and memoirists whom I consider to be poets, in the deepest sense of that word. I don’t believe that’s a term that should be reserved for those writing in verse. You use language the way a painter uses paint. There are limits to that analogy, but still . . .

I remember we first met at Lee Hope’s Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in Brunswick, Maine. It was hot as blazes and you were wearing an ice-cream suit and Panama hat, and I thought you were Tom Wolfe! (Now I prefer your writing to his, hands down.) A little later, I discovered we were both a part of the late Mike Steinberg’s circle. How I miss him! It’s worth taking a moment here to remember him, one of the central figures in the renascence of the American essay.

When I first read The Beloved Republic, I was struck by how similar our two books are: not so much in style (although I see affinities there as well) as in content, in commitments, convictions, principles. You begin The Beloved Republic with a parsing of your title, tracing it to E. M. Forster, and finding the idea threaded throughout history as a kind of counterweight to the main story we’ve been told: of conquest, dominion, empire. So I’m wondering how “this invincible army of losers in the service of love” became a lodestar around which you decided to organize these essays. Even in those essays where you are not directly invoking this idea, it is subtly present as the core value or principle or aspiration informing your thinking.

 

Steven Harvey [SH]: Well, I remember meeting you at Stonecoast, but not the ice-cream suit, though I do have a fondness for Panama hats, and I too miss our friend Mike Steinberg, who did so much for the personal essay. It was typical of him to bring writers like us together.

I really look forward to our conversation about The Beloved Republic and Remembering the Alchemists, a book that speaks with such passion about our troubled, endangered, and beautiful world. A good place to start is E. M. Forster’s definition of the beloved republic, which I found in “What I Believe,” an essay I read many years ago but returned to after the 2016 presidential election. The beloved republic is “not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence,” Forster argues, “but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.” It consists of ordinary people who “are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.” They are “an invincible army, yet not a victorious one.”

His concept divides the world into those who are creative—making families, writing books, doing art and science—as opposed to those who are destructive. He came up with the idea as Hitler rose to power in Europe. In a radio address before World War II started, he explained that “thousands and thousands of innocent people” had been “killed, robbed, mutilated, insulted,” and “imprisoned.” Millions more would follow. Book burnings at the University of Berlin and the mass deportation of Jews had already begun. Against this backdrop of atrocity Forster argued for the existence, and persistence, of the beloved republic.

I see this dichotomy everywhere. Let me give an example from the opening essay, “Like Never Before,” in Remembering the Alchemists. In this ekphrastic piece you describe Blake’s illumination of “Cain Fleeing from the Wrath of God” that is the cover for your book. With the killing of his brother, Cain stepped out of the beloved republic and his torment—our torment when we enter the world of death—can be read in his body. ”Adam is stunned, a rictus of terror,” you write, “stuck in a moment that will never end, ineffectual, wronged and wrong, paralytic, twisted, broken.” You write it so well, picking up nuances and paradoxes. “Cain becomes the archetype of the person who discovers with horror, the evil he has done with passion, and its meaning, and therefore his impossible responsibility: to know himself capable of death.”

But writing about it well is a possible way out, right? Or making a painting of it. Creating out of the horror. You write, “Of the many things the painting stirs in me, including fear and sadness, is the vain hope that we can right ourselves.” Joining the beloved republic of those who create in the face of agony is our best, though fragile, hope. “If you have the words,” you write, quoting Seamus Heaney, “there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” And you add this bracing corollary: “When we fail to find the words, we murder.” Like you, it is hard for me to believe that art is enough, but we are, as you put it, in “the realm of the imagination where the suspension of disbelief is the beginning of spiritual understanding.”

RH: Ha! I think it’s great that you don’t take my memory of the ice cream suit as unassailable! It isn’t; it’s a memory of a detail. Maybe we can take up the whole question of remembering and what it means, and doesn’t, later in this conversation. I tried, at least in part, to address that problem in the essay “Backtalk & Backlash.” Mnemosyne is a goddess: an artist, not a taxidermist. But the larger question you raise here, “Is Art enough?,” is one I think deserves to be thoroughly explored. I think Forster’s understanding is akin to Auden’s. Here’s the final stanza of “September 1st, 1939”:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Honestly, Steve, this is a poem that wakes me to feeling, like certain pieces of music, like your essay “The Book of Knowledge,” and reads to me like a charge, in two senses of that word: an obligation and a reinvigorating jolt. I wish Auden had kept faith with the poem’s prophetic impulse as I mention in “A Kind of Sorcery,” but we have the original now, and it is, in at least one sense, enough.

Forster was speaking from that same desperate moment, and you and I are speaking from that moment too, here in the present. But all my efforts so far at asking that question point-blank have led me only to the further question, “Enough for what?” I don’t believe that art of any kind (including, by the way, technology) is enough to free us from the consequential violence, the nightmare of horror, guilt, and sorrow we are forced to inhabit with the ancestral figures in that Blake painting.

And yet, we, survivors, have that painting, and “Guernica,” and Shosta- kovich, and all the music made at Terezin, and Tyre Nichols’s photographs, all the “points of light” that make darkness at least incomplete. I don’t think Art is a solution in which we can dissolve history’s atrocities, but it is enough nourishment to stave off the starvation of despair.

So I aspire to serving up something as nutritious as your essays, whether you are writing about America or Ecuador or racism or reading your mother’s letters or a night in a cabin at the top of Blood Mountain. I’m always reinvigo- rated, inspirited by them. At the same time, I can’t fool myself into thinking my writing is “enough,” that somehow I am gainfully addressing the enormity of our predicament right now.

I’ll digress a moment: The other day my friend, the poet, playwright, and novelist William Orem (to whom the essay “Procedure” is dedicated), made me laugh at myself spontaneously and deeply. I mentioned I’d just downloaded a book to my Kindle entitled Rest Is Resistance and William, who is quite a bit younger than I am burst into laughter. “It’s the perfect book for old hippies!” he said. “You can kick back in your BarcaLounger and stick it to the man!” It made me laugh uproariously. That isn’t at all what the book’s about, but his remark does point to a sophistry, not always so comical, to be avoided.

So I think that for me, Art, especially the art of poetry (again, in verse or prose), is most useful when it opens the door to moral imagination, especially when authoritarian forces have nailed it shut with shame and graffitied its surface with simplistic precepts and platitudes.

Which brings me around to the fact that The Beloved Republic begins with your return to the Forster essay just after Donald Trump’s election. In “The Political Personal Essay” you write, “The great gift that the personal essay offers our mean spirited politics [is] the power of intimacy.” I would love to hear you elaborate on that. I think this is another of our shared understandings and we could probably spend a month talking about it, coming up with an anthology of examples. My selections would include your essays “The Other Steve Harvey,” “One Boy’s Luminous Skin,” “A Laying on of Hands,” and “The Razor Blade,” among others of yours.

 

SH: Intimacy is the great gift of the personal essay. I know that essayists do not speak directly to their readers—as in all literary genres a persona, a character created by the author, intercedes—but it is far less intrusive than it is in fiction, drama, or poetry. It is created, it seems, to break down the barrier. Some writers, such as Sonya Huber, the author of Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, see this intimacy as a matter of voice, and in her books she disarms us by letting us hear all the voices—from the bombastic to the insecure—rattling around in her head in a way that pulls us toward her. Others, like Phillip Lopate in the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, suggest that the intimacy is created by a mix of genre ingredients: honesty, reliability, self-absorption, confessions of uncertainty, frankness about the reluctance to tell all, and an underlying but pervasive self-deprecation. All of these tendencies let the persona part the curtain on the actual person of the author or at least seem to do so in a convincing way. For me as a reader it brings a comfort unique to the genre.

It can work in two ways, I think, illustrated in the effect of your essays on me. First, it can confirm a shared experience, which can deepen our convictions. I felt it in almost all of your explicitly political essays since we share a common set of values. I found an ally, glowing in the pages. So when you write about the culture and industry of death in America—the “maniacal dream” that put cap guns in our hands as boys and provides weapons in obscenely vast numbers at home and abroad—I’m nodding my head. When you ask how we “can extricate ourselves from this unholy covenant” I realize that I ask this question daily now. Sadly, I share your skepticism about solving the problem—and it is here that your voice speaks to me intimately as you struggle with the issue. “We are layers away from any possible clarity, layers of lies from the truth,” and you add that in your lifetime you “can find no evidence” that we will address this issue, and it is my lifetime that you are talking about since we are the same age with the same concern. So when you add “and yet, I cannot allow myself to believe it,” I am stirred because I cannot allow that feeling of defeat in myself either. You speak for us both—this insight shook me, really, in its simplicity and clarity—when you make a telling distinction: “I suppose that is the definition of faith—not hope, faith—that compromised as we are we are not cursed, and that ‘although the sleep is deep and long,’ we can wake.”

At the same time, when I read where our experiences differ, your expression of them enlarges my world, which is the equally valuable gift of intimacy in the personal essay. I felt it most in the essay “A Kind of Sorcery,” in which you discuss the nagging sense of shame you felt as a writer coming from a working class family. “No doubt all writers, all artists have this struggle to some degree,” you admit. My dad was a veterinarian who worked for a pharmaceutical corporation for most of his life. We were not working class, and yet I feel guilt about pursuing a lifetime of art that makes no money. What I realized, though, while reading your essay, is that you have this guilt in spades. First you had the guilt of “setting out to behave” like a writer, which meant rejecting your background, including shedding your mother’s “Dutch” accent. You had to endure insults from your father, who said, “Look at him, he sits on his ass for a living.” You had to face a family who thought creative writing made you rich. It led to shame at every gathering of writers and ultimately to alcoholism. The moment in the essay that speaks to me most clearly because I feel the tug of our differences is that your writing during this period was ruined. It became a stance, an act of revenge: “In hindsight, the trouble was that I hadn’t been writing to any purpose except to work myself up to believing I was someone I was not.” Fortunately, you crawl out of this hole that your working class shame dug for you. You change your life—a twelve-year struggle—to write from an authentic self, but as I read about a struggle I did not have to endure, my understanding of writers with backgrounds different from mine deepened. Okay, it’s my turn to ask a question. I would love to get your thoughts on memory and the essay, in particular your thoughts on Mnemosyne as “the mother of all the muses.” I know that in my essay “The Book of Knowledge,” I used every avenue I could find—photos, art, pop culture and sports, and above all my mother’s letters—even her handwriting—as conjuring tools to create writable memories of a traumatic time that I had almost entirely forgotten. All I had were a few vivid but disconnected images. So your statement that “memory is for those who have forgotten” spoke directly to me. Could you amplify on it?

 

RH: Sometimes I think we don’t have enough words for memory, for all its hues and viscosities and textures. I think postmodern consciousness, in which our mnemonic abilities seem to be devolving to those of a goldfish, cries out for the stabilizing power of memory in our personal lives and history in our public affairs, but untethered as we are, ahistorical, hydroponic, we don’t know how to begin. I happen to think the best way to begin is with those memories from childhood that will not let you go, that have proven to be nodes, knots in the net of oneself, those “vivid but disconnected images.” To me, they’re the portal to authenticity. I have tried to start always with a memory I am sure is my own and work from there to trace connections, looking for the larger forces at work, particularly the power dynamics that are, writ large, the economic and political realities of our time.

I know that sounds grandiose, but we’re looking for a corrective. Because we must. And I have nowhere more trustworthy to look for it than my own experience. We live in the aftermath of an apocalyptic century, with extinction still hanging over us. Every institution in my life has betrayed its purpose to profit-seeking, and I trust so little even of what is going on in my own head, so much of it is a kind of static, the noise of a machine we’re inside. In “A Kind of Sorcery,” I recount a memory of being with my dad and uncles, an indelible memory that begged, like any dream, to be understood. That memory was a kind of fountain, a source of power in the form of questions, and the essay is the pursuit of those questions, about class, and shame, and hierarchical power.

Your deeply personal and moving “The Book of Knowledge” seems driven by that same need to understand what’s real. And, as in my essay “An Egg!,” you are in pursuit of your mother, trying to “conjure” her, as you put it. Our situations were different, but both of our mothers were lost to us early on, and both of us feel the need to understand who they were, as people, as women of their time and place. I was so influenced by the expectations of boyhood that my mother became all but invisible to me. I wrote two memoirs in which my father was central, and when I set out to write about my mother she had been dead thirty years and all I had was a handful of preschool memories.

But talk about indelible images! I will never not see the boy you were under those stairs, with the nails poking through like stars. Camus once wrote, “A writer’s work is nothing but this slow trek to discover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” It’s not for me to say, but you, ten years old, under those stairs, must be one of those.

I’ve said that such images are the portal to authenticity, and yet, in elaborating on them the imagination can easily blunder into falsifying them, bullying them into the service of a point we’re trying to make or a narrative shape we’re after. Grace Paley described it this way: “Write and write and write and write, then take out all the lies. It’s not as easy as you might think, taking out the lies.” How do you go about it? Taking out the lies?

 

SH: Oh, that’s a tough one. I agree that the postmodern consciousness is “untethered” and—I love this metaphor—“hydroponic,” and I too hear a constant static running through my mind that I think is a product of our times. We are “sorely in need of the stabilizing power of memory in our personal lives and history in our public affairs,” and I love your idea that “we don’t have enough words for memory, for all its hues and viscosities and textures.” We also, sadly, need more words for lies because we are prone to so many kinds. Two in particular haunt me as a writer of nonfiction. First there is the venial sin of forgetting or misremembering. When I wrote “The Book of Knowledge,” I remembered, vividly, my dad telling my brother and me that my mother was dead while on the train ride out of Chicago, but when my brother read my essay he told me that he had a completely different memory of it happening in my dad’s car. My rule is to trust my perceptions unless there is contrary evidence. When I find a contradiction, I see it as part of my craft to work the evidence in artfully—an idea I first heard articulated by you in a craft talk. “The Book of Knowledge” was already published so I could not change it, but when I enlarged it into a memoir I included my brother’s story as well as mine—two stories for one!—and left it at that.

The mortal sin for the nonfiction writer is the lie for artistic effect. This issue was part of the controversy surrounding John D’Agata’s Around the Mountain, where he changed facts about a suicide because he liked the sounds of the words. He sees life in the service of art, but I see it the other way around, art serving life. I have at times been tempted to distort a memory for some artistic purpose—compressing events or creating composite characters, for instance, even changing facts of sound effects—but so far I think I have avoided those sins. For me, as a writer of nonfiction, facts are great teachers, almost always forcing me to think harder and write more powerfully than anything I could make up. It is our job as writers of nonfiction to render our most vivid memories precisely and honestly and then, as you write, “trace connections, looking for the larger forces at work, particularly the power dynamics that are, writ large, the economic and political realities of our time.” Artistry in the service of such honesty is not “grandiose,” but, as you say, “a corrective” in an era of illusion.

At the same time, I believe that imagination is a function of memory. As you point out in your book, the ancient Greeks identified Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the mother of the muses, and they were right to single out memory rather than imagination as the source for inspiration in the arts and sciences, but—and here we come to the crux of the matter—memory is, in fact, a form of imagining, a way of creating a usable past, of dreaming up a past, in order to move into an uncertain future.

On the day my mother died I remembered playing with a Guillow flyer airplane in the basement, spinning to make it fly—a clear and distinct memory. In my mind I see—but don’t really see, do I?—I conjure up the balsa airplane with its wings embossed with red ailerons and a pilot in the cockpit. A memory like this one has a plastic quality to it. I can freeze it, holding the plane in my still hands, or slow it down, manipulating time as I watch myself spin. I find metaphors, one of many devices supplied by the imagination, in the whispering sound of footsteps overhead. And I have an attitude toward it—I’m eleven, too old for this nonsense! All of this imaginative work happens within the boundaries of a true account. Memory and imagination are not experienced as separate mental phenomena, but are on a continuum with thinking and dreaming.

We do not have memories, we construct them, the imagination extrapolating on a kernel of the event by inevitably adding more detail and giving it all a larger, mind-shaped, context to create a coherent scene. Building memories this way, forging links between memory and imagination born apparently out of our need to anticipate the future in a dangerous world, explains the relief and subsequent delight heard in the voice of discovery in lyric prose despite the subject matter. Whether a writer like Virginia Woolf in Moments of Being is remembering a flower rooted in a circle of dirt or describing sexual abuse by her half-brother when she was a girl, the act of recreating a memory in words and “discovering what belongs to what,” she explains, “is the strongest pleasure known to me.” For her, making these connections uncovers “the hidden pattern” in everyday experience and reveals “that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”

I know in your work—including Remembering the Alchemists—this kind of remembering often takes you to very dark places. Did you have Virginia Woolf’s cathartic experience as you wrote about them, or was your experience different?

 

RH: I agree that we make our memories. “Construct” suggests to me a kind of deliberation though, and I think we create them the way we create our dreams. They’re the product of our encounters with the world, inflected by our needs and desires at the time; little about them is objective. But I think writing personal nonfiction, whether essay or memoir, we are not recording our encounters with the world but our encounters with our memories. So questioning how they have come to be our memories, looking for the ways they line up—or don’t—with others’ memories, is the search for the truth that we call honesty.

I distrust the word “catharsis” because it has come to mean a kind of expulsion of something, some kind of vomiting that makes us feel better afterward. I think that plays into denial. I don’t want to expel any of my memories, I want to understand them, especially the most painful ones. I want to integrate them so that they do not arrive unbidden with their terrible power to wreak havoc in the present. I keep on saying this, but—“as above, so below”—I believe this is what the writing of history must be as well, not merely personal history, and it requires experiencing grief, real sorrow that the past is so painful, and the tragedy that it could have been otherwise. Allowing yourself to understand that things could have unfolded differently, less tragically, hurts, but that’s what gives rise to the moral imagination, to the belief that things can be different, now and in the future, and offers us the possibility to work toward that.

One byproduct of a radical honesty that is willing to feel the pain of a tragic past is the ability to feel all the emotions adjacent to those memories. There are paradisal moments in every childhood. I think of the joy on the faces of children playing amid the rubble of catastrophic events. I think of something Camus wrote about his childhood: “I was poised midway between poverty and sunshine. Poverty prevented me from thinking that all was well in the world and in history; the sun taught me that history is not everything.” History is not everything, but denying its pain, refusing to grieve, renders us ineligible for joy.

I worry I’m sounding pretentious here. I’m not playing guru. I just see it this way. Period. I think that this tragic sensibility is something we share, a place where we’ve each arrived not only because there have been tragedies in our lives but because we have interrogated those tragedies in our writing, using our writing as a forensic tool, trying to grasp how these tragedies made us who we are. In “Kindly Dark,” the final essay in your collection, you go on to articulate how acceptance of the tragic dimension can turn into relief and a kind of sweetness, a deeper appreciation for life. In that essay you begin by listening, and by exploring a regional usage, and it leads me to wonder about this love of language that we share. Earlier in our conversation I described you as a poet. I’d love to hear your thoughts about language, the richness of English, and your “poetics” as an essayist.

 

SH: Let me concede your first two points. The mind constructs memories—we are not in control. Once we try to take control, it is no longer a memory, right? And catharsis is the wrong word for what Virginia Woolf is talking about. She does not want to purge herself of debilitating memories at all. By writing she engages them seeing deep into the mystery of things, which is exhilarating whatever the subject matter. And you are right that this memory making is much like a dream.

As for my poetics—I feel lucky to be a writer of personal essays because I do not share the skepticism about language that is the burden that so many poets seem to carry in our time. In the essay “Living Midnight” I write about the intimacy of the personal essay. In it I am reading “Earth’s Body” by Scott Russell Sanders, an essay I often turn to when I have insomnia because it is about a night when he is awash in death fear and cannot sleep. In it Sanders sits at an oak table running his finger along the grain and seems to speak directly to me. When he writes “Surely you know the place I’m talking about,” he seems to glance up from the table to speak to me directly. “Nothing else in my life,” he says, “not the tang of blackberries or the perfume of lilacs, not even the smack of love is so utterly fresh, so utterly convincing, as this fear of annihilation.” It is as if he is looking up at me from the page.

I had the good fortune of reading the first half of your essay “From the Depths” in a draft form when you did not know how you would end the piece. In the essay a young man you mentored in a 12-step program seemed with your help to be finding a way to his better self when suddenly in a phone call he turned on you. The language of the call was sexist, rascist, obscene, and horrible, and as I read it I felt, viscerally, your pain. I had no idea how you would end an account filled with such swings between hope and vitriol, but I knew the issue at hand: What are the limits of empathy? When you did finish the essay and it included your phone call back to him in which you released your own anger in stunning language, I felt your words of fury and resolve in my core. When I read great personal essays like that, skepticism about the power of language to reach across the page vanishes. I know you had reached the limits of empathy with that narrow-minded bigot, but you opened a floodgate of it in me for you.

There is a wonderful phrase from the critic Helen Vendler. The lyric voice, she writes, is “an utterance for us to utter as ours.” Lyric prose like that found in the personal essays we admire may be the product of “a mind alone with itself,” but the reader is not a “voyeur of the writer’s sensations.” Lyrical prose draws us in the way a whisper spoken directly to us will. Such words make us feel less lonely and bring balm.