Must try harder

Whatever happened to the essay?  It enjoyed an auspicious enough beginning over four hundred years ago, when Montaigne in France and, a little later, Francis Bacon in England, published tightly argued works in prose which had their roots in the writings of Seneca.  Montaigne’s and Bacon’s essays tested their personal ideas and experience while illuminating the commonplace.
The characteristic brevity of expression accorded by Bacon to complex human sentiment has stood the test of time.  Here he dismisses at a stroke the folly of romantic attachment in ‘Of Love’ – ‘The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man’ – and here, slaps down the adult foolish enough to contemplate with terror the ending of his earthly life – ‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark’.   The Harvard Professor of English Barratt Wendell described Bacon’s essays as ‘the masterpieces of English aphorism’. Bacon, however, was dismissive of his own work, describing the first edition of his essays as ‘fragments of my conceits’.
Mention the essay now though, and homework handed in late at school and university assignments sighed over in the small hours are more likely associations for most people than high-flown thought on high-flown themes.  Although the teaching of English in schools has moved on a long way from the days of ‘What I did in my holidays’,  the regimentation of the secondary school timetable into subject disciplines does little to encourage the wide-angled thinking on which the engaging essayist draws.
Broadcasters and think tanks have muscled into essay territory too, offering for the most part dry fare that may be an appealing prospect for the policy-maker and the politician, but is one unlikely to provoke pleasure in the reading public.
Earlier this month, for example, Reform, the think tank whose mission is ‘to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity’ and which is free of political party affiliations, published ‘The Next Ten Years’, a collection of 75 essays (the second edition of Bacon’s stretched to 58) on public service reform, written ‘by people at the top level of politics, the civil service, business and public services’. As far as this volume is concerned, logic and philosophy have fallen by the wayside over the last half millennium.  In their place are urgent calls to action: to take a measured approach to targets; to take responsibility for our own pensions and stop expecting the state to provide; to relinquish the six-week summer holiday and the 9am to 3.30pm school day.
The BBC, on the other hand, would probably find itself on a similar wavelength to Bacon with its daily Radio 3 essay.  The series promises ‘Authored essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week.’ The net is cast wide, both for writers and for ideas. This week, with a nod to the forthcoming Olympic Games, the public service broadcaster has invited writers to look at how sports have been portrayed in the arts, from novels to painting, film to photography.  Olympic fencer Richard Cohen, former England cricketer Ed Smith and writer Lynne Truss are three who have done so.
OCA’s newly appointed curriculum lead for creative writing, Chris Arthur, has published four volumes of essays.  His fifth is due for publication later this year.  A firm believer in the disciplines that essay writing can instil in writers in many genres, he quotes the essayist Graham Good, who said: ‘Anyone who can look attentively, think freely and write clearly can be an essayist. No other qualifications are needed.’   As he acknowledges, Good’s dictum is easy to state but harder to practise.
Chris has been described by Patrick O’Sullivan as ‘the Irish writer who has been quietly rescuing the meditative essay for the twenty-first century.’   It’s a view that suggests the essay has been neglected.  Now, often, the essay tells rather than shows.  Is it time for it to return in a new guise, to suspend its tendency to the hortative and to aspire to Voltaire’s desire for good essay writing to be combined with good philosophy? Watch this space.