Little gem

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL By Anne Fadiman,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $19.25

Anne Fadiman is the book lover’s and book reader’s delight. Very few writers evoke the world of books and reading as wonderfully as she does. Her Ex Libris, reviewed in these columns some years ago, won the hearts of all those who read it. She has a select band of admirers across the world. She is at her best with books and writing about books and writers. Her only rival in this field is Alberto Manguel.

In this small book of essays, Fadiman’s charm is once again evident. The subjects of the essays, as the title of the book suggests, are varied, but the essays are linked because they touch the world of books in one way or the other.

The immediate provocation for Fadiman’s reflections is the disappearing art of essay writing. But Fadiman concedes that “the essay portending the end of the essay has become a genre in itself.” This would suggest that previous soothsayers have been wrong.

Within the genre of essay writing, there is a subset that particularly concerns Fadiman. This is the “familiar essay”, a term that features as the subtitle of the present volume. It is a term that is rarely heard these days. Its heyday, as Fadiman points out, was the early nineteenth century when Charles Lamb was writing The Essays of Elia, and William Hazlitt was engaged in the production of Table Talk. What is the “familiar essay”?

Fadiman writes, “The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favourite stimulants at hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy.” Today’s readers, Fadiman asserts, encounter plenty of critical essays that have more head than heart; they also see many personal essays that have more heart than head, but very few familiar essays that have equal measures of heart and head. She believes that the survival of the familiar essay is something worth fighting for. And this volume is her contribution to that struggle for survival.

In an essay called “Night owl”, Fadiman brings her personal predicament and her erudition together to write on the problems faced by human beings who are larks and those who are owls. Fadiman is the latter, but is married to an early riser. Her reflections begin from this. From there, she takes her readers (or should one say, reader, since this is a familiar essay) on to how certain flowers open their petals at different times of the day; to how the owl’s prose is influenced by the time of the night; to the nature of insomnia. The essay, like most of the others here, is a special gift to all those who enjoy good writing.

Welcome to Anne Fadiman’s familiar world.