A review by briancrandall
Essayism by Brian Dillon

4.0

Dear essayist, do you remember that strange metaphor that William Carlos Williams deploys in his ‘Essay on Virginia' to describe the liberty of the essay to stop dead? Here it is, with a preamble that sounds conventional but really is not, and less so for 1925:

To essay is to try but not to attempt. It is to establish trial. The essay is the most human literary form in that it is always sure, it remains from the first to the last fixed. Nothing affects it. It may stop, but if it stops that is surely the end and so it remains perfect, just as with an infant which fails to continue.

Of course it is not such a curious image for the poet and family doctor to propose, but still it adds to the autonomy of the essay — which we should not confuse with unity — levels of violence and grief and retrospect that we had perhaps not expected, but which are quite in keeping with the stop-start form of 'Essay on Virginia' itself, which veers between the US state in the title and the literary genre that Williams wants not exactly to define but obliquely to outline. He is oddly, perhaps ironically, insistent on the essay's independence and integrity:

Perhaps one should say that it is only an essay when it is wholly uncoloured by that which passes through it. Every essay should be, to be human, exactly like another. But the perfect essay should have every word numbered, say as the bones in the body and the thoughts in the mind are fixed, permanent and never vary. Then there could be no confusion, no deception and the pleasure of reading would be increased.

This form which is selfsame and lucid and autonomous — it is also filled with new and disparate aspects or elements, it ranges these new possibilities in series, or better in some curious arrangement. Who could foresee, on top of Williams's peculiar image of the essay as a dead child, that he would give us this bizarre and apparently whimsical alternative:

Often there will appear some heirloom like the cut-glass jelly stand that Jefferson brought back from Paris for his daughter, a branching tree of crystal hung with glass baskets that would be filled with jelly — on occasion. This is the essence of all essays. [136–8]