Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

is the essay an embarrassing form?;

Previous twenty-three posts in this series on Marilynne Summers Robinson and Annie Doak Dillard, two writers this writer loves excessively, devotedly, nerdily.

There is an interesting little note at the beginning of Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard’s 1982 essay collection. “Some of these have not been published before; others, such as ‘Living like Weasels’ and ‘The Deer at Providencia,’ were published obscurely. At any rate, this is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.”

Teaching a Stone to Talk includes, in addition to the pieces already mentioned, “Total Eclipse,” “Expedition to the Pole,” and the title joint, not to mention “Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos.” In essayist terms, this is an outrageous bounty. If I were to, say, drum up paid subscriptions by writing a list of what I think are the greatest non-greatest-hits essay collections ever written, and then paywall it, I would probably put this book at or near the top. So it’s interesting that Dillard feels she has to essentially say, “This is not like those giant things John Updike puts out every few years where he dumps all his New Yorker pieces and commissioned prefaces. This is my realest shit.”

Would a young Annie Dillard have to say this today? I know several essayist-critics, and it’s not clear to me that any of them feel that they have to defend what they do, or explain that it is what they do. It is true that The Novel is still the prestige form, as the long poem and the verse tragedy were in the age of Samuel Johnson, who wasted (IMO) some of his precious essay-writing and shit-talking time on things like “London” and “Irene.” I don’t think Annie Dillard really cares about prestige — at least I’d imagine she cares less about it than most people. Not because she’s a saint necessarily, but because every sentence she’s ever written suggests a mind too otherwise occupied to remember to, say, look up how her book is doing on Amazon. But she needs people to read these pieces as though they’ve cost something — as any writer would — and the status of the essay in 1982 is such that she has to prompt them to do so.

Why apologize? Why would the essay be embarrassing, in the way that the novel sort of was in the eighteenth century? Often enough, any period in the history of any art form that we recognize after the fact as a Golden Age is also a period in which that art form is kinda embarrassing, a thing people resort to to raise money for their Real Work. (Think of Faulkner and Fitzgerald in Hollywood in the ‘30s. Think of the way other playwrights were weirded out when Ben Jonson brought out a fancy uniform edition of his plays and poems — as though he were a real writer like Sir Philip Sidney. Think of comics in the early ‘60s.) Money follows vitality, and feeds it, and then feeds on it. And for a serious writer, “money” is relative, but, to misquote “Arrested Development”: There’s always money in the take stand. If in 1982 you were midway through the composition of a novel that may or may not sell well (or at all), you can fly to the Grand Canyon with a camera and get a few hundred bucks out of Outside. (Today you can do the same thing, but the magazines keep shutting down, so you have to do it for Substack, and you’re traveling on your own dime — so instead you do a roundup.) So in a stronger magazine economy the essay had an air of practicality about it, funny enough. Also, we write essays in school, and Dillard was by this point not in school anymore. Dillard is naturally a very good student and I suspect this might have been embarrassing for her at some point. (Robinson writes like she has never been, will never be embarrassed about it, and it’s part of what makes her refreshing.)