A tension is all you need

The book begins with a litany, a litany about itself. “On essays and essayists. On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write; an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles, which he does not; what another learned about himself the day he fell unconscious from his horse; of noses, of cannibals, of method…” There is a music to these descriptions, a gentle rubato in how they expand and contract, a droll humor in the way many of the clauses turn. Holding it together is the ground note, the persistent and incantatory “on” that recalls Montaigne. Underneath this spell and music, a canon forms. In Essayism, Dillon explores many of his favorite authors—Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, but also lesser known writers like Cyril Connolly and Maeve Brennan—to meditate on the capabilities contained within the essay form.

From the outset, Dillon refuses the conventional. Received histories of the essay, according to him, “hide a good deal both about essays and the nature of effort and experience.” Rather than a “stable entity or established class,” the essay becomes a site of potential, with Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (from which the book gets one of its epigraphs) neatly articulating the paradox of this posture: “Let us talk about it as though it existed.” Dillon’s war on genealogical cliche raises the question: just what is essayism? The suffix lodges itself in the mind. Dillon takes his title from a chapter from Robert Musil’s gargantuan novel of ideas, The Man Without Qualities. The chapter’s title sets the tone (“The earth too, but Ulrich in particular, pays homage to the Utopian idea of Essayism”) and describes how “the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis.” This optimistic vision of intellectual adventure is shaded by an ironical awareness (“the earth too, but Ulrich in particular”) of its own ambition, its utopianism. Dillon then narrows his ambit; the essays that fascinate him give the “sense of a genre suspended between its impulses to hazard and adventure and to achieved form, aesthetic integrity.” This suspension governs the structural logic of Essayism, with Dillon’s lapidary prose filling the book’s twenty-six chapters, which glint with insight like tiny shards of crystal and bear faux-classical titles such as “On style” and “On melancholy.” These fragments do not, they need not, form an ordered whole.

These self-contained sections show Dillon closely attending to many of his favorite authors. No writer appears more tailored to Dillon’s taste than the subject of his section “On melancholy”: Cyril Connolly. What draws him to the languorous mid-century man of letters is the “word cycle” The Unquiet Grave, a beguiling collection of aphorisms and quotations. After describing Connolly’s eccentric and decadent lifestyle, Dillon punctures the “inflated” grandeur of Connolly’s book (“But you can hear that his pensées are already on the turn; his taste is for the overripe”) and indulges in some armchair psychology: “Approaching forty, heaving his well-lunched frame into a new decade, moving already with the anonymous waddle of mid-life, Connolly is convinced that if he can just lose half a stone the rest – his masterpiece – will follow.” But ultimately, Connolly’s complex sensibility captivates Dillon. After an astute comparison to the aphorisms of Emil Cioran, he concludes with praise: “The Unquiet Grave is a lesson, seventy-three years old this year, in the potential still of an elegant, unruly form. It is a masterpiece despite all, and Palinurus our essayistic contemporary.” Dillon ranges in scale, however, and obsesses over sentences as readily as personalities. In the sections titled “On taste” and “On sentences,” he fixates on two essays by Elizabeth Hardwick. After praising the “fractured rhythms and peculiar phrases” of her prose, he singles out one on the death of Dylan Thomas, quoting a passage which begins with the line: “He died, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious weeping women at his bedside.” With an attention rivaling that of writers like Garielle Lutz, Dillon anatomizes the sentence’s sonics (the mirroring and progression of vowels, how it slows down as it draws to a close) before detailing how the sentence prompts him to speculate about the scene of Thomas’s death. But then, Dillon doubles back:

But isn’t there something peculiar about the placing of that first comma? When I read the essay for the first time – and reading it now I must remind myself that this is not what it says – I thought Dylan Thomas had died grotesquely, like Valentino. But that is not it, or not quite: the grotesquerie belongs not to the death itself, or not only, but to the resemblance – in death, Thomas was grotesquely like Valentino. The distinction may seem subtle, hardly worth making; except I suspect Hardwick of pausing over the comma’s placement, suddenly aware that the mere parallel of the two deaths – poet and silent star, both loved by many women, though the poet a little more bafflingly – was not enough: what truly appalled was the fact one could, in fact must, set these men alongside one another in the first place.

Dillon continues: “Hardwick knows, must know, that reeling the comma back a notch does not rid us of the expected sense – the one I mistakenly settled for at first. She gets to have the seamlessness and its subversion.” Dillon’s eye for prose is only matched by his comfort with paradox. He latches on to the tiniest detail and after a brief moment of performed self-doubt (“the distinction may seem subtle, hardly worth making”) ends with the provocative claim that by placing her comma there, Hardwick courted a kind of productive misreading.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then block-quoting Dillon is the highest of praise, for he uses them freely. The section “On diverging” almost resembles color field painting in the way two large block-quotes from Woolf’s “On Being Ill” are chained in between three large paragraphs that gloss the essay. This visual quality is also implicit in Dillon’s shorter quotations. In a section on how Susan Sontag’s diaries show the insecurity behind her notoriously aloof persona, Dillon writes that “Sex and writing arrived at more or less the same time. Aged fifteen she wrote: 'I feel that I have lesbian tendencies'; the following year she had her first relationship with a woman, and noted: 'Everything begins from now.'" The punctuation here is typical; Dillon’s prose is glutted with semicolons and colons. What do they mean? Colons for Dillon often set up quotations. James Wood (and many other critics) are masters of the deft inline quotation, their writing merging into the voice of their quoted author in the same way that Wood describes free indirect style allowing narration to bend towards a character's consciousness. Not Dillon. For him, quotes are meant to be exhibited, to be staged. There is a residual Arnoldianism in the "touchstone" quality of how he distances himself from the quotations he chooses. Likewise, his frequent use of the semicolon allows him to evade subordination between clauses. The connection between passages is up to the reader; we paratactically stroll through a gallery of staged quotes.

Through punctuation, Dillon allows for uncertainty to structure his prose. Take this line: "I always imagined–not always, though I have been here before: I imagined for some time–that after the disaster would come a type of stricture, tightening, shrinkage.” The peculiar punctuation and syntax (the two em-dashes, which set off a comma and colon on either side) give the sentence a hesitant feel of stopping and starting multiple times. We begin with the definitive ("always imagined"), are immediately contradicted ("not always"), before a brief recorrection ("though I have been here before"), which sets off a clearing of the throat, a redo ("I imagined for some time"), before the sentence closes with finality: a trinity of constricting nouns, albeit after a little distancing ("a type of"). Here is Dillon's writing in a nutshell: a dance between finality and uncertainty, classical cadences often undone through idiosyncratic presentation. More frequent are Dillon’s parentheticals, little flickers of self-consciousness that swerve away from his contention. “Imagine what [the essay] might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at ‘therefore’) at the level of thought.” But there is no regularity to Dillon’s method; in a memorable parenthetical spanning a whole page, he digresses about Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Musing on Cioran’s judgement of the book as “indigestible,” the passage itself remains typographically undigested in the section, recalling Samuel Johnson’s definition of the essay (“a loose sally of the mind, an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition”).

The aesthetic world of Dillon’s book is held together by a constant unraveling. Nothing survives his quest for instability: not the essay and not the self. In a section on the essay’s origins, Dillon glosses an essay by Montaigne in which he is knocked off his horse and wakes up, dazed and bloodied. And yet Montaigne finds a “kind of pleasure” in the experience, which allows his sense of self to hazily dissipate. This “dispersal,” as Dillon terms it, underlies the philosophy of self-hood that Montaigne develops in his many essays, and its lack of stability attracts Dillon and informs his prose. Interpreting Virginia Woolf’s essay “Thunder at Wembley,” in which lightning breaks out during a stately exhibition of the British Empire, he writes how “Woolf’s prose mimics the action of the storm, exploding delicately into flurries of image, sound, and metaphor.” “Exploding delicately”: Dillon’s descriptions often contain these oxymorons, such as when he praises the “wavering precision” with which Maeve Brennan describes the broccoli and sauceboat of a meal on Fifty-ninth street, or how Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” “swerves weakly” from its opening argument into a febrile jumble of language. Phrases like these draw the reader in, with Dillon’s oxymorons straining under their torqued precision.

Despite this hunger for tension, another current runs through the book: earnestness. Dillon’s sensibilities are often postmodern, but he is a postmodern Romantic. Five chapters titled “On consolation” appear throughout the book, forming an emotional backbone. In these passages, Dillon describes the depression that has dogged him for much of his life, the death of both of his parents before he finished college, and periods of crippling writer’s block. On his time in Margate, a time when he could “connect nothing with nothing,” Dillon says: “There were nights when I did walk down to the front and cling to the cliffs to light a cigarette, then stare out at the lights of container ships in the North Sea, paused before they rounded the coast and approached the port of Dover in the morning. Sometimes a late-night dog walker would pass by in the dark, and roused from my panic reverie I would know that tonight was not the night to drown myself.” While Dillon describes the “writing ‘I’” as contained, provisional, and dispersed, these passages show a suffering yet stable self, around which the psychic weight of the book gathers. For relief from this affliction, for consolation, Dillon turned to literature, to essays and criticism. The stylish, “antic” reviews by Ian Penman and Paul Morley in NME introduce him to the “extravagance” of Roland Barthes, his reading of William Styron’s Darkness Visible brings him to a canon of theory about depression and melancholia: Julia Kristeva, Emil Cioran, Robert Burton. For Dillon, consolation is found in how a certain kind of essayistic writing mirrors the inner turmoil of the self. In one section, he describes looking for guidance: “Hardwick’s ‘Billie Holiday’ was the first – discovered at a moment when suddenly, after years of feeling that I had at last a solid self that might survive, I sensed that I might disperse on the merest breeze, float away on currents of abstracted unease. Hardwick’s coolly composed sentences gave me something to hang on to, but there was enough about them of intentional disarray that I felt as though in her essayism she understood extremes – the Dylan Thomas essay confirmed it.” And so a taste for style, an aestheticism, becomes a method of self preservation.

The tension of Essayism never resolves. In the final section, titled “On starting again,” Dillon ends by quoting from William Carlos Williams’ “Essay on Virginia,” with Williams comparing “the essence of all essays” to “a branching tree of crystal hung with glass baskets that would be filled with jelly” that Thomas Jefferson brought back from Paris for his daughter. Dillon declines to elaborate upon this enigmatic image, the quote getting the last word. In the end, we have a book divided against itself. Dillon’s taste for tension, for fracture, is informed by a lingering melancholia, but through the earnest depiction of his struggles, he exemplifies a more personal mode of writing. Against his own aesthetic criteria, Dillon makes a case for the earnest, searching exploration of the self.