Philip Lopate - Getting Personal

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ATTRACTED TO the confessional mode in literature and, with it, the whole dynamic of confidingness, rationalization, unreliable narration, and self-aggrandizement versus self-disgust. An irresistible title when I was an undergraduate (and a favorite novel of our set) was James Hoggs The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I ate up Dostoevskys Notes From Underground, Gides The Immoralist and his autobiographical writings, The Confessions of St.Augustine, Rousseaus Confessions, Svevos Confessions of Zeno, De Quinceys Confessionsof an English Opium-Eater, Celine, Henry Miller, Kerouac.... I eagerly read the work of the so-called confessional poets, such as Ann Sexton, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, and disagreed with their detractors when they found something unclean about their self-revealing poems, just as, more recently, I could not agree with the backlash against the memoir by critics who felt it was too narcissistically self-indulgent. My own view is that, if anything, what is wrong with most memoirs and autobiographical poems is that they dont go far enough in their confessions; they myopically fudge the details, the close nitty-gritty of self-observation. I am endlessly interested in the wormy thoughts and regrets and excuses and explanations that people have for their behavior. Confessional is, to me, a descriptive term, not a derogatory one. (My first novel was called Confessions of Summer.) It was inevitable that I should be drawn to the personal essay, the form with which I am now most identified, because of its conversational and confessional attributes.

Honesty has been, for me, the one lodestar to which I never stop aspiring in print. I dont say I attain honesty, but the very fact that I try to reach it gives my work, at least in my own eyes, a formal thrust, a dynamic, a topography. I want to get to the bottom of things. And as a reader, I have always loved that moment when the writer said something very daring, tore the cover off, told the real truth, and you had to gasp. Of course it is necessary to do more than merely confess and strive for honesty. (What, I wonder? Expanded argument tk.)

I have sometimes been startled to hear a stranger, acquaintance, or even friend make some indulgent comment about me that seems drawn from assumptions about my character as it has appeared in print. For instance, they might say, Oh, you wouldnt like to go on a nature hike, when in fact I am very susceptible to the charms of nature. I am not a committed curmudgeon, by any means. The contrarian role I have sometimes assumed in print, to throw my I-character into sharper relief or to distance myself from conventional thinking, has become a mental reflex, one part of my thinking pattern. But in daily circumstances, I am energetic and almost lifeembracing; I regard myself as a blend of optimist and stoic. True, I like a little complexity and darkness with my optimism, though only in a Pollyannaish culture such as Americas would such seasonings be regarded as cynical. (This is beginning to sound smug.)

My prose style drifts in and out of beauty. I am not one of those to break himself on the wheel of the sentence. I do not try, as Isaac Babel did, to unleash a period with the force of a bullet; I simply end a sentence and start another. I sometimes listen in amazement to the advice other writing teachers give their students, such as: You should purge your work of passive verbs or adjectives. I would never think of doing such a thing to my own prose. Where my writing is lively (theres that is againshould I change it to something more active?), its because what I have to say at that moment quickens into vigorous expression. A writer-friend told me she never begins a sentence with a gerund. Having started many such sentences this way myself, I paid her no heed; besides, archaic diction has always had a perverse appeal for me. I have never set out to exemplify the most up-to-date prose. I expect to be clear, and thats about it. It surprises and delights me when I come across a passage I wrote years ago that has a measure of elegance, concision, density of thought. Knowing you can write well sometimes, the reader might ask, why dont you make the effort to do it always? I dont know. It goes against the grain to take myself or the art of prose so seriously; Flauberts