My excitement at learning that Anne Fadiman had a new essay collection out was comparable to that of readers who might wait for hours together outside bookshops for their copy of a major author's hyped-to-the-gills global release that will sell millions of copies. Anne Fadiman is a professor at Yale and a writer of (mostly) essays, she is not getting on the bestseller lists. And thank goodness for this, if you see what makes the bestseller lists. She is a writer I adore, and gush about, much like Sam Anderson in his almost “fan boy” introduction to this new collection. As I read him, I agreed with everything he said. I too love her lists! I love her use of words now and then that I have never come across (urtextual, lucubration, druthers, hortatory), but it does not feel like she threw it in there to flaunt her vast vocabulary. To her it is simply the right word.
In Frog and Other Essays, she takes on subjects that feel mundane - the family’s pet frog, her old printer - as well as subjects that are more topical - pronouns - and brings to each subject her uniquely curious, compassionate, analytical, and literary gaze.
In All My Pronouns she examines the use of the singular “they”. Given her famously prescripitivist and grammar-obsessed Fadiman family background, I expected the essay to go one way, but it went in a surprising and unexpected direction and you not only conclude that “language changes” but you do so with the help of her irrefutable logic.
In Frog, the titular essay, which is about Bunky, the pet African clawed frog her family had for seventeen years, she examines the question of the bonds we form (or don’t) with “unpettable” pets, the pets that live in their own separate habitat, that are generally no trouble, do not respond to a name, and cannot show affection. As she says, “we pay more attention to the pets that pay more attention to us.”
In The Oakling and the Oak she presents a sympathetic portrait of Hartley Coleridge, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hartley, from whom great things were expected, ultimately failed to step out of the vast shadow cast by his famous father. He eventually became “Poor Hartley” for most people who knew him. Hartley once wrote of himself: “I am brief myself; brief in stature, brief in discourse, short of memory and money, and far short of my wishes.” But was this view of Hartley’s abilities and accomplishments fair or even accurate? Fadiman digs.
In South Polar Times, she takes up one of her long standing obsessions - polar expeditions - and this time writes a fascinating account of the South Polar Times, a magazine that Robert Falcon Scott introduced on his first Antarctic expedition in 1902, to serve as a distraction to the crew in the dark and sun-less months between April and August, with Ernest Shackleton, third lieutenant, as its first editor and Edward Wilson, ship’s surgeon, as chief illustrator.
Each essay is pure gold. And I hereby declare that Anne Fadiman is my favourite writer.