Once upon a time intellectual stimulation for essays was found in the café, the former place of the intellectual-artist; this artist created the essay in his mind; it was a convocation of voices that responded to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time. Over the decades and beginning while at university in the 1960s, I was driven away from academic institutions of higher learning and toward a more journalistic approach, to a plain speech and a style of writing that was not as esoteric as an MA thesis or a PhD dissertation. Direct observation and the necessity to entertain was absolutely crucial for some writers—and, it seems looking back over my life, this was the case for me. I would never have surived in classrooms had these qualities not surfaced insensibly over the first half-a-dozen years of my teaching experience from 1967 to 1973.

Not in the mass media eye, as some writers are, and sometimes with immense success, I settled for a more modest achievement in the world of “the school” and “the college.” Like some writers, I wrote essays, reviews, sketches and squibs, but mostly for students; I also wrote in longer and more conventionally prestigious forms, but always in styles that had been honed by the whetstone of conversation, but without the accruing prestige that successful writers in the media accumulated.

Writing for the student and for the popular press, even at a much less successful and prestigious level of everyday journalism than others, demanded both simplicity and compression, and compression, if it is of good quality, makes language glow. I felt, as the years went on, that some light was finally being emitted from the marks on the page that I was putting down. The stylistic models that I emulated were much different than most writers. However different, they each could "pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs." My highest heros, the voices behind the voices of my writing were many, too many to include here.

It was Tacitus who wrote the sentence, says Clive James, out of which his entire volume Cultural Amnesia grew: "They make a desert and they call it peace." James heard the line quoted as a young man and "saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it."

My Tacitus, was Gibbon and Gibbon saw his history as a continuation of Tacitus’ work. I felt James and I were on a similar track. I would like to think that my memoirs are what James’ book Cultural Amnesia was to the reviewer in The Nation; namely, “less a collection of great figures than of great sentences.” But alas and alack, this is not the case. That same reviewer, William Deresiewicz, went on to say, “reading Cultural Amnesia feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway.” Well, I’m not sure I have had such a conversation in years—as a talker or a listener—expect in books. But James is, for me, one of my many, one of my crucial, mentors.

The reason James is such a good talker is that he's such a good listener. He means it literally when he says that the book took forty years to write, because its quotations are the harvest of the notebooks he has kept for all that time, and the notebooks are the harvest of his insatiable reading. Forty years of talking tired me out as did forty years of listening. Forty years of my note-taking has resulted, for me, in a small study filled with files that annoy my wife who has a penchant for the tidy and the clean, the orderly and the useful. It is a penchant I share with her but in a different modus operandi, modus vivendi. Forty years of reading and note-taking gave me an even greater appetite for print after I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-work in the years 1999 to 2005....enough of this rambling on how I have come to write the way I have.--Ron Price, Tasmania

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married for 37 years, a teacher for 35 years and a Baha'i for 47 years.

Hi Ron -

Good to read - always something erudite and useful from you!

Haven't heard from you in the forum for around 9 months, I think! Welcome back!

Cheers!

Johann

as far as i am concerned, 60% professional evaluators say whatever I write should be published as scholar-level stuff, while the other 40% think I ought to go back to kindergarten.

most evaluators called bluff on this one.
They said it's 'too compressed' or 'too cryptic'.
You may say my compression isn't good enough; I say you can't please everybody at all times.

It's never a bad idea to have an informal discussion with your evaluator before you begin submitting work. Ask them what they're looking for and what they consider important in your diction.

The extra effort will show that you're interested in producing the type of writing that they deem valuable.

And sometimes, you have to swallow your pride to do that.