Folio Books: Review of The Oxford Book of Essays edited by John Gross

The Oxford Book of Essays

Chosen and edited by John Gross

Oxford University Press

The grand old Oxford University Press has published anthologies on almost every conceivable subject, from classics like the Oxford Book of English Verse (such a classic that you can refer to it by its initials -- OBEV -- and be perfectly understood) and the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (edited by Yeats) to more recent additions like The Oxford Book of Villains and The Oxford Book of Money.

One of the more successful recent arrivals is the Oxford Book of Essays (1991), edited by John Gross, a former editor of the TLS. This is a nice hefty volume -- 680 pages -- and my edition is sturdily hardbound in traditional Oxford blue. It contains 140 essays by 120 writers arranged chronologically by author, starting with Sir Francis Bacon and concluding with Clive James. Only essays originally written in English are included, so Montaigne, the inventor of the essay proper, is not to be found, though he is properly invoked by Gross in his introduction. (At five pages the introduction is just the right length for a neat summary of the history of the essay and an explanation of Mr. Gross's rationale in making his choices.)

An anthology, of course, is only as good as its editors' taste and judgment (and perhaps insofar as they agree with one's own). A good way to test the value of such a collection as this is to choose a couple of one's favourite writers and see how they are represented. My test cases were E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Gross has chosen Forster's essay 'My Own Centenary' from his book Abinger Harvest. It is amusing, and typical of Forster's modest, self-deprecating humour, but to my mind far from his best. Virginia Woolf fares better: here is 'The Death of the Moth', published posthumously, a delicate and moving reminder of the joy she experienced in her life and the death to which she turned when it seemed that joy would no more be possible.

I am pleased to report that on the second anthology test the Oxford Book of Essays scores very high: this second test is that of random dipping and browsing over the course of several nights. It meets one's expectations of what a good anthology should be, providing familiar favourites, delightful curiosities, unexpected contributions by well-known writers and opportunities to discover some less well-known.

A few examples to indicate the book's scope and range: here are Jonathon Swift's 'Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick'; James Thurber's 'Ten Rules For a Happy Marriage'; V.S. Naipaul on 'Columbus and Crusoe' and Jeremy Taylor on 'Charity, or the Love of God'; Marianne Moore's 'What There is to See at the Zoo,' which reads rather like a long Marianne Moore poem; William Hazlitt's devastating 'Brumelliana'; Pauline Kael, long-time New Yorker film critic, on 'Movies on Television'; Dryden on Chaucer, Orwell on Gandhi, Robert Graves on Greek myth, Gore Vidal on Robert Graves, Oliver Goldsmith on the varieties of national prejudice and Reyner Banham on the varieties of potato crisps.

A fine book indeed.

N.L., 13 December, 1997

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