READINGS IN LANGUAGE

A love letter, a provocation, and a treatise on the essay

Are personal essayists for real? Or do they just assume a different persona in their essays, writing in ways different from who they really are?

In his new book The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay (University of Iowa Press, 174 pages), Carl H. Klaus, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, contends that “exactly who’s talking in a personal essay is often up in the air, and has been ever since Montaigne* acknowledged, ‘I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention.’”

Klaus doesn’t spare himself from this indictment: “Most readers probably realize that the angry person in [my own essay] is a satiric impersonation, as much a put-on as the put-ons he’s angry with. But I wonder how many are aware that the person coming across right now is also a put-on—a genial, low-key fellow I’ve been rehearsing ever since I was captivated some 40 years ago by the familiar voice of E.B. White and imagined I might sound like him by heeding all the rules in The Elements of Style, the handbook of White’s former English instructor, William Strunk Jr., that White revised and expanded into a credo of his own.”

In The Made-Up Self, Klaus shares his vast store of wisdom about the essay form and in teaching how to write it. “This book is a cabinet of finely balanced wonders: treatise and revelation, study and confession, provocation and lyric—but most of all, it’s a love letter to the essay form,” says Lia Purpura, author of On Looking, in her review of the book. “Carl Klaus approaches his subject, the complicated construction of a self on the page, with the curiosity, intellect, and innocence of an artist in love with and awed by his materials.”

Read Carl H. Klaus’ “The Put-Ons of Personal Essayists” in The Chronicle Review now!

Read Chapter 1 of  Carl H. Klaus’ The Made-Up Self in the BarnesandNoble website!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Carl H. Klaus, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, is the founder of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. An essayist, diarist, and specialist in nonfiction writing, he is the author of My Vegetable Love, Weathering Winter, Taking Retirement, and Letters to Kate—essayistic works in the form of diaries and letters that reflect on his life and marriage, on gardening and food, on work and retirement, and on his concern with time, change, and mortality. He is co-editor (with Patricia Hampl) of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction.
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*Montaigne is, of course, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592), the French writer so well-known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. One of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, Montaigne is widely regarded as the father of Modern Skepticism.

RELATED READING:
In “A stutter concerns kings and commoners alike,” an article he wrote for the December 5, 2010 issue of the Los Angeles Times, the paper’s theater critic Charles McNulty argues that “public speaking consistently ranks as one of life’s most stressful events, up there with divorce, bereavement and home foreclosure.” In his review of the film The King’s Speech, which portrays the future King George VI—a serious stammerer—preparing with great trepidation to deliver a few ceremonial remarks, McNulty also talks about his own stuttering when he was young: “Parents and teachers treated my stuttering as an impediment, not as a life-altering affliction (even though, depending on the day, it could very much feel like one). My self-image was colored by having something unfortunate, like acne or a weight problem, not catastrophic, like a condition requiring a wheelchair.”

Read Charles McNulty’s “A stutter concerns kings and commoners alike” in the Los Angeles Times now!

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