The Best of Pickering

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Foreword by Jay Parini sam pickering counts among the handful of contemporary writers who practice, with aplomb, the art of the essay. This genre is, in many ways, our most native accomplishment, and Pickering’s work stands ‹rmly in the line of essayists from Thoreau and Emerson through Mark Twain, E. B. White, Robert Benchley, John McPhee, Scott Russell Sanders, Barry Lopez, and others. But he remains sui generis, a writer dif‹cult to de‹ne, but one who deserves a wide readership. This generous selection of his best essays puts him before readers in such a way that his virtues will become obvious. He is, in the fullest sense, an American classic. The word essay, of course, derives from a French term: essai. It represents , in its root sense, an “attempt,” an exploration, a form of verbal wandering. It is, by its nature, a form of autobiography, as the wandering eye becomes a wandering “I.” The genre has its roots in the essays of Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist who might well be considered the original ancestor of Pickering himself: the learned man who lets his mind range freely over deeply human topics, such as the nature of nature or the nature of human relations. He is, at once, bookish and common, a reader who refers to literature and ideas in a casual way while describing the world before him with an easy familiarity. Pickering, who grew up in Tennessee and was educated at the University of the South (as well as Princeton and Cambridge) is a southerner to the core, and his core values are those one associates with that group of southern writers who are called the Fugitives. That is, Pickering is ‹ercely traditional, almost radically so, and his work re›ects this bias. Like Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom—two of the original Fugitives—he admires the countryside, taking immense pleasure in the natural world; he is instinctively against industrialization and its discontents. The whole project of literary modernism, with its emphasis on Freud, on dislocation, on obliquity, goes against his grain. Pickering also has something in common with Wendell Berry, the Ken- tucky regionalist (another master of the essay), although Pickering does not himself, like Berry, practice the agrarian life. Though a perpetual southerner in his persona, Pickering left the Deep South for the East at a youngish age, taking his Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University. He also spent time at Cambridge University, in England (where he took a second bachelor’s degree in 1965). His ‹rst teaching job was at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire , where he began his writing career as an essayist. From Dartmouth , in 1978, he moved to the University of Connecticut, where he has remained, publishing eleven books of essays to date (2002), one book-length autobiographical volume, and three books of literary scholarship. In addition to this primary work, Pickering has been a proli‹c book reviewer, writing countless review-essays for the Sewanee Review, the Virginia Quarterly, and other periodicals. In the essay format, which he has perfected, Pickering adopts the persona of the congenial, wise, bemused southern gentleman who is perpetually astonished by what he discovers in his peregrinations. He is the bright amateur, at home in the world of books and children, academics and the natural world. Indeed, in the more recent essays, the natural world comes to play an increasingly important part in his life as he wanders the woods of Connecticut or Nova Scotia or the Antipodes. A typical Pickering essay begins with a peculiar, eye-catching sentence : “Pod Malone was the worst stutterer in Smith County, Tennessee ” or “Reading occasionally in›uences life.” One can expect almost anything to follow from such an observation as the writer’s mind roves. Pickering has a kind of wildness in him that is re›ected in the forms the essays take. As the narrative proceeds, way always leads on to way, and the reader knows that one will never get back to the original starting point. But one does not regret this lack of traditional unity; Pickering is the quintessential essayist-as-wanderer, and it would be churlish to expect a neat package, a return ticket to the point of embarkation. The twenty-four essays in this selected volume begin with his amusing exploration of celebrity, which fell upon him when a ‹lm, Dead Poets Society, appeared, and it became known that the central character, played by Robin Williams, was...