The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay

Elia: Pseudonymous Self Extraordinaire

60 elia Pseudonymous Self Extraordinaire alking into Tio Pepe’s, I never imagined that dining there in Baltimore, amid the lamp-lit stucco walls of a Spanish restaurant, bristling with redjacketed waiters and bullfighting scenes, would lead to this piece on Elia, the pseudonymous self of Charles Lamb. Oh yes, I went there intending to dine on roast suckling pig, a specialty of the chef and subject of Elia’s renowned “Dissertation,” so one might say I was tacitly committed to doing the kind of primary research that could lead to an essay such as this. But I would hasten to reply that my hunger for the suckling was roused not by an interest in Elia but by somewhat different motives, for I was eager to determine whether the roasted creature warranted so flamboyant a tribute as Lamb’s that I too might be moved to such essayistic effusions. After all, I had traveled to Baltimore to serve as visiting essayist at a local university, and how better to fulfill that role than to walk in the footsteps of such an illustrious predecessor—he might even have savored his roast pig in a Georgian building like the nineteenth-century brick edifice that houses Tio Pepe’s. So if truth be known, I had in mind a literary communion of sorts, a partaking of flesh akin to “the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not overroasted , crackling” that had moved Elia to proclaim “of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate—princeps obsoniorum.” Not having sampled the entire world of delicacies, I was hardly in a position to declare the suckling pig I dined on that night, the Conchinillo Asado Estilo Segovia, to be the most distinguished of all meats. But it surewas a mouthful. Such exquisite crackling, such tender flesh, “such animal manna”—the very first taste of it made me feel I had never understood “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” because I had never had a gustatory experience sufficient to illuminate the source of its inspiration. I, who had taught it on numerous occasions throughout my academic career, guiding stualking into Tio Pepe’s, I never imagined that dining there in Baltimore, amid the lamp-lit stucco walls of a Spanish restaurant, bristling with redjacketed waiters and bullfighting scenes, would lead to this piece on Elia, the pseudonymous self of Charles Lamb. W Elia 61 dents through its five-​ part structure (culinary history, epideictic oratory, personal reminiscence, ethical inquiry, pithy recipe), each part with its own distinctive style, as if the whole were an elaborate jeu d’esprit—I, who might have written a dissertation upon Elia’s dissertation, suddenly realized, as never before, that Lamb’s game was deadly earnest. More earnest, by far, than I had ever imagined. Who, after all, having dined on roast suckling pig could fail to be enthralled by its incomparable flavor and texture, by the striking contrast between its buttery flesh and ineffable crackling? And who having tasted such a supreme dish could write about it without succumbing to hyperbole? Or so I thought in that first moment of ingestion . Yet Lamb sustained a playfully exaggerated style without becoming so extravagant as to mock the impulse that engendered such hyperbole or render himself a fit subject for mockery. A delicate balance indeed. With each precious morsel—bathed, it should be noted, in a sensuous gravy—I found myself pondering Elia’s dissertation and Elia himself not only with greateradmiration but alsowith a heightened sense of curiosity, wondering what more I might discover by revisiting the dissertation, savoring it once again as I had never done before. But no sooner did I vow to renew my acquaintance with Lamb’s performance therein than it occurred to me that perhaps I could not fully appreciate Elia’s behavior in that excursion without taking note of his conduct in otheressays published under that fictitious name. So it was that Tio Pepe’s Conchinillo Asado led me back to the essays of Elia and anything else that might shed light on that remarkable personage. Elia made his debut without any editorial fanfare in the London Magazine of August 1820, in such a strange and haunting essay, “The South Sea House,” that readers were evidently fascinated as much by him as by the piece itself. And with good reason. What an eccentric he must have seemed to be obsessed with the decaying headquarters and skeleton staff of such a...