On the Genteel

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"What ho!" I said, tacking on an interrogatory "eh" for good measure. I sounded like P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, one of my favorite literary characters. Bertie, however, was not a chap whose brow beetled forth prominently on the frieze adorning the au courant. "As well you might say, 'What ho! Eh?'" the professor responded, underlining you with irritation and raising her right eyebrow into a boomerang. The professor was lecturing on the personal essay. Having scribbled fifteen volumes of essays, I thought I should behave patriotically and fly my paragraphs, so I attended the lecture. The what, the ho and the eh slipped my lips near the end of the talk.

"Contemporary practitioners of the essay," the professor said, fixing me with a dry eye, "have, thank goodness, kicked the genteel into the tar pit. Only a dinosaur or two continues to lumber about, not smart enough to know he is extinct."

Years ago I regularly confused genteel with gentile. Even today when I'm sleepy, I misspeak and substitute one word for the other. Clearly the professor understood the difference between the words well enough to excommunicate me. "Hum," I thought after the lecture, "like a clerk in Wal-Mart, I'll take inventory this summer and see how well stocked my writings are with the genteel."

Genteel essayists are usually Anglophiles. They genuflect before the word Empire and think Heaven a clone of the Lake District. God doesn't slumber on a white throne but lopes across the Cotswolds arm in arm with the divine Wordsworth; lesser souls gambol behind the Good Poetic Shepherd like a flock of Southdowns, the aura of admirable deeds white and woolly about them. In taking inventory, I scrolled through time. I'd earned an undergraduate degree at Cambridge, lived in London for two and a half years, taken my family to western Australia for two years and spent the better parts of fifteen summers in Canada. Although such a life did not necessarily convict me of Anglophilia, I was clearly an habitué of the English-speaking world.

When not hobnobbing with the tweedy and the toothy, genteel essayists live in New England. They need not be born in the Northeast, but they must be associated with New England. No inhabitant of the tinpot states, formerly parts of the Confederate Reich, can be a genteel essayist. Raised on a diet thick with guns, dogs and drink, Southern essayists mature into eccentricity, there being no colostrum strong enough to prevent madness from tarring their middle years, causing them, for example, to name twin daughters, as a literary acquaintance in Mississippi recently did, Blarina and Condylura, the first the species name of a shrew, the second of a mole.

Unlike the distilled jocularity of genteel essayists, the moonshine ladled out by Southern writers is raw. This past fall a writer from Tennessee described a man's moving from Birmingham to Nashville to teach at Vanderbilt. In Nashville the man enrolled his son Edgar in second grade. During the first day of school the teacher asked the children to count to fifty. Some performed well. A bright little girl counted to thirty-two. Edgar, however, counted all the way to ninety and made only two mistakes, skipping forty-six and seventy-one. "You did well because you are from Alabama," Edgar's father explained. The next day the teacher asked the children to recite the alphabet. The smart little girl got to k, but Edgar reached the end of the alphabet, making only one mistake, putting t before s. "That's because you are from Alabama," his father said at dinner that night. The following day all the boys attended physical education. After class they bathed. In the shower Edgar noticed that his toodle was bigger than those of the other boys. "At least twelve times bigger," he told his daddy at dinner that night and asked, "Is that because I'm from Alabama?" "No, son," his father answered, "that's because you are eighteen."

Rarely does the humor of the genteel essayist descend below the pun. After spending...