At Large and at Small - Anne Fadiman

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About Anne Fadiman

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At Large and at Small

Confessions of a Literary Hedonist

» Anne Fadiman

Allen Lane
Hardback : 01 Nov 2007

£12.99

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Synopsis

In At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman returns to one of her favourite genres, the familiar essay – a beloved and hallowed literary tradition recognized for both its intellectual breadth and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences. With her wonderful combination of wit and erudition, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions: from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from her wistfulness for the days of letter-writing to the challenges and rewards of moving from the city to the country.

Many of these essays were composed ‘under the influence’ of the subject at hand. Fadiman divulges her passion for Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip and her brother’s homemade Liquid Nitrogen Kahlúa Coffee (recipe included); she sustains a terrific caffeine buzz while recounting Balzac’s coffee addiction; and she stays up till dawn to write about being a night owl, examining the rhythms of our circadian clocks and sharing such insomnia cures as her father’s nocturnal word games and Lewis Carroll’s mathematical puzzles. This is a perfect book for life’s passionate obsessives.

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Interview

Why did you want to write about obsessions?
Obsession is the opposite of boredom. Being a hedonistic sort, I like to experience maximal pleasure when I write, and the best way to do that is to write about something that interests me–really, really interests me, to the point that I lie awake thinking about it.

When I’m working on an essay, about eighty percent of my time is spent reading and researching and only twenty percent is spent writing. I want the eighty percent to taste like a chocolate truffle, not like broccoli. When I was working on At Large and At Small, the prospect of spending two or three weeks immersed in books by and about Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Vilhjalmur Stefansson (three men who had fascinated me for decades) was delicious. I couldn’t wait to open them. When I was getting ready to write about being a night owl, I stayed up for ten nights in a row, reading nocturnally themed novels, essays, and poems until dawn and sleeping during the day. That stretch of time felt more like an exotic vacation than a chore, and when I returned to normal life I experienced a combination of jet lag and culture shock. When I was writing about coffee, I drank a hell of a lot of coffee, and when I was writing about ice cream, of course it was necessary to eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs almost every day. (Sometimes research demands great sacrifices.)

How does it feel to share one's deepest obsessions with the world?
If I were obsessed with, say, underwear, it would be extremely embarrassing. But it’s only moderately embarrassing to reveal that I asked for a pickled human tapeworm for my tenth birthday or that, when I was in college, I wanted to sit at Coleridge’s feet while he recited “The Eolian Harp.”

You are writing in essays, as you did with Ex Libris. What draws you to the essay form? Do you think it is generally undervalued?
I became an essayist by accident, when I was confined to bed during a problematic pregnancy and couldn’t do any reporting. When I got out of bed after eight horizontal months, I discovered I’d so completely fallen in love with essays that all I wanted to do was write more of them.

I do think the essay is undervalued today – at least, compared with the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century. However, it’s doing better today than it was twenty years ago. In the U.S. there are several popular essay anthologies, including an annual series called Best American Essays, that have breathed new life into the form. I imagine there must be similar anthologies in Britain. These books wouldn’t be published unless someone was reading them. I’m waiting patiently for a more universal acknowledgment that the essay is the perfect genre for overscheduled readers. It isn’t War and Peace. You can put a collection on your bedside table and read an essay a night, a self-contained little work whose satisfyingly finite beginning, middle, and end provide an antidote to the messiness of the day’s unfinished business.

Who has inspired you?
From the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. From the twentieth, Virginia Woolf and E. B. White. Among current essayists, Edward Hoagland, Nicholson Baker, and Cynthia Ozick.

Did you discover any surprises–about yourself or any of your subjects–when you were writing the book?
Sometimes I felt that my research consisted of nothing but surprises. Most of those surprises were good. If you’re the sort of person I am, your entire outlook on life can be improved by stumbling on a delightful new fact. For instance, when I was researching postal history, I learned that in 1653, Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer, the proprietor of a private postal service in Paris, was thwarted by practical jokers who put mail-chewing mice in his postboxes. I felt happy for hours. However, some of the surprises were bad. I’d long revered the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, but until I started preparing to write my essay, I’d read only works by him, not about him. I remember the moment when I learned from a Stefansson biography that my hero had abandoned his Inuit mistress and failed to acknowledge their son. Bitter disillusionment!

Because my essays are personal, they all entailed a certain amount of self-discovery. The most difficult was the last, “Under Water,” about a canoeing accident I’d witnessed when I was a teenager. It took me twenty-seven years to be ready to write it. You’d think that after all that time the subject would hold no surprises for me, but when I actually sat down in front of my computer, I was overwhelmed by the extent to which my sense of loss and guilt had splashed out from the event and seeped into other corners of my life.

If all the rest of the world was washed away, leaving you on a desert island with one classic (a Penguin classic, of course!), what would you want it to be?
This wouldn’t be the place for a short essay collection. Here are my criteria: The book would have to be long. It would have to be something I already knew and loved, so that memories of earlier readings would build a bridge of associations to the rest of my life. It would have to be something infinitely rereadable, a work with so many layers that it offered up something new every time it was opened. It would have to be more sad than happy–not tragic, since I’d be trying to make the best of a bad situation, but not so filled with lighthearted optimism that I couldn’t imagine its author giving me worthwhile advice. And it would have to be emotionally mature, a grownup’s view of what makes us human. In short, it would have to be Middlemarch.