Scathing Online Schoolmarm very much likes Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on music, The Unanswered Question. She especially likes the way he explains musical modernism as having introduced, among other things, a striking chromatic ambiguity into composition. Take Chopin’s Etude in Thirds:

Are we in the major or minor? Or in the Phrygian mode? Is this music tonal or modal? Are we to infer ninth chords, or diminished sevenths?

This sort of ambiguity, Bernstein remarks, is intriguing – even exciting – in art forms like music and poetry.

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But SOS is here to tell you that being up in the air like this for extended periods of time does not work very well in the essay.

Certainly readers are willing to be confused or disoriented for awhile in reading essays – the writer might be drunk or dreaming or just mentally drifting at the beginning of an essay – but pretty quickly the form needs to find its dominant, its key, its voice, its mood, its argument. If it starts with an anecdote, it has to tell us why it starts with an anecdote, where that anecdote stands in relation to the subject around which the essay is organized… If it doesn’t do this sort of thing, it’s not really an essay — it’s a prose poem, maybe, but not an essay.

A glance at Wikipedia yields, among others, this definition of an essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. We can of course think of ways in which essayists can depart from this emphasis on steady focus and dominant subject matter; but SOS would suggest the nature as well as the strength of the essay as a distinct mode of writing involves its relative non-ambiguity. It tends to want to argue something clearly, or make you see what it’s like to be inside of a particular experience clearly. And even when we’ve got the second sort of essay – call it a narrative essay – that narrative is still, almost always, in the service of some sort of cultural or spiritual or political argument.

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One of the signs of a very bad essay is indeed an unpleasant interminable ambiguity. The writer doesn’t allow you to get a foothold in the writing. You’re not sure what she’s on about. What is she urging that you believe, or feel?

Where, for that matter, is she? It’s not that bad essays lack a voice; typically they have all too many voices, a sort of confused, insecure trying on of many tones, attitudes, and dialects.

You never know what key you’re in. The feeling grows upon you, as you read, that you are in an emotionally and intellectually muddled world; and since you have entered the essay for the dual pleasures of good writing and clarified perceptions, you are eventually put off by the essay, and you probably stop reading it.

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Carlin Romano’s recent essay about Christopher Hitchens exemplifies the failure of the form.

Its title – No One Left to Pray To? – poses a question that – like the essay that follows – seems to come from a person at once insecure about his hold on his subject and boastful about his superiority to it (the subject here being a human being, Christopher Hitchens). One of Hitchens’ books – the one about Bill Clinton – is titled No One Left to Lie To, and, as that title makes clear, it’s a strong polemic arguing that Clinton is so intense and inveterate a liar that eventually no one believes anything he says.

Romano’s title is a question rather than a statement – a move that ushers us in to the vagueness and timidity of his essay’s assertions. Hitchens may be dying and doesn’t believe in God, so … he has no one to pray to. Is that it? Okay. But why put the twist on his title in the form of a question? If your essay is going to be about how sad or strange or ironic it is that Hitchens is dying and, since he doesn’t believe in God, God won’t keep him from doing that — a not very generous thought on Romano’s part, but let’s go with it — then why not put the title in the affirmative? Why the weaselly question mark?

Or is Romano simply trying to be clever? Where is his conviction in this matter? We assume, from the title on, that Romano is a religious person. We’re prepared, having been signaled by this title, for an essay in which Romano will, let us say, lament the desperation and sterility of this atheist’s last days. But we’re not fully prepared, because the tentativeness of that question mark puts us someplace ambiguous.

First paragraph:

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

Are we being funny? Is this an effort at the folksy humor of the preacher, or is it the insouciant observation of a secular sophisticate? What’s the key?

As organs go, it’s long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can’t swallow me? You won’t swallow anything!

Since this last statement is about as funny as God saying to a woman with breast cancer You don’t enjoy breast feeding? You don’t even get a breast! the reader right away dismisses the possibility that this essay means to be somehow lighthearted and witty as well as serious. The vulgarity of the piece suggests that the writer wishes to be seen as… brash? We’re not sure.

For atheist apostle and recent memoirista Christopher Hitchens, who announced on June 30 that he’d cancel the rest of his Hitch-22 book tour to undergo chemotherapy on said cancerous organ, the argument for such personalized intelligent design presumably doesn’t hold. Hitch does recognize the role of vengeance and resentiment in believer/nonbeliever relations, but only in fueling institutions established by believers further down the Great Chain of Being. “Religion,” he wrote in God Is Not Great, “does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths.”

By this point the careful reader has stepped pretty far into that sense of reading unpleasant interminable ambiguity I described earlier. It’s not that the reader takes offense at any particular position in regard to Hitchens — she’s ready to read someone hating or pitying him or admiring or taking energetic issue with this or that position of his. It’s rather that the reader is beginning to take offense at being asked to remain within the prose world of a person whose writing is confusing rather than enlightening.

To be sure, there are many cutesy words and turns of phrase here (apostle; memoirista; said organ) that continue to make us play with the idea that this means to be a lighthearted and ultimately charitable take on the bad turn in Hitchens’ life; yet these words seem a strained effort at lightness, and when we get to the writer’s use of Hitch – a nickname – we wonder why he uses it. Yes, the Hitchens memoir (Is this supposed to be a book review?) titles itself with that name; yet Romano seems to use it in the way of an intimate. This comes across as pretentious, or at least as weird, especially since the essay is beginning to look unfriendly. Maybe.

We also note that Romano has misspelled ressentiment, which makes us wonder why he uses the French version of the word resentment. What did he think was gained by the French spelling? Since his subject is an erudite man who would not make this mistake, Romano’s foray into French makes him look inferior to Hitchens, whereas his rhetoric, to the extent that we can understand it, suggests a self-appraisal as superior. Romano also spells god is Not Great incorrectly.

One thing’s for sure—Hitch is not in great health. Indeed, he faces the possibility of not being at all if the chemo proves useless. Should believers pray for him, a man celebratedly insensitive to norms of politeness and acts of altruism?

Not being at all. Romano’s essay turns out to be a jig atop a grave-to-be.

At this point, the reader – this one at least – turns away from the prose in embarrassment.

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SOS has often said on this blog that bad writing is, among other things, writing that cannot help betraying things the writer clearly does not mean to betray to the reader. This is one of the things we mean by saying that good writing is about control.

It does Romano no good that he goes on, in his essay, to pretend a sort of even-handedness about his subject. He has betrayed his hatred. Nor is it the honestly and sometimes wittily proffered hatred of certain ideas and people for which Hitchens is notorious. It is the unpleasant inchoate passion of a writer who has not learned to master himself or his prose.