On ‘On’ in Essay Titles

The proposition that the preposition on is merely a locator in time or place seriously understates its historical use in essay and book titles in English-language Western literature. The use of on in an essay title is a writer’s assurance to a reader that the essay is, at least in part, an assay that aspires to leave the world a better place and the reader a better person, without having done anything to either. It is the promise of a writing that is on, about, or a consideration of something of substance in a work of art that leaves one wanting more, even as it apparently exhausts, or completely ignores, the subject about which it is ostensibly written. 

Certainly on has done and continues to do duty as an adverb and an adjective in other prose, but it was the essayist Hilaire Belloc who promoted it from preposition to proper noun as the title of his book On, a collection of essays published in 1923. This was an inevitable development from his earlier and amusing parodies of essay titles in collections such as On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (1908), On Everything (1909), On Anything (1910) and, deciding perhaps to pull his wide-ranging vision into sharper focus, On Something (1910). How he found time to write these and other books of essays when he wasn’t on the turps, clambering over mountains, fording rivers and sketching the sights on The Path to Rome (1902), attending Commons as the Liberal Member for South Salford (1906 to 1910), besides editing a number of London newspapers and magazines, is quite remarkable.

Words, like people, can sometimes stand in for something or someone else: on has been used as a synonym for other prepositions and prepositional phrases: about, for example, not to mention concerning, of and with regard to. These expressions will also be recognised as translations of the Latin preposition de. This can also mean “on” and, as with many English prepositions, justifies itself by being paired with a capable noun. In Latin, of course, such a noun is dressed as an ablative.

This takes me back to Cicero, who first prompted my interest in what I regard as the “pure form” of the essay as written, since Montaigne, in English by the English, the Americans, the Australians, the Canadians and New Zealanders: a meditation “on” a subject that promises, or at least suggests, a free-ranging account of such issues of concern or unconcern to the author as might add to the author’s own insight and delectation, as well as the reader’s entertainment and delight.

My favourite essays of Cicero include “De Amicitia” (“On Friendship”, 44 BC), “De Senectute” (“On Old Age”, 44 BC) and “De Officiis” (“On Duties”, 44 BC), this last essay later becoming the second book printed in Europe using movable metal type (the first being the Gutenberg Bible).

I read (and sometimes re-read) a good essay as much for its content as for the sheer delight and unalloyed pleasure in the felicitous phrasing of the words, the intoxicating flavours in the juxtaposition of images and the verbal adventurousness of the author’s astonishing use of language. Such an essay can place itself in form midway between poetry (which, appealing to a concentration of feeling, I read for pleasure) and prose (which, appealing to the need for information, I read once for that and only ever read again for what I might have forgotten). But add on, that understated, underappreciated two-lettered paragon of prepositional versatility to the title, and it becomes an appetiser to more richly-flavoured content: an essay says so much more when its title includes a preposition that proposes in an essay that disposes.

Cicero’s philosophical masterpiece, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil, 45 BC) even shorn of personal asides and period references, still retains contemporary relevance in today’s war-ravaged, terrorist-infested and supposedly-globalised world. “I cannot help wondering,” he wrote in Book I, iii, 10, “where the extravagant contempt for locally-made products that is now so fashionable actually comes from.” (Ego autem mirari [satis] non queo unde hoc sit tam insolens domesticarum rerum fastidium.) Never before and rarely since has any philosopher-essayist so effortlessly written on song for both his time and ours. And time he had, in plenty, to board a boat and escape the soldiers that he knew Mark Antony had sent to kill him, but he dithered and the dithering seemed to become a bizarre interest in acquiring material for the one essay that he would never get around to writing: “On Indecision” (“De Inconstabilitione”).

I know of no Greek in or around the Golden Age who wrote a single essay “On Democracy” in the city-state from which Plato wanted all poets banned (though he was happy for Athens to retain its slaves). Had the Greeks taken the essay form a lot more seriously than they did and developed it from the single example that Longinus gave them in “On the Sublime”, they might have had great fun writing essays with titles like “On Hypocrisy”, a Greek construct, to be sure.

It is easy to mock the Americans; indeed, they seem to invite it. Such a response, though, would seriously undervalue their historical contribution to the essay form. Between the two of them, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor, gave American letters the great writing the nation so sorely needed and that did so much to replenish the essay in its Old World form with New World material. That they both did this without once using my preferred preposition in any of the titles of their published essays, only makes their achievement all the more remarkable for me. Ironically, though Thoreau’s most famous essay was originally published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), that title did not last very long in popular reference and the essay has since generally been referred to, both in literature and in polite conversation, as On Walden Pond. On is clearly a preposition with attitude and amplitude that shamelessly takes its place in the titles of the best English-language essays. Indeed, on is now as attached to Walden Pond, as the Pond is to the nearby village of Concord, in Massachusetts. I first visited Walden Pond in 1978; it now attracts more than half a million visitors a year. And all because someone revised, and added on to, the title of an essay written by a transcendental philosopher and environmentalist.

Like all great essays, On Walden Pond bristles with “quotations”:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

and

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Despite the absence of on in the titles of two of Emerson’s essays, “Love” and “The Poet”, I thoroughly enjoyed (and occasionally re-read) them; the absence of this key preposition in the titles of the others, however, may well have hastened their relapse into the mere sermons they have since come to be regarded.

I had read a few of the many novels but none of the essays of Gore Vidal. So I owed it to myself to read the forty-seven essays in his United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993). Only one, “On Prettiness”, managed to include my preposition up front in its title. This essay reads exactly as we have often heard him speak: with confidence, allusiveness and a droll, acerbic wit. In almost every other paragraph there is a quotable one-liner. Sadly, none of the others read to me like essays so much as brief biographies of friends or distant relatives, or accounts of forgotten causes.

Alexander Pope’s “Essays” were, of course, poems which sometimes limped, like Pope himself, but which generally flowed in a stream of mesmerising pentameters in a delightful display of virtuosity as he asserted his superiority to John Dryden in lines that, whilst they will never be forgotten, are these days very rarely read: “One Science only will one Genius fit; / So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit.”

I cannot help thinking, though, that had both his “Essay on Criticism” and his “Essay on Man” been shorn of their didacticism and rendered in prose as “On Criticism” and “On Mankind” respectively, he would have been a lot more successful in vindicating “the ways of God” (and of Alexander Pope) to a much wider reading public, including atheists.

Despite being blind in one eye, no other essay writer has been able to focus such a searching binocular vision on the foibles, fantasies and frenetic business of mankind whilst, at the same time, celebrating our gloriously achieved past in the promised and promising present of humanity, whilst projecting unbounded optimism into his and his every reader’s future with every “loose sally”, as Samuel Johnson. His essays in the Rambler do not have titles and, like the series in the Idler, are simply numbered. Despite this, I couldn’t help noticing that the preposition on managed to maintain a pervasive presence in ghostly if unstated titles because I felt that these essays read as though they were actually “on” something.

Johnson is one of the few English essayists whose work, like great poetry, invites re-reading, for poetry is what his prose seems to aspire to and almost resembles. As the Scottish essayist Alexander Smith would later observe in “On the Writing of Essays”, “the essayist is a kind of poet in prose”, and Johnson was certainly that. By contrast, paradoxically, I have always found his poetry quite pedestrian. Indeed, I have never ceased wondering why someone with such impeccable taste when it came to writing prose could lose it completely when writing poetry.

It is now sixty years since my high school English teacher, Jack Qua, introduced me to the English essayists Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Hilaire Belloc and the late-flowering Charles Lamb. Just a few and just a little of these few, but I never forgot them, Lamb especially:

There is no science in their pretensions to which mankind are more apt to commit grievous mistakes, than in the supposed very obvious one of physiognomy

—he wrote in “On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity”. A vegan long before it became fashionable, Charles Lamb made his lifestyle commitment quite clear in the opening sentence of his essay “On the Immoderate Indulgence of the Pleasure of the Palate”: “We have a theory, that animal food is neither wholesome nor natural to man.”

I did not then know that he had died at a relatively young fifty-nine of a streptococcal infection, though no one would have known what that was at the time. But I did know that he, like the others, was a real essayist writing in and extending a tradition. Whatever I was going to do with my life, I was determined it would be in an occupation that had a significant and ongoing tradition and was also open to contributions.

When G.K. Chesterton adds on to an essay title, it seems to prompt him to focus on the traditional essay form (and my reading pleasure). Take “On Lying in Bed” (1909):

Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom.

And, from “On Abolishing Sunday” (1930):

The report that the Bolshevist Government had abolished Sunday might be read in several ways … it was highly significant of a universal human need that the three great cosmopolitan communions, which all disagreed about the choice of a sacred day, all agreed in having one.

In my sampling of other Chesterton essays, I particularly liked “On America” (1930) and “On Turnpikes and Medievalism” (1933). In almost all the remaining pieces, however, he neglected to preface titles with the preposition on and so, inevitably, they read like reportage, potted biographies and sad short stories. They aren’t really essays, either as Cicero invented them in antiquity, as Montaigne reshaped them for post-Renaissance Europe, or as Samuel Johnson defined them for the modern age and us in his very own Dictionary of the English Language as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition”.

America has now largely replaced England as the cultural icon of choice to be slavishly imitated and unthinkingly deferred to at all levels of Australian society. The few modern Australian essayists who have a distinctly Australian focus on a life of the mind and imagination in the laid-back, resource-rich and sun-drenched lifestyle of this most magnificent of island continents, are invariably surrounded with a silence from dismissive, diminutive and decidedly jealous peers that is as deafening as the several oceans that border our extensive shoreline are loud.

The “Best Australian Essays” published annually in Melbourne are rarely on anything at all.  As a condition for inclusion, every item selected must have been previously published elsewhere. This might explain why the contributions tend to read, in their predictable and politically correct uniformity, as tedious tales of confected urbanity, self-conscious lunch-hour vignettes, character assassination dressed up as political commentary, or simple stories of personal or community suffering that try hard to appear not to be trying at all. So a well-written and elegant essay that is a meditation on nothing in particular but everything in general that has never been published anywhere else would not even be considered. This is cultural cringe—and the term was invented by an Australian—at its most bizarre.

Nevertheless, most contemporary Australian essayists will be familiar with the work of perhaps the best essayist of the first half of twentieth-century Australian letters: Walter Murdoch. This extraordinary fellow was onto on in all its ontological nuances. Take, for example, his essay “On Sitting Still”, and its opening two sentences:

No new and inspired religion has come to us from the United States for over a fortnight. This is very disquieting; if there is one thing we thought we could depend on, it was the steady, uninterrupted flow of American religions.

And this, from his essay “On Having Enemies”:

To say that a man has had no enemies is as much as to say that he has consistently shirked his duty. It is to accuse him of all sorts of cowardly compromises and mean capitulations.

Compared with that, most essay writing by living Australians seems to me to be quite insipid, sclerotic and generally without taste, wit, or even a soupçon of humour. Even jocose pathos is beyond them. It’s pathetic. I had once thought of offering to help, but what could I do? Not only do they despise the use of my favourite preposition in essay titles, but they have neutered that once proudly-transitive verb enjoy and turned it into an intransitive eunuch. Where is the pleasure in that?

I have to resist the temptation to quote extensively from the work of the best contemporary Australian essayists (mostly women), whilst the need to keep this essay both readable and interesting dissuades me from giving examples of the work of the rest (mostly men). That still leaves me free to say that, to my taste, Charmian Clift is easily the best Australian essayist writing in the second half of the twentieth century. She wrote on and not just about and with a lightness of touch that belied the weight of sentiment and depth of significance of the numerous weekly essays that she wrote for the (then very readable) Sydney Morning Herald from November 1964 to July 1969. In itself, this was a major achievement for any Australian essayist; that she did it within the 1200-word limit imposed by the editor makes it all the more remarkable.

In “On Living on Love Alone” she meditates on the foolishness that love is all that’s needed to make a marriage last, when marrying without love is even more foolish:

I think that marriage is harder than it has ever been, more risky than it has ever been, more challenging than it has ever been. Risk and challenge are always inherent in creative effort, and marriage these days must depend more and more on real creative effort than in the days when its rules were fixed and inflexible.

In “On Being a Home-Grown Migrant” she considers, on returning to Australia after living for fifteen years overseas, how both she and the Australia she was born in had changed and whether she and the country can re-establish the links needed for her creative growth in the nation’s development. And after reading “On Being Middle-Aged”, I reflected that this essay, probably typed-up off the “top of her head” in less than sixty minutes, was something that I could never have hoped to emulate, had I tried for sixty years:

I often think that middle-aged people have two lives, the one they’ve lived, and a parallel life, as it were, that walks around with them like a cast shadow and lies down with them when they go to sleep, and this is the life they might have lived if they had made different choices in that time when time was so abundant and the choices were so many.

This essay is so artfully artless and disarmingly simple that it left me almost breathless in admiration. She recounts how, as a teenage girl in a women’s change room, she had seen a naked middle-aged woman and been appalled at the sight of a form she knew she would one day assume; she then recalls how many years later, and then at about the same age as that woman, she had compared her gnarled and worn hands with those of her seventeen-year-old daughter. These and other comparisons illuminate an ageing process that she both abhors and yet embraces, and from which and without labouring any points, she extracts an understated lesson for herself.

There are no clever one-liners, no Ciceronian flourishes, no elaborate puns, no classical allusions and no polysyllabic excrescences: nothing to suggest that she is trying to upstage other essayists or impress her readers. And because I knew, instinctively, that this was the work of a master, I twice re-read “On Being Middle-Aged” just to savour the pleasure of her deftness of touch, her assured use of imagery and her sense of her own humanity being weighed in the balance against love, family and the good life. The scales wobble and waver, but confirm the equilibrium. This is the essay as a work of art, as feeling written up in intellect without being written down for common understanding: a piece of writing that keeps the emotions grounded, even as it elevates aspirations whilst proceeding from that simple preposition in a title to the body of an essay that describes what we all hope to live up to, on, through or beyond.

It was a joy to read her essays, all for the first time, most with on in the title and very few forgettable: master works such as “On Turning Slightly Sepia” (in memories and photographs), “Read Any Good Books Lately?” (on refusing to read Montaigne), “On Trouble in Lotus Land” (on why having it so good or bad is good and bad), “On Tick and Tock” (on never having worn a watch in her life) and “On England, My England” (on people of fond remembrance):

On the icy road to Stratford, with the cars waltzing behind a snowplough or caught in drifts by the side of the road, they waved and laughed and stopped to help each other and me too, and I have never met such courtesy on the roads before or since.

Charmian Clift is both the people’s essayist and the essayist’s essayist and earns the approbation of everyone who reads her for the easy elegance, assured versatility and wry humour her work contains.

It is very easy these days for writers (and especially male writers) to lapse into a facile, self-referencing and onanistic postmodernism in prose pieces described as essays but which are really articles about this, that and sometimes the other, political diatribes, wholesale whinges, entitlement complaints, nepotistic biographies, paeans to political agendas, or resentful rewritings of recent history. In this essay, I have recalled some of the many essays titled as I like them titled and written as masters of the genre prefer. This process has also forced me to concede what has long been obvious to better-informed readers than me: that the essay is a self-contained literary form as complex in its deceptive simplicity and as compelling in its effortless persuasiveness as any poem, play, novel and short story can be and, in the hands of a master, is.

Like the Chopin cadence that in prospect could never have been predicted but in retrospect sounds utterly inevitable, a good essay, an original, traditional, prepositionally-prefaced-in-its-title essay, may seem initially to meander aimlessly through the memories, associations and feelings of an author, but yet read, in an apparently effortless but gloriously finessed peroration, as a distillation of wisdom that, in a summary of original gleanings, sees connections between a past that can’t be changed and a present that can be, between desired ideals and achievable realities.

If its extensive history endorses the essay with the status of tradition; if the attention given it by contemporary writers confirms its ongoing relevance and the vitality of the form proves it a valid vehicle for future exploration of individual contemplation, then the essay as a literary artefact has a future just as assured as its past is celebrated.

In this necessarily brief survey of my limited reading of the world’s best essays in English titled with my preferred preposition, I will have ignored many that are always adored, and noticed several that may not be. Here, I can only plead ignorance and suggest that I have a lot more reading to do; but then, don’t we all?

I must also admit that I have very little reading knowledge of Canadian or New Zealand poetry, novels, plays or essays. A positive take on such ignorance is that I can look forward to the pleasure of reading the essays of Margaret Atwood in Canada and those of C.K. Stead in New Zealand, provided I find that they use my preferred preposition in their essay titles. If they also allow this preposition its benign influence on composition and its role in the certification of essay quality, then this could be quite a revelation for me.