[...] The newspaper column is too finished, too regular; it is an easily digested piece. The essay of the kind that I have long enjoyed reading-as perfected by, say, Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Orwell or E.B. White-has all but disappeared from modern English. Anyone with an argument of more than 1,000 words is called an essayist-which is a shame given that, at its best, the essay strives for the literary permanence of a poem or novel and, I think, concerns the search for a personal voice. For Montaigne the essay was a philosophical form-amorphous, reflective, digressive and informed by self-revelation. Above all, it was personal and confidential. And he was writing not because he was commissioned but because he felt compelled to do so. His essays were ends in themselves. Hazlitt somewhere likens the idea of the essayist's role to that of a traveler embarking upon a long journey, the destination of which is uncertain. It is something like that for an essayist ... the idea of starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely unexpected. The word essai, in French, means an attempt, which captures the tentative nature of the form, a questing for knowledge. In this sense, the best essayists are those who have the gift of digression, those who can surprise the reader and themselves, who are able to luxuriate in language and to elaborate and inflate any chosen subject. One of the frustrations of being a writer in Britain, at the moment, is that there are very few places where you can publish essays which are not, in effect, extended book reviews. There is the monthly magazine Prospect, which in eclecticism, range and style recalls the defunct Encounter, and very little else. Few publications offer space for long, discursive essays.

JOHNSON: There was a horrible piece I wrote in 1968 praising the student revolution. I'd gone to Paris to cover the Vietnam talks and then in the middle of this the students exploded, for no reason at all, and this became the story. Everyone forgot about Vietnam. It was very exciting, of course, and I fell for it and wrote a piece, which was a kind of imitation of The Communist Manifesto saying that a new specter was haunting Europe, a specter of students. It went down very well—that wasn't the problem. I realized I'd made a huge error of judgment when, in the same week, no less than four very rich men congratulated me on it.

LAPHAM: Maybe I'd try to tell the wonderful story of Robert Benchley, who was given an examination at Harvard when he was in law school. He hadn't been to a single class in his entire year and was asked to discuss the fishing rights off the Grand Bank from the point of view of the French, the British and the Americans. It was a three-hour exam. Benchley's opening sentence was to the effect that he never knew what the French position was, he never wanted to know what the British position was and he didn't care what the American position was. He would, however, like to discuss the question from the point of view of the fish. Then follows a long conversation between a cod and a flounder as to whether it's better to be fried by the French or boiled by the British.