Further days had me offsider to Tony, our short-sighted electrical engineer, with whom I connected the hundreds of wires that plunged 140 feet from our tower’s summit to their matching colours on the ground. Matching, stripping, crimping the connectors, the two of us enthused about the films of Ingmar Bergman, took a liking to each other – crusty Englishman and ex-student anarchist – as the cataract of coaxials and gaily coloured PVC-coated cables cascaded about us.

Our network of workshops, with their mezzanines, clerestories and outbuildings, were hived with outlandish bric-a-brac to suit the vivid miscellany of our tasks. Bits of antique cyclotron were shelved with torpedoes and naval shellcasings from World War II. In a room designated the ‘Switch Room’ stood a half-barrel into which perhaps 2000 jumbo tubes of Araldite had been squeezed in order to provide a stable anchorage for the equipment’s six-feet-high switch. Elsewhere was a sandblasting enclosure within which technicians, costumed like deep-sea divers, hosed sand at rusty steel until it gleamed like tinfoil.

Of what use to post-quark physics were 1940s torpedoes, I wondered, cheerfully trusting that my technician workmates, in their overalls and hardhats, would find one. For they were genial fellows, alive at that vital edge where intellect and materials try each other, if not this way, then that way.

A job outlandish and everyday. Yet those workshops, with their apparatus, bizarrerie and miscellaneous business, strike me as an apt metaphor for the cave-of-making from which essays proceed, crucibles in which the ordinary and the unusual, the pressing and the dreamy improvisation, were tried, one with another, one against another, each against what we believed we knew. In essay, as it were.

If the essayist is an alert, curious technician, then some are methodical and forensic in their workmanship: John Stuart Mill on liberty; Michel Montaigne and Francis Bacon on the dimensions of human character, Raimond Gaita on political trust. Others make of the essay a wild, lucid thing: think of D.H. Lawrence on democracy or the flowers of Tuscany.

But here’s the point. Whether from Montaigne or Lawrence, essays exist at that vital crossover of intellect and the close-to-hand. We call this crossover interest, which itself is the subject of two lateral-minded verse essays by Les Murray, while the splendid Quarterly Essays from Black Inc. show how the individual interest and that distinct creature, the public interest, hold conversation with each other. Essays may, on occasion, spit chips or express fear and loathing, but must, in the first instance, be hooked to this positive terminal, interest, thought’s vital engagement with what might go with what.

In my own essay practice, I favour this idea of ‘The Outlandish Workshop’ as the place where mental leftovers and new perspectives do their try-outs and try-ons.

So here on a bench, for instance, lies a jobbing book review I once wrote on poet X. One of its phrases, an intimation that did not quite rise to insight, has bothered me to give it an elaboration more attentive, more shapely than the negligent commentary I accorded it at the time. For the essay insists on the shaping of attention. And here on a neighbour bench lies an old travel diary I kept while in Europe. My entry on the medieval town of Assisi is the immature note-taking of a writer still coming into voice. The visit had charged my mind, not so much with subject matter but with the presentiment of a subject: an inchoate substance, tangled in Nietszche, to do with how the town’s architecture expressed vivid temporal and spiritual tensions in the medieval psyche. For a few years, this unresolved stuff has hung about; now it presses to be worked through, to be matched, bared, crimped with connectors, turned into circuitry. For the shaping of attention is the finding of circuitry.

On a third bench glint a scatter of thoughts from my long practice as a maker of model ships. Suddenly, these thoughts have been polarised by an elaborating recognition: ‘to make models is to usurp the tyranny of scale.’ Match and connect, and look how the essay carries that recognition to its own small but distinct place in the sum of observations on human behaviour. For the essay insists on its own ground, not a share-farm with the preconceived.

Well, these three essays are long since dealt with. But while I worked on each, I was aware of giving to the essay a greater degree of diligence, of shaping and fiddling, than I might have done were I composing a weekly sermon, lecture or newspaper column. Priest, lecturer, journalist must all meet their deadlines. In the long run, who avoids them? But in my notion of the essay, it aims not to meet but to detour around deadline, to outwit that ‘use-by’ pressure placed upon its material by an originating occasion. In this, we know the essay to be an art, its finesse determined by how lucid, how shapely and, above all, how just, the essayist’s wit can make it.

How, then, does the essay differ from the poem, the drama, the novel, all of which might aim to outwit deadlines in this manner?

My guess is this. Being in origin involved with public ritual, poetry and drama found themselves answerable to ‘the gods’, however one wishes to imagine such lofty surveillance. These two literary arts are therefore, in the first instance, conscious of being watched, and this fact makes poets and dramatists self-conscious with respect to the form and the formality of their utterance. Poetry and drama evolve, create the story of their evolution, which they tell in terms of the changes in form, the shifts in how much and what kind of formality should attend them. The novel, that eighteenth-century latecomer, partakes of this self-consciousness, dipping as it does into the gene pools of narrative verse, dramatic spectacle and historical annal for its characteristics. And the gods are ambivalent in how they talk of the poem, drama or novel. One will speak of the work’s value, another of its validity. This distinction is one between the inherent attractiveness of the communication and the contextual pressure on its manner-of-saying. ‘Mr Gould, your poem is true and compelling, but you can’t write that kind of poem any more because of what has been done to the paradigm’, might sum up both sides of the argument. The Charm versus the Rage.

Has the essay as a literary form largely escaped the Rage? I think so, and this may be because it can never escape reliance on the claim of its substance upon the curiosity of the reader. Perhaps the ideal essay’s nearest relative in human utterance is conversation. At first glance, this might seem odd, since the essay presents the one voice. But if the viewpoint is truly alive to its subject – Raimond Gaita on political trust, say, or G.K. Chesterton in his wide-awake defence of nonsense – a topic will be opened to suggest, not the voicing but the attendance of other viewpoints, without loss to the given viewpoint. In that sense, the essay is the instrument of liberal discourse, wary of the harangue (and the harangue’s disguises) because it is conscious of itself as a try-out, as reasoning and feeling in the process of finding themselves. One notes how frequently aphorism and proverb appear in the fabric of an essay, verbal dynabolts on which to hang or clinch argument. ‘A man that studies revenge keeps his wounds green that would otherwise mend,’ Bacon tells us in his short essay ‘Of Revenge’, while Gaita, deflating the vaunt of radio shock-jock types, reminds us (from Maynard Keynes) of ‘the man who had his ear so close to the ground he could no longer hear what an upright man was saying’.

You have allowed me my metaphor of the outlandish workshop as the place from which essays proceed. Permit me to extend it a little further. For here is Max Beerbohm pausing in the light of the workshop’s roll-a-door to exclaim, ‘You know, Macbeth is not about ambition at all! It is actually a play about bad hosts’, then hurrying to his bench that he might elaborate this fragile vagary into his charmed, incisive essay that divides the human psyche into two archetypes who either give hospitality or receive it. In the sunlight beyond him, sitting together below an ancient tree with views across an Arcadian landscape, I discern Hilaire Belloc and Les Murray. Their meditations are distinct, but kindred, the Englishman contemplating the mowing of a field with all its atavistic skills and watchful manners, the Australian trying out his distinctions between the Boeotian Way and the Athenian Way for the luminous essay that will be titled ‘On Sitting Back and Thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’.

Having neglected the great women essayists, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Susan Sontag, let me look over the shoulder of Woolf as she pens her tribute to Joseph Conrad on the occasion of his death in 1924:

Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival long years ago, to take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the country, out of earshot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses so that for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke English with a strong foreign accent.

Look how exact for Conrad Virginia Woolf’s word ‘guest’ is, how concisely, effectively, she conjures the presence of the dead novelist. Here is the essay rising to an occasion, creating a resilient presence for occasion. Utterly dissimilar were the kinds of experience from which Conrad and Woolf crafted their fiction. Yet here, putting aside difference, is the magnanimity one generation of artists feels it must pay to the passing of another if it is to feel free, if it is to feel whole. Each time I reread this passage, I am moved by its generosity and the care with which presence is evoked, this homage of one great artist to another, the essay trying the images, emotions, recollections perhaps, that present themselves at the bench, on the occasion, inside the outlandish workshop.