Frog

Frog: and Other Essays is a collection of seven personal essays by Anne Fadiman. The essays range across subjects including household pets, obsolete printers, Romantic-era literary biography, the politics of English pronouns, pandemic-era teaching, Antarctic exploration, and the legacy of a student killed in a car accident.

The title essay, "Frog," opens with the disclosure that a dead frog spent six years in the family freezer. Fadiman and her husband, George, placed their pet frog Bunky in a Ziploc bag after his death, intending to bury him when their grown children, Susannah and Henry, were both home. Bunky was an accidental pet, a tadpole kit left by a grandmother for Susannah and later coveted by Henry. The adult frog was mostly ignored by everyone except George, who fed him and cleaned his aquarium. Fadiman admits she never researched Bunky's species until a student casually identified him as an African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). She ranks the family's pets by ease of care and by love generated, with Bunky at the top of the first list and the bottom of the second. Her deepest regret is that Bunky's aquarium was far too small; she researched the problem extensively but overthought every detail and never bought a larger tank. When Bunky died at sixteen or seventeen with his head stuck in a polyresin castle, Fadiman grieved not from deep affection but from guilt. Six years passed before she and George finally buried him under the weeping cherry tree. George offered a brief eulogy, and Fadiman said, "I'm sorry, Bunky" (25).

"The Oakling and the Oak" examines the life of Hartley Coleridge, eldest son of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Fadiman calls S.T.C. to avoid granting the father sole ownership of the surname. The title alludes to the proverb that a young oak withers beneath a great one, and Fadiman uses the metaphor to explore how a father's genius and neglect crushed a child's promise. She traces Hartley's arc from the child who inspired some of the greatest English poems, including "Frost at Midnight," to the man universally pitied as a failure. S.T.C.'s adoration of his infant son quickly gave way to emotional absence: He decamped for Germany when Hartley was two and later left for two and a half years in Malta, leaving Robert Southey, Hartley's uncle, to raise the children. Fadiman argues that S.T.C.'s hectoring letters to the young Hartley cataloged faults that were projections of the father's own failings. At Oxford, Hartley dazzled his peers but began drinking after failing to win a poetry prize. He earned a fellowship at Oriel College, only to lose it for intemperance. Fadiman notes that Hartley's second-class degree surpassed the academic records of S.T.C., Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, all of whom dropped out or were expelled. Father and son last saw each other in London in 1822; twelve years of separation followed. S.T.C. died in 1834, and Hartley lived out his remaining years in the Lake District, pouring his regrets into sonnets. After Hartley died at fifty-two, his brother Derwent discovered far more finished work than anyone expected. Fadiman connects the story to her own experience as an oakling, the daughter of the critic Clifton Fadiman.

In "My Old Printer," Fadiman recounts her decades-long attachment to an HP LaserJet Series II purchased in 1987 for $1,795 to help her pitch stories to The New Yorker. She became devoted to Cartridge P, a font cartridge containing a particular iteration of Times Roman that no other printer could replicate. As the printer aged, only one local technician, Scott, was willing to repair it. When Scott declared the printer needed a prohibitively expensive part, Fadiman bought a reconditioned LaserJet II on eBay and convinced herself it was the same machine. She traces a chain of obsolescence: The LaserJet required Windows XP, the last version of Windows that could run DOS (Disk Operating System), an older operating system needed for WordPerfect for DOS, which was necessary for Cartridge P. She reflects that her generation clings to obsolete equipment because they fear being discontinued themselves.

"All My Pronouns" traces Fadiman's evolving relationship with the singular they. She opens with the story of Mae, a former advisee who transitioned during college from they/them to she/her pronouns. Fadiman establishes herself as a prescriptivist raised by parents who treated proper English as a near-sacred discipline. She distinguishes between the nonbinary identity pronoun and the generic gender-neutral usage of the singular they. She recounts a pivotal classroom moment in which a student named Luna called prescriptivism linguistically void and part of an apparatus of oppression. Fadiman lay awake that night before realizing that you underwent the same evolution she fears for they, shifting from exclusively plural to both singular and plural while retaining its plural verb. She presents ten arguments favoring the singular they and sorts its uses into five categories, placing herself in Category 3. The essay ends with Fadiman writing about a black bear using the singular they for the first time in her own prose and closing with the observation that language changes.

"Screen Share" documents Fadiman's spring 2020 semester teaching Writing about Oneself over Zoom after Yale closed its campus. She chronicles her twelve students' pandemic lives: canceled internships, family illness, and small triumphs. Victor, a former student who joined the class via Zoom, lost his father to Covid-19 at Elmhurst Hospital. Fadiman adjusted her teaching with structured check-ins, PowerPoint slides, and musical codas performed by George and Henry. Despite universal Pass/Fail grading, every student attended every class and submitted every assignment. On the last day, Fadiman misses the sounds and physical proximity of the seminar room but finds that the crackle of last-day energy still jumps from rectangle to rectangle.

"South Polar Times" recounts the history of The South Polar Times (S.P.T.), a handmade illustrated magazine produced during Robert Falcon Scott's two Antarctic expeditions (1901-04 and 1910-13) to combat the despair of four months of polar darkness. Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's third lieutenant, edited the first issues; Louis Bernacchi, a Tasmanian physicist, succeeded him for three; and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, an assistant zoologist, became the third editor. Fadiman devotes particular attention to Edward Wilson, the expedition's artist and assistant surgeon, whose watercolors she calls the magazine's soul. The essay traces the expeditions to the unspoken grief of the final issue: Cherry-Garrard published it while knowing that Scott, Wilson, and three companions had died returning from the South Pole, yet the issue made no mention of their deaths. Cherry-Garrard withheld this last issue from publication for nearly a century.

The final essay, "Yes to Everything," pays tribute to Marina Keegan, a former student who challenged a visiting novelist's pessimism about literary careers and declared she would be a writer "with my life" (165). Fadiman describes Marina's talent and determination, then recounts her death five days after graduating magna cum laude, when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel. Marina's parents embraced the boyfriend and requested no charges be filed. Her commencement essay was read by more than a million people, and a posthumous collection compiled by Fadiman and Marina's parents, The Opposite of Loneliness, became a New York Times bestseller. Fadiman closes with an anecdote about a sailing race Marina entered at fourteen in forty-knot winds: Every other junior sailor dropped out, but Marina capsized repeatedly and finished the race with bloody hands, to incredulous applause.