November 29, 2010 Issue

John Updike said that writing criticism is to writing fiction as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. This week in the magazine, two of my favorite critics, Peter Schjeldahl and James Wood, depart the shoreline and head for deeper water, not by writing fiction, but by writing something even more difficult – a piece of factual writing. The two pieces are quite different in content. But it’s their form that interests me. How do Schjeldahl and Wood – both masters of the review – fare when they try their hand at something more extensive?

Schjeldahl’s “The Flip Side” is about his attendance at a meeting of experts to examine the condition of the oak panels behind the six hundred year old Ghent Alterpiece. The painter at the centre of his piece is Jan van Eyck. Wood’s “The Fun Stuff” is about his love of rock drumming. The drummer at the centre of his piece is Keith Moon. Schjeldahl’s story wastes no time getting started. He plunges right in with “Several of the world’s top experts in the conservation of very old wood covered with very old paint met recently in a windowless, cramped room of the St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium.” I confess I’m a sucker for articles that start with meetings, whether they’re parties (e.g., John Seabrook’s “Ruffled Feathers,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2006), presentations (e.g., Arthur Lubow’s “This Vodka Has Legs,” The New Yorker, September 12, 1994), get-togethers at a bar (e.g., Tad Friend’s “Blue-Collar Gold,” The New Yorker, July 10 & 17, 2006), etc. Instantly, my curiosity is aroused: Whoa! What goes on here? That was exactly my response to Schjeldahl’s opening in “The Flip Side.” Whereas, it took me longer to get into Wood’s “The Fun Stuff.” He eases into his story with a tracing of his roots in “traditional musical education.”

Schjeldahl also does something else early in his piece to juice reader interest. He unfurls this gorgeous descriptive passage that damn near took my breath away: “But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.” That “liquid radiance” is amazing! Interestingly, Wood almost matches it in his piece when he says of Moon’s drumming: “But he needed all those drums, as a flute needs all its stops or a harp its strings, so that his tremendous bubbling cascades, his liquid journeys, could be voiced.”

Describing something visual, like a painting, is, I think, easier than describing something aural, like rock music. But the multi-paneled Ghent Alterpiece, “a six-hinged polyptych, measuring twelve feet high by seventeen feet wide,” is no ordinary artwork. Schjeldahl takes his time and clearly describes each panel, at times laying on exquisite word paint such as “At the far left and right stand Adam and Eve, naked and melancholy, presented like statues in narrow niches but naturalistically vibrant with carnal candor.” Wood’s drumming descriptions are fine – almost as good as Whitney Balliett’s magnificent drum writings: see, for example, Balliett's great profile of Elvin Jones, “A Walk to the Park,” The New Yorker, May 18, 1968. Here is Wood on the complexity of Keith Moon-style drumming:

In addition to demonstrating intricate cymbal work, Moon is constantly flicking off little triplets (sometimes on the toms, but sometimes with his feet, by playing the two bass drums together), and doing double-stroke rolls (a method by which, essentially, you bounce the sticks on the drum to get them to strike faster notes) and irregular flams on the snare drum (a flam involves hitting the drum with the two sticks not simultaneously but slightly staggered, and results in a sound more like ‘blat’ than ‘that’).

Compare this with Balliett on Elvin Jones:

Then Jones took off. He began with heavy rimshots on the snare, which split notes and split them again, then broke into swaying, grandiose strokes on his ride cymbals, accompanied by lightning triplets and off-beat single-notes on the bass drum. Switching patterns, he moved his right hand between his big and small tomtoms in a faster and faster arc while his left hand roared through geometrical snare-drum figures and his high-hat rattled and shivered. He switched patterns again and settled down on his snare with sharp, flat strokes, spaced regularly and then irregularly. He varied this scheme incessantly, gradually bringing in bass-drum beats and big tomtom booms. Cymbals exploded like flushed birds. Jones had passed beyond a mere drum solo. He was playing with ear-splitting loudness, and what he was doing had become an enormous rolling ball of abstract sound, divorced from music, from reality, from flesh and bone. It trampled traditional order and replaced it with unknown order. It delighted the mind and hammered at the guts. Jones waded through his cymbals again and went into a deliberate, alternately running and limping fussilade between his snare and tomtoms that rose an inch or two higher in volume. Suddenly he was finished. Farrell played the theme and Jones slid into a long, downhill coda that was a variation on the close of his solo, paused, and came down with a crash on his cymbals and bass drum.

How I love that “Cymbals exploded like flushed birds.” One of the main differences between Wood’s description and Balliett’s is that Balliett’s is much more rhythmical. Of course, Balliett had the advantage of actually seeing Jones play in person. But Wood’s piece does contain one astonishing line that perhaps even Balliett wouldn’t have thought of. I’m referring to the part where Wood says, “For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.” This to me is a revelation: Wood wants to write Keith Moon-style. He’s dropped hints about his governing aesthetic before – in his piece on “Anna Karenina” (“At Home In The World,” The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), for example, where he writes admiringly of Tolstoy, calls him “a beast of instinct who can outrun the nervous zoologists of form,” and says he's “the great anti-formalist.” Does that not describe Keith Moon to a T? In his lavish appreciation of Henry Green’s writing (see “Henry Green’s England,” included in Wood’s book The Irresponsible Self, 2005), Wood says, “His [Green’s] stylistic principle is the Joycean run-on.” At one point in “Henry Green’s England,” he quotes a sentence by Green and says, “This fast, largely unpunctuated welter intensifies each word even as it seems to throw out the words as they are speedily consumed.” Now, almost everywhere I look in Wood’s writings, I see corroboration: Moon is the key to Wood’s aesthetic.