Interesting Emendations: Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table"

Here are two variations of the same passage. One is from Michael Ondaatje’s short story “The Cat’s Table,” which appeared in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. The other is from his novel of the same name. Just from looking at their composition, can you tell which one is the New Yorker version?

Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

Out on the street, you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a narrow, vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

The two passages differ in three ways: (1) one has a comma after “street,” the other one doesn’t; (2) in one, the scissors are described as “vicious”; in the other, they are described as “narrow, vicious”; (3) one says “the possibility of any further hair”; the other simply says “the possibility of hair.”

Of the three differences, the most telling, in terms of identifying the New Yorker version, is the deletion of the extraneous “any further” in the second passage. The New Yorker consistently follows the principles set out in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, chief amongst which is “Omit needless words.” The second passage is from The New Yorker.

Here from the same sources are two more extracts for comparison:

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, the throat-catching smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut, and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

Note the elimination of the parenthesis in the second passage, and the insertion of “throat-catching” immediately before “smell.” The second version strikes me as more concise and, as Strunk & White would say, definite. It’s my favorite passage in the short story. I was surprised to see it altered in the novel.

The Cat’s Table contains many such differences. In almost every instance, I prefer the New Yorker version. I wonder why Ondaatje didn’t use the New Yorker edits in his novel.

Credit: The above portrait of Michael Ondaatje is by Patrick Long; it appears in The New Yorker, June 4, 2007, as an illustration for Louis Menand’s “The Aesthete.”

Interesting Emendations: A. J. Liebling's "Normandy Revisited"

I’ve just finished reading A. J. Liebling’s 1958 memoir Normandy Revisited. It’s a delicious layer cake of a book. The first layer is Liebling’s recollection of his 1926 sojourn in Lower Normandy, when he was twenty-two. The country gripped him, he says, because “it was the first foreign land I had traveled in alone.” The second layer is his memory of passing through the same region eighteen years later when, as a reporter for The New Yorker, he covered the Allied invasion. About that time, he says, Normandy had a dual character – “nasty going up front, and lovely, fat tranquil farming country a couple of miles back, undisturbed by enemy aviation or artillery.” And the third layer is his account of his 1955 return to Normandy to make sure that, as he says, the events his memories represent “were real.” These layers are so saturated in over-lapping detail that they often blend; many passages contain rich mixtures of all three.

One of my favorite scenes in Normandy Revisited occurs in the chapter titled “The Hounds with Sad Voices,” in which Liebling searches for and eventually finds a château, where he and other members of the press stayed for a week after the Allied troops broke through the German lines. I enjoy descriptions of house interiors. A detailed description of a room, it seems to me, goes a long way towards describing the life lived in it. Liebling’s description of his recollection of the baroque chateau’s interior is a beauty:

This family had enjoyed another period of prosperity in a more recent era, to judge from the vestiges of the chic of the early Third Republic that cluttered the house, like props for the production of a dramatic version of Bel-Ami. There were trophies of African spears and Arab scimitars on the walls, which were papered with an imitation of brocade, and faded green plush portieres drooped crazily from valences askew. Notably there was a stuffed leopard, its lips pulled back in a savage snarl from teeth that were no longer present. Age affects the grip even of plaster gums. The background of the leopard’s rosettes had faded to the color of bad California white wine. Most of the furniture was crank and perilous to sit upon.

As the above extract shows, Liebling had a splendid eye for detail. I love that “faded green plush portieres drooped crazily from valences askew.” Interestingly, there’s another version of this passage. Normandy Revisited is composed mostly of articles written for The New Yorker. In an exquisite piece called “Revisited Normandy: In Quest of a Gray Granite House” (The New Yorker, November 16, 1957), Liebling provides the following description:

The family owning this house, though, had enjoyed another, later period of prosperity, to judge by the vestiges of early Third Republic chic that cluttered the place, like props for a dramatic version of “Bel-Ami.” There were trophies – African spears and Arab scimitars and Tuareg shields – hanging on the walls, which were covered with a paper imitation of brocade, and faded green plush draperies drooped crazily from valences that formed St. Andrew’s crosses against the window frames. Notably, there was a stuffed leopard, its lips pulled back in a savage snarl from teeth no longer present. The field of the leopard’s rosettes had faded to the color of bad California white wine. Most of the furniture was cranky and perilous.

Compare the book’s “to judge from the vestiges of the chic of the early Third Republic” with the magazine’s slightly tighter “to judge by the vestiges of early Third Republic chic.” Compare also the book’s “like props for the production of a dramatic version of Bel-Ami” to the magazine’s more concise “like props for a dramatic version of Bel-Ami.” Notice the additional “Tuareg shields” on the walls in the New Yorker version. Notice, too, that the walls in the New Yorker version are “covered with a paper imitation of brocade,” whereas the walls in the book version are “papered with an imitation of brocade.” “Portieres” in the book is simply “draperies” in the magazine. And, instead of the book’s “drooped crazily from valences askew,” the magazine has “drooped crazily from valences that formed St. Andrew’s crosses against the window frames.” Regarding the stuffed leopard, the New Yorker version omits the observation made in the book that “Age affects the grip even of plaster gums.” Both versions are wonderful, but I think I prefer the extra detailing (“Tuareg shields,” “St. Andrew’s crosses”) of the New Yorker passage.

Almost every paragraph of “Revisited Normandy: In Quest of a Gray Granite House” differs in some way or other from the book’s version. I find the variations fascinating. Comparing them provides a glimpse of a great stylist fine-tuning his composition.

Credit: The above portrait of A. J. Liebling is by David Levine. It appears in The New York Review of Books (November 18, 2004), as an illustration for Russell Baker's "A Great Reporter at Large."

Best of 2011

Okay, here we go. I’ve got a stack of New Yorkers here – all from 2011. Flipping through them triggers countless memories of blissful reading. My project today is to sort through this rich harvest and choose what I consider to be the ten best factual pieces and the ten best critical pieces. How do I decide? It’s easy. I just look through each issue and pick out the articles containing the most starred and underlined passages. Who did the starring and underlining? Me. When I read, I mark passages that strike me as noteworthy for one reason or another. So, that’s my method. I realize it’s not very scientific, but it works for me. I know you can hardly wait to see my choices, so here they are:

TOP TEN FACT PIECES

1. Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests” (September 5, 2011).
2. Elif Batuman, “The View from the Stands (March 7, 2011)
3. Ian Frazier, “Back to the Harbor” (March 21, 2011)
4. Burkhard Bilger, “The Great Oasis” (December 19 & 26, 2011)
5. Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal” (November 21, 2011)
6. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011)
7. D. T. Max, “Her Way” (November 7, 2011)
8. Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero” (October 31, 2011)
9. Janet Malcolm, “Depth of Field” (September 26, 2011)
10. Mike Peed, “We Have No Bananas” (January 10, 2011)

Looking over the above list, I see a few common traits: the pieces are about travel, food, nature, or art; they appeal to the senses; they contain inspired writing.

Now for my “top ten” critical pieces. I hope this list doesn’t insult the magazine’s dance, theatre, music, and movie critics. They’re all great writers; it’s just that their fields of interest aren’t quite mine. On the other hand, I love books and art. I devour James Wood’s and Peter Schjeldahl’s every word and hunger for more. That’s why their names dominate the following list:

TOP TEN CRITICAL PIECES

1. James Wood, “The Arrival of Enigmas” (February 28, 2011)
2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Haarlem Shuffle” (August 8, 2011)
3. James Wood, “Cabin Fever” (September 5, 2011)
4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Long Faces” (March 7, 2011)
5. James Wood, “Reality Testing” (October 31, 2011)
6. Peter Schjeldahl, “Inside Story” (May 2, 2011)
7. Peter Schjeldahl, “Artists and Writers” (January 31, 2011)
8. Dan Chiasson, “Southern Discomfort” (January 3, 2011)
9. John Lahr, “Bluebird of Unhappiness” (October 31, 2011)
10. Joan Acocella, “From Bad Beginnings” (May 16, 2011)

There you have it - another great New Yorker year come and gone. I take this opportunity to thank the editors and staff for all the pleasure they’ve given me. They do an incredible job. Each issue is a distinctive, intricate, wonderful work of art.

Credit: The above artwork, by Olimpia Zagnoli and Emanuela Ligabue, appears in The New Yorker (December 19 & 26, 2011), as an illustration for "A Year's Reading."

December 19 & 26, 2011 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the last issue of the year, and it’s terrific. It contains at least a half-dozen excellent pieces. The two that I’ll comment on here are Burkhard Bilger’s “The Great Oasis” and James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” Bilger consistently produces some of the magazine’s best writing. His “Towheads” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) was one of my “Best of 2010” picks (see my December 28, 2010, post). This year, his “The Possibilian” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011) and his “True Grits” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) were both tremendously interesting and enjoyable. Now we have his brilliant “The Great Oasis.” It’s about reforestation in desert lands. Among its highlights are: (1) a visit to Oman where a Dutch inventor, named Pieter Hoff, is testing an experimental tree-planting device called the Waterboxx; (2) a description of the Great Green Wall, a massive project in which “eleven African nations have agreed to erect a wall of trees across the dusty shoulders of the continent” for the purpose of halting the spread of the Sahara; (3) a trip to Burkino Faso to meet Chris Reij, an agroforestry specialist, and learn about the African Re-Greening Initiative, in which farmers are reforesting vast stretches of the Sahel; and (4) a search for “one of the last baobabs in northern Oman.” The piece is beautifully structured, beginning and ending with the search for the baobab tree. And it is artfully written. Bilger gives us interesting facts in words we can picture. Here is rainfall in the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman: “When the clouds burst, as they do a few times a year, the rain skitters from the slopes like oil from a griddle, gathers into rivulets and swiftly moving sheets, and tumbles into wadies that wind between the peaks.” Here is the baobab tree that Pieter Hoff was searching for: “In the deepening dusk, it looked like an apparition out of ‘The Arabian Nights’ – a fat caliph surrounded by his fan-fluttering harem.” And here’s the sound of two men praying: “Their voices came to us as a steady murmur mixed with the rustling of the leaves.” The Sahara (“the only traces of green are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia tortilis, anchored to the bare rock”) and the Sahel (“the grasses were parched brittle and sere, the red soil baked hard beneath them”) are evoked with a specificity that puts us squarely there. Bilger’s details are wonderful (e.g., “The only signs of life were a few Senegalese fire finches, darting like sparks among the shea trees”). “The Great Oasis” is a marvelous piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

I kept thinking of Bilger’s writing as I read James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” What does Wood think of Bilger’s work? Does he even read it? To be frank, until I read “Reality Effects,” in this week’s issue, I suspected that Wood was blind to the merits of literary journalism. For example, in “Keeping It Real” (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010), Wood calls David Shields’ promotion of “reality” over fiction “highly problematic.” In reply to Shields’ preference for essays and memoirs rather than fiction, Wood advanced the example of Tolstoy, who, he says, “so often reproduced reality directly from life.” Wood calls Tolstoy “the great ‘reality-artist.’” I share Shields’ skepticism regarding fiction, even fiction as consummate as Tolstoy’s, as a representation of reality. Fiction is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. I much prefer factual writing. Now, in “Reality Effects,” an admiring review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead, it appears Wood is starting to see the light. He says of Sullivan’s pieces:

It is obvious enough that they are by a talented storyteller, who has learned from fiction (as well as from the essayistic tradition) on how to structure and ration his narratives. He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives.

The verve of that last sentence is thrilling. It would appear that what Sullivan writes falls more into the category of “personal history” than it does “fact piece.” (Last night, I dipped into Pulphead for the first time; its “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” is excellent.) This is why Wood says Sullivan’s talent “is beautifully for the real” and why he immediately qualifies this observation with “or, rather, for the real fictions that people make of the real, and which they live by.” Bilger’s art is “beautifully for the real,” too. But it doesn’t move between reality and fictionality the way Wood says the contemporary essay often does. Bilger’s writing is factual. That’s what I like about it. “Factual” is a word Wood seldom, if ever, uses. Maybe someday he’ll see its value. I find it promising that, in “Reality Effects,” he’s at least showing appreciation for something other than fiction.

The Year In Reading: Philip Connors' "Fire Season"

One of the best books of 2011 is Philip Connors’ Fire Season. The New Yorker calls it "a compelling study of isolation, wildness, and 'a vocation in its twilight'" ("Briefly Noted," May 9, 2011). That’s an excellent description of it. But the magazine’s anonymous reviewer also says that Connors' "prose style can be portentous" and that his "personality veers from smug to misanthropic." Reading Fire Season, I didn’t detect any of those alleged attributes. Granted, there are passages in which Connors bluntly expresses aversion to what he calls “nonlookout work” and to “any task involving contact with the public in an official government capacity.” He’s quite open about his wish to be “left utterly and blissfully alone.” But he’s equally honest about the fact that his aloneness lasts only ten days at a time. After each ten-day stint on the mountain, he takes a four-day break during which he returns to Silver City. Even when he’s up on the mountain carrying out his duties as a fire lookout (or, as he calls himself, “a professional watcher of mountains”), he has occasional contact with the outside world, either by radio or in person (e.g., when hikers unexpectedly appear, or when government colleagues trek or fly in to see him). In those outside contacts, Connors doesn't come across as cold or aloof; on the contrary, he seems affable and easy to get along with. One time his wife visits with him for three days. Connors calls that time "three days of delicious domesticity." That doesn't sound like misanthropism to me. Yes, Connors has an attraction to solitude. But that doesn’t make him a misanthrope anymore than Thoreau’s solo existence at Walden made him a misanthrope. In fact, as Robert Sullivan points out in The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), Thoreau “kept a chair by his door to encourage visitors, and took it away only when he was writing.” Note that exception – “only when he was writing.” The need for solitude and the urge to write are closely knit. Connors uses some of his time at the lookout to think and write. At one point, when he’s up in the tower, he says, “In all my seasons I’ve never seen the view so clear, so I open my notebook and begin to name and count the visible mountain ranges….” Then, in one of Fire Season’s most beautiful passages, he proceeds to recreate the list:

… the Wahoos, the Details, the Cuchillos, the San Mateos, the Magdalenas, the Fra Cristobal Range, the Oscuras, the Caballos, the San Andres Mountains, the Sacramentos, the Organs, the Franklins, the Doña Anas and the Rough and Ready Hills, the Sierra de las Uvas, the Good Sight Mountains, the Cookes Range, the Floridas and the Tres Hermanas, the Cedars, the Big and Little Hatchets, the Animas Mountains, the Pyramids, the Peloncillos and Chiricahaus, and Big Burros, the Pinaleños, the Silver City Range, the Pinos Altos Range, the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons – more than thirty in all and me in the middle of them, goggle-eyed and rapturous, alone in my aerie in the vastness.

Alone in my aerie in the vastness – aloneness is the key; if Connors hadn’t been alone at that particular “goggle-eyed and rapturous” moment, he likely wouldn’t have been moved to get out his notebook and compile his wonderful mountain list. As a consequence, we might not have the pleasure of reading it now. Connors’ self-confessed “attraction to solitude” isn’t a function of misanthropy; it flows from his being a writer. The book we hold in our hands today, Fire Season, is the result of the solitude that Connors sought and found on the Black Range. You’d think The New Yorker, the most literary of all magazines, would appreciate that. E. B. White would certainly have appreciated it. He wouldn’t allege misanthropy against a writer seeking solitude.

As for the criticism that Connors is “smug,” I find no basis for it, unless it’s in his “reference to his “peonage in newspapers,” and assertions that he doesn’t have the requisite temperament for what he calls “the hamster wheel of the eight-hour day.” I don’t find these passages smug; I find them bracing. They contain a Thoreauvian friction, a resistance to the culture at large, that I really admire.

This brings me to the most irritating aspect of the New Yorker review – the description of Connors’ prose style as “portentous.” Of the many adjectives I can think of to apply to Connors’ writing (e.g., clear, vivid, precise, detailed, honest, lyrical), “portentous” is most certainly not among them. Fire Season struck me as a remarkable piece of writing, remarkable for its clarity and concreteness, and for the present-tense immediacy of many of its descriptions. Here is birdsong (“Through the open tower windows I hear the call of the hermit thrush, one of the most gorgeous sounds in all of nature, a mellifluous warble beginning on a long clear note”), clouds (“Lenticular clouds dot the highest peaks, their elliptical shapes and striated edges bringing news of howling winds a few thousand feet above me”), air (“Come morning the air will smell sweetly of burning grass and pine duff, and my tower will cast its silhouette against a hazy salmon sunrise”), smoke (“All past folly recedes, at least momentarily, beneath the roiling smokes of June”), more smoke (“The mountains to my north are mantled in a haze of drift smoke stretching sixty miles”), trees (“On the north slope red-bark ponderosa far older than the Vitorio war throw their shaggy shadows on the needle-cast floor”), mountain peaks (“Off in the other direction, the shadow of my peak stretches in the shape of an arrowhead forty miles across the desert, the tip of it touching the Rio Grande just before sunset”), a snake (“Bit by bit the snake – a Western wandering garter – walks its jaws up the length of the salamander’s body, preparing to swallow it whole”), lightning striking his cabin (“For several minutes there’s a weird smell in the air, like an over-heated radiator, and my heart jiggles in my chest like a fox in a burlap bag”) – on and on, a multiplicity of acutely seen details that bring the page alive. At one point in Fire Season, Connors says, “I produce nothing but words.” Yes, that may be so. But what words! Fire Season is a wonderful book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Janet Malcolm's Chekhovian Ambiguity

I’m pleased to see that my favorite New York Times critic, Dwight Garner, has chosen Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills as one of his “top ten” books of the year (see “Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 11, 2011). A substantial portion of the book appeared in The New Yorker (May 3, 2010). In his piece, Garner says:

Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story.

That “eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story” is brilliant! Geoffrey O’Brien, in his illuminating review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills (“The Trial,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011), also notes Malcolm’s Chekhovian approach to her subject. He quotes a statement made by Judge Robert Hanophy during Mazoltuv Borukhova’s trial (“Somebody’s life was taken, somebody’s arrested, they’re indicted, they’re tried and they’re convicted. That’s all this is”), which Malcolm uses as an epigraph to introduce the book, and says:

In opposition to this cut-and-dried dismissal of any residual impulse to probe deeper, she juxtaposes the words of a prospective, ultimately unselected juror: “Everything is ambiguous in life except in court” – an observation of a sort in which Malcolm’s books abound, posted like warning signs to the reader to beware of the astringent clarity of each separate element as it come sinto view. We want the elements to add up to a satisfying and coherent story. But as Anton Chekhov wrote – in a letter quoted by Malcolm in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001) – responding to a reader who had complained of the writer’s having evaded a proper explanation of his protagonist’s motives: “We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.”

In support of O’Brien’s point, I would also refer to Malcolm’s description of the psychologist Igor Davidson, one of the few compassionate figures in the book:

Davidson introduced an element into the hearing that had been entirely absent from it: ambiguity. Alone among the participants, Davidson spoke as if he were in touch with life as it exists outside the courtroom, where everything isn’t always this or that, but can be both.

V. S. Pritchett, in his review of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (“A Doctor,” included in Pritchett’s 1979 essay collection The Myth Makers), quotes from a letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor, Alexei Suvorin, attacking him for the anti-Semitic articles Suvorin published at the time of the Dreyfus affair and the trial of Zola. The quotation, which could serve as another epigraph for Iphigenia in Forest Hills, is as follows: “Zola is right, because the writer’s job is not to accuse or persecute but to stand up even for the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment.”

December 12, 2011 Issue

There are a few piquant details in this week’s issue: the Beagle’s White Monkey cocktail that “somehow exactly evokes the flavor of a Granny Smith apple” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two”), the two baby teeth in Julia Taubman’s left earlobe – “one from each of her twin sons” (Nick Paumgarten, “Detroit Valentine”); a Citroën DS “the color of light manure” (Anthony Lane, “I Spy”), and Rooney Mara’s fingers “poking out of black woollen gloves as they skitter across a laptop keyboard” (David Denby, “Double Dare”). I particularly like that White Monkey. I wish I had the ingredients to mix one at home. But since I don’t, I’m going to make rum eggnog, instead. Here’s to Goldfield, Paumgarten, Lane, and Denby!

Dove v. Vendler

Is “restricted vocabulary” in the statement, “Perhaps Dove’s canvas – exhibiting mostly short poems of rather restricted vocabulary – is what needs to be displayed now to a general audience," a proxy for racial discrimination? Rita Dove thinks it is. It’s the basis of her “barely veiled racism” allegation against Helen Vendler, made in a blistering letter published in the current issue of The New York Review of Books ("Defending an Anthology," December 22, 2011). In her letter, Dove says, “This statement [by Vendler] is breathtaking on several levels: its condescension, lack of veracity, and the barely veiled racism lurking behind the expression 'restricted vocabulary.'”

You might ask, what’s this got to do with The New Yorker? Well, I’m a long-time fan of Vendler’s writing. She was the New Yorker poetry critic from 1978 to 2001. She’s written some of the most brilliant reviews ever to appear in the magazine (see my post “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011, #1: Helen Vendler’s ‘A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,’” August 7, 2011). Although she hasn’t, to my knowledge, reviewed Dove’s work in The New Yorker, she has written four appreciative essays on Dove, including “Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove” (collected in Vendler’s The Music of What Happens, 1988), “A Dissonant Triad: Henri Cole, Rita Dove, and August Kleinzahler” (collected in Vendler’s Soul Says, 1995), “The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate” (also collected in Soul Says), and “Rita Dove: Identity Markers” (chapter 3 of Vendler’s The Given and the Made, 1995).

In “Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove,” Vendler calls Dove’s Thomas and Beulah “remarkable.” She says of Dove’s poem “The Event,” which is included in Thomas’s side (“Mandolin”) of Thomas and Beulah:

When I first read this poem and some of its companions from “Mandolin,” I experienced the best of all poetic delights – feeling that something was very beautiful and not knowing why. New forms of beauty declare themselves only gradually. It seems to me now that a rapid succession of dramatic “takes” is Dove’s perfected form; she almost always refuses editorializing, musing, and “leading” the reader. Her brilliance lies in her arrangement of content; as the elements of meaning find their one inevitable form, juxtaposition alone takes on the work of explanation.

In her introduction to Soul Says, Vendler says, “Though I’m white, I could not do without the poetry of Langston Hughes and Rita Dove.”

In “A Dissonant Triad: Henri Cole, Rita Dove, and August Kleinzahler,” Vendler describes Dove’s poem “Ozone” as “unforgettable.” She also says, in a sentence that touches the current racial issue, “I admire Dove’s persistent probes into ordinary language, including the language of the black proletariat.” Is “restricted vocabulary” another way of saying “ordinary language”? Yes, I think it is. I’ll come back to this point in a moment.

In “The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate,” Vendler says of Dove’s work, “No matter how painful her stories, no matter how sharp-edged her lines, her poems fall on the ear with solace.”

And in “Rita Dove: Identity Markers,” Vendler refers to “the ingenious process of reflective faceting” in Dove’s poem “Aircraft.”

This brings me to the piece in question, Vendler’s review of Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (“Are These the Poems to Remember?,” The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011), in which the impugned words “restricted vocabulary” occur. Consideration of these words contextually clearly shows their consistency with several other descriptions used by Vendler to convey the stylistic nature of many of the poems included by Dove in her anthology. For example, Vendler describes Dove’s five Wallace Stevens selections as “plain-voiced.” Later in the piece, she says, “Dove’s tipping of the balance obeys a populist aesthetic.” She also says, “The only canonical poets she [Dove] writes about with real enthusiasm are the ones using what she feels to be popular language.” And she says, “Most of the new poets at the end of the book are writing in her [Dove’s] preferred demotic style.” Poems written in a demotic style are often written in simplified language, i.e, a “restricted vocabulary.” “Plain-voiced,” “populist aesthetic,” “popular language,” “ordinary language,” “demotic style," and yes, “restricted vocabulary” – these are all ways of distinguishing a plain style of poetry from a more intricate one. When Vendler says, in her review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, that perhaps now what’s needed is an anthology consisting of poems “of rather restricted vocabulary,” she is referring to an anthology of plain-style poems. Therefore, while I admire the spiritedness of Dove's letter, I respectfully submit that her racial interpretation of Vendler's phrase "restricted vocabulary" is seriously mistaken.

Credit: The above portrait of Helen Vendler is by David Levine.

December 5, 2011 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home." At first, I thought it was going to be about Hemon’s return to Sarajevo after the war, and his account of the people and places he rediscovered, and the memories that came to mind – a sort of variation on A. J. Liebling’s great Normandy Revisited (1959), which I’m currently reading. The first part of Hemon’s piece is a form of nostalgia trip. At one point, he says:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage – during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

The second section of “Mapping Home” is my favorite. It shows Hemon, in his mid-twenties, before he left Sarajevo for Chicago, when he worked as a film reviewer and columnist, walking Sarajevo’s streets, seeing, looking, reflecting. He says:

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city.

That last phrase (“for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city”) is inspired! It deepens Hemon’s theme. “Mapping Home” is not just a memory piece; it’s also about using our senses to create a definition of space. Reading Hemon’s piece, I was reminded of Sallie Tisdale’s brilliant “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991), in which she talks about the word “chorophiliac,” which means “place-lover.” Hemon is a chorophiliac. His choro is Sarajevo. He says:

I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphorically, I was placed.

“Mapping Home” deepens even further when Hemon shows how Chicago eventually became his choro, too. During his early days in Chicago, he was, he says, “a tormented flâneur.” He says:

In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I did not yet know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, had not been satisfied.”

It wasn’t until Hemon settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater that he started to feel “placed.” One of the highlight passages of “Mapping Home" is Hemon’s vivid description of how he gradually started feeling like an Edgewater “local.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar.

Little by little, Hemon started to feel at home in Edgewater. He says, “I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood.”

I’m attracted to pieces about place. I’m doubly attracted when they’re written at street level by a writer addicted to walking. Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” is such a piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

Objectivist Takeover?

New Yorker writers divide into two broad categories – Objectivists and Subjectivists. Objectivists write mainly in the third person; they’re loath to say “I.” Subjectivists write mainly in the first person; their pieces read almost like excerpts from their personal journals.

Throughout the magazine’s history, Subjectivism has predominated; I much prefer it. Liebling, Mitchell, Bailey, and Rouché wrote in the first person, as do McPhee, Singer, Frazier, Bilger, Friend, Kolbert, Wilkinson, Remnick, Thurman, Paumgarten, Collins, Batuman, and Mead. But lately, it seems to me, the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in the magazine has been on the rise. Jill Lepore’s “American Chronicles” pieces, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Fish Tales” (March 7, 2011), David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011), George Packer’s “A Dirty Business” (June 27, 2011), George Packer’s “Coming Apart” (September 12, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Three Trials for Murder” (November 14, 2011), and Kelefa Sannah’s “Sacred Grounds” (November 21, 2011) are all written in the third person. (Packer and Schmidle may protest the Objectivist charge on the basis of a line or two of first-person perspective buried deep in their otherwise impersonal narratives), but they can’t deny that the gist of their approach is fundamentally Objectivist.) In the magazine’s November 28th issue, all four features are essentially Objectivist: Mattathias Schwartz’s “Pre-Occupied”; Ariel Levy’s “The Renovation”; George Packer’s “No Death, No Taxes”; and Raffi Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture.” I say “essentially” because some of these pieces contain a light sprinkling of “told me” and “said to me” – feeble attempts to mitigate their over-all machined, Objectivist feel and look. The last section of Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture” suddenly turns Subjectivist (“When the video ended, JR had to rush out. He wanted to surprise Nourry by showing her a SoHo rooftop that he had discovered. Two days later, he flew to Edinburgh, and then to Paris, where I caught up with him”), but it’s too little, too late.

I prefer the Subjectivist approach because it’s closest to the most true-to-life form of writing, namely, the journal. A journal tells what happened from the point of view of the writer as he or she actually experienced it. It seems to me that journalism is most effective when it is journal-like. Here are a few examples of quintessential journal-like sentences taken from recent New Yorker articles:

One day, Cagan took me to visit the Aras station, an hour’s drive south-east of Kars, near the Armenian border. (Elif Batuman, “Natural Histories,” October 24, 2011)

Beach trials the next morning were called off owing to rain, so I took a train to Amsterdam and visited the Rijksmuseum. (Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests,” September 5, 2011)

It was after 6 P.M. when we sat down at Dean’s editing machine, a twelve-thousand-dollar 35-mm. Steenbeck, to look at some rushes. (Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero,” October 31, 2011)

One day in July, I watched Grimaud play the pieces on “Resonances,” her current CD, in the Stadhalle, in Bayreuth. (D. T. Max, “Her Way,” November 7, 2011)

At the end of May, when I visited Yusuke Tataki, the worker who was inside Reactor Building No. 4 at the time of the quake, he said that he had passed up offers to go back as a jumper. (Evan Osnos, “The Fallout,” October 17, 2011)

On a recent Saturday, Worsley and I and a few others attempted to whip up the dinner that King George III ate on the evening of February 6, 1789. (Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal,” November 21, 2011)

Such sentences make pursuit of the story part of the story. They clue the reader in on what the writer is thinking and doing. Most importantly, they help authenticate what’s being described. Objectivist pieces feel and look synthetic. Yes, they’re often magnificently crafted (see, for example, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Sacred Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2011). But they feel as if they’ve been manufactured (I almost said “made-up”) rather than experienced first-hand.

Fortunately, there are still lots of Subjectivists writing for The New Yorker. But the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in it seems to be on the upswing. The November 28th issue is filled with them. Objectivism appears to be trending at the magazine. I think it should be discouraged.

Credit: The above portrait of Joseph Mitchell is by Al Hirschfeld; it appears in The New Yorker (February 22, 2004), as an illustration for Mark Singer's "Joe Mitchell's Secret."

Peter Campbell (April 16, 1937 - October 25, 2011)

This is my tribute to Peter Campbell, who died October 25, 2011. Campbell worked for the London Review of Books from its inception, in 1979, as designer, illustrator, and art reviewer. He was a brilliant contemplator of art. As Mary-Kay Wilmers says, in her tribute to Campbell (“Diary,” London Review of Books, November 17, 2011), his pieces about exhibitions “take you with him into the gallery.” His art writing was, for me, a great source of pleasure. His connection with The New Yorker is non-existent, but I often read him in conjunction with pieces I’d read in the magazine. See, for example, my posts “Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike” (February 7, 2011) and “Werner Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’: 3 Reviews” (June 9, 2011). The origin of my interest in his writing traces back to his review of a Joan Eardley exhibition that appeared in the December 13, 2007, LRB, titled “At the National Gallery of Scotland.” I have a clipping of it here in front of me as I write this. It’s filled with my underlinings. I love descriptions of art. The Eardley piece contains several beauties, including this inspired line: “de Kooning in America made pictures in which the bones of an unseen landscape seem to direct the reading of a field of abstract marks.” How fine that “bones of an unseen landscape”! The clinching review – the one that made me a devoted follower of his LRB columns – is the one he did on the Tate Modern exhibition “Rothko: The Late Series” (“At Tate Modern,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008). I have that clipping here in front of me, as well. Looking at one of Rothko’s great red-on-maroon Seagram murals, he says, “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” Campbell also had an appreciative eye for items of material culture (e.g., the “bicornual” basket from the rain forests of north-eastern Queensland, which he noted in his piece “At the British Museum,” London Review of Books, June 16, 2011, as follows: “Its sculptural curves are emphasized by the way the strands of cane from which it is made follow swelling contours. It is a wonderful, evolved design”). In 2009, At …, a rich collection of Campbell’s art writings was published. I count it among my favorite books.

November 28, 2011 Issue

I crave thisness. My search for it in this week’s issue has been fruitless. Well, almost fruitless. I found a crumb, a little morsel of succulent thisness, in the last line of Rebecca Mead’s Talk story “Model Student,” where she says, “Gunn signed her name boldly across the blue shirtsleeve of the artist’s painting arm.” That’s it! That’s the only delectable detail in the entire issue. But I can’t complain. The last four New Yorkers were feasts. I’m still digesting them.

Sometimes, when the magazine’s fact pieces fail to impress, as is the case this week, I turn to the short story. The current issue features Alice Munro’s “Leaving Maverley.” It’s about a guy named Ray Elliot, who’s the night policeman in the small town of Maverley, his wife, Isabel, who’s seriously ill, and a young woman, Leah, who’s raised in a repressive, religious household in Maverley, and who’s life, from time to time, briefly intersects with Ray’s life. Of these three characters, Leah is the most interesting. Although described as “weirdly shy,” she elopes with a saxophone player, has an affair with a minister, divorces the sax player, loses custody of her two children, and, at the end of the story, is characterized by Munro as “an expert at losing.” When I read that, I immediately thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem “One Art” (The New Yorker, April 26, 1976), which begins, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” It occurred to me for the first time that, in many ways, Bishop is like a Munro heroine, or, to put it the other way around, many of Munro’s heroines are like Bishop, and that the two writers have similar sensibilities. But to get back to “Leaving Maverley,” did anyone besides me find the final meeting between Ray and Leah a bit too coincidental? I felt the same way about Munro's “Axis” (The New Yorker, January 31, 2011). There were just too many damned coincidences. The story didn’t ring true, and neither does “Leaving Maverley.” Having said that, I also wish to note that Munro’s “The Turkey Season” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980) is my choice for the best short story ever published in The New Yorker. Maybe someday, I’ll get around to posting a fuller appreciation of it.

November 21, 2011 Issue

Mmm, my favorite themed New Yorker, The Food Issue, is here. I love the Wayne Thiebaud “Turkey Dinner” cover. Thiebaud lays on the paint in such delicious thick strokes that I almost want to eat it. John Seabrook’s piece about the SweeTango apple (“Crunch”) is excellent. I particularly liked its last paragraph:

I bought as many SweeTangos as I could carry, walked out onto Broadway, and stood on the sidewalk with an apple in my hand, my fingers not quite encircling its girth, feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm. I stared at the skin, and the lenticels gazed indifferently back at me, as I contemplated man’s long and sometimes discordant relationship with this fruit. Then I set my teeth on its skin, and crunched.

That “feeling the chill of the Fairway basement in the center of my palm” is inspired!

Lauren Collins’s “The King’s Meal” brims with inspired lines (e.g., “‘The only way you can eat like a king is to eat like a king,’ Meltonville had said, liberating a gleaming ladle , part of Hampton Court’s collection, from its bubble-wrap cocoon”).

I smiled and chuckled my way through Calvin Trillin’s wonderful “My Repertoire.” At one point, I read a passage out loud to my daughter, and we both laughed. Here’s the passage:

One of my sons-in-law was not crazy about my salmon hash – I won’t say which one; that sort of thing will come out in good time at the reading of the will – but just about everybody else seemed to like it.

I like the boots that René Redzepi is wearing in the vivid photo by Alfredo Cáliz that illustrates Jane Kramer’s superb “The Food At Our Feet.” When I say “superb,” I’m referring to the second half of the piece. The first part, concerning Kramer’s preparation for her foraging excursion with Redzepi, didn’t grab me. It contains too much information about her “distinguished” friends and their bourgeois surroundings. But at the point where Kramer writes, “I met Redzepi at Noma early the following afternoon,” her piece really takes off. I savored Kramer’s beautiful long lines. For example:

But, at the moment, the food he cherishes is cabbage – from the big, pale cabbages that he slices and steams, at home, in a knob of butter and a half inch of his wife’s leftover tea, to the tiny, vividly green-leaved wild cabbages that sit in pots, basking in ultraviolet light, on a steel counter in the middle of one of Noma’s upstairs kitchens, waiting for the day they’re ready to be wrapped with their stems around a sliver of pike perch and served to customers on a beautiful stoneware plate, between a green verbena sauce and a butter-and-fish-bone foam.

Kelefa Sanneh's "Sacred Grounds" is factually interesting. But in terms of style, it suffers from the same weakness that afflicts all his pieces - an impersonal, almost godlike objectivity that leaves me cold. I much prefer the subjective approach in which the writer establishes his or her presence in the material.

November 14, 2011 Issue

John McPhee, in an interesting piece called “Progression,” in this week’s issue, talks about, among other things, the background sources of some of his early New Yorker articles. In a way, it’s sort of a companion piece to the fascinating Paris Review interview he did last year. It seems McPhee always dwells on structure whenever he talks about his writing method. In doing so, he sells himself short. Yes, structure is one of the hallmarks of his incomparable style. And yes, it’s absorbing and useful to learn how he structures his work. But structure is only one aspect of his composition. McPhee is a brilliant describer. For example (this is just one among hundreds that can be adduced), in “Ranger” (The New Yorker, September 11, 1971), which he mentions in “Progression,” he describes Hartzog’s boatman, Cal Smith, as follows: “Smith is a big man with heavy bones, frankfurtery fingers, lithic jowls.” How did McPhee arrive at that adjective “frankfurtery”? The average writer – someone like myself, say – would write “thick-fingered” or maybe, if he/she saw, as McPhee did (a mighty big “if”), the similarity between thick fingers and wieners, he/she might say “weiner-like.” But “frankfurtery” takes finger description to a whole new level, an inspired level, in my opinion. How did McPhee think of it? Here’s another example, also taken from “Ranger.” It’s a description of Hartzog fishing:

There are five eyes on his rod. He sights through the last one into a patch of flat blue among high mounds of cumulus. He finds a fragment of cloud loose in the blue and he frames it steadily in the fifth eye while he waits for the glass to bend.

What an inspired perspective! A view of a cloud fragment as seen through the eye on a fishing rod! How did McPhee conceive it? No amount of talk about structure accounts for it. It’s art; it’s inspiration; it’s genius. McPhee’s work brims with it. Here’s one more example. In “The Encircled River - I” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977), McPhee provides this arresting image of salmon: “Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.” How did he conceive the comparison of river with sky, salmon with zeppelins? In a piece titled “Checkpoints” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009), McPhee touches on his art of figuration. He says, “In ‘Coal Train’ (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one: ‘The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train’s very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel.’” I felt a need for analogy – right there is the nub of the creative mystery. Why does he feel that need? Maybe McPhee can’t explain it. Maybe no one can. It certainly involves more than structure. It’s sourced in the realm of inspiration. I wish McPhee would talk more about it.

Postscript: Last week, when I was in Trinidad, Cuba, I had lunch in the back yard of a little restaurant under the vast green canopy of a giant ceiba tree. The tree’s gray bark was like elephant hide. It struck me that the tree would be worthy of a poem. When I returned home, I opened this week’s New Yorker and was astounded and delighted to find just such an item, a poem by Mark Svenvold, titled “Ceiba Tree, Petac, Mexico.” I enjoyed it immensely, particularly the part about “the broad cloth / of a morning above us and in us, like some momentary shaft, / of sunlight on the floating seed of the ceiba tree, / that hangs like this and like that in the shadows and subaltern greens.” And is this the same Mark Svenvold who went up the Merrimack with John McPhee in McPhee’s wonderful “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (The New Yorker, December 15, 2003)? I believe it is. Perhaps this is another way in which, as McPhee says in “Progression,” pieces “skein out in surprising ways, finally ending in some unexpected place.”

November 7, 2011 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Ian Frazier’s wonderful “History Lesson” (“One of the young men from O.W.S. – the one who said they would never leave – was wearing a dark suit jacket, a white shirt, a burgundy tie, a bolo string tie, a beaded Indian necklace, and a silver pendant. On his head he had a wildly multicolored baseball cap, set sideways. His hair was a braided ponytail. His trousers were skin-tight leggings, also multicolored, and he had beige flip-flops on his feet”), John Lahr’s superb “The Natural” (“Her excitement made her luminous”), James Wood’s “Shelf Life,” with its short, rhythmic, three-beat sentences (“I found him hard to love, easier to admire, and I rather feared him”; “I knew he would say it, hated him for it, agreed with him”) and breathtaking, long, loaded-up lines (“His Algerian childhood, his intellectual ambition, the diversion of that ambition into run-of-the-mill moneymaking, his isolation and estrangement in America, his confidence and shyness, pugilism and anxiety, the drinking and the anger and the passion and the pressurized conformity of his businesslike existence: of course, in some general way, these thousands of volumes – neatly systematic, proudly comprehensive – incarnated the shape of this life, but not the facets of his character”); the enticing, exquisite opening sentence of Peter Schjeldahl’s “Old and New” (“Fourteen lamps hanging, aglow, beckon you to an entrance to the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic wing, which is open again after eight years of expansion and renovation”) – the most piquant is the glorious descriptive power of D. T. Max’s “Her Way,” a profile of the pianist Hélène Grimaud. Here, for example, is Max’s description of Grimaud’s hair: “On album covers, her hair telegraphs a mood. It is pinned up in a Clara Schumann-like bun for a Brahms recording, and on the cover of “Credo” – a CD of Beethoven and a pair of mystic-minded modern composers – it is tucked behind her ears, in wan, heroin-chic strands. Ordinarily, her hair is shaggy, with too-busy-to-blow-dry bangs.” And here is his image of her at the keyboard: “Grimaud opened with Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, playing it as if she were lashing a carriage down the streets of Salzburg.” And here is his rendition of the sound of wolves howling: “Two Mexican wolves, in a nearby enclosure, joined in, several tones higher, glissando-ing down while the red wolves added a frenzied pizzicato.” Grimaud is an outstandingly great subject, and Max’s profile of her is commensurately outstandingly great. It’s incredible color, nuance, and texture reminds me of Kenneth Tynan’s piece on Johnny Carson (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), perhaps the finest profile ever to appear in the magazine. That’s just about the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing.

October 31, 2011 Issue

The New Yorker is a great traveling companion. I took the October 31st issue with me to Cuba. It was a constant source of pleasure during my two-week visit there. There are so many delectable items in it: Lizzie Widdicombe’s description of The Leopard At Des Artistes’ zabaione with berries (“egg yolks and Marsala wine, beaten tableside over an open flame, until it reaches the consistency of a sugary alcoholic cloud”); Richard Brody’s representation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “architectural precision” (“he presses his lovers into hard-edged industrial, corporate, and domestic spaces by way of graphically etched, high-contrast camera work that emphasizes the coldly thrilling modernism of tall buildings, progressive urbanism, and avant-garde design”); the poetry of the vegetable names in Burkhard Bilger’s excellent “True Grits” (“He set aside a bag of Whippoorwill peas and another of Zipper cream peas – the ones speckled brown and black, the others bright pink, like magic seeds from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’”); Dan Chiasson’s analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s style (“Tranströmer seeks not the ‘deep image’ but the elusive surface of things”); James Wood’s assessment of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving Atocha Station (“Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and ‘conflict,’ fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life”); Peter Schjeldahl’s close look at an African wooden sculpture (“The figure is all palpably moving parts: mouth open, eyes raised, knees bent, weight shifted to the right leg, and breasts swaying. She wields a rattle. A pattern of bold striations repeats in the coiled hair, a necklace, and anklets”). I loved all these things. Most of all I loved Emily Eakin’s “Celluloid Hero.” I’m a sucker for descriptions of the creative process. “Celluloid Hero” contains a beauty – a description of how Tacita Dean made “FILM” for exhibition at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. In a beautifully crafted, intensely engaging narrative, Eakin reports the various technical obstacles Dean encountered (e.g., the difficulty involved in fashioning “masks” thin enough to convincingly create the illusion of a filmstrip with sprocket holes) and the ways they were solved (e.g., using a digital laser device to produce a 3-D plastic mask that was less than a millimetre thick). Along the way, Eakin provides gorgeous descriptions of Dean’s art. Here is one of my favorites: “Her carefully layered shots had a sculptural quality; the glass-matte ostrich egg, appearing more than twenty feet tall, protruded from the screen as if it had been hurled right through it.” Eakin is new to me. As far as I know, “Celluloid Hero” is her first New Yorker piece. I look forward to many more.

October 24, 2011 Issue

What to make of Nathan Heller’s Pauline Kael piece (“What She Said”) in this week’s issue? I confess I didn’t much like it. Here are eight reasons why:

1. Heller reduces Kael’s thinking to the level of “whimsical taste.” He says, “from the time she wrote her first review until the moment she retired, in 1991, her authority as a critic relied solely on her own, occasionally whimsical taste.” He says that she flaunted intuition “in the face of formalism,“ and that “She was dowsing for film classics with her nervous system.” Intuition,” “taste,” and “ dowsing with her nervous system” do not do justice to Kael’s approach. Each of her reviews is an unfolding of thought. Did she have an interpretive or ideological a priori? Yes and no. She wasn’t locked into a system the way, say, a Freudian or Marxist critic is. But there are theories implicit in her criticism. Her love of “open form,” for example, governs her aesthetic response. And her great essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (included in her 1970 collection Going Steady), develops “the simple good distinction” that she repeatedly applied in her criticism: “all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art.” Heller, in his piece, fails to mention “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

2. Heller asserts that “the fifteen-year stretch between 1964 and 1979” is “when Kael wrote almost all the reviews on which her reputation rests.” Even though he’s saying “almost,” he’s still leaving the impression that the writing Kael did between 1980 and February 11, 1991, when she wrote her last review, is of secondary importance. I disagree. In that eleven-year period, Kael produced four brilliant collections: Taking It All In (1984), State of the Art (1985), Hooked (1989), and Movie Love (1991). Also, in 1982, the first edition of her magnificent 5001 Nights at the Movies was published. It’s a collection of several thousand capsule reviews she did for The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” department. In the foreword to 5001 Nights at the Movies, William Shawn says:

A master of synopsis, Pauline Kael has contrived to tell us between the covers of one book what eight decades of film are about and who is in them and behind them, and to reflect, swiftly but astutely, on what they signify. No one else has done that; no one else could have done that.

Heller, in his piece, fails to mention 5001 Nights at the Movies.

3. Speaking of William Shawn, I was surprised to read in Heller’s article that, when Kael tried to return to The New Yorker, after spending less than a year working in Hollywood, “William Shawn balked.” Heller says, “One of her former editors prevailed on him, but the homecoming was awkward.” This is the same Shawn, who, three years later, writes in his Foreword to 5001 Nights at the Movies that “The originality of Pauline Kael’s mind and temperament, her formidable intelligence, her eloquent use of the vernacular, her extraordinary analytical powers, her insight into character, her ability to shed light wherever the real world intersects with the world on film, her enormous gift for social observation, the wit and energy and clarity of her prose all go into making her the singular critic she is.” In light of the foregoing, it’s hard to imagine Shawn passing up the opportunity to rehire Kael. Heller doesn’t disclose his source for the information that “William Shawn balked.” Perhaps it comes from Brian Kellow’s new biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. If so, he should’ve said so, rather than report it as established fact.

4. Heller says that Kael “had few qualms about blackballing young writers on her turf, and otherwise using her influence for ill.” This verges on slander, unless substantiated. Heller fails to do so. But he does indicate his source for this nasty tidbit: “In 1970, Kellow tells us, Kael conned a U.C.L.A. assistant professor, Howard Suber, out of publishing an essay on 'Citizen Kane': she promised a collaboration, vanished with Suber’s proprietary research, and ultimately used it for an extended piece of her own, 'Raising Kane' (1971).” This is absolutely the worst story I have ever heard told about Pauline Kael. I question whether it’s true. And so should Heller and The New Yorker question it. What was the nature of the promise? What proof is there of it? How “proprietary” was the research? What part, if any, did Kael use?

5. Heller uses the old, elitist High-Low structure to describe culture. At one point, he says, “The art and the criticism of the sixties were blurring the boundaries of high and low culture.” At another point, he says, “In truth, most of her early pursuits reached for higher cultural ground.” And at another, he says, “And when she started to write seriously about movies, much later, it was her passion for the high-art canon that helped set her bearings.” Kael was against High-Low distinctions. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies, she said, “Movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in movies, it is not found in a return to that official high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.” Heller is wrong. Kael didn’t have a “passion for the high-art canon.” She wanted that high-art canon overturned. Her passion was for “the subversive gesture.” That’s one of the reasons I admire her.

6. Heller claims that Kael “actively opposed” “many of the seventies’ classics.” He names three of them: The French Connection, Chinatown, and Manhattan. It’s true that she disliked The French Connection. She said, “It’s certainly exciting, but that excitement isn’t necessarily a pleasure.” But with regard to Chinatown, her opinion was mixed. She says, “It’s all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don’t care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look and a fascination.” That doesn’t sound like “active opposition” to me. Regarding Woody Allen’s Manhattan, she didn’t review it, not even in capsule form. In her review of Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, she refers to Manhattan as part of his “ongoing poem to love and New York City” (“Couples,” Hooked, 1989). Therefore, Heller is wrong with respect to two out of the three movies he says Kael “actively opposed.” And, contrary to what he says, there were many seventies’ classics that she praised, e.g., Last Tango in Paris, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, The Godfather, Part II, Nashville, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Deer Hunter.

7. Heller rarely quotes from Kael’s writing. And when he does, it’s not to celebrate her style, but to embarrass her reputation. For example, his quote from her Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid review is a bridge to a wretched anecdote in which George Roy Hill calls her a “miserable bitch” because she conveyed the impression (apparently wrong) that some of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s dialogue was taped in a studio. In his piece, Heller constantly tells us what Kael was doing, instead of showing us by adducing examples from her work: “She was constantly goading the industry to try harder, but dismissed pictures that seemed to try harder”; “She worried – and this is essentially an avant-garde worry – that audiences suckling a teat of cynicism and easy entertainment would lose their appetite for creative urgency”; “She reviewed many of these movies [late sixties’ films] with gusto”; “Kael didn’t just say, This is a bad movie because it fails to turn me on. Instead, she strung movies loosely together, as if mapping out the lines of tradition, and weather-tested them against a couple of things: authenticity of experience and the proved canon of noncimematic art.” Reading this stuff, I found myself thinking, For gods sake, Heller, shut up for a moment and let Kael speak. The same goes for his endless theorizing. “What She Said” is awash with airy theories, e.g., “Kael fell in love with writing about movies, because, unlike every other creative form at the time, they had no “tradition” from the audience’s point of view.” Really? James Agee was in the audience from 1941 to 1948, writing reviews for Time and The Nation. He and countless other moviegoers (including Kael, of course) had a very clear sense of movie tradition stretching back to Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and beyond. Kael fell in love with writing about movies because she loved writing and she loved movies. In the introduction to her wonderful For Keeps, she says, “As the seventies gave way to the eighties, the excitement I had earlier found in the movies gave way to the pleasure I found in writing.”

8. This brings me to my main complaint about Heller’s piece. He fails to see that it's Kael’s writing that accounts for her work’s endurance. He talks about how a lot of people today dream of lost opportunities, and he says, “Kael’s great achievement was to fight this way of thinking, to persuade her readers that work is always done with the machinery at hand.” Maybe that’s one of Kael’s achievements, but it’s not her greatest. Her greatest achievement was the creation of a style of writing that let you in on her thought processes as she wrote. Before she came along, no one did that. She was the first. Now, almost every critic writes that way, her way. She changed the way writers write (and think) about art. I yearn for a close, literary study of her work, one that considers her writing from the level of language, syntax, structure. Heller’s piece is just about as wide of the mark as you can get.

Postscript: Elif Batuman enriches this week’s issue with a cabinet-of-wonders piece titled “Natural Histories” that, in its combinative strangeness, its mixture of history, ecology, eco-poetry, wildlife, biology, literature, politics, travelogue, and memoir, is some sort of masterpiece. Its final two paragraphs are exquisite. Carolyn Drake's photograph is superb.

Ian Frazier: The Art of Figuration

Mark Doty, in his The Art of Description (2010), says that figurative speech is “one of the poet’s primary tools for conveying the texture of experience, and for inquiring into experience in search of meaning.” It’s one of the journalist’s primary tools, too. The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier is a consummate writer of figurative speech. Here are a dozen examples of his art:

While I was watching, only the ten semi-professional dancers danced, and on the street’s breadth, under the harsh mercury light, their weaving, unweaving, crossing, recrossing, exchanging, promenading, short-petticoat rustling, and boot-heel clicking seemed like an inexplicable organic structure on a microscope slide. (“Authentic Accounts of Massacres,” The New Yorker, March 19, 1979; included in Frazier’s 1997 collection Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody)

If you stop at night on one of the roads that mark the edge of this wilderness and listen, the accumulated silence of all that empty space will break around your ears like surf. (“Bear News,” The New Yorker, September 9, 1985; included in Frazier’s 1997 collection Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody)

Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for a while and then largely forgot about. (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

Beyond the roads were foothills, clear-cut of timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery. (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

As you approach, pigeons leap from the trash like flames. (“Canal Street,” The New Yorker, April 30, 1990; included in Frazier’s 2005 collection Gone To New York)

All around me, the summer landscape draped like a big hammock. (“Out Of Ohio,” The New Yorker, January 10, 2005; included in Frazier's 2005 collection Gone To New York)

Beneath the chinaberries their little purple blossoms lay on the mud like a pattern on an old dress, sometimes with hog tracks squished in between. (“Hogs Wild,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2005)

If you take I-95 North through the Bronx heading out of the city, Co-op City will be on your right. Its high-rise apartment buildings stand far enough from one another so that each appears distinct and impressive against the sky. In slow-motion seconds, they pass like the measureless underside of a starship in a science-fiction movie. (“Utopia, The Bronx,” The New Yorker, June 26, 2006)

A flock of sparrows burst from a cluster of bushes by the corner of a house with a noise like heavy rain. (“Travels in Siberia – II,” The New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2010; included in Frazier’s 2010 Travels In Siberia)

The captain sped up to avoid a huge in-bound cargo ship, which went by in our wake with its containers piled high like a waiter balancing dishes. (“Back to the Harbor,” The New Yorker, March 21, 2011)

Credit: The above photo of Ian Frazier is by Sigrid Estrada.

October 17, 2011 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is a tussle between four pieces: Evan Osnos’s report on the Fukushima meltdowns (“The Fallout”); James Wood’s review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Stranger’s Child (“Sons and Lovers”); Dan Chiasson’s review of Dorothea Tanning’s poetry collection Coming to That (“Late Harvest”); and Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts show “Degas and the Nude” (“Bare Naked Ladies”). Each is excellent in its own way. Osnos’s piece encompasses a vast amount of information, drawn from an impressive array of sources, artfully arranged in twelve sections. The message I gleaned from it is that the Fukushima disaster was anthropogenic. Osnos says:

The March tsunami was history’s most expensive natural disaster, with losses estimated at three hundred billion dollars. But the Fukushima meltdowns, the world’s worst nuclear accident in twenty-five years, were man-made, the consequences of failures that laid bare how far Japan’s political and technological rigor have drifted from their apex.

James Wood’s “Sons and Lovers” is an amusing examination of some of Hollinghurst’s stylistic tics, such as his repeated use of “levelly,” “narrowly,” and “muddle.” Wood sums up his assessment of Hollinghurst’s novel as follows:

“The Stranger’s Child” is a frustrating book, both a large and a curiously small novel – it trembles for a time on the verge of moving beyond the parochialism of its very familiar literary setting, and is finally happy to fall back into the comfy and known.

Chiasson’s “Late Harvest” contains this inspired observation: “But the poem’s tactical chitchat is Tanning’s fierce way of defying time.”

Schjeldahl, in his “Bare Naked Ladies,” composes several beautifully contoured, sparkling figurations, e.g., “Viewing his work, we breathe the dizzyingly thin air on the snowy peak of the capital ‘A’ in Art”; “The show yields an immersive sense of early modern art as a tidal wave of hot-and-bothered genius.” And it features a line – “His dancers’ perfect arabesques evoke a soundtrack of grunts” – that, in its brilliant connection between form (“perfect arabesques”) and sound (“soundtrack of grunts”), clinches my decision to make “Bare Naked Ladies” this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

October 10, 2011 Issue

It’s great to see David Long back in the magazine after a thirteen-year absence. His short story “Oubliette” is in this week’s issue. His “Attraction” (The New Yorker, December 9, 1991; included in his superb 1995 collection Blue Spruce) is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker short stories, right up there with Alice Munro’s “The Turkey Season” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980), Maile Meloy’s “Travis, B.” (The New Yorker, October 28, 2002), and Louise Erdrich’s “The Painted Drum” (The New Yorker, March 3, 2003). Long excels at writing free indirect speech. Here, for example, is a snippet from “Attraction”:

He’d talked his cousin into digging the cellar hole and setting the forms for the concrete, but Cynthia had a vision of them living down there indefinitely. “In the crypt,” she called it. Tarpaper roof, splintery planks laid across the mud, the electrical service on the little pole. No way.

That “No way” isn’t Long’s voice, although he’s the one narrating the story; it’s Marly’s, the story’s main character. Long is telling the story from her point of view. The “No way” is her internal speech.

Parts of “Oubliette,” in this week’s New Yorker, are also written in free indirect style. The story is about a girl, Nathalie Chilcott, whose mother starts behaving more and more erratically. Long so identifies with Nathalie that his authorial voice often blends with her voice to the point that they’re indistinguishable. For example, here’s a passage from one of the story’s key scenes, in which Nathalie’s mother locked Nathalie in the attic:

She made a pallet of old coats and garment bags, and lay, arms behind her head, listening to air sieving in a the eaves, the wood-on-wood sound of the roof trusses. Before long, she was picturing this episode as a short film, “Girl in Attic” – except, of course, she wasn’t the pathetic teen-ager sucker-punched by her own mother; she was the camera-wielder, preserving events for the record. Still, make no mistake, she was freaked. There was no denying that this stunt of her mothers had led them into uncharted waters.

That “Still, make no mistake, she was freaked” belongs to both Long and Nathalie. Long is reporting Nathalie’s mental state, but he’s using a phrase (“she was freaked”) that Nathalie would use.

“Oubliette” is briskly told; it presents a lot of information in concentrated form. Long calls it “flash fiction” (see his interview with New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, “The Book Bench,” newyorker.com, October 3, 2011). But it struck me as being more like an abstract of a short story, an abstract written in free indirect style. I liked it, but I didn’t get the sense of deep entry, of entry into real life, that I experienced when I read “Attraction.” I think the difference is that “Attraction” has more passion.