Interesting Emendations: William Murray's "Letter From Rome"

Between 1962 and 1989, William Murray contributed over thirty “Letters From Rome” and other pieces to The New Yorker. My favorite Murray piece is the “Letter From Rome” that appeared in the magazine’s August 22, 1988, issue. It’s about a trattoria called Il Grappolo d’Oro, located on the Piazza della Cancelleria, in one of the oldest quarters of Rome’s centro storico. In the piece, Murray says, “From the moment I walked into the Grappolo d’Oro, sometime during the summer of 1968, it became one of my favorite hangouts.” In the course of describing the Grappolo and the people who work there, particularly one of the co-owners named Andrea d’Angelo, Murray captures a point of view that feels quintessentially Italian. This particular “Letter From Rome,” retitled “Cronaca di Roma,” is included in Murray’s collection The Last Italian (1991). Comparing the New Yorker version with the book version, I find some interesting differences. For example, here’s a passage from the magazine version that illustrates what I mean when I say Murray catches a perspective that feels authentically Italian:

Every day, between sixty and eighty mostly contented people will come, eat, and leave, unaware of the effort being made, the price being paid – and why should they care? It’s not their business, after all; they have their own affairs to worry about.

I like the tough-mindedness that springs into being at the end of that passage. The book version is worded slightly differently:

Every day between sixty and eighty mostly contented people will come, eat, leave, unaware of the effort being made, the price being paid, and why should they care? It’s not their business, after all; they have their own affairs to trouble them.

I have to admit I like the book version better. I like the omission of “and” from the “come, eat, leave” line; I like the comma in place of the dash, so that the question “and why should they care?” comes fast on the heels of the statement about the lack of awareness; and, most of all, I like “they have their own affairs to trouble them,” rather than the more ordinary “they have their own affairs to worry about.”

Here’s another example. It’s an excerpt from a long, detailed, delicious passage in which Murray describes the Grappolo’s interior. The New Yorker version is as follows:

On the walls hang landscapes and still-lifes by a friend of Andrea, the Roman painter Franco Mazzilli, who also designed the frieze of vines and grape clusters executed in dark terra-cotta tiles, which rings the walls.

Interestingly, the book version of this passage describes things a bit differently:

On the walls hang landscapes and still lifes by the Roman painter Franco Mazzilli, a friend, who also designed the frieze of vines and grape clusters, executed in dark wooden panels, that ring the walls.

What happened to the terra-cotta tiles? My guess is that, after the publication of The New Yorker piece, it came to Murray’s attention that what he thought were dark terra-cotta tile were actually dark wooden panels. He made the correction in the book version.

The most surprising difference between the two versions comes at the end of the piece. I really like the ending. It’s a comment by the cynical, pragmatic, traditionalist d’Angelo. Here’s the New Yorker version:

“Let the politicians talk,” he said not long ago. “They love to talk, that is what they do best. For me, it is all rhetoric. Life is hard and work is everything. The rest is dreams.”

Here’s the book version:

“Let the politicians talk,” he said not long ago. “They love to talk, that is what they do best. For me it is all rhetoric. Life is hard and work is all. All the rest is dreams.”

The difference is subtle, a matter of rhythm and sound. Again, I prefer the book version. “Life is hard and work is everything” is not as plain and concentrated as “Life is hard and work is all.” “The rest is dreams” is too brisk. The extra beat in “All the rest is dreams” gives the line an Italian flourish – the perfect note on which to end a perfect piece.

Ian Frazier: Crazy Horse

I’ve just finished reading Ian Frazier’s review of Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse (“The Magic of Crazy Horse,” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011), and I have a question. Why wasn’t this article published in The New Yorker? It’s a significant critical piece, not only because it describes and analyzes a book about one of the pivotal incidents in American history, but also because it is, as far as I know, one of the few book reviews that Frazier has ever written. (It may be the only one he’s ever written!) Frazier is The New Yorker’s top writer. And he’s very knowledgeable about Crazy Horse (see his exciting, powerful account of Crazy Horse’s death in “Great Plains – II,” The New Yorker, February 27, 1989; included in his classic 1989 book Great Plains). 

Frazier's review is terrific. Darkness is its theme, established brilliantly in the first paragraph, when he talks about being on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota back in the 1990s and, as a result of various weird circumstances, “a powerful sense of darkness shivered into my bones like ague.” He then moves to an examination of Powers’ book, calling its subject “the darkest episode ever to happen in that part of the world.” My favorite part of the review is where he shows Powers' ability to relate to and describe the spirit world that the Indian warriors invoke with medicine objects they carry into battle. He says, 

Before turning to the Battle of the Rosebud, he spends five pages describing the war charms and paint important to Crazy Horse and others (golden eagle feathers tied in the war pony’s tail, the small “spirit rocks” Crazy Horse wore under his left arm and behind his left ear, dried wild aster seeds mixed with dried eagle heart and brains, etc.). 

Did Crazy Horse paint his face blue with white hailstones, as per Le War Lance’s claim in Great Plains? There’s no mention of it in Frazier’s review. I noticed a couple of differences between Frazier’s Great Plains account of Crazy Horse’s death and the account he gives of it in “The Magic of Crazy Horse,” based on Powers’ book. In Great Plains, Frazier says that Crazy Horse was stabbed “twice through the abdomen.” Whereas, in “The Magic of Crazy Horse,” he says that Crazy Horse was “bayonetted twice in the back.” And there’s a discrepancy between Frazier’s statement in Great Plains that “no photograph or painting or sketch” of Crazy Horse exists, and the existence of the drawings of Crazy Horse by Amos Bad Heart Bull, two of which are used to illustrate “The Magic of Crazy Horse.” Both discrepancies (if that’s what they are) are likely the result of new information coming to light since the publication of Great Plains twenty-two years ago. 

Frazier, in his review, quotes several passages from Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse, including this Cormac McCarthy-like beauty: 

That is what rode south toward the Rosebud on the night of June 16-17, 1876: thunder dreamers, storm splitters, men who could turn aside bullets, men on horses that flew like hawks or darted like dragon-flies. They came with power as real as a whirlwind, as if the whole natural world – the bears and the buffalo, the storm clouds and the lightning – were moving in tandem with the Indians, protecting them and making them strong. 

If you enjoy writing like that, as much as I do, you may want to read Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse. See also Powers’ excellent “The Indians' Own Story” (The New York Review of Books, August 7, 2005). 

Credit: The above drawing of Crazy Horse's last moments is by Amos Bad Heart Bull; it appears in The New York Review of Books (February 24, 2011), as an illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Magic of Crazy Horse."

Croce's Contradiction

Comparing Arlene Croce’s recent “The Great Adventure of Sergei Diaghilev" (The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011) with her great “Inside the Ballets Russes” (The New Yorker, May 12, 1980; included in Croce’s 1982 collection Going to the Dance), I think I detect a contradiction. In “The Great Adventure of Sergie Diaghilev,” she says of Sjeng Scheijen’s Diaghilev: A Life, “Scheijen’s text avoids the overload of names, dates, and places that sank Richard Buckle’s Diaghilev in 1979, but his approach is nowhere as sophisticated, his interpretive skills never as refined as Buckle’s.” But in “Inside the Ballets Russes,” which is a review of Buckle’s Diaghilev, Croce repeatedly complains about Buckle’s lack of interpretation. She says:

One has no sense from Buckle of the dimensions of Diaghilev’s world, so much smaller than our own.

One feels that for Buckle just the record – facts that haven’t decomposed into legend – is enough.

But Buckle tracks down so many day-by-day minutiae that the movements and decisions become ends in themselves, and he never gets around to states of mind.

The jottings and cullings hardly ever turn into a line of thought. Buckle has trouble sustaining any single subject for more than a page.

A text so lacking in synthesis, in interpretation, can still be useful: future biographers will refer to the million and one checkpoints assembled in this source book.

Twenty-nine years after writing the above, Croce appears more favorably disposed to Buckle’s book. She now deems Buckle’s “just the record” approach to be “sophisticated.” She no longer complains about his lack of interpretation. Instead, she praises his “refined” interpretive skills. It’s too bad Buckle isn’t around to witness her change of opinion. He died in 2001.

I have no idea what accounts for Croce’s reappraisal of Buckle’s book. But anyone reading her review of it in “Inside the Ballets Russes” should do so in light of what she says about it now in “The Great Adventures of Sergei Diaghilev.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Morgan Elliott; it appears in The New Yorker (February 28, 2011) as an illustration for Joan Acocella’s “Critic’s Notebook.”

February 14 & 21, 2011 Issue

There’s no obvious Pick Of The Issue in this week’s New Yorker (“The Anniversary Issue”). But there are plenty of transfixing details. For example: the dining room at Annisa, where, “At regular intervals, a semi-transparent section of a rear wall slides open and out comes Lo’s ornate, succulent creations, sparked by her blended heritage” (Mike Peed, “Tables For Two”); the woman attending the George Eliot conference “who had upswept blond hair and wore teetering heels and a gash of red lipstick” (Rebecca Mead, “Middlemarch and Me”); Frank Gehry’s New World Center, where “high-definition projectors inside the hall can show slides and films on five separate ‘sails,’ gently curved surfaces floating above the stage” (Alex Ross, “Schubert on the Beach”).

How does this year’s Anniversary Issue stack up against last year’s? There’s no contest. Last year’s wins easily; it contains Susan Orlean’s great “Riding High.”

The New Yorker in The New York Review of Books

New Yorker readers know that the magazine’s content is very strong. But if proof is needed, check out the January 13, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books, which contains four New Yorker-related articles:

• Sue Halpern’s “How Do We Know What We Know?” – a review of Oliver Sacks’s book The Mind’s Eye, which is primarily a collection of pieces published over the past few years in The New Yorker;

• Christian Caryl’s “Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything” (“Raffi Khatchadourian on the New Yorker website speculates that the aim of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘is not to reveal a single act of abuse …, but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to judge its morality’”);

• Gordon S. Wood’s “No Thanks for the Memories” – a review of New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History;

• Dan Chiasson’s “‘Rude Ludicrous Lucrative’ Rap,” which refers to Kelefa Sanneh’s “now-classic New Yorker piece on Jay-Z [“Word,” December 6, 2010].”

William Logan's Elitist Brow System

This week in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, William Logan says that The New Yorker is “a middlebrow journal for people who would like to be highbrows” (“Deal With the Devil,” February 18, 2011). I’ve never agreed with the lowbrow-middlebrow-highbrow form of analysis. It smacks of snobbery. John Seabrook, in his book Nobrow (2000), says, “The words highbrow and lowbrow are American inventions, devised for a specifically American purpose: to render culture into class.” I’m not interested in making cultural or class distinctions. I don’t read The New Yorker because I want to improve my social status. I read it because I enjoy it. Reading The New Yorker is bliss. William Logan can take his elitist brow system, fold it for ways, and put it where the moon doesn’t shine.

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurie Rosenwald; it appears in The New Yorker (January 24, 2011) as an “On The Horizon” illustration in “Goings On About Town.”

February 7, 2011 Issue

In this week’s issue, John McPhee pays eloquent tribute to one of his “principal editors,” Pat Crow, who died last week. McPhee’s piece ("Postscript: Pat Crow") contains several inspired descriptions (e.g., “Pat was an easy and supple, drape-fold flycaster”), but it’s the way it ends that stays with me. Having vividly described Crow fishing from Table Rock (“With heavy currents high up his chest, he would make his way there with without the aid of a wading staff, climb up, stand in water scarcely covering his ankles, and walk around on the rock’s remarkably flat top, where he could be king of the universe, or at least of a river two hundred feet from bank to bank”), McPhee says in conclusion, “And that is where I want to leave him – standing on an erratic boulder halfway across a deep fast river with three thousand cubic feet of water going past him every second.” I like that “And that is where I want to leave him.” McPhee's approach to eulogy - memory of good times rather than mourning of loss - resonates with me.

I was moved by McPhee’s “Pat Crow” piece to reread his 1984 La Place de la Concorde Suisse, which says on the publisher’s page, “The text of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker and was developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and C. P. Crow.” Many of the McPhee books that Crow had a hand in editing say, “developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and Robert Bingham, and C. P. Crow.” But it appears that in the case of La Place de la Concorde Suisse, Shawn was the over-arching editor and Crow was the sole principal editor. What a brilliant book! There should be a word for this form of beautifully crafted, compact, concrete writing. “Fact piece” seems totally insufficient. If you ask me, it’s a form of poetry. The piece is about the Swiss Army. There’s a wonderful, irreverent character in it, Luc Massy. The descriptions of alpine angles of vision are ravishing. Consider this beauty:

The view is now panoptic – over the deep-set river to the white summits, the long front line of the Pennines leading the eye west. Twenty miles downstream, the valley bends slightly and cuts the view. Above the river, avalanche tracks stripe the mountainsides between dark gorges no machine could pass. The floor of the valley is groomed and industrial. There are rows of Lombardy poplars along airstrips that serve no city. This centerland of the Valais, with its vegetable fields and orchards, too – its apples and asparagus, tomatoes and pears – would appear to be the ultimate citadel for the democracy, where the nation could attempt an impregnable stand. As if the mountains were not barrier enough, ancient landslides have left their natural barricades at intervals down the valley.

How fine that “Above the river, avalanche tracks stripe the mountainsides between dark gorges no machine could pass.” I could quote endlessly from this delicious work. Here’s one more:

A narrow red train appears far below. Coming out of a tunnel, it crosses a bridge, whistling – three cars in all, the Furka-Oberalp. The train will go up the Rhone until there is no more Rhone, and then climb on cogs to the Furka Pass, and the Oberalp Pass, to finish its journey descending the nascent Rhine, pool to cascade pool, pastel green with glacial flour.

McPhee makes poetry of Swiss place names, e.g., “The Rigi and the Rossberg are subalpine mountains that flank the Valley of Arth and Goldau, south of the Zuger See – in Schwyz, the forest canton for which the Confederation was named.” La Place de la Concorde Suisse, with its complex geographic descriptions and large cast of characters, would not have been an easy piece to edit. Indeed, in a fascinating article titled “Checkpoints” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009; included in McPhee’s 2010 collection Silk Parachute), McPhee says about the fact-checking of The New Yorker version of La Place de la Concorde Suisse, which appeared in the October 31, 1983 issue of the magazine, that “I have never turned in to The New Yorker a more combed-over piece than that one.”

In his tribute to Crow, McPhee says:

He once remarked of a dish I was preparing in advance that by afternoon it would be “dirty bacterial soup.” I still wondered if he felt that way about some of my pieces of writing, but one day – out of nowhere, twenty-five years after editing something of mine about who knows what – he told me that he had just finished rereading it from a book on his shelf at home, and he went on to make remarks about it too positive to appear in a sophisticated publication.

I wonder if the piece that Crow was referring to was La Place de la Concorde Suisse. I have a feeling it might’ve been. It’s definitely a masterpiece. Crow assisted in its creation, its "development." In the world of editing, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike

It’s interesting to see how three first-rate critical minds channel Norman Rockwell. Recently, London Review of Book’s art critic, Peter Campbell, reviewed Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition of Rockwell’s works, saying that, “The artwork is pukka oil painting” ("At Dulwich Picture Gallery," London Review of Books, January 20, 2011). I confess when I read that, I didn't know what "pukka" meant. I'm still not sure. At first glance, I thought Campbell was saying that Rockwell’s pictures made him ill. I recalled Peter Schjeldahl saying something similar a number of years ago in a New Yorker review of a Rockwell retrospective. Schjeldahl said, “The absolute absence of mystery in his art makes me sick” (“Fanfares for the Common Man,” The New Yorker, November 22, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). But I see in the dictionary that “pukka,” though it looks and sounds ugly, is actually an adjective of praise, meaning either “genuine” or (informal) “excellent.” So what's Campbell saying? I interpret his statement to mean that Rockwell’s artwork is high quality oil painting. The problem with this interpretation is that it conflicts with what he later says in his review: “He was a terrific phenomenon, not a terrific painter.” When Campbell says this, he’s responding to a remark made by Schjeldahl (“Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t”) that is quoted in the Dulwich exhibition catalogue. I take it that when Campbell says that Rockwell is a terrific phenomenon, he’s referring to Rockwell’s ability to paint the telling image. Campbell says, “The end to which Rockwell worked was the telling image, not the precious artefact.” But, when Campbell looks at some of Rockwell’s images, he finds, “hopeful platitudes,” “winsome notions,” “a folksy version of the American dream.” In perhaps the finest sentence in his piece, Campbell says about Rockwell’s comic images, “The gestures and expressions, like those in silent movies, caricature real frowns and smiles – over-salt and over-sweet.” I detect ambivalence at the heart of Campbell’s review. He likes Rockwell’s painting technique, but he's not crazy about his subject matter.

Peter Schjeldahl, in the aforementioned New Yorker review, says something similar, only his reaction to some of Rockwell’s images is much more intense. For example, in regard to Rockwell’s Girl at Mirror (1954), he asks, “Why, oh why, must she have a goddam movie magazine on her lap?” He answers: “O.K. I know. Rockwell’s principled sense of narrative cogency demanded that every visible action have a visible cause. But the effect is suffocating.”

But Schjeldahl also says, “Rockwell painted well.” He describes Rockwell’s technique as follows:

His surprisingly large, dense, and sumptuous canvases seem excessive to the requirements of designs for magazine covers. He mastered a sort of hurry-up chiaroscuro, starting with a transfer drawing that was derived from many preliminary sketches, photographs, and oil sketches, and then working out tones in a warm grayish-purple, Mars violet. Then he would apply varnish, so as not to disturb the painting’s underlayer while he revised the scumbled lights and shadows to construct images that are at once photographically vivid in their details and painterly over all.

Schjeldahl’s opinion is that “Rockwell is some kind of great artist.” This, too, seems a shade ambivalent; but when you consider the illness and suffocation that Schjeldal says he feels when he looks at Rockwells, it’s also downright generous. Is there a way of appreciating Rockwell’s art that doesn’t mix negative with positive?

Let’s seek a third opinion. John Updike, in a review called “Tote That Quill” (The New Yorker, August 14, 1978; collected in Updike’s superb Hugging the Shore, 1983), says this about Rockwell:

One must turn to America’s Great Illustrators to see how he evolved from a young imitator of J. C. Leyendecker, even to the showily parallel brushstrokes (Post cover, 1919), into a hyper-realist whose barbershop interior (Post cover, 1950) yields nothing in skill and reflective interplay to a Richard Estes. It differs from an Estes in the coziness of the details Rockwell has chosen to illuminate, and in its central cozy implication that at the back of every small-town barbershop lurks a bunch of music-loving old men; but the barber chair, the reflected light on the stovepipe, the crack in the corner of the big window the viewer is looking through – this is amazing painting.

Updike liked that picture of the barbershop interior (it’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop, 1950) so much that, in a piece titled “Acts of Seeing” (included in his great collection More Matter, 1999), he described it again, savoring every detail:

The boots and rubbers, for instance, in front of the stove, with its red-hot coals, and, in the diagonally opposite corner, the ghostly row of old shaving mugs in the top cells of the obsolete cabinet, between the ceiling fixture of frosted glass and the little gooseneck lamp. One’s eye, traveling around the edge of the painting, encounters a whisk broom, an Indian-shuttered window frame, a porcelain basin, a rack of comic books, two knobbed chairs, a mullion with parched putty, a carved crack in the corner of a window pane, a spindleback settee, shelves holding old magazines, a gun, fishing tackle, and all along the top, the gilt appliqué letters spelling BARBER. The eye naturally swoops through the front window to the luminous, man-crammed rectangle of the back room, skimming through the shadows of the closed shop, past the listening cat, the magnificent old barber chair, the hairy broom, the little cracked mirror, the wartime poster of a torn flag, into the bright chaste chamber where music is made. The most brilliant passages of painting, perhaps, depict the standing violinist, all but dissolved in light, and the reflections on the foreshortened piece of stove pipe leading into the wall. But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life.

If you believe, as I most certainly do, that art is in the detail, you will likely find that Updike’s extraordinary description of Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop clinches the case for Rockwell’s greatness. After you read a passage like that, concern about the meaning of “pukka oil painting” seems irrelevant.

Credit: The above illustration is Norman Rockwell's Charwomen in Theatre - Study (1946).

January 31, 2011 Issue

It’s been three days since I first read Alice Munro’s short story “Axis” in this week’s issue of the magazine, and I find myself still pondering its meaning. The story is not straightforward. There are shifting time-frames and points-of-view. I think I understand everything up to the second last section, which is about the Frontenac Axis. Munro writes:

When the train starts up again, he explains that all around them are great slabs of limestone packed in order, one on top of the other, like a grand construction. But in one spot this gives way, he says, and you can see something else. It’s what is known as the Frontenac Axis. It is nothing less than an eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield, all the ancient combustion cutting through the limestone, pouring over, messing up those giant steps.

The story takes its name from this geological formation. I assume, therefore, that Munro intends the Frontenac Axis to symbolize something. That “something” is, I think, the unconscious. The “great slabs of limestone packed in order” are the repressive, rigid layers of the conscious mind. The “eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield” is the welling up of wild, messy, not-to-be denied passion from the unconscious. Munro has expressed this geological concept of the unconscious before. For example, in her story "Fits" (included in her 1986 collection The Progress of Love), a character says, "People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit." Normally, I resist reading stories as allegories. I prefer to analyze the form and leave the “meaning” alone. But in the case of “Axis,” I don’t think we are reading too much between the lines if we interpret the Frontenac Axis symbolically. In fact, I think the meaning of “Axis” depends on it.