March 21, 2011 Issue

Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to “Ian Frazier and Me,” and be done with it. Frazier’s my man! A new piece by him is a major event. He has two in this week’s issue: a Talk story called “Heavy Hitters,” and a feature titled “Back to the Harbor.” It’s interesting to see how Frazier handles the Talk tradition that discourages the use of the first person singular. “We” is the preferred point of view, as in “Lately, we’ve been pondering the pigeons in Bryant Park.” Frazier is the quintessential first-person-singular writer – it’s one of the many things I like about his writing. In conformity with the Talk “rule,” he generally refrains from using “I” in his Talk pieces. But he doesn’t often use “we” – and no wonder; it seems pretty damned artificial to ask a writer to write as if he’s a crowd. Sometimes he uses “you,” as in “If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes …” (“Antipodes,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1975; included in Frazier’s great 2005 collection Gone To New York). But most of the time, he writes in the third person, giving his Talk pieces an objective feel that’s quite distinct from his other work, which is written in a much more personal style. Now and then, I suspect Frazier of sneaking himself into his Talk stories by posing as an anonymous questioner. For example, in this week’s “Heavy Hitters,” which is a wonderful description of an evening of Daily News Golden Gloves amateur boxing at the Cultural Performing Arts Center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, there’s a referee named Ilya Friedman, who is “introduced to the crowd as having been a boxer in the Soviet Union.” We know Frazier is a passionate Russophile. In the story, Frazier has an unidentified man sitting next to Friedman asking him questions:

The man asked him where in Russia he was from. “Odessa,” he replied, pronouncing it “Ah-dessa.” The man asked what weight he had fought at over there. “When I started, I didn’t even have any weight, I was a child,” he said. “Later, I fought at seventy-five kilos, what is called cruiserweight in America. I fought a hundred and thirty-seven amateur fights in the Soviet Union, and won a hundred and twenty-four.” The man asked what was the difference between these matches tonight and boxing in the Soviet Union. “These are friendly fights,” Ilya Friedman said.

Maybe I’m crazy, but, as I say, I suspect that the man doing the questioning is none other than Frazier himself. This is not the first time I’ve had this feeling. At the end of Frazier’s memorable Talk piece “Lovefest” (The New Yorker, March 1, 2010), Frazier writes, “Somebody asked the Reverend Daughtry if today’s was the coldest march he had ever been on.” I have a hunch that “somebody” was Frazier. But I could be wrong.

The other piece by Frazier in this week’s issue – “Back to the Harbor” – is a beauty. Frazier has so many interests – seal-watching is one I didn’t know about until now. It’s about Frazier nosing around Staten Island and other places looking for seals. He eventually finds them when he takes a seal-watching cruise in New York Harbor. Frazier has a way of putting things in his stories that most other writers leave out. For example, in “Back to the Harbor,” he talks about having a flat tire as a result of hitting a pothole: “I thought I had no spare, but when I pulled over and checked, I did. I changed the tire in a lot in Perth Amboy and got to Staten Island just after sunrise.” I like incidental details like that – after all, they’re part of life, and deserve to be mentioned. In “Back to the Harbor,” Frazier’s descriptions of park benches (“All the park benches had blankets of snow pulled up over their knees”), birds (“A flock of brants on the water croaked their creaky calls, ring-billed gulls on the breeze teetered like skateboarders”), a ship (“The captain sped up to avoid a huge in-bound cargo ship, which sped by in our wake with its containers piled high like a waiter balancing dishes”), the basking posture of seals (“curved like cocktail wieners on toothpicks”), a peregrine falcon (“The elegant little predator came into focus against the sky framed by the bincoculars’ circle, moving his head back and forth surveillantly”) are inspired. He devotes a very funny paragraph to the description of a plastic patio chair that he finds on the beach at the foot of Joline Avenue. If you collect verbless sentence fragments, as I do, check out this dandy from “Back to the Harbor”: “A huge tractor tire on its side with herring gulls standing on it, a row of white pines a recent storm had knocked down, deep snowdrifts, a man in a car in the parking lot doing a crossword puzzle.” “Back to the Harbor” is like a prose poem of facts. I enjoyed it immensely.

Teju Cole's "Flat" Description

I’m still trying to figure out what James Wood meant by “‘flat’ description” in his review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In his piece, Wood talks about a particularly vivid image that occurs near the end of Open City: Julius, the novel’s narrator, is attending a Carnegie Hall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; he sees an elderly lady walking up the aisle. Cole describes her as follows:

She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.

Wood says,

Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.

“Flat” in the sense that Cole’s description is dull and lifeless? I don’t think that’s what Wood means. The fact that he sets “flat” in quotation marks indicates that he’s using the word in a particular way – to denote a particular style of description. There’s a hint as to what he means when he says the image of the old woman “seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.” We know that Wood dislikes overly rich description. In his essay “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate), he disdainfully refers to Updike’s “puffy lyricism” and “slathered detail.” He’s an anti-inflationist. When it comes to verbal representation of reality, he seems to prefer an almost literal transcription – the thing itself. It’s the kind of description that Teju Cole abundantly provides in Open City. For example, here’s Cole’s depiction of a section of Wall Street:

I walked toward the west. People bought food from a falafel vendor whose van was parked on the corner, or walked alone, in pairs, in threes. I saw black women in charcoal grey skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men. Just past Federal Hall, I walked past the glass frontage of the New York Sports Club. Right up against the glass in its brightly lit interior was a single row of exercise bicycles, all of them occupied by men and women in Lycra who pedaled in the silence and looked out at the commuters in the dusk. Near the corner of Nassau, a man in a scarf and fedora hat stood with an easel before him and painted the Stock Exchange in grisaille on a large canvas. A stack of completed paintings, also grisaille, of the same building seen from different angles, lay at his feet. I watched him work for a moment, as he loaded his brush, and with careful gestures applied white highlights to the acanthus of the six massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange.

“I saw,” I watched,” “I noticed,” “I scrutinized” – these words occur frequently in Cole’s writing. His descriptions are built on data received through the eye. He rarely constructs a metaphor or simile, and when he does, it’s usually a fairly plain one (e.g., “The just risen sun came at the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river gleamed like aluminum roofing”).

There’s a Hopperesque quality to many of Cole’s descriptions that I really like. That image of the men and women on their exercise bicycles pedaling “in the silence,” looking out “at the commuters in the dusk,” in the above-quoted passage, for example, seems to me a scene that might’ve caught Hopper’s eye.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Cole’s “flat” description – what I understand “flat” to mean, at any rate – is his use of catalog. For example, here’s a passage from Open City in which he catalogs the details of the interior of a Chinese shop:

The shop, of which I was the sole customer, was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects: a profusion of bamboo cages as well as finely worked metal ones, hanging like lampshades from the ceiling; hand-carved chess sets on the ancient-looking bar between the customer and the shopkeeper’s bay; imitation Ming Dynasty lacquerware, which ranged in size from tiny decorative pots to round-bellied vases large enough to conceal a man; humorous pamphlets of the “Confucius say” variety, which had been printed in English in Hong Kong and which gave advice to those gentlemen who wished to find success with women; fine wooden chopsticks set on porcelain chopstick stands; glass bowls of every hue, thickness, and design; and, in a seemingly endless glass-fronted gallery high above the regular shelves, a series of brightly painted masks that run through every facial expression possible in the dramatist’s art.

I’m a sucker for compendiums of detail like the one above. They seem to me to be one of the most effective ways for a writer to reproduce reality. The trick is in knowing how to make something good, something artful, out of them. There’s an intriguing scrap of catalog writing under the title “Descriptions of Things and Atmosphere” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nonfiction collection The Crack Up that reads as follows:

Seen in a Junk Yard: Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs, plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water, pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dinghy, box of bolts, (No.1), van, stove, auto stuff (No.2), army trucks, cast iron body, hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.

Fitzgerald must’ve made this entry in his notebook with the intention of someday turning it into something – a scene in a novel or short story, maybe. But, unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to do so. In Open City, Teju Cole integrates his catalogs of urban details into a larger narrative about a young man for whom walking in the city is “a release,” “a reminder of freedom.” He’s successfully done what all artists strive to do - shape reality’s welter into something meaningful.

March 14, 2011 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent “The Gulf War,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, convincingly corrects at least two major misconceptions regarding last year’s massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: (1) that the government wrongfully ceded control over the spill response to BP; (2) that BP’s response was inept. Khatchadourian says:

It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope – the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary and anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M. – as one federal scientist called it, “a company built in the middle of the night.” In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. After the well ruptured [on April 20, 2010], BP accepted help from competing oil companies, and hired the world’s leading oil-pollution specialists to run key operations. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast – a region of varied geography and political culture – were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country."

Khatchadourian’s impressive article is divided into eight parts that describe, among other interesting things, the efforts of a Shore Clean-Up Assessment Technique (SCAT) team searching for oil pollution in the Louisiana marshland ("One had to travel, sometimes an hour or more, to see the oil - one had to hunt for it"); the strong leadership of Admiral Thad Allen (commandant of the Coast Guard, “who struggled to keep the various parties united”), Edwin Stanton (commander at the Houma Incident Command Post, who believed “in a big show of force”), and Roger Laferriere (Stanton’s replacement, who recognized that “the principal fight against the oil was offshore, to be conducted with a weapon – dispersants – that many people thought was more harmful than the spill itself”); the alarmist histrionics of the president of Plaquemines Parish, Billy Nungesser (“Like no other official during the spill, Nungasser embodied the rage, anxiety, and frustration that swept through South Louisiana”); President Obama’s involvement in resolving conflicts between local politicians and the responders (at a critical juncture, he says to Admiral Thad Allen, “Thad, I want to get a panel together, and get a roundtable discussion, and then I want to be briefed on the answer, and I want it done in the next few days”); the close collaboration between BP and the Coast Guard (“As the response outgrew what BP was obligated by law to support, the company nonetheless gave the Coast Guard nearly everything it asked for”); the debate over the use of dispersants (“Scientists and activists spoke of the dispersants as if they had been concocted in a weapons lab”).

As it turned out, the use of dispersants may well have been determinative in what appears to be a positive environmental outcome (“Luck certainly played a role in sparing large portions of the coast – a turn in the weather could have made the impact much worse – but a strategy based on dispersing the oil offshore appears to have helped prevent a great deal of crude from hitting the land”).

In terms of writing as pure writing, I enjoyed the last part of “The Gulf War” the most. Wonderfully titled “The Plume Hunters,” it describes, from a first person point of view, a science crew’s search for under-sea oil plumes. In it, Khatchadourian writes my kind of ideal sentence: “It was late on a September night, and in the darkness I climbed up to the bridge.” As a reader, I welcomed Khatchadourian’s appearance in the narrative. I like it when a writer lets us in on his whereabouts and what he’s doing in pursuit of the story. In his brilliant profile of Julian Assange (“No Secrets,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010), Khatchadourian did the same thing that he does in “The Gulf War” – he waits until near the end of the piece to step inside the narrative frame. I wish he’d write more in the first person. He’s tremendously effective when he does.

The Parentheses of Pauline

One of the hallmarks of Pauline Kael’s incomparable style was her extensive and creative use of parenthesis. She stuffed all kinds of comments - sniffs, snorts, hoots, harrumphs, cackles, raspberries, tidbits, wisecracks, barbs, etc. – inside brackets. Example of a wisecrack (from her review of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, The New Yorker, December 27, 1969; included in her great National Book Award-winning 1973 Deeper Into Movies):

Ashamed of her sexuality (like all liberals, in this schematic view), she is given such lines as – to Redford – “I use you the way you use me.” (Most women in the audience will probably think, Lucky you.)

Example of a tidbit (from her review of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The New Yorker, June 28, 1982; collected in her 1984 Taking It All In):

Henry Thomas (who was the older of Sissy Spacek’s two small sons in Raggedy Man) has a beautiful brainy head with a thick crop of hair; his touching serio-comic solemnity draws us into the mood of the picture.

Example of a barb (from her terrific essay “Fear of Movies,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1978; collected in her 1980 When The Lights Go Down):

She is truly a terrible actress, of the nostril school. (Did she study under Natalie Wood?)

There’s scarcely a paragraph in the hundreds of reviews she wrote that doesn’t contain at least one parenthesis. Sometimes she’d pack two or three in a single sentence. Example (from her brilliant 1969 Harper’s Magazine essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” included in her 1970 collection Going Steady):

It took off from a political double entendre that everybody had been thinking of (“Why, if Joe McCarthy had been working for the Communists, he couldn’t be doing them more good!”) and carried it to startling absurdity, and the extravagances and conceits and conversational non sequiturs (by George Axelrod out of Richard Condon) were ambivalent and funny in a way that was trashy yet liberating.

Kael’s paragraphs are like strings of firecrackers going off – sparks of perception flying in every direction – many of which are caught in parentheses. There are at least three kinds of Kael parenthesis. The first kind is sort of a “memory pocket,” which Kael filled with movie associations drawn from her vast knowledge of the cinema. Example (from her review of Saturday Night Fever, The New Yorker, December 26, 1977; included in When The Lights Go Down):

(She’s reminiscent of the girl Margaret Sullivan played in The Shop Around the Corner.)

A second type is what I would call her “poison pen” parenthesis, in which she plants a sharp-tongued comment. Example (from her review of Midnight Express, The New Yorker, November 27, 1978; collected in When The Lights Go Down):

(I didn’t hope for Billy and his friends to escape – just for the movie to be over.)

And a third variety of Kael’s parenthesis is a very general category that I simply call “descriptive.” It’s my favorite kind, in which Kael tucks an extra bit of memorable detail into her descriptions of scenes, characters, actors, etc. Example (from her review of Stardust Memories, The New Yorker, October 27, 1980; collected in Taking It All In):

She seems to be used just for her physiognomy – for her bony chest and wide mouth (its corners run right into her cheekbones).

It’s hard to say how Kael’s penchant for parenthesis developed. It may be a spin-off from her admiration for thirties comedies’ fast-talking, wisecracking heroines – e.g., Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard. I say this because I see a parallel between the quick, subversive way a verbal wisecrack is delivered and the quick, subversive way Kael inserts her parenthetical comments into her writing). Or it could be an aspect of her tendency to say something and then immediately qualify it with a “but ... ,” “though ... ,” “still ... ,” thereby adding shade after shade of nuance.

Kael’s parentheses don’t stick out or clog the flow of her writing. They’re part of what makes the texture of her prose so incredibly rich. They're a means of conveying the action of her thought.

From the hundreds (maybe thousands) of parentheses that Kael wrote, here are six I’ve chosen mainly because they strike me as being so … Kaelesque:

(The bit of opera performed in China Is Near is the damnedest thing since “Salammbô” in Citizen Kane.) – “China Is Near,” The New Yorker, January 13, 1968

(And when, at last, he communicates with a visitor from above, there is a fleeting suggestion of Jean Renoir’s lopsided grin in the extraterrestrial’s young-old face.) – “The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977

(You’ll also notice that she gets the worst – the most gnomic – lines, such as “At the center of a sick psyche there is a sick spirit.” Huh?) – “Fear of Movies,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1978

(His theory that men impart their substance and qualities into women along with their semen is a typical macho Mailerism; he sees it as a one-way process, of course. Has no woman slipped a little something onto his privates?) – “Marilyn,” The New York Times Book Review, July 22, 1973

(He wants to be buried in an unmarked grave. Of course. That’s why he’s made a four-hour movie about himself and his pilgrimage.) – “The Calvary Gig,” The New Yorker, February 13, 1978

(For true dryness, you’d have to sit through The Legend of the Lone Ranger to hear another great comedian, Jason Robards, as President Ulysses S. Grant, rasp out at the end, “Who is that masked man?”) – “Arthur,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1981

Credit: The above 1985 photograph of Pauline Kael is by James Hamilton. It appears on the back of her 1985 collection State of the Art.

Cézanne's "Card Players" and "Smokers": Clark v. Schjeldahl

It’s interesting to compare Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Met’s “Cézanne’s Card Players” (“Game Change,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011) with T. J. Clark’s piece on the same show when it was at the Courtauld (“At the Courtauld,” London Review of Books, December 2, 2010). Schjeldahl, in his review, refers to Clark’s piece, and says:

Clark still adores the pictures. I don’t, especially. The greatness of Cezanne’s art is undeniable but, for me, dauntingly saturnine, with a medicinal aftertaste, despite fugitive beauties of touch and color, which still often take me by surprise.

Schjeldahl is right; Clark does adore the pictures. In “At the Courtauld,” Clark says:

There is an astonishing trio of large portraits of a middle-aged man, probably a farm labourer, in his Sunday best – loans from Mannheim, St. Petersburg and Moscow – that it is worth traveling the earth to see hung in a row. They are the most complex depictions of “an ordinary man” to come down to us from the recent past.

When I read Clark’s piece, I found the references to “class position,” “his class’s best thinkers,” and “class identity” off-putting. Clark seemed way too class-conscious for my taste. One thing I can’t abide is snobbery, and I thought I detected a strong whiff of it from Clark’s review. Then, last week, when I read Schjeldahl’s “Game Change,” in which he points out that Clark is a Marxist, it became clear to me that all that “class” business in Clark’s Cézanne piece stemmed from his interpretative ideology. Ideological critics have always seemed to me to be bent on leaving out whatever in an artwork is not to their purposes, or on distorting, in the service of argument, what they do find to describe. I haven’t had the benefit of seeing the actual Card Players, but from what I can see of them in reproductions, I find myself agreeing with Schjeldahl when he says, “The scenes of the Card Players are thoroughly banal – unless you sentimentalize peasants, as Clark does, hailing them as actors in a ‘great historical turning point,’ mainly blooms of a perishing class.” Notwithstanding Clark’s ideological a priori, he is an amazing writer. Check out his description of the St. Petersburg Smoker: “In the St. Petersburg painting the red of the peasant’s lip bleeds – explodes – across his chin, neck, earlobe, shadowed forehead.” There’s a wonderful description of one of Cezanne’s paintings (the Orsay Card Players) in Schjeldahl’s piece, too: “Pooling darks intermingle with lighter hues that are like exhalations from damp earth.” When I look closely at the reproduction of Cézanne’s Study for the Card Players that is used to illustrate Schjeldahl’s New Yorker piece, I marvel at the way the figure of a man playing cards has been bodied forth in paint. As Schjeldahl says, “It is amazing, when you think about it, that a clutter of coarse, arbitrary-seeming strokes can add up to a solid – and impenetrably stolid – man.” How did Cézanne do it? Schjeldahl attributes Cézanne’s achievement to “being rigorously true to the testimony of eyesight.” This is helpful, but only in a general way. Clark seems to get closer to an answer when he focuses on the details of the paintings. For example, he says:

In the Hermitage Smoker, a group of black bottles and flushed fruit turns out to be a painting of part of a painting produced 20 years ago before (now in Berlin): an ominous, doom-laden vision of familiar things, done in great thunder and lightning impasto of Cézanne’s first (I hate “early”) style. The Moscow Smoker’s elbow goes off at a neat tangent into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of the curtain, and over to the right he is given a woman partner on the wall, on a piece of canvas whose corner refuses to stay flat.

That “into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of the curtain” is very fine. But then Clark suddenly stops his fascinating analysis and rather crazily says, “Blather about these sorts of detail being so many tokens of ‘paintedness’ has me immediately switching off my metaphorical hearing aid and humming the ‘Ça ira.’” Well, I, for one, don’t consider it blather at all. Those descriptions of detail are the most interesting things in Clark’s piece – far more interesting than his points about “class position,” “class identity,” and so on, which truly are blather.

Credit: The above artwork is Paul Cézanne’s “Study for the Card Players” (ca. 1890-92), used to illustrate Peter Schjeldahl’s “Game Change” (The New Yorker, February 28, 2011).

March 7, 2011 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is unquestionably Elif Batuman’s wonderful “The View from the Stands.” From the moment I read its opening sentence - “One cold, wet morning in December, I headed into Istanbul to watch the Beşiktaş soccer team play a match against Bursaspor, a team from the city of Bursa, the original Ottoman capital” – I was hooked. The piece is filled with "thisness" - James Wood's great term for "any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion" (How Fiction Works). Here are some examples of "thisness" in "The View from the Stands": the umbrella seller ("A gaunt young woman in a head scarf and a cheap trenchcoat stood pressed up against an embankment, selling Beşiktaş umbrellas"); tea-drinking ("Ayhan ordered another round of tea, and for a few moments the only sound was the clinking of spoons as the men stirred sugar cubes into their tea"); Ayhan's cigarette ("Eyes narrowed, lips moving silently, he watched the game with total fixity, the cigarette between his fingers turning into a column of ash"); a snack bar near Inönü Stadium ("Out front, under the stars, a young round-faced man was standing at a large charcoal grill, tending to kebaps, green peppers and tomatoes. The smell of grilled lamb filled the air"). And if you enjoy the poetics of place names ("signs always pregnant with a dense texture of meaning," Roland Barthes says in "Proust and Names"), as much as I do, you will relish the way Batuman plunges you into Istanbul's place names: Beşiktaş, Dolmabahçe Palace, Inönü Stadium, Kazan pub, Eagle Café, Üsküdar. Reading "The View from the Stands," I marveled at the variousness of its constituent elements - taxi-driver dialogue, Turkish soccer chants, iPhone news, sociology, history, poetry, the Carşi website, interviews, YouTube videos, all intermixed with Batuman's own vivid accounts of her time hanging out with Deniz, Ayhan, Autobahn, and others. The piece ends beautifully with Batuman imagining herself in the stands under Autobahn's new Beşiktaş banner:

Remembering the Rapid Wien game, I thought of how the new banner would come alive at the next match. It would unfurl itself over you and you would beat at it with your hands as it rolled over the crowd in a great wave, its slogan facing the floodlights and the night sky.

"The View from the Stands" is an inspired piece of writing. I enjoyed it immensely.

Mendelsohn's Malice

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his malicious “The Truman Show” (The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004; included in Mendelsohn’s 2008 collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken) looks down his nose at Truman Capote and judges him to be a failure. He says it three times: (1) “In his inexorable disintegration, Capote represents a distinct type of American failure – the artist whose early success is so spectacular that both life and art are forever trapped by, and associated with, long-past triumphs”; (2) “Thus seduced by his own reputation, he failed to pursue an artistic avenue that could well have led him to greater success”; (3) “Together, they [a volume of Capote’s letters entitled Too Brief a Treat and The Complete Short Stories of Truman Capote] provide intriguing insights into the nature both of his gift and of his terrible failure.” Terrible failure? We are talking here about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood, and – my favorite Capote work – The Muses are Heard. Rather than focusing on Capote’s writing, Mendelsohn dwells on Capote’s personal life. In addition to calling Capote a failure, he also calls him an “inveterate liar.” I find this ad hominem form of book reviewing despicable. I’m interested in the writing, not the writer. Compare Mendelsohn’s piece with Thomas Mallon’s New Yorker review of the same two Capote books (“Golden Boy,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2004). Mallon says,

To best experience Capote the stylist, one must go back to his short fiction, his work in the form that he called his “great love”; it was a genre he neglected through the nineteen-sixties, and then, near the end of his life, began to woo again. In fewer than four hundred pages, Random House has just given us “The Complete Stories of Truman Capote” ($24.95). If some of the earliest, most precocious efforts seem derivative (“My Side of the Matter” now feels awfully like Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”), one experiences as strongly as ever his gift for concrete abstraction (“She had a hectic brightness”) and his spectacular observancy: the eyes of a woman taking off her glasses seem “stunned by freedom; the skimpily lashed lids fluttered like long-captive birds abruptly let loose.” Again and again, his lyricim, to poignant effect, stops just short of overripeness: a parked car, buried in new snow, “winked its headlights: help! help! silent, like the heart’s distress.”

By staying close to Capote’s writing, Mallon's piece is much fairer than Mendelsohn’s.

Here are two more examples of Capote’s “spectacular observancy.” The first one is from his great The Muses are Heard, which ran as a two-part article in The New Yorker (October 20 & 27, 1956), and the second one is from his much maligned “La Côte Basque,” which is a fragment of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, published in 1986:

Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, we rode for forty minutes through the blackened acres of bombed-out East Berlin. The two additional buses, with the rest of the company, had arrived at the station before us. We joined the others on the platform where The Blue Express waited. Mrs. Gershwin was there, supervising the loading of her luggage onto the train. She was wearing a nutria coat and, over her arm, carried a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag.

Even for this those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can’t refuse: Dom Pérignon, and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.

Those acutely seen details – “a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag,” champagne “bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze” – are the mark of a terrific describer. Capote’s writing brims with such details. I think, in the long run, Judge Time will be kind to it. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with moralizing critics like Daniel Mendelsohn who judge Capote’s life, not his work.

Credit: The above 1973 photograph of Truman Capote is by Henry Diltz, and is used to illustrate Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show,” The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004.

February 28, 2011 Issue

There’s a strong flâneur tradition at The New Yorker (e.g., Joseph Mitchell’s classic accounts of poking around New York Harbor, Anthony Bailey’s pieces about his various strolls, Ian Frazier’s memorable account of his hike along Route 3), and it’s a pleasure to see it continue in this week’s issue of the magazine. James Wood, in his favorable review of Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, clearly enjoys novelist-as-flâneur writing. He likes it because, as he says, “what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose – the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing).” Of Wood's many fine descriptions of the book, the following passage clinched it for me:

Eschewing the systematic rigor of Sebald’s work, as well as its atmosphere of fatigued nervous tension, Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it: “When I turned around, I saw that I was at the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum. Never having visited before, I went in”; “In early December, I met a Haitian man in the underground catacombs of Penn Station”; The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified”; At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook”; Last night, I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony, which is the work Mahler wrote after Das Lied von der Erde.”

Wood’s choice of quotation in the above excerpt is inspired! The five sentences quoted are my idea of the ideal sentence – subjective, specific, active, interesting. The only reservation I have about reading Open City is that, because it’s fiction, it’s not true to reality. I much prefer to read factual writing. Wood doesn’t appear to have any problem with this issue. He appears content to seek the real in fiction, an endeavor that has always struck me as paradoxical. Nevertheless, in light of Wood’s stimulating review, I intend to read Cole’s Open City. I’ll post my review of it in the near future.

The flâneur tradition continues in another piece in this week’s issue, as well. Ian Frazier’s Talk story “Bridge” describes a walk on the Walkway Over the Hudson, the former Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge, in Poughkeepsie, that is “the longest elevated pedestrian bridge in the world.” I enjoyed this piece immensely, particularly the following terrific description of river ice:

On the river’s surface, a vast field of broken ice, all white (ice slabs), dark brown (water), and light brown (ice slabs under water), in a pattern of splendid randomness like winter camouflage, proceeded slowly oceanward.

How fine that “in a pattern of splendid randomness like winter camouflage” is! Frazier’s on a roll in the Talk department. In addition to “Bridge,” he’s written at least four other dandies in the past year. They are: “The Big Shoe” (February 1, 2010), “Lovefest” (March 1, 2010), “Parade of the Night” (September 20, 2010), and “Shower” (January 24, 2011).

Jane Freilicher's "The Painting Table"

Jane Freilicher, The Painting Table (1954)

Two recent reviews of the “Painters & Poets” show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Artists and Writers” (The New Yorker, January 31, 2011) and Dan Chiasson’s “A Vanguard of Friends” (NYR Daily, February 26, 2011) - are endlessly stimulating. They radiate light in a number of directions. As Schjeldahl says in his piece, the de Nagy “amounted to a salon” for a circle of painters and poets that included Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, and Jane Freilicher. I’m a fan of most of these artists, especially Schuyler. My appreciation of Schuyler’s work goes back to a wonderful 1981 piece that Howard Moss, The New Yorker’s poetry editor from 1950 to 1987, wrote about it, entitled “Whatever Is Moving” (included in Moss’s 1986 collection Minor Monuments). Moss notes Schuyler’s interest in painting, saying that, “Painting is crucial in Schuyler’s case because it brings with it one of the essential components of his verse – light.” A few years ago, August Kleinzahler, in a review of a volume of Schuyler’s letters, said, “Schuyler’s finest poems are landscapes and interiors, paintings in language” (see “Living on Apple Crumble,” London Review of Books, November 17, 2005). Painting is a way of seeing, of course, and what I like about the de Nagy group is that they see, paint, and write “the whatever-happens-along.” This phrase is from John Ashbery’s essay “Jane Freilicher,” included in his great 1991 collection of art writings Reported Sightings. Freilicher’s The Painting Table is one of the key pieces in the de Nagy show. Both Schjeldahl and Chiasson mention it. Schjeldahl says:

Freilicher’s “The Painting Table” (1954) makes no pretense to mastery – it is awkwardly composed – but each of the represented studio details strikes the heart, through the eye, as a thing individually, intimately known. It shares a sense of cosmopolitan sophistication, as a quality soul-deep, with the poetry of Ashbery, O’Hara, and Schuyler.

Chiasson, in his piece, says:

Everything in this show requires close-up scrutiny of multi-faceted images, canvases with lots of small dramas and scattered events. This in itself is an aesthetic intervention at a moment when big canvases that made a single impression—think of Mark Rothko—were the rule and the vogue. But the Freilicher painting [The Painting Table], which is only about 26 by 40 inches in dimension, really depends on getting up so close that the one raised glob in its lower right quadrant, near the edge of the table it depicts, stands out. It looks as though she’s just squeezed the paint directly from the tube, the way Pollock sometimes did (an art historian friend of mine assures me there is no technical term for this method, and opines that “that’s why descriptions of Pollock are so pseudo-poetic”).

But the meaning here of paint-as-paint could not be more different than in Pollock’s ejaculations. Freilicher’s is a painting, after all, of a painting table. And that daub of white paint represents—well, it represents a daub of white paint, waiting on its palette for the tip of a brush. Which makes this perfectly representational picture in its weird way abstract, or at least what people often mean by abstract: a painting of painting, a closed loop that refuses external reference much more successfully than Pollock’s or de Kooning’s paintings, which, Rorschach-like, always suggest “real” things beyond themselves—landscapes, cityscapes, people.

Chiasson goes on to call that little daub of white paint in Freilicher’s The Painting Table “one of the great daubs of white paint in American art.”

Perhaps the best description of The Painting Table is contained in Ashbery’s “Jane Freilicher,” in which he says:

“The Painting Table” is a congeries of conflicting pictorial grammars. There is a gold paint can rendered with a mellow realism that suggests Dutch still-life painting, but in the background there is a reddish coffee can (Savarin?) that is crudely scumbled in, whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse – one understands that this wasn’t the shape of the can, but that the painter decided on a whim that it would be this way for the purpose of the picture. Other objects on the table are painted with varying degrees of realism, some of them – the flattened tubes of paint and the blobs of pigment – hardly realistic at all. There is even a kind of humor in the way the pigment is painted. What better way than to just squeeze it out of the tube onto the flat surface of the canvas, the way it is in fact lying on the surface of the table, reality “standing in” for itself? But she doesn’t leave it entirely at that; there are places where she paints the image of the pigment too, so that one can’t be exactly sure where reality leaves off and illusion begins. The tabletop slants up, the way tabletops are known to do in art since Cézanne – but this seems not the result of any Expressionist urge to set things on edge but rather an acknowledgment that things sometimes look this way in the twentieth century, just as the gold tin can is allowed to have its way and be classical, since that is apparently what it wants. The tall, narrow blue can of turpentine accommodates itself politely to this exaggerated perspective, but the other objects aren’t sure they want to go along, and take all kinds of positions in connivance with and against each other. The surrounding room is barely indicated except for the white wall and a partly open window giving on flat darkness. (Is it that these objects have come to life at night, like toys in some boutique fantasque?) The result is a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another. What is better than anything is the renewed realization that all kinds of things can and must exist side by side at any given moment, and that this is what life and creating are all about.

You can tell from the above passage that Ashbery admires the way The Painting Table is painted. Clearly, he’s studied it. When he concludes that “this is what life and creating are all about,” it’s tempting to say that he’s holding up The Painting Table as an embodiment of at least one element of his aesthetic – a democratic way of seeing things (“all kinds of things can and must exist side by side at any given moment”). Indeed, Helen Vendler has written a review of Ashbery’s A Worldly Country: New Poems titled “The Democratic Eye” (The New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007), in which she says, “nothing in ordinary life is alien to his democratic and comprehensive and indulgent eye.” Perhaps another way to describe the democratic nature of Ashbery’s poetry is to say that it’s Freilicher-like, thereby linking it to The Painting Table and Ashbery’s appreciation of it in his great essay “Jane Freilicher.”