Interesting Emendations: Simon Schama's "The Patriot" and "Rembrandt's Ghost"

These days I’ve been rereading some of Simon Schama’s old New Yorker pieces. There are five included in his recently published essay collection Scribble, Scribble, Scribble. I enjoy them immensely, particularly the two reviews, “Rembrandt’s Ghost” (The New Yorker, March 26, 2007) and “The Patriot” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2007). Comparing the book versions of these wonderful pieces with their magazine antecedents, I find them almost exactly the same. The only differences are with respect to the placement of a few commas. Apparently, Schama, unlike (say) John Updike, doesn’t much tinker with his writings after they’ve appeared in The New Yorker. What you see in the magazine is what you get in the collection. But what about those commas? Schama is a master writer. Any change he makes, no matter how minute, is significant. Here, for example, is a sentence from his New Yorker piece, “The Patriot,” that now appears in the Scribble, Scribble, Scribble version (retitled “Turner and the Drama of History”) with an added comma:

The New Yorker: "Turner was interested not in the deeds of the heroes but, rather, in the ways in which their memory might be visually transmitted to posterity."

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: "Turner was interested not in the deeds of the heroes, but, rather, in the ways in which their memory might be visually transmitted to posterity."

Here are two more examples – both taken from “Rembrandt’s Ghost”:

The New Yorker: "The look is naïve and apparently artless, but the hand that draws it is heavy with memories, not just of a Barcelona boyhood but of the archive of painting."

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: "The look is naive and apparently artless, but the hand that draws it is heavy with memories, not just of a Barcelona boyhood, but of the archive of painting."

The New Yorker: "Compositions like 'The Night Watch,' he gambled, would come alive not through an accumulation of posed portraits but through their atmospheric integration into a regularly lit drama."

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: "Compositions like The Night Watch, he gambled, would come alive not through an accumulation of posed portraits, but through their atmospheric integration into a regularly lit drama."

I confess, in all three instances, I prefer the slightly smoother New Yorker version. Why did Schama insert the extra commas in the book versions? My guess is that they were present in the drafts submitted to The New Yorker, and that they were deleted by the magazine editor(s). Schama reverted to his original texts when he included the pieces in his collection.

But these punctuation changes are exceedingly minor and do not in the least affect the stunning impact of Schama’s glorious powerhouse prose. I conclude by quoting one of my favorite passages from “Turner and the Drama of History” (formerly known as “The Patriot”), a description of Turner’s spectacular The Battle of Trafalgar:

The entanglement of the ships of the line, like so many lumbering dinosaurs locked in belligerent slaughter, is described through an inchoate massing of sails, each impossible to connect to any vessel in particular. It’s a maritime traffic jam, a smoke-choked pile-up with nowhere to go, no visible stretch of sea!

Celebrity Obsessed: The Talk of the Town Special Issue

Where are the zipper fixers, oven repairmen, dog washers, and pigeon mumblers? Where’s the balloon aeronaut? Where’s Doc Sternbach? They’re all interesting people. They all appeared in Talk of the Town. Why aren’t they in The Talk of the Town Special Issue? I open its pages and all I find are celebrities. Ugh! It’s a collection of all the stories I skipped (except for one or two) when they appeared in the magazine. Do I care that James Franco has “a glaze of coffee on his teeth”? No! Am I interested in the fact that Prince eats carrot soup, Janet Reno’s eyeglasses are “a bit smudged,” Ellen Barkin has four herniated disks? No, no, and no. Do I need to know that Cindy Adams says, “I have more hair under my arms than Juicy has on her whole body”? I don’t think so. Juicy is a dog, by the way. The Special Issue comprises fifty Talk of the Town pieces from the last decade, and not one of them is about an unfamous person. Why isn’t Robert Sullivan’s great Talk story about the woman who investigated the history of a hundred and seventeen year old piece of cheese (“Say Cheese,” September 13, 2010) included? Where’s Ian Frazier’s memorable Talk piece about the Naked Cowboy (“Nude Dude,” August 24, 2009)? Where is Mark Singer’s Talk story about Reid Stowe and his attempt to sail for a thousand days (“A Thousand Days,” February 15, 2010)? I know it’s impossible to include everything. And not everyone shares my interest in under-the-radar-type characters. But couldn’t there have been at least one or two stories in the Special Issue about “ordinary,” i.e., non-celebrity, but larger than life human beings? Frazier, Singer, and Sullivan are among the finest Talk writers in the magazine’s history. Their work should be represented in an issue that claims to contain “highlights from the past ten years of The Talk of the Town.” To find them absent is, to say the least, disappointing.

But I'll get over it. Of the Special Issue’s fifty pieces, which one do I like the best? That’s easy: Nick Paumgarten’s “Skype Chat.” It’s a transcript of a conversation between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young, conducted via Skype. The conversation itself is very funny, but what I like most are the italicized bits in which Paumgarten describes the process (e.g., “Young faces the camera – eye contact, of a kind. On the laptop, his image breaks apart, and his voice burbles. There is something warm and archaic about Skype’s flaws. A Skype call can feel like a telegram. ‘It’s so fragile,’ Demme says, ‘It’s sweet’”). The piece is illustrated by Tom Bachtell’s brilliant full-page drawing of Young playing the guitar. “Skype Chat” is one of Paumgarten’s two Neil Young Talk pieces. The other one is called “Request Line” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2008). It’s about a Neil Young concert held at Christ United Church’s Palace Cathedral. It’s not included in the Special Issue, but it’s well worth checking out.

Neil Young (Illustration by Tom Bachtell)

May 23, 2011 Issue

Keith Gessen, in his excellent “The Gift,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, says of Joseph Brodsky’s internal exile in the northern village of Norinskaya, “On the whole, this was more Yaddo than Gulag.” It’s a witty line, and I smiled when I read it, but does it do justice to the reality of Brodsky’s situation? It’s true that Brodsky didn’t have to endure the horrors of the Siberian prison camps. Nevertheless, his life in Norinskaya was far from easy. He spent his days shoveling manure. David Remnick, in his profile of Brodsky, titled “Perfect Pitch” (The New Yorker, February 12, 1996; included in Remnick’s 1996 collection The Devil Problem), describes the poet “sitting in his shack, smoking, his back aching from the pitchfork, dung on his boots, the reek of the bog still on his clothes.” As far as I know, artists in residence at Yaddo don’t have to shovel shit. It’s true that, according to Remnick, Brodsky enjoyed his eighteen months in internal exile. He says, “He enjoyed pulling on his boots and working on a collective farm, enjoyed shoveling manure. Knowing that everyone else across Russia was shoveling shit, too, he felt a sense of nation, of kinship.” But just because Brodsky made the best of a hard situation doesn’t entitle us, some forty-six years later, to minimize it. It seems to me that Remnick, in his piece, strikes the proper note of respect when he says, “He refused the role of celebrity-martyr and did his work, but in those moments when he was called on by fate to step forward – in the courtroom, in exile – he did so with perfect pitch.”

May 16, 2011 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with inspired details, e.g., Laurent Cilluffo’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration for The New York Philharmonic concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, David Remnick’s Talk piece “Exit Bin Laden” that reprises the unforgettable “severe clear” opening line of his great “September 11, 2001” (The New Yorker, September 24, 2011), the closing sentence of Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “The Names” (“A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else the total absence of one”), John Seabrook’s Proustian moment in his excellent “Snacks for a Fat Planet,” when the taste of a potato chip triggers a childhood memory (“For some reason, the taste reminded me of the chips my mother sometimes packed in my lunchbox when I was a little kid”), the erotic jolt of Judith Thurman’s “bare-breasted disheveled girls staggered down the runway in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty tartan, and distressed leather” (“Dressed To Thrill”), the amazing final line of Joan Acocella’s Paula Fox book review “From Bad Beginnings” (“I think she needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art”). The whole magazine is a feast for the eye and the mind. I devoured it. And when I finished, I thought, How incredibly lucky we are to have a magazine that contains such felicities! New Yorker without end, amen!

Two "Paris Review" Interviews: Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm

Two long-time New Yorker contributors, Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm, are interviewed in the current issue of The Paris Review. Comparing the two interviews, I find Beattie much more interesting and open in her discussion of her “art” than I do Malcolm. In talking about her writing technique, Beattie doesn’t use the word “art”; instead, she says, “I only have a certain bag of tricks.” One of the “tricks” she mentions is bringing into the narrative “something unexpected that has a lot of immediacy.” She says, “If you write a fictional letter, the reader will perk up and think, Oh, a letter. All the rest of it’s been narrative – but this is an actual letter.” She says, “You can also do something similar with songs. Just pick a song that’s well known enough, or a musician whose sound is well known enough, and the reader will play a sound track for you.”

Reading Beattie’s interview, I was fascinated to learn how deliberate she is in trying to avoid what she calls “the temptation of tying it all together formally.” She says, “In general I end my stories before I get a chance to do something more aesthetically pleasing to me.” She’s leery of stories that are written “too carefully.” At one point, she says, “I avoided eloquence as much as possible.” At another point, she states, “In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character’s head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.” In Beattie’s studious avoidance of narrative closure, and in her decided preference for the haphazard, I detect a distrust of the “well-made story” similar to the one Janet Malcolm expresses in her brilliant review of Donald P. Spence’s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (“Six Roses ou Cirrhose?”, The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in Malcolm’s great essay collection The Purloined Clinic, 1992), in which she memorably observes, “Our lives are not like novels.”

Interestingly, Malcolm, in her Paris Review interview, doesn’t mention her wariness of narrative truth. What she does say is that,

What nonfiction writers take from novelists and short-story writers (as well as from other nonfiction writers) are the devices of narration. Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way. There’s an art to it.

Malcolm doesn’t give examples of what she means by “devices of narration,” and the interviewer (Katie Roiphe) doesn’t ask her to provide any. I wonder if she would consider the heightening of drama (or, in Beattie’s case, the deliberate understatement of drama) as such a device. There’s a difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction: the latter activity is subject to the ironclad rule “Don’t mess with the facts.” Malcolm’s observation that “Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way” could be true, I suppose, so long as the aforesaid “rule” is borne in mind. But on this point, Malcolm worries me. In the interview, she quotes a passage from the afterword of her The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she says,

The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way – the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the dispassionate observer of life.

I find it hard to accept that the “I” in, say, Ian Frazier’s work is “almost pure invention.” On the contrary, I consider Frazier’s “I” one of the truest, most reliable narrators in reportage literature. His “I” is true and reliable because, far from setting himself up as “an embodiment of the dispassionate observer,” he is, in his writings, so subjectively, idiosyncratically human. For example, when he says in Travels In Siberia, “Aside from the rain and wind and chill, and the chronically damp clothes, I enjoyed the fish camp,” I interpret his “I” not as an “ad hoc creation,” but as Ian Frazier, the man himself, the guy I've happily accompanied (vicariously, of course) on many a great trip. The same goes for the “I” of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, to name a few of my favorite New Yorker writers – writers whose voices on the page strike me as absolutely true, authentic, real, consistent. Joyce Carol Oates, in the preface to her essay collection Uncensored (2005), says,

In virtually none of my prose fiction, with the possible exception of the novel I’ll Take You There, and in that novel only intermittently, do I allow myself to speak in my “own” voice, but in my non-fiction prose, it is always my “own” voice that speaks.

Is Oates kidding herself? I don’t think so. It’s Malcolm who’s got it wrong. It’s time her viewpoint on this matter was challenged.

May 9, 2011 Issue

A New Yorker without a book review is like a pastrami sandwich without hot mustard, a mojito without mint, tiramisù without the cognac. The book review is a key ingredient of the magazine’s “signature mix”; when it’s absent, as it is this week, I feel cheated. But I soon get over it, usually when I find myself immersed in an inspired feature, as I did this week, in Jon Lee Anderson’s “Sons of the Revolution.” What a terrific piece of reportage! Anderson seems to thrive on chaos. He has a knack of making contact with articulate, English-speaking individuals who are directly impacted on a survival level by the events he’s covering, e.g., Nadia François, in earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince (“Neighbor’s Keeper,” The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), and binding their experiences into his narrative core. In “Sons of the Revolution,” the central figure is Osama ben Sadik, a volunteer ambulance driver, who, during the time Anderson is with him, suffers the tragic loss of his oldest son, Muhannad, in the war with Qaddafi’s soldiers. Anderson’s style could be described as first-person descriptive analysis. It’s tremendously effective; it puts you right in the thick of things. Yet, it also pulls back now and then and gives you a glimpse of the big picture. For example, in “Sons of the Revolution,” he says, “As Qaddafi’s Army advanced, a number of Libyans told me that, if Benghazi fell, they would retreat to the Green Mountains, east of the city, to fight a guerrilla war.” Anderson uses his mention of “Green Mountains” to trace the chain of events that led to Qaddafi’s dictatorship. It must be tremendously difficult for a foreign correspondent to find his or her focus in such a welter of information, much of it conflicting, that a revolution or a war or a natural disaster throws up. But Anderson always seems to pull it off. His “Sons of the Revolution” goes straight into my personal anthology of great reportage literature.

On Gandhi: Mishra v. Desai

What interests me is the structure of the book review. I want to compare two reviews of Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India: Pankaj Mishra’s “The Inner Voice” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2011) and Anita Desai’s “A Different Gandhi” (The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011). I want to explore the way they’re written. Mishra begins his piece with a shocking question:

Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure?

Desai’s opener is more equable:

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi has grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him.

Both writers establish their themes in their opening paragraphs. Mishra’s focus is on Gandhi’s failure; Desai’s is on the man behind the legend. In choosing to dwell on failure, Mishra takes the low road. He makes sweeping accusations against Gandhi, such as “And yet the Indian leader failed to achieve his most important aims and was widely disliked and resented during his lifetime.” It’s difficult to square such charges with Desai’s observation that,

He would start to fast in prison and the nation would hold its breath till he agreed to suspend it. As his body dwindled, Lelyveld observes, his political and spiritual power increased. The fast joined the spinning wheel as a distinctly Gandhian symbol of protest. In 1930 his genius for the inspired and inspiring gesture made him lead a march of two hundred miles from his ashram to Dandi on the Arabian Sea, crowds lining the road to cheer him. With “the beauty and simplicity of a fresh artistic vision,” Lelyveld writes, he bent to pick a handful of salt on the beach in defiance of British taxation of even so lowly and indispensable commodity.

You’ll not find much reference to Gandhi’s “genius for the inspired and inspiring gesture” in Mishra’s piece, so intent is he in making his case of failure. Note, in the above quote, the way Desai inserts “Lelyveld observes” and “Lelyveld writes.” Mishra doesn’t credit Lelyveld this way. Except for a couple of brief snippets of quotation, he hardly mentions Lelyveld at all, even though it’s Lelyveld’s book, along with The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, that’s supposedly under review. The lack of quotation in Mishra’s piece is a major flaw. As Martin Amis said in the foreword to his brilliant book review collection The War Against Cliché, “You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue.”

Another off-putting aspect of Mishra’s piece is its repeated use of that slippery, open-textured word “moral”: “moral persuasion,” “higher morality,” “moral and psychological effects,” “moral cover,” “moral self-knowledge,” “moral sanction,” “moral superiority,” “moral choices,” “moral authority,” “moral or normative demands,” “the difficulty of being moral men and women.” That’s a lot of "moral" to stomach in one piece. What’s it all about? We are in the presence of a moralist, obviously. I’m referring to Mishra, not Gandhi. Mishra even defines Gandhi’s satyagraha principle in terms of morality. He says it’s “a mode of political activism based on moral persuasion.” Interestingly, Desai, in her review, says satyagraha translates literally as “truth force” or “firmness in truth.” What if the first act of morality is to acknowledge that, as Osgood memorably says, in Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect”? George Orwell, in his great essay, “Reflections on Gandhi,” says:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

The judging of a human being, any human being, as a failure is a rotten business. Yet, Mishra appears to have no qualms engaging in it. He might counter that, in his focus on Gandhi’s "many failures,” he’s merely reflecting Lelyveld’s findings in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. But if you look at Desai’s piece, you’ll see a much more balanced interpretation of Lelyveld’s book. Desai says,

One might think that Gandhi’s legacy on the whole has been depicted negatively and yet there is no denying Lelyveld’s deep sympathy with the man. The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring.

I much prefer Desai’s humanistic approach. Mishra, in his piece, can’t even credit Gandhi for his advocacy of non-violent politics without, in the same breath, mentioning his “many failures” (“It is what young Egyptians and Tunisians feel today, and their Yemeni counterparts may experience tomorrow: the ever renewable power of cooperative action, which is a truer measure of Gandhi’s legacy than his many failures”).

In conclusion, I submit that Pankaj Mishra’s New Yorker review is flawed in three respects: (1) it lacks quotation; (2) it lacks balance; (3) it’s too moralistic.

May 2, 2011 Issue

In this week’s issue, Peter Schjeldahl proposes an interesting alternative to the Metropolitan Museum’s interpretation of Caspar David Friedrich’s two exquisite “window” drawings, “View from the Artist’s Studio, Window on the Right” (ca. 1805-06) and “View from the Artist’s Studio Window on the Left” (ca. 1805-06). On its website, the Met says, “Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing.” Schjeldahl, in his “Inside Story,” says, “the notion of longing reduces the complexity of Friedrich.” He senses “Something painful about the drawings – a whiff of latent, even delicate, terror.” He suggests that what the drawings convey is “a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing.” What does Schjeldahl mean by that? He offers three examples: Kafka, Hopper, and Robert Frank. We know that for Kafka life was scarcely endurable. His ideal room would be windowless. In a letter to Felice, he says, “I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp….” As for Hopper, his windows are filled with light and life. In contrast, the barrenness of his rooms suggest imprisonment (see, for example, “Rooms by the Sea,” and “Sun in an Empty Room”). How is it that Robert Frank is relevant? Schjeldahl says, “Take Robert Frank’s classic, devastating shot of gauzy curtains blowing in a window that overlooks a grimy mining town: the good news of beauty laced with the bad news of being stuck in Butte, Montana.” But the windows in Friedrich’s drawings look out on ships floating on the placid Elbe. I don’t see how Frank’s hellish picture is pertinent. So I’m going to say, with the greatest respect, that Schjeldahl’s “otherizing” interpretation, while endlessly stimulating, seems off the mark. I think the Met got it right: Friedrich’s two great “window” drawings are “a metaphor for unfulfilled longing.”

Postscript: I should add that Schjeldahl’s review contains my favorite passage in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a description of Friedrich’s “Woman at the Window”: “She is seen from behind in a dusky, greenish interior: hair done up, wearing a high-waisted dress that is described, with gorgeous economy, by a few fast strokes of turquoise, for the pleats in it, on a sketchy brownish ground.” That “few fast strokes of turquoise” is wonderful.

Second Thoughts: But I wonder if we do an injustice to these wonderful drawings by reducing them to metaphor. In seeking Friedrich’s meaning, are we missing out on savoring his art? Is it too simplistic to suggest that all Friedrich was doing when he created these beautiful pictures was taking pleasure in describing what he saw out his studio window?

Francisco Goldman's "The Wave": Fact or Fiction?

Is Francisco Goldman’s “The Wave” (The New Yorker, February 7, 2011) fact or fiction? It appeared in the magazine under the heading “Personal History,” so I took it to be factual. But I see that the recently published book version is titled Say Her Name: A Novel. Perhaps the two versions are different? I hope so. I’m totally against fact pieces that mess with the facts.