March 26, 2012 Issue

This week, in the magazine, Judith Thurman and John Lahr revisit the subjects of two of their finest New Yorker pieces. Judith Thurman, in her “Radical Chic” writes about a Prada and Schiaparelli joint retrospective that opens in May at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and John Lahr, in his “Lives In Limbo,” reviews Mike Nichols’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Thurman previously wrote about Schiaparelli in her “Mother of Invention” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2003; included in her 2007 collection Cleopatra’s Nose). Lahr wrote about Death of a Salesman in his “Making Willy Loman” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1999; included in his 2000 collection Show and Tell). It’s interesting to compare their earlier pieces with what they’ve written now.

In “Radical Chic,” Thurman executes a number of minor variations on her earlier “Mother of Invention.” For example, “vagina-shaped fedora” is now “cocktail hats in the shape of a lamb chop, a high-heeled shoe, and a vagina.” “Tree bark rayon” has become “barklike crumpled silk.” And “swagger,” which was previously used in the phrase “racy swagger of the stars,” is repurposed in the new piece to form part of Thurman’s description of Schiaparelli’s “hard chic” (“the swagger of her broad-shouldered suits, the rawness of her furs and embroidery, and a tough attitude toward any simpering or mincing in fashion”). The most interesting variance between the two pieces is Thurman’s redeployment of “scarlet-clawed.” In “Mother of Invention,” “scarlet-clawed” occurs in this delightful line:

Joan Crawford brought her Schiaparellis back to Hollywood and threw them like a gauntlet at Adrian, who made their linebacker shoulders and lavish embellishment his own trademarks, and those of nearly every sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties.

In “Radical Chic,” “scarlet-clawed” is clipped from Joan Crawford and attached to Wallis Simpson:

Dali had painted the skirt with a bright-red lobster, which matched its cummerbund, and Cecil Beaton photographed the future Duchess wearing it serenely, despite – or perhaps to mock – her reputation as a scarlet-clawed predator.

Comparing the two pieces, I think I prefer “Mother of Invention,” mainly because it contains that great “sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties” line. Both articles are beauties.

Turning now to Lahr’s two “Death of a Salesman” pieces, I remember reading “Making Willy Loman,” when it first appeared in the magazine, and finding it fascinating. It describes how Miller came to write Death of a Salesman, the cabin he wrote it in, and his notebook for the play that “soon becomes an expansive, exact handwritten log of Miller’s contact with his inner voices.” I devoured Lahr’s quotations from the notebook and his descriptions of Miller’s use of them, e.g., “Here, as in all his notes for the play, Miller’s passion and his flow are apparent in the surprising absence of cross-outs; the pages exude a startling alertness.”

In “Making Willy Loman,” Lahr shows Miller’s method of composition. He traces the origins of Death of a Salesman back to Miller’s youth. He shows the use Miller made of seemingly stray material (e.g., the moment in 1947 when Miller’s uncle Manny Newman accosted him in the lobby of a theatre). But his interpretation of the play, as a dissection of “cultural envy in action,” strikes me as too brutally reductive. I much prefer the construction he puts forward in his new piece, “Lives In Limbo,” in which he says:

The revelation of this production – drawn out by Nichols’s seamless and limpid orchestration of Willy’s disconcerting flights of imagination (Miller’s original title for the play was “The Inside of His Head”) – is that Willy, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes, and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

A kind of living ghost. This is an interpretation of Willy Loman’s character that speaks to me. Lahr’s “Lives In Limbo” is a wonderful companion to his memorable “Making Willy Loman.” Both pieces are brilliant!

March 19, 2012 Issue

Anthony Lane is starting to sound like Adam Gopnik, and that’s not good. One Proustian prose charmer on staff is enough. There was a time when Lane expressed himself clearly. Remember what he said about The Saint? “I’ve eaten bowls of spaghetti that were more tightly structured than this picture” (“The Saint,” The New Yorker, April 14, 1997). Okay, well, at least we know where he stands. Compare this with his comment on The Kid with a Bike in this week’s issue: “I will say nothing of what happens there, except that for every viewer who thinks that the film-makers are pushing their luck, another will claim, as I would, that they have earned the right to step across the threshold of transcendence” (“Not Child’s Play”). I think Lane likes the movie. But in what way are the Dardenne brothers “pushing their luck,” and does earning “the right to step across the threshold of transcendence” mean they’ve produced a film worth seeing? I suppose just saying “I really like this movie” would be too simple. Pauline Kael didn’t shy away from expressing herself simply (and bluntly). Remember her “Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it” (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974)? It’s not subtle, but, by god, it’s got rhythm, and it lets you know exactly what she thought of the film. Granted, Lane clarifies his position in the next paragraph of his review, when he says: “The real reason to see ‘The Kid with a Bike' is that it offers something changelessly rare and difficult: a credible portrait of goodness.” Still, all this talk about “threshold of transcendence,” “changelessly rare,” and “portrait of goodness” seems blandly abstract. Interestingly, these words are deleted from Lane’s capsule review of The Kid with a Bike that appears in “Goings On About Town” in next week’s issue (which can be accessed at newyorker.com). Lane’s GOAT review is completely rewritten; I much prefer it. For example, instead of “portrait of goodness,” Lane writes: “De France fulfills the daunting task of making goodness look plausible, instinctive, and down-to-earth, rather than lofty or pharisaical; her nature merely instructs her to do the right thing.”

















It’ll be interesting to see if Lane’s GOAT review makes it into the magazine’s online movie review archive “The Film File.” Currently, the capsule review of The Kid with a Bike that Richard Brody wrote a few of months ago is on file there. It contains this wonderful line: “The directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, track the young perpetual-motion machine through his small Belgian city, where he pedals, runs, scampers, dives, and climbs past all clutches, and, when cornered, fights with an animal ferocity.” The Kid with a Bike deserves the three New Yorker notices it’s received. I saw it about a month ago. I admired its calm, matter-of-fact style immensely.

Credit: The above artwork is by Annette Marnat; it appears in The New Yorker (March 19, 2012) as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Not Child's Play."

Fact/Truth/Creativity

A special shout-out to Lee Gutkind for his observation yesterday in the Los Angeles Review of Books that “it’s possible to write terrific nonfiction narrative and stay steadfast to both truth and fact. One can be creative and truthful simultaneously. It just takes a lot more work” (“Doing A D’Agata,” March 19, 2012). Yes, factual writing is the more challenging art form. It’s refreshing to see this point being made. Writing a fact piece is, in a way, like writing a sonnet: the rule of the form must be obeyed. And the rule that governs factual writing is that the facts can’t be messed with. Everything else – design, voice, perspective, syntax, choice of detail, etc. – is fair game. As the great New Yorker writer John McPhee said in his Paris Review interview: “With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read” (The Paris Review, Spring, 2010).

Credit: The above artwork is by Henrik Kubel; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 26, 2012), as an illustration for Jennifer B. McDonald's "In the Details."

Translation, Interpretation, Distortion

I see in this week’s Times Sunday Book Review that Robin Robertson’s idea of translation is not only to simplify the original, but to insert details of his own creation (see David Orr, “Versions,” March 11, 2012). For example, in his translation of Tomas Transtromer’s poem “Calling Home,” he adds a knife-fight that isn’t in the original. I think this takes translation too far. While I realize there’s no such thing as a definitive translation, I think a translator has to be true to the original. Richard Pevear, translator (in partnership with his wife Larissa Volokhonsky) of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina, among other classics, compares translation to music interpretation: “It’s like a musical composition and a musician, an interpretation. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece can be distorted” (quoted in David Remnick’s “The Translation Wars,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2005). Orr, in his piece, makes a similar analogy. He says:

But translating a poem is like covering a song. We can savor the liberties someone is taking with, say, “Gin and Juice” in a way we couldn’t understand similar variations on songs written by Martians. And Transtromer, however popular he is among poets, remains largely unknown to readers eager to see work from the new Nobel laureate. In this instance, even a sincere imitation probably isn’t the most helpful form of flattery.

I agree, except I’d put it more strongly. It appears that Robertson’s interpretation of Transtromer constitutes distortion.

Credit: The above photograph of Tomas Transtromer is by Ulla Montan; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review as an illustration for David Orr’s “Versions.”

March 12, 2012 Issue

I devoured Dahlia Lithwick’s “Extreme Makeover,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Dale Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct, which Lithwick wonderfully describes as “a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case [Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, striking down anti-sodomy laws] back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really get to know, and back again through centuries of law criminalizing 'unnatural' sexual activity.” I’m a sucker for “behind-the-scenes” analysis of court cases, for reportage that sets out to show what “really” happened. One of my all-time favorite New Yorker pieces is Leonard Garment’s detailed backstage account of Times, Inc. v. Hill, a privacy dispute that the Supreme Court decided on constitutional grounds (“The Hill Case,” The New Yorker, April 17, 1989).

Lithwick’s article centers on a very interesting legal phenomenon – the way cases are converted to “vehicles” for the argument of weighty constitutional issues. For example, with respect to Lawrence v. Texas, Lithwick says, “In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story.” Lithwick seems to think that storytelling is an important aspect of legal argument. In “Extreme Makeover,” she says:

As Carpenter’s nuanced exploration of what worked in Lawrence v. Texas makes clear, the Supreme Court is both supremely open to and supremely closed off from the world around it. That’s why we come to the Court, play by its rules and tell the Justices stories they like to hear about people who remind them of themselves.

I think Lithwick overemphasizes the role that narrative plays in legal argument, especially legal argument at the Supreme Court level. There’s a distillation process that occurs as a case makes its way through the appellate process. By the time it arrives in the highest court, it’s been reduced to a question of pure law. The argument at that stage turns on precedent, and consists of interpretation and comparative analysis.

Lithwick isn’t the only writer who views law in terms of narrative. Janet Malcolm, in her great “Iphigenia In Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010) says, “If we understand that a trial is a contest between competing narratives, we can see the importance of the first appearance of the narrators.” By “narrators,” she means the prosecutor and the defense attorneys. Later in her piece, she says,

We go through life mis-hearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.

I think it’s misleading to describe trials and appeals solely as matters of storytelling. Trials are evidentiary processes. Offences are broken down into their constituent elements; the key issue at trial is whether the prosecution has proved each ingredient beyond a reasonable doubt. Appeals are arguments of legal issues. Narrative has little role to play at trial, and even less so on appeal. Law should be understood not as a matter of competing narratives, but as a matter of competing arguments. That’s one of the main reasons I admire Leonard Garment’s piece; it beautifully lays out the competing arguments in Time, Inc v. Hill.

Notwithstanding Lithwick’s narrative-based concept of law, I enjoyed her review immensely. It brought me news of an interesting new book, and it did so in a lively, vivid manner. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine.

Renata Adler's "The Perils of Pauline": Classic Low Snark

Last year, I posted an article in which I said there’d never been a more wrong-headed interpretation of Pauline Kael’s work than Louis Menand’s “The Popist: Pauline Kael.” I was wrong. That distinction belongs to Renata Adler’s vile "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in Adler's 2001 collection Canaries in the Mineshaft under the title "House Critic"). I’d forgotten about Adler’s piece. However, as a result of reading a couple of reviews of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011), namely, Nathan Heller’s "What She Said" (The New Yorker, October 24, 2011) and Richard Schickel’s "Hell To Sit Next To" (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 30, 2011), which mention Adler’s article, my memory of it was quickly rekindled.

I recently reread “The Perils of Pauline.” It’s a lengthy review of Kael’s 1980 collection When The Lights Go Down. Its basic approach is a snarky attempt to reduce Kael’s work to caricature. It asserts that Kael “has, in principle, four things she likes,” that she “has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words,” that her writing consists of a “repertory of devices,” e.g., “the mock rhetorical question,” “the hack carom,” “the structure of spite,” and so on. Most of her claims have been ably rebutted by, among others, Craig Seligman, in his Sontag and Kael (2004). Seligman quotes Adler’s “four things she likes” passage and calls it “grotesque.” I agree. He says her “prissiness is embarrassing.” I agree. But when he writes, “Despite the occasional shoddiness of Adler’s tactics, I wouldn’t accuse her of the bad faith she imputes to Kael,” I demur. Adler knows exactly what she’s doing. Like an overzealous prosecutor, she twists the evidence, quotes out of context, and exaggerates the alleged crime. And what exactly, in Adler’s view, is the alleged crime? It’s that Kael is profane, raucous, lewd and loud. These are the very qualities I admire about her writing. I’m not alone in liking them. Laurie Winer, in her excellent “Taste is the Great Divider” (Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2, 2011) writes:

Adler’s slam echoed the complaints of critic John Simon, who described Kael as a Russian count might describe a clever serf: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler complained of Kael’s “vulgarity,” and she listed what she thought of as Kael’s worst phrases, among them, “tumescent filmmaking” and “plastic turds.” It’s hard not to laugh now at Adler’s discomfort, at her long lists of Kael’s crimes. It’s also hard not to see this attack as the age-old battle between the keepers of good taste and the antic comic spirit, with Adler taking the role of Margaret Dumont and Kael appearing as Groucho Marx. In the long run, of course, Groucho always wins.

Kael, in her wonderful review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (“The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977; collected in When The Lights Go Down), says, “Close Encounters is so generous in its feelings that it makes one feel maternal and protective; there’s also another side of one, which says, ‘I could use a little dirty friction.’ ” Right there is the side of Kael I love.

Credit: The above portrait of Renata Adler is by David Levine.

March 5, 2012 Issue

We’re only in March, but Nick Paumgarten has already written what’s sure to be one of the year’s best pieces. I’m referring to his great “The Ring and the Bear” (The New Yorker, January 30, 2012). The question is can he score two hits in a row? Alas, the answer is no. His “Magic Mountain,” in this week’s issue, is damn near unstomachable. It’s about his attendance at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. So intolerable is it, so full of wealthy, élite, globe-trotting, class-conscious, status-seeking, full-of-themselves windbags, pedants, and egotists (mostly male) that I had to force myself to keep reading. When I came to the sentence “The stratification begins with badges,” I closed the magazine and went for a walk. I finished the thing later, persisting only because it’s by Paumgarten, one of my favorites. Over the years, his writing has taken me on some memorable excursions, e.g., Inwood Hill Park (“The Mannahatta Project,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2007), Governors Island (“Useless Beauty,” The New Yorker, October 31, 2009). But this Davos trip – what a bummer!

February 27, 2012 Issue

One of the pleasures of reading a new piece by a favorite New Yorker writer is the recognition of certain echoes from his or her earlier work. Such was my experience when I read Burkhard Bilger’s superb “Beware of the Dogs” in this week’s issue. It’s about New York City’s police dogs, the way canine police think about them (they describe them as tools or technology), and “build” them through the use of operant conditioning. In the opening section of the piece, Bilger says, “I’ve never been much good around dogs.” In the course of describing being chased by dogs when he was a kid, he says, “In the town where I grew up, about an hour north of Oklahoma City, every other house seemed to be patrolled by some bawling bluetick or excitable Irish setter, and the locals liked to leave them unchained.” His mention of “bawling bluetick” reminded me of the wonderful piece he wrote about coonhounds (“Send in the Hounds,” collected in his Noodling for Flatheads, 2000), in which expert coon hunter, Sondra Beck, is quoted as saying: “Those old black and tans and blueticks, they might pick a trail three days old and howl and boohoo over it for hours. I don’t have any time for that. I need my dog to move that track.”

Another passage in “Beware of the Dogs” that triggered an association with a previous Bilger piece is the description of the bluegrass band Ebony Hillbillies playing a tune in the Times Square subway station as the canine squad files through: “The bass and banjo lines skittered from run to run while the washboard chattered underneath, mimicking the commuters around us.” I smiled when I read that, recalling with pleasure Bilger’s great blues piece “The Last Verse” (The New Yorker, April 28, 2008), which contains this memorable description of folk revivalist Art Rosenbaum singing and playing the banjo:

Rosenbaum sang it in his usual, oddly endearing bray. Then he grabbed a banjo from beside the couch and played a ballad about a shipwreck. With his hat off, he looked like a figure out of Melville: bald pate, hooked nose, long, shaggy sideburns. He played in the clawhammer style, whanging the bottom string with his thumb, and strumming or plucking the other strings with his forefinger.

That “oddly endearing bray” is very good, and “whanging” is inspired.

“Beware of the Dogs” contains some inspired lines, too. This one, for example: “A leash can be like a faulty phone line.” And it brims with interesting details (e.g., “At Auburn, a dog that can’t cut it as a bomb detector could find work as a fungus hound, sniffing out growths that attack and kill the roots of pine trees in the Southeast”). I think my favorite passage in the piece is the description of a black Lab named Ray, trained as a Vapor Wake, trailing a decoy who's carrying “seven pounds of ammonium nitrate, wrapped in black panty hose and stuffed in a backpack” through crowded Grand Central Terminal:

The decoy walked beneath the arch and down the corridor, heading toward a set of stairs that led to the subway. Ray cut zigzags across his trail, zeroing in on the scent. Soon, she was only about ten feet away, pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a lizard’s, claws scrabbling on the tile. She was about to catch up when a middle-aged woman sauntered by with three toy dogs on a leash beside her. Ray stopped and glanced at them – a little hungrily, I thought – then shook her head and continued. But by then the trail had drifted, and the decoy was down the stairs.

I find that “pulling so hard on the leash that her legs were splayed like a lizard’s, claws scrabbling on the tile” marvelously evocative. And Bilger's reading of Ray's glance (“a little hungrily, I thought”) is a neat touch. For a guy who’s “never been much good around dogs,” Bilger sure writes beautifully and perceptively about them. I enjoyed "Beware of the Dogs" immensely.