George Bellows’s "Stag at Sharkey’s" and "Both Members of This Club"

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said, in her great “In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy” (In Rough Country, 2010), about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates likes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

Credit: The above painting is George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s (1909).

July 23, 2012 Issue

“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams wrote, introducing his long poem Paterson. I enjoy writing that follows this dictum. This week’s New Yorker brims with things, e.g., Charlie Watts’s “carefully cut gray suit, a violet shirt, and brown tasseled loafers” (Alec Wilkinson’s “Tag Team”), the “old bicycle sprouting bundles of bamboo fishing baskets” on display in a museum in Hanoi’s old market district (Jane Kramer’s “A Reporter at Odds”), the torturous Apollon’s Wheels barbell that caused Brian Shaw to “tweak” his left biceps at this year’s Arnold Strongman Classic (Burkhard Bilger’s “The Strongest Man in the World”), and the intimidating “field hockey stick, decorated with bright racing stripes” wielded by Brigadier Mahana Bashir, commander of an S.P.L.A. training camp in the Nuba Mountains (Jon Lee Anderson’s “A History of Violence”). My favorite “thing” in this week’s issue is the unbroken white clay pipe with the “irregular tooth marks” at the base of the stem that the conceptual landscape artist Matthew Jensen found “half buried near a park trail in Riverdale.” It’s mentioned in Ian Frazier’s dandy little Talk story about Jensen (“Lost and Found”). Looking at those tooth marks sparks Frazier’s imagination, inspiring him to write this wonderful line: “Suddenly, the face of the snaggletoothed smoker seemed to materialize, the café faded out, and a landscape of old New York sprang up magically all around.” 

Vertigo's "Happy Ending"

Does Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo end happily? Richard Brody thinks so. He says that Vertigo’s “happy ending, of health restored and crime punished, resembles an aridly monastic renunciation” (“Vertigo,” "Goings On About Town," The New Yorker, May 28, 2012). New York Magazine thinks otherwise. It says, “New Yorker film writer Richard Brody boldly but delusionally states that Hitchcock’s Vertigo has a happy ending” (“The Approval Matrix: Week of June 11, 2012,” New York Magazine, June 3, 2012). In “‘Vertigo’: The Search For A Cure” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, June 7, 2012), Brody replies that he was using “happy ending” ironically (“So, please allow me my irony of suggesting that the movie has a truly happy ending: the revelation of unhappy truth”). Why irony? Is Brody now saying he meant the opposite of what he said? Recall Samuel Johnson’s definition of irony: “A mode of speech of which the meaning is contrary to the words” (quoted in D. J. Enright’s The Alluring Problem, 1986). Vertigo’s dark last scene shows Scottie (James Stewart) standing on the ledge at the top of the Mission San Juan Bautista bell tower where, only moments before, he witnessed his beloved Judy (Kim Novak) plunge to her death. He’s conquered his acrophobia, but he’s lost (for the second time!) the woman he loves. Standing on the precipice, looking down, Scottie is caught in a sad equilibrium. It could be a scene in an Edward Hopper – a vision of a chill, ominous world, noir to its bare bones.  

July 9 & 16, 2012 Issue

Jon Michaud’s “Mavis Gallant: Fact Into Fiction” (“Back Issues,” newyorker.com, July 2, 2012) points out an interesting fact: “Gallant took the experiences recorded in her Madrid diary and transformed them into her short story, “When We Were Nearly Young,” which was published in The New Yorker [October 15, 1960].” Comparing the story with the diary excerpts, published in this week’s New Yorker (“The Hunger Diaries”), I find that I much prefer the diary version. It seems more real, i.e., more alive, closer to reality, truer to life. For example, here is Gallant’s diary description of a young woman she encounters on the Barcelona train:

I share the window with a young girl who wears the Saint-Germain-des-Prés uniform – plaid slacks, black shirt, peajacket, mascara, no lipstick. Holes in her socks (the heel is a great grubby-white moon) and she obviously doesn’t give a damn.

That “the heel is a great grubby-white moon” is inspired! There’s nothing like this in the story. The girl gets only a brief mention (“A girl had given me the address on a train, warning me to say nothing about it to anyone”). In the diary, Gallant describes her own face as follows:

Sometimes catching sight of myself in a glass on the street, I am bewildered at what I have become – even my expression seems shabby, as if I were one with the street now.

I love that “as if I were one with the street now.” Gallant omits it from the story. She simply says, “In no time at all, I had the speech and the movements and the very expression on my face of seedy Madrid.”

Some of the incidents recorded in the diary occur in the story, but their details are described differently. For example, the knife that the “poor madman” in the restaurant uses to comb his hair becomes, in the story, a fork that he uses to scratch his head. And in the pickpocket incident, there’s a change from sale of all her books for forty pesetas to sale of a coat and skirt for a dollar-fifty.

The main difference between “The Hunger Diaries” and “When We Were Nearly Young” is that the former brims with sharp observation (e.g., “The sound of Madrid is a million trampling feet”; “There are babies, little girls in white skirts so starched they stand out like lampshades, gold buttons in their ears”; “Streams of urine everywhere, under café tables”). Few of the story’s descriptions are as pungent and specific as the diary’s are.

Geoff Dyer, in his review of John Cheever’s Journals, wrote, “I would go further and suggest that this selection from his journals represents Cheever’s greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival” (“John Cheever: The Journals,” Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, 2011). I suggest the same can be said about Mavis Gallant’s diaries.

Mid-Year Top Ten (2012)

Midpoint in the year – as good a time as any to pause, sift through the many reading pleasures The New Yorker has afforded me, and pick my ten favorite pieces. Here’s my Mid-Year Top Ten (2012):

1.  Raffi Khatchadourian, “Transfiguration” (February 13 & 20, 2012)

2.  Ian Frazier, “Out of the Bronx” (February 6, 2012)

3.  Robert A. Caro, “The Transition” (April 2, 2012)

4.  Nick Paumgarten, “The Ring and the Bar” (January 30, 2012)

5.  Burkhard Bilger, “Beware of the Dogs” (February 27, 2012)

6.  Jill Lepore, “Battleground America” (April 23, 2012)

7.   Peter Hessler, “Identity Parade” (May 21, 2012)

8.  Dahlia Lithwick, “Extreme Makeover” (March 12, 2012)

9.  Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood” (June 4 & 11, 2012)

10.  Jeremy Denk, “Flight of the Concord” (February 6, 2012)

Credit: The above artwork is by Bendik Kaltenborn; it appears in The New Yorker (June 25, 2012), as an “Above and Beyond” illustration for the event “Coney Island Mermaid Parade.”

July 2, 2012 Issue

This week’s issue contains a curio – John McPhee’s “Editors & Publisher." It connects McPhee’s memories of three key people in his writing life (Robert Gottlieb, William Shawn, and Roger Strauss) through the use of “fuck” or variations thereof (e.g., “fucking,” “motherfucker”). McPhee writes: “Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word – with its silent ‘c’ and its quartzite ‘k’ – more shocking than a thunderclap.” Of the various “fuck”-themed anecdotes that McPhee relates in his piece, the one I most enjoyed was Roger Strauss saying “Fuck you” to McPhee when McPhee asked him for an advance. What I like about it is the way McPhee reveals, in the aftermath of the shock of hearing what Strauss said, that he (McPhee) may have teasingly provoked it (“Truth be told, though, the book was an amalgam of fragments of other books, for which he had long since paid advances”). “Editors and Publisher” raised a question in my mind: when it came time to publish “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” in book form, why didn’t McPhee change it to reflect what Warren Elmer actually said (“You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!”)? Why did he keep the bowdlerized New Yorker version (“You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”)?

“Editors and Publisher” provides valuable insight into The New Yorker’s evolving usage of “fuck.” But there’s another word I’m even more curious about. In my opinion, no expletive packs more punch than the blunt, concussive “cunt.” According to Erin Overbey’s “Bonfire of the Profanities” (“Back Issues,” newyorker.com, June 2, 2011), it first appeared in the magazine in Philip Roth’s short story “The Ultimatum” (June 26, 1995). I notice that John Updike uses it in the version of his great short story “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer,” included in his 2003 collection The Early Stories (“The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind on her cunt”). “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer” was originally published in The New Yorker, June 14, 1976. Checking it now, I’m not surprised to see that “cunt” has been airbrushed (so to speak); the line reads, “The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind now.”