Joyce's Commonplace

The caption under the illustration for Louis Menand’s “Silence, Exile, Punning” (The New Yorker, July 2, 2012) is inaccurate and misleading. It says: “The detritus of reality is the material of Joyce’s fiction.” Detritus? In his piece, Menand doesn’t use the word “detritus.” He says, “the materials of Joyce’s fiction are found objects, ‘the reality of experience,’ as Stephen puts it at the end of A Portrait of the Artist.” Richard Ellmann, in his brilliant James Joyce (1959), states, “The initial and determining act of judgment in his work is the justification of the commonplace.” He further says, “Joyce’s discovery, so humanistic that he would have been embarrassed to disclose it out of context, was that the ordinary is the extraordinary.” Joyce’s materials were humble, but they weren’t trash. 

Credit: The above portrait of James Joyce is by Delphine Lebourgeois; it appears in The New Yorker, July 2, 2012, as an illustration for Louis Menand's "Silence, Exile, Punning."

David Maraniss's Chaotic Theory of History

One of the coolest, most interesting theories I’ve read recently is David Maraniss’s statement of his approach to history writing. In his new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, Maraniss says:

My perspective in researching and writing this book, and my broader philosophy, is shaped by a contradiction that I cannot and never intend to resolve. I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. I find these connections in story, in history, threading together individual lives as well as disparate societies – and they were everywhere I looked in the story of Barack Obama.

I share Maraniss’s belief. Chance does play a part in the way our lives unfold. I’ll never forget the line Ian Frazier uses in his great Family (1994) to describe the beginning of the attack at Chancellorville that killed several of his Ohio ancestors: “In the next instant, History, that force which always seems to choose people who are richer or poorer or in a different place, caught my relatives and the rest of the 55^th square on the point of the chin.” That’s the way history works. If you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – look out!

However, at least two reviewers have criticized Maraniss’s theory. Jill Lepore, in her “Obama, The Prequel” (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), says:

There is something quite searching and wonderful about seeing much of history as a chaos of chance. It has a few pitfalls, however. One is that it renders brutality, as a driver of the course of human events, hard to see and even harder to gauge. Politics and economics appear in Maraniss’s account, in carefully researched detail: slavery and abolition, Jim Crow and civil rights in the United States, and colonialism in Kenya and Indonesia. But they can seem like richly painted stage cloth. Another difficulty is that telling the story of the President’s ancestors to explain how the President became the President is a teleological project, and a teleologist who embraces randomness is in some danger of finding himself unable to decide which details to include and which to leave out.

Darryl Pinckney, in his “Young Barry Wins” (The New York Review of Books, August 16, 2012), has a different complaint: “But if Dreams from My Father is Obama’s declaration of selfhood, it is his self-definition that Maraniss tries to take away from him by recasting him not as self-invented, but as the sum of inherited characteristics and traumatic circumstances.”

But I don’t think Maraniss is saying that “inherited characteristics and traumatic circumstances” are the only causes in Obama’s history. He treats them as among the multiplicity of causes in play at all times, in all humans. As Lepore points out, “By no means does Maraniss believe only in chaos. He has a passion for chance, but also a belief in order and a commitment to evidence.”

Is brutality “hard to see” in Maraniss’s account? It mightn’t be emphasized to the degree that it is in, say, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, but it’s implicit, I submit, in Maraniss’s coverage of slavery, civil rights, colonialism, etc.

What I like about Maraniss’s theory is that it treats chance, accident and mistake the way, say, Carlyle treats heroes, and Marx treats relations of production, that is, as bright threads in history’s causal tapestry. 

August 27, 2012 Issue

Summertime and the living is easy, right? Not necessarily at The New Yorker. Mixed in with the magazine’s articles about mosquitoes, TED conferences, strength competitions, scavenger hunts, and modern violins, are gritty, gruesome war reports – four of them this summer, including this week’s “The War Within” by Jon Lee Anderson. The other three are William Finnegan’s “The Kingpins” (July 2, 2012), Dexter Filkins’s “After America” (July 9 & 16, 2012), and Jon Lee Anderson’s “A History of Violence" (July 23, 2012). Encountering them is like coming face to face with the mouth of hell. Assassination, decapitation, castration, torture, mass murder, maiming, starvation, atrocity – it’s all there, the real truth about human experience, expressed in crisp, clear, matter-of-fact prose. I force myself to read it, and even though it’s perverse to consider it the way I do other non-war New Yorker writings, i.e., formally, in terms of writing as pure writing, I find myself admiring certain turns of phrase, descriptions, details, etc. For example, Anderson’s “The War Within,” in this week’s issue, contains this vivid description of a rebel leader at his base in a commandeered school:

Abu Anas wore a black Polo shirt and holstered pistol when he received me in his office. With lilac-colored walls and salmon-pink curtains, the office was a difficult place in which to give the impression of ferocity, but Abu Anas had made a concerted effort. On a desk, he had laid a Koran and another holy book, and a sword with a battered golden scabbard, engraved with Koranic inscriptions. Behind him hung a black flag, like the one that flew on the mosque.

And I admire the bravery of these reporters. Their willingness to travel in dangerous places and meet volatile individuals is amazing. I worry that we’re going to lose one or more of them. Why do they do it? Like Goya, they appear to have a fascination with life’s extremes. John Updike said of Goya, “he relentlessly bared the nightmare beneath the world’s surface” (“An Obstinate Survivor,” The New Yorker, November 3, 2003). That’s what Anderson, Filkins, and Finnegan do – bare the nightmare beneath the world’s surface. If we ignore the truth of their brute reality, we do so at our peril. 

August 13 & 20, 2012 Issue

James Wood is a sucker for flatness – flat prose, flat characters. In his admiring review of Teju Cole’s Open City, he says, “Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively ‘flat’ description” (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In How Fiction Works (2008), he says of certain “flat” characters (e.g., Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Gould in Nostromo), “Yet they are no less vivid, interesting or true as creations, for being flat.” And in the current issue of The New Yorker, reviewing Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, he quotes a seemingly prosaic passage detailing detergent brands and says, “Yet Knausgaard pauses to think aloud at this moment, and wrings a distinctively flat, rigorous poetry out of the Klorin and the Ajax.”

Wood can have his flatness. I’m not a fan of it. Flat prose is like flat beer – it’s dead. I seek vitality – “the strangeness of the vital,” as John Updike expressed it in the concluding sentence of his great “An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green,” Hugging the Shore, 1983). There’s an excellent example of “the strangeness of the vital” in this week’s issue of the magazine. I’m referring to Ben McGrath’s sparkling “Medals and Marketing,” a vitally swift, fluid, humorous, colorful account of life at the London Olympics with particular emphasis on the Games’ commercialization. Here’s one of my favorite passages: 

Good luck to anyone who brought a MasterCard or a Discover card with him to the Olympic Park, in Stratford, hoping to stock up on T-shirts featuring Wenlock, the one-eyed mascot. Visa only, please – and that goes for the A.T.M.s, too. So great was Visa’s investment in Phelps going into London that a couple of months ago the company’s head of global sponsorship marketing, Ricardo Fort, personally ironed a pink shirt for him in a midtown Manhattan hotel basement while Phelps conducted phone interviews to promote Visa’s Go World campaign, pausing occasionally to reload on calories with yogurt and granola.

What a surprising, delightful mix of facts and images! Look at the variety of ingredients – Olympic Park, credit cards, T-shirts, one-eyed mascot, A.T.Ms, Phelps, iron, pink shirt, Manhattan hotel basement, phone interviews, yogurt, and granola. This is an original word combo; it’s typical of almost every passage in the piece.

Here’s another example:

Doubles canoeing presented a real dilemma: do you go flat water, and catch the Belarussian Bahdanovich brothers, or white water, and see the Slovakian Hochschorner twins? In the end, I took Mayor Boris Johnson’s advice, and went to Horse Guards parade, near Buckingham Palace, in search of ‘wet otters’ – Johnson’s euphemism, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, for the women of beach volleyball.

The piece is endlessly quotable. McGrath’s collection and arrangement of variegated materials – dialogue, quotation, tweets, songs, descriptions (“Her pirouette to the left looked slow and mannered, and her pirouette to the right began with a bit of a lurch and an over-large first step”), names, characters, terms, and aphorisms (“The Olympics are nothing if not a convention of salesmen”) – is amazing. Like the event it describes, “Medals and Marketing” is full of zing, juice and luster. I enjoyed it immensely.

Second Thoughts: The above post is unsatisfactory. It quotes from James Wood’s “Total Recall,” but it omits something important. It fails to say that “Total Recall” is one of the most stimulating reviews I’ve read this year. I devoured it. The passage that begins, “He notices everything – too much, no doubt – but often lingers beautifully,” is superb. And the ending (“Mourning, for Knausgaard, involves an acceptance that we are all things, even the people we have known and loved and hated will slowly leak away their meaning. Death and life finally unite, married in their ordinariness”) is inspired. Wood’s writing is one of this blog’s lodestars. If I sometimes quote it negatively, as I do above, I do so with the greatest respect.

In Praise of Criticism - I (Contra Gopnik)

For a tonic alternative to Adam Gopnik’s recent, dismaying, dismal view that “Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it” (“Postscript: Robert Hughes,” newyorker.com, August 7, 2012), check out Dwight Garner’s “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical” in this week’s The New York Times Magazine. Garner says, “The best work of Alfred Kazin, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, Pauline Kael and Dwight Macdonald (to name just a few of the past century’s most perceptive critics) is more valuable – and more stimulating – than all but the most first-rate novels.” I totally agree. I’ll take critical analysis over narrative any day. As Garner says, “Give me some straight talk. Give me a little humor. Give me something real. Above all, give me an argument.”

Interestingly, in conjunction with “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” Garner posted a list titled “5 Critics Who Deserve a Statue” on the Times’ blog “The Sixth Floor” (nytimes.com, August 16, 2012). Three of the five are New Yorker contributors: Helen Vendler, Clive James, and Kenneth Tynan. They’re excellent choices. I particularly like what Garner says about Tynan:

Elegant theater critic. His critical profiles, which appeared in The New Yorker, are master classes. His smoking style — he held a cigarette between his two middle fingers — will give his statue an unbeatable élan.

Tynan’s smoking style is shown in the above portrait by Snowdon, which was used to illustrate a series of entries from Tynan’s journals, titled “The Third Act” (The New Yorker, August 14, 2000). Tynan’s piece on Johnny Carson, “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), is perhaps the finest profile ever to appear in the magazine. On the basis of this piece alone, Tynan deserves to be immortalized in stone.  

August 6, 2012 Issue

Paragraphs may be “the units of composition” (Strunk & White, The Elements of Style), but sentences are the indicia of style. Sanford Schwartz, in his brilliant “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978), says of Hemingway, “He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.” Reading The New Yorker, I’m always on the look out for creative, evocative, stylish sentences – sentences that “have a profile” and are “as contoured as a carving.” I found four in this week’s issue:

Just don’t arrive hungry, and leave any frumpy totes – or friends – behind, and you may enjoy the novelty of a Savage Detective (a mescal Old Fashioned with sherry, maple syrup, and charred pineapple) amidst the buzzy blend of flirting, texting, and social climbing that is Abramcyk’s signature dish. (Ariel Levy, “Tables For Two: Super Linda”)

Siodmak makes performance his subject, with scenes of an orchestra playing Wagner (her ecstacy) and Beethoven (her fate), lovers singing at a piano in a parlor, and a society band at a swank café, where, in a cunning crane shot of a saunter down a staircase – with Kelly’s leonine grace and Durbin’s homely footfalls – he condenses the drama to a thwarted dance. (Richard Brody, “Critic’s Notebook: Screen Fright”)

His black jeans puddle around white sneakers that looked like they were cut from blocks of foam. (Lauren Collins, “The Question Artist”)

When I met Aung Min this spring in Rangoon, he had about him a Brylcreem crispness that evoked an Asian Robert McNamara. (Evan Osnos, “The Burmese Spring”)

Interesting Emendations: Pauline Kael's "Bonnie and Clyde"

Reading Richard Brody’s “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” list ("The Top Ten," newyorker.com, May 15, 2012), I found myself considering what my own list might look like. One film I’d definitely include is Arthur Penn’s great Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Rereading Pauline Kael’s classic review of it (“Bonnie and Clyde,” The New Yorker, October 21, 1967), I was intrigued by the line, “There is a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression (as true in its way as Nabokov’s vision of Humbert Humbert and Lolita in the cross-country world of motels) – as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty.” It’s an inspired sentence, containing a number of Kael’s signature moves: praise in terms of poetry, literary reference, use of parenthesis. Interestingly, she deploys this line to set up a significant criticism of Penn’s direction:

But Arthur Penn doesn’t quite have the toughness of mind to know it; its not what he means by poetry. His squatters’-jungle scene is too ‘eloquent,’ like a poster making an appeal, and the Parker-family-reunion sequence is poetic in the gauzy mode. He makes the sequence a fancy lyric interlude, like a number in a musical (Funny Face, to be exact); it’s too ‘imaginative’ – a literal dust bowl, as thoroughly becalmed as Sleeping Beauty’s garden. The movie becomes dreamy-soft where it should be hard (and hard-edged).

This passage not only pinpoints one of Bonnie and Clyde’s few weaknesses, it also illuminates Kael’s notion of cinematic poetry. One of her favorite expressions of movie love was to call a film “poetry.” For example:

“La Grande Illusion is poetry” (“Retrospective Reviews: Movies Remembered with Pleasure,” I Lost it at the Movies, 1965)

“Yet it’s an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life – poetry of the commonplace” (“The God-Bless-America Symphony,” When the Lights Go Down, 1980)

“It’s a traumatic poem of violence” (“The Wild Bunch,” 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991)

“An amazingly high-strung, feverishly poetic movie about Cain and Abel as American brothers living on a lettuce farm in California in the years just before the First World War” (“East of Eden,” 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991)

The above passage from “Bonnie and Clyde” indicates Kael’s notion of poetry – “toughness of mind,” not “gauzy,”  “hard (and hard-edged).”

Interestingly, when Kael wrote her capsule “Bonnie and Clyde” review (collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies) for the magazine’s “Goings On About Town,” condensing the original ten-thousand-word essay to 175 words, she distilled the “There is a kind of American poetry” line to its essence, deleting the parenthetical comparison with Nabokov’s Lolita, and completely omitting her criticism of Penn for not having “the toughness of mind” to do justice to the “kind of American poetry” inherent in the story. The result is a capsule review conveying the impression that there is, in Bonnie and Clyde, “a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression – as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty.” It’s a superb line, enacting the poetry it describes. And it comes with an unforgettable soundtrack. I hear it now, mentally, as I write this – bluegrass, banjos - Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs playing their brilliant, jangling, jumping “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” another of Bonnie and Clyde's myriad artful elements. 

Heer's Heresy

Jeet Heer’s “Fire in the Hole: The New Yorker’s In-House Radicals” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2, 2012) gives William Shawn a bum rap. In his piece, Heer refers to “the interminable torpor produced by William Shawn’s editorial dotage of the 1970s and 1980s,” and to Shawn’s “perverse late-life preference for producing a sleep-inducing publication.” To appreciate just how wrong-headed Heer’s assessment is, consider that during the ’70s and ’80s The New Yorker published, among other great pieces, Robert A. Caro’s “The Power Broker,” Pauline Kael's "Raising Kane," C. D. B. Bryan’s “Friendly Fire,” Susan Sheehan’s “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?,” Anthony Bailey's "The Edge of the Forest,” Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” Saul Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” Janet Malcolm’s “The Impossible Profession,” Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Bill Barich's "Laughing in the Hills," Joseph Brodsky's "Flight from Byzantium." And this is just scratching the surface of The New Yorker’s rich content during the Shawn era. Clearly, these pieces, no matter what else might be said of them, aren’t “sleep-inducing”; they don’t produce “interminable torpor.” Quite the opposite; they are among the seventies’ and eighties’ most exciting, stimulating, brilliant writings. They were all shepherded into print under William Shawn’s ingenious editorship. 

Credit: The above portrait of William Shawn is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (July 2, 2012) as an illustration for John McPhee's "Editors & Publisher."

July 30, 2012 Issue

Zadie Smith has a beautiful tone – deep, rich, rhythmic, bluesy. She’s the Cassandra Wilson of the essay. Her “Dead Man Laughing” (The New Yorker, December 22, 2008; included in her 2009 collection Changing My Mind) is brilliant, and her recent “North West London Blues” (The New York Review of Books, July 12, 2012), a passionate defense of Willesden Library, is excellent. Now, in this week’s New Yorker, comes her short story, “Permission to Enter.” It’s the first fiction by her that I’ve read. I approached it a bit warily, mindful of James Wood’s criticism of her novel White Teeth: “This style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality – the usual charge – but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself” (“Hysterical Realism,” collected in his 2004 The Irresponsible Self). “Permission to Enter” is interestingly structured – bits and pieces, each numbered and tagged like fragments of artifacts found in a dig, a memory dig. The pieces are set down chronologically, starting with “These Red Pigtails,” in which four-year old Keisha Blake’s saving of Leah Hanwell (also four year’s old) from drowning is fleetingly, retrospectively recounted by Keisha’s mother, Marcia, while Keisha (now age ten) is trying on shoes in a shoe store. It ends with a fragment (#67), titled “Mixed Metaphors,” showing Keisha (now known as Natalie) studying for the bar. In between, all kinds of material are introduced [e.g., brief scenes, slices of conversation, lists, observations, quotations, bright dabs of precise detail (“She had to wear regulation flat black shoes with rounded toes and chunky soles, and a brown-and-white striped outfit topped off by a baker’s hat, with an elastic rim, under which every last strand of her hair was to be placed”), even a menu (see #53)]. Use of rapid takes is a cool way to tell a story. One precedent that comes to mind is Donald Barthelme’s “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning” (included in his 1968 collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts). But Barthelme’s story is surrealist; Smith’s is gloriously realist. In “Hysterical Realism,” Wood says, “When Smith is writing well, she seems capable of almost anything.” “Permission to Enter” confirms his opinion.