Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

March 25, 2013 Issue


Dogs, hip-hop, punk, opera, TV, “failure memoir,” paranoid billionaire – at first glance, the contents of the March 25th New Yorker appear most unappetizing. But there’s always something in every issue – a line of sharp description, a piquant observation, a pungent detail – to appreciate. This week’s issue is no exception. I enjoyed William Finnegan’s “The Miner’s Daughter” for its description of Port Hedland (“Ancient-looking, iron-covered conveyor belts lattice the badlands”; “Bulk-carrier ships hunker like squared-off stadiums beyond the evaporation ponds”). And Anthony Lane’s review of Spring Breakers contains a line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker questions: “Who, you want to ask, can possibly be the magus behind this bacchanal – this forthright sucking of Popsicles, this spume of beer hosed across bare flesh, this char-grilled day?”

What, you may ask, are some of the other “great New Yorker questions” in my collection? Here are three:

To the palate of a traveling Martian – which would be more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? – John McPhee, “The Encircled River – I” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977)

How radical can you be in a town where the locals shop in leopard-skin bikinis at 4P.M.? – Sasha Frere-Jones, “Critic’s Notebook: South For Winter” (The New Yorker, March 20, 2006)

But does the nation's capital of artisanal bitters really need another nostalgia-soaked outpost for herb muddling? - Andrea K. Scott, “Tables For Two: Maison Premiere” (The New Yorker, September 26, 2011)

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Paper Rooms: The Art of Interior Description in "New Yorker" Profiles


Fairfield Porter, Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969)
Alec Wilkinson, in his recent “Jazz Hands” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2013), a profile of the jazz pianist Jason Moran, misses a glorious opportunity to describe Moran’s Harlem apartment. He says that the living room has “a view of the Hudson River” and that it contains an “upright piano from his parents’ house.” But with regard to how the room is furnished and decorated, he doesn’t say. Wilkinson would no doubt scoff at my hunger for such details. “Jazz Hands” is, after all, a piece about jazz, not interior decoration. Nevertheless, descriptions of the rooms in which people live help illumine their character.

John Updike, in his absorbing essay “Fictional Houses” (Odd Jobs, 1991), refers to “the cozy quality of the brick rows of Pennsylvania small towns” and “the many subtle styles, much patched and revised, of wooden farmhouses” in New England, and says, “To describe these houses is halfway to describe the life lived in them.” In my opinion, the same can be said about the rooms, apartments, lofts, offices, and other places that the subjects of New Yorker profiles live, work, and hang out in: to describe these places is “halfway to describe the life lived in them.”

Whitney Balliett, in his great jazz profiles, often depicted the rooms his subjects lived and performed in. For example, in his “The Human Sound” (The New Yorker, December 26, 1970; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American Singers), a profile of Bobby Short, he describes Short’s Carnegie Hall apartment as follows:

The small foyer on the first floor contained a desk, a big Queen Anne armchair, a bicycle, and a staircase. A turn-around kitchen opened off it. The living room, at the top of the stairs, was two stories high, with a vaulted ceiling and a row of high windows facing north. At one end were a small bar, a bathroom, and a second set of stairs. The stairs led to a spacious balcony, which served as Short’s bedroom. A bedroom window faced a small roof, where his cats, Rufus and Miss Brown, were aired. The furnishings were high-class Camp. A heavy glass-topped coffee table rested on a zebra-skin rug, and on the rug, beneath the table, were two metal lizards—one gilt, one brass. A pair of big daybeds, which were covered with bright African-looking material and leopard-skin pillows, flanked the table. Near the foyer stairs were a huge wooden lion, a stolid eighteenth-century Italian refectory table, and one of those roofed-in wicker wing chairs that still haunt old summer cottages on Naushon Island. An antler chandelier hung in the living room, and it was echoed by a Teddy Roosevelt leather chair with tusks as arms. Pictures of every description jammed the walls, and the window side of the room was lined with books and bric-a-brac.

Balliett’s room descriptions are so lovingly detailed, I want to enter them, sit in that Teddy Roosevelt chair with the tusk arms, and soak up the atmosphere. Here’s another Balliett apartment description – this from his great Jim Hall profile, “The Answer Is Yes” (The New Yorker, March 31, 1975; included in his 1977 collection Improvising):

When the Halls were married, he moved into her apartment, on West Twelfth Street. It faces south and is at eye level with chimney pots and the tops of ailanthus trees. Sunlight fills the living room all day. The off-white walls are hung with a lively assortment of lithographs, oils, and drawings. A tall cabinet, which contains hundreds of L.P.s, is flanked by full bookshelves. A sofa, a hassock, a fat floor pillow, a couple of canvas Japanese chairs, and a coffee table ring the window end of the room. An upright piano sits by the front door, and Hall’s electric guitar rests on a stand by the kitchen door.

The above-quoted passages are typical Balliett apartment descriptions. They’re almost “description for description’s sake, akin to 17th century Dutch still life – “devised as a feast for the attentive eye” (Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983).

It seems to me that New Yorker descriptions of physical interiors divide into at least three categories:

1. Description done purely for the pleasure of describing interesting, beautiful things;

2. Description that illumines the subject’s character;

3. Description that furthers narrative.

The first two types are closely linked. For instance, Balliett descriptions are both “feasts for the attentive eye” and illustrations of the occupants’ lifestyle. A classic example of the third category is found in Janet Malcolm’s Ingrid Sischy profile, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1986; included in Malcolm’s 1992 collection The Purloined Clinic). Malcolm begins her brilliant piece with a description of Rosalind Krauss’s loft:

Rosalind Krauss’s loft, on Greene Street, is one of the most beautiful living places in New York. Its beauty has a dark, forceful, willful character. Each piece of furniture and every object of use or decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into this disdainfully interesting room – a long, mildly begloomed rectangle with tall windows at either end, a sachlich white kitchen area in the center, a study, and a sleeping balcony. An arrangement of geometric dark-blue armchairs around a coffee table forms the loft’s sitting room, also furnished with, among other rarities, an antique armchair on splayed, carved feet and upholstered in a dark William Morris fabric; an assertive all-black Minimalist shaped-felt piece; a strange black-and-white photograph of ocean water; and a gold owl-shaped Art Deco table clock. But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of “good taste” and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

Malcolm’s piece is structured around apartments, lofts, and studios. It uses them not just as organizing principles, but as a means of analyzing their occupants’ various notions of style.

An example of a room description that falls in all three of the above categories is Mark Singer’s memorable depiction of Goodman Ace’s living room (“Goody,” The New Yorker, April 4, 1977; re-titled “Words Fool Me,” and included in Singer’s wonderful 1988 collection Mr. Personality):

These days, the cottage of Ace’s own cottage industry is his apartment in the Ritz Tower – four spacious rooms of white walls and black-and-white tiles. The living room leads to a terrace that offers a view of Park Avenue below and Central Park to the northwest. Ace often used to sit on the terrace and read and work – a habit he sustained until a few years ago, when flocks of pigeons began to roost there. “Shoo, pigeons!” didn’t get rid of the birds, nor did the pigeon repellants, plastic windmills, or signs that said “No Pigeons Allowed,” so he finally gave up and retreated indoors. The apartment contains the same furniture that it has had for twenty years – off-white leather upholstery, a vague flavor of Art-Deco-in-decline, the aura of a stage setting. On one of the armchairs, there is a green cushion with white lettering  that says, “LAUGHTER IS THE MUSIC OF THE HEART.” A white grand piano stands in one corner of the room, and atop the piano are a ceramic vase filled with artificial roses, a thirty-year-old photograph of Jane Ace, an unframed photograph of Groucho inscribed “Dear Goody, Here Is Me. Groucho,” and an ineluctably stubborn pile of unanswered mail.

That “ineluctably stubborn pile of unanswered mail” functions as a segue to a discussion of Ace’s letter writing, particularly his Groucho Marx correspondence.

Interior description in today’s New Yorker profiles isn’t as detailed as it once was. The mention of one or two telling particulars appears to be preferred to extensive notation of a room’s contents. For example, here is the extent of David Remnick’s description of Israeli spymaster Meir Dagan’s Tel Aviv apartment: “The apartment is decorated with his canvases. They are naïve, sentimental, Orientalist—desert landscapes, a Bedouin, an old man in the Iranian town of Tabriz” (“The Vegetarian,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2012). In two quick, vivid strokes, Lauren Collins sketches the Paris office of Gerard Depaerdieu’s lawyer, Hervé Temime: “Temime, who represented Roman Polanski, sat at a desk, in front of spectacular windows framed by bright-yellow velour curtains. His printer was filled with bright-yellow paper” (“L’Étranger,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2013). Elizabeth Kolbert vivifies a room in Oostvaardersplassen’s administrative offices when she writes, “Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large black Heck bull” (“Recall of the Wild” (The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012).

There are exceptions to the minimalist approach. Jeffrey Toobin, in his “Madoff’s Curveball” (The New Yorker, May 30, 2011) neatly conveys the look of Fred Wilpon’s office as follows:

The headquarters of the Wilpon empire resembles an English manor house transplanted to a high floor in Rockefeller Center. Wood panelling, thick carpets, and pastoral landscapes in heavy frames offer a serene contrast to the hubbub below. Soft drinks are decanted into crystal glasses. (No Coke; Pepsi is a Mets sponsor.) True, the muted television in the reception area is set to SNY—the Wilpons’ successful cable sports channel—and there is the obligatory LeRoy Neiman painting. But the Neiman shows the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, rather than his customary jock kitsch, and the over-all feel of the offices is boardroom, not locker room.

Judith Thurman, in her “Ask Betty” (The New Yorker, November 12, 2012), unreels an admirable Balliettian run of interior detailing when she describes Betty Halbreich’s Park Avenue apartment:

You could not describe Halbreich’s décor as soberly tailored. The den is paneled in knotty cypress (“big in the fifties”), with pink chintz upholstery (“It used to be tartan”). The master bedroom has gingham walls and needlepoint rugs. There is a laundry suite, and a walk-in closet dedicated to Christmas decorations. In the formal dining room (Wedgwood-blue walls, opaline-glass chandelier, antique breakfront groaning with heirloom china), Halbreich’s banquet table was set for two.

But these depictions pale in comparison with my all-time favorite New Yorker interior description – John McPhee’s masterful evocation of the room in Otto’s farmhouse restaurant “where the customers sit and have their aperitifs while they wait for a message from the kitchen that it is time to go to table for dinner” (“Brigade de Cuisine,” The New Yorker, February 19, 1979; included in McPhee’s classic 1979 collection Giving Good Weight):

I remember from the first moment I walked into it the compact and offhand rural European character and feeling of that room. With its nonchalant miscellany of detail, it was beyond the margins of formal design, but it was too pleasurable merely to have been flung together and too thematic not to imply a tale. There were a pair of bullfighter prints – one called “La Lidia” and the other a depiction of a desencajonamiento – and protruding sharp-horned from the wall between these pictures was the head of a fighting bull. The animal had been raised on the dehesa of Pepe Alvarez and killed in the ring with a sword. Crossed Spanish swords had been hung above the fire. All around the room were wrought-iron Spanish sconces with small amber bulbs. There was a three-hundred-year-old map of the Danube, a two-hundred-year-old map of “Magna Britannia.” There were hand-carved cabinets. There were tall wicker chairs, Queen Anne chairs, and Spanish brass-studded leather chairs in groups on a red tile floor. I eventually learned that many of these things had come down through the chef’s family – to America from England via Spain. There were heavy red curtains on brass rods. The ceiling slanted upward in the mansard manner, with boards of tongue and groove. The silent paddle fan hung down between exposed checked beams. Staring back at the bull were the small glass eyes of a taxidermal fox – just its head and neck, on a plaque – and near it were photographs made in Alaska of dog foxes and vixens. A poster in one corner said “Extinct is forever” and presented line drawings of vanishing and vanished creatures – Cape lion (1860), quagga (1883), Labrador duck (1875), solenodon, snow leopard, northern kit fox.

Lofts, apartments, offices, farmhouses, rooms, having been willfully acquired, furnished, and decorated tell us much about their occupants, and their description is a major resource of the art of the profile.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Interesting Emendations: David Denby's "Jungle Fever"















Hearing the sad news of Chinua Achebe’s death, I recalled David Denby’s “Jungle Fever” (The New Yorker, November 6, 1995) – one of the best “A Critic At Large” pieces ever to appear in the magazine – in which Denby argues against Achebe’s potent charge that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is racist. A version of “Jungle Fever” appears as chapter 27, titled “Conrad,” in Denby’s wonderful 1996 Great Books.

Comparing the two versions, I notice a couple of interesting differences. Firstly, the Great Books version uses slightly stronger language to describe the racism argument. For example, it says that Heart of Darkness “could be read as racist by anyone ruthless enough to detach its representation of life from meaning” (emphasis added). This sentence isn’t in the New Yorker piece. The book version also says, “Still, one has to wonder if blaming writers for what they fail to write about is not a bizarrely wrongheaded or even malicious way of reading them” (emphasis added). The New Yorker version of this sentence uses “extraordinarily” instead of “bizarrely,” and omits “or even malicious way of reading them.”

Secondly, the “pleasure” aspect of Denby’s argument in the New Yorker piece is less pronounced than it is in Great Books. Early in Great Books, in a passage that I adopt as one of this blog’s touchstones, Denby says,

I believe in pleasure, even in “immediate” pleasures, “shallow” pleasures. Pleasure is the route to understanding; you expand on what you love, going from one enthusiasm to the next, one book to the next, one piece of music to the next, and finally what you wind up with as the sum of these pleasures is your own soul.

In Great Books’ “Conrad” chapter, Denby describes Achebe’s (and Edward Said’s) approach in terms of “their fear of narrative pleasure, their demand for correct attitudes.” These words don’t appear in the New Yorker version. Neither does the brilliant question posed near the end of the Great Books version: “So what had pleasure learned, how had pleasure been corrected, extended, or rebuffed?”

And when, in Great Books, Denby concedes a point to Achebes and Said’s approach, he says, “So let pleasure yield this much to the academic left: However wrong or extreme in individual cases, the academic left has alerted readers to the possible hidden assumptions in language and point of view.” The New Yorker version drops the “So let pleasure yield this much” and simply says, “However wrong or extreme in individual cases, the academic left has alerted readers to the possible hidden assumption in language and point of view.”

Both versions make a powerful case for Heart of Darkness as a work of “daunting intricacy.” (Great Books says, “daunting”; The New Yorker says, “spectacular.”) I prefer the Great Books version slightly more because it argues the pleasure principle.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Subhankar Banerjee's "Sheenjek River II"

Subhankar Banerjee, Sheenjek River II (2002)















Subhankar Banerjee’s landscape photograph Sheenjek River II (2002) is stunning. It’s used to illustrate Ian Frazier’s absorbing review of Banerjee’s Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (“In the Beautiful, Threatened North,” The New York Review of Books, March 7, 2013). Luminous, exquisite, pale gray-blue-mauve intermingling with pearl and aquamarine, almost abstract like a Helen Frankenthaler – it takes my breath away.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

March 18, 2013 Issue


David Owen is on a roll – three features in less than two months: “The Psychology of Space” (The New Yorker, January 21, 2013) about the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta; “Hands Across America” (The New Yorker, March 4, 2013) on the rise of Purell hand sanitizer; and now, in this week’s issue, “Notes From Under Ground” about Florida sinkholes and dry-downs. All three are immensely informative and enjoyable. They consist of an amazing range of variegated materials and ideas: Oslo Opera House, collectivist approach, Alexandria Library, keyless structures, Norwegian Wild Reindeer Center Pavilion, World Trade Center, visitor flow model, Times Square, de-cluttering, Gojo’s headquarters, hand-hygiene lab, formulation lab, breakfast buffet table, treatment-resistant pathogens, compliance monitoring system, Lake Jackson, karst, Talahassee, Floridan Aquifier, Church Sink, deep-water cave divers, Wakulla Springs, Turner Sink, Weeki Wachee Springs, Sinkhole Alley, sinkhole investors.

Owen’s choice of material, guided by his acute perception, generates his vivid factual style, e.g., “He and Goldie mixed the first batches in the washing machine in the basement of Goldie’s parents’ house – they were living the attic – and packaged the finished product in pickle jars that Jerry salvaged from area restaurants” (“Hands Across America”); “As we waited for an express at Fourteenth Street, he said that in most stations you can anticipate where the doors of the next train will open by looking for concentrations of chewing-gum splats near the edges of the platforms” (“The Psychology of Space”); “The mermaids smiled a lot, breathed from what looked like gas-station hoses, and did a pretty good job of using awkward-seeming tails to propel themselves across the stage, a deep spring that is part of the Floridan Aquifier” (“Notes from Underground”).

I relish his use of “I” (“One afternoon, Dykers and I met at his office and then took the subway uptown to look at the site”; “When I met him, at Gojo’s headquaters, he told me that he began working there as a young boy, and that one of his firsr assignments was sitting on freshly glued shipping cartons, to keep the flaps from popping open”; “I was taken on a tour by Jim Arbogast, a scientist who came to work at Gojo in 2002”; “During a recent trip to Europe, I was mildly alarmed to find no serving tongs in the breadbasket on my hotel’s breakfast-buffet table: the only way to pick up a croissant was with my fingers”; “Early the next morning, I met the divers for breakfast at their favorite Tallahassee assembly point, the Village Inn on Apalachee Parkway”; “I couldn’t see into the backyard, but two children on the sidewalk hollered, ‘We walked in the sinkhole!’”).

Owen is a subjectivist par excellence. I enjoy his work enormously. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

March 11, 2013 Issue



Is it crass to rue the lack of melody in the playing of a jazz standard? I wonder this as I listen to Jason Moran’s abstract version of Johnny Green’s great “Body and Soul” (on Moran’s 2002 album Modernicity). Moran’s interpretation renders the song almost unrecognizable. Whitney Balliett wrote, “Jazz fans relish the shock of melodic recognition and when it doesn’t come they grow disoriented and gloomy” (Collected Works, 2000). That’s the way I feel about Moran’s “Body and Soul.” In a profile of Moran, titled “Jazz Hands,” in this week’s New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson says that Moran “often uses only the parts of a song that appeal to him – in his version of ‘Body and Soul,’ the most recorded standard in jazz, he plays only the A part.” This is an interesting approach, but while I respect the effort, I’m not crazy about the result. It’s like taking a beautiful green artichoke and stripping it of its leaves just to get to its heart. Alec Wilder called “Body and Soul” an “enormously innovative song” (American Popular Song, 1972). It deserves homage, not deconstruction.

Nevertheless, “Jazz Hands” itself is a wonderful piece of writing. It contains three “visits” that I enjoyed immensely: to a practice room at the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston, where Moran gives lessons to three students; to the KC Jazz Club at the Kennedy Center, where Moran’s group Bandwagon, plus Bill Frisell, rehearsed; and to the Village Vanguard, where Bandwagon was playing. Wilkinson’s evocation of the scene inside the Village Vanguard is superb. When he says, “One night, I occupied the last seat on the banquette, which is beside the drum set and is called the drummer’s seat, because drummers like to sit there to observe,” I smiled appreciatively. This is exactly the kind of personal, specific, journalistic observation I devour. “Jazz Hands”’s ending is equally marvelous:

What I remember most clearly was a moment, at the end of a passage of frantic playing, when, suddenly quiet, all three had their hands poised, their eyes closed, and their breath held. They seemed to be listening as acutely as animals in the woods. Each was waiting for one of the others to make a sound. Instead, a small smile formed on Moran’s lips, and he slowly lowered his hands to his lap, and, without opening their eyes, the others lowered theirs, too.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Cécile McLorin Salvant - The Sound of Surprise


Interpretation of the great American Songbook is overdue for major renovation. I know just the singer for the job. Her name is Cécile McLorin Salvant. I first learned about her in a “Goings On About Town” note on Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series: “The swinging singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, who has a vocal warmth to match her rhythmic ease, is a vibrant neo-traditionalist who makes the old new again” (“Jazz and Standards,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2013). Not recognizing the name, I went to iTunes to see if there were any samples of her work. I found a 2010 album called Cécile, containing ten songs. I decided to buy it. I’ve been listening to it ever since. Whoever wrote that anonymous New Yorker blurb knows what he/she is talking about. “Swinging” is exactly the right word to describe Salvant’s singing, along with “delightful,” “inventive,” “agile,” “rangy,” “magnetic,” “calm,” and “assured.” Her rhythms and inflections and accents change continually. Her voice seems capable of endless colors and timbres. Her dynamics are consummate. On Cécile, she sings an exquisite version of Gigi Gryce’s “Social Call.” Ben Ratliff, reviewing her performance at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, says, “She radiates authority” (“A Young Vocalist Tweaks Expectations,” The New York Times, November 2, 2012). Ratliff’s piece is illustrated with a video of Salvant singing Richard Rodgers’s “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” What a mesmerizing rendition! She perfectly expresses that great song’s mysterioso quality. There’s a fascinating YouTube video of her singing Harry Warren’s “I Only Have Eyes For You” in which she repeats “disappear,” in the line “You are here, so am I / Maybe millions of people go by / But they all disappear from view / And I only have eyes for you,” an astounding eight times. It’s an amazing interpretation. Salvant’s singing has what Whitney Balliett identified as jazz’s defining characteristic – the sound of surprise. 

Credit: The above photograph of Cécile McLorin Salvant is by Tony Cenicola; it appears in The New York Times (November 2, 2012), as an illustration for Ben Ratliff's A Young Vocalist Tweaks Expectations.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

March 4, 2013 Issue


Pauline Kael, in the Introduction to her great For Keeps (1994), said, “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” Peter Schjeldahl could say the same thing. Bits of his life are embedded here and there throughout his reviews. For example, in his splendid “Warhol In Bloom” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2002; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See), a review of the Tate Modern’s 2002 Andy Warhol retrospective, he hints at the circumstances that clinched his decision to become an art critic:

Announcing that pleasure will be the show’s keynote, De Salvo [Tate curator] begins with a group of Flowers – large silk-screen paintings from 1964 and 1967 that ring changes on a motif of flat hibiscus blossoms against a grainy ground of grass blades. (Warhol cribbed the image from a tiny black-and-white ad in a magazine.) The choice elated me, because a Flowers show in Paris, in 1965, was one of two experiences I had that year that inspired a vocational devotion to art. (The other was a Piero della Francesca fresco in Tuscany.)

Now, eleven years later, we learn the details of Schjeldahl’s epiphanic Piero della Francesca encounter. In his lovely “Heaven On Earth,” in this week’s issue, Schjeldah writes:

One hot August, when I was twenty-three, I traversed Tuscany on the back of a Vespa driven by a painter friend, George Schneeman. We had seen Piero’s magnum opus, the “Legend of the True Cross” frescoes, in Arezzo, which I found bewildering, and were headed northeast, to the artist’s home town of Sansepolcro, the site of his famous “Resurrection of Christ” (“the best picture in the world,” according to Aldous Huxley), which I also failed to make much of. Then we stopped at a tiny cemetery chapel, in the hill town of Monterchi, to see Piero’s highly unusual “Madonna del Parto.” An immensely pregnant but delicately elegant young Mary stands pensively in a bell-shaped tent, as two mirror-image angels sweep aside the flaps to reveal her. One angel wears green, the other purple. Here was the circumstantial drama of a ripeness with life in a place of death. George told me a sentimental, almost certainly untrue story that the work memorialized a secret mistress of Piero’s who had died in childbirth. This befitted the picture’s held-breath tenderness and its air of sharing a deeply felt, urgent mystery. In another age, the experience might have made me consider entering a monastery. Instead, I became an art critic.

That “held-breath tenderness” is inspired! Schjeldahl is one of The New Yorker’s most distinctive stylists. I enjoy his work immensely. And to think it all began forty-eight years ago with Andy Warhol and Piero della Francesco – amazing!