Sundays With Updike: "The Purest of Styles"

Van Gogh, letter to Émile Bernard, March 18, 1888

I reserve Sundays for Updike. I associate him with Sunday. (He wrote, among other Sunday-related works, a novel called A Month of Sundays and a beautiful appreciation of Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning.) I try to read at least one piece by him every Sabbath. Is it too much to say he’s my form of worship? Today, I reread his wonderful “The Purest of Styles,” a piece I first encountered when it appeared in the November 22, 2007, New York Review of Books. It’s included in Updike’s posthumous collection Higher Gossip (2011). It’s a review of “Vincent van Gogh – Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, September 28, 2007 – January 6, 2008. I relish this piece for its delicious word-painting – van Gogh’s and Updike’s. Here, from a letter to Bernard, quoted by Updike, is van Gogh’s description of a painting he recently completed:

Large field with clods of plowed earth, mostly downright violet.

Field of ripe wheat in a yellow ochre tone with a little crimson.

The chrome yellow 1 sky almost as bright as the sun itself, which is chrome yellow 1 with a little white, while the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed, very yellow then.

The sower’s smock is blue, and his trousers white. Square no. 25 canvas. There are many repetitions of yellow in the earth, neutral tones, resulting from the mixing of violet with yellow, but I could hardly give a damn about the veracity of the color.

How I love that “but I could hardly give a damn about the veracity of the color.”

And here is Updike’s description of two late van Goghs, Enclosed Field with Young Wheat and Rising Sun and A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawn-Off Tree (both 1889):

The latter is the very painting described as a picture of anxiety in his last letter to Bernard – circular swirls and flame-shaped arabesques move like a wind through the branches of the olive trees, against a yellow-and-blue sunset, while small human figures slowly become visible on the asylum grounds. In the former, the undulating field, blue and golden and green, rushes toward the viewer, and the blue mountains beyond seem a roiling river, under a bright-yellow sky where the white sun is pinned like a medal. His impasto has become terrific – ridged ribbons of color as in a heavy brocade.

That “ridged ribbons of color as in a heavy brocade” is as beautifully textured as the painting it describes.

Updike closely identifies with van Gogh. He quotes a letter to Bernard in which van Gogh says his art is “truly first and foremost a question of immersing oneself in reality.” Later in his piece, Updike writes, “Van Gogh’s achievement was to sublimate his own mysticism in the representation of reality, rather than inventing symbolic images.” For Updike, one of fiction’s basic questions is “how literature represents reality” (“Fairy Tales and Paradigms,” in Due Considerations, 2007). In the Foreword to his The Early Stories, 1953-1975, he says, ““My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – and to give the mundane its beautiful due.” He finds Van Gogh’s “resistance to abstract thought and advocacy of realism” exemplary. He concludes “The Purest of Styles” with this clinching image: “Van Gogh, out in the hot fields, his easel anchored with iron pegs against the winds of the mistral, resolved the debate [between abstraction and representation] with acts of submission: ‘I do what I do with an abandonment to reality, without thinking about this or that.’ ” 

January 20, 2014 Issue

Dana Goodyear, writer of some of The New Yorker’s most ravishingly descriptive sentences, including this beauty, “Meanwhile, the streets and courthouses were quiet, as people waited to see if the marriages would be allowed to resume, and bruised purple jacaranda blossoms, rather than wedding confetti, clogged the gutters of Boys Town” (“Down the Aisle,” April 16 & 23, 2010), has broken her style. Her “Death Dust,” in this week’s issue, is written in a plain, point-and-shoot fashion that is almost totally bereft of sensuous detail. “The houses were big and beige, stark blocks against a bright-blue sky” is about as evocative as the piece gets. Nevertheless, its facticity is impressive. It’s about “valley fever,” a disease caused by inhaling the microscopic spores of a soil-dwelling fungus found in the desert South-west – California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas. When the wind blows through the San Joaquin Valley it lofts huge clouds of dust into the sky. Breathe in this dust and, to borrow a memorable phrase of Goodyear’s, whoosh, millions of spores go up your nose. How bad is the dust? So bad, Goodyear tells us, that in Antelope Valley, on the southern edge of San Joaquin Valley, people in at least one home started wearing masks. “Sometimes they can’t see each other across the living room.” “Death Dust” may not be as richly descriptive as some of Goodyear’s previous pieces, but it’s thick with dust. By the time I was finished reading it, I could practically taste the dry, deadly stuff. In other words, “Death Dust” is a very effective piece. For this reason, it’s this week’s Pick of the Issue. 

January 13, 2014 Issue

The New Yorker’s “Bar Tab” isn’t just a food-and-drink review column; it’s a series of miniature illustrations. The most striking of them are by Matthew Hollister. Luminous, fresh, and deliciously hued, they attract the eye, decorate the text, and symbolize the bar under review. They lean towards abstraction and simplification. They’re a superb reduction of the bar’s essence, expressed in geometry and arrangement. This week’s “Bar Tab,” a review of a wine bar called Old Man Hustle, features a delectable orange-brick-purple-neon-pearl-tile-tan-cork beauty that went straight into my digital collection of favorite New Yorker artworks. Hollister has a wonderful way with shimmery coppers and satiny whites. See, for example, his exquisite illustration for Rob Fischer’s “Bar Tab” review of The Shanty (also in my collection).

Hollister has a knack for picking out a detail in the review and including it in his picture. For example, Fischer’s Shanty piece mentions “the metal vats and oak barrels that now line the factory floor.” Sure enough, there in Hollister’s illustration are partial views of four barrels with their checkered patterns of light-and-dark wood, and a gorgeous rendition of a bright, bulbous copper distillery vat. In this week’s “Bar Tab,” also by Fischer, Old Man Hustle is described as “this tiny brick-walled wine bar and performance space.” Hollister’s picture incorporates a beautiful horizontal band of orange-brown-buff brickwork. The burnt orange, setting off the black wine bottles with their tan corks, and the ravishing grape-colored neon sign, and the intricate gray-and-white tiles above, are satisfying to the point of sensuousness. I can practically taste the wine.  

Credit: The above artwork is by Matthew Hollister; it appears in The New Yorker (January 13, 2014), as an illustration for Rob Fischer’s “Bar Tab: Old Man Hustle.”

Barry Levinson's "Diner": Kael vs. Wolcott

It’s interesting to compare James Wolcott’s “French Fries and Sympathy” (in his recent collection Critical Mass) with Pauline Kael’s “Comedians” (in her classic 1984 collection Taking It All In). Both are reviews of Barry Levinson’s charming, offbeat 1982 autobiographical movie Diner; they provide an excellent opportunity to contrast Kael’s and Wolcott’s critical approaches. Also, I want to see how the student stacks up against the master. Wolcott was a Kael disciple, a Paulette. They saw Diner together. Wolcott writes about it in his memoir Lucking Out (“ ‘What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?’ she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. ‘Gravy.’ ‘They put gravy on French fries?’ ‘Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is an option’ ”). Wolcott was just a fledgling; Kael was at the height of her powers. The comparison may be unfair to Wolcott. On the other hand, he may surprise us. He’s an inspired metaphorist. And he’s closer to Diner’s culture than Kael is; he grew up near Baltimore, where Diner is set.

Both pieces are appreciative. Kael, in her “Comedians,” calls Diner “a wonderful movie,” “that rare autobiographical movie that is made by someone who knows how to get the texture right.” Wolcott, in his “French Fries and Sympathy,” describes the film as a “bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until the squeak of dawn.”

Wolcott’s piece starts strong. His first paragraph contains this marvelous line:

As Baltimore pretties itself with crinkly gold Christmas decorations and rows of navy-blue Colt banners, Levinson’s characters – Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Billy (Timothy Daly), and Boogie (Mickey Rourke) – scheme and gamble, cop cheap feels and mull over impending marriages, blow warmth into their knotted fists, reminisce about high school escapades, razz each other into fits of helpless laughter.

That “blow warmth into their knotted fists” is very fine.

In contrast, Kael’s loveliest effect is her conclusion:

Levinson has a great feel for promise. At the diner, the boys are all storytellers, and they take off from each other; their conversations are almost all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. The diner is like a comedy club where the performers and the customers feed each other lines – they’re all stars and all part of the audience. The diner is where they go to give their nightly performances, and the actors all get a chance to be comedians.

Both critics admire Diner’s talented young cast. Both are excited by Mickey Rourke’s Boogie. Kael calls Boogie “the sleaziest and most charismatic figure of the group.” Wolcott describes him as a “tattered prince of sleaze.” Wolcott’s depiction of Kevin Bacon’s eyes as a “bleary, amused scrunch” is very good, as is Kael’s notation of Steve Guttenberg’s “perfectly inflected Paul Newman-like grins.”

Both critics are superb noticers. In his piece, Wolcott points out that the drummer in the strip-joint scene is “portrayed by Jay Dee Daugherty , formerly the drummer for Patti Smith.” In “Comedians,” Kael notes “the kid wandering around quoting from Sweet Smell of Success.” Regarding the wedding scene, Kael mentions “the Baltimore Colts marching song and the bridesmaids’ dresses in the Colts’ colors (blue and white), and Beth trying to teach her record-aficionado husband to dance.” Looking at the same scene, Wolcott observes,

Here girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet, Earl affably picks his way through the buffet, Boogie and the gang gather around the table (ties loosened, smiles relaxed); the entire sequence has a hushed tenderness in which every character is given his dignified due and then suspended in time, to be remembered only with fondness.

That phrase, “girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet,” is wonderfully alive. At the end of his piece, Wolcott says that Diner’s “world and feelings have the full crack of life.” So, too, do these two splendid, generous-hearted reviews. 

Interesting Emendations: Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

Do you remember these lines?

On weekend mornings, we piled in the car and ate breakfast at Smutzie’s, in New Jersey, then filled up the tank at Sam Williams’s Mobil, in Pennsylvania.

The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works.

They’re from Gabrielle Hamilton’s wonderful memory piece "The Lamb Roast" (The New Yorker, January 17, 2011). They are, in their rich simplicity, examples of my idea of the ideal sentence. I was looking for them when I recently read Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter (2011), in which a variation of “The Lamb Roast” appears as Chapter 1. I found them. They’re different from the New Yorker lines. They now read:

On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie’s in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams’s Mobil on the New Hope side. [My emphasis]

So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. [My emphasis]

In the first sentence, “we piled in the car” has been deleted, “ate” has been changed to “had,” “in New Jersey” has been changed to “in Lambertville, on the Jersey side,” “then filled up the tank” has been changed to “but then we got gas for the car,” and “in Pennsylvania” has been changed to “on the New Hope side.”

In the second sentence, “The day before the party, we drove” has been changed to “So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy,” “out along” has been changed to just “out,” “winding roads” has been changed to “winding country roads,” and “past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works” has been changed to “past Black’s Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works.”

I’m pleased to see that those glorious names – Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’s Mobil, Black’s Christmas tree farm, LaRue bottle works – remain untouched, except that the “R” in “LaRue” is now lowercase. It’s the marvelous specificity of these great names that, for me, makes the sentences so alive. The New Yorker versions are simpler; I prefer them. Both versions are excellent, illustrating the truth of William Strunk’s old adage: “the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete” (The Elements of Style).