February 17 & 24, 2014 Issue

William Strunk’s advice to “Make the paragraph the unit of composition” (Elements of Style, 1972) is undoubtedly right. But, for me, reading’s deepest pleasure is sourced in the colors, contours and textures of artfully crafted sentences. This week’s issue contains two gems. The first is from Amelia Lester’s “Tables For Two” piece on the Empire Diner:

Young families, their tabletops littered with sippy cups and mezcal cocktails, tend to finish their meal by attacking the Platonic ideal of the banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream.

What a mélange of delightful, surprising ingredients! I particularly like the incongruous juxtaposition of “sippy cups” and “mezcal cocktails.” And the combination of abstraction (“Platonic ideal”) with specificity (“banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream”) is ravishing. The whole thing is like a gorgeous Rauschenberg – Washington’s Golden Egg, say, or Monogram. I’m glad to have read it.

The other line that caught my eye is in Roger Angell’s wonderful “This Old Man”:

I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.

The analogy between blogging and making (and launching) a paper airplane is brilliant. It exactly expresses the “ease and freedom of the form” that I feel when I post an item here. Praise of blogging by a master writer like Angell is inspiring.

Notes on James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

James Wolcott, in his delectable essay collection Critical Mass, describes John Updike’s Hugging the Shore as being “crammed with goodies.” The same can be said of Critical Mass. One of its most enjoyable aspects is Wolcott’s Kaelesque ability to pin his subjects with arresting, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued appraisals. For example, he says Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s “conveys the champagne fizz and sparkle of fashion magazines in the fifties, the infusion of frisky new energy into old money. It’s all surface, but the surface dances.” He calls Capote’s “La Côte Basque, 1965” “a cutthroat string quartet.” He says of William Shawn, “His desk was an altar where the ideals of accuracy, clarity, and understated elegance were held sacrosanct. Every article, no matter how ephemeral, was groomed like a French poodle.” Of Norman Mailer: “The crippler is that in his writing Mailer was psychologically, creatively, empathetically tone-deaf when it came to women, his female characters a creamy mélange of angel-whores whose lipstick was ripe for smearing – a Playboy Bunny mansion of haughty bitches and breathy ditzes whose dialogue bore no resemblance to indoor speech.” On William Styron: “My own problem with Styron’s ennobled potboilers was not his subject matter, point of view, historical accuracy, pale-male effrontery, or any other heavy carbs, but the sheer awful self-conscious succulence of the prose, a fruit-orchard in every scene-painting description.”

Wolcott doesn’t analyze at the level of language the way James Wood does. His hands aren’t as inky with text (to steal a phrase from Wood) as Wood’s are. Both critics are incredible metaphoricists. Wolcott mixes his metaphors more than Wood does. His writing is fizzier, more audacious. In his piece on Marvin Mudrick, Wolcott says that Mudrick “turned litcrit into a spinoff of stand-up comedy.” The same can be said of Wolcott. Like Kael, he’s a master of the parenthetical wisecrack. His inspired “Ved, have a melon ball,” in “The Love Bug,” makes me laugh every time I read it.

Reading Wolcott, I’m sometimes reminded of Wilfrid Sheed, except he doesn’t treat criticism as a game the way Sheed did. Sheed’s reviews were all about how witty he could be. Wolcott is more attentive to his subject, more descriptive. When he’s really digging his material, he can strike some wonderfully surprising, surreal word combos. Consider this beauty from Wolcott’s superb “Manny Farber’s Termite Art” (included in Critical Mass):  

His McCabe and Mrs. Miller features a broken bar of Hershey’s chocolate, and The Films of R. W. Fassbinder so trims the fat from Fassbinder’s blobby corpus that what’s left is a pair of toilets, a telephone cord and receiver stretched across an empty bed, a giant beer bottle, and a magazine spread on Hanna Schygulla.

When was the last time you saw “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Hershey’s chocolate,” “R. W. Fassbinder,” “blobby corpus,” “toilets,” “telephone cord,” “empty bed,” “giant beer bottle,” “magazine spread,” and “Hanna Schygulla” conjoined in the same sentence? I’ll bet, never. It’s the prose equivalent of a ravishing Rauschenberg combine. I love it.

Wolcott doesn’t treat Capote and Cheever as failed saints the way (say) Daniel Mendelsohn and Colm Tóibín do. “Liar,” “failure,” “snob,” “drunk” occur so often in Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show” (included in his How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, 2008) and Tóibín’s “My God, the Suburbs” (London Review of Books, November 5, 2009), I found myself thinking, these guys enjoy using these words. It’s tonic to read Wolcott’s Capote and Cheever pieces because he avoids Mendelsohn’s and Tóibín’s moralizing, prosecutorial approach. Wolcott relishes Capote’s and Cheevers’s complex, tormented personalities. He says of Capote:

For many, the fizzle of Answered Prayers and his personal tailspin offer a spectacle more engrossing than the arc of a distinguished life. A dignified exit may be desirable in principle, but if you can have your subject bumming around in his bathrobe in public, then you’ve got yourself a Cautionary Tale. There but for the grace of God and an empty liquor cabinet go I.

On Cheever, he writes:

Our literary life would be poorer without its theatrical touch-ups, and Cheever’s are no more to be begrudged and censured than the pile of buttermilk batter that James Dickey became or Isak Dinesen’s eye shadow.

I agree. The essence of being human is that we screw up. I applaud Wolcott’s humanism (and humor). Dan and Colm, have a melon ball. 

Sundays With Updike: "Survivor / Believer"

My “Sundays With Updike” selection this week is “Survivor / Believer” (The New Yorker, December 24, 2001; in Updike’s Due Considerations, 2007), a review of Czeslaw Milosz’s essay collection To Begin Where I Am (2001). I treasure this piece for its celebration of specificity:

In To Begin Where I Am, the author’s brief opening statement, “My Intention,” expresses the lifelong priority Milosz has given to subjective specifics over abstract conceptions: “I have read many books, but to place all those volumes on top of one another and stand on them would not add a cubit to my stature. Their learned terms are of little use when I attempt to seize naked experience, which eludes all accepted ideas.”

“Subjective specifics” is a great phrase; it precisely captures what I most value in life and in art. It’s a variation on “thisness,” magnificently defined by James Wood as “any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion” (How Fiction Works, 2008).

“Survivor / Believer” is valuable in another way, too. It affirms one of writing’s prime purposes – the preservation of memory. Updike says,

But Milosz does not remember only the victims of violence; he recalls his cousin the French poet Oscar Milosz; a Polish actress who murdered her lover at his own request and became a nun after being pronounced not guilty; and, in “Miss Anna and Miss Dora,” a pair of “old, poor, and helpless” spinsters, for little more reason than that “no one but me remembers their names anymore.” For an exile, no remembered face or scene is too incidental to clarify the basic mystery of being.

Milosz is a poet of memory. His retrieval of those “old, poor, helpless” spinsters from history’s murk is, for me, an exemplary artistic achievement. Thanks to him, they'll live on and on. 

Credit: The above portrait of Czeslaw Milosz is by Riccardo Vecchio; it appears in the December 24, 2001, issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for John Updike’s brilliant “Survivor / Believer.”

February 10, 2014 Issue

I’m not a fan of third-person journalism. I find it flat, impersonal, artificial. I much prefer firsthand accounts – reality translated into subjective experience by an author who was there. But occasionally a third-person piece appears that bowls me over. Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker, August 8, 2011) is one such article. And so is Tad Friend’s riveting “Thicker Than Water,” in this week’s issue. It’s about five young men sport-fishing in the Opening (“the most ticklish fishing spot in Nantucket’s capricious waters”), when their boat is overturned by a huge wave:

The wave caught them from behind and lifted them until they were surfing its face. They hung there for five seconds – their port gunwale tilting overhead, the Yamaha outboard whirring in the air – as if time were taking a breath. Jason still believed that they’d shoot the barrel and make it out. Then the starboard gunwale hit sand, and with fantastic power the wave lifted the boat and hurled it onto the sandbar up-side down.

That “as if time were taking a breath” is very fine. Friend is perhaps best known as a celebrity-profiler (my least favorite form of journalism), but he’s also a terrific action writer. See, for example, his car-chase descriptions in “The Pursuit of Happiness” (The New Yorker, January 23, 2006) and the horse-riding scenes in his superb “Lost in Mongolia” (in Lost in Mongolia, 2001).

But there’s something disconcerting going on in “Thicker Than Water,” too. It has to do with its third-person perspective. Friend reports what his subjects were thinking. For example: “ ‘Boats flip, but never our boats,’ he [Tom Mleczko] told himself.” This must be based on what Tom Mleczko later told Friend, but Friend doesn’t say so, leaving us free to speculate that it might be based on hearsay. Friend follows this quote with “The waters around Nantucket were life-giving and familiar, almost amniotic.” Who owns these words? They appear to be a form of indirect speech – Friend bending his own thought around Tom’s words. But does Friend have license, in a fact piece, to inflect a subject’s words in this way? It’s an important question because the observations, both the quoted ones and the free-indirect ones, are incredibly naïve, evincing a disconnect with harsh ocean reality.  

“Thicker Than Water” seems slanted against Tom. Tom’s preoccupation with Jabb’s salvage, requiring Jason to jump back into the water and anchor the overturned boat is callous. And his refusal to help Jason climb back on board Purple Water after he’d attached a line to Jabb is wretched. It’s an unforgettable moment, in a piece brimming with vivid scenes:

When the task was done, Jason swam to Purple Water’s bow, but couldn’t pull himself onto it. Tom looked over, askance, and Jason said, “Cap, I’ve been in the water for four hours – I’m at about ten per cent.” He finally crabbed himself aboard.

And yet … if it hadn’t been for Tom’s determined search, and his astonishing alertness (“Then he saw a tiny flicker out of the corner of his right eye – a movement that was subtly out of cadence with the waves. He swiveled and stared, not daring to blink: nothing. Then he saw it it again – an infinitesimal nod in the water. There they are! he thought, powering into a right-hand turn”), five men would've died.

“Thicker Than Water” is, I think, destined for classic status – a story of the peril that befalls those who flirt with ocean disaster, and a damning indictment of dumb father-son machismo. However, I hope Friend doesn’t interpret such praise as encouragement to write more third-person pieces. His strength lies in his inimitable “I” perspective. 

February 3, 2014 Issue

A hallmark of Peter Schjeldahl’s ravishing style is his use of zero-marking, i.e., the construction of noun phrases containing no articles. It’s the prose equivalent of hard-edged painting. Schjeldahl is a master of it. Here are five examples:

Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal scorings cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint. [“Abstract Meridian: Agnes Martin,” Let’s See, 2008]

Poignantly inferior paintings surprise in “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” an instructive little show in new, cozy galleries at MOMA. [“The Night Stuff,” The New Yorker, September 29, 2008]

Growing intellectual frustration overlaps dawning aesthetic pleasure in subtle beauties of extraordinary touch and color. [“On Tuymans,” The New Yorker, November 14, 2005]

Visually advancing color counterbalances illusions of deep space. [“Fra Angelico,” Let’s See, 2008]

Wet resin turned clayey oils pellucid. Colors—greenish-brown chiaroscuro background, pale peachy flesh with bluish insinuations—sang. [“Meet John Currin,” Let’s See, 2008]

What are the sources of Schjeldahl’s gorgeous, concentrated, zero-article style? His brilliant “The Outlaw,” in this week’s issue, offers a clue. It’s a review of Barry Miles’s Call Me Burroughs, a biography of William S. Burroughs. Burroughs is a zero-article stylist par excellence: “Windowless cubicle with blue walls”; “Sharp protein odor of semen fills the air”; “Rococo bar backed by pink shell”; “Great whistles through his teeth”; “Warm spring wind blows faded pink curtains in through open window”; “Naked lifeguards carry in iron-lungs full of paralyzed youths”; on and on. These examples are from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, a work that Schjeldahl calls a “ragged masterpiece.” In his piece, Schjeldahl evinces extensive knowledge of Burroughs’s oeuvre. He says that Burroughs “always wrote in tones of spooky authority,” that Burroughs’s Exterminator is a “delectable memoir”; that Exterminator’s title story “employs a tone, typical of him, that begs to be called bleak nostalgia,” that Burroughs could be “startlingly moralistic,” that the prose of Burroughs’s second trilogy (The Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands) is “nimble and often ravishing, but marred by the author’s monotonous obsessions and gross tics,” that “much of Burroughs’s best writing originated in letters to the poet [Allen Ginsberg].” Regarding Burroughs’s writing, he concludes, “there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.” Schjeldahl’s “The Outlaw” whets my appetite for Burroughs’s work and provides insight into the sources of Schjeldahl’s own extraordinarily beautiful style. It’s a remarkable piece. I enjoyed it immensely.