George V. Higgins's Profane Style

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” – from The Digger’s Game (1973)

You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life – this is a very powerful line, and its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says, in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld-style.

Credit: The above photograph of George V. Higgins, by Benno Friedman, appears on the back cover of Higgins’s Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years (1988).

August 25, 2014 Issue

Inspiration – that “shimmer of exact details” (in Nabokov’s memorable phrase) – is one of the essential ingredients of great writing. What passages in this week’s issue bear the mark of inspiration? I find at least three:

A tiny park mouse frantically circled the flower-box perimeters. To the west, the night sky was lit up with L.E.D. slingshot helicopters, set aloft by hawkers on the Square. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: The Pavilion Market Café”

Unlike the work of Beckett, who has obviously had a large influence on him, Kelman’s writing has almost no metaphysical dimension, as though metaphysics were offensively luxurious—brocade for the bourgeois. There is an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival. – James Wood, “Away Thinking About Things”

One great pleasure of the Bowl is the sense of a spell being cast, and it happened here: in the third movement of the Mahler, when a ghostly klezmer band files by, seven thousand leaned in, their red wine and grilled chicken neglected, their motionless heads etched by the light pouring off the stage. – Alex Ross, “Under the Stars”

Postscript: My admiration for Michael Specter’s work continues to grow. His “Seeds of Doubt,” in this week’s issue, is a masterly dissection of Vandana Shiva’s emotional arguments against genetically modified crops. Specter not only quotes scientific studies (e.g., “According to a recent study by the Flemish Institutue for Biotechnology, there has been a sevenfold reduction in the use of pesticide since the introduction of Bt cotton; the number of cases of pesticide poisoning has fallen by nearly ninety percent”); he also talks to farmers (“The first thing the cotton farmers I visited wanted to discuss, though, was their improved health and that of their families. Before Bt genes were inserted into cotton, they would typically spray their crops with powerful chemicals dozens of times each season”). Specter’s use of evidence to lance Shiva’s arguments is impressive. His conclusion that Shiva’s statements “are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than those of a scientist” appears irrefutable. 

August 11 & 18, 2014 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most is Dana Goodyear’s “Paper Palaces.” It’s a profile of the architect Shigeru Ban. Goodyear is an artful describer. She says of Ban, “He looks clicked together, like a Lego figurine.” Her descriptions of Ban’s creations are delightful. For example, she depicts his Aspen Art Museum as “a glass box nested in a lattice screen made from resin-infused paper and topped with a timber truss roof.” Of his Kobe cabins, she writes, “Pleasingly geometric, with an eco-friendly, brown-rice look – smooth paper columns supporting crisp white canvas roofs – the Kobe cabins have an aesthetic that lies somewhere between a Tinkertoy masterpiece and a Seventh Generation diaper with operable windows.” My favorite passage in “Paper Palaces” involves Goodyear herself. She and Ban are looking at the Aspen Art Museum’s truss roof: “I said that the swooshing lines reminded me of overlapping ski tracks. He looked at me blankly.” I smiled when I read that. I relish its use of “I,” and I love the way she shows herself failing to spark Ban’s response. I smiled again near the end of the piece when Goodyear observes Ban at Tom McInerney’s Montana lot, listening to McInerney and Maltz discuss design ideas. She says, “Who knew what he was thinking? ‘Do you have mayonnaise?’ he said finally.” Ban strikes me as a very cool guy. I enjoyed “Paper Palaces” immensely. 

Edward Hoagland's Brilliant "Of Cows and Cambodia"

Photo of Edward Hoagland by Glenn Russell

Recently, I had the pleasure of rediscovering Edward Hoagland’s great 1971 essay “Of Cows and Cambodia,” included in his wonderful 1973 collection, Walking the Dead Diamond River. I’m indebted to Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s Good Prose (2013) for leading me to it. Kidder and Todd quote “Of Cows and Cambodia” ’s remarkable opening passage –

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

– and comment: “No one gives you permission to write this way. It is like taking a bite of the apple that is the world. You do it. You get away with it. Soon experience entitles you to do it again.”

Not only do Kidder and Todd spotlight Hoagland’s brilliant essay; they also provide a key to appreciating its art. They say,

Most of the work that we call personal essay goes beyond logic and fact into the sovereign claims of idiosyncrasy. This is not to suggest that essays should be illogical, but they maybe, and generally should be, extra-logical – governed by associative more than strictly linear thought.

Governed by associative more than strictly linear thought – this strikes me as a perfect description of Hoagland’s approach, an approach that I admire immensely. “Of Cows and Cambodia” is a superb example of it. The piece is about Hoagland’s “escape to the woods,” to an abandoned farm he owns in Vermont. It brims with delightful, surprising, evocative descriptions – of the land (“Around on my side of Mount Hor a deep, traditional sort of cave corkscrews into the mountains a hundred feet or more, a place where hunters lived, and once an eccentric called Leatherman, who wore skins and lived off whatever he could catch or kill”), the wildlife (“Plenty of deer skirt through, and on the mountainside you can find boggy glades where single deer have made their beds in the fine grassy patches, leaving the imprint of themselves after they run”; “The porcupines, after huddling in congregations through the winter, spread out and fight for territory during the spring, with piercing, nasty screams, though in the evening you can hear them chewing bark high in the spruces, their teeth sounding gravelly-voiced”), his adopted collie, Bimbo (“Worse than just using a dead deer, he singles out a picnicker’s ordure to roll in if he can, smearing his fluffy fur with excrement, wearing it like epaulets, as the most mythic material of all”), a commune (“Everyone went off on jaunts into the countryside or swam or gathered firewood or sat talking all day in the cook tent, fixing salads of sorrel, lamb’s-quarters and wild mustard leaves with little berries and raw eggs stirred in”), his friend Paul Sumner (“He’s got blue eyes and a jug-handle pair of ears, a puckery, sharp-witted face, a twisty smile”), an old farmer (“He was in his middle eighties and walked very slowly, like a frail Galapagos turtle, looking incongruously weightless but leaning heavily while I helped him to edge through the willow-alder thickets”), and, most vividly, an artificial inseminator named Donald Nault, whom Hoagland started accompanying on his rounds:

Nault has five kids and lives in a frail-looking frame house, shingled gray and set on a hilltop that overlooks most of his working territory, which is twenty-five miles square. His wife is a stocky, pretty woman, an ironist, a pertinacious mother, who stuffs bitterns and flying squirrels to decorate the living room. He is a good explainer and seems to smile more than most people do, although he’s perfectly prepared to yell. He’s gangly and has short gray hair and the open-faced look of a high-school science teacher, with thin-rimmed glasses, a spacious physiognomy but narrow bones. His voice is flat-timbred and dispassionate-sounding; he breaks his vowels in half, twanging the halves in different tones. He keeps bees and hunts with bow and arrow for hobbies, and works in the 4-H program, a much more freewheeling proposition than scouting, being geared to what farm youngsters can do off in the boondocks by themselves. Like the bulk-milk pickup drivers, the feed dealers and John Deere men, he’s one of the county’s peripatetics.

How I love that “he breaks his vowels in half, twanging the halves in different tones”! And the reference to the “bulk-milk pickup drivers” is inspired (you hardly ever see them mentioned in literary writing, yet they’re a common sight on country roads, and their trucks with their gleaming stainless steel tanks are eye-catching).

You can see Hoagland’s associative, nonlinear style at work in the above-quoted passage – in the way it leaps from Nault’s wife, who “stuffs bitterns and flying squirrels to decorate the living room” to Nault “is a good explainer and seems to smile more than most people do, although he’s perfectly prepared to yell,” and then swerves from Nault’s voice (“flat-timbred and dispassionate-sounding; he breaks his vowels in half, twanging the halves in different tones”) to his hobbies (“He keeps bees and hunts with bow and arrow for hobbies, and works in the 4-H program, a much more freewheeling proposition than scouting, being geared to what farm youngsters can do off in the boondocks by themselves”).

Look at the unlikely combination of ingredients of that passage: “five kids,” “frail-looking frame house,” “ironist,” “pertinacious mother,” “bitterns and flying squirrels,” “good explainer,” “open-faced look,” “thin-rimmed glasses,” “spacious physiognomy,” “narrow bones,” “flat-timbred,” “dispassionate-sounding,” “vowels,” “different tones,” “bees,” “bow and arrow,” “4-H program,” “boondocks,” “bulk-milk pickup drivers,” “feed dealers,” “John Deere men,” “county’s peripatetics.” Yet it’s all drawn from real life – the surreal reality of the artificial inseminator, as processed by Hoagland’s voracious eye and ear.

Credit: The above photograph of Edward Hoagland is by Glenn Russell; it appears in the May 5, 2012 Burlington Free Press.

August 4, 2014 Issue

James Wood, in his “Perfuming the Money Issue” (London Review of Books, October 11, 2012), says, “I have always thought Gilbert Osmond the most frightening character in fiction.” In my opinion, the most frightening (and evil) characters in real life are hanging judges – rude, biased tyrants who are allergic to reasonable doubt, run their courtrooms like police states, bully defense lawyers, and mock their submissions on behalf of the accused. One such scourge is Judge Robert Hanophy (“Hang ’em Hanophy”) in Janet Malcolm’s memorable "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010). Another is Judge Michael Bolan in Nicholas Schmidle’s excellent "Crime Fiction," in this week’s issue. Here’s Schmidle’s account of what happened at trial when Tyrone Hood’s lawyer, Jim Mullenix, tried to raise the single most important issue in Hood’s case:

When Mullenix asked Morgan, Sr., about the life-insurance policy – “How much money did you collect from your son’s death?” – Higgins and Rogers, the state’s attorneys, objected. At one point, Judge Bolan told Mullenix, “Perry Mason does this. Perry Mason proves the guy in the back of the court did it.” He criticized Mullenix for failing to establish a “relevant nexus between the Hood case and Morgan, Sr.’s past. Any similarity between the deaths of Morgan, Jr., and Soto were mere “coincidence.” He ridiculed Mullenix’s argument as one more appropriate for the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Our justice system depends on fair-minded judges who constantly apply the fundamental principle of reasonable doubt. Judges like Hanophy and Bolan anger me. I'm sure that if I appeared in front of them, I'd be found in contempt. And that would be appropriate, because it's exactly what I feel for them - utter contempt. 

One way to diminish the impact of hanging judges is to elect trial by judge and jury. Juries can sometimes counterbalance the roughshod rulings of biased judges. I think Tyrone Hood made a serious mistake when he “waived his right to a jury trial, placing his fate in Judge Bolan's hands.”

Postscript: I see that Richard Brody is still polishing his brilliant “Critic’s Notebook” review of Woody Allen’s great Annie Hall (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012). In this week’s “Goings On About Town,” he changes “a psychoanalytic obsession in baring his sexual desires …” to “a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires….” More significantly, he adds a new last line: “Yet it’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him.”

Brody gives Allen more credit for knowing what he’s doing than Pauline Kael did. He says that Allen “allows” Annie to run away from him. Kael said that Allen “is bewildered that Annie wearied of Alvy’s obsessions and preferred to move on and maybe have some fun” (“The Prince Who Turned Into A Frog,” The New Yorker, October 27, 1980). I think Brody is right. Annie goes her own way because Woody Allen, her creator, intended her to go her own way. Given the seriousness of Allen’s talent, his art has always to be respected as intentional.