August 24, 2015 Issue

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a note at the end of his unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941), observed, “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” I thought of this adage as I read Alice McDermott’s wonderful "These Short, Dark Days," in this week’s issue. It’s a portrait of a sixty-four-year-old nun, Sister St. Savior, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, who, walking back to the convent one dark February evening, happens on an emergency – an apartment fire, a man asphyxiated, his young wife in despair. McDermott uses action to reveal Sister St. Savior’s remarkable character. Sister boldly enters the building and takes charge of the young woman’s care. The story is like a nun’s version of a police procedural. Sister learns from a policeman that the asphyxiated husband committed suicide, a fact that the reader already knows because McDermott shows us his preparations in the opening part of the story. Her response to this information is interesting:

Sister accepted the information with only a discreet nod. When she looked up again—her eyes behind her glasses were small and brown and caught the light the way only a hard surface would, marble or black tin, nothing watery—the truth of the suicide was both acknowledged and put away. She had entered the homes of strangers and seen the bottles in the bin, the poor contents of a cupboard, the bruise in a hidden place, seen as well, once, a pale, thumb-size infant in a basin filled with blood and had bowed her head and nodded in just the same way.

Hard eyes, soft heart – a paradoxical combination that complicates Sister’s character. She’s determined to circumvent church rules that forbid the burial of a suicide in a church cemetery. She says to the young widow:

“Your man fell asleep,” Sister St. Savior whispered now. “The flame went out. It was a wet and unfortunate day.” She paused to make sure the girl had heard. “He belongs in Calvary,” she said. “You paid for the plot, didn’t you?” The girl nodded slowly. “Well, that’s where he’ll go.”

The story’s tone is tender but unsentimental. Even the slightest phrases bloom in the damp, gray atmosphere: “the terrible scent of doused fire on the winter air”; “a glass of tea on the edge of a folded newspaper”; “a green scent coaxed out of dried reeds”; “the rusty stains on the blue ticking of the mattress”; two nuns side by side on a couch, asleep, “puffed into their black cloaks like gulls on a pier.”

Was Sister St. Savior successful in getting the young man’s body buried in Calvary Cemetery? The ending suggests she wasn’t. But it’s not clear. The ending is satisfyingly ambiguous. “These Short, Dark Days” is a great story. I enjoyed it immensely.

Adam Begley's Brilliant "Updike"

This summer I’m reading Adam Begley’s Updike. I find it addictive. Begley’s biographical readings of Updike’s work are fascinating. For example, in his early chapters, he shows how immersed Updike was in his beloved Pennsylvania geography (Plowville, Shillington, Reading). He says of Updike’s great “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, January 3, 1959), “The farm, the town, the city – when an adult John Nordholm looks fondly back on the events of that night, Updike is taking us on a pilgrimage to all three of his holy sites.” Updike, in his “On Literary Biography” (Due Considerations, 2007), described George D. Painter’s masterly Marcel Proust as “a way of re-experiencing the novel [Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past], with a closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details conjured back into real ones, that only this particular writer and his vast autobiographical masterpiece could provide.” Begley’s Updike works the same way in relation to Updike’s writing - mirroring the fiction back into reality. I’m enjoying it immensely.

August 10 & 17, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My pleasure-seeking eyes devoured the “Goings On About Town” capsule review of the Met’s “Van Gogh: Irises and Roses,” particularly the description of the roses: “pinwheels of thickly applied light blue, cream, and canary yellow.”

2. Amelia Lester’s “ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard,” in her superb "Tables For Two: Shuko," is inspired.

3. Jake Halpern’s absorbing "The Cop" brings us face to face with the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer’s name is Darren Wilson. Halpern says, “Many Americans believe that Wilson need not have killed Brown in order to protect himself, and might not have resorted to lethal force had Brown been white.” I share that belief. After reading Halpern’s detailed piece, I still believe it. Wilson didn’t shoot Brown in the back. But he did fire ten bullets at him. Halpern says that a few bullets missed him, “but he was hit in the chest, the forehead, and the arm.” This, in my view, is damning evidence of Wilson’s overreaction. His insistence that “I did my job that day” is outrageous.

Samanth Subramanian's "Followig Fish"

I relish Samanth Subramanian’s writing. He crafts the kind of sturdy, specific, plain-style sentence – first person, active voice, spiced with a hint of adventure or exoticism – that I devour. “One morning earlier this year, I took the Delhi Metro to an eastern suburb called Ghaziabad, where the Aam Aadmi Party is headquartered,” he writes, in his absorbing "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September 2, 2013), and I instantly think, Okay, I’m with you. Let’s go! Subramanian’s wonderful Following Fish (2010), which I’ve just finished reading, brims with such lines:

One day, I accompanied Father Kattar to his home village of Veerapandiyapattinam, a community of roughly five thousand fishermen, forty-five minutes’ drive from Tuticorin and less than two kilometres from the temple town of Tiruchendur.

With nothing else to do, I began walking the promenade beside the River Mandovi, a procession of lemon-yellow and powder-blue walls across the road to my right, and moored riverboat casinos with names like Noah’s Ark and King’s Casino, dozing after the previous night’s excesses, to my left.

Climbing the few steps up into the temple – each rendered permanently sticky underfoot by the spilled juice of hundreds of smashed coconuts – I entered a small sanctum with two individual shrines.

Only on my final full day in Goa was I able to follow the second part of Alvares’ advice: to walk the beach from Calangute to Candolim.

In Veraval, thanks to Bapu, I wheedled my way for hours at a time into the yards of two master boat builders.

Following Fish is a brilliant, delicious travelogue, an account of Subramanian’s meanderings along “the long, magnificent necklace of India’s coastline,” exploring fish markets (“fisherwomen with toes reddened by fish blood squat behind cutters, little steel tubs of still-swimming catfish, and turmeric-smeared cuts of fish”), toddy shops (“This toddy had been tapped just a couple of hours earlier and was still so sweet that, when it was brought to our table, it managed to attract fruit flies out of nowhere”), eateries (“Out of the gloom, a waiter materialized and first brought me water in a squat, broad steel bowl, then a cool glass of the spiced kokum-coconut milk drink known as sol kadhi, and then a superb set lunch that sang of home: rice, fresh rotis, an elongated piece of fried fish, a bowl of curry, and a piece of curried fish”), beaches (“The beach had little sand to spare; the ground felt hard under my feet, not as if the sand had been packed by water but as if there were brick or clay just beneath”), and boat-building yards (“Here, a boy in his late teens was dipping strands of braided cotton into a mix of oil and resin, and then inserting the strands into the crevices between the planks with the help of a chisel and a mallet, pounding them into place until the crevices were full”).

My favorite chapter is “On seeking to eat as a city once ate,” in which Subramanian describes eating a meal in an old Mumbai “lunch home” or khanawal called Anantashram:

For the entirety of my meal, though, it was the curry that held my attention. It was more than anything else, a thick fish soup, flavoured heartily with mackerel, smooth with coconut, yellow with turmeric, tart with kokum, and finished with a flourish of tempered mustard seeds. I asked for a second helping of the curry, to go with the perfectly cylindrical serving of rice; of the curried mackerel itself, though, I was not a fan. It seemed to have given its all to its gravy and it now sat glistening but essence-less on the edge of my plate. When I rose after my meal, in fact, that remaining hunk of fish earned me a scolding from my waiter for not finishing my food.

Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish is a satisfying blend of stimulating travel and good eating. I enjoyed it immensely.  

"Mr. Hunter's Grave" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

It’s interesting to compare seven reviews of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015) and see the various ways they respond to Kunkel’s revelation that Mitchell fabricated certain aspects of his great “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). The seven reviews are:

1. Thomas Berenato’s "Progress of Stories" (Los Angeles Book Review, April 21, 2015)

2. Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015)

3. Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2015)

4. Blake Bailey’s " 'Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,' by Thomas Kunkel" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 19, 2015)

5. Thomas Powers’ "All I Can Stand" (London Review of Books, June 18, 2015)

6. John Williams’ "Review: 'Man in Profile" Studies Joseph Mitchell of 'The New Yorker' " (The New York Times, June 24, 2015)

7. Thomas Beller’s “Nowhere Man” (Bookforum, Summer 2015)

Before looking at these pieces, I want to set out the fabrications reported by Kunkel. There are six:

1. The single Saturday visit with Hunter, as described in the story, is actually a conflation of at least seven different interviews that Mitchell conducted with Hunter over a number of months.

2. The three long Hunter monologues in the story were constructed by splicing (and “embroidering”) quotations from related segments of multiple Mitchell-Hunter conversations. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.”

3. In the story, Mitchell’s first meeting with Hunter occurs in Hunter’s house; in actual fact, it took place at Sandy Ground’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

4. In the story, it’s Rev. Raymond Brock who steers Mitchell to Hunter; in actual fact, it was a man named James McCoy, sitting on the porch of a house in Sandy Ground, when Mitchell passed by, who first mentioned Hunter to Mitchell.

5. In the story, Mitchell first encounters Brock in St. Luke’s Cemetery; in actual fact, he didn’t meet him there. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked if could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which is one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission….”

6. In the story, Hunter takes the “BELOVED SON” wreath ribbon out of his wallet at the cemetery entrance. In actual fact, according to Kunkel, “Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.”

In Man in Profile, Kunkel asks, “Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He answers, “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

Well, let’s see what the seven appraisers listed above have to say. Thomas Berenato, in his “Progress of Stories,” writes,

What the “character” Mr. Hunter says in the story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is not verbatim what George H. Hunter told Mitchell in propria persona, but it is revelatory of his character, or at least of “character” period. Sometimes Mitchell sought, and received, permission from his subjects to rearrange or even reassign the dialogue that took place. Sometimes not. In any case, monologues unspool for pages at a time. Soliloquies as charming and harrowing as these are few to find outside the works of Joyce, Beckett, or Bernhard. They are all as unmistakably Mitchellian as Sebald’s are Sebaldian. Mitchell, Kunkel writes, “was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction.”

Implicit in this is that fact pieces that are considered “literature” are somehow exempt from the requirement that they be accurate.

Janet Malcolm, in her “The Master Writer of the City,” expresses a similar view. She refers to Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” Regarding “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” she says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm mocks the puritanical response to the liberties Mitchell takes with the facts. She says,

He [Mitchell] has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

Her view is that “Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat.” She says,

His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Malcolm suggests, “Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Charles McGrath, in his “The People You Meet,” takes a different view. He says, “More than we knew, or wanted to know, he [Mitchell] made things up.” Of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” McGrath says,

Mitchell’s best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell’s masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And yet the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.

McGrath’s view differs from Malcolm’s. She sees Mitchell’s fabrications as a function of his creative imagination. She holds that most journalists lack such an imagination (“There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads”). Whereas McGrath says, “As inglorious examples like Jayson Blair demonstrate, invention is often easier than reporting—you can do it without even leaving home—and requires no special talent other than nerve.”

McGrath doesn’t use literary values to excuse Mitchell the way Berenato and Malcolm do. But he does defend him. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

Blake Bailey, in his “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel,” calls Mitchell’s writing “a kind of hybrid nonfiction that encompassed (with the blessing of his editors) long embellished monologues delivered by old Mr. Flood and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the Gypsy king, who were actually composites of various New York characters with a piquant admixture of Mitchell himself.” Other than the “long embellished monologues,” Bailey makes no mention of any of the other fabrications reported by Kunkel. He calls Mitchell “arguably, our greatest literary journalist — a man who wrote about freaks, barkeeps, street preachers, grandiose hobos and other singular specimens of humanity with compassion and deep, hard-earned understanding, and above all with a novelist’s eyes and ears.”

Thomas Powers’ “All I Can Stand,” is a favorable assessment of Kunkel’s book and a wonderful review of several of Mitchell’s best stories, including “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (“To disappear is the common fate and it would have been Mr Hunter’s, too, were it not for one thing – Joe Mitchell’s refusal to let him go. In the way of writers, Mitchell has listened to Mr Hunter, told his story, and stayed the clock”). Interestingly, throughout his piece, Powers refers to Mitchell’s stories as “fact pieces” without qualification or acknowledgment of the “license” (Kunkel’s word) that Mitchell employed in writing them. Is Powers in denial of Mitchell’s fabrications? Or does he view them as irrelevant? His failure to comment on Kunkel’s revelations is a weakness in a piece that is otherwise an excellent appreciation of Mitchell’s writing.  

John Williams, in his “Review: Man in Profile Studies Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” calls Mitchell “a writer who observed and imagined his way to a brilliant, heightened version of reality.” He says, “It’s clear Mitchell did make things up.” He approvingly quotes Janet Malcolm’s Kunkel review (“But few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to”). It appears that Williams, like Berenato and Malcolm, sees Mitchell as a literary artist, exempt from journalism’s basic “don’t mess with the facts.”

Thomas Beller, in his “Nowhere Man,” observes that Mitchell’s pieces convey an “immersive sense of interest in their subjects, within which there is affection, even love.” He says Mitchell’s prose is “burnished with the warmth of empathy.” He doesn’t mention Mitchell’s fabrications other than to say that Mitchell wrestled with “guilt over liberties he took with facts,” and to point out that Mr. Flood was not Mitchell’s only composite character.

       

Until I read these reviews, I didn’t think of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as a “heightened version of reality” (Williams) or a “kind of hybrid nonfiction” (Bailey) or “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” (Malcolm). I thought of it the way Powers apparently still thinks of it – as a “fact piece.” I agree with McGrath when he says, “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

I resist reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as fiction. Mitchell didn’t intend it as such. In the Author’s Note of his great Up in the Old Hotel (1992), he classified it as “factual.” In my opinion, everything in it is factual, except the six fabrications listed above. They are sufficient to compromise the story’s status as a fact piece, but insufficient to justify reclassifying it as fiction. Bailey’s phrase – “a kind of hybrid nonfiction” – will have to do for now.  

August 3, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is a contest between Becky Cooper’s "Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge" (“Panties, petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles”), Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Chomp Chomp" (“For dessert, get the banana fritters, eat them hot, and wait for the kiss of spice”), Ian Frazier’s, "Amo, Amas" (“Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board”), and Peter Schjeldahl’s "Shapes and Colors" (“At length, beauty does arrive, though clad in its judicial robes, as truth”).

And the winner is Becky Cooper’s “Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge” for superbly noticing those petite panties “hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles.”