Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"

Illustration by Eric Nyquist

Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent "Pond Scum" (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau self-obsessed, narcissistic, fanatical, parochial, egotistical, disingenuous, arrogant, sanctimonious, hypocritical, and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). “Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,

Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.

Yes, it is a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk par excellence. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau.

October 19, 2015 Issue

Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Bombshells," in this week’s issue, refers to one of my all-time favorite essays – Susan Sontag’s "Fascinating Fascism" (The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975; included in her great 1980 collection Under the Sign of Saturn). Pierpont writes,

In 1973, Riefenstahl launched a new career as a photographer, with a lauded book of color images of the Nuba, a majestic tribe in remote central Sudan. The subject, as far from her past as possible, supported the increasingly widespread contention that the only constant in her work was a devotion to physical beauty, without regard to race. Sontag, in an essay that seems to have made Riefenstahl angrier than anything Hitler had done, countered that the only constant in Riefenstahl’s work was its inherent Fascism, evident precisely in this devotion to physical beauty, among other things, and in its exclusion of human complexity. It’s a strong argument about intention: a refusal to separate the artist from the art. The photographs, however, remain indistinguishable in any moral or political sense from those taken of the Nuba by George Rodger, the English war photographer whose work inspired Riefenstahl, and whose perspective was anything but Fascist: Rodger, accompanying the British Army in 1945, had been among the first to photograph the corpses at Belsen.

Pierpont is right to say that Sontag’s essay is “a strong argument about intention: a refusal to separate the artist from the art.” But it’s far more than that. It’s powerfully analytical. Most people, leafing through Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba, would probably see it as one more lament for vanishing primitives. Not Sontag. She carefully examined the photographs in conjunction with Riefenstahl’s text and showed they’re “continuous with her Nazis work.” Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” is a compelling argument against Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation. It’s an important argument to keep in mind when pondering the possibility floated in Pierpont’s piece that “Riefenstahl might have been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazis.”

Postscript: Paul Farley’s “Poker,” in this week’s issue, is one of the best poems I’ve read in a long time. It’s an inspired unpacking of the possible history of three old decks of playing cards. The decks are stunningly described with a tactile specificity (“shuffled and dealt to a soft / pliancy, greased with lanolin”; “dark-edged with mammal sweat”) that enables me to feel them in my own hands. “Poker” makes me hungry for more Farley.

October 12, 2015 Issue

The most absorbing piece in this week’s issue, for me, is Jiayang Fan’s "The Accused." It’s about the prosecution of a Chinatown bank for mortgage fraud. Normally, I shy away from crime writing. I resist its built-in sensationalism. But this piece hooked me with its immigrant focus. Also, it appealed to my sense of injustice. The bank in question, Abacus, appears to have been picked on. Fan writes,

But in some ways Abacus was a surprising target for a high-profile mortgage-fraud case. Of the four thousand three hundred and ninety mortgages that Abacus held in 2009, only sixteen were in trouble, a delinquency rate less than a twentieth of the national average. Chinese immigrants, poor though some of them were, seemed to be far more dependable as borrowers than the rest of America. Of all the institutions that were investigated for mortgage fraud after the financial crisis, the only commercial bank that was brought to trial was a small community bank whose assets had never exceeded two hundred and eighty-two million dollars—around a hundredth of one per cent of the assets of Bank of America.

Abacus’s founder is eighty-year-old Thomas Sung. I relished Fan’s description of his office:

The office of Thomas Sung, the founder of Abacus, is three floors above where the tellers sit at the bank’s headquarters. It is a ramshackle room, determinedly functional and frugally furnished. When I first visited, in February, boxes of files formed a mountain on the floor, law journals were piled on cheap shelving, and a straggly potted palm wilted in a corner. The only color was from the tea sets, a traditional Chinese ceremonial gift, that had been left lying around. To Sung’s customers, the décor would be reassuring; it is the office of someone who knows that money is too important to be spent casually.

Fan provides an immigrant view of the case. She talks about the difficulty immigrants face getting bank credit. She points out, “The fact that such people often work exclusively in a cash economy means that their income is hard to prove.” She observes, “Instead of inflating incomes, as the D.A. alleged, in many cases Abacus had seemingly managed to accurately assess borrowers’ true incomes, rather than the artificially low numbers they divulged to the I.R.S.” I find this perspective refreshing. 

My favorite part of “The Accused” is its conclusion, in which, a few days after the trial, Fan accompanies Sung and three of his daughters to a “no-frills” Cantonese restaurant. She writes,

Switching between Mandarin and Cantonese, Thomas Sung exchanged greetings with the waiter and ordered for us, without a menu. Not everything he ordered was palatable to the sisters. They pushed a clay pot of chicken feet, with claws attached, toward their father.

That “clay pot of chicken feet, with claws attached” is brilliant! Fan is a superb noticer, as anyone who’s read her “Bar Tab” columns well knows. To my knowledge, this is her first feature for the magazine. I look forward to many more. 

My First "New Yorker"

I bought my first New Yorker – the March 1, 1976 issue – at Atlantic News in Halifax. I remember the circumstances. I was twenty-three years old. I’d quit university and was working as a gas jockey at the Spring Garden Road Esso. After work one evening, I decided to drop into Atlantic News and check out the magazine section. Perhaps I was looking for a new Esquire. At that time, I was an Esquire fan. But on this occasion it was The New Yorker that caught my eye. Its cover showed a strange scene, a ladder-carrying mob storming a towering statueless plinth. I leafed through it. What dense, strange type! No photos, no illustrations. Perusing its contents, I stumbled on this sentence: “On his last night of leave, Wednesday, September 3, 1969, Michael Eugene Mullen worked until ten o’clock on his family’s farm – a hundred-and-twenty-acre tract five miles northwest of La Porte City, in Black Hawk County, Iowa.” It was the kind of Hemingwayesque sentence I relished (still do) – concrete, hard-edged, factual. It was the opening line of the first installment of C. D. B. Bryan’s Vietnam War chronicle “Friendly Fire.” I bought the issue (75¢), took it home, and read “Friendly Fire – I” straight through in one sitting. It struck me as brilliant. I bought the next two issues, devouring “Friendly Fire – II” and “Friendly Fire – III” (the final installment). In the process, I discovered another arresting aspect of the magazine – Pauline Kael’s movie reviews. I found her avid, urgent, irreverent style thrilling. From that time on, I was hooked on The New Yorker – what’s turned out to be a thirty-nine-year addiction with no end in sight. If anything, it’s getting more intense.

October 5, 2015 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Superiority Burger" (“A slip of flavorless iceberg lettuce is pure signifier”), Colin Stokes’s "Bar Tab: Covenhoven" (“Cavernous fridges illuminate the slim space, as well as the faces of customers poring over the panoply of alcohol therein”), Nick Paumgarten’s "Amerks" (“Dutton, eighty-two, had a brush cut, a firm jawline, and teeth that looked suspiciously like replacements for a set scattered on a frozen pond”), Scaachi Koul’s "The Dad Restaurant" (“Served the way it’s supposed to be: near-frozen, sure to give you severe brain freeze halfway through, as it always does, and mostly foam”), John Updike’s "Coming Into New York" (“And then like Death it comes upon us: / the plain of steaming trash, the tinge of brown / that colors now the trees and grass as though / exposed to rays sent from the core of heat – / these are the signs we see in retrospect”), William Finnegan’s "The Man Who Wouldn't Sit Down" (“Ramos, standing alone, seemed to fold into himself. His expulsion had been tense, uncomfortable, heart-pounding stuff. Everyone involved was surely agitated. But Ramos seemed calm, as if his pulse had slowed”), and Alexandra Schwartz’s "The Unforgotten" (“Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction’s righteous mission, and ‘Honeymoon’ performs it beautifully. But truthfulness isn’t the same as the truth”). A special shout-out to Philip Montgomery for his striking portrait of Jorge Ramos, illustrating “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down.”

Kael's Combines

Pauline Kael (Photo by Jerry Bauer)

Charles McGrath, in his "Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic?" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 1, 2015), says, “The great critic of my life was Pauline Kael (who deserves some renewed appreciation now that Renata Adler’s famous takedown of her is back in circulation).” McGrath’s comment resonates with me. Kael was one of the great critics of my life, too. In response to McGrath’s call for “renewed appreciation” of Kael’s work, I want to focus on what I call her “combines” – delightful, surprising, collage-like constructs of description, quotation, reference, and response. For example,

There’s a pleasant matte of Manhattan with five Chrysler Buildings, and there are charming, slightly miniaturized yellow Checker cabs that suggest Red Grooms, but then when Dorothy and her companions arrive to see the Wiz at the Emerald City and it’s the World Trade Center Plaza, you think, My God, that’s where King Kong died.

That’s from Kael’s marvelous “Saint Dorothy,” a review of Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz. The unlikely combination of “matte,” “Manhattan,” “five Chrysler Buildings,” “slightly miniaturized yellow Checker cabs,” “Red Grooms,” “Dorothy,” “Wiz,” “Emerald City,” “World Trade Center Plaza,” and “King Kong” is ingenious. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box. Here’s another one, also from “Saint Dorothy”:

Nipsey Russell is a vast improvement; his first lines are funny, and he gives them rhythm and beat, and though the lyrics of his song “What Would I Do If I Could Feel?” are unbelievably feeble (“What would I do / If I could suddenly feel / And to know once again / What I feel is real?”), he sings them in Dapper Dan night-club style – like a suave carnival barker – and on a nearby carousel the painted heads of girl angels provide a backup chorus.

How I love that final, surreal “and on a nearby carousel the painted heads of girl angels provide a backup chorus.” Consider this beauty from “Pods,” a review of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

When the four principals run down Telegraph Hill, with a phalanx of pod people in pursuit, and dash to the Embarcadero, they cast long shadows, like figures in one of de Chirico’s almost deserted piazzas.

When was the last time you saw “Telegraph Hill,” “Embarcadero,” and “de Chirico” conjoined in the same sentence? And those textured six “p” words –  “principals,” “phalanx,” “pod,” “people,” “pursuit,” and “piazzas” – are also pleasing.

One more example – this one from “Boss Ladies,” a review of Michael Lindsay Hogg’s Nasty Habits:

When she speculates, “If the thimble was a symbol,” there’s a bit of the hypercivilized impishness of Bea Lillie’s “You will find the dinghy by the jetty” in On Approval – a movie that Nasty Habits, in its heraldic camp, somewhat resembles.

Only Kael, with her deep mental reservoir of movie associations, would think to connect “If the thimble was a symbol” with “You will find the dinghy by the jetty” from two movies made thirty-four years apart. Her conjunction of “hypercivilized impishness” and “heraldic camp” is brilliant.

All of the above excerpts are from reviews in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down. This is deliberate. I want to show that this book, far from being “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,” as alleged by Renata Adler, in her notorious "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in her recent After the Tall Timber under the bland title “House Critic”), contains some of Kael’s most alluring, artful writing.

September 28, 2015 Issue

I’m pleased to see James Wood in the magazine this week. He’s been absent for the last four months, and I’ve missed him. His reviews are, for me, an essential part of The New Yorker. His excellent "The Art of Witness," in this week’s issue, considers The Complete Works of Primo Levi. The piece is noteworthy for at least three reasons: (1) Wood’s recurring use of “moral”; (2) the surprisingly high value he places on “story”; (3) his ongoing preoccupation with death. I can’t recall another Wood review that uses “moral” as often as this piece does. Wood usually takes a formalist approach to criticism. It’s one of the reasons I admire his work. But in “The Art of Witness” he repeatedly invokes morality: Levi’s friend, Sandro Delmastro, is described as being “physically and morally strong”; the clarity of poet and concentration-camp survivor, Dan Pagis, is “ontological and moral”; Levi’s storytelling is “a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters”; “Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment”; “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote”; “This is a classical prose, the possession of a civilized man who never expected that his humane irony would have to battle with its moral opposite”; “That emphasis on resistance makes its sequel, The Truce, not merely funny but joyous: the camps are no more, the Germans have been vanquished, and gentler life, like a moral sun, is returning”; “The philosopher Berel Lang, in one of the best recent inquiries into Levi’s work, argues that this moral optimism makes him a singular figure”; “And he does not exempt himself from this moral mottling: on the one hand, he firmly asserts his innocence, but, on the other, he feels guilty to have survived.” Has Wood exchanged formalism for moralism? No, I don’t think so. He’s describing a writing that is distinctly moral in nature. He says, “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote.” His frequent use of “moral” is a way of conveying this feeling.

Another interesting aspect of “The Art of Witness” is Wood’s praise of Levi’s storytelling. He says, “Many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses. What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not quite tell a story….” And later in the piece, he observes, “But If This Is a Man and The Truce are powerful because they do not disdain story. They unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” There was a time not long ago when Wood praised “antinarrative” – the “reaching for what cannot be disclosed in narrative” (see his great "Life's White Machine: Ben Lerner," included in his 2012 collection The Fun Stuff). But lately, he seems to have developed a taste for old-fashioned storytelling – stories that “unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” In his recent "All Her Children" (The New Yorker, May 25, 2015), he says of Anne Enright’s The Green Road, “This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip….” And in “Using Everything” (included in his The Nearest Thing to Life), he says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Wood has made a strong case for the merits of antinarrative, and he’s made a strong case for storytelling. Lately, he seems to favor the latter.

Like his hero W. G. Sebald, Wood is death-haunted. “Life is bounded by death,” he says in "Why?" (included in The Nearest Thing to Life). “Life is death-in-waiting.” “Toward becoming these old things, these old headstones in mud, we are all traveling,” he says in “Austerlitz” (The Fun Stuff). In “The Art of Witness,” he writes,

Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But, above all, they existed. Sandro, in “The Periodic Table” (“nothing of him remained”); Alberto, most beloved among the camp inmates, who died on the midwinter death march from Auschwitz (“Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains”); Elias Lindzin, the “dwarf” (“Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything”); Mordo Nahum, “the Greek,” who helped Levi survive part of the long journey back to Italy (“We parted after a friendly conversation; and after that, since the whirlwind that had convulsed that old Europe, dragging it into a wild contra dance of separations and meetings, had come to rest, I never saw my Greek master again, or heard news of him”). And the “drowned,” those who went under—“leaving no trace in anyone’s memory.” Levi rings the bell even for himself, who in some way disappeared into his tattooed number: “At a distance of thirty years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517.

But, above all, they existed – I relish that elegiac note. Perhaps Wood’s profoundest contribution to literary theory is his idea that “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (“Serious Noticing,” included in The Nearest Thing to Life). As Wood makes clear, Levi is one of literature’s great rescuers.

Postscript: This week’s issue contains three terrific Talk stories: Andrew Marantz’s "Paint Job" (“He uses Rust-Oleum paint, mostly five colors – black, white, red, blue, green – that are available at Bruno’s Hardware Center, on Court Street”); Emma Allen’s "Big Silky" (“She stepped outside to call Bruce Cost, of artisanal-ginger-ale fame, for black-chicken advice”); Jonathan Blitzer’s "Drive-By" [“He taught Chris Penn how to drive stick in ‘The Funeral’ (’37 LaSalle), and he drove Chloë Sevigny around in ‘The Last Days of Disco’ (’75 Checker Cab)”].