Larkin the Photographer

Philip Larkin with his Rolleiflex, 1957

Philip Larkin as a shutterbug? It’s a surprising revision of the reclusive Larkin image. Nevertheless, it’s a fact, as reported by Lev Mendes in his fascinating "Philip Larkin's Life Behind the Camera" (newyorker.com, “Page-Turner,” January 29, 2016). Mendes describes Larkin roaming the countryside, taking pictures with his Rolleiflex. He writes, “Rather than a poet committed to monkish isolation and routine, Larkin the photographer appears as an eager traveller through Britain and Ireland, with [Monica] Jones often in tow.” According to Mendes, Larkin took at least five thousand pictures, two hundred of which have now been assembled for the first time in a book titled The Importance of Elsewhere.

Mendes asks, “What drew Larkin to take pictures?” His conclusion – “Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving” – strikes me as brilliant. It fits with Larkin’s view of poetry as set out in his “Statement” (Required Writing, 1983), one of the most compelling expressions of artistic purpose I’ve ever read:

I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.

January 25, 2016 Issue

Ah, the surreal reality of Jiayang Fan’s ravishing descriptions:

On a recent Wednesday, a pair of patrons—dressed decidedly frumpier than their cashmere-sweatered, silk-bloused neighbors—commented, above the snarl of eighties-era Hüsker Dü and Circle Jerks, on the thematic connection between a drink named The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (sherry, grapefruit, cardamom) and one called Lee Marvin (tequila, agave, orange). The energetic barkeep who claimed authorship grinned: “I’m not so clever. For example, I also came up with this.” He pointed matter-of-factly at the New Fuck Buddy (rum, coffee sauce, lemon), which he advised pairing, improbably, with Szechuan-peppercorn duck wings.

That’s from Fan’s inspired "Bar Tab: Mother's Ruin," in this week’s issue. Her Rauschenbergian word assemblages – “frumpier than their cashmere-sweatered, silk-bloused neighbors,” with “the snarl of eighties-era Hüsker Dü and Circle Jerks,” with “the thematic connection between a drink named The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (sherry, grapefruit, cardamom) and one called Lee Marvin (tequila, agave, orange),” with “the energetic barkeep who claimed authorship,” with “the New Fuck Buddy (rum, coffee sauce, lemon),” with “Szechuan-peppercorn duck wings” – first surprise, then delight.

There’s another exquisite construction in this week’s issue – Lawrence Joseph’s poem "A Fable." I don’t claim to fully understand it. I like the swift, vivid notations at the beginning – “Great bronze doors of Trinity Church,” “A red // tugboat pushes a red-and-gold barge / into the Narrows,” “A bench in the shadows // on a pier in the Hudson,” “The café / on Cornelia Street” – like pictures by a savvy street photographer, Marvin E. Newman, say, or Sid Grossman, or Morris Engel, or other members of New York’s Photo League. And I like the specificity of the place names – Cornelia Street, Peck Slip, Water Street, Front Street, Coenties Slip, Stone Street, Exchange Place. The poem expresses passionate engagement with the city. I like the colors – bronze, red, red-and-gold, green, the yellow in Gauguin’s “Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ.” How often do you see Blake and Gauguin juxtaposed? Not often. Most of all, I relish the lineation, the stanzas’ wrap-around edges – enjambment, I think, is the fancy word for it. I’m not sure what to make of this poem. But I’m glad I read it.

January 18, 2016 Issue

I can’t believe I’ve just read a whole article – Tad Friend’s "Holding the T," in this week’s issue – about squash, a sport I’m not even remotely interested in. What held me is Friend’s springy, kinesthetic, exuberant style, e.g.,

He liked to drill afterward. I’d never been big on drills, but with Will I actually preferred them to matches, because the way his warmth and thoughtfulness contracted in competition reminded me uncomfortably of myself. So we traded baby drops and cross-court volleys: the training montage, at last. As I examined my game, there’d be an occasional glint of brilliance—a moment when I lunged just right, held my shot to freeze him, then feathered in a drop to the nick, the delicious spot where the floor and the sidewall join and the ball rolls out dead.

And:

We played a game, just for fun. I got off to a lead, and then Peter began to reel me in, extending the points with a knowing grin. He shaved his rails tight, working me until my hammies quivered. But I was hitting good rails, too, thanks to him, and I converted a reaching-back-in-midair volley to go up, 6–5. Trying to catch me with low kills, he tinned a few, and then I dead-handed a drop shot to the nick. At 10–6, after a long rally, I held a forehand, then crunched a rail into empty space. He gave a little hop of chagrin and cried, “You . . . bugger!”

That “He shaved his rails tight, working me until my hammies quivered” made me smile. Perhaps the piece’s best passage is this non-squash remembrance of youthful joy:

I wear contact lenses then, and one is killing me, so I take it out and cradle it in my palm as we kiss, and with my nearsighted eye I see her soft mouth and glacier-blue eye made enormous, while my corrected eye sees the Chrysler Building and the blazing city beyond, closeup zooming to master shot, the way New York can suddenly open itself to you for a moment, when you’re young.

“Holding the T” proves once again the old adage that almost anything that happens to a person, even a squash player, can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough.

January 11, 2016 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ben Lerner’s exceptionally beautiful, cerebral "The Custodians." It’s about the Whitney Museum of American Art’s replication committee and its determination of “when a work of art, or a part of a work of art, cannot be fixed or restored in the traditional ways—when and how it must, instead, be replicated.” What makes the piece so beautiful is that it’s sort of a verbal equivalent of the sculptural assemblage it describes. Just look at some of the myriad elements it comprehends: the High Line (“Grass grows over the rails, trees among the trestles; it’s almost as if nature had reclaimed the infrastructure of a civilization wiped out by an unspecified disaster”), the Whitney’s mirror-paneled elevator (“half of the occupants are filming their reflections as we ascend”), Josh Kline’s Cost of Living (Aleyda) (“a janitor’s cart, to which L.E.D. lights have been taped, and on which are several objects, printed in plaster and cyanoacrylate: brushes, sponges, a bottle of cleaning … two 3-D prints of the digitally imaged head of ‘Aleyda,’ a housekeeper at the Hotel on Rivington, along with a print of her hand, enclosed in a plastic glove, and of her foot, in a sock and shoe”), the Whitney’s conservation department (“The space is open and airy, despite giant fume extractors that snake down from the ceiling”), Barkley Hendricks’s Steve (“a full-length portrait of a man wearing a white suit and mirrored sunglasses, in which the windows of Hendricks’s studio—and, if you look closely, part of Hendricks’s head—are reflected”), John Ruskin’s The Lamp of Memory (“In The Lamp of Memory, written in 1848, John Ruskin … argued that buildings and objects must be left to decline, even die—that the ‘greatest glory of a building . . . is in its Age’ ”), two Mark Rothko triptychs (“black rectangles on a plum-colored ground”), Rothko’s Harvard murals (“five large mural paintings … ranging from light pink to deep purple”), the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library (“has a huge bank of sloped windows facing the Hudson River”), Claes Oldenburg’s Ice Bag Scale C (“a combination of custom-made and commercially available materials, including three motors and six fans designed to make the bag move more or less at random—to make it seem alive”), Nina Simone’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes (“The recording sounds particularly beautiful, because my headphones are staticky, a false patina that interacts well with the lyrics and the grain of Simone’s voice”), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“I walk among the ancient sculptures that we leave fragmented and paintless even though we could try to restore the vivid polychromy they originally possessed”).

What holds all this wild variegated material together, what makes it cohere, is Lerner’s marvelously perceptive “I” (“I walk south on Manhattan’s High Line …”; “I feel as if I were wandering through a composite …”; “I can’t help thinking of it as the Noah’s Ark of American Art”; “I enter through the museum’s glass façade …”; “As I leave the building, I find myself thinking of the ship of Theseus …”; “I asked Mancusi-Ungaro about Petryn …”; “Talking about Rothko with Mancusi-Ungaro, I was struck, not for the first time, by how the work of a conservator can re-sacralize the original art object”; “But when I arrived at the library I was put in mind of more recent mythology …”; “I was struck by how contact between the museum and the artist inevitably changes the art it would conserve”; “I felt that I was watching conservation shade into collaboration”). Lerner is subjective to the bone.

“The Custodians” reads more like a personal essay than it does reportage. That’s what draws me to it. What makes the piece cerebral is Lerner’s examination of the idea of art conservation from every conceivable angle – restoration, “reversibility,” tratteggio, replication, collaboration. “The Custodians” ’s formal integration of so many ideas and elements into such a shapely, absorbing composition smacks of genius.   

On Jonathan Galassi's "Updike's Violin"

Jonathan Galassi, in his absorbing “Updike’s Violin” (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2015), criticizes John Updike’s poetry for failing to be transformative. Galassi says, “He sees, he denotes, but he does not transform. His observations nearly always remain the beginning and the end of his writing in verse.” I agree that Updike’s poems, particularly the brilliant ten-poem sequence, “Endpoint,” that appeared in the March 16, 2009 New Yorker, aren’t transformative. That’s exactly why I treasure them. They are poems of untransformed reality. For example, consider "Fred Muth, Peggy Lutz," the seventh poem in the “Endpoint” sequence:

December 13, 2008

They’ve been in my fiction; both now dead,

Peggy just recently, long stricken (like

my Grandma) with Parkinson’s disease.

But what a peppy knockout Peggy was!—

cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN.

Pigtailed in kindergarten, she caught my mother’s

eye, but she was too much girl for me.

Fred—so bright, so quietly wry—his

mother’s eye fell on me, a “nicer” boy

than her son’s pet pals. Fred’s slight wild streak

was tamed by diabetes. At the end,

it took his toes and feet. Last time we met,

his walk rolled wildly, fetching my coat. With health

he might have soared. As was, he taught me smarts.

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,

scant hundred of you, for providing a

sufficiency of human types: beauty,

bully, hanger-on, natural,

twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,

all there in Shillington, its trolley cars

and little factories, cornfields and trees,

leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life. Even then were tears

and fear and struggle, but the town itself

draped in plain glory the passing days.

The town forgave me for existing; it

included me in Christmas carols, songfests

(though I sang poorly) at the Shillington,

the local movie house. My father stood,

in back, too restless to sit, but everybody

knew his name, and mine. In turn I knew

my Granddad in the overalled town crew.

I’ve written these before, these modest facts,

but their meaning has no bottom in my mind.

The fragments in their jiggled scope collide

to form more sacred windows. I had to move

to beautiful New England—its triple

deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets—

to learn how drear and deadly life can be.

That “The town forgave me for existing” gets to me every time I read it. The poem is an exceptionally beautiful, heartfelt tribute to Updike’s hometown of Shillington. The reference to “these modest facts” reminds me of Lowell’s “poor passing facts” in his great “Epilogue.” Galassi is right when he says the “Endpoint” poems “recall Robert Lowell’s work of the late 1960s and 1970s.” Reviewing Lowell’s Day by Day (1977), Helen Vendler said, “Accuracy and fidelity to perception have rarely received such a desperate pledge of faith” (Part of Nature, Part of Us). 

Accuracy and fidelity to perception – these, it seems to me, are the hallmarks of Updike’s late style, as expressed in his magnificent “Endpoint” poems – poems that do not alter, dramatize, fictionalize, or otherwise transform the world, but strive to show it exactly as he sees it.

January 4, 2016 Issue

Opening this week’s issue – the first of 2016 – I was delighted to encounter an old friend – Pauline Kael. Her capsule review of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1967) is in “Goings On About Town: Movies.” It’s a condensed version of the note that Kael included in her great 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), which is itself an abridgement of her “Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way,” in her classic 1968 collection Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. All three versions contain variations of Kael’s memorable description of the movie’s battle sequence. Here’s the original description:

He [Welles] has directed a sequence, the battle of Shrewsbury, which is unlike anything he has ever done, indeed unlike any battle ever done on the screen before. It ranks with the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa – that is, with the best ever done. How can one sequence in this movie be so good? It has no dialogue and so he isn’t handicapped: for the only time in the movie he can edit, not cover gaps and defects but as an artist. The compositions suggest Uccello and the chilling ironic music is a death knell for all men in battle. The soldiers, plastered by the mud they fall in, are already monuments. It’s the most brutally somber battle ever filmed. It does justice to Hotspur’s great, “O, Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth.”

That “The soldiers, plastered by the mud they fall in, are already monuments” is inspired. The lines “How can one sequence in this movie be so good? It has no dialogue and so he isn’t handicapped: for the only time in the movie he can edit, not cover gaps and defects but as an artist” refer to the movie’s disastrous, imperfectly synchronized sound track that Kael mentioned earlier in her essay:

Although the words on the soundtrack are intelligible, the sound doesn’t match the images. We hear the voices as if the speakers were close, but on the screen the figures may be a half mile away or turned from us at some angle that doesn’t jibe with the voice. In the middle of a sentence an actor may walk away from us while the voice goes on. Often, for a second, we can’t be sure who is supposed to be talking. And the cutting is maddening, designed as it is for camouflage – to keep us from seeing faces closely or from registering that mouths which should be open and moving are closed.

Kael’s condensation of “Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way” for 5001 Nights at the Movies contains a vivid reference to Chimes at Midnight’s flawed soundtrack (“It is damaged by technical problems resulting from lack of funds, and during the first twenty minutes viewers may want to walk out, because although Shakespeare’s words on the soundtrack are intelligible, the sound doesn’t match the images, and often we can’t be sure who is supposed to be talking”). And it retains the brilliant description of the battle of Shrewsbury, except that it deletes the lines alluding to the technical trouble (“How can one sequence in this movie be so good? It has no dialogue and so he isn’t handicapped: for the only time in the movie he can edit, not cover gaps and defects but as an artist”).

The capsule review of Chimes at Midnight that appears in this week’s New Yorker deletes all references to the movie’s sound problems. It reproduces the Shrewsbury battle passage that Kael used in 5001 Nights at the Movies, not the one in her original essay.

Perhaps Chimes at Midnight has been refurbished and the technical problems that Kael described have been fixed. If so, I can see why her references to those problems have been deleted from the capsule review that appears in the current issue. But if they haven’t been fixed, I submit that her reference to them should be retained. They are, I believe, the main reason she calls the film not a masterpiece, but a “near-masterpiece.”

Vuillard's Late Portraits: Barnes's Bravura Dissent

Édouard Vuillard, "Jeanne Lanvin" (1933)

What does “Vuillardize” mean? Peter Schjeldahl, in his "Parlor Music" (The New Yorker, March 10, 2003; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See), a review of the huge Édouard Vuillard retrospective that appeared in Washington, Montreal, Paris, and London, in 2003-4, says of Vuillard’s late portraits,

The compulsive renderings of settings, with their pointless attention to bric-a-brac, cast the sitters as an interior decorator’s stilted, finishing touches. In these commissions, he didn’t so much portray his self-satisfied patrons as Vuillardize them.

In Schjeldahl’s opinion, Vuillardization spoils the portrait, rendering the sitter as just one more aspect of the décor. Sanford Schwartz, reviewing the same show, expresses a similar view. He says,

You take in these works where the sitters, in their homes or offices, are surrounded by their lamps, telephones, pets, rugs, coffee cups, artworks on the wall, children’s toys, fountain-pen holders, stacks of mail, and seemingly scores of other items, all of which are exactly as engaging as the person at the center of it, with the same instantaneous avidity with which you pick up Architectural Digest; and you forget these pictures as immediately as you forget Architectural Digest. [‘The Genius of the Family,” The New York Review of Books, April 10, 2003]

But, interestingly, Julian Barnes, in his review of the 2003-4 Vuillard retrospective, titled “Vuillard: You Can Call Him Édouard” (included in his recent collection Keeping An Eye Open), dissents. He says, “We ought by now to be able to look at Vuillard’s later work more even-handedly.” He calls Vuillard’s Jeanne Lanvin (1933) “one of his finest late paintings – indeed one of the great twentieth-century portraits.” He says,

It contrasts the disorder of creation – samples, fabrics, loose papers and other items falling off the front right of the desk – with the absolute orderliness of money: the neat account books, the safe-like metallic drawers behind the sitter. The painting is held together by color: from bottom left to top right, the greens of the glass sculpture case, the sitter’s jacket, and up into the gray-green shadows; from bottom right to top left, the reds of the fabric samples, sitter’s lips and book spines. The two colors intersect cannily – and no doubt truly – in Mme Lanvin’s jacket: there, on the green lapel, sits the scarlet ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur.

Barnes calls Jeanne Lanvin “a triumph of relevant detail.” I find his analysis persuasive. He’s opened Vuillard’s late portraits to new discovery.

The Year In Review: 20 Memorable Lines

Here’s one more list – twenty memorable New Yorker lines of 2015:

1. It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture. – James Wood, "Look Again" (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

2. “This is about what you leave out, not what you take off. Writing is selection.” – John McPhee, "Omission" (September 14, 2015)

3. “Mayweather’s eyes get bigger when he fights: he seems intensely aware of his own vulnerability, which is precisely what makes him invulnerable.” – Kelefa Sanneh, "The Best Defense" (May 25, 2015)

4. “Dear God, the drinking.” – Anthony Lane, "Good Fights" (January 5, 2015)

5. “ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard.” – Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Shuko" (August 10, 2015)

6. “After straining for a sterner response to the works, I opted to relax and like them.” – Peter Schjeldahl, "Take Your Time" (January 5, 2015)

7. “This, this: this was the madness of the color line.” – Jill Lepore, "Joe Gould's Teeth" (July 27, 2015)

8. “Tastes differ, and Ishiguro is welcome to his Arthurian chain metal.” – James Wood, "The Uses of Oblivion" (March 23, 2015)

9. “Those who order the pear-and-kale salad, curiously wet, will get what they deserve. – Amelia Lester, "Tables For Two: Brooklyn Bavarian Biergarten" (October 12, 2015)

10. “Riefenstahl might have been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazis.” – Claudia Roth Pierpont, "Bombshells" (October 19, 2015)

11. “The Wayback Machine is humongous, and getting humongouser” – Jill Lepore, "The Cobweb" (January 26, 2015)

12. “But Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn….” – Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum" (October 19, 2015)

13. “I don’t like chocolate chips or see the point of vegan cookies.” – Michael Specter, "Freedom From Fries" (November 2, 2015)

14. “No better way to process a paradox than to have another drink.” – Emma Allen, "Bar Tab: Nitehawk Cinema and Lo-Res" (September 21, 2015)

15. “But how deep can a truth be – indeed, how true can it be – if it is not built from facts?” – Kathryn Schulz, "Pond Scum" (October 19, 2015)

16. “Through their decades of vicissitudes, he referred to their marriage as ‘cloudless’—even to his mistress.” – Judith Thurman, "Silent Partner" (November 16, 2015)

17. “Mass violence was buried in the city like strata in rock.” – Raffi Khatchadourian, "A Century of Silence" (January 5, 2015)

18. “Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out.” – Mary Norris, "Holy Writ" (February 23 & March 2, 2015)

19. “You could tattoo the entirety of Max’s dialogue onto his biceps.” – Anthony Lane, "High Gear" (May 25, 2015)

20. “Her spirit vibrates in the greenhouse air. But it can’t make you forget that, for twenty-two bucks at the gift shop, you can become the owner of a Frida oven mitt.” – Peter Schjeldahl, "Native Soil" (May 25, 2015)

Before I conclude, I’d like to give a special shout-out to the writers of “Tables For Two” and “Bar Tab.” These columns are tremendous sources of pleasure. I devour them.

And I want to salute David Denby. His distinguished run as New Yorker movie critic ended this year. I’ll miss his zingers (e.g., “Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque”). And I’ll miss his superb descriptive analyses – this one, for example, from his memorable "Influencing People" (October 4, 2010), a review of David Fincher’s The Social Network:

The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

That’s it! Time to clear the decks and make room for next year’s batch. Thank you New Yorker for another wonderful, absorbing, pleasurable, “unimpeachably interesting” (words stolen from Hannah Goldfield’s delectable "Tables For Two: Lupulo") year of reading. I don’t know how you do it, but you do. I love you.

But wait! I forgot to mention the Best Short Story: Martin Amis’s "Oktober" (December 7, 2015)

Best Poem: Meghan O’Rourke’s "Unforced Error" (October 26, 2015)

Best Cover: Mark Ulriksen’s “Streetball” (September 28, 2015)

I could go on. But I won’t. I’m going to mix myself a drink. If I had the ingredients, I’d try a Negligence (“Appropriately, first on the list is the terrific Negligence, which blends gin, basil syrup, lemon, and absinthe into what looks like a green juice cleanse, but is much better for you, depending on who you trust” – Colin Stokes, "Bar Tab: Threes Brewing," June 29, 2015), but I’m fresh out of basil syrup, damn it. My old standby, the Dark and Dirty (dark rum and Coke), will have to do. Here’s to you, New Yorker, you gorgeous creature. You take my breath away.