Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

Elizabeth Bishop (Photo: Bettman/CORBIS)

Megan Marshall, in her fascinating “Elizabeth and Alice” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, October 27, 2016) identifies “you” in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (The New Yorker, April 26, 1976) as Bishop’s partner, Alice Methfessel, who left Bishop, in 1975, after a five-year relationship. Marshall also reports that “One Art” went through seventeen drafts. She writes,

As late as draft eleven, the loss of Methfessel still registered in the poem’s concluding stanza as the one misfortune Bishop could not withstand: “My losses haven’t been too hard to master / with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.”

Marshall concludes, “But, though she later described “One Art” as ‘pure emotion,’ Bishop guarded her feelings in the final version’s last stanza, pretending bravery.”

I confess that “pretending bravery” irks me. It makes it sound as if “One Art” ’s stoicism is a put-on. I think when Bishop says, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” she means it. Helen Vendler, in her brilliant “Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III” (included in her 2010 Last Looks, Last Books), writes,

By bringing “One Art” down to the very moment of present writing, by lifting her pen after she writes “like” and then reinscribing “like” after her tenacious interpolation of self-command “(Write it!),” Bishop turns once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin. Her art, wrung from loss, paradoxically becomes her life principle.

What Bishop wrote in her eleventh draft is interesting. But what she wrote in her final draft is determinative. That draft shows her, as Vendler says, “turning once again to the one art she has claimed to master: stoicism in the face of what seems certain ruin.”  

October 24, 2016, Issue

Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant “A Song of Ice,” in this week’s issue, brims with the kind of sentence – active, specific, first-person, real – that, for me, makes journalism the most exhilarating form of writing. Consider its opening lines:

Not long ago, I attended a memorial service on top of the Greenland ice sheet for a man I did not know. The service was an intimate affair, with only four people present. I worried that I might be regarded as an interloper and thought about stepping away. But I was clipped onto a rope, and, in any case, I wanted to be there.

I want to be there, too. And thanks to Kolbert’s superb narrative art, I am there, right along side her, as she walks the slippery bank of a Greenland ice stream, sips champagne in an ice station rec room atop a vast ice sheet, attends a political meeting in Nuuk, walks through a “dusty dog encampment,” boats to the “calving front” of a glacier, and stands on the “suicide ledge” near Ilulissat observing the ice bergs in the fjord:

Towers of ice leaned against arches of ice, which pressed into palaces of ice. Some of the icebergs had smaller icebergs perched on top of them, like minarets. There were ice pyramids and what looked to me like an ice cathedral. The city of ice stretched on for miles. It was all a dazzling white except for pools of meltwater—that fantastic shade of Popsicle blue. Nothing moved, and, apart from the droning of the mosquitoes, the only sound was the patter of water running off the bergs.

Kolbert is magnetized by Greenland ice. She writes,

People attracted to the Greenland ice sheet tend to be the type to sail up fjords or to fly single-engine planes, which is to say they enjoy danger. I am not that type of person, and yet I keep finding myself drawn back to the ice—to its beauty, to its otherworldliness, to its sheer, ungodly significance.

Kolbert has explored that “sheer ungodly significance” at least twice before, in “Ice Memory” (The New Yorker, January 7, 2002), and “The Climate of Man – I” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2005). “A Song of Ice” is her masterpiece. It’s definitely one of this year’s best reporting pieces.

October 17, 2016, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is a tussle between three sparkling reviews: Leo Robson’s “Doings and Undoings”; Dan Chiasson’s “Hell of a Drug”; and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Drawing Lines.”

In “Doings and Undoings,” Robson brilliantly assesses Henry Green’s oeuvre, describing his style as “terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.” The piece contains two bravura analytical moves: (1) a comparison of Green’s Loving with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (“Green was an obsessive cinemagoer, and Loving, in its plot and setting, has strong resemblances to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), which concerns upstairs-downstairs antics at a French villa over a shooting weekend”); (2) a tracing of Green’s originality back to his youth when his family home was turned into a hospital for convalescent officers:

Green wrote that he “began to learn the half-tones of class,” and then prevaricates: “or, if not to learn because I was too young, to see enough to recognize the echoes later when I came to hear them.” And he learned something even more valuable: how to listen, to surrender, to make himself a vehicle or channel. The soldiers, he recalled, “found in me a boy who looked on them as heroes every one and who enjoyed each story of blood and cruelty they had to tell.”

My favorite sentence in “Doings and Undoings” is Robson’s description of Green’s Caught:

During the early years of the Second World War—the so-called Phoney or Bore War, then the Big Blitz—while his wife, Dig, and son, Sebastian, were living in the countryside, Green remained in London, responding to air raids, frequenting jazz clubs, falling serially in love, socializing with other firemen—and writing one of his best novels, the charged, ornate, and wrenching Caught (1943), which amounted to a virtual live feed of all that activity.

That “which amounted to a virtual live feed of all that activity” is superb!

Dan Chiasson, in his excellent “Hell of a Drug,” reviews Frances Wilson’s Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. He writes,

Wilson’s book is on a collision course with her subject. This is always the case with biographies of great autobiographers. Somehow one needs to figure out how to do more than tidy up after the subject’s mind has swept, cyclone-like, through the details of his life.

My favorite sentence in “Hell of a Drug” is “The details of his life were like carrousel horses, disappearing around the bend and reappearing, in his visions as in his writing, with fresh intensity and vividness.”

In “Drawing Lines,” Peter Schjeldahl reviews the Guggenheim Museum’s new Agnes Martin retrospective. Schjeldahl has written at least one previous piece on Martin’s work – his great “Life Work” (The New Yorker, June 7, 2004), in which he memorably describes Martin’s 2003 masterpiece The Sea: “Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white gessoed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint.” God, I love that! Can Schjeldahl top it? I wondered, as I began reading his new piece. It turns out he comes mighty close with this beauty:

The show starts with a late climax: “The Islands I-XII” (1979), a dozen paintings in acrylic that at first glance appear almost identically all-white but which deploy differently proportioned horizontal bands and pencilled lines. Admixtures of light, almost subliminal blue cool some of the bands. The design stops just short of the sides of the canvas. When you notice this, the fields of paint seem to jiggle loose, and to hover. If you look long enough—the minute or so that Martin deemed sufficient for her works—your sensation-starved optic nerve may produce fugitive impressions of other colors. (At one point, I saw green, and then I didn’t.) It helps to shade your eyes. This causes tones to darken and textures to register more strongly. Looking at Martin’s art is something of an art in itself. Motivated by continual, ineffable rewards, you become an adept.

"Admixtures of light, almost subliminal blue cool some of the bands" – how fine that is.

I enjoyed all three of these reviews immensely. I'm particularly struck by Robson’s idea that Loving is at least partially sourced in Renoir's The Rules of the Game. For this reason, his “Doings and Undoings” is this week’s Pick of the Issue.

Gone to Mont-Tremblant

Mont-Tremblant (Photo by John MacDougall)

Tomorrow I depart for Mont-Tremblant to do some cycling. I’ll be gone a week. I’m taking the October 17 New Yorker with me. (The New Yorker is an excellent travel companion.) I’ll post my review when I return. À bientôt.  

On John Updike's "Creeper"

John Updike (Photo by Michael O'Neill)

As a result of reading Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour, I find myself thinking about the meaning of John Updike’s “Creeper,” the ninth in a ten-poem sequence called “Endpoint” that originally appeared in the March 16, 2009, New Yorker. The poem figures centrally in Roiphe’s portrait of Updike’s death. She calls it “a lovely, wishful expression of an accepting stance toward dying, a new, late iteration of stoicism.” But it seems to me that “Creeper” expresses more than just acceptance of death. It appears to treat death as “good”:

With what stoic delicacy does

Virginia creeper let go:

the feeblest tug brings down

a sheaf of leaves kite-high,

as if to say, To live is good

but not to live—to be pulled down

with scarce a ripping sound,

still flourishing, still

stretching toward the sun—

is good also, all photosynthesis

abandoned, quite quits. Next spring

the hairy rootlets left unpulled

snake out a leafy afterlife

up that same smooth-barked oak.

I love the image of the Virginia creeper “letting go” as a symbol of death. It captures life’s fragility. But I balk at the idea that it is “good” to be pulled down – “all photosynthesis / abandoned, quite quits.” That is going beyond stoical acceptance. Yes, death is part of life. But it’s also an extinguishment of life. There’s nothing good about it.

John Leonard's "Blowing His Nose in the Wind"

Bob Dylan (Illustration by Andy Friedman)

As an antidote to all the overwrought tributes to Bob Dylan posted on newyorker.com (see, for example, David Remnick’s “Let’s Celebrate the Bob Dylan Nobel Win”), check out John Leonard’s acidly brilliant “Blowing His Nose in the Wind” (included in Leonard’s posthumous 2012 essay collection Reading For My Life), in which he scorns Dylan for, among other things, his rotten treatment of Joan Baez (“Bob used Joan to get famous and then did everything he could think of to ridicule and degrade her, to which she responded with a love song, ‘Diamonds and Rust,’ that would have shamed any other cad this side of Dr. Kissinger’s princely narcissism”). Leonard writes,

So now ask yourself if Dylan’s notorious indifference to the niceties of cutting a record, to the relative merits of a multitude of sessions musicians, to the desires and opinions of his fans and audience, to whether he had any business on a stage, taking their money, when he was wired out of his skull, or in a recording studio, martyrizing thugs like Joey Gallo; combined with his disdain for former colleagues, ex-friends, and previous incarnations, contempt for other artists like Harry Belafonte and Theodore Bikel who cared about causes he could no longer use, like civil rights, and surliness unto Road Rage; even his unintelligible weirdness on such public occasions as his accepting the Tom Paine award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union in November 1963 with a monologue that empathized with Lee Harvey Oswald – “But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me,” which must be what inspired Jerry Rubin, five years later, to proclaim that “Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!” – well, ask yourself if some of this might have owed as much to chemicals as it did to authenticity.

For tonic relief from The New Yorker’s hyperventilation over Mr. Tambourine Man’s Nobel win, I recommend John Leonard’s great “Blowing His Nose in the Wind.”

October 10, 2016, Issue

James Wood’s superb “Male Gaze,” in this week’s issue, seems to praise David Szalay’s All That Man Is for the very practice that he (Wood), in his classic “Coetzee’s Disgrace,” criticized J. M. Coetzee for – use of shorthand description (“Thus at the simplest level, no one is ever adequately described as simply ‘tall and wiry … a thin goatee and an ear-ring … black leather jacket.’ This is only the beginning of description”). In “Male Gaze,” he says of Szalay’s novel,

Characters are lightly, but also terminally, blocked in, as they are in movie scripts: “He is short, blonde, with a moustache—Asterix, basically.” As the Russian oligarch moves through the London streets in his luxury Maybach, we get: “Sloane Street, its familiar shops—Hermès, Ermenegildo Zegna. Cheyne Walk.” In the same story, when Lars, Aleksandr’s lawyer, takes off his sunglasses, he is peremptorily dispatched. We’d been given a brisk inventory of his apparel; now we’re informed, “The understated tan sharpens the blue of his eyes. He is in his mid-forties: he looks younger.” And that’s it for Lars. We get no more physical description—just dialogue. Lars is up and running.

Wood calls Szalay’s use of reduced language “startup mimesis” (“Szalay practices a kind of startup mimesis: in canny, broad strokes, full of intelligently managed detail, each story funds its new fictional enterprise, as if he were calling out, each time, ‘Where do you want to go? Poland? Copenhagen? Málaga? Berlin? I can do them all. Let’s go’”).

I’d like to hear more from Wood on why Szalay’s broad strokes are “canny,” whereas Coetzee’s are “sheerest conventionality.”

Similarly, there appears to be an inconsistency between Wood’s criticism of Emma Cline’s use of sentence fragments (see his “Making the Cut,” in which he says such usage “fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail”) and his seeming admiration for Szalay’s use of them (“The men in these stories, as if writing lyrics in their heads, express themselves in passionate stutters”).

Where Wood’s piece shines is in its comparison of Szalay’s book with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. At one point, Wood brilliantly observes,

Reality is very sticky in both writers: brand names, objects, humdrum details of all kinds adhere to the text.

Later in his piece, he writes,

When Knausgaard talks about a VW Beetle, he seems obsessed by its tormenting VW-ness; for Szalay, a VW Passat is just a VW Passat, the detail doing its functional, reflexive duty.

That “tormenting VW-ness” is inspired! Wood’s “Male Gaze” is the second review of All That Man Is I’ve read. The first – also excellent – was Michael Hofmann’s “Muted Ragu Tones” (London Review of Books, April 21, 2016). Hofmann says of Szalay’s writing,

There is a cheerful and ghastly sordidness to everything, and Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste. Even if it’s something as simple as a man putting up an umbrella, to go out into the rain and try to talk down his unhappy mistress, it’s unforgettable: “It bangs into place above him, and immediately fills with sound.”

A writer who excites two of the world’s best literary critics is worth checking out. I don’t read much fiction. But I’m looking forward to reading David Szalay’s All That Man Is.

October 3, 2016, Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Cuba Play” is one of 2016’s most absorbing reporting pieces. It tells the story of Obama’s Cuba project, beginning with a remarkable scene – Obama on stage at La Cerveceria, on Havana Harbor, speaking directly to the Cuban people about entrepreneurship – then cutting to Anderson’s interview with Obama (“A few weeks later, in the Oval Office, I asked Obama about the reaction”), then moving into a remarkable reconstruction of the string of events leading to the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations, including the famous handshake between Obama and Raúl Castro at Nelson Mendela’s funeral (“Castro wore an expression of flustered delight”), secret negotiations in Ottawa, the transfer of a vial of sperm of a Cuban spy, and a covert letter from Pope Francis to Obama. Anderson has discussed some of these events before in his “News Desk” posts on newyorker.com. But in “The Cuba Play,” he masterfully draws it all together, combining it with fascinating quotations from his personal interviews with Obama and other key players. If you consider the opening with Cuba one of Obama's major accomplishments, as I do, you’ll surely appreciate Anderson’s great “The Cuba Play.”

2.  I relish descriptions of scent. There are two dandies in this week’s issue: Jiayang Fan’s “Just then, the chocolate fondue arrived, halting the conversation with its exhalation of cinnamon and coconut” (“Tables For Two: Ladybird”), and Ian Frazier’s “He ordered a decaf espresso and asked the waiter to top it off with Sambuca. A smell of licorice rose” (“Don’t Tread On Me”).

3. I’m not crazy about pop music, but Hua Hsu’s “Word of Mouth,” on Bon Iver’s digitally manipulated sound, impinged my consciousness with this inspired line: “Speech synthesizers often make a song sound as though someone were running a leaky fluorescent highlighter across its lyrics.”

Minna Zallman Proctor on Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills"

Minna Zallman Proctor, in her “The Law of Uncertainty” (Bookforum, Summer 2016), quotes Janet Malcolm’s great Iphigenia in Forest Hills [“If any profession (apart from the novelist’s) is in the business of making things up, it is the profession of the trial lawyer”] and says, “The justice system will operate under the auspices of competing fabrications and decidedly will not provide the truth equation for the crime.” Proctor appears to accept Malcolm’s theory that “a trial is a contest between competing narratives” (Iphigenia in Forest Hills). This is a very literary way of looking at trials. Another way – more realistic, in my opinion – is to view the trial as a matter of proof. If the prosecution is able to prove all the elements of the alleged offense beyond a reasonable doubt, the accused will be found guilty. In other words, narrative, schmarrative.

Proctor is on firmer ground when she writes,

Throughout her investigative work, from one villainous bramble to the next, Malcolm is brilliant and irresistibly vexing. For her, observable truth lies not in the collection and skillful organization of facts but in the reliable complexity and inexplicableness of human behavior.

I agree. As Malcolm memorably says of Borukhova in Iphigenia in Forest Hills, “She couldn’t have done it and she must’ve done it.”

Postscript: A portion of Iphigenia in Forest Hills was originally published in the May 3, 2010, New Yorker (see here).