At the Archive: Robert Andrew Parker's "Erich von Stroheim"

Robert Andrew Parker, "Erich von Stroheim" (1999)

This is the first post in a new series called “At the Archive,” in which I visit The New Yorker’s vast online archive in search of intriguing articles and images. If something catches my eye, I’ll dust it off, hold it up to the light, and say why it appeals to me. Today’s find is Robert Andrew Parker’s portrait of Erich von Stroheim (“Goings On About Town,” July 5, 1999). Parker is one of my favorite New Yorker illustrators. His work regularly appeared in the magazine back in the late nineties and early aughts. I relish this von Stroheim picture for its luminosity and saturated color. I’m not sure what movie it’s based on. From the stars on the collar, I’m guessing it’s Blind Husbands (1918) – von Stroheim’s first film as writer, director, and star.  

January 23, 2017, Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is John Seabrook’s “My Father’s Cellar,” a memoir of his “drinking career,” starting with his youthful exposure to his father’s fabulous wine collection and ending just recently with therapy aimed at “untangling alcohol from my life.” What’s really being untangled, it seems to me, is Seabrook’s relationship with his snobbish aristocratic father. It’s an ongoing Seabrook project. Nineteen years ago, Seabrook wrote a piece called “My Father’s Closet” (The New Yorker, March 16, 1998) in which he says, “My Father used his clothes to pass along culture to me. I, in turn, used clothes to resist his efforts.” Now, in “My Father’s Cellar,” Seabrook asks, “Just what was my father up to, in introducing me to alcohol?” His answer: “He was passing along something he loved, and, moreover, something we could do together for the rest of his life (and did).” But Seabrook isn’t content with this answer. He asks another question: “Perhaps he was trying to educate a thirteen-year-old in the gentlemanly art of drinking?” In answer to this, he writes,

Possibly, but I doubt it ever occurred to him that his namesake, John, Jr., might have a weakness for alcohol. Alcohol was not about weakness in our family. It was about strength. I understood early on that what was important was not how much you drank but how well you held it.

Seabrook then writes,

My father didn’t anticipate that when it came to alcohol I was not going to be like him. Our house sat atop a Fort Knox of alcohol, and, at least as far as I could tell, he never had one glass more than he should. But for me alcohol offered an escape from control, his and everyone else’s. A glass of wine gave me a kind of confidence I didn’t otherwise feel—the confidence to be me.

The implication is that Seabrook feels he disappointed his father. He may be right. All I know is that, given his elite upbringing, Seabrook could’ve become another William F. Buckley. Instead, miraculously, he emerged a literary journalist in the John McPhee tradition, writing such classic New Yorker reporting pieces as “The Flash of Genius,” “The Fruit Detective,” and “American Scrap.” Who’s to say? If he’d submissively followed his old man’s teachings on how to drink (and dress), he might not be the brilliant writer he is today.

“My Father’s Cellar” brims with memorable passages. My favorite is Seabrook’s description of his father descending the stairs to the wine cellar:

“You can help me pick the wine for tonight,” he said one Saturday afternoon before a dinner party, when I was seven or eight. Thrilled, I followed him down the steep, curving steps that led to the basement. He was dressed in his casual weekend clothes: wide-wale corduroys the color of straw, a pale-yellow dress shirt, beautiful brown ankle boots with pink socks poking out of the tops. He moved carefully on the stairs, gripping the right-hand railing and lowering his foot slowly onto the next step, then stamping down with his heel to make sure it gripped before putting his weight on it. Years before, while riding alone one Sunday morning, he’d been thrown from his horse and landed on an irrigation pipe, cracking his pelvis. The horse had run back to the farm, and the men had gone out looking for my father, not finding him until several hours later, lying in a ditch. That was one of the few stories he told in which he was ever at a disadvantage. It wasn’t heard often.

Comparing “My Father’s Cellar” with “My Father’s Closet,” I find the earlier piece slightly preferable for one specific reason – the scene in the tailor shop:

Later he took me to A-Man Hing Cheong, his Hong Kong tailor, to be “measured up” for a few “country” suits (a glen plaid and a window pane check) and, presumably, many others in the future. (“Big men can wear bolder plaids and more details without appearing to be fairies,” Dad once advised me.)

“Which side?” the tailor asked; he spoke a bit of English. He was kneeling in front of me, pointing at my crotch and waggling his forefinger back and forth.

“He wants to know which side you wear your pecker on,” my father said.

“Yeh yeh, ha ha ha, yar peck-ah!”

Both pieces are terrific – chronicles of Seabrook's resistance to being molded in the image of his highbrow, bespoke-suited, wine-connoisseur father. As he says in “My Father’s Closet,” “My boyhood’s closet was a riot of misplaced anger exhibited towards innocent garments. Inside the little lord’s scrubbed and Etonian exterior there seemed to be a dirt farmer struggling to get out.”

William Christenberry - Visual Poet

William Christenberry, "Tool Shed - near Stewart, Alabama" (1977)

I want to pay tribute to one of my favorite photographers, William Christenberry, who died November 28, 2016. He was, for me, one of the best photographers of old shacks, sheds, barns, and other ephemeral places. He worked mostly in the documentary tradition of Walker Evans. Richard B. Woodward, in his “Country Roads” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 3, 2006), says that Christenberry “moved in and out of the Evans penumbra all his life.” A brief “Goings On About Town” note in the January 9^th New Yorker calls him “a visual poet of the American south.” The note, a capsule review of a Christenberry exhibition at Pace/MacGill gallery, goes on to say,

The attention that Christenberry paid to his subjects, which he often photographed years apart, bordered on the devotional. Here, his deceptively modest images are poignant monuments to the passage—and the ravages—of time.

That last line neatly expresses one reason I’m drawn to Christenberry’s photos. Another reason is his feeling for a range of rich, corroded, distressed textures – thick rust, weather-beaten boards, eroded brick. Christenberry’s pictures show the texture of time.

Eric Rohmer's Superb "Summer"

Reading Richard Brody’s recent “Goings On About Town” note on Eric Rohmer’s 1986 film Summer (The New Yorker, January 9, 2017), I was reminded of another terrific commentary on that great film – Terrence Rafferty’s “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” (The New Yorker, July 25, 1988; included in his 1993 collection The Thing Happens). The piece is a review of Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends, but it also contains an excellent consideration of Summer. Rafferty writes,

In this amazing film, which followed the two weakest and most contrived of the Comedies and Proverbs, Pauline at the Beach and Full Moon in Paris, Rohmer relaxed his customary iron control over the narrative: the movie was made in an on-the-run documentary style, in 16mm and with direct sound, and the dialogue, usually chiseled and epigrammatic in his movies, was largely improvised by the actors.... In Summer he’s exploring, a little nervously, hoping that something will emerge from the mess of daily improvisation, wondering if anything will happen as he follows his restless heroine from one French vacation to another.

The heroine’s name is Delphine, described by Rafferty as a “slim, dark, delicate-featured depressive.” He continues,

Since breaking up with her boyfriend, she has become cautious, conservative, almost pathologically wary. Her response to everything is refusal: she’s a vegetarian, she flees from men who approach her, she won’t even admit, after to years, that her love affair is over. Rohmer, whose art is based on refusal – he quietly declines to indulge in the ordinary, vulgar pleasures that movies provide so easily – understands her very well. The movie has the tentative, irresolute rhythm of its heroine’s search for a place where she can feel at ease on her long French summer holiday. This woman is comically, absurdly, infuriatingly incapable of enjoying herself: she goes somewhere, gets disgusted with it, returns to Paris, takes off for some place new, and is unhappy everywhere. Her idea of vacation reading is The Idiot. She drives us crazy, but she’s in real pain, the mundane, annoying, debilitating kind that wont’s go away yet isn’t spectacular enough to win much sympathy – like a migraine. When relief comes, it’s sudden, arbitrary, a stroke of luck or grace. While Delphine is waiting for a train in Biarritz to take her back to Paris after another vacation fiasco, she decides, impulsively, to tag along with a pleasant young man on his way to the coastal town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. She surprises herself, and us, with her boldness: after all her self-imposed restrictions, this act has the force of a reckless break with her old self, or perhaps a return to a freer, more spontaneous relationship to experience. In Saint-Jean-de-Luz, she’s rewarded: watching the sun go down, she sees the green ray, which according to Verne, enables its viewer to see “clearly into his own heart and the hearts of others.” She cries “Yes!” and clutches her gentle companion. This is one of the purest moments of happiness in recent movies: we feel that Rohmer, along with his heroine, has finally found a way to release himself, to be at ease with the accidents, the scary contingencies, of the natural world.

One of the purest moments of happiness in recent movies. Twenty-nine years later, Rafferty’s assessment still holds.  

January 16, 2017, Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Mixed Up,” a review of Philippe Desan’s Montaigne: A Life, in this week’s issue, overgeneralizes when he says that an essay “is always addressed to an intimate unknown” (Gopnik’s emphasis). Some of the best essays – Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism,” Pauline Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” to name three of my favorites – aren’t so much addressed, as launched. They’re not letters; they’re grenades aimed at specific targets. To be fair, Gopnik tempers his statement a few lines later when he writes, “The illusion of confiding in the reader alone is what essayists play on. You’re my best friend, Montaigne, like every subsequent essayist of his type, implies to his readers.” Note that “of his type.” Gopnik is talking about essayists like Montaigne, essayists who write digressive, letter-like essays with “the tone of a man talking to himself and being startled by what his self says back,” pieces “without the mucilage of extended argument.”   

I admire Montaigne for his bone-deep subjectivity. His “I” is the measure of all things. “We must espouse nothing but ourselves,” he says, in his great “Of Solitude.” Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Montaigne” (The Common Reader – 1), writes,

We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach; he kept on saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to write himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged road, more than it seems.”

John McPhee's "Firewood"

Early last summer, Lorna and I bought four cords of dry, blocked, white birch from a local farmer to burn in our woodstove. We split it and stacked it ourselves, and covered it with a tarp. Carrying the wood to the stove, I pass a set of pine bookshelves that contain, among other items, my collection of John McPhee, including his great Pieces of the Frame (1975). In that book, there’s a New Yorker piece called “Firewood” (March 25, 1974) packed with interesting facts about trees and wood burning. For example, here’s a description of what actually happens when wood burns:

When a log is thrown on the fire, the molecules on the surface become agitated and begin to move vigorously. Some vibrate. Some rotate. Some travel swiftly from one place to another. The cellulose molecule is long, complicated, convoluted – thousands of atoms like many balls on a few long strings. The strings have a breaking point. The molecule, tumbling, whipping, vibrating, breaks apart. Hydrogen atoms, stripping away, snap onto oxygen atoms that are passing by in the uprushing stream of air, forming even more water, which goes up the chimney as vapor. Incandescent carbon particles, by the tens of millions, leap free of the log and wave like banners, as flame.

The piece also tells about three New Yorkers who visit Carmel, N.Y., to cut wood (“The saw started on the nineteenth pull. Its din shot up the air”), and it reports on an old New York City wood lot owned and operated by a firm named Clark & Wilkins (“Even the corporate records smell of smoke”).

My favorite passage in “Firewood” is the ending, a sort of wood fire prose poem:

A wood fire, in its core, in its glowing coals, could never be hot enough to be blue, but, at its hottest, it can be white, and orange-white. Subsiding, it becomes orange and orange-red and red and deeper red and dark red, until its light goes off the visible spectrum. The heat can be banked in ash, though, for eight, ten hours – long enough to last through the night and, in the morning, begin another fire.

January 9, 2017, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ian Frazier’s “High-Rise Greens,” an absorbing account of how a mini-farm installed in the corner of school cafeteria led to the creation of a huge “vertical farm” inside a former steel-supply warehouse in Newark, New Jersey. Frazier visits the vertical farm and describes its technology:

Countless algorithm-driven computer commands combine to induce the greens to grow, night and day, so that a crop can go from seed to shoot to harvest in eighteen days. Every known influence on the plant’s wellbeing is measured, adjusted, remeasured. Tens of thousands of sensing devices monitor what’s going on. The ambient air is Newark’s, but filtered, ventilated, heated, and cooled. Like all air today, it has an average CO₂ content of about four hundred parts per million (we exceeded the three-fifty-p.p.m. threshold a while ago), but an even higher content is better for the plants, so tanks of CO₂ enrich the concentration inside the building to a thousand p.p.m.

He describes the lighting:

The L.E.D. grow lights are in plastic tubing above each level of the grow tower. Their radiance has been stripped of the heat-producing part of the spectrum, the most expensive part of it from an energy point of view. The plants don’t need it, preferring cooler reds and blues. In row after row, the L.E.D.s shining these colors call to mind strings of Christmas lights. At different growth stages, the plants require light in different intensities, and algorithms controlling the L.E.D. arrays adjust for that.

He also visits the mini-farm in the cafeteria at Newark’s Philip’s Academy. He calls the mini-farm an objet d’art. I relished his description of it, particularly this line: “The pumps hum, the water gurgles, and the whole thing makes the sound of a courtyard fountain.”

Frazier is a great nose writer. Almost every one of his pieces contains a description of some sort of smell. In “High-Rise Greens,” he mentions a corner of the vertical farm, “where the fresh, florist-shop aroma of chlorophyll is strong.”

Frazier takes time to note details that other writers usually disregard. For example, in “High-Rise Greens,” he observes that AeroFarms technicians “wear white sanitary mobcaps on their heads.” Then, in the next line, he adds, “Some of these workers are young guys who also have mobcaps on their beards.”

My favorite scene in  “High-Rise Greens” takes place at a grocery store. Frazier writes,

At the Bloomfield ShopRite, I watched a woman pick up a clamshell of AeroFarms arugula, look at it, and put it back. Then she picked up a clamshell of Fresh Attitude arugula and dropped it in her cart. I asked her if she knew that AeroFarms was grown in Newark. She said, “I thought it was only distributed from Newark.” I told her the arugula was indeed Newark-grown and explained about the vertical farm. She put the out-of-state arugula back, picked up the Newark arugula, and thanked me for telling her. I think AeroFarms does not play up Newark enough on the packaging. They should call their product Newark Greens.

That “At the Bloomfield ShopRite, I watched a woman pick up a clamshell of AeroFarms arugula, look at it, and put it back” is delightful, like a line from a James Schuyler poem, logging the slight but profound epiphanies of everyday life.

“High-Rise Greens” brims with Frazier’s sharp-eyed observations. I enjoyed it immensely.

James Merrill: Sublime Poet of the Everyday

James Merrill (Photo by Rollie McKenna)

Edward Mendelson, in his “The Genius and Generosity of Jimmy Merrill” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016), says of Merrill, “Poetic artifice was his natural voice.” I’m not sure he’s right. He makes Merrill sound as if he’s anti-realist. What I cherish in Merrill’s poems is his deep engagement with quotidian reality. For example, the description of the New Age shop where he bought his world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker, in “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1992):

I found it in one of those vaguely imbecile 


Emporia catering to the collective unconscious 


Of our time and place. This one featured crystals, 


Cassettes of whalesong and rain-forest whistles, 


Barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins, 


Recycled notebooks, mechanized lucite coffins 

For sapphire waves that crest, break, and recede, 

As they presumably do in nature still.

Dan Chiasson, in his brilliant “Out of this World” (The New Yorker, April 13, 2015), a review of Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art, says of Merrill:

His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an “Atari dragonfly” on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker.

This, for me, is a more accurate description of Merrill’s work than Mendelson’s “poetic artifice.”  

January 2, 2017, Issue

For me, the most arresting piece in this week’s issue is Dexter Filkins’s “Before the Flood,” in which he reports firsthand on what it’s like to be inside the “gallery,” a tunnel that runs through the base of the Mosul Dam, four hundred feet below the top. Filkins writes,

The interior is cool and wet and dark. It feels like a mine shaft, deep under the earth. You can sense the water from the reservoir pressing against the walls.

Filkins puts us squarely there, in a tunnel under a massive dam that could collapse at any moment. He describes tunnel workers pumping cement into the earth in an effort to fill the cavities under the dam’s foundation:

At Jabouri’s command, the engineers began pushing a long, narrow pipe, tipped with a drill bit, into the earth. The void they were hunting for was deep below—perhaps three hundred feet down from where we were standing. After several minutes of drilling, a few feet at a time, the bit pushed into the void, letting loose a geyser that sprayed the gallery walls and doused the crew. The men, wrestling the pipe, connected it to the pump. Jabouri flicked a switch, and, with the high-pitched whine of a motorcycle engine, the machine reversed the pressure and the grout began to flow, displacing the water in the void. “It’s been like this for thirty years,” Jabouri said with a shrug. “Every day, nonstop.”

Reading this, I was reminded of another Filkins piece, the superb “After Syria” (The New Yorker, February 25, 2013), in which he visits a “vast Hezbollah bunker”:

Under a foot of dirt and rubble is a trap door, and a ladder leading down to the main tunnel. Inside, the only sign of life was a colony of black bats, dangling silently from the ceiling. Startled by my entry, they dropped down, then glided up the shaft toward the light.

Filkins is a true adventurer. Recall last year’s great “The End of Ice” (The New Yorker, April 4, 2016), in which he crosses a Himalayan river in a sketchy gondola lift:

Near the valley floor, we veered onto a rocky trail that tracked an icy river called the Chandra. Our van halted and a group of men appeared: Nepali porters, who led us to an outcropping on the river’s edge. Chhota Shigri—six miles long and shaped like a branching piece of ginger—is considered one of the Himalayas’ most accessible glaciers, but our way across was a rickety gondola, an open cage reminiscent of a shopping cart, which runs on a cable over the Chandra. With one of the porters working a pulley, we climbed in and rode across, one by one, while fifty feet below the river rushed through gigantic boulders.

In clear, evocative prose, Filkins takes me to cool, existential places. I enjoy his work immensely.