Janet Malcolm's "The Master Writer of the City"

One of my favorite essays of the past ten years is Janet Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City,” a spirited defense of Joseph Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Review of Books (April 23, 2015). At that time, I was struck by Malcolm’s audacity; she mocked journalism’s ironclad injunction don’t mess with the facts! She says,

The obvious answer to Kunkel’s question – the one that most journalists, editors, and professors of journalism would give – is yes, of course, the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” should suffer now that we know that Mitchell cheated. He has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he was 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.

But today, rereading Malcolm’s piece in her new essay collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, I find myself admiring the stylish way she shapes her argument. She doesn’t start out wildly swinging at Mitchell’s critics. She begins with a close reading of one of Mitchell’s greatest pieces, “Up in the Old Hotel.” She gives it the same concentrated attention she gives to Chekhov’s stories in her Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001). She shows the art in Mitchell’s many seemingly irrelevant digressions. She says,

As in all of Mitchell’s pieces everything is always going somewhere, though not necessarily so you’d notice. Mitchell is one of the great masters of the device of the plot twist disguised as a digression that seems pointless but that heightens the effect of unforced realism.

Malcolm’s defense of Mitchell is based on artistic license. She makes a two-step argument: (1) Mitchell is an artist; (2) therefore, he’s free to bend actuality to his artistic will. She writes,

Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. 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.

I disagree with the second stage of Malcolm’s argument. In my opinion, a journalist, no matter how artistic he or she may be, isn’t free to tamper with the facts. But the first part of her brief – the claim that Mitchell is an artist – seems to me incontrovertible. No one argues it better than she does in her superb “The Master Writer of the City.”  

March 25, 2019 Issue

Two excellent pieces in this week’s issue: Kathryn Schulz’s “The Stack” and Joshua Rothman’s “What Lies Beneath.”

Schulz’s piece is a memoir of her father’s love of books. She writes,

Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s. 

Her father sounds like my kind of guy. I, too, find “respite” in library reading rooms. Books are for me, as they were for him – “transportive and salvific.” And I share his awareness of life’s fragility. Schulz says,

Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way.

It’s a pleasure to read the profile of a book-lover – coffee stains, pistachio dust, and all. I totally identify with him. 

Joshua Rothman’s “What Lies Beneath” is a profile of the painter Peter Sacks. What I relish about it is its attentive first-hand observation of Sacks making a painting. Rothman puts us right in the room with Sacks as he sets fire to his creation:

Sacks bent down and selected another strip of linen. Using his brush, he glued it to the wooden shingle, half obscuring its red eyes. The fabric flowed vertically down the canvas. Leaning in, he used his fingers to adjust its path, creating ridges and folds so that it would be open to oxygen. Then, from a nearby worktable, he retrieved a box of kitchen matches. He struck one of them and set fire to the linen. The flames rippled upward, serpentine. He watched them climb, then, after a few seconds, used his brush to snuff them out. Some of the linen was gone. We stood looking at the materials, colored by smoke, now joined by a scar.

That passage is part of a fascinating section describing Sacks’s “ritualized form of art-making – creating, burying, burning, uncovering.” I enjoyed it immensely. 

W. S. Merwin's Essays

W. S. Merwin, who died March 15, 2019, published over two hundred works of poetry and prose in The New Yorker: see Hannah Aizenman’s “W. S. Merwin in The New Yorker” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2019). As a long-time reader of the magazine, I skimmed many of these pieces. They didn’t resonate with me. I found them toneless, colorless abstractions. 

But a few years ago I looked into a book of essays by Merwin called The Ends of the Earth (2004), and I was hooked. His essays are warm, vivid, companionable – the exact opposite of his poetry. 

Take for example his wonderful “The Tree on One Tree Hill,” a profile of Captain Cook’s young shipboard artist Sydney Parkinson. It starts in the British Museum (“While passing the sarcophagi and the glass cases, the sense of human knowledge may seem neither definite nor near at hand”), and ends in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, where Parkinson makes his famous sketch of a “huge, dark, ancient tree” – the One Tree on One Tree Hill. In between, Merwin puts us directly in the Great Cabin of Cook’s Endeavour as it sails the South Pacific:

Most of his work was done at sea in the Great Cabin, with the other “gentlemen” and, no doubt, officers of the Endeavour present at the same table, often in bad weather, with the bark pitching and rolling (“seldom was there a storm,” Banks wrote, “strong enough to break up our normal study time”); in the midst of almost continuous motion, he was portraying an illusory stillness.

My favorite piece in The Ends of the Earth is “The Wake of the Blackfish: A Memoir of George Kirstein.” Kirstein was the wealthy publisher of the magazine The Nation, and a paternal figure in Merwin’s life. In a memorable passage, Merwin describes a harrowing trip through a hurricane that he and Kirstein took on Kirstein’s thirty-eight-foot yawl, Skylark:

We hurtled forward as though falling down stairs, and struck the troughs between waves as though they were floors. When I was at the wheel there were sickening instants when I thought that the compass card had spun ninety degrees and more, and that we were out of control and about to be swamped broadside.

The essays in Merwin’s The Ends of the Earth are completely different from his cold, surreal poetry. They have the breath of life. I highly recommend them.

March 18, 2019 Issue

Rebecca Mead’s “The Perfect Paint,” in this week’s issue, is the latest in a line of recent New Yorker “paint” pieces. The others are Patricia Marx’s “New Shade” (January 14, 2019), Simon Schama’s “Blue as Can Be” (September 3, 2018), and Ian Frazier’s “Patina” (September 19, 2016). Which of these pieces is the most “painterly”? 

In “Perfect Paint,” Mead tells about the success of high-end English paint company Farrow & Ball. Of her visit to the company’s factory, she writes,

When I was visiting, a batch of Hague Blue was being stirred to completion. The enormous vat of paint shimmered like a luxurious pool in a Turkish hammam, and I almost wanted to climb in.

That last line is wonderfully sensuous. 

Patricia Marx, in her Talk story “New Shade,” accompanies color consultant Martin Kesselman on a tour of the home of one of his clients, Stacey Lighthouse. Marx’s description of the color of Lighthouse’s clothes made me laugh:

Lighthouse answered the door, dressed in satin trousers and a matching blouse in Visa Infinite Privilege Card blue, and enthusiastically showed Kesselman around.

Simon Schama’s “Blue as Can Be” is an account of his visit to the Forbes Collection, a color archive at Harvard University. He tells about two tubes of Mummy Brown, “made from the rendered gunk of the Egyptian dead, thought to be rich in the bituminous asphalt used in embalming and as a protection against fungal decay.” In a delightful line, he says, “There was cuttlefish sepia and burnt umber, but if Turner needed a loamy richness he reached for Mummy.”

Ian Frazier, in his superb “Patina,” describes Statue of Liberty green: “the ageless patina of the copper had a texture like extremely fine velour. Some of it shaded to a green-black, parts were dark blue, parts olive.” He says,

When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes.

All four pieces are excellent; all of them brim with color. But reviewing them today, I find one hue stands out: Statue of Liberty green. 

March 11, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue: 

 1. I enjoyed Helen Rosner’s “A Season for Everything,” particularly this sentence: “Nakayama chatted with one of her seafood suppliers, who had dropped by to deliver four burly kegani, or horsehair crabs, their strawberry-colored shells covered in spiky whiskers.” 

2. James Marcus’s moving “Blood Relations,” an essay on the death of his father, contains this memorable definition of “palliative care”: 

The word comes from the Latin pallium, which is a cloak. It means that the patient will be enveloped, protected, wrapped in a mantle of painkilling techniques that are often pharmaceutical but may also consist of old-fashioned human tenderness. It’s what we should want for the people we love. But it also signals that the fight is over. It is a white flag, a coming to terms with extinction. 

 3. Another excellent piece, David Remnick’s “Holding the Note,” profiles bluesman Buddy Guy. Remnick’s mention of Alberta Hunter reminded me of Whitney Balliett’s superb “Let it Be Classy” (The New Yorker, October 31, 1977; included in Balliett’s great 1979 collection American Singers), in which he describes Hunter singing her classic “Downhearted Blues”: 

Jimmy Rowles played a four-bar introduction, and Alberta Hunter began the famous lyrics: “Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand. Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand. The next man I get, he’s got to come under my command.” Her voice was steady and rich, and her vibrato betrayed none of the quaveriness that often besets older singers. Her phrasing was legato, and once in a while she used a high, almost falsetto cluster of notes which recalled Ethel Waters. There is a burnished, accreted assurance and depth and color on Alberta Hunter’s singing. At first, she stood nearly motionless. She moved one knee on the beat, and occasionally she raised her right arm and smoothed the air with her hand. 

 4. In his absorbing “Modernism for All,” a review of MoMA’s “Joan Miró: Birth of the World,” Peter Schjeldahl says of Miró’s “Painting,” “It stirs a personal memory.” Schjeldahl’s piece stirred a personal memory for me, too. When I was fifteen, my family and I lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. I recall bringing home a library book on Miró’s work. My father, who’d never shown any interest in art, leafed through it and took a fancy to a painting of a strange constellation of eyeballs, stars, and horned creatures. He liked it so much, he decided to make an imitation of it. He bought a big sheet of plywood, covered it with canvas, painted it tan, plotted all the shapes on it in pencil, glued twine on the sinuous lines and painted it black, then painted all the shapes, following Miró’s colors – red, white, blue, black, even a dab of yellow. I helped him with it. When it was finished, we hung it in the living room of our Fort Howe apartment. That was a long time ago. We moved several times after that. Our homemade Miró disappeared. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know the name of the original. Google provides the painting, but not its title:

Alexander Nemerov's Questionable Religious Interpretation of George Ault's Russell's Corners Paintings

George Ault, Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946)

Alexander Nemerov, in his To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), propounds a cockeyed double-aspect theory that the light in George Ault’s wonderful Russell’s Corners paintings is religious. He says:

(1)  “In one sense it is Christian, the sign of a private devotion, strange as this may seem about an artist who hated religion.” He refers to Sassetta’s Journey of the Magi, a reproduction of which hung in Ault’s studio. He says that the star in Sassetta’s painting 

seems an apt model for the large and eponymous streetlight in Bright Light, making the lonely crossroads a place of religious reverence and holy guidance, even for a person like Ault who had changed his middle name from Christian to Copeland, who spent his life retreating from his mother’s piety (exemplified by Studies in Christian Character, a book she had given him as a boy), and who “denounced organized religion violently.”

(2) But in another sense, Nemerov says, “the light is also that of someone who believes God is dead.” The basis for this interpretation is that Ault’s wife “chose a quotation from Frederich Nietzsche to epitomize her husband: ‘Unless there be chaos within, no dancing star is born,’ and the Russell’s Corners lights are such Nietzschean glows.”

Neither of these interpretations makes sense to me. They’re inconsistent with each other, and they’re inconsistent with Ault’s loathing of religion. I prefer a more secular interpretation. 

In my view, the subject of Ault’s great Russell’s Corners paintings is light itself. As Sanford Schwartz says in his “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” (included in his 1990 collection Artists and Writers), “He [Ault] gives us the light that’s reflected on telephone or power lines at night – light that resembles strands of a necklace.” 

Schwartz’s piece memorably concludes, “When you drive down a country road at night and see, from the lights of a distant oncoming car, telephone wires turning into thin white lines, you may say to yourself, ‘An Ault!’ ” 

March 4, 2019 Issue

The best New Yorker pizza shot is Davide Luciano’s scrumptious illustration for Amelia Lester’s “Tables For Two: Prova” (April 13, 2015):

Davide Luciano, illustration for Amelia Lester's "Tables For Two: Prova"

But William Mebane’s Rhode Island pizza photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Violet,” in this week’s issue, is a close second. Mebane captures the pie's grilled “black lines” and the “large shears for custom cutting” that Goldfield describes in her delectable piece.

William Mebane, illustration for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: Violet"