Ian Frazier's "On the Rez"

In Ian Frazier’s great On the Rez (2000), there’s a chapter on Indian bars. And in that chapter, there’s a sentence: “I walked around Buffalo Gap’s red dirt and gravel streets one summer afternoon awhile ago.” And that sentences leads to this description: 

The grain elevators by the railroad tracks were still active, with sparrows eating spills of grain on the ground nearby. Against the side of a building behind the elevator an assortment of galvanized-metal tanks of various sizes leaned on their sides, the ten-foot ones inside the twenty-foot ones inside the thirty-footers, like a set of nesting cups.

And that right there is why I love this book so much. Nosing around the little town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, Frazier is like an inspired street photographer – Eugène Atget, say, or Garry Winogrand – only instead of a camera, he uses a notebook. Anthony Lane said of Atget, “He stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice” (“A Balzac of the Camera,” The New Yorker, April 15, 1994). The same applies to Frazier. He’s a connoisseur of the overlooked and disregarded. He visits Buffalo Gap to check out a bar called the Stockman, where a twenty-two-year-old Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull was fatally stabbed in 1973. But Frazier is always looking for things to notice. The grain elevators catch his eye. Poking around them, he spies the galvanized-metal tanks, noting the way they’re put inside each other resembles a “set of nesting cups.” It’s the sort of incidental detail I relish.

Here’s another example from the same book. This time, Frazier is on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, visiting his friend Le War Lance. Frazier writes: 

On Sunday morning, I got up in my motel room at 4:30 and drove to Le’s to go hunting. I took the back road from Chadron and saw one other car in thirty-eight miles. I was aware of the dusty smell of the car heater, the staticky uselessness of the radio, and the veering of the headlights back and forth across the darkness as the car swerved through the windings of the road. When I pulled into Le’s driveway, I turned off the engine and the lights and stood for a while in the darkness beside the car and looked at the stars. One problem the Pine Ridge Reservation does not have is light pollution. The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot.

That image of Frazier standing in the darkness beside his car, observing the stars, is marvelously fine. The ending – “The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot” – is like an epiphany.

One more example of Frazier’s superb noticing, this from On the Rez’s chapter 15, in which Frazier again visits Le War Lance on Pine Ridge Reservation:

At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it, but it was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains.

How I love that passage! The bit about Le’s oily thumbprints on the sandwich makes me smile every time I read it. On the Rez abounds with such passages. Like James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it’s an “effort in human actuality” (Agee’s words). It’s also a brilliant evocation of the Pine Ridge Reservation. I treasure it.

Gilbert Rogin's "The Sans Souci Launderama"

Gilbert Rogin (Sports Illustrated)

Gilbert Rogin, who died November 4, 2017, age 87, wrote at least thirty-three short stories for The New Yorker. His New York Times obituary describes his work as “droll.” Yes, it is, but it’s more than that. It flashes with slight but profound epiphanies of everyday life. Consider, for example, his description of a refrigerator’s interior:

Listening to the Milkman’s Matinee on Barney’s headset radio, Albert makes his way to the kitchen to get a tangerine. Opening the refrigerator he is dazzled by the burst of light, finding it comparable to the effulgence which in the Rembrandt print reveals the stirring Lazarus, floods Christ’s robes. In that case, the light presumably emanates from the Lord instead of coming from behind the No-Cal cream soda, but the principle is the same. The Renaissance provides a wealth of examples of the Refrigerator Effect – a mysterious source of light, located below eye level in the middle ground. ["Night Thoughts," The New Yorker, September 2, 1974; Chapter 5 of Rogin’s Preparations for the Ascent, 1980]

That “In that case, the light presumably emanates from the Lord instead of coming from behind the No-Cal cream soda, but the principle is the same” makes me smile every time I read it.

My favorite Rogin story is “The Sans Souci Launderama” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1973; Chapter 3, Preparations for the Ascent, 1980), which relates several incidents from the protagonist’s past, including his adventures in a Miami laundromat, where he goes to pick up women – divorcées and widows:

But who can say what will undo one? For instance, here is the same exceptional fellow sitting by himself late at night in the San Souci Launderama, in a Miami shopping center, shedding tears at sea level. Except for the Sans Souci, in which fluorescent tubes distribute their forbidding light on the ranks of washers and dryers, the notices advertising babysitters, lost cats, and used potter’s wheels, the shopping center is dark.

That bit about “the notices advertising babysitters, lost cats, and used potter’s wheels” is superb. “The Sans Souci Launderama” is one of The New Yorker’s most underrated short stories. 

Peter Schjeldahl's New Collection "Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light"

I see Peter Schjeldahl has a new book out titled Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018. Charles Finch reviews it in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Finch says Schjeldahl “writes with remarkable tensile beauty and closeness of observation.” I agree. Schjeldahl is one of my favorite New Yorker writers. I look forward to reading his new collection. 

May 20, 2019 Issue

Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Lhasa Fresh Food,” in this week’s issue, is deliciously descriptive: 

But my favorite dish might be the karsod, another soup. With a putty-pale sheet of lightly oiled dough stretched over the top of the bowl, it resembles an uncooked potpie, a broadcast of blandness. To pierce the surface and access the piping hot broth inside is to be reminded that mild does not necessarily equate to boring. In a version with lamb, the simple, slightly gummy pastry and the clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato, provide an optimal canvas for the gently gamy flavor of the simmered meat—as humble yet surprising as the restaurant itself. 

Mmm, love that “clear, fragrant liquid, dotted sparingly with scallion, cilantro, and translucent coins of potato.” 

On Chemo: Anne Boyer and Colm Tóibín

Bianca Bagnarelli's illustration for Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

I’ve just finished reading Colm Tóibín’s superb “ ‘It’s curable,’ he said” (London Review of Books, April 18, 2019), an account of his experience of chemotherapy. It’s the second “chemo” piece I’ve read recently. The other is Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019). It’s interesting to compare them.  

Boyer’s piece is linguistically richer. For example, here’s her opening paragraph:

Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined architecture of sadness: gargoyles made of night sweat, moldings made of longest minutes, support beams made of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on.

You’ll not find arresting, original phrases like “gargoyles made of night sweat” in Tóibín’s piece. His is less a meditation and more a plain blow-by-blow description of what happened to him. It reads more like a journal. Here, for example, is his description of how he felt during and after his third chemotherapy session:

Slowly, as the chemo went on, things got worse. There were a few hours, especially in the early evening, that were almost OK, but the rest of the time was grim. There was no pain again, just increasing weakness, continued lack of appetite and growing depression. Nonetheless, the hospital was almost fine, filled with distractions and things that amused me. I liked everybody there and that helped. It was the time at home that was hard. One morning, a few days after I had finished the third week of chemo, I knew that I couldn’t go on. I found it difficult to stand and could no longer leave the house. I hadn’t eaten anything for three days. I was determined, however, to follow the agreed schedule, which included a blood test the following day. If there were any real problem the blood test would show what it was. But I found myself sitting in the middle of a room in real distress. It wasn’t just the lack of energy, or the inability to think, or the sense of some vast shadow wandering in my head: it was much more active and present than that. I tried my five-minute trick. I imagined that this would last only for five minutes. All I had to do was concentrate on the next five minutes, keeping at bay the certain knowledge that there would be many such five minutes and that would include today, all day.

Chemo devastated Tóibín. It wasn’t much kinder to Boyer. While she’s recovering from one of her treatments, she counts up her wounds:

The pains in my body were not precise instructions for the future or reliable accounts of the past. The entire upper half hurt: neck arms glands abdomen back eyeballs throat face shoulder head. There was one spot, on the side of what would be my new left breast, that hurt like an emergency. There was another spot, on the side of what would be my new right breast, that hurt like a minor emergency.

But as bad as it gets for Tóibín (at one point, after finishing his fourth and final treatment, he describes his condition as “like mixing a major hangover with a major flu”), he never mentions death. In contrast, Boyer’s piece is death-haunted. She writes,

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most.

I’m not sure Tóibín ever viewed his cancer as “a problem for art.” Unlike Boyer, who says having cancer opened her to “wild deathly thinking,” Tóibín repeatedly talks about his “inability to think” (“Everything that normally kept the day going was reduced to almost zero. I couldn’t think”; “I had such great resistance to thought that I didn’t even worry”). Nevertheless, both writers are artists to the tips of their fingernails (due to the chemo, Boyer’s nails actually lift and fall off). Both have produced transfixing records of their encounter with “the red devil.”

Where Have All the Great "New Yorker" Illustrators Gone?

Riccardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

It pains me to say this, but New Yorker illustration isn’t as consistently interesting as it used to be. I miss the brilliant work of Luis Grañena, Robert Risko, André Carrilho, Edward Sorel, Ralph Steadman, Jorge Arevalo, Riccardo Vecchio, Marcellus Hall, David Hughes, Gerald Scarfe, Laurie Rosenwald, Edwin Fotheringham, Conor Langton, Marc Aspinall, Kirsten Ulve, among others. 

Remember this great Ralph Steadman?

It’s from James Wood’s “A Fine Rage” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2009), a critical essay on George Orwell.

Remember Edward Sorel’s wonderful flying, letter-shedding, double portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop for Dan Chiasson’s “Works on Paper” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2008)?

Here’s a beauty by Luis Grañena, from Anthony Lane’s “Command Performances” (The New Yorker, November 21, 2010), a review of Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech.

Remember the superb David Hughes portrait of Les Murray in Dan Chiasson’s “Fire Down Below” (The New Yorker, June 4, 2007)?

And who could forget the marvelous André Carrilho portrait of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé that appeared in “Goings On About Town,” June 27, 2011)?

And how about Conor Langton’s eye-catching, fractured-faced, multi-hued seance for David Denby’s “Under the Spell” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2014), a review of Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight)?

I could go on and on – so many inspired images to pick from. But in the last few years the overall quality has slipped. There are still pearls to be found [e.g., Riccardo Vecchio’s “Bill Knott” (2017); Andrea Ventura’s “Jenny Erpenbeck” (2017); this year’s Bendik Kaltenborn portrait of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen], but not as abundantly as before. 

May 13, 2019 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his “Exposed,” in this week’s issue, refers to “photography’s artificiality” (“Winogrand was as fully and dramatically cognizant of photography’s artificiality as, say, Cindy Sherman, but he assumed a right to be judged strictly on the quality of his work”). The aspect of photography that I admire most is its factuality. Does the camera lie? Yes, but only when the photographer controlling the camera wants it to. Such a photographer is Jeff Wall, who stages many of his pictures. I’m allergic to his work. Garry Winogrand, on the other hand, is among photography’s most factual, least artificial artists. Even the skewed look of his images is born not of willed distortion, but of avidity to capture ever more within his picture frame. Schjeldahl writes:

You see the comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing. If the camera tilts, it’s not for arty effect but to squeeze in the relevant details of, say, a group of women bustling forward between a beggar in a wheelchair and a small group of people standing or sitting at a curb—three rhythms in flashing counterpoint.

That “comprehensive capture of scenes on the wing” beautifully describes Winogrand’s art. 

May 6, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rivka Galchen’s absorbing “The Eighth Continent,” a report on the race to develop the moon. Galchen talks with a number of fascinating people, including Jack Burns, director of the Network for Exploration and Space Science, at the University of Colorado Boulder; George Sowers, professor of space resources at the Colorado School of Mines; Alain Berinstain, vice-president of global development at the lunar-exploration company Moon Express; and Zou Xiaoduan, who works for the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson. 

She visits the Sommers-Bausch Observatory, in Boulder; Masten Space Systems at the Mojave Air and Space Port, in California; the Center for Space Resources’ laboratory, in Golden, Colorado; and the exploration-technology division of Honeybee Robotics, in Pasadena. 

My favourite passage in “The Eighth Continent” is Galchen’s description of a Masten rocket taking off:

One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional.

That “it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely.

April 29, 2019 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker (“The Travel Issue”) that deserves not a review but a party. It’s layered and loaded with good things, beginning with Lauren Collins’s “Kitchen Companion,” a report on Georgia’s food renaissance. Collins dines at Andria Kurasbediani’s Barbarestan in Tbilisi:

The plates kept coming. There was dambal khacho, a bouncy Georgian fondue; a duck patty with topographical grooves, served with plum sauce; many breads and wines. Plenitude is important in Georgia, where feasting and toasting are cherished, heavily choreographed rites. The meal felt like a food version of one of those movie montages where spinning newspapers keep stacking up on top of one another.

She visits Kasheria, a tripe-soup dispensary. She has coffee with writer Diana Anthimiadou. She visits the Raphael Eristavi House Museum in Kistauri. And she makes quince dolmas with food blogger Tamara Mirianashvili (“The dish was medicinal but luscious, a hot toddy you could eat with a fork”).

Collins’s details are superb: “Andria was wearing a three-piece suit, accented by a scarlet pin that glowed like a pomegranate seed”; “Andria handled the wooden cutting board as though it were a precious violin.” I enjoyed “Kitchen Companion” immensely.

Next is James Lasdun’s “Glow,” a delightful account of his quest to see the aurora borealis. Lasdun writes about staying at an “igloo hotel” near the town of Ivalo, Finland:

A glass-panelled dome loomed over the north-facing end of a single room, with luxe bedding and a complimentary drinks tray arranged below, like the furnishings of a tastefully debauched starship. Slipping under a reindeer-fur coverlet, I found myself facing the first conundrum of northern-lights tourism, which is that the more comfortable your viewing situation the more likely you are to be insensate when the lights appear. I was eager to see them, naturally, but not obsessed. I had a whole week, and, from what I’d read, at the time of my visit there were good odds for a display on most nights. With this comforting thought, I fell asleep.

He joins an ice-fishing safari:

The fishing rods seemed absurdly short and bendy, like something that you might use to win a prize at an amusement park. We squatted at our holes, dipping and raising as instructed. The flat landscape around us was more built up than I’d expected this far north, but pleasant enough under the fresh snow, with the wide sky showing different pinks and yellows every time you looked at it. Now and then, dogsleds carrying tourists hurtled by; each time, we laboriously took off our mittens and glove liners and rummaged for our phones, in order to take photographs.

He attends an Aurora Camp:

The sky showed no sign of clearing, and the Kp-index reading had plummeted. Meanwhile, the temperature had fallen to minus ten degrees Fahrenheit, which turned every gust of wind into a scouring assault. People were pulling up balaclavas and stamping their feet. No surprises occurred overhead, but an earthly one did: a woman suddenly slipped her arm through mine and began murmuring in my ear in Italian. I looked at her, and she gave a shriek: she’d mistaken me, in my snowsuit, for her husband. Peals of unnerving laughter broke from her as we sledded back across the lake. 

On his way to Tromsø, Norway, his taxi strikes a reindeer:

The road was covered with packed snow and the driver was going fast. On a long, straight, desolate stretch, we came over a rise and saw five reindeer galloping straight toward us. The driver cursed in English: “Shit.” I braced myself, felt a slam, and saw one of the animals thrown into the air. It had antlers, and, as the previous night’s guide had informed us, a deer that still had them in late winter was female, and probably pregnant. We backed up and found it lying, dead, in the snow. The taxi was dented but drivable, and after reporting the accident we continued on our way, both of us badly shaken.

Lasdun stays at a “wilderness camp” near the village of Kilpisjärvi, in western Finland:

We rounded a promontory with scrubby birches doubled over by snow, and came to a dark hut, raised up on sled runners, on the ice. An outhouse stood off to the side. It was cozy inside the hut, with a banged-together quality that I liked, though spending the night there still seemed disconcerting. 

Photo by Joakim Eskildsen (from James Lasdun's "Glow")

And he participates in an Aurora Chase:

A second bus, twice the size of ours, pulled into the parking area. I had become highly suspicious of all the apps and meteorological charts that were being consulted, but this time my skepticism was misplaced. A crack appeared in the clouds directly above us. It widened, showing a sprinkling of stars and then the entire Big Dipper. There was a stirring among the photographers: their cameras had started detecting things. After a moment, an oblique greenish bar like the one I’d seen the night before became visible. It grew brighter and denser, then contracted into an oval of emerald light. People chattered excitedly. I was about to warn them not to get too carried away when a streak of brilliant green shot out of the oval, at high speed, and zoomed over our tipped-back heads, corkscrewing across the sky. I almost toppled over while following its trajectory. The green light formed several tentacles, which twisted and writhed together and looped in circles. Astonishment was proclaimed in a half-dozen languages. The circles dropped needles of piercing brightness that travelled, in tandem, around the sky, as if tracing the undulations of a celestial shower curtain.

To write a successful travel piece, one must have an observant eye and a gift for description. Lasdun has both. His “Glow” is perfect.

But wait! We’re not done. There’s another brilliant piece in this week’s issue – Nick Paumgarten’s “The Descent of Man,” an account of his attendance at the 2019 Hahnenkamm, in Kitzbühel, Austria. Paumgarten puts us squarely there, at the base of the Hahnenkamm gondola (“I glanced up and saw for the first time, shadow-blue and telephoto close, the final section of the Streif, where the racers, after soaring off a jump, come hauling across a steep, bumpy, fallaway traverse—legs burning, skis thrashing—and into the final plunge, the Zielschuss, reaching speeds of almost ninety miles an hour”); eating with the U.S. ski team at their training table (“In years past, the team had hired a chef from New Zealand, but here the athletes ate like Bavarian policemen: the hotel served bratwurst, fatty pork, and boiled potatoes and carrots”); in the back of the team’s supply truck (“At six-forty-five the next morning, I crawled over a pile of skis to a spot atop a crate in back of the team’s supply truck—a windowless white van crammed with gear”); in the starter shed at the top of the course:

We removed one beam and stepped inside. During the race, there would be a small crowd inside consisting of a few racers, their coaches, race officials, and whatever aura of extreme anxiety and nervousness envelops them there. The shed, and the holding pen outside—where the skiers stare into space, stretch, stand knee-deep in the snow to stiffen their boots, close their eyes and rehearse the run in their mind’s eyes—constitute the Hahnenkamm’s emotional epicenter, the germ of the mayhem down in the valley. A portion of that clenched mood plummets down the run with each racer, like unexploded ordnance, and detonates amid the pandemonium below, in a kind of steady bombardment of relief and adoration that reverberates for days.

He even skis the punishing course:

The Steilhang exuded the full gloom of a north face at befogged dawn. McBride had told me that this was a “no-fall zone.” I started skidding helplessly across and down. In front of me, Addie Godfrey fell. I went into a full defensive squat—what surfers call the poo stance—as Godfrey’s slide was mercifully halted by the poles of one of the gates. Clattering past, I soon found myself at the fence, still on my feet.

He observes the skiers make their training runs (“I passed undetected through the racers’ waiting area and over to a perch just to the left of the starting gate. One false step and I’d be on my back, hurtling toward the Mausefalle”). On race day, he climbs up the course to watch the skiers (“Halfway up the Zielschuss, I passed through the Matthias Mayer fan club (orange parkas) and the Christian Walder fan club (black parkas), before finding myself in the company of the Ski Club St. Martin, enthusiasts from Switzerland, who were passing around a flask”).

And, of course, Paumgarten being Paumgarten, he explores Kitzbühel’s post-race festivities:

Stately town houses and hotels in mint green, terra-cotta, mustard, ochre, and pink. A fourteenth-century Gothic church. Bogner, Moncler, Lacoste, Louis Vuitton. As a day-drinking backdrop, it was almost comically grand. “Sweet Caroline,” not even the Neil Diamond version, seemed to pop up on every block, a Whack-a-Mole of song. Bands of young men in red-and-white Dr. Seuss hats erupted in drinking chants. Swiss men in white smocks marched in formation, swinging giant cowbells called Trychlers—each bell weighing more than forty pounds—with deadpan expressions, holding them at arm’s length in front of their privates.

I’ve long admired Paumgarten’s work. “The Descent of Man” is one of his finest. Its thereness is extraordinary.

I want to conclude with a brief comment on another piece in this week’s issue – Nicholas Lemann’s “The Art of Fact.” It’s a review of Jeremy Treglown’s Mr. Straight Arrow, a biography of New Yorker writer John Hersey. I relish the piece’s title. The art of fact is exactly what most interests me. But, in my view, Lemann doesn’t do justice to his subject. Yes, he refers to Hersey’s great “Hiroshima” as a “marvel of journalistic engineering.” But he also says,

The relationship between fiction and nonfiction is like the one between art and architecture: fiction is pure, nonfiction is applied. Just as buildings shouldn’t leak or fall down, nonfiction ought to work within the limits of its claim to be about the world as it really is. But narrative journalism is far from artless. 

“Far from artless” seems feeble as a description of great fact pieces like John McPhee’s “The Encircled River,” Ian Frazier’s “Great Plains,” Alec Wilkinson’s “The Blessing of the Fleet,” Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” and Nicholas Schmidles’ “Getting Bin Laden,” to name five that come quickly to mind. These superb pieces are as much the achievement of selection and shaping as the finest fiction. Michael Pearson, in his John McPhee (1997), says, “Like any creative writer, McPhee imposes order on his materials to arrive at truth. Materials must be fashioned and shaped.” This is the art of fact.

April 22, 2019 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl’s mention of Gerard ter Borch, in his capsule review of the Metropolitan Museum’s In Praise of Painting exhibition, in this week’s issue, caught my eye. He calls Ter Borch a “key figure” in the Dutch Golden Age of painting. I haven’t thought of Ter Borch in a long time. I know his work through Zbigniew Herbert’s brilliant “Gerard Terborch: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” included in Herbert’s 1991 essay collection, Still Life with a Bridle. In that piece, Herbert noted, among other things, Ter Borch’s “mastery in rendering the consistency of objects, especially fabrics, from rustling cool silks to meaty wool that absorbs light.” See, for example, the luminous pink satin dress and the velvety pile of an upholstered chair in Ter Borch’s A Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid (1650-51), one of six Ter Borchs currently on view at the Met. 

Gerard ter Borch, "A Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid " (1650-51)

Updike on Van Gogh

One of this blog’s aims is to note new books by New Yorker writers. Over the past nine years, I’ve reviewed at least twenty of them here. But, for whatever reason, I neglected to notice John Updike’s great posthumous essay collection Higher Gossip, when it appeared in 2011. I want to try to correct that oversight now by considering two of Higher Gossip’s best pieces: “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” and “The Purest of Styles.” Both are on van Gogh, my favorite painter.

“Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” is a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2005 exhibition Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. It abounds with beautiful descriptions of van Gogh’s art:

The foreground to the otherwise staid Nursery on Schenkweg (1882) shows the weedy, reedy edges of a ditch with the calligraphic energy, the half-suppressed violence, that would become the hallmark of his mature style.

The somewhat damaged and time-altered Landscape in Drenthe (1883), of utterly flat country in the northeastern Netherlands, is strikingly minimalist, piling upon the twilit moors a nearly empty sky lightly laden with reckless scribbles, in early premonition of van Gogh’s insistence that the sky is never really empty.

The Blute-Fin Mill (1887) is dashing in its application of soft graphite to the paper; the swift parallel horizontal strokes of the stairs and the kindred vertical strokes of the low building beside them invite the viewer to relish the artist’s virtuosity.

Public Garden in the Place Lamartine… and Orchard with Arles in the Background possess a nearly full set of the calligraphic gestures – quick hatchings and zigzag scribbles, small circles and specks – that are evolving alongside remnants of his Dutch literalist manner, most noticeable in the carefully traced branchings of foreground trees.

Everything squirms and twists. Clouds and hills, mountains and vegetation appear moulded from one wormy, resistant substance (Wheat Fields with Cypresses, 1889).

In Walled Wheat Field with Rising Sun– a drawing that, the catalogue shrugs, might have preceded or followed its partner painting – the field hurtles toward the wall while a swollen sun emits concentric waves like a struck drumhead.

Looking at the “sinuous parallel arabesques” of van Gogh’s three reed-pen copies of his turbulent oil Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Updike comments, “The flamelike dark cypresses, writhing olive trees, blaring oversized suns, convulsed mountains, and vortically churning stars of van Gogh’s visionary madness are not far off.”

Vincent van Gogh, "Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer" (1888)

My favourite passage in “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” contrasts van Gogh’s two pen copies of his superb Harvest in Provence:

At the Metropolitan exhibit, the crowds, their eyes made bleary by dimlit chambers of pen-work, stood back with relief from Harvest in Provence (1888), a large golden oil canvas preceded by a detailed, lightly tinted drawing and followed by two rather differing pen versions for Émile Bernard and John Russell. The one for Bernard takes more liberties with the painting, and is freer in its use of van Gogh’s shorthand of hatching, squiggles, and dots. In the version for Russell, specks appear in the sky where the painting has a blank blue, and these, and concentric lines encircling the sun (A Summer Evening, 1888), become an almost compulsive feature of the drawings, as if van Gogh is saying that no space of nature is truly blank, devoid of color and of divine activity. The drawings brim with latent color.

That last line is inspired.

Vincent van Gogh, "Harvest in Provence" (1888)

Updike’s other van Gogh piece, “The Purest of Styles,” reviews the Morgan Library and Museum’s 2007 exhibition Vincent van Gogh – Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard. It contains, among other felicities, a wonderful description of two of van Gogh’s late paintings – Enclosed Field with Young Wheat and Rising Sun and A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawn-Off Tree (both 1888):

The latter is the very painting described as a picture of anxiety in his last letter to Bernard—circular swirls and flame-shaped arabesques move like a wind through the branches of the olive trees, against a yellow and blue sunset, while small human figures slowly become visible on the asylum grounds. In the former, the undulating field, blue and golden and green, rushes toward the viewer, and the blue mountains beyond seem a roiling river, under a bright yellow sky where the white sun is pinned like a medal. His impasto has become terrific—ridged ribbons of color as in a heavy brocade. 

In “The Purest of Styles,” Updike quotes a passage from van Gogh’s last letter to Bernard:

And by working very calmly, beautiful subjects will come of their own accord; it’s truly first and foremost a question of immersing oneself in reality again, with no plan made in advance, with no Parisian bias.

Updike identifies with van Gogh’s immersion in reality. He writes, 

Van Gogh’s achievement was to sublimate his own mysticism in the representation of reality, rather than inventing symbolic images. He made things themselves—worn shoes, a rush-seat chair, sunflowers—symbols, bristling with wordless meaning.

This accords with Updike’s own credo: “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (“Foreword,” The Early Stories: 1953 – 1975).