Notes on Becca Rothfeld's "The Joy of Text"

Notes on Becca Rothfeld’s “The Joy of Text” (Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2020), an effusive review of James Wood’s new essay collection Serious Noticing:

1. Rothfeld says that of the twenty-eight pieces included in Serious Noticing, “only two are negative” – "Paul Auster’s Shallowness” and “Hysterical Realism.” I think there’s a third: “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution,” in which Wood calls Orwell a “puritan masochist,” suggests that he “heightened” passages in his memoir Down and Out in Paris, and argues that Orwell’s socialism had Fascist roots. (See my “James Wood’s Vile ‘George Orwell’s Very English Revolution.’ ”)

2. Rothfeld says that Serious Noticing’s Introduction is new. This isn’t entirely true. Part of it is new, and part of it is from Wood’s “Using Everything,” included in his 2015 collection The Nearest Thing to Life.

3. My appreciation of Wood differs radically from Rothfeld’s. She says his writing is “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” Those are just about the last words I’d use to describe his work. To me, Wood is a thinker, not a feeler. He’s at his best when he’s dissecting a piece of writing, showing how it works. His most inspired sentences aren’t lush; they’re glittering combines of observation and quotation (e.g., “How strange and original that ‘clutching itself’ is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shriveling”).

4. Rothfeld describes Wood’s Melville piece as “exquisite” – “perhaps the best in Serious Noticing.” I found it the least interesting – too much blather about God (e.g., “The difficulty is that, if we really did live in the world according to God’s time, we would be thought mad: for this is just what Jesus did”; “Language breaks up God, releases us from the one meaning of the predestinating God, but merely makes that God differently inscrutable by flooding Him with thousands of different meanings”). 

5. My favorite Wood essay is one he’s never collected – “Late and Soon” (The New Yorker, December 10, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s novels. Wood’s extensive quotations from Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time and his fascinating analyses of those quotations persuaded me to seek this book out and read it. This is something I rarely do; I’m not a fan of fiction. I found I Curse the River of Time so good, I read it twice, savoring its “curling form and drifting sentences” (Wood’s words). I count it among my favorite books. 

Cars and Songs: Quentin Tarantino's Pleasurable "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood"

Last night I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time  ... in Hollywood for the first time. I have to say, notwithstanding my allergy to much of his previous work, I enjoyed it immensely. What I enjoyed was the sight of that gorgeous cream-yellow 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville cruising around Hollywood. Strange how such a simple thing as a car gliding across a screen can magnetize my eyes. Of course, it helps if the car is driven by Brad Pitt and Los Bravos’ “Bring a Little Lovin’ ” is playing in the background. (Margot Robbie is not too hard on the eyes, either.) This morning, checking out what Anthony Lane had to say about the movie, I see that’s what he liked, too. He says,

Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it, than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” is a declaration of that love. There are many scenes in which the characters—folks like Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt)—motor around Los Angeles without a care. To call those scenes the best thing in the film is not a slight upon Tarantino. As he, of all people, is aware, they are the kinds of scene that play in our movie memories, years after the event, on a helpless and happy loop. [“Surface Tension,” The New Yorker, August 5 & 12, 2019]

That, for me, is a perfect summation of the film.

"Or is something else going on?"

Andrew Wyeth, Night Hauling (1944)

I’ve just finished reading Alexander Nemerov’s “The Glitter of Night Hauling: Andrew Wyeth in the 1940s” (included in Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, 2014, edited by David Cateforis). Its opening paragraph is thrillingly good:

How do we account for the strangeness of Andrew Wyeth’s art of the 1940s? How, that is, beyond discerning the surrealist undertones, finding the magic realist affinities, or seeing that Wyeth followed in a Brandywine tradition whose oddity was firmly established by the art of Howard Pyle: lone pirates on desolate shores; magicians and curly-shoed dwarves; Revolutionary War officers strolling down streets so detailed (down to every last timber, shop sign, and grass blade) they make your head swim? Is the young Andrew Wyeth only an inheritor of that tradition, updating it in a modernist-inflected manner for the 1940s, and might we leave it simply at that? Or is something else going on? Consider Night Hauling, a painting Wyeth made in 1944 showing a lone man on the ocean at night, furtively stealing from a lobster trap amid twinkling and gleaming pours of phosphorescence.

For me, that “Or is something else going on?” is an excellent kick-starter for almost any form of critical writing. It questions traditional approaches, and leads to more imaginative responses. 

Michael Fried, in his brilliant Realism, Writing, Disfiguration(1987) approaches Thomas Eakin’s The Gross Clinic in a similar way, arguing against the “blandly normalizing” realist reading of The Gross Clinic. Fried’s theory doesn’t convince me; neither does Nemerov’s, but I find their strange over-the-top analyses exhilarating. As Janet Malcolm says in her “The Purloined Clinic” (The New Yorker, October 5, 1987), a review of Fried’s book, 

Criticism as radical as this is rare, but only when criticism is radical does it stand a chance of being something more than a pale reflection of the work of art that is its subject. By disfiguring the work of art almost beyond recognition, Fried forces us to imagine it anew – not a bad achievement for a critic.

It all begins with that subversive question: “Or is something else going on?”

March 23, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is James Somers’ absorbing “Cold War,” a reporting piece about snow science and avalanche control. Somers visits Alta, Utah, where explosives are used to cut avalanche risk. High on a mountain, he observes the firing of “a pair of hundred-and-five-millimetre howitzer cannons, of Second World War vintage, installed on semicircular tracks.” He describes “brittle, spiky snow” called depth hoar – “the eeriest stuff on any mountain”:

It is strong in compression but weak in shear. Like a row of champagne glasses slowly loaded with bricks, it can hold a surprising amount of weight until, with the slightest shove, the structure falls apart, creating a slab avalanche.

He describes what it’s like to get caught in an avalanche:

On slopes shallow enough to accumulate snow but steep enough for it to be unstable—the sweet spot is said to be thirty-nine degrees—the layers will separate, and the slab will crack and slide. Churning violently, the snow reaches eighty miles per hour within a few seconds. A skier who avoids colliding with trees and rocks is likely to be pulled under, then pinned in place by thousands of pounds of snow that harden like concrete. Very few people can dig themselves out; most can’t even move their fingers. Within minutes, an ice mask forms around your face. You asphyxiate on your own exhaled carbon dioxide.

He visits the headquarters of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, Switzerland, and observes, among other things, “snow metamorphism” in a device called the Snowbreeder. He visits the Institute’s avalanche test site and vividly describes a 1999 experiment:

If you had been skiing on the mountain during the last avalanche, you might have heard a soft exhalation: air releasing from a crack in the slab. Upslope, it would have looked as though someone had slit the mountain’s forehead. Now its face was falling off; the break, nine football fields across, was as deep as eleven feet in places. Blocks of snow would begin leaping up prettily, breaking like roiling water. In the quiet, you might feel something lapping at the back of your legs before being swept off your feet.

And he visits St. Antönien, a tiny Swiss farming village an hour outside Davos (“The threat of avalanche there is so great that, in storms, residents wear beacons while tending their farms”).

My favourite line in “Cold War” is “Avalanche country is like bear country. The threat hardly ever comes, but it defines the place, and lends it its grandeur.” Lines like that remind me of John McPhee’s work. That’s one of the highest compliments I can pay a piece of writing. I look forward to reading more of Somers’ work in The New Yorker. 

Dina Litovsky's Striking "Jessica West" Photo

Photo by Dina Litvosky for Helen Rosner's "What We're Buying for the Quarantine"

One of the best New Yorker photos of the year (so far) is Dina Litovsky’s picture of an interesting looking woman named Jessica West, wearing sunglasses, surgical mask, and a beautiful textured brown-tan-orange sweater, standing in front of pallets loaded with boxes, bottles, and other subtly colorful items. The photo is one among several excellent Litovskys illustrating Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2020.

Litovsky first impinged my consciousness with her striking kubaneh-in-a-flowerpot photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timma" (The New Yorker, October 26, 2015). That one made my “Best of 2015: Photos.”

Her sharp capture of Phil Young for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017) was on my “Best of 2017: Photos.”

And I wouldn’t be surprised if her “Jessica West” appears on my “Best of 2020” list. 

Excellent work, Dina! 

Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz's Wonderful "The Peanut Butter Falcon"

A few nights ago, I watched Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) on crave.ca. I enjoyed it immensely. For an excellent capsule review of this movie, I recommend The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” note by Bruce Diones. Here it is in full:

Zack Gottsagen, an actor with Down syndrome, stars in this affectionate drama as Zak, a young man with the same condition, who escapes from the Georgia nursing home where he lives in order to search for a professional-wrestling camp that he wants to enroll in. Along the way, he meets a small-time tidewater fisherman on the run (Shia LaBeouf), who reluctantly agrees to help him in his search. As their rafting trip begins, a nursing-home attendant (Dakota Johnson) looking for Zak catches up with them and eventually agrees to become a part of the adventure. The trio meet colorful characters in the course of this journey through photogenic landscapes (the cinematography is by Nigel Bluck). Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz wrote and directed the film; despite their screenplay’s clichés, they don’t let life-lesson dialogue distract from the genial Mark Twain-esque settings. Both Gottsagen and Johnson deliver endearing performances, and LaBeouf’s scruffy, ramshackle manner lifts the film above its predictable roots into something lived-in and surprisingly memorable.

"Yet why not say what happened?"

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)

Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue” is one of my favorite poems. I’ve long viewed it as an argument for factuality. The first part of it appears to be just the opposite – a rejection of facticity for being literal-minded (“paralyzed by fact”) and unimaginative (“the threadbare art of my eye”). Lowell seems to regret his “snapshot” poetics (“lurid, rapid, garish, grouped”). But then he thrillingly pivots and declares his fidelity to fact:

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

Yet why not say what happened? In the contest between fact and fiction, it’s a cardinal question. Why make it up? Why not say exactly what happened? Lowell sided with fact. I applaud him. 

Interestingly, Lowell borrowed the question from his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Langdon Hammer, in his absorbing “The Art of Losing” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2019, writes,

He doesn’t indicate it in the poem, but Lowell quoted that question – “Yet why not say what happened?” – from Hardwick, who had posed it to him when he was blocked while writing Life Studies, and he found the advice enabling. 

Hardwick’s question would’ve been lost to history. By remembering it and including it in his superb “Epilogue,” Lowell preserved it.  

March 16, 2020 Issue

Peter Hessler’s “Broken Bonds,” in this week’s issue, is both a pleasure and a disappointment. It’s a pleasure because it kindles memories of his great 2001 memoir River Town, one of my favorite books. It’s a disappointment because it only briefly revisits Fuling, the remote city on the Yangtze, where most of River Town takes place. In 1996, the Peace Corps sent Hessler to teach English to college students in Fuling. Most of “Broken Bonds” is concerned with the Trump government’s cancelation of that Peace Corps program. Hessler says of the cancelation,

It seemed part of a larger American trend: every foreign contact was a threat, every exchange was zero-sum. Instead of trusting themselves and their best models, people regressed to the paranoia of those with closed systems.

It seems like a rotten thing for the government to do. Hessler points out, 

Many volunteers had studied pedagogy as undergrads, and often they returned to teach in U.S. classrooms. But there were others whose life paths were radically transformed. They became diplomats, civil servants, businesspeople, or scholars specializing in China.

For me, the most enjoyable part of “Broken Bonds” is the penultimate section that begins, “In January, I visited Fuling with my family, and one afternoon we went to the former campus.” It brought back memories of Hessler’s wonderful River Town, an immersive account of the two years he spent teaching in Fuling as a Peace Corps volunteer. He reports that the building where he taught is gone, but his former apartment is still standing. “The library was also intact, although its doors were chained shut and many windows were broken.” He says, 

While we were there, a man called out my Chinese name. He introduced himself as a former colleague who was also visiting the campus before it was demolished. Suddenly, I recognized him—in the old days, he sometimes came to my apartment late at night to borrow banned books. In front of the shuttered library, he said, “I remember reading about the Cultural Revolution.” I asked if the authorities had warned him about associating with the Americans, and he smiled shyly. “It wasn’t that direct,” he said. “But we were careful.”

That’s all Hessler has to say about his Fuling visit. I wish he’d written more about it. Are Qian Manli and Wang Dongmei still working at the local Bank of China? Is the Students’ Home still operating? Was the wall mural in the Catholic church courtyard ever painted? Is Father Li still around? These are just some of the things arising from my reading of River Town that I wish he’d explored in “Broken Bonds.” But maybe he’s already explored them. Just before I started writing this post, I googled “Peter Hessler Fuling” and discovered a 2013 National Geographic piece by him titled “Return to River Town.” It’s available only to National Geographic subscribers. I’m considering subscribing. 

March 9, 2020 Issue

Here are some of the things in this week’s New Yorker that I enjoyed immensely:

1. The delectable description in Johanna Fateman’s “Art: Shannon Cartier Lucy": “The creamily painted, crystalline image of goldfish whose bowl rests, alarmingly, on the lavender flame of a gas stove.”

2. Steve Futterman’s wonderful “Night Life: Andy Statman”: 

An Orthodox Jew walks into the back room of a bar and proceeds to play avant-garde jazz on the clarinet and bluegrass on the mandolin, among much else. Welcome to the manifold musical world of Andy Statman, who, in his frequent visits to this long-standing Park Slope watering hole and music space, proves that New York has always been the place to be if multiculturalism is the air you breathe.

3. News of a new French film that might be worth checking out - Rebecca Zlottowski’s An Easy Girl – described by Richard Brody, in his capsule review of it, as “passionate and finely observed.” 

4. Nick Paumgarten’s excellent Talk story “Pointillism,” a mini-profile of W. Ian Lipkin, “one of the one of the world’s leading infectious-disease epidemiologists,” commenting on the spread of COVID-19:

On Central Park West, he pointed out a painted railing and said, “That, I wouldn’t worry about. You’ve got ultraviolet light, wind.” But on the C train he wrapped an elbow around a pole and said, “I look at the world differently than you do. I see surfaces in a pointillistic ­fashion.” 

5. Alexandra Schwartz’s Talk piece, “Lady from Shanghai,” an encounter with movie director Cathy Yan, the last paragraph of which is superb:

Outside Wu’s Wonton King, Yan struggled to light some sparklers she had just bought. An elderly passerby stopped to cup his hands around Yan’s, shielding the flame from the elements. “He says it’s raining and it’s windy,” Yan said, when he’d left. “There’s a metaphor in here somewhere.” She produced a party popper from a bag and began to twist. Tiny hundred-dollar bills shot into the air. Yan squealed and took a photo. Then she headed off, shedding miniature Benjamins as she walked. Maybe there was a metaphor in there, too.

6. Rivka Galchin’s excellent “Complete Trash,” reporting on South Korea’s progressive approach to waste-processing (“Interspersed among the windrows were truck-size machines that looked like toys: a bright-orange Doppstadt Inventhor ground up trees, an emerald-green Komptech Multistar sorted waste by size, and a white-and-yellow SCARAB turned and aerated the windrows with its inner spokes”). 

7. Vinson Cunningham’s absorbing “Test Case,” an account of his education at a wonderful non-profit school called Prep for Prep and the far-reaching impact it had on his life: 

So Prep recommended me as a tutor for the teen-age son of a black investment banker who was on Prep’s board of directors. The banker paid me directly, by the hour, and I sent him occasional e-mail updates on his son’s progress. We read plays and short stories and articles from the sports pages, and ran through long sets of simple algebra. The kid didn’t like to concentrate; I could relate. One day, I got a call from his stepmother, who was from Chicago. She was supporting a young Illinois senator who was preparing to run for President. His campaign was setting up a fund-raising office in New York, and they’d need an assistant. I knew that I was stumbling into another unmerited adventure.

8. Peter Schjeldahl grappling with the meaning of Donald Judd’s benumbing artworks: “They aren’t about anything. They afford no traction for analysis while making you more or less conscious of your physical relation to them, and to the space that you and they share” (“The Shape of Things”). 

  

9. And Anthony Lane’s description of sex in two new movies, The Burnt Orange Heresy and The Whistler: “vanilla but vigorous, like a frothing milkshake” (“Lying Together”). 

March 2, 2020 Issue

Mountain tragedy – death by falling or suffocation – is a Nick Paumgarten obsession. He’s written several variations on it: “Life Is Rescues,” “The Manic Mountain,” “The Ski Gods,” and “Dangerous Game” are four that come to mind. His excellent “The Altitude Sickness,” in this week’s issue, is his latest and deepest exploration of this fraught subject. It’s about the psychic toll of mountain climbing and a therapist, Tim Tate, who treats it. Paumgarten describes a number of Tate’s clients, e.g., Hillary Allen:

Hillary Allen, known to friends as the Hillygoat, is an ultra-runner sponsored by the North Face. She also has a master’s degree in neuroscience. In 2017, when she was twenty-eight and competing in a thirty-five-mile “skyrunning” race along a ridge in Norway, a rock gave way, and she fell a hundred and fifty feet. She broke fourteen bones in her back, rib cage, arms, and feet and tore a bunch of ligaments. “I was pretty shaken up,” she said. “I had nightmares forever. I was mentally trying to figure out a way to get back. I was dealing with the guilt of wanting to devote myself to something that nearly killed me. People suggested a sports psychologist or a regular counsellor, but that wasn’t really the right fit.” Instead, she travelled to Bozeman for an intensive with Tate. “He’s my cup of tea. I’m a mountain person. I’m not an ooey-gooey dress-everything-in-pink kind of woman.”

But Tate isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and Paumgarten makes it clear why. He describes Tate as a “kind of visionary sage” with “shamanistic attributes, which are deeply rooted, perhaps even innate, and yet not uncultivated.” When Paumgarten first witnesses Tate’s approach, at a gathering of North Face athletes in Puerto Rico, he’s sceptical:

With the scarf, Tate bound together the wrists of Anker and Nelson, their mates looking on with some measure of bafflement at this quasi-matrimonial sacrament. A few people in the back got the giggles. “The energy in this room, and the love of these people, is the authority that this moment signifies,” Tate’s voice boomed. “This man is transferring the power to this woman. We honor them and bless them, and we wish you the best, Hilaree.”

Confession: I was one of the gigglers. As a knee-jerk eye-roller, I was wary of Tate at first. The apparent hodgepodge of recycled folklore, cultural appropriation, performative grandeur, and Jungian bubble magic reminded me of some people I have chosen through the years to avoid. And yet before long I felt drawn to him—to his charisma, his sense of humor, his eagerness to listen, his over-the-topness. He’d been around. He had heft. He seemed to be tuned in to a cosmic thrum.

Paumgarten describing himself as a “knee-jerk eye-roller” made me laugh. I’m in the same camp. If I’d been at that meeting, I likely would've giggled too. But that’s the thing – I wasn’t there. Paumgarten takes me places I wouldn’t get to otherwise. In “The Altitude Sickness” he visits Tate in his office in Bozeman, Montana:

That afternoon, we spent some time in his office. Tate sees clients on the ground floor of an old brick house in downtown Bozeman—“behind the blue door,” as he often says. (He took the blue-painted front door, his local trademark, from his former office, on Main Street.) He’s tall and fit, with a white mustache and soul patch and long, receding poodley hair that he often pulls back in a bun. He wears a tie in the office, on this day with a checked shirt and hiking trousers and boots. The space is decorated with feathers, bones, and cowboy and Native American art. A deluxe edition of Carl Jung’s “Red Book” sits on a stand, open to a chapter about Hell. 

He goes out with Tate, Conrad Anker and the writer David Quammen for a drink. He, Tate, and Anker hike a canyon trail, a trip that shows Anker's incredible energy:

He attacked the rest of the evening this way: splitting wood, making a fire, rigging a tripod over the fire for the pot, cutting vegetables, cooking a stew, drinking beer, playing air guitar, crushing empty cans with the side of an axe. “I had A.D.H.D. as a kid,” Anker said. “Hyper-situational awareness.” His energy was palpable. Semiretirement didn’t suit him at all, but hanging around a bonfire with a few dudes certainly did. The snow started to fall before midnight, and by morning there was half a foot on the ground.

And he attends the North Face gathering in Puerto Rico, where he first sees Tate in action. Artfully woven through all this are stories about death – the loss of climbers to mountains and their deadly avalanches – and its impact on the survivors. The piece is deeply absorbing – one of Paumgarten’s best.

Richard Cobb 's Wonderful "The Streets of Paris"

I’m a fan of Richard Cobb’s writing, particularly his wonderful The Streets of Paris (1980), an illustrated account of several flâneurial walks that he and photographer Nicholas Breach took along some of Paris’s ancient backstreets. Cobb was an aficionado of peeling plaster, faded advertisements, dilapidated shutters, crumbling walls, dim staircases, and other manifestations of what today is sometimes called ruin porn. He was a superb describer. For example, here’s his depiction of the side of an apartment building in the Xme arrondissement:

Cadoricin and Delsol, to the accompaniment of accordion music, balmusette style, on Radio-Paris advertising, in the 1930s, the fading reminder of a disappearing social history, on the cut-off end of a tall apartment house as if from a scene of a Carné film: Shampooing Brillant à l’Huile, and with something already indecipherable about hair.

That musical reading of a faded ad on the side of an old apartment house is inspired! The whole book is inspired – a great testament to the pleasures of being a flâneur. 

Best of the Decade: #10 Robert A. Caro's "The Transition"

Photo from Robert A. Caro's "The Transition"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #10 pick – Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” (April 2, 2012). It’s a riveting account of the events of November 22, 1963 – the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson became President. 

Caro puts us squarely there in the car with Johnson when Kennedy is shot:

Whirling in his seat, Youngblood shouted—in a “voice I had never heard him ever use,” Lady Bird recalled—“Get down! Get down!” and, grabbing Johnson’s right shoulder, yanked him roughly down toward the floor in the center of the car, as he almost leaped over the front seat, and threw his body over the Vice-President, shouting again, “Get down! Get down! ” By the time the next two sharp reports had cracked out—it was a matter of only eight seconds, but everyone knew what they were now—Lyndon Johnson was down on the floor of the back seat of the car. The loud, sharp sound, the hand suddenly grabbing his shoulder and pulling him down: now he was on the floor, his face on the floor, with the weight of a big man lying on top of him, pressing him down—Lyndon Johnson would never forget “his knees in my back and his elbows in my back.”

I read that passage back in 2012, when the piece first appeared; I’ve never forgotten it. Its thereness is mesmerizing. The same is true of at least two other scenes in this transfixing piece: LBJ and Lady Bird waiting in “a small white room” at Parkland Memorial Hospital, communicating only with their eyes as they wait for news of Kennedy’s condition (“There was more waiting. ‘Lyndon and I didn’t speak,’ Lady Bird Johnson recalled. ‘We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might be’ ”), and – another reference to eyes – LBJ aboard Air Force One, in the President’s stateroom, about to be sworn in as President, requesting Jacqueline Kennedy’s presence: 

One witness was still missing, the most important one. As Judge Hughes recalled, he told her that “Mrs. Kennedy wanted to be present and we would wait for her.” To O’Donnell and O’Brien he said, “Do you want to ask Mrs. Kennedy if she would like to stand with us?” When they didn’t respond at once, the glance he threw at them was the old Johnson glance, the eyes burning with impatience and anger. “She said she wants to be here when I take the oath,” he told O’Donnell. “Why don’t you see what’s keeping her?”

The old Johnson glance – right there is Caro’s theme: the return of Johnson’s old self. The piece’s title has a double meaning: the transition of power from Kennedy to Johnson; and the immediate transformation of Johnson – from the despondency he felt about his powerlessness as Vice-President (“For more than a year now, the desolation Lyndon Johnson felt about his position had shown in his posture—in the slump of his shoulders—and in his gait, the slow steps that had replaced the old long Texas stride with which he had walked the corridors of Capitol Hill, and in his face, on which all the lines ran downward, his jowls sagging, so that reporters mocked in print his ‘hangdog’ look”) to a “man with the instinct to decide, the will to decide.” Caro writes,

And the hangdog look was gone, replaced by an expression—the lines on the face no longer drooping but hard—that Jack Brooks described as “set.” Lyndon Johnson’s oldest aides and allies, the men who had known him longest, knew that expression: the big jaw jutting, the lips above it pulled into a tight, grim line, the corners turned down in a hint of a snarl, the dark-brown eyes, under the long black eyebrows, narrowed, hard, piercing. It was an expression of determination and fierce concentration; when Lyndon Johnson wore that expression, a problem was being thought through with an intensity that was almost palpable, a problem was being thought through—and a decision made. That expression, set and hard, was, his aide Horace Busby said, Lyndon Johnson’s “deciding expression,” and that was his expression now. To Lady Bird Johnson, looking up at her husband, his face had become “almost a graven image of a face carved in bronze.”

Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition” is one of the most absorbing New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read.