May 18, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week (and maybe Pick of the Year) is Ben Taub’s masterly “Five Oceans, Five Deeps.” What a piece of writing! It’s an exhilarating account of an exploration team that builds an amazing one-of-a-kind submersible, named the Limiting Factor, and pilots it to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trenches.

Of its many pleasures – superb description (“Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves”), vivid figuration (“At the bottom of the deepest trench, every square inch would have to hold back sixteen thousand pounds of water – an elephant standing on a stiletto heel”), arresting details (“They are ancient, insect-like scavengers, whose bodies accommodate the water – floating organs in a waxy exoskeleton”) – the most piquant for me is the contrast between the “misfit” characterization of the team (“ ‘a proper band of thieves,’ as the expedition’s chief scientist put it—with backgrounds in logistics, engineering, academia, and petty crime”) and its amazing ingenuity. For example, when the Limiting Factor’s manipulator arm fell off during a test dive, and the mission was in danger of being called off, Tom Blades, the team’s chief electrical officer, noted

that the loss of the manipulator arm had freed up an electrical junction box, creating an opportunity to fix nearly everything else that was wrong with the electronics. “Basically, Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,” Lahey explained. “There was literally a jumper cable running through the pressure hull, tucked behind Victor’s seat.”

And when the team lost two of its landers (“large, unmanned contraptions with baited traps and cameras, dropped over the side of a ship”), Alan Jamieson, the team’s chief scientist, “cobbled together a new lander out of aluminum scraps, spare electronics, and some ropes and buoys.”

Those are just two examples of the team’s creative responses to the mission’s numerous setbacks.

Reading “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” I was in awe of the way Taub put me right there with Vescovo inside the Limiting Factor as he explores the bottom of, first, the Puerto Rico Trench, then the South Sandwich Trench, then the Java Trench, then the Mariana Trench, and, finally, Molloy Hole, in the Arctic. It’s an epic journey. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: I want to compliment The New Yorker on the wonderful job it did illustrating “Five Oceans, Five Deeps.” The online version is a lavish photo text, with pictures by Paolo Pellegrin and illustrations by Anuj Shrestha. Pellegrin’s photo of the Limiting Factor in its custom-built cradle on board the Pressure Drop allows me to appreciate the aptness of Taub’s “bulging briefcase” description of it.

Paolo Pellegrin, "Limiting Factor"

Postscript: Anthony Bailey, 1933 - 2020

Anthony Bailey [Photo by Jessica (Bibby) Giesen]

I see in yesterday’s Times that Anthony Bailey died May 13, 2020 of coronavirus. Between 1949 and 1995, Bailey wrote eighty-six articles for The New Yorker – everything from reporting pieces, profiles and personal history to Talk stories, fiction, and poetry. Among his best pieces are “A Walk Along the Boyne” (June 2, 1980), “The Edge of the Forest” (June 27 & July 4, 1983), “A Good Little Vessel” (June 2, 1986), and “Outer Banks” (May 25, 1987).

Bailey was a superb describer. Here, for example, from “A Walk Along the Boyne,” is his depiction of the Russell Arms Hotel, in Navan, where he and Seamus Heaney stayed after their first day of hiking along the Boyne River:

The Russell Arms: staircases going this way and that; the feeling of being in two or three large Victorian houses knocked together in a period of expansion, and now, that moment passed, in old age propping one another up. In the bathroom I used, there were no light bulbs in the fixtures and no plug in the bath. Fortunately, daylight of a feeble sort persisted. I used the small plug from the washbasin and added my facecloth to stem the ebb from the tub. In my bedroom, one out of three lights worked. However, on the ground floor all was well set up and jovial. The bar was full of early arrivals for a meeting of the local association of Tipperary Men – exiles, it appeared, from that fair county, all of a hundred miles from Navan. Heaney arrived, still hobbling, but otherwise restored by hot water. We drank apértifs of Bushmills whiskey, from the North, and dined off sirloin from the South. We toasted the Boyne with several carafes of red Spanish plonk. Meanwhile, the river was running a hundred yards away, unseen, past the backs of the houses of Navan, which resolutely look the other way.

My favorite Bailey piece is “Outer Banks,” an account of a trip he took along North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1985. It’s written in the first person, present tense – a combination I find irresistible. It tells what Bailey did, saw, heard, ate and felt, in detail after palpable detail, as he walks, drives, camps, and noses his way across the precarious Banks. Here’s a sample:

Then I turn left – north – along the beach. The tide is at half ebb, so I am able to stride easily on firm, damp sand at the water’s edge; higher on the beach, the sand is dry and loose, too soft for comfortable walking. Some people are sitting on porches, or in beach chairs in front of their cottages. A few fishermen are casting into the surf, and several youths on surfboards are floating some way out, waiting for the right wave. Toward the horizon, a small white blob is a solitary sportfishing boat. At the water’s edge, I pass a child swimming and being watched by his father, who gives me an affable nod. I make my turnaround point a structure called the Nags Head Fishing Pier. It is battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed, yet a number of customers obviously feel secure enough to be angling from it; on the landward end, it has a bar, a luncheonette, and a fishing-tackle store. As I walk back, I observe driftwood; the black egg cases of skate, like dark pouches of ravioli or wonton, sealed as if with a twist at each end; all sorts of shells; and a plastic fork or two.

John Updike said of Bailey, “He writes as naturally as he walks, and he is the last great walker.” If you want to walk with him, just enter his work almost anywhere – this is the consolation he’s left us – and there you’ll find him, traveling about, looking around, seeing what there is to see. 

A. J. Liebling's Classic "Poet and Pedagogue"

Cassius Clay (Photo from The New Yorker}

As a result of seeing A. J. Liebling’s classic “Poet and Pedagogue” listed in Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: First Encounters with Legendary Figures” (newyorker.com, May 24, 2020), I decided to revisit it. What a great piece! It’s an account of the Cassius Clay-Sonny Banks fight at Madison Square Garden, February 10, 1962. It originally appeared in the March 3, 1962, New Yorker and is included in Liebling’s posthumous 1990 collection A Neutral Corner.

Liebling begins with visits to both boxers’ training camps a week or so before the fight. His description of Clay reciting a poem while doing sit-ups is inspired:

At the gym that day, Cassius was on a mat doing situps when Mr. Angelo Dundee, his trainer, brought up the subject of the ballad. “He is smart,” Dundee said. “He made up a poem.” Clay had his hands locked behind his neck, elbows straight out, as he bobbed up and down. He is a golden-brown young man, big-chested and long-legged, whose limbs have the smooth, rounded look that Joe Louis’s used to have, and that frequently denotes fast muscles. He is twenty years old and six feet two inches tall, and he weighs a hundred and ninety-five pounds.

“I’ll say it for you,” the poet announced, without waiting to be wheedled or breaking cadence. He began on a rise:

“You may talk about Sweden [down and up again],
You may talk about Rome [down and up again],
But Rockville Centre is Floyd Patterson’s home [down].”

He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try.

Clay went on, continuing his ventriflexions:

“A lot of people say that Floyd couldn’t fight,
But you should have seen him on that comeback night.”

There were some lines that I fumbled; the tempo of situps and poetry grew concurrently faster as the bardic fury took hold. But I caught the climax as the poet’s voice rose:

“He cut up his eyes and mussed up his face
And that last left hook knocked his head out of place!”

Cassius smiled and said no more for several sit ups, as if waiting for Johansson to be carried to his corner. He resumed when the Swede’s seconds had had time to slosh water in his pants and bring him around. The fight was done; the press took over:

“A reporter asked: ‘Ingo, will a rematch be put on?’
Johansson said: ‘Don’t know. It might be postponed.’ ”

The poet did a few more silent strophes, and then said:

“If he would have stayed in Sweden,
He wouldn’t have took that beatin’.”

Here, overcome by admiration, he lay back and laughed. After a minute or two, he said, “That rhymes. I like it.”

That “He is probably the only poet in America who can recite this way. I would like to see T. S. Eliot try” made me laugh. That’s the thing about this piece; it’s still as fresh and vital as the day Liebling wrote it. It puts me squarely there with Clay (as he was then known), at the Department of Parks gymnasium, as he trained for his New York debut as a professional against Detroit heavyweight Sonny Banks.

It also puts me there at Harry Wiley’s Gymnasium, where Banks was training. Liebling writes,

By the time I got up the stairs, the three fellows who were going to spar were already in the locker room changing their clothes, and the only ones in sight were a big, solid man in a red jersey, who was laying out the gloves and bandages on a rubbing table, and a wispy little chap in an olive-green sweater, who was smoking a long rattail cigar. His thin black hair was carefully marcelled along the top of his narrow skull, a long gold watch chain dangled from his fob pocket, and he exuded an air of elegance, precision, and authority, like a withered but still peppery mahout in charge of a string of not quite bright elephants. 

Liebling has a jeweller’s eye for telltale boxing details. He says of Banks,

Banks, when he sparred with Jones, did not scuffle around but practiced purposefully a pattern of coming in low, feinting with head and body to draw a lead, and then hammering in hooks to body and head, following the combination with a right cross. His footwork was neat and geometrical but not flashy—he slid his soles along the mat, always set to hit hard.

Liebling’s description of the fight is excellent. This particular bout is historically significant as the first time in Clay’s professional career that he was knocked down. Here’s the moment:

When the bell rang, Banks dropped into the crouch I had seen him rehearse, and began the stalk after Clay that was to put the pressure on him. I felt a species of complicity. The poet, still wrapped in certitude, jabbed, moved, teased, looking the Konzertstück over before he banged the ivories. By nimble dodging, as in Rome, he rendered the hungry fighter’s attack quite harmless, but this time without keeping his hypnotic stare fixed steadily enough on the punch-hand. They circled around for a minute or so, and then Clay was hit, but not hard, by a left hand. He moved to his own left, across Banks’s field of vision, and Banks, turning with him, hit him again, but this time full, with the rising left hook he had worked on so faithfully. The poet went down, and the three men crouching below Banks’s corner must have felt, as they listened to the count, like a Reno tourist who hears the silver-dollar jackpot come rolling down. It had been a solid shot—and where one shot succeeds, there is no reason to think that another won’t.

It was not to be. Clay quickly recovers, and in the next round “jabbed the good boy until he had spread his already wide nose over his face.” Liebling says of Banks, “He kept throwing that left hook whenever he could get set, but he was like a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.”

The fight is stopped in the fourth round, with Banks staggered and helpless. The piece ends memorably. Instead of going to Clay’s dressing room for a post-fight interview with the winner, Liebling seeks out Banks. He writes,

When I arrived, Banks, sitting up on the edge of a rubbing table, was shaking his head, angry at himself, like a kid outfielder who has let the deciding run drop through his fingers. Summerlin was telling him what he had done wrong: “You can’t hit anybody throwing just one punch all the time. You had him, but you lost him. You forgot to keep crowding.” Then the unquenchable pedagogue said, “You’re a better fighter than he is, but you lost your head. If you can only get him again . . .” But poor Banks looked only half convinced. What he felt, I imagine, was that he had had Clay, and that it might be a long time before he caught him again. If he had followed through, he would have been in line for dazzling matches—the kind that bring you five figures even if you lose. I asked him what punch had started him on the downgrade, but he just shook his head. Wiley, the gym proprietor, said there hadn’t been any one turning point. “Things just went sour gradually all at once,” he declared. “You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”

I think this is one of the all-time great endings in sports writing. As Fred Warner says in the Afterword of A Neutral Corner,

Like the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he [Liebling] can joke because he is so serious, as he is at the end of “Poet and Pedagogue,” where he describes the beaten and now forgotten fighter who had nearly beaten Cassius Clay and was faced with a lifetime of remembering what might have been. That sad tableau reveals a lot about what made Liebling such a good writer. None of the taints of the sports page are there – hyperbole, cynicism, or sentimentality. It is heartbreaking, emblematic, and just right.

David Means' Superb "The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934"

Rutu Modan's illustration for David Means' "The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934"

I see in the online version of the June 1st issue that David Means has a new story out. It's called "Two Nurses, Smoking." As soon as the print edition arrives, I'll check it out.

Means wrote one of my favorite New Yorker stories of the last decade – “The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934” (October 25, 2010; included in his excellent 2019 collection Instructions for a Funeral). It’s about two F.B.I. agents, Lee and Barnes, staking out a hardscrabble Kansas farm, waiting to see if a bank robber named Carson shows up. The opening paragraph is terrific:

Five days of trading the field glasses and taking turns crawling back into the trees to smoke out of sight. Five days on surveillance, waiting to see if by some chance Carson might return to his uncle’s farm. Five days of listening to the young agent, named Barnes, as he recited verbatim from the file: Carson has a propensity to fire warning shots; it has been speculated that Carson’s limited vision in his left eye causes his shots to carry to the right of his intended target; impulse control somewhat limited. Five days of listening to Barnes recount the pattern of heists that began down the Texas Panhandle and proceeded north all the way up to Wisconsin, then back down to Kansas, until the trail tangled up in the fumbling ineptitude of the Bureau. For five days, Barnes talked while Lee, older, hard-bitten, nodded and let the boy play out his theories. Five days reduced to a single conversation.

I read that and I was hooked. The two agents have different takes on their assignment. The young man, Barnes, is convinced that Carson isn’t coming and that the stakeout is a waste of time. The veteran Lee has a gut feeling something is going to happen: “Something big was coming, the wind had said. It was a sure giveaway. Any experienced lawman knew that the wind rising like that had to mean something.”

It turns out that Lee is right. I’m not going to give away the ending. But here’s a taste of the action:

Years later, in the reductive, slowed-down replay of memory, the Buick sedan—stolen fresh off a lot in Topeka—appeared suddenly, having come in off a cat road that ran west and hit the main road a quarter mile from the Carson farm, deep enough in the quivering heat to provide the element of surprise. First, just a glint of chrome radiator, a spark of light where the road bled itself into plowed field. Then, in a matter of seconds, the glint turned into a full-blown automobile, swinging alongside the house, roaring to a stop, rocking heavily as it disgorged three men. 

That “First, just a glint of chrome radiator, a spark of light where the road bled itself into plowed field” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired, brilliantly describing a stakeout that goes awfully wrong.

May 11, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Anthony Lane’s wonderful “Because the Night,” a paean to the pleasures of sleeper trains. Lane says, “The departure of a night train—by definition, a humdrum event for the station staff—exudes, for all but the most jaded travellers, the thrill of an unfamiliar ritual.”

His description of his compartment on the Caledonian Sleeper made me laugh:

When turning from the window to the door, in my compartment, I had to revolve on the spot, as if roasting on a vertical spit, and, despite my being the sole occupant, both bunks had been let down, locked into place, and joined by a ladder. A printed notice offered advice: “Guests should use the ladders in the traditional manner, by always facing the bed as they climb up and down.” What other manner is there? Had the train recently hosted the cast of Cirque du Soleil, perhaps, who insisted on descending head first, arms outstretched, after crooking one knee over the top rung?

I like the way he blends movies into his narrative. For example,

Consider Claudette Colbert, in “The Palm Beach Story,” who falls in with the rowdy millionaires of the Ale and Quail Club. Sweeping her up as a mascot, and boarding the 11:58 from Penn Station with a pack of hounds, they think nothing of firing their shotguns at crackers, tossed up by a bar steward like clay pigeons. 

My favourite part is an account of a recent night train trip he took from Lisbon to Madrid. He writes,

We pulled away, and, as I stood at the door of my carriage, in fond valediction, something occurred to me: the door was open. The platform slid by, quickening, a single step away. Maybe this was company practice, assigning responsibility to customers. If so, what else were we bidden to do? Toot the whistle? Make the beds? In case there were children aboard, I swung the door shut. With a heavy clang, it locked; the handle snapped upward and struck my middle finger. I was bleeding under my nail, swearing like a stoker, and we hadn’t even left the station. Who says that the romance of travel is dead?

Lane’s piece is as elegant, engaging, and delightful as the trains he describes. I enjoyed it immensely.

Julian Bell and Peter Schjeldahl on the Ghent Altarpiece

Hubert van Eyck and Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

Julian Bell, in his brilliant “Kestrel, Burgher, Spout” (London Review of Books, April 16, 2020), says of the Ghent Altarpiece,

When Van Eyck delivered the work, it was recognised that its quality was also without equal, a judgment that remains irrefutable. It’s the superabundance that staggers. You zoom out from the townscape to the four-panel wide Annunciation that encapsulates it, but that scene is merely a prelude, painted on the exterior panels of the doors, to the two-level panoply within: theological VIPs above, and below, an early morning mass meeting of the blessed in some verdant parkland. The lush heaviness into which your eyes sink suggests that whatever breathes or glistens or crinkles – clouds, foliage, faces, cloaks, jewels, metalware and stone – has been stroked and befriended by brushwork of infinite patience: all is celebrated but decelerated, as if you are witnessing the creation of the world replayed in slow motion.

Wow! That last sentence is inspired. The whole piece is inspired – one of the most absorbing art reviews I’ve read this year. Reading it, I was reminded of Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful “Ghent Altarpiece” essay – “The Flip Side” (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010), in which he says,

There is no more astounding work of art than the Ghent Altarpiece. Historically, it is a clutch of firsts: it represents the first really ambitious and consummate use of oil paint, though with some admixtures of tempera, and it marks the birth of realism as a guiding principle in European painting. Oils—of linseed, walnut, and other plant extracts—were employed as binders for pigments in Afghanistan in the seventh century and in Europe a century later. Some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Norwegian altar fronts are all in oils. But nothing that we know of anticipated the eloquence of van Eyck’s glazes, which pool like liquid radiance across his pictures’ smooth surfaces, trapping and releasing graded tones of light and shadow and effulgences of brilliant color.

Again, wow! Two great art critics responding to one of the world’s great artworks – it doesn’t get any better than that. 

Jonathan Blitzer's Excellent "Juan Sanabria"

Juan Sanabria (Photo from The New Yorker)

I want to make amends for a recent oversight. Reviewing the April 20, 2020, New Yorker, I neglected to note Jonathan Blitzer’s superb “Juan Sanabria.” It’s an account of the life and death of one of New York City’s first coronavirus victims. It’s one of the best pieces to appear in the magazine this year.

Sanabria worked as a doorman at a residential apartment building in the Bronx. Blitzer writes,

There was an art to Sanabria’s salutations. Dana Frishkorn, who’s lived in the building for three and a half years, appreciated that he called her by her first name when she entered, and never failed to tell her “Take care” when she left. Yet somehow Sanabria knew that Anthony Tucker, who has spent five years in the building, preferred to be called by his last name. “Hey, Tuck,” Sanabria would say, extending his hand for a fist bump. When Tony Chen, who runs a boutique tour company and lives on the seventh floor, limped into the building one morning, addled by plantar fasciitis, Sanabria showed him a foot stretch that helped. On another day, when a tenant showed up at the front door with a large couch to take up to his apartment, even though the building’s rules mandated the use of a side door, Sanabria stood watch to make sure a meddlesome neighbor didn’t wander over.

Blitzer talks to many people – members of Sanabria’s family, his friends, apartment residents – composing a distinctive portrait of a warm, humane, ordinary-extraordinary individual.

One of the apartment residents, Georgeen Comerford, says of Sanabria’s death, “That made this whole thing very real. Before, the deaths were just statistics. Knowing that one of them was Juan, it gave the thing a face.”

Blitzer’s tribute does the same thing. It rescues Sanabria from anonymity, from the mass of coronavirus deaths, currently totalling over eighty thousand in the U.S. alone. It honors his singularity and gives him back what the virus stole from him – the breath of life.

May 4, 2020 Issue

The New Yorker’s coronavirus coverage continues to impress immensely. Of its many superb pieces – Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown,” Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution,” Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The One and the Many,” Rivka Galchen’s “The Longest Shift,” Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria” – perhaps the most striking and original (so far) is “April 15, 2020,” in this week’s issue. It's a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. 

Comprising thirty-two snapshots of life in the city, the piece is structured chronologically, beginning “soon after midnight” at John F. Kennedy Airport and ending twenty-four hours later at Lower Manhattan Hospital. In between, it visits, among other places, Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere”); the Amazon fulfilment center on Staten Island (“Previously, masked employees wielding thermometer guns had taken co-workers’ temperatures as they entered the four-story building; now an automated system was in place”); the Hudson Theatre near Times Square (“A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage”); the Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx (“Urgent codes rang out on the P.A. system: ‘Rapid response,’ for when a patient can’t breathe; ‘C.A.C.,’ for cardiac arrest”); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed and cherry trees shed pink petals onto sidewalks all over the city, the urns stood empty”); the American Museum of Natural History (“In individual containers on a sunny windowsill, a dozen large garden spiders sat in their webs”); the Herald Square subway station (“An elderly woman dozed behind a phone-charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shopping cart, her head nodding”); an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell Medicine (“Bright fluorescent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man with paper-white hair, age seventy-five. Intubated. His skin was nearly translucent”); the top floor of an East Village walkup (“Near the window, Fredericks tuned his electric guitar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stratocaster neck”); Sherman’s Flatbush Memorial Chapel, in Midwood, Brooklyn (“Inside, four tables held eight bodies, some of them in scuffed orange pouches from the hospital, others in clear sleeves no thicker than garbage bags”); on a tugboat on the north shore of Staten Island (“With its nearly seven-thousand-horsepower engines and azimuth propeller, it can go forward, backward, and sideways, or spin like a top on the water”).

“She wore a high-visibility vest, and her eyes danced brightly above a blue mask” – I relish sentences like that. “April 15, 2020” brims with them.

My favourite part is the visit to Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street. The reporter (is it Helen Rosner?) describes the aroma inside the shop: “The next day, the air was perfumed with a familiar smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—tinged with a jagged note of surface cleaner.” The quotation at the end made me smile:

Tupper regarded the assemblage as it came together on the counter. “This is a small little order,” he said. “But you know, right now, if someone wants a quarter pound of whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever we can.”

Whoever conceived the idea of this brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of NYC as it struggles to deal with the pandemic is a genius. Bravo, New Yorker!

Postscript: The online version of “April 15, 2020” is a remarkable photo text, featuring forty-five still images and four short video loops. The photos and videos don’t appear to depict people or scenes mentioned in the text, but they certainly complement it. Like the text, they document New York's coronavirus reality. Many of them are artfully matter-of-fact. For example:

Andre D. Wagner, "11:50 A.M., Williamsburg, Brooklyn"

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Dina Litovsky, "9:58 P.M., Times Square"

My favourite “April 15, 2020” illustration is Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” a transfixing fifteen second video loop showing a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs – the visual equivalent of a lyric poem. My eyes devour it. 

3 Definitions of Love

William Blake, Adam and Eve Sleeping (1808)

1. “ ‘What is love,’ Skinner wrote, ‘except another name for the use of positive reinforcement?’ ” [Tim Wu, “Bigger Brother,” The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020]

2. “It is Freud’s honesty that rises above his ambitions as a scientist and forces him to acknowledge that this thing called transference-love is a pretty wobbly notion, if not a cover-up for the attraction that develops between a man and a woman who meet every day in a small room and talk about intimate things while one of them is lying down.” [Janet Malcolm, “Lovesick,” The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020]

3. “Love as we experience it is love for the Unattainable Lady, the Iseult who is ‘ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing and almost hostile in a fellow-being, that which indeed incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself.’ ” [John Updike, “More Love in the Western World,” The New Yorker, August 24, 1963).

Bread, Bread, Bread

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

Reading Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020), I recalled two other excellent New Yorker “bread” pieces: Lauren Collins’ “Bread Winner” (December 3, 2012) and Adam Gopnik’s “Bread and Women” (November 4, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Buford’s “Good Bread” is about his apprenticeship to a Lyon bread maker identified simply as “Bob.” Here’s his description of Bob’s boulangerie:

By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands. Everyone left with an armful and with the same look, suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. It was a lesson in the appeal of good bread—handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday in Lyon.

Collins’ “Bread Winner” profiles Apollonia Poilâne, “C.E.O. of the company that for eight decades has made Paris’s most celebrated bread.” Collins says of Poilâne,

Thin, pale, and refined, Apollonia—more of a baguette of a woman than a miche—is a formidable presence. She dispenses her opinions with the peremptory air of a mother-in-law giving child-care advice. She makes recommendations with the efficient gravity of a doctor writing a prescription. Still, she projects a mixture of innocence and experience. Her eyes are often hooded, from fatigue, but so are her sweatshirts. “I have a very instinctive and simple approach to bread,” she told me. “My philosophy is a small array of breads, each with its own use. I do not believe in making one bread with hazelnuts, one with almonds, and one with cumin, just for the hell of it.” Her other prejudices include breads that contain meats (“doughy and nasty”), breads that contain cheeses (“frivolous”), breads that contain novelty ingredients, such as algae (“not very relevant”), “organic” breads (“I don’t believe in paying money to some guy sitting behind a desk to certify something, when my father and grandfather before me were working very closely with their suppliers to make sure there were as few pesticides as possible”), panini (“pointless”), bakeries that sell soda (“drives me nuts”), and the French habit of eating foie gras with gingerbread (“fucking disgusting”).

Gopnik’s “Bread and Women” tells about a weekend he spent with his mother, learning how to bake bread. He says,

As we mixed and kneaded, the comforting sounds of my childhood reasserted themselves: the steady hum of the powerful electric mixer my mother uses, the dough hook humming and coughing as it turned, and, in harmony with it, the sound of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the background, offering its perpetual mixture of grave-sounding news and bright-sounding Baroque music. (A certain kind of Canadian keeps the CBC on from early morning to bedtime, indiscriminately.)

All three of these pieces are wonderfully evocative. For example, here’s Buford’s account of accompanying Bob on one of his delivery rounds:

Bob drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The first stop was L’Harmonie des Vins, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy preparing for the lunch service but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced, Bob’s new student, quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out. Next: La Quintessence, a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction, the bag drop, kisses, out. We crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, trying to keep up: Les Oliviers (“Exceptional food”—a double pump—“Michelin-listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, bag drop, high-fives, out.

Here’s Collins’ description of Poilâne’s manufactory:

A baker was sliding a batch of pale miches into the oven with a wooden paddle the length of an oar. He and his apprentice wore canvas shoes, white shorts, and white T-shirts. They looked like tennis pros. The air was warm, with a breakfasty smell. The oven roared. To make the loaves, the bakers had churned flour, water, and salt in a mechanical mixer. (It’s like a KitchenAid, but many times larger.) After letting the dough rise in a wooden box, they shaped it by hand, then let it rest a second time. Finally, the master baker used a razor blade to score the top of each loaf with the signature “P.” (The practice, known as “docking,” insures that the loaf doesn’t burst while it’s baking.)

And here’s Gopnik’s description of bread dough's feel:

I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merging into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective intelligence of all those little bugs. Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.

You can tell from the sensuousness of their descriptions that all three of these writers love bread. Buford says of a roll he’s served at Boulangerie Vincent in Le Bourget-du-Lac:

It had the flavors that I had tasted at breakfast. I asked for another roll, broke it open, and stuck my nose into la mie, the crumb—Frederick’s routine. It smelled of yeast and oven-caramelized aromas, and of something else, an evocative fruitiness. I closed my eyes. Bob.

Collins says of Poilâne’s signature loaf: 

A Poilâne miche brings to mind something with which a troubadour might have sopped up broth at a medieval tavern. It reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings.

Gopnik describes the smell of baking bread:

Then, there are the smells. There’s the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-my-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bread smell that comes from the oven as it bakes. The deepest sensual pleasure of bread occurs not when tasting but when slicing, cutting into softness that has suddenly gained structure: the pile of yeasty dough, after its time in the hot oven, turned into a little house, with a crisp solid roof and a yielding interior of inner space. 

Mmm, so good! These three “bread” pieces are double bliss: the subject is delicious; the writing is divine.