Two Excellent Critical Pieces

Camille Pissarro, Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873)

I want to note the recent appearance of two extraordinary essay-reviews by two of my favorite writers: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Wendell Berry’s High Horse” (The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2020) and T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020). 

Klinkenborg’s piece is a biting critique of Wendell Berry’s collected essays What I Stand On. “All too often,” Klinkenborg says, “I’m disturbed, to the point of physical unease, by the involuted, strangely patristic way his writing and thinking move.” He says that Berry “often fails to do the first important job of a writer – ‘even’ a nonfiction writer – which is to make sentences that breathe with the life of the body, even when that body happens to be thinking.” He notes “the extraordinarily high degree of abstraction and generalization” in Berry’s prose. Klinkenborg’s close analysis of Berry’s sentences is thrilling. So is his skewering of the way Berry uses metaphor:

There’s also a kind of skittering in The Long-Legged House that reminds me of Thoreau – an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge. You can hear a version of this in the way that Thoreau – like Berry – uses metaphor. The instantaneous fusion of resemblance and dissonance that I hope to find in a good metaphor – the suddenness of perception – isn’t much use to Thoreau, because he it’s hard to moralize one that works that way. Every actual thing in his prose seems to quiver with the desire to become metaphorical or symbolic, like the dead horse in Walden whose strong scent causes Thoreau to think of the myriads of creatures squashed and gobbled and “run over in the road,” ending in a vision of “universal innocence.” It’s a relief when things remain merely themselves.

That “an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge” is brilliant! The whole piece is brilliant – a vigorous application of the dictum that Klinkenborg set out in his great Several short sentences about writing (2012): The goal is “To get your words, your phrases, as close as you can to the solidity of the world your noticing.”

T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” is a wonderful comparative analysis of Pissarro and Cézanne. It brims with delicious description. Clark says of Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873),

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.

Yes, and there are many such wonders in Clark’s piece, too. Here’s another – a comparison of Pissarro’s Louveciennes (1871) with Cézanne’s Louveciennes (c.1873):

Colour in the Cézanne is not primarily an aspect – a felt reality – of an atmosphere: it adheres somewhat perfunctorily to things. Look, for example, at the yellows and oranges on the old bulwark at the side of the road, or the yellows and browns making the screen of trees to the right of the two figures, over the low wall. Equally, space in Cézanne’s copy is not a filled emptiness. It is not something grounded and contained. It does not approach the viewer along the modest dirt road, across a solid proximity, offering us a way into the illusion. ‘Way’ is a notion foreign to Cézanne’s vision. Where in general we might be in space is an enigma in the copy: the houses in the distance in the original enter a kind of non-distance, or anti-distance, when Cézanne redoes them – not that that means they are nearer, more tangible. The highest house is an epitome of this. Cézanne takes Pissarro’s gentle indications of a road climbing the hill to the house and zigzagging left towards it, and turns the whole collocation into a crisp folding of edges and collision of overlapping planes.

Who would not want such sublime writing to continue forever? Reading “Strange Apprentice,” I found myself slowing down to prolong the pleasure. I didn’t want it to end.

Both these splendid pieces went straight into my personal anthology of great criticism.

Martin Amis's Searing "Koba the Dread" (Contra Giles Harvey)

 

Giles Harvey, in his recent New Yorker review of Martin Amis’s new novel Inside Story (“Last Laugh," October 26, 2020), says of Amis’s Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), “The whole thing felt less like a stand on principle than like a way to demonstrate that Amis had transitioned from erotic jester to moral and intellectual heavyweight, someone capable of holding his own on matters of world history.” Well, it doesn’t feel that way to me. When I read Koba, I feel the heat of its anger – anger at all the “fucking fools” (Robert Conquest’s words, quoted by Amis) who lauded the “Soviet experiment.” Some experiment! It resulted in the extermination of at least twenty million people. Those “fucking fools” include a lot of people who should’ve known better – H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A. J. Ayer, Eric Hobsbawm, Edmund Wilson, Hugh MacDiarmid, Christopher Hitchens, among others. The world offered a choice between two realities, and these so-called “brains” chose the wrong one.

Amis is relentless in his documentation of Stalin’s barbarity. For example, he writes, “Imagine the mass of the glove that Stalin swiped across your face; imagine the mass of it.” To this he appends a searing footnote:

It will be as well, here, to get a foretaste of his rigor. The fate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a famous Red commander in the Civil War, was ordinary enough, and that of his family was too. Tukhachevsky was arrested in 1937, tortured (his interrogation protocols were stained with drops of “flying” blood, suggesting that his head was in rapid motion at the time), farcically arraigned, and duly executed. Moreover (this is Robert C. Tucker’s précis in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-41): “His wife and daughter returned to Moscow where she was arrested a day or two later along with Tukhachevsky’s mother, sisters, and brothers Nikolai and Alexander. Later his wife and both brothers were killed on Stalin’s orders, three sisters were sent to camps, his young daughter Svetlana was placed in a home for children of ‘enemies of the people’ and arrested and sent to a camp on reaching the age of seventeen, and his mother and one sister died in exile.”

Koba the Dread is a powerful indictment of Stalinism, written in fierce unforgettable prose. Samples:

Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag.

The tortures described by Solzhenitsyn are unendurable. This reader has endured none of them; and I will proceed with caution and unease. It feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction.

Of course, the figures are still not secure, and they vary dismayingly. But these are not the “imaginary” zeros of the millennium, and we we will certainly need seven of them in our inventory of the Soviet experiment. We badly need to know the numbers of the dead. More than this, we need to know their names. And the dead, too, need us to know their names. 

Is there a moral difference between the Nazi doctor (the white coat, the black boots, the pellets of Zyklon B) and the blood-bespattered interrogator in the penalty camp of Orotukan? 

But Stalin, in the execution of the broad brushstrokes of his hate, had weapons that Hitler did not have.

He would not accept reality. He would break it.

This, perhaps, is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal moral gangrene of Stalinism.

Congress of Vultures, one might say, after briefly consulting the reality of the countryside – or Congress of Vampires. And Congress of Vaudevillians, too: in January/February 1934 the Party began to absent itself from actuality. It entered the psychotheater in Stalin’s head.For Stalin, power was a thing of the senses and the membranes. And he invariably sought the upper limit.

Nor should we neglect the obvious point – that Stalin did it because Stalin liked it. He couldn’t help himself. The Terror was, in part, an episode of sensual indulgence. It was a bacchanal whose stimulant was power.

And although Hitler’s invigilation of the citizenry was intimidating and persistent, he did not go out of his way, as Stalin did, to create a circumambience of nausea and fear.

Paul Berman, in his “A Million Deaths Is Not a Statistic” (The New York Times, July 28, 2002), says Koba the Dread “carries a punch, artfully delivered.” I agree. It’s the same kind of punch Amis delivers in his literary criticism: see, for example, his brilliant, jabbing, stinging “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a ferocious defence of Philip Larkin. 

Koba the Dread’s punch comes from looking at Stalinism and finding fresh ways to describe its evil: “The shoes: sections of old car tire, secured with wire or an electrical cord”; “A group of prisoners at Kolyma were hungry enough to eat a horse that had been dead for more than a week (despite the stench and the infestation of flies and maggots)”; “The hospitals were themselves deathtraps, but inert deathtraps. A man chopped off half his foot to get in there. And prisoners cultivated infections, feeding saliva, pus or kerosene to their wounds.”

Reading Giles Harvey’s facile comment above, I question whether he actually read Amis’s book. 

Scott Frank's Wonderful "The Queen's Gambit"

Rachel Syme, in her recent newyorker.com post, calls The Queen's Gambit “the most satisfying show on television.” I agree. Set in the 1960s, the series tells the story of Beth Harmon (played superbly by Anya Taylor-Joy), a child prodigy who discovers how to play chess in a Kentucky orphanage. Despite addictions to alcohol and tranquilizers, Beth plays and trains obsessively, rising through the ranks until she faces the world’s best in Moscow.

The show has a ravishing look. The chess tournaments are set in gorgeous locales and Beth’s clothes are spectacularly chic. Syme says,

In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. “The Queen’s Gambit,” instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style.

An unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style – this sums up The Queen’s Gambit beautifully.

November 9, 2020 Issue

Two delightful sentences in this week’s “Goings On About Town”:

1. The bright moments—including the fragments of sampled speech, rapidly chopped up, that bracket the album—make up for Lopatin’s overreliance on sad robot voices. – Michaelangelo Matos, “Music: Oneohtrix Point Never”

2. A group of thirtysomethings celebrating a birthday plucked a bunch of eerily fresh-looking calla lilies out of a public trash can. – Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two: The Odeon” 

I relish the Matos construction for its surreal elements - "fragments of sampled speech, rapidly chopped up," "sad robot voices." Goldfield's conjures a sweet image of found poetry. Both are marvelous!

November 2, 2020 Issue

This week’s New Yorker contains an excellent short story – Curtis Sittenfeld’s “A for Alone.” It’s about an artist named Irene who’s doing a project on the so-called Billy Graham/Mike Pence rule that if you’re a married man, you don’t spend time alone with another woman. I confess I wasn't aware of such a rule before I read this story. But after I finished it, I googled the rule, and it turns out it actually exists. That’s one of the things I like about the story. It doesn’t feel invented; it feels quite real, quite plausible. Irene’s project involves inviting men to lunch, asking them to fill out a handwritten questionnaire, and taking a Polaroid photo of them. This project flares into an affair with one of her interview subjects, a geologist named Jack (“Man No. 6”). 

I devoured this story. It intrigued me; it excited me; and I found myself mirroring off the character Jack. Does the story prove the rule's validity? Maybe, but it also shows it to be, as Jack says, “so depressingly heteronormative.” The piece brims with wonderful lines. I think my favorite is “She wants his questionnaire to impart some central truth, to give her closure, and, while it’s nice, the niceness pales in comparison with what he said moments after filling it out—‘It’s you specifically’—or the many ardent declarations of devotion in the months that followed.” Sittenfeld’s return to Jack’s questionnaire after the affair suddenly ends is inspired. The whole story is inspired – one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

Brody Distorts Kael

Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz

I see Richard Brody is at it again – distorting Pauline Kael’s great “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 1971). In his “Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over Citizen Kane” (newyorker.com, November 14, 2020), he says that Kael “argued that much of what’s great about Citizen Kane in fact arose not from Welles but from the contributions of Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast and crew.” Wrong! Kael never said that. What she said is this: “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” That’s the exact opposite of what Brody says she said. In case there’s any doubt about Kael’s position, she went on to say, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he [Welles] took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” Where are The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checkers? Anytime Brody refers to Kael, he should be checked. He seems incapable of accurately stating her views. 

Jimmy Jim

Jimmy Jim MacAulay (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

 

1.

Today is Remembrance Day. It puts me in mind of a WWI veteran I was privileged to know. His name is Jimmy Jim MacAulay. He died in 1999 at the age of ninety-eight. He was a soldier, horseman, rumrunner, fish peddler, woodsman, Irish moss harvester, and a member of the French Legion of Honour. He had blue eyes, long ski-jump nose, narrow jutting chin, and wispy white hair, He was full of stories, enjoyed conversation, and had a ready laugh. He was tall, big-boned, broad-shouldered. How strong was he? Strong enough to lift the back end of our blue Chevette (with me in it!) and swing it clear of the snowdrift in which it was stuck. He dressed in wool – plaid shirts, wool pants, wool socks. He wore high, black rubber boots. He did things the old way. In the fall, he banked the trailer he lived in with seaweed; he ate potted meat; he drove a horse-and-cart; smoked a pipe.

2.

Jimmy Jim scraped his chair back from the table. “Jim will have his pie now,” he said. 

Lorna and I laughed. “Sorry, Jim. We haven’t got much in the line of desserts,” Lorna said. “How about a dish of strawberries?” 

Jim laughed. “No pie for Jim,” he said. “That’s okay. Strawberries aren’t hard to take. Jim forgot his manners.”

This was the first time we’d had Jim over for supper.

3.

We were in a bit of a pickle that’s for sure. We’d let two Clydesdales – a mare and her colt, both about the same size – out into a fenced field behind the shed where they were kept. These horses were handsome to look at, chestnut with cream-colored manes and tails, but once loosed in the yard they began trotting around real frisky-like, shaking their heads, snuffling their noses, showing no interest in allowing us to get anywhere near them. 

They were big, barrel-chested horses with enormous hooves and broad, muscly behinds. I’d estimate they each weighed about two thousand pounds. We watched them run around for a while. That’s why we’d let them out in the first place – so we could observe them, particularly the colt, which was for sale. My biggest fear was getting knocked down and trampled. It felt like being in a circus ring with a couple of stampeding elephants. 

We stayed in the center of the yard, and the horses trotted along the fence. After while, we decided we’d seen enough and we tried to shoo them back into the shed. We clapped our hands and yelled at them, “Hey, okay, let’s go, get back in there, c’mon, let’s go, get going” – all to no avail. They weren’t going back in. That’s the last thing those big critters wanted to do. They just got more skitterish and started galloping along the fence down into the far corner of the field. 

Jim went inside the shed and came out with a coil of rope, tied a lasso knot in it and walked down towards the horses. They were standing there, watching him approach. Suddenly, the colt bolted towards him. Jim calmly side-stepped him and kept walking towards the mare. Now he was talking to the mare, “Settle down there now, settle down, that’s the way.” He walked right up to her, took hold of her bridle, and led her along the fence and back inside the shed. He made it look pretty easy. But I had a feeling that catching that other one wouldn’t go as smooth, and I was right.

4. 

Relaxation on the back step, Jim’s aromatic pipe smoke, barn swallows dipping low over the stubble field, and the evening sun’s orange slanting rays mingle to dissolve the day’s anxieties. Jim needs an ole plug,” Jim says. He means an old horse. We’ve had this conversation before, Jim and I. He’s been horseless for about a month, ever since old Bob went lame and Jim sold him to the meat packers. Now Jim hankers for a replacement. He’s superstitious about being without one.

So it was, one Saturday in June, he and I drove up West to look for an ole plug. “Where up West?” I asked him, as we drove. 

“Profits Corner.” 

“Never heard of it.” 

“Don’t worry,” he said, “Jimmy knows.” And so I guess I just had to have faith he did know. But how could he? He hadn’t been up this way in decades. He used to harvest moss in Skinners Pond, he told me. Okay, I thought, I’ll go along with the gag. It’s a beautiful day for a drive. So we rolled along, Jim’s rangy, six-foot frame wedged into the Chevette’s tiny front seat, his eagle-like head alertly looking out at the passing countryside.

5. 

One day Jim’s dog Butch was hit by a car and crawled under our front step. I went in under and gently pulled him out. He was bleeding badly from the hind quarters. Lorna told Jim and the three of us took Butch into the vet in Charlottetown and got him stitched up. That’s how we came to know Jim. After that, every now and then, we’d invite him over for supper. He’d tell us stories. He was like a pump – story after story flowed out of him. 

He talked about what it was like as a kid in the orphanage in Charlottetown, getting his backside whipped with cat o’ nine tails. He told us about being in a trench in France and when the tarp was pulled back in the morning how the rats came tumbling in and all the soldiers pumped their legs up and down to squash them. I remember Jim chuckling when he finished that story and saying, “Jim nearly messed himself.” He often referred to himself in the third person. 

He talked about riding the rails West for the grain harvest, working for Captain Dick, hauling puncheons of rum off the boats and hiding them in the marsh at Covehead Harbour, breaking logjams on the Miramichi, working at the Saint John dry-dock, leaving the bootlegger’s full as an egg, crawling home between the potato drills in pitch darkness. I didn’t believe everything he said. It didn’t matter, really. His eyes sparkled, he laughed a lot. It was a pleasure just to hang out with him. 

6.

“Try in there,” Jim says, nodding at a big farmhouse and barn close to the road on our left. 

“Profits?” I ask.

 

Jim is chuckling: “We’ll see if old Jim’s memory is any good. Maybe old Jim dreamed it.”

I pulled into the yard. There was a long, low-slung, weather-beaten barn nearby. We got out of the car. A man in his mid-thirties came out the back door of the house and approached us. 

“Hi,” I say. “Know anybody who might want to sell a horse?”

 

The guy looked at me. He looked at Jim. Jim was looking at the dark, open door to the barn. He said to Jim: “I know you, don’t I?”

 

“I used to peddle fish up this way,” Jim said.

 

“Right enough,” the fellow said, smiling. “I remember you. I was just a kid. You had a beauty team of horses, flashy harness, and a rubber-wheeled cart, and you wore a long black leather coat.” 

I was visualizing this picture of Jim standing in this yard probably twenty years ago, and at the same time I was marveling at the man’s recall, and the glorious happenstance that put the two of them back in this same yard this morning. 

“I’ll show you our horses,” the fellow said. “I’m Robert Profit.”  

We followed Robert into the barn, into a horse-smelling, straw-stuffed world of empty stalls. We walked the length of the barn, along high-walled pens made of worn boards, side-by-side, both sides of the passageway, to the gold waterfall of light at the end. One occupant, in the second to last stall, a compact red-eyed, rough-haired stud, tried to kick his stall apart as we passed by. As we emerged into the sunlight, Robert reached up and lifted a metal pail from a nail, brought it down to his side, and strode out a ways from the barn into the field, which seemed vast as an ocean. He banged the pail hard with his open palm. He kept banging. Far in the distance, where the blue sky and the green field met, I could see black specks steadily growing in size, taking the shape of … horses. Then I felt their motion. Yes, felt it. The grassy ground beneath my feet was vibrating. They were getting close. Enormous! Giants! Beautiful black Percherons. Six of them. They were ponderously galloping straight toward us, jarring the earth, laying down a beat I could feel in my bones. They stopped maybe twenty feet in front of us, blowing, shaking, shining, rippling.

Robert stepped forward and patted the shoulder of one. “This here one weighs three thousand pounds. He likes his oats, don’t you, ole boy. This here’s their oat bucket.” Jim went right out amongst them, rubbing their sides, their noses. “Too much horse for Jim,” Jim said. “All Jim needs is an ole plug.” 

We said good-bye to Robert. He thought we might have some luck up by Skinner’s Pond. “Good to meet you ... again,” Robert said to Jim. They shook hands. “Take care,” Robert said. Back in the Chevette, the sweet leathery scent of the horses traveling with us, we continued our trip westward, the beat of heavy black hooves drumming in our ears.

7.

Some things Jimmy Jim told me:

Cubans mix dope with their tobacco to make cigars. 

Beet beer vanishes from the blood stream fifteen minutes after you drink it. 

Death by firing squad is death from a single bullet. Five of the six shooters fire blanks.

The rumrunner, who, at one time, owned Dalvay-by-the-Sea, was shot by the naval authorities on a dock in Halifax for servicing a German submarine. 

Whiskey fixes everything. 

8. 

Memory within memory, and all of it fading fast! This horse-buying trip up West with Jimmy Jim happened almost forty years ago and the stories he told me took place long before that. I’m a little hazy on how we ended up at the spot where we let the two Clydesdales out in the field. I’m not even sure of the name of the community. We’d stopped at various places and asked if anyone knew of any horses for sale. We ended up at this house with a shed out back containing the two Clydesdales. It might’ve been in St. Louis. Anyway, I remember the fellow who owned them taking us out to the shed. I believe he said the colt was for sale for $800. He said he and his family were going to a wedding, but that we were welcome to stick around and look at the horses and that, if we wanted to, we could let them out into the field to get a better look at them. And that’s how we ended up in that fix I mentioned earlier. Jim managed to get the mare back in the shed. But the colt was balking. He was enjoying his freedom and wasn’t in any hurry to give it up. Jim was still carrying the rope he’d found in the shed. The colt was down by the fence at the end of the field. Jim walked toward it. The colt eyed him, kicked out his back legs and took off, galloping along the fence as far as he could go, turned, and charged straight at Jim. Jim stepped a few feet to one side, and swung the rope above his head. As the colt drew abreast of him, he cast the loop over the colt’s head. The colt kept going, pulling Jim behind him. Jim leaned back, dug in his heels. Still, he was dragged. I ran over to them, yelling, “Whoa! Whoa!” The colt was slowing. Jim was pulling back on the rope with all he had. Finally, the colt stopped. Jim led him back to the shed, put him in his stall, shut the door, and fastened it. “Too much horse for Jim,” he said. 

9.

On the way home that day, Jim told me a story about the time he was harvesting Irish moss. I believe he said it was in Skinner’s Pond or in that area. It was after a bad storm and the sea was still running high. There was a large amount of moss floating out in the water. Trying to 

reach it, Jim, his horse, and the big metal basket that the horse was pulling behind it, were caught in a heavy undertow and were pulled out into deep, rough water. Jim hung on to the reins. The horse swam mightily, and even with Jim’s weight and the weight of the metal basket dragging it down, it managed to get close enough to shore for Jim to get his footing. After a long struggle, Jim reached the beach. But the horse got swept out again and drowned. “That horse saved ole Jimmy’s life,” Jim said. 

10. 

Jim died on April 19, 1999.  The headline of the piece in the Guardian read, “Island’s last WWI veteran dies at 98.” Ninety-eight! That would’ve made him eighty-one when we took that West Prince horse-buying trip. Eighty-one years of age, roping that skittish Clydesdale, hanging on tight, as it dragged him across the field!

A few summers ago, Lorna and I biked over to Corran Ban cemetery to see Jim’s grave. At first, we couldn’t find the marker. Then Lorna spotted it near the fence, in the shade of a green ash and a small-leafed linden: 

MACAULAY

Sir James Allen

May 17, 1900

April 19, 1999

Last Veteran of

First World War

Lest We Forget

Above his name, etched in the stone’s polished surface, was the image of a horse’s head. 

Down with "Dialogical"

Van Gogh, from letter to Émile Bernard, March 18, 1888

“Dialogical” – what an ugly word! It sounds like something left over from the wastelands of Soviet industrialism. It’s like a cross between “dialectical” and “diabolical.” It's like the sluggish churning sound of an old washing machine - dialogical dialogical dialogical. Patrick Grant, in his The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (2014), uses it to describe Van Gogh’s writing. He suggests that “a dialogical interplay among religion, morality, and art provides an implicit, quasi-narrative structure to the correspondence.” He refers to “the dialogical evolution of Van Gogh’s thinking.” He views the shifts in Van Gogh’s idealism as a “dialogical process.” He refers to “the dialogical complexities of Van Gogh’s writing.” He talks about “the dialogical transformations that the letters record.” That’s a lot of “dialogical” to digest. What does it mean? I think it stems from the word “dialogue,” as in a dialogue between religion and morality or a dialogue between morality and art. Grant’s theory is that Van Gogh’s writing embodies such dialogues. Okay, I get it. Analytically, "dialogical" might be justified. Aesthetically - as a description of Van Gogh's glorious, direct, spontaneous, talking letters - it's a dud. 

Movie Love

My father taught me many things – how to ride a bike, how to catch and throw a baseball, how to tie a necktie, how to swim, how to throw a Frisbee, the pleasure of drinking Beaujolais, the pleasure of listening to jazz piano, and many other things. He also introduced me to the pleasure of movies. That happened in 1967. I was fourteen; he was thirty-seven. We lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. He took me to at least three movies that year – Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, and In the Heat of the Night. They impressed me immensely. There’s a scene in Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman eats a whole lot of boiled eggs. I’ve never forgotten it. Newman is my father’s favorite actor. He’s one of mine, too. But that year, the actor who made the strongest impression on me was Rod Steiger. As the blundering Mississippi police chief in In the Heat of the Night, he was transfixing. 

What did Pauline Kael think of these three movies? Kael’s writing was unknown to me in 1967; I discovered it nine years later, when I started reading The New Yorker. She disliked Cool Hand Luke, calling it “a tearjerker for hip high-school students” (“The Freedom to Make Product,” The New Yorker, March 16, 1968). Of In the Heat of the Night, she said, it “isn’t in itself a particularly important movie; amazingly alive photographically, it’s an entertaining, somewhat messed-up comedy-thriller” (“Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Going Steady, 1970). Of Bonnie and Clyde, she wrote, “I think that Bonnie and Clyde, though flawed, is a work of art” (“Bonnie and Clyde,” The New Yorker, October 21, 1967). 

All three of these movies are significant to me. They hooked me on the pleasures of cinema, an addiction that – half a century later – still grips me. 

John Updike and the Meaning of "The Thing Itself"

Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin (1974)

What did John Updike mean by “the thing itself”? He uses the phrase in at least three pieces:

1. In “Journeyers” (The New Yorker, March 10, 1980; included in his 1983 collection Hugging the Shore), he said,

The literary problem faced by travel writers differs from that of fictionists and poets, whose material arrives mercifully thinned and pruned by the limitations of imagination and memory. A travel writer, notebook in hand, confronts the thing itself – immense, multiform, contradictory, numbing. 

I believe what Updike is referring to here is the raw ore of reality, unprocessed by memory or imagination – the thing itself. 

2. In “A Case of Monumentality” (originally published in the 1994 anthology Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, edited by Edward Hirsch; later included in Updike’s 1999 More Matter, and in his posthumous 2012 collection Always Looking, edited by Christopher Carduff), he wrote,

Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1975) stands in the Art Institute of Chicago’s palatial halls like a Cyclopean, ten-foot-tall security guard, his gracefully tapered legs braced apart, his spring ready to snap. But the resemblance is incidental, we feel; Oldenburg is too much the engineer and architectural draftsman to be after anything less than the Ding an sich, the thing itself. His plaster hamburgers, his canvas telephones, his giant typewriter-erasers and baseball bats and electrical switches and plugs all have an elemental solemnity that disdains anthropomorphism and beckons us into the mute, inhuman world of artifacts. Oldenburg’s sculptures look made, and concern made things.

Later, in the same piece, he said, 

The mute significance of things gives the visual arts their inexhaustible impetus; the visible world, so abundant and heedless around us, is processed by the painter’s or sculptor’s hand, and becomes understood. This act of understanding is the light that representation gives off, and that draws millions to rotate through museums, delighting in recognitions. We recognize the clothespin, even though it has been idealized in Cor-ten and stainless steel, enlarged in size, and placed upside down from the way we usually see it on the clothesline. The recognition is fringed and flavored by what art history we possess – by whatever analogies to the Eiffel Tower or Brancusi’s Kiss arise – but there is no escaping the Ding an sich. 

Here, I think, Updike uses “the thing itself” to convey the most basic, literal, unfiltered way of seeing: Oldenburg’s beautiful giant clothespin not as symbol or metaphor, but simply as itself – the thing itself.

3. In “The Thing Itself” (The New York Review of Books, November 29, 2001; included in his 2007 collection Due Considerations), a wonderful review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, he said,

These landscapes are astonishing in their breadth and intensity; though the wall commentary and the catalogue speak of Northern traditions of landscape versus Southern traditions, the viewer feels confronted with the thing itself, the Alpine landscapes first beheld, in their airy vastness and elevation of view, by a visitor from the Lowlands.

“The thing itself,” in this context, means reality, or as close to reality as painting can get. It means the Bruegel paintings seen not in terms of theory (“Northern traditions of landscape versus Southern traditions”), but as revelations of the real. How I love that “the viewer feels confronted with the thing itself.” For me, it’s realism’s ultimate compliment.

October 26, 2020 Issue

What’s so great about autofiction? I wish Giles Harvey, in his absorbing “Last Laugh,” a review of Martin Amis’s new novel Inside Story, in this week’s issue, had addressed that question. Comparing Inside Story to Amis’s earlier Experience, he says it “often feels like something of a sequel—or, at certain moments, a remake or a director’s cut.” But hold on – Experience is a memoir; Inside Story is a novel. Reading the former, I expect accuracy; reading the latter, I expect … what? Not accuracy. Harvey quotes Amis describing Inside Story as “not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical.” For me, “fairly strictly” doesn’t cut it. It signals unreliability. Harvey says that the narrator of Inside Story is called Martin Amis, and “much of what he relates—about his life, his career, and his illustrious inner circle—is verifiably unmade-up.” Much of what he relates – okay, but much isn’t all. And it’s that residue of fiction that spoils the mix for me. I know I sound puritanical on this subject of fact versus fiction. But when a writer is dealing with real-life people and real-life events, I think he has a duty to tell it straight.

Best of the Decade: #2 Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul"

Photo by Victor J. Blue, from Luke Mogelson's "The Avengers of Mosul"

“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 #2 pick – Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017).

“The Avengers of Mosul” is a brilliant, brutal, immersive account of Mogelson’s experience traveling with an Iraqi police unit called the Nineveh Province SWAT team, made up almost entirely of native sons of Mosul, as they fight to liberate their city from ISIS occupation. The piece is divided into four sections: (1) “Up the Tigris”; (2) “Entering the City”; (3) “A Respite from Battle”; and (4) “Urban Combat.”

The first section, “Up the Tigris,” opens with the SWAT team located in the village of Kharbardan, anxiously awaiting orders to join the assault on ISIS-held Mosul. The orders come, and the SWAT team moves up the eastern bank of the Tigris River, helping the Ninety-first Brigade of the Iraqi Army’s 16th Division clear half a dozen villages of ISIS occupants. The Brigade halts outside the village of Salahiya. The SWAT team continues into town on its own. Mogelson writes,

We accelerated into the lead, hurtling down alleys and whipping around corners. I was impressed that the driver could steer at all. The bulletproof windshield, cracked by past rounds, looked like battered ice, and a large photograph of a recently killed SWAT-team member obstructed much of the view.

In the second section, “Entering the City,” the SWAT team is stationed in Shaymaa, a neighborhood on Mosul’s southeastern edge. Mogelson travels to an aid station set up outside Shaymaa by the 9th Division. He describes the arrival of injured soldiers:

A Humvee belonging to an infantry unit that was working with the 9th Division parked outside the aid station and unloaded a soldier whose left arm was open to the bone. His face was raw with burns; he was unconscious, and snorting loudly through his nose.

After several days at the aid station, Mogelson catches a ride to a SWAT-team position inside Shaymaa. He writes,

Upstairs, we found First Lieutenant Omar Ibrahim hunched below a shattered window. An oblong hole gaped in the cinder-block wall behind him, where a rocket-propelled grenade had exploded the day before. Omar was one of the only men in the unit whom I’d never heard raise his voice—he rarely spoke at all—and he recounted the grenade incident with sangfroid.

“They’re very close,” he said.

Peeking over the windowsill, we could glimpse dense blocks of identical-looking houses with water tanks on their roofs, the domes and minarets of mosques scattered here and there. One of the houses belonged to Dumbuk’s uncle and cousins; another held Hadi’s wife and daughter. ISIS and the men’s loved ones were in the same place, but ISIS was too close and their loved ones were too far away.

That night, gunmen attacking the SWAT team’s line approached so near that we could hear them crying “Allahu Akbar!” Bullets whistled overhead; red tracers arced and disappeared. In the morning, rounds smacked against the walls of the house occupied by Mezher [Major Mezher Sadoon, the SWAT team’s deputy commander], and a mortar rattled the windows. To the east, two enormous blasts preceded two enormous plumes.

The 9th Division asks the SWAT team to help it capture the adjoining neighborhood of Intisar, where ISIS resistance is fierce. The SWAT team enters Intisar and is nearly decimated. Mogelson reports,

Of the forty-odd men who’d been in Intisar, twenty-two had been seriously injured and two killed. Nearly everyone else was hurt to some degree. Four of the swat team’s seven Humvees had been destroyed and abandoned on the battlefield. Two others were out of commission. Later that night, I met Rayyan [Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, commander of the SWAT team]] in the house where he was staying, by himself. His eyes downcast, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “They defeated us.”

In the third section, “A Respite From Battle,” the SWAT team is given a week off. Mogelson visits the father and siblings of a SWAT-team member named Souhel Najem in a camp for internally displaced people (I.D.P.s), “a vast grid of white tents enclosed by cyclone fencing,” in a village called Hassan Sham. The next day, he visits Corporal Bilal, a forty-year-old member of the SWAT team, at a private acute care hospital in Erbil. Bilal’s hand had been nearly severed by a suicide truck explosion in Intisar. Mogelson writes,

I found Bilal in an electrically reclining bed. The air in the room smelled mildly of rot. His left hand was splinted and bandaged; long metal pins protruded from it. His thumb, his ring finger, and his little finger were black. I asked the obvious question. When would the fingers be amputated?

“They were supposed to do it three days ago,” Bilal said. “The problem is, I don’t have the money because our salaries are late.”

The next afternoon, Bilal’s doctor agrees to perform the surgery, with the understanding that Bilal will pay at a future date. Mogelson says, “The black fingers were amputated successfully. By then, however, the necrosis had spread, and another operation was required to remove the entire hand.”

The last section, “Urban Combat,” chronicles Mogelson’s experience as he follows the SWAT team back into battle, this time in a part of Mosul known as Gogjali. Mogelson writes,

To reach the SWAT team’s new positions, my interpreter and I drove down Highway 2 until we reached a berm that had been heaped across the lanes, and then turned left onto an unpaved road with a decapitated corpse lying in the middle of it. Stray dogs picked at the body; children played nearby. The unpaved road paralleled the cemetery, which lay behind a row of houses. At the end of the row, a perpendicular alley offered a sight line to the brown field of tombstones and, beyond it, the buildings in Al Quds. The SWAT team was in a house on the other side of the alley.

ISIS snipers shoot at the house:

The snipers eventually quit for the night, but they resumed with gusto in the morning. The SWAT-team members who were not stationed on the roof went to the road behind the house. Bullets zinged up the alley leading to the cemetery. Every now and then, the men backed a Humvee into the alley and aimed a few bursts from the Dushka at Al Quds; they also launched grenades from a turret-mounted MK19. The moment the Humvee pulled back behind cover, more bullets hit the house and the houses around it. They kicked up dirt and slapped against walls. They pierced an empty fuel tanker. They shook the branches of a tree and cut down leaves. They ricocheted off power-line poles, ringing them like bells.

The SWAT team is deployed to Aden, a neighborhood west of Gogjali. One of its positions is a school. Mogelson writes,

The school was a large two-story building that jutted into the clearing—and therefore was exposed on three sides. We had to duck low while climbing an exterior staircase. A corridor ran the length of the second floor, ending at an open doorframe that gave onto a landing. A bedsheet had been hung from the frame, but you still had to hew to the corridor walls, because the snipers in Akha [a nearby neighborhood] sometimes shot through the sheet.

Mogelson crawls on his stomach under the bedsheet. He describes what he sees:

Outside, two machine guns were propped, on bipods, in front of small holes in a waist-high wall. The floor was covered with spent ammunition. Peering through a hole, I could see the houses across the clearing and, behind them, the yellow dome of a mosque. Souhel [a SWAT-team member] drew my attention to a house with a corrugated-tin roof and several square windows missing their panes.

“There are three ISIS in there,” he said.

While Mogelson is in the school, a mortar lands “so thunderously that we thought, mistakenly, that it had hit the building.” He reports,

People were screaming. I followed Basam downstairs and outside. A crater gaped in the street; a metal cistern raised on stilts was spewing water. The screams came from a house around the corner. We pushed through a gate and found a man in a tracksuit lying in the driveway. Before we could attend to him, a woman came out and yelled that more seriously wounded people were inside. She led us into the living room, where an older, shirtless man sat on a couch. Blood smeared his torso and was splattered all over his pants. People were holding sopping red cotton pads to both sides of his face. He was having trouble breathing. When he saw us, he pitched forward, as if to say something. Instead of words, blood spilled from his mouth.

A young boy lay at the man’s feet. He was also shirtless and bleeding heavily from wounds on his torso and his legs.

It was a challenge to focus. The living room was crowded with screaming relatives and neighbors. While we worked on the boy, a woman began shaking my shoulder and shouting in my ear. I had to push her away. My interpreter later told me what she’d been saying: “Don’t let my son die!”

Note that “we.” Mogelson is more than an observer; he’s a participant, helping dispense first aid.

Also in this section, Mogelson visits another I.D.P. camp, this one in Khazer. He goes there to see a SWAT-team member nicknamed Dumbuk (his real name is Mohammad Ahmed), who is recovering from a leg wound suffered in the fighting in Aden. Mogelson writes, “As we ate, Dumbuk told me that as soon as his leg and arm healed he planned to rejoin the swat team. He was happy to see his relatives, but he missed the front line.” This line reminded me of something A. J. Liebling said in the Foreword of his great Mollie & Other War Pieces (1964):

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

“The Avengers of Mosul” is an extraordinary piece of writing, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. In summarizing it, I’ve cherry-picked a few incidents to convey its vividness. I relish the way it unfolds sequentially without flashbacks. I relish its factual style. I relish its focus on the SWAT-team members. Most of all, I relish its details, e.g., a Humvee’s interior (“I crammed into Mezher’s vehicle, sharing a seat with a corporal in a black balaclava. We were wedged in amid ammo boxes, ammo belts, and the feet of another policeman, who stood in the turret behind a Dushka, a Russian heavy machine gun”); a medic’s cigarette ash (“He spoke excellent English, and worked with calm efficiency, often while smoking a cigarette, the ash falling on his patients”); the SWAT team’s deputy commander sitting on the edge of a bed “casually flipping a hand grenade around his finger”; inside a new aid station (“The fake-gold pages of a Koran, draped with a garland of plastic roses, were mounted on the wall, above bags of saline hanging from protruding screws”); the way a soldier puts his foot on a prisoner’s head (“The soldier in the cap twisted his boot back and forth, as if putting out a cigarette”); the ringtone of the Swat-team commander’s phone (“His phone kept ringing: the tone was the theme song from the movie ‘Halloween’ ”); a woman suturing a boy’s face with needle and thread (“It looked as if she’d dipped her hands in a bucket of red paint. I cut the thread and tried to shoo her off. A minute later, while attending to the wounds on the man’s legs, I looked up and saw that she was stitching him again”).

Reviewing “The Avengers of Mosul” when it originally appeared in The New Yorker, I called it a “masterpiece of war reportage” (see here). It’s also one of the most memorable New Yorker pieces I’ve ever read.