June 28, 2021 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl, in his disappointing “Drawing Conclusions,” in this week’s issue, reviews MoMA’s “Cézanne Drawing,” a show of some two hundred and eighty works on paper, without describing a single one of them. He admits he’s not crazy about Cézanne’s art. He says, “I, for one, have struggled with him all my art-loving life.” He says,

You don’t look at a Cézanne, some ravishing late works excepted. You study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor. Each detail conveys the artist’s direct gaze at a subject but is rarely at pains to serve an integrated composition. 

Okay, fair enough, but let’s hear about those details. Schjeldahl doesn’t give us any. Instead, he uncharacteristically opts for generalizations – albeit some pretty cool ones (“Thingness magnetized him”; “Cézanne’s scattershot approach triumphed in his conflations of surface with depth”). No wonder he struggles. He’s departed from his own dictum: “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap” (Introduction to Let’s See, 2008). Or has he? In the same piece, he also says, “Nothing ruins a critic like pretending to care.” 

For a tonic antidote to Schjeldahl’s Cézanne struggles, I recommend this superb description of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) by John Updike:

Pines and Rocks, for instance, fascinated me, because its subject – these few pine trunks, these outcroppings of patchily tinted rock – was so obscurely deserving, compared with the traditional fruits of his still lifes, or Mont Sainte Victoire, or his portrait subjects and nude bathers. The ardor of Cézanne’s painting shone most clearly through this curiously quiet piece of landscape, which he might have chosen by setting his easel down almost anywhere. In this canvas, his numerous little decisions as to tone and color impart an excited shimmer to the area where the green of the pine shows against the blue of the sky, to the parts of the ochre trunks where shadow and outline intermix, and to the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass. Blue, green, and ochre – these basic shades never bore him, and are observed and captured each time as if afresh. In the intensity of the attention they receive, the painter’s subjects shed their materiality: the pines’ branches here and there leap free of the trunks, and the rocks have no heaviness, their planes all but dissolved in the rapid shift of grayish-blue tints. What did it mean, this oddly airy severity, this tremor in the face of the mundane? It meant that the world, even in such drab constituents as pines and rocks, was definitely rewarding of observation, and that simplicity was composed of many little plenitudes, or small, firm arrivals – paint pondered but then applied with a certain nervous speed. Cézanne’s extreme concentration breaks through into a feeling as carefree and unencumbered as that which surrounds us in nature itself. In its new, minimal frame, Pines and Rocks seems smaller than the canvas I remember from the Fifties – but the grandeur of its silence, the gravity with which it seems to turn away from the viewer toward some horizon of contemplation, is undiminished. [“What MoMA Done Tole Me,” Just Looking, 1989]

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

June 21, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing “The Deep,” an essay on deep-sea mining and the threat it poses to fragile deep-sea ecosystems. Reading it, I learned about extraordinary “bioluminescent creatures” that live in the vast darkness at the bottom of the sea, creatures such as the stoplight loose jaw (“a fish with photon-emitting organs under each eye”), the humpback blackdevil (“sports a shiny lure that dangles off its forehead like a crystal from a chandelier”), and the giant red mysid (“a hamster-size crustacean” that “spews streams of blue sparkles from nozzles near its mouth”). I also learned about hydrothermal vents. Kolbert writes,

Some of the seas’ most extraordinary animals live around hydrothermal vents—the oceanic equivalents of hot springs. Through cracks in the seafloor, water comes in contact with the earth’s magma; the process leaves it superheated and loaded with dissolved minerals. (At some vents, the water reaches a temperature of more than seven hundred degrees.) As the water rises and cools, the minerals precipitate out to form crenellated, castlelike structures.

Kolbert is a superb nature-describer. She says of the scaly-foot snail: “It’s the only animal known to build its shell with iron, and around its foot it sports a fringe of iron plates that looks a bit like a flamenco skirt.”

Kolbert’s piece flags a serious concern that deep-sea mining will wreck the ocean floor “before many of the most marvellous creatures living there are even identified.”  

Postscript: Janet Malcolm 1934 - 2021

Janet Malcolm (Portrait by Jillian Tamaki)

Janet Malcolm, in her wonderful Reading Chekhov (2001), said,

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

Malcolm died last week, age eighty-six. Are the books and essay collections she left behind “mere husk”? Not in this eye, among beholders. They’re among the glories of New Yorker writing. Malcolm is one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on her name in the “Labels” column, and you’ll open sixty-one posts on her work. 

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading tributes to her. One of the most perceptive is Jennifer Szalai’s “Janet Malcolm, a Writer Who Emphasized the Messiness of Life With Slyness and Precision” (The New York Times Book Review, June 19, 2021). Szalai says, 

As the daughter of a psychiatrist herself, Malcolm was ever alert to inconsistencies and reversals, to text and to subtext, to the ways that we try to make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others. 

This gets at an aspect of Malcolm’s writing that speaks to me: her psychoanalytical approach to journalism. She took nothing at face value. “Was the incident like a screen memory that hides a more painful recollection?” she asks in her superb “The Window Washer” (The New Yorker, November 19, 1990). “My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness”: “Travels with Chekhov” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000). 

Some of her best pieces are on psychoanalysis: “The Impossible Profession,” The New Yorker, November 24 & December 1, 1980 (“For embedded in the transcript, like a message written in invisible ink, are innumerable, unmistakable traces of the patient’s unconscious motives”); “Six Roses au Cirrhose?,” The New Yorker, January 24, 1983 (“Mistrust is the analyst’s stock-in-trade, an attitude from which he must never relent”); “J’appelle un Chat un Chat,” The New Yorker, April 12, 1987 (“Today everyone knows – except possibly a few literary theorists – that the chief subject of the psychoanalytic dialogue is not the patient’s repressed memories but the analyst’s vacation”).

She had a psychoanalyst's distrust of narrative:  

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. [“Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010]

Even her photography writing has a psychoanalytical dimension. In her brilliant “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, PA.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979), she wrote,

Hare takes the camera’s capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield an interpretation.

That last sentence is inspired. It could serve as a description of Malcolm’s own special brand of psychoanalytical magic. She took the secret of that magic with her. She left behind a splendid oeuvre.

June 14, 2021 Issue

A James Wood review has a distinctive look. Instead of the narrative approach that most literary critics opt for – paragraph on paragraph of plot summary and interpretation trailing down the page – Wood quotes and analyzes the writing. Mark O’Connell, in his review of Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. You see it in his “Where I’m Coming From,” a review of Francisco Goldman’s novel Monkey Boy, in this week’s issue. Midway in the piece, up goes the block quote:

An extended recollection from this period of Frankie’s life demonstrates the hospitable rhythms of the prose:

The memory of sitting in my bedroom’s window seat and passing my toy truck out through the bars to an Indian woman who took her baby boy out of her rebozo and set him down on the patterned old paving stones of the sidewalk so that he could play with the truck and my astonishment that he was naked. A memory like the broken-off half of a mysterious amulet that can only be made whole if that now-grown little boy remembers it, too, and we can somehow meet and put our pieces together. I don’t even remember if I let him keep the truck or not, though I like to think I did. Not all that likely that he’s even still alive, considering what the war years were like for young Maya men of our generation. Who knows, maybe he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.

The density of the memory, the playing over present and past, the essayistic space made for an ongoing political dimension, along with an insistent optimism—all these are characteristic of the novel as a whole, and of Goldman’s feel for a kind of narrative phrasing that allows an ideally sauntering and shifting perspective.

This is quintessential Wood, and I love it. His artful use of quotation gives the reader a taste of the book under review. And, at the same time, it gives Wood an opportunity to do what he does best – analyze style. 

June 7, 2021 Issue

Reading “Briefly Noted,” in this week’s issue, I discovered that Jacqueline Rose’s new essay collection, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, contains her brilliant “Bantu in the Bathroom,” an analysis of the trial of Oscar Pistorius. For me, that’s reason enough to acquire this book. 

I first read “Bantu in the Bathroom” five years ago when it appeared in the November 19, 2015, London Review of Books. It considers the Pistorius trial from every conceivable angle, including sex, race, and disability. Rose analyzes the accused, Oscar Pistorius, the victim, Reeva Steenkamp, and the judge, Thokozile Matilda Masipa. In one of her most powerful passages, she faults Judge Masipa for failing to appreciate the significance of a WhatsApp message that Steenkamp sent Pistorius eighteen days before she died, expressing fear of him. Rose writes,

Yet for me this is perhaps the darkest moment in the judgment, when the law, when a woman judge, fails to give due weight to another woman, one who didn’t survive. I don’t believe that all women are at risk from all men but I do believe that a woman doesn’t say she is scared of a man without cause and that when she does we must listen. It is the fear in the future tense – ‘I am scared of you sometimes ... and of how you will react to me’ – that, for me, most loudly calls for our attention.

“Bantu in the Bathroom” is one of the best trial analyses I’ve ever read. I’m pleased to see it preserved between hard covers. 

May 31, 2021 Issue

Nicolas Niarchos is back in the magazine! He’s been absent for a while. He was one of The New Yorker’s best “Bar Tab” writers. Remember his great “Bar Tab: Berlin,” February 8 & 15, 2016 (“At the bottom of the stairs, in a barrel-vaulted watering hole, long lines of people waited for the bathroom from whence burst ebullient gaggles of young women and a madly coughing guy in a Thrasher hat”)? In this week’s issue, Niarchos has a “Reporter at Large” piece titled “Buried Dreams.” It’s about cobalt mining in southern Congo. That’s not a subject high on my list of interests. But because the piece is by Niarchos, I decided to check it out. I found it quite absorbing. I learned, among other things, that southern Congo sits atop an estimated 3.4 million metric tons of cobalt, almost half the world’s known supply, that cobalt is a key ingredient of lithium-ion batteries that are used to power everything from call phones to electric cars, that China is the world’s largest producer of lithium-ion batteries, and that the industrial cobalt mines of southern Congo are largely owned by China. I also learned about the brutal conditions at some of these Chinese-owned mines. Niarchos writes, 

At some sites, the treatment of Congolese by their Chinese bosses is reminiscent of the colonial period. In a video shared with me by Mutindi, of Good Shepherd, a Congolese guard with a Kalashnikov slung across his back beats a man who is lying, semi-naked, in mud, his arms bound. Behind the camera, a man otherwise speaking Mandarin starts yelling “Piga!”—the Kiswahili word for “beat.” In the background are seven of the trucks that Congo Dongfang uses to transport cobalt ore.

Of course, I’m interested in the style of Niarchos’s piece as much as I am in its substance. I relish the way he writes in the “I.” For example:

In a warehouse at the site, I watched a man, his face grim, pulverizing ore on a concrete floor as two Chinese overseers scrutinized creuseurs from behind a barrier of chicken wire. No Chinese employee interacted with me, and nobody responded when I waved in greeting.

One night in Kolwezi, I went to a Chinese-run casino with a few Congolese friends. I was immediately allowed inside, but they were stopped at the door and told that they could not gamble. Black Africans, the casino’s staff explained, can’t be trusted with money. At a roulette table, a host of drunken white South Africans addressed a Congolese croupier as “Black man.”

One Sunday morning, I met Kajumba and Trésor Mputu at the Temple Évangélique de Carmel, a hangar-style megachurch in the center of Kolwezi.

Passages like these give the piece the force of real experience. This is a different, more serious Niarchos than the one I know from “Bar Tab.” And while I admire “Buried Dreams,” I still prefer the sensuous lines of those wonderful sybaritic drinking columns. This one, for example:  “Behind a brown door on a blasted section of Jackson Avenue, a whip-thin saloon that bears the neighborhood’s name is bringing back a version of the past, with the clink of hand-cut ice in tumblers and the waft of freshly cut orange peel” ("Bar Tab: Dutch Kills," November 2, 2015). 

Susannah Clapp's Delightful "At the V&A"

Emily Jo Gibbs's horse chestnut bag (1996)

The last couple of days, I’ve been holding the image of Emily Jo Gibbs’s green spiked horse chestnut bag in my mind, enjoying its ingenious design. A photo of it illustrates Susannah Clapp’s delightful “At the V&A,” in the May 20th London Review of Books. Clapp’s piece reviews the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Bags: Inside Out, an exhibition of handbags, purses, suitcases, and other forms of “the ultimate accessory.” Clapp writes,

The curator, Lucia Savi, has brought together items so varied in appearance and function, so 17th and so 21st century, so cosmopolitan and so country, so Myanmar and so Anya Hindmarch, so differently Turkish inflected – an 18th-century goat leather portfolio from Istanbul and a woollen suitcase from Tracey Emin – that ‘bags’ begins to look less like a category than an all-encompassing, constantly changing force. After seeing this show, it would be impossible to say that bags are not your bag. The items on display include a sturdy container for a Second World War gas mask; a delicate 2019 bucket woven from bamboo, silk and leather; a Versace pouch punctured with safety pins; and – hello, Lucy Ellmann – a tasselled 18th-century falconry bag whose inside pockets are embroidered with a woman in a scarlet slit of a skirt, a man with boots and a big horn, and a dead animal. Here is 17th-century filigree from Germany – silver wires twisted into the shape of a heart – and 20th-century jangle from Paris, supplied by Paco Rabanne’s chainmail belt bag.

Clapp is a superb describer. For example:

Supreme among the creations of the last century is the sleek, black ‘Normandie’ clutch, opulently framed in a crimson box. Created to celebrate the maiden voyage of the ocean liner Normandie in 1935, and presented as a gift to first-class passengers, it mirrors the sloping wedge of the ship, with a tiny metal anchor looped on the side and on top three gleaming clasps in the shape of funnels. The wit of the translation is made gloriously apparent by a photograph of the ship, with lights streaming from its portholes into the water.

Clapp’s piece celebrates the “barmy bravura” of the V&A bags. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Gus Powell Is Back!

Gus Powell, Sculpture by E. V. Day (2010)

I see Gus Powell is this week’s “Tables For Two” photographer. Great to see him back in the magazine! He’s been absent for a while. Powell took one of my all-time favorite New Yorker photos – a shot of a sculpture by E. V. Day, created from the New York City Opera’s costume archive. It appeared in “Goings On About Town,” April 12, 2010. What draws me to it? I think it's the exquisite spun-sugar texture of the suspended rose-gold gown, white daylight streaming through it, against the ravishing railing-and-windows grid of brown, gray, pink, pearl, and charcoal lines. It’s a most original and striking image.   

3 for the Road: Place

This is the sixth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their sense of place.

How do you evoke places as vast as Alaska, the Great Plains, and northern British Columbia? One way is by immersing yourself in them and describing the experience. That’s what Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier do in these three great books. What do I mean by immersion? Consider this:

Incredible spoked sundials are set up along shore where the big cottonwoods have been undermined and have fallen over with their bleached roots exposed. The Katete debouches through a thick screen of swamp. A wide valley funnels back to mountains and saddles which encircle the end. The Ikut, the largest tributary on the Stikine, is next, even more barricaded behind islands and sloughs. It’s a classic straight corridor through a vast steep valley of virgin trees, each as straight as if it had been plumbed. The Stikine weaves, like the highway it is. As we approach the mountains before us, they slowly open a gap, which closes again after we pass. We feel our way over the snags, often nuzzling so closely against an island that we can hear the songbirds over the noise. Crossing again, we slip backwards eerily for what seems along time, only just succeeding in holding our slant. The scow up in front is fun to ride because it slides vibrationlessly, but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor. The river is often a mile across, an eddying gale of gray water. A half-skinned cedar floats by with flesh-colored protrusions where the limbs were. Great Glacier, in its majestic slash of a valley, takes two hours to pass. Mud Glacier, two hours more. This is the spine of the coast range. The mountains go 6,000 to 10,000 feet, to gunsight peaks and to sailing, razory peaks. They’re blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips. A sudden slide wipes out a waterfall before our eyes, and the black and white patterns of snow that are left are like dramatic couturier’s dresses. 

That’s from Hoagland’s marvellous Notes from the Century Before. He’s traveling up the Stikine, on his way to Telegraph Creek. And he, like the river, is in full flood. His words call up pictures: the bleached roots of fallen cottonwoods like “incredible spoked sundials”; “thick screen of swamp”; a tributary “barricaded behind islands and sloughs”; virgin trees “each as straight as if it had been plumbed”; the river “often a mile across, an eddying gale of gray water”; a floating half-skinned cedar “with flesh-colored protrusions where the limbs were”; a glacier “in its majestic slash of a valley”; mountains “blue, cut with shadows and loaded with snow, and they carry small glaciers slung on their hips.” We are plunged into a world of rivers, mountains, valleys, islands, swamps, glaciers, waterfalls, and snow. We aren’t just looking at a river; we are on it (“We feel our way over the snags, often nuzzling so closely against an island that we can hear the songbirds over the noise”). Note the specificity of language, particularly the use of proper nouns (“Katete,” “Ikut,” “Stikine,” “Judith Ann,” “Great Glacier,” “Mud Glacier”). Above all, note that sublime “but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor.” All the ingredients of Hoagland’s bravura immersive style are here: specificity, vivid figuration, perceptual rapture. Page after glorious page, this is the way he evokes the Stikene’s wild, labyrinthine world.

Let’s stick with rivers, but now it’s the Salmon of the Brooks Range, and we’re in John McPhee’s superb Coming into the Country:

My bandana is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and then dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving. This has done away with the headaches that the sun caused in days before. The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good. Meanwhile, the river – the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks – breaks the light into flashes and sends them upward into the eyes. The headaches have reminded me of the kind that are sometimes caused by altitude, but, for all the fact that we have come down through mountains, we have not been higher than a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Drifting now – a canoe, two kayaks – and thanking God it is not my turn in either of the kayaks, I lift my fishing rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward the a wall of bedrock by the edge of the stream. A grayling comes up and, after some hesitation, takes the lure and runs with it for a time. I disengage the lure and let the grayling go, being mindful not to wipe my hands on my shirt. Several days in use, the shirt is approaching filthy, but here among grizzly bears I would prefer to stink of humanity than of fish.

Talk about immersion! That is the opening paragraph of the book. Immediately, we are there, with McPhee, in a canoe, on the Salmon, in northern Alaska. Note how he palpably conveys temperature: “The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.” He writes from an immediate sensation of things: “The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good.” Through his description of his sensory experience, McPhee gets us as close as he can to the Salmon’s physical reality. That paragraph is my favorite beginning in all of literature. (I first read it when “The Encircled River” appeared in The New Yorker, May 2, 1977.)

Continuing our river motif, consider this passage from Ian Frazier’s Great Plains:

Among the rivers of the Great Plains are the Cimarron, the Red, the Brazos, the Purgatoire, the Trinity, the Big Sandy, the Canadian, the Smoky Hill, the Solomon, the Republican, the Arikaree, the Frenchman, the Little Blue, the South Platte, the North Platte, the Laramie, the Loup, the Niobrara, the White Earth, the Cheyenne, the Owl, the Grand, the Cannonball, the Heart, the Knife, the Little Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the Tongue, the Bighorn, the Musselshell, the Judith, the Marias, the Milk, the Missouri.

You might say, well, that’s just a list. Yes, but what a list! It’s certainly a sign that Frazier is interested in rivers. In the next paragraph, he describes their reality:

The rivers of the southern plains are dry much of their length, much of the year. All-terrain-vehicle tracks cross the white sand in the bed of the North Fork of the Red. As you go north, the rivers are more likely to have water. Descending from the flat benchland into their valleys can be like walking off a hot sidewalk into a spa. Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun. The trees lean at odd angles, like flowers in a vase. In the summers, windrows of cottonwood-seed down cover the ground. Big cottonwoods have bark as ridged as a tractor tire, and the buffalo used to love to rub against it. In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair. At sunset, the shadows of the cottonwoods fall across the river and flutter on the riffles. Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain. Sandbar willows grow as straight as dowels in the gray-black mud along the banks. Game trails six inches wide wind through the willows. For a while, the air is smarting with mosquitoes, and weird little bugs that don’t bite but just dive right for your eyes. Later there are stars, and silence. At dawn, birds pipe the light through the trees.

God, who would not want such exquisite writing to go on forever? I love the immediacy of that “Cottonwood trees grow in all the valleys; suddenly there is something between you and the sun.” It puts me right there in the cottonwood shade! The last line is inspired! The whole passage is inspired! I relish the way it blends arresting historical detail (“In the shedding season, the river bottoms would often be ankle-deep in buffalo hair”) and vivid personal observation (“Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain”). Frazier is a phenomenal describer. 

Description of landscape is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.