Asif Kapadia's Riveting "Senna"

As a result of reading Anthony Lane’s recent capsule review of Asif Kapadia’s 2011 documentary Senna, I decided to check it out. What a riveting film! It chronicles the spectacular career of Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna. Lane calls it “an homage to velocity—it’s stripped of narration, talking heads, and anything else that might threaten to slow it down. What remains is a self-propelling drama, and the abiding image of Senna’s oil-dark eyes, gleaming through the letter box of his helmet.” This describes it perfectly. Highly recommended. 

November 29, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ed Caesar’s terrific “Only Disconnect,” an account of his recent experience “getting lost” in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The quotation marks are necessary because his experience was, as he says, “both real and extremely theatrical.” His trip was organized by a firm called Black Tomato that offers a package called “Get Lost”: 

A client is dropped somewhere spectacular and scantly populated, and challenged to find his or her way out within a given time period. From the moment that Asher left me in the valley, I was allotted two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains.

But this is only part of the challenge. As Caesar explains, 

The concept of Get Lost isn’t only that clients must find their way out of desolate situations; they have no clue where in the world they are going, until the last minute. Participants are also encouraged to surrender their cell phones. The imperative is not just to disappear but to disconnect. 

Two days before the start of the trip, Caesar receives his tickets: Manchester to Marrakech. The morning after his arrival in Marrakech, he’s picked up at his hotel and taken on a ten-hour drive to the starting point of his trek. He describes this part of the adventure as being like “a very pleasant kidnapping, with coffee breaks.” 

He’s taken to a remote location in the Atlas Mountains, “an apex where two high valleys met.” A member of Black Tomato’s support team briefs Caesar on the journey that lies ahead of him. He has two days to walk to a rendezvous point eighteen miles away, over and around mountains, carrying fifty-pound backpack stuffed with “clothes, paper maps, a compass, two G.P.S. trackers, spare batteries, notepads and pens, a big knife, a sleeping bag, flashlights, fire-lighting equipment, dried food, a few energy-rich snacks, three litres of water, a mosquito shelter, a roll mat, and a tarpaulin.” Caesar writes, “I was going to trek for two days, at altitude, with the equivalent of my six-year-old daughter strapped to my back.”

The next day, off he goes into the wilderness, wearing a shemagh, or head scarf, to keep his head from “boiling” in the hundred-degree heat. He says the first hour was hard (“Loose rocks on the ground often gave way, particularly on steep grades. Navigating posed its own challenges. The G.P.S. kept me pointed in the correct general direction, but it was sometimes fiendish to pick out the precise path that I was supposed to take”). He describes the terrain (“Some rocky expanses reminded me of footage from the Mars Rover”). At around lunchtime, he encounters some Moroccan men with mules:

The men were making Berber tea, which is the color of rust. They seemed delighted to see a stranger, and came out to greet me. Their grooved, hard faces confirmed a lifetime spent outdoors. Next to them, I looked like a newborn. They gave me bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of the tea, which was as sweet as a candy cane. I happily devoured all of it.

He wants to stay longer with these guys, but he can’t; he has to be at his camp in time to set up for the night. So he moves on. He writes, “It wasn’t lost on me how perverse it was to break off an authentic and unusual experience—a chance exchange between mutually interested parties—in order to hew to an arbitrary timetable, on a trip supposedly designed to reconnect me to authentic modes of living.”

He arrives at the spot indicated on his map for his campsite, sets up his tarp, and makes supper:

The main part of my meal—“Veg Chilli and Rice”—was surprisingly edible, and the only thing missing from the sunset was a cinematographer: the whole plain glowed red. The view made me ecstatic but also a little blue, because there was nobody to share it with. I fell asleep in no time, waking only to the sound of rain on my tarpaulin, and a clap of thunder at around 11 p.m. As the eye of the storm grew closer, lightning illuminated the plain, and the raindrops grew heavier. I wondered for a few anxious minutes how much rain would have to fall to send a flash flood down the gully I was in. My conclusion: a hell of a lot. I went back to sleep.

The second day of Caesar’s walk is more challenging. The sun is brighter and the temperature soon reaches a hundred degrees. He writes,

My head pounded, and my pee turned the color of Berber tea. I had tried to drink plenty of water the previous day, but clearly it had not been enough. (I concluded, too, that an insufficiently rehydrated dessert I’d eaten the previous evening—an egg-custard imitation—had sucked some moisture out of me.) I resolved to stop more often and drink more. Given my G.P.S.’s unreliable battery supply, I also used the rests to pay attention to my paper maps. It was pleasing to reacquaint myself with analog navigation, and my compass replaced my G.P.S. around my neck.

Now, he’s in the final stretch of the journey. He says, “I could see from my maps that I had only a few hundred yards to walk. Suddenly, I did not want the experience to end. I slowed down, to revel in my last minutes of simplicity.” 

The trip ends in the tiny village of Ichazzoun. When he arrives, there’s a wedding going on. “Four musicians performing at the ceremony had heard about my trek, and they all came to greet me, in matching white-and-green outfits. They sang and clapped, and formed an honor guard for me to walk past, as a finish line.” Caesar says, “It was a surreal, embarrassing, joyous moment.”

Caesar sums up his trip:

My experience had been both real and extremely theatrical. The mountains and the rocks were solid enough to have broken my bones. But I was able to travel as I did only because a group of experts had prepared a route customized for my level of fitness, and had monitored my every move so that I could feel danger without actually being endangered. There was a touch of “Westworld” to Get Lost. And I hadn’t been truly disconnected; rather, I had been given the luxury of living for a short while under the illusion that I was. The adventure was every bit as confected as my hotel stay.

“Nevertheless,” he says, “my hike was deeply gratifying.” 

My summary of “Only Disconnect” doesn’t do it justice. I’ve omitted many delightful details, not to mention several narrative twists, including a flashback triggered by a bar of Kendal Mint Cake. Suffice it to say here, the piece is double bliss. Its subject is transfixing; its writing is superb. I enjoyed it immensely. 

November 22, 2021 Issue

“The best way to understand a writer is to interpret the work,” says Maggie Doherty, in her absorbing “Think Twice,” in this week’s issue. Really? Recall Susan Sontag’s famous dictum: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’ ” (“Against Interpretation,” 1964). Sontag favoured experiencing the work – “experiencing the luminousness of the thing itself, of things being what they are.” Robert B. Pippin, in his recent Philosophy by Other Means, is pro-interpretation. He writes, “But the injunction that we should ‘stop interpreting’ a work and just ‘experience’ it is like demanding that we just look at the words on a page and not say what they mean.” He has a point. Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to Sontag’s approach – one that aims for “a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.” It seems to me that if a work is closely described, its meaning will follow. Peter Schjeldahl, in the Introduction to his great Let’s See (2008), says, “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.” Boom! As usual, Schjeldahl nails it. 

But on further reflection, I realize I've overreacted. Doherty isn't arguing for interpretation as the critical approach. She's saying if you want to understand the writer, look at his or her writing. With that, I agree.  

November 15, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is M. R. O’Connor’s brilliant “Towering Infernos,” an account of her experience fighting the Dixie Fire in California. The piece tells about her training to be a wildland firefighter. She learned, among other things, to “blackline”:

We “blacklined” for hours on end, starting fires with our torches and controlling their spread with hand tools or water hoses. Our work left behind undulating, blackened squiggles, about thirty feet wide, which marked the perimeters of the areas we intended to ignite. The early spring weather was frigid. Often, I stood on a patch of smoldering prairie, letting the heat warm my leather boots. The smells of diesel fuel and burning bluestem grass combined into something like incense.

It then moves to the scene of the ferocious Dixie Fire. This part is riveting; it puts us squarely there with O’Connor and the unit she’s embedded with: 

We spent our first day in Plumas National Forest, in Indian Valley, prepping homes for the coming fire by digging perimeters of bare dirt. The area sat under a smoke inversion, in which a cap of warm air trapped cooler air and smoke low to the ground; the mountains around us were invisible in the pall. The temperature was a hundred degrees, and the Air Quality Index was 368—a “hazardous” rating. An opened but undrunk can of Budweiser sat on the patio of an abandoned house, and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant. We took our breaks sitting inside idling trucks, where we could breathe conditioned air instead of toxic smoke.

That “and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant” is very fine. Her description of a mop-up patrol is superb. Here’s an excerpt:

Another crew member joined me, and we began to excavate. We dug through the powdery soil and sent up brown clouds of dust. The deeper we went, the hotter the ground became. The heat permeated the soles of our boots—eventually, we were dancing to relieve the discomfort. I stepped away from the pit and took in the situation. We were standing on an oven. Yards away from us, other crew members were also digging. Together, we were uncovering a single network of still smoldering roots.

Reading that, I could almost feel those smouldering roots beneath my own feet. “Towering Infernos” immerses us in the reality of megafire. It’s harrowing! (But the writing is delightful.) 

Elaine Blair's "Hemingway's Consolations"

Ernest Hemingway (Portrait by Sébastien Plassard)

To me, it’s a serious mistake to write about Hemingway without mentioning his incomparable style. Yet, that’s exactly what Elaine Blair does in her “Hemingway’s Consolations” (The New York Review of Books, September 23, 2021). “Humiliation,” “violence,” “death,” “failure,” “hate” – these are the words she invokes to assess Hemingway’s work. “Beautiful,” “sensuous,” “poetical” are nowhere to be found. 

Hemingway created one of the most sublime styles in all of literature. Ho hum, we know that. No, we don’t. His stylistic achievement is in danger of being buried under criticism such as this: 

It takes a simple statement—and it must be simple—to get to the bottom of the emotional truth of a situation. You can speak of Hemingway’s verbal economy in relation to modernism, or realism, or personal style. But at their most powerful, his brevity and simplicity are in service of emotional release. Hemingway’s work consoles us, if it does console us, according to the verbal principles of a good psychotherapeutic interlocutor. [“Hemingway’s Consolations”]

Well, okay, maybe so. All I can say is that Hemingway’s work consoles me in a completely different way – in service of the pleasure principle. For example, consider this beauty:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. [A Farewell to Arms, 1929]

Each word is a painterly touch. Hemingway’s hero was Cézanne. Like Cézanne, he had an extraordinary feel for life’s sensuous surfaces. “He wrote pleasure far better than violence,” Adam Gopnik says, in his excellent “Hemingway, the Sensualist” (newyorker.com, June 26, 2017). He’s right.

November 8, 2021 Issue

Two Talk stories in this week’s issue I really liked: Sheila Yasmin Marikar’s “Smelling the Roses” and Nick Paumgarten’s “Bear Cash.” 

Marikar’s piece is about L.A. florist Maurice Harris, whose realist takes on life and the flower business made me smile. This one, for example: “Flowers are gross. They stink. It’s a lot of hauling shit around. It’s a lot of logistics. Like, twenty per cent of it is pretty; the rest is just annoying.” And this: We’re in a time when people think that a double tap, a share, and a visit solves the problem, when, No. It’s still pretty systemic.” 

Paumgarten’s piece is the damnedest bit of found surrealism I’ve read in quite some time. It’s not easy to summarize. It comprehends the Grateful Dead, the Rainforest Action Network, weight-lifting, Gold’s Gym, “a circus camp among the California redwoods,” reel-to-reel tapes, the Allman Brothers, Fillmore East, Jimmy Carter, Johnny Cash, a psychedelic dance hall called the Carousel Ballroom, Bob Dylan, Folsom Prison, Jimi Hendrix, and people named Hawk, Bear, Starfinder, and Redbird. You’ll have to read it to appreciate how it all ingeniously coheres. Paumgarten is a master Talk writer. “Bear Cash” is one of his best.

Two Interpretations of Thomas Struth's "Crosby Street, New York, Soho"

Thomas Struth, Crosby Street, New York, Soho (1978)

Robert B. Pippin, in his Philosophy by Other Means (2021), approaches art as a form of thought. He calls his approach “philosophical criticism.” He says the task of philosophical criticism is to illuminate the “philosophical issue” at the heart of the artwork. In theory, this is an interesting approach. Surely, there’s a thinking process involved in the creation of art. One of criticism’s tasks is to track it. But in Pippin’s hands, the approach doesn’t clarify; it occludes. 

The problem is that his own thinking is blinkered by an odd notion. He thinks that the “defeat of theatricality” is “central to establishing the work, any pictorial work in modernity, as an artwork.” I say “odd” because the question of whether a work is theatrical or anti-theatrical seems such a minor consideration. Much more important, in my view, is the work’s style – the way it makes thought visible. 

Take Thomas Struth’s brilliant “Crosby Street, New York, Soho” (1978), for example. Pippin uses it to illustrate his point about how a sense of meaningfulness in art is “opened by the still, mute, eerie absences in the objects depicted.” Fair enough. But bear in mind that “absences in the objects” (italicized by Pippin for emphasis) is, in Pippin’s view, a loaded phrase. It’s one of the indices of anti-theatricality.  

I like Struth’s photo. Why? It has nothing to do with anti-theatricality – at least I don’t think it does. It has to do with pattern, texture, all those subtle shades of grimy gray, and the white light of early morning glinting in the chrome and glass of that parked car. It’s a beautiful picture! But for Struth’s inspiration, it would’ve passed unnoticed. 

In his book, Pippin says that value resides in whether an artwork can be said to reveal “a kind of truth.” Okay. But, for me, value also resides in enjoying the aesthetic aspects of the work.

Critics as Makers of Works of Art (Contra Colin Burrow)

Colin Burrow, in his absorbing review of Christopher Ricks’ new essay collection Along Heroic Lines (London Review of Books, October 7, 2021), says, “Critics see things, but do not make things.” Really? Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman isn’t made? T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death isn’t made? Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment isn’t made? Howard Moss’s The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust isn’t made? Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue isn’t made? Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida isn’t made? I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point. There are works of criticism that are as much works of art as the subjects they consider. It’s time to drop the condescension and recognize them as such.  

My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

November 1, 2021 Issue

Shauna Lyon, in her delectable “Tables For Two: Le Pavillon,” in this week’s issue, describes the location of her table in Le Pavillon as slightly evoking “a Hilton Hotel in Toronto.” Why Toronto? Is that her idea of restaurant Siberia? Never mind. Her piece is delightful, starting with a wonderful decorative detail (“A fanciful blown-glass chandelier, by the artist Andy Paiko, drips from the room’s cathedral ceiling”), and ending with a delicious description of Le Pavillon’s Noisette Chocolat (“controlled whimsy, precise geometry, silken mousse, flawless chocolate coating, a crumbly, nutty praline croustillant, and a strong hit of salt”). Mm, I’ll have a piece of that, please. 

Ben Lerner's "The Storyteller"

W. G. Sebald (portrait by Yann Kebbi)

What to make of Ben Lerner’s “The Storyteller” (The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2021)? Well, for one thing, it’s one of the best reviews of W. G. Sebald’s work I’ve ever read, right up there with James Wood’s “Sent East” (London Review of Books, October 6, 2011) and Anthony Lane’s “Higher Ground” (The New Yorker, May 29, 2000). For another, it’s an eloquent defence of the novelist’s right to repurpose facts. Lerner says,

How do you acknowledge—not just in an acknowledgments page but in the structure of the work itself—that you have models and that you’ve departed from them? Here Sebald’s purposeful destabilization of fact and fiction, and his dramatic alteration of the facts in question, within his four great books of prose fiction is a moral and aesthetic necessity, not some sort of failing: it foregrounds artifice, constructedness; it proclaims that Sebald is experimenting with making sense, making pattern, that he is weaving out of disparate materials an artwork that will not live or die according to fact-checkers.

I love that last line. I just want to emphasize that it’s also possible to make literary artworks purely from facts. Fiction isn’t an essential ingredient of literary art. I wish Sebald’s brilliant The Rings of Saturn were factual. It’s so good at creating the illusion of a real account of an actual journey that I have to keep reminding myself that not one word of it is reliable. 

I read Sebald for his exquisite melancholy. This, for example:

As usual when I go down to London on my own, a kind of dull despair stirred within me on that December morning. I looked out a the flat, almost treeless landscape, the vast brown expanse of ploughed fields, the railway stations where I would never get out, the flock of gulls which makes a habit of gathering on the football pitch on the outskirts of Ipswich, the allotments, the crippled bushes overgrown with dead traveller’s joy on the embankments, the quicksilver mudflats and channels at Manningtree, the boats capsized on their sides, the Colchester water-tower, the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, the empty greyhound track at Romsford, the ugly backs of the terraced houses past which the railway line runs in the suburbs of the metropolis, the Manor Park cemetery and the tower blocks of flats in Hackney, sights which are always the same and flit past me whenever I go to London, yet remain alien and incomprehensible in spite of all the years that have passed since my arrival in England. I always feel particularly apprehensive on the last stretch of the journey, where just before turning into Liverpool Street station the train must wind its way over several sets of points through a narrow defile, and where the brick walls rising above both sides of the track with their round arches, columns and niches, blackened with soot and diesel oil, put me in mind once again that morning of an underground columbarium. [Austerlitz]

As Lerner says, Sebald sees death everywhere. On Sebald's obsession with ruins, Lerner writes,

More generally, if history is one long catastrophe returning in new guises, the work of historical reckoning can pass into a transhistorical fatalism. This is why I can lose patience with Sebald’s narrators’ tendency to see only ruins, which is a way of not seeing forms of life and meaning-making that have sprung and might spring up in their midst. It’s not that it’s depressing; it’s that it’s leveling.

This is a good point. We need artists like Sebald to remind us of life’s transience. But we also need artists with a more balanced vision, who remind us that even in the midst of death there’s life – “the green weed breaking through the stone” (Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 2020). 

3 for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh 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 quality of observation – their details.

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized. For example, in Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland, roaming around the town of Wrangell, meets totem-pole carver Tom Ukas. Ukas takes Hoagland to a shed in back of his house and shows him a totem pole he’s created. Hoagland describes it in detail: 

The totem is made of a fresh, beautiful, pale yellow wood. I’m amazed by it. Completely filling the shed, lying on several supports, it thrusts like a rocket, many times taller than me. Carving from the bottom upwards, he has finished all but the hat at the top, even the long Raven beaks which attach separately. The little tools rest on a bench. He walks back and forth, touching the segments with a certain humility, this probably being the last totem pole he will have enough energy for and the last anybody in Wrangell will carve. He is delaying finishing – an hour’s chipping at the hat would take care of it. The wood is red cedar, and it will stand in front of the post office, a marvellous huge piece with six succinct figures. At the top sits the hatted, ruling Raven. At his feet is the Power Box (like a box), holding the Tide Control and the Daylight Control for the moon and the sun. Under the box is the Raven again, though only his head, with a bright halo disk around it – this representing the Raven in his special capacity as Creator. Below the Creator Raven, scrunched up, is a kewpie-doll Man, and underneath Man is the Raven Mother, whose beak is carved to lie on her chest, not stick out grandly like the Raven Creator’s. At the bottom, under the Raven Mother, sits the Tide Control, who escaped from his box and triggered the flood and is personified by a big beaver. It’s all magnificently bright and incisive, as I try to tell him mainly by my excitement.

Details accrete and a marvellous totem pole is bodied forth. McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, works the same way, adding detail after animate detail until a bear or a river or a cabin or a mountain is re-created on the page. Here’s his memorable depiction of prospector Joe Vogler’s truck: 

Vogler travels the mining district in a big three-axle truck so much the worse for wear it appears to have been recently salvaged after a very long stay at the bottom of the Yukon. He drives it on what roads there are and, where roads do not exist, directly up the beds of rushing streams. Lurching, ungainly, it is a collage of vehicular components – running gear from one source, transmission from another – that Vogler selected and assembled to be “good in the brush.” The front wheels are directly under the cab, and the engine mount (high off the ground) is cantilevered a full eight feet forward to become a projecting snout, probing the way toward gold. The cab and engine are military fragments, artifacts of the Second World War. The frame was taken from a twenty-five-year-old tractor trailer. The long flatbed reaches out behind and is towered over by a winch and boom. There are no fenders. Much of the engine’s cowling is gone. The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes. Enfeebled as the rig looks, it has six-wheel drive and, thunking up ledges and over boulders, is much at home in a stream.

That “The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes” is pure McPhee. No one could've thought of that analogy but him.

Many of McPhee’s details are inspired! This one, for example:

We collected a marten that had climbed up a pole-set for a grouse wing and was now hanging by a leg in a life-like pose, frozen stiffer than taxidermy, its forepaws stretched as if leaping for prey, its eyes, at fifteen below zero, like white chick-peas.

And this:

On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. 

And this:

On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle.

One of the most memorable details in Frazier’s Great Plains is the tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick that he finds in the front yard of an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, a house that figures in the legend of Bonnie and Clyde:

In front of the house was an old slippery-elm tree – once a friendly tree in a yard, now just a tree – with big roots knuckling up through te ground. The roots were skinned and smooth from people sitting on them, and on the bare dirt in between I spotted a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick. The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuchsias Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably come here sometimes to park and make-out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

That “The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is brilliant! The whole book is like that – an extraordinary feat of attention. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.