April 18, 2022 Issue

I read Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “The Colorist,” in this week’s issue, with great interest. It’s a consideration of the art of Winslow Homer, one of my favorite painters. Was Homer colonialist? Two scholars of his work think so. Pierpont quotes them both and persuasively rebuts their arguments. She writes,

Turquoise waters, bright sun, brown skin—rendered in a watercolor technique newly free and vibrant, using the white of the paper to set off colors already saturated with light, so that the images appear to glow from within. The Met’s selection of these fragile and rarely shown works suggests not only summery breezes but also the human warmth and interest so increasingly absent from the ocean scenes back home. Yet, to judge by the catalogue that forms the permanent record of this show, the beauty of these works is a significant problem. Although slavery ended in the Bahamas in the eighteen-thirties, in Homer’s era it was a British colony with a racially brutal economic system, akin to sharecropping in America. Tourism, a means of income for the British governor, was just gearing up, and Homer, who published some of these scenes as illustrations in a “touristic article,” in 1887, is in the dock.

She continues:

“He seemed entirely comfortable with colonialist stereotypes of Caribbean islands as exotic idylls,” the historian Daniel Immerwahr writes. True, he admits, Homer depicts hurricanes hitting the islands, and the works have “variation and nuance,” but the weather he shows is too often bright, the people too consistently healthy. We see Black men wresting a living from the beautiful waters, but not “the harsh economics of colonialism” that impels them. Nor do we see any “indictment” of “U.S. colonialism,” which did not in fact exist in the places Homer knew: the Bahamas remained British until independence, Bermuda is still a British territory, and the U.S. takeover of Cuba followed his visit by some thirteen years. Beyond the Atlantic, the artist is censured for failing to depict the murderous violence of the U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines—about which Immerwahr has written elsewhere with effectiveness—and a reader might easily fail to realize that Homer was never in the Philippines. No matter. An illustration of the violence appeared on the cover of Life. The artist could have—should have—painted such a scene. Instead, he spent the years when the war was taking place (1899-1902) making works so enticing they amounted to “an invitation to empire.”

Of Herdrich’s allegation, Pierpont says,

A debt is owed to the co-curator Stephanie L. Herdrich for conceiving this show. So it is even more perplexing, in terms of the triumph of presupposition, when she writes, of the Bahamas watercolors, “He focused on the quotidian lives of the island’s Black inhabitants and uncritically acknowledged the rigid stratification of Bahamian society.” Uncritically? The statement would be perfectly accurate were it not for this inexplicable word, which contradicts the content of several of the works on the museum’s walls, and even some of Herdrich’s descriptions of them. “A Garden in Nassau,” for example, of 1885, in which a small Black child stands on a dusty road, looking up toward a tall, closed gate in a whitewashed wall, forcefully excluded from the lush growth of palms and flowers on the other side. (We know that Homer originally painted and then erased two figures climbing the wall to pick a coconut, increasing the poignance of the lone child.) Or “Native Hut at Nassau,” of the same year, with a group of Black children staring from the doorway of a poor hut in a hardscrabble yard; Cross, whose perception of the artist’s intent is more generous, sees him as “eager to understand the lives they lived within these houses.” Or “A Wall, Nassau,” of 1898, showing the same sort of whitewashed wall with cultivated plantings behind it, and jagged shards of glass along the top to keep the unwanted out. Needless to say—or is it?—these images are not exotic idylls and are far from uncritical of the racial status quo.

That is well said. Case dismissed. 

Winslow Homer, A Garden in Nassau (1885)

April 11, 2022 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Ernesto’s” describes an intriguing martini:

The enormous round-edged, globe-lit bar is an especially nice place to sit, not least because of the easy-drinking yet civilized cocktails, including the 5 Finger Martini, made with two types of vermouth and sherry instead of the hard stuff, and a bright, effervescent Spanish G. & T., with wheels of lime and grapefruit and sprigs of rosemary in a goblet running over.

2. I enjoyed Ian Frazier’s “Stir-Crazy,” particularly its description of a barking fox: “A barking fox kind of gags and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s enjoying it.”

3. James Wood’s idea of what is “real” and “true” has always struck me as fuzzy. He says things like “The real is the atlas of fiction” and “Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie.” He doesn’t seem to have much regard for fact, which, for me, is reality’s bedrock.  But, in his “By the Collar,” in this week’s issue, he says something new: “These public events have the irresistible tang of the actual.” He’s talking about the events covered in Fintan O’Toole’s new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. The irresistible tang of the actual – what a marvellous phrase! It perfectly expresses the quality I value most in art and literature. 

4. A special shout-out to Peter Schjeldahl for spotlighting N. H. Pritchard’s wonderful Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69). This work is new to me; it went straight on to my list of favourite paintings. Schjeldahl says of it, 

“Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms. ["All Together Now"]

N. H, Pritchard, Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69)

April 4, 2022 Issue

I love lists of what the artist Philip Guston called “crapola.” Laura Preston’s Talk story, “Incidental Masterpieces,” in this week’s issue, contains a dandy:

Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading “Alone Ave.”; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops.

Preston's list is the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box or a Rauschenberg combine: junk transformed into art. Alchemy! 

Rereadings: Judith Thurman's "Cleopatra's Nose"

This is the first in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Judith Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2008). 

This is one of my all-time favorite essay collections. Thurman is an excellent analyst and a superb describer. She has a critic’s eye for aesthetic specificity and a journalist’s nose for a good story, especially if it involves sex.

Thurman loves to write about female free spirits. Cleopatra’s Nose throngs with them: Vanessa Beecroft, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Catherine Millet, Diane Arbus, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Rei Kawakubo, Marie Antoinette, Jackie Kennedy, and yes, Cleopatra, to name but a few. Also included are a number of stylish men, e.g., Cristóbal Balenciaga, Richard Avedon, Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass, and Hump the Grinder.

Hump the Grinder? It’s the stage name of David Humphries, “the Don King of black hair entertainment.” In 2004, Thurman attended Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars 10-Year Anniversary & California Hair Grammys in Los Angeles, and wrote about it in a wonderful piece called “Roots,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker. (Thirty-eight of the book’s thirty-nine essays are from The New Yorker.) Here’s her description of Hair War’s sponsor, Big Bad D:

That afternoon, D was dressed in an ensemble worthy of Galliano: a pair of high-waisted patchwork leather samurai pants evocative in pizzazz and volume of a Montgolfier; a red T-shirt inlaid with gold and gems that was slashed to display his awesome pectorals; a belt of scarified alligator skin, with claws still attached, from which hung a pouch containing, he said, freeze-dried gator meat; a rawhide “coolie” hat adorned with stones, pods, and shells; and some $50,000 worth of diamonds, including a bracelet of hazelnut-size beads and a ring, about four inches wide, shaped like a pair of scissors.

Many of the best pieces in this collection are reviews of brilliant haute-couture shows. For example, in “Swann Song,” she’s at the Centre Pompidou for a Saint Laurent extravaganza:

Most couture shows last about twenty minutes. This one roiled on for more than an hour, in waves of staggering beauty, fauvish color, and perverse extravagance – a jacket costing half a million francs, for example, perfectly replicating van Gogh’s Irises in seven hundred hours’ worth of hand-beading by Lesage. There were sumptuously embellished tributes to other painters: Picasso, Matisse, Bracque, Dalí, and Warhol; to poets and writers, among them Aragon and Cocteau; and to exotic native populations – Russian moujiks, Forbidden City courtesans, Castilian matadors, and African queens. There was plenty of cerebral whimsy to offset the noirish sex play: feather minis suitable for a showgirl’s wedding to a peer; a miniscule suede tunic from the sixties worn with high-heeled waders; swanky cocktail dresses that exposed a nipple; a transparent black baby-doll disco nighties trimmed with fur; quite a bit of immaculately white-collared Belle de Jour respectability begging to be corrupted; a strong dose of double-breasted androgyny; and a backless evening gown cut to the cleft of the buttocks, then scored with lace. But while Saint Laurent can sometimes be pedantically outré, he’s never trashy. And he displayed such encyclopedic formal invention and technical virtuosity that the occasional bomb – like a series of umbrella-shaped flowered tea frocks in what looked like a shower-curtain fabric, or a shapeless wool shrift worn with a dowager’s turban – were like a sorbet between courses rather than a disappointment.

That “quite a bit of immaculately white-collared Belle de Jour respectability begging to be corrupted” is pure Thurman. She relishes corruption. In the book’s Introduction, she says, “A mutual interest in corruption is what draws me to Pascal.” 

In one of this collection's most memorable reviews, “Broad Stripes, Bright Stars,” Thurman describes a fashion show set in a Milan canal:

Then, to universal amazement, we beheld—drifting lazily down the canal—two red boots, a white shirt, a pair of dark trousers. They were followed by a boy dressed in a thick vest of what looked like russet-colored steel wool. He lay supine and motionless, his limbs outstretched, his perfectly calm face framed by the swirling mass of his hair. There were sixteen of his fellow-volunteers to come. Though the clothes were soggy and a little blurred, one read them—as the current turned the page—like the hand-colored images in some mildewed yet marvellous old book. Poell’s idea was so poetic that the magical buoyancy of bodies and clothes (kept from sinking by an invisible flotation device) leapt the banks and infected the audience with a fit of joy. It didn’t matter, I thought, what the collection looked like on a hanger or in a shop, because the show had performed a feat that is rare enough in theatre or art and practically unheard of in fashion. It surprised a group of people with an emotion they hadn’t been expecting to feel. That is how a child experiences a sensual revelation, and how it is transformed into a memory of being happy. “Everybody follows fashion,” Poell told me later. “But change goes against the stream.”

My favourite piece in Cleopatra’s Nose is “Night Kitchens,” a delightful account of Thurman’s visit to the kitchens of two of Kyoto’s master tofu-makers. Here’s a sample: 

Kawashima bounded into the restaurant at about eight, as his pretty wife, Keiko, was clearing away the Nakazato pottery on which breakfast is served—rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark underglaze and a primal beauty. Tofu-making may have a Zen gestalt, but Kawashima—a sporty fifty-eight-year-old with a goatee and a crewcut—doesn’t make a monklike impression. He is the sort of character the French call a gaillard—a bon vivant bristling with rakish vigor. One keeps up with him at a fast trot. His cottage-scale factory and offices occupy a warren of rooms in a sombre two-hundred-year-old house, with blackened beams, which survived demolition when the arcade was built, and seems out of synch with its festive swags of plastic wisteria. At the back of a rather cramped, unlovely industrial kitchen, baskets of zaru dofu were moving down a conveyor belt, getting wrapped and labelled. (The tofu is handmade, and strictly organic, but the packaging is mechanized, and a small fleet of white delivery vans was waiting at the loading dock.) Kawashima’s younger brother was dressed in kitchen whites, stirring soy milk in a metal vat. It was warm but hadn’t been curdled yet, and he offered me some from the ladle. Its taste was slightly beany, yet elemental, with an ineffable sweetness, as if it came not from a plant but from a breast.

Mm, that last line is crazy-good. The whole book is like that – textured, sensuous, inspired. Highly recommended. 

3 for the Sea: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure. 

McPhee’s Looking for a Ship has a curious structure. Unlike most travelogues, it doesn’t follow the journey as it was made through time and space. The book consists of seventeen untitled chapters. The first two, written in the past tense, are set in Charleston, South Carolina, where McPhee and his friend Andy Chase, second mate, look for a ship. They eventually find one, the Stella Lykes, that takes them on a forty-two-day run through the Panama Canal and down the coast of South America, with stops to unload and pick up freight at such ports as Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Buenaventura, Lima, and Guayaquil. Chapter 3, written in the present tense, plunges us directly into life aboard Stella. The date is August 10, “the twentieth day of the voyage.” Stella is six days out of Guayaquil, Ecuador, heading for Valparaiso, Chile. What happened to the previous nineteen days? What about the ports before Guayaquil – Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura? What about the Panama Canal? No mention of any of them. We jump from Charleston to Valparaiso. But be patient; keep reading. McPhee has his own artful way of proceeding. All these ports of call eventually enter the narrative: Valparaiso in Chapter 3; Cartagena in Chapter 4; Guayaquil in Chapters 5, 12, and 13; Balboa and Panama Canal in Chapter 11; Lima in Chapter 12; Buenaventura in Chapter 15.

Looking for a Ship’s structure isn’t determined by chronology. It’s theme-driven. One of its main themes is the strong character and superb seamanship of Stella’s captain – Paul McHenry Washburn. McPhee calls him “the most interesting person on the ship.” Washburn appears in almost every chapter. McPhee describes him on the bridge, interviews him in his office, shows him docking Stella in some tight spots, tells about his personal history, visits him at his home in Jacksonville, shows him outwitting a Caribbean storm, describes him dealing with pirates, stowaways, and Stella’s burners going out. 

Captain Washburn is one of McPhee’s themes. Another is the decline of the American Merchant Marine. It’s this theme that generates the ending of the book, with Stella dead in the water. When I first read Looking for a Ship many years ago, I found this ending abrupt and unsatisfying. The journey seemed prematurely terminated (even though there’s at least one clue – the reference in Chapter 17 to the inspection of Stella’s hull in Port Newark – indicating the ship did make it back to where it started). But, on second reading recently, the ending strikes me as perfect. Stella, floating dead in the water, is a marvellous symbol of the United States Merchant Marine’s predicament. McPhee’s final sentence is consummate:

With our lemons and lollipops and terrycloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with out ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiata pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.

Unlike Looking for a Ship, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau unfolds in a straight chronological line. Events are described in the order they happened. There are no flashbacks. But there is a neat structural wrinkle. Raban braids two narratives: (1) his journey through the Inside Passage; (2) Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploratory voyage through the same body of water. The two strands are beautifully interlaced. At times, it’s almost as if Captain Van is sailing right there with him (“I’d planned that day to sail up Admiralty Inlet and cross the strait, meeting Vancouver’s expedition as his small boats made their way south into the sound”). 

The primary narrative – Raban’s account of his trip – moves in the most natural way, day by day, noting details, logging impressions. I relish this journal-like form of writing. The book consists of eight chapters. The first begins in Seattle, in March. The last ends back in Seattle, in August. Chapter 5 contains a surprise, a break in the narrative line. Raban suspends his trip, docks his boat in Potts Lagoon, approximately midway on his voyage, and returns to his Seattle home, where he learns that his father is seriously ill. Raban flies to England to be with him. We go from the labyrinthine channels, mercurial tides, and boiling whirlpools of the Inside Passage to the lawns and gardens of Market Harborough and the modest brick bungalow where his mother and father live. We’re plunged directly into Raban’s personal life, his sometimes prickly relations with his parents and siblings. Raban describes his father’s death, funeral, and cremation. The chapter, called “Rite of Passage,” is forty-six pages long. Its content contrasts sharply with the rest of the book. At the chapter’s end, Raban flies back to Potts Lagoon and resumes his voyage. But his mood has changed (“There was no avoiding my father now”). 

Earlier, I described Chapter 5 as a break in the narrative. But, on reflection, I don’t think it is. It’s part of the chronology of events that happened during the voyage. By including it, Raban shows his fidelity to real life. 

Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler is interestingly structured. The first three chapters are chronological; the remaining eleven are thematic. The book begins at O’Hanlon’s home in Oxfordshire. He receives an excited call from his friend Luke Bullough:

Redmond, you’ve got to get up here, fast. There’s a storm coming in, big style! I have the satellite maps. Force 11, maybe more. Straight for Orkney. And Jason, the Norlantean skipper – he’s called on Cellnet. He’s north-west of Shetland. He says the weather’s horrendous. And getting worse. Perfect! Just what you wanted! He says we sign on at Scrabster, Saturday, two days’ time, 7 a.m., no later. OK? Good. So pick me up at home – 19 Pilot Square, Fittie. Be there! And remember – nothing green.

The first three chapters tell about O’Hanlon’s trip to Fittie to pick up Luke, and then about the two of them continuing on to Scrabster, where they board the Norlantean. The ship then makes a short trip to Stromness, where it takes on supplies and ice, and where O’Hanlon, Luke, and some of the crewmen visit a couple of bars. Then back aboard the Norlantean, and away she goes, away, away to the wild North Atlantic fishing-grounds. In one of my favourite sentences, O’Hanlon describes her departure this way:

The next day, in full, black, northern winter night of four o’clock in the afternoon, in a constant, unvarying wind of such violence that I found it almost impossible to stand on deck, the Norlantean, spotlights blazing, left Stromness.

The rest of the book takes place on the Norlantean. We say goodbye to chronological narration. The trip becomes a series of pungent, vivid, humorous set pieces. For example, Chapter 4 takes place in the fish-room, where O’Hanlon learns to gut Greenland halibut (“my gloves only just got a grip on its smooth slimy skin”). Chapter 5 shows him in the galley, eating clapshot (“I decided that I actually liked minced sheep’s-oesophagus-and-stomach, both lengths of colon, the rectum, the entire alimentary canal, as long as it had that reassuringly acrid background taste of gunpowder”). Chapter 6 describes being in the wheelhouse during a Force 12, Category One hurricane (“I was silent, mesmerized by the lines of foam streaking towards the bow window, lit by the bow searchlight, flying seawater whipped into white by winds gone berserk, like snow in a blizzard, except that the snowflakes had got together, coagulated, as if they were whole long lines of detached wave-crests, coming at me in a solid weighted mass”). 

Each of Trawler's chapters describes a particular aspect of shipboard life. Time seems measured not in days or hours, but in hauls. 

To sum up, Passage to Juneau is chronological; Looking for a Ship is thematic; Trawler is partly chronological and partly thematic. All three structures contain an immense amount of action. That’s the subject of my next post in this series.