Robert Kushner's Gorgeous Paintings

Robert Kushner, For Betty (2022)

Johanna Fateman’s recent "Art: Robert Kushner" (The New Yorker, March 13, 2023) spurred me to visit dcmooregallery.com and view Kushner’s exhibition “Then & Now.” Wow! Kushner’s paintings are gorgeous! Fateman’s description of his recent works – “lusciously digressive elaborations and tributes to Matisse’s tabletop vistas” – is perfect. If I had the dough, I’d buy at least six. I think my favourite is For Betty (see above). Thank you to Fateman for leading me to this wonderful artist. 

On T. J. Clark's Superb Art Descriptions

T. J. Clark (Photo from blogs.getty.edu)

I see in the February 9 New York Review of Books that T. J. Clark was awarded the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing. The announcement says,

His focus on art throughout its history as an expression of social and political conditions of its time has brought what the judges called “revolutionarily fresh and vivifying insights into subjects as diverse as Bruegel, Giotto, Courbet, and Picasso in a manner that is as notable for its deep humanity as it is for its uncompromising acuity.”

In my opinion, the judges reached the right decision for the wrong reasons. Clark is a superb art writer, and is absolutely deserving of the Dudley Prize. But his strength is not social and political interpretation. If anything, that’s his weakness. His great strength is his descriptive power. He’s an extraordinary describer. Here are three examples:

On Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill (1971):

The wonderful sky in the 1971 Primrose Hill is pictorial, even picturesque. That does not mean I disapprove of it, any more than I do of the pulled purple-brown strokes sealing in and stamping down the picture’s bottom-right corner. But the sky and corner are stratagems, moves in a game. They’re easily recognised as such. Now turn to the red-brown furrows scraped across the picture’s midground, or the two slivers of yellow locking the red-brown in place, or the slab of deep green laid on top of the trees at right like the lid of a coffin ... about these I’m much less certain. The white sky and the purple-brown field are maybe there essentially to release these episodes – so that the painting moves up, where it matters, from the realm of illusion to that of presence. ‘Something’, in the red and yellow, takes hold of the painting process and accelerates it almost to breaking point. Whatever that something is – ‘seeing’, ‘totality’, ‘the thing itself’ – the oil paint is twisted and scarified by it. Space begins to elude us. The ground hardens. The trees are full of camouflaged guns. [“Frank Auerbach,” London Review of Books, September 10, 2015]

On Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932):

Touch – the imagination of contact and softness and curvature – is consumed in the Nude on Black Armchair by something else: a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding onto the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a color – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is falling. The blue wall to the left is icy cold. The woman’s blonde hair is sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast. Blacks encase her as if for an eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window. [Picasso and Truth, 2013]

On Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855):

Take the horse’s head. It is first and foremost a picture of a creature looking death in the face; and if one goes on to think about it, the face of death – the face the horse seems to fix with its desperate glare – is most likely that of the fallen rider, the man in the turban, his fingers still clutching the horse’s mane. The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. The choice of supporting colours is a stroke of genius. The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch. The cold gold of the horseman’s tunic, again with its exquisite green filigree, is a kind of deathly counterpoint to the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath: the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows. [“A Horse’s Impossible Head,” London Review of Books, October 10, 2019]

I could easily quote a dozen more. I love Clark's descriptions. They are themselves a form of art – the art of translating paint into words. 

March 20, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Jill Lepore’s “Pay Dirt,” a wonderful review of seed catalogues. It begins and ends with beets. Here’s the ending:

Or you could just grow some beets and eat them. You can plant them soon, so soon. Three weeks before the last frost: it’ll be here before you know it. Poke a hole in the ground half an inch deep. You can use your pinkie to measure, fingertip to first knuckle. The seeds of the common beet are about the size of peppercorns. Plop them in one by one, two inches apart. Rows are good. After a couple of weeks, when the tops pop up, yank out the seedlings that have come up too close together; I try to chuck them over the fence by smashing them with a trowel, as if they were little green-and-red badminton birdies. It passes the time. Wait another month, then dig up the roots and wash them off in the kitchen sink. They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them. You can even eat the leaves: they look like red-veined chard, and I have always found that they taste like dirt, but I don’t mind.

That “They’ll be red-fleshed and globe-shaped and fist-size and grubby and hairy, and I usually roast them” is excellent!

In her piece, Lepore mentions another great New Yorker “garden catalogues” review – Katherine S. White’s classic “A Romp in the Catalogues” (March 1, 1958), included in White’s 1979 collection Onward and Upward in the Garden. It contains one of my all-time favourite New Yorker lines: “To me a ruffled petunia is occasionally a delight but a ruffled snapdragon is an abomination.” 

March 13, 2023 Issue

Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Eyval," in this week’s issue,” begins, 

I’ll start with the cocktails at Eyval, a Persian restaurant that opened last year—and so should you. Gin tends not to agree with me, and yet I couldn’t help but steal sips of a friend’s orange-blossom Negroni, a cold and viscous concoction that lingered on my tongue and in my memory (I can taste it now!), the intoxicating, floral perfume of the orange-blossom water achieving thrilling alchemy with the herbal gin, bitter Aperol, and sweet vermouth.

Mm, instant seduction! I read that and just kept going, devouring the whole mouth-watering piece in one ravenous gulp. Goldfield writes crazy good sentences, e.g., “Plucking out a puckered leathery lime and eating it whole, sticky and sour, left me feeling as lucky as if I’d found the baby in a king cake.” Her “Eyval” is a feast. I enjoyed it immensely. 

March 6, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her absorbing “Marvellous Things,” in this week’s issue, extols the work of Italo Calvino. She calls him “the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” That may be so. I’ve tried reading him, but never got very far. He’s too dreamy, too schematic for my taste. He’s a fabulist; I’m a realist. But there’s no doubt he could write. In his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), he provides this description:

The old towns on the Ligurian coast grew up in times when those parts were infested by Moorish pirates; built to resist siege, they are as close and dense as pine-cones; their deep narrow alleys, called carrugi, are spanned by arches propping the tops of the houses, with dark vaulted arcades and flights of cobbled steps running far below …

That “they are as close and dense as pine-cones” is inspired! 

Emre’s comments on Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1985) are compelling. She says of the book’s concluding vignette:

In the final vignette, “Learning to be dead,” Mr. Palomar tries to imagine the most obscure thing: the world after his death:

“If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,” Mr. Palomar thinks, “and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.” He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.

It is a terribly funny and terribly bleak ending. Yet even here one finds a flicker of hope. If each of the twenty-seven vignettes is an instant in his life, and if each instant, when described, expands forever, then at the moment Mr. Palomar dies he lives. And if he lives forever we need never reconcile ourselves to a world without him in it.

Emre calls Mr. Palomar “Calvino’s most affecting work.” Her review spurs me to give him another try. 

Rosecrans Baldwin's "Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really"

Photo by Adall Schell

I just finished reading Rosecrans Baldwin’s “Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. What a great piece! Baldwin’s subject is Rosecrans Avenue. He writes,

At first glance, Rosecrans is not awe-inspiring. Rosecrans Avenue is just over 27 miles long, running east from the beach through South Los Angeles to the Orange County town of Fullerton. As one of the city’s major avenues, it’s among the few manufactured things here big enough to span the region’s disparate parts. I’ll take a walk or drive on Rosecrans — or Vermont, or Pico — and loop in and out of side streets, watching one neighborhood morph into another, not necessarily for the pleasure of it but to absorb all there is to see. Hand-painted business signs change from Spanish to Korean. For a block or two, restaurants suddenly advertise Creole specialties, reflecting Cajun roots, only to revert the next block to ubiquitous fast-food joints. I’ll walk past squashed-together homes, families hosting driveway parties, a BBQ business tucked halfway down a nondescript alley. Amid all this a sense of low-key peace prevails, along with a shared notion of tolerance — minding your business in clear sight of your neighbor’s. Honestly, the only other way I know how to encounter so much of Los Angeles, to see so many of its diverse communities coexisting, is to go to the beach.

Baldwin’s descriptions of Rosecrans evince an avid flâneurial sensibility – exactly the kind I relish. My favorite part of his piece is his account of walking a portion of Rosecrans in Fullerton:

Previously, for thousands of years, this was the homeland of the Indigenous Tongva people. The yellow cliffs of the Coyote Hills were on view in the distance, but my eye was on nearer details. A 90-minute ramble revealed L.A.’s familiar extremes: big houses alongside dingbats, the shock of the unexpected coinciding with numbing dullness. But I also saw small green parks, southern views of the basin and an older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells. I finished at Rosecrans’s eastern terminus and got a burrito. There was a feeling I’ve experienced only in Los Angeles: I was in the middle of nowhere and at the center of everything, all at once.

I love that detail of the “older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells.” 

Baldwin’s writing is new to me. I see he’s written a book on Los Angeles – Everything Now (2021). I think I’ll check it out.

Acts of Seeing: After the Rain

Ferrara, 2013 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Last night, reading Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena (2019), I encountered these words: “The rain was now a drizzle and the black cobblestones shone darkly.” They recalled for me the time Lorna and I were cycling in Ferrara. We got caught in a shower. We sheltered in the archway of a galleria and waited for the rain to stop. When it did, we biked on. Now everything looked so bright and fresh. I relished the way the wet pavement shone. I took a few photos, including this one of the Cattedrale di San Giorgio.  

McPhee's Mustaches

Norton Townshend Dodge (Photo from andrewsolomon.com)

I’m collecting John McPhee mustaches. So far I have six:

1. Scott Parker: “Tall, with a dark and gyroscopic mustache” (“The Ships of Port Revel”);

2. Norton Townshend Dodge: “With his grand odobene mustache, he had everything but the tusks” (The Ransom of Russian Art);

3. Vernon McLaughlin: “A man built strong and square-shouldered, with a large head, a regal paunch, an equitable mustache, and eyes that gleam with fun and anger” (Looking for a Ship);

4. Mel Adams: “Mel is tall and lanky, fed in the middle but lithe in the legs. He has a sincere mustache, a trig goatee, and a slow, clear, frank, and friendly Ozark voice” (“Tight-Assed River”);

5. Tom Armstrong: “Of medium height and strongly built, he has a precise, navigational mustache” (“Tight-Assed River”);

6. Dick Eisfeller: “Bald, bluejeaned, wearing white running shoes, he had a round face, an amiable mustache, a significant corporation" (“Coal Train”);

And these: 

"The district’s conductors were all men. There were not a few speckled beards, and mustaches large enough to resemble the lower halves of crossing signs" (“Coal Train”);

"There was a lot of Mephistophelian facial hair – the caterpillar sideburns, the full beard, the mustache as bilateral semaphore" (“Coal Train”).

Rereadings: John McPhee's "Uncommon Carriers"

This is the fourth 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 John McPhee’s superb Uncommon Carriers (2006).

This is a book about freight transportation. Sound exciting? Well, it is. McPhee brings it alive. How? That’s one of the things I want to look at here – his technique. He’s an incomparable stylist. But first, I’ll describe the book’s contents. It consists of seven pieces, six of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Here’s a brief summary of each:

1. “A Fleet of One” – Tells about McPhee’s three-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety mile ride with trucker Don Ainsworth, from Bankhead, Georgia, to Tacoma, Washington, aboard Ainsworth’s dazzling sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker.

2. “The Ships of Port Revel” – Tells about McPhee’s visit to Port Revel, a ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of fifteen thousand dollars a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models.

3. “Tight-Assed River” – Tells about McPhee’s trip up the Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being “a good deal longer than the Titanic,” longer even than the Queen Mary 2.

4. “Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” – Tells about his canoe trip up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways travelled by twenty-two-year-old Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff 164 years earlier, the journey described in Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

5. “Out in the Sort” – Tells about his visit to UPS Air’s distribution hub at Louisville International Airport, where a million packages are processed daily.

6. “Coal Train” – Tells about his ride in the cabs of coal trains in Nebraska, Kansas, Georgia, and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.

7. “A Fleet of One – II” – Tells about a second trip McPhee took with Don Ainsworth aboard his chemical tanker – this one an eastbound-and-westbound seven-hundred-and-fifty mile run, starting at the Western Truck Stop in Henrietta, New York. 

Okay, that’s exceedingly rough, but at least it gives you an idea of what the book is about. Now for a taste of the writing, which, for me, is the main attraction. Here’s a sample: 

And now CCTBT was about to turn into CBTCT. Its nose was close to the silo. It was moving steadily at .4 miles per hour. Scott Davis and I went out of the cab and back along the catwalk in the noise and the snow, stepping over to the second unit, and continuing along its catwalk to the far end, because the second unit was facing backward. We got into the cab there and watched. Next to us was the first of a hundred and thirty-four hoppers. The looming silo was something like a grain elevator, reaching out with great arms to the crushers that supplied it. Moving inside, the lead locomotives passed three control booths, whose bay windows were not entirely black with dust. As the first hopper drew abreast of a booth, a pair of steel sheets was lowered from above, coffering the interior of the car in the way that a dentist places baffles around a tooth he’s about to fill. Then coal dropped, explosively, between the sheets. A hundred and fifteen measured tons fell into the coal car in one second. A six-kiloton cloud shot up into the silo’s black interior. Under the crash of coal, the aluminium hopper staggered, wrenched downward, and looked as if it might flatten. From above, the baffles were lifted. The coal in the hopper was maybe five feet above the rims, a calculated fluff that would settle down. At .4 miles per hour, the second car was now in position. The baffles came down, and the coal fell. Crunch, cloud, and the next car was in position. Emerging from the silo on a slight curve, we watched twenty cars totter in the dust under the weight of falling coal before the interior of the silo passed out of sight, with more than a mile of hoppers to follow.

That’s from the penultimate section of “Coal Train,” describing train CCTBT filling up with coal at Black Thunder Mine, Wyoming. Notice the many active verbs – “moving,” “stopping,” “reaching,” “coffering,” “dropped,” “fell,” “shot,” “staggered,” “wrenched,” “lifted,” “totter.” “Coffering” is inspired! McPhee is an action writer par excellence. Notice the use of analogy (“in the way that a dentist places baffles around a tooth he’s about to fill”) to make the image clearer. Notice McPhee’s distinctive way of “being there.” He’s not just a passive observer. Moving from the cab of one locomotive to the cab of another locomotive to get a better view, he participates in the action he’s describing. Notice the compression and precision and dynamism of his description: “Then coal dropped, explosively, between the sheets”; “From above, the baffles were lifted”; “The baffles came down, and the coal fell”; and the brilliant “Crunch, cloud, and the next car was in position.” 

The book brims with surprising, original, delightful sentences:

We crossed the Columbia River and went over the Horse Heaven Hills into the Yakima Valley, apples and grapes in the Horse Heaven Hills, gators in the valley.

For the spectacular plunge in christiania turns down through the mountains from Snoqualmie Pass, Ainsworth’s gear selection was No. 14 and his foot never touched the brake.

In Lowell, nearing the Merrimack, the canal emerges from woods and, conjoining Black Brook, becomes the water hazard that divides the second and third fairways of Mount Pleasant Golf Club, John and Henry all but visible hauling their skiff from the second tee and the third green to the second green and the third tee among the putting golfers, the swinging golfers, the riding golfers in their rolling carts.

We gained momentum and went on up the west side of the river in the tailrace pool of the dam, past the bare and truly mountainous beds of the dead cascade.

Aiming now for the big piers where Interstate 93 crosses the river, we passed private homes in the trophy range, with tessellated riprap like fortress walls, and elaborate stairways, balustered white, descending the riprap in stages to dual-consoled cockpit boats tied up below.

Mark and I found the mouth of a brook coming in from under a railroad track through a very long cylindrical culvert, which we could look through as through a telescope, seeing verdure at the far end, H.D. Thoreau framed in cameo.

The weight of the envelope and speed of the loop and distance to the bag and friction on the wood all having been calculated as if by a Norden bombsight, the envelope slides forward and down, and drops into the bag, missing by a matter of inches the Tallahassee bag on one side and the Green Bay bag on the other.

One of McPhee’s maxims is “Art is where you find it.” In Uncommon Carriers, he finds it in, among other things, a towboat, a chemical tanker, a coal train, and a sixteen-foot Old Town canoe. It’s one of his finest works.  

The Art or the Life: On Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Christopher Benfey, in his recent “Buildings Come to Life,” The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2023), tells me something about Edward Hopper I didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t want to know. He says, “A life-long conservative Republican, he was vehemently opposed to the New Deal.” According to Benfey, he called FDR a “jackass.” I’m a fan of Hopper’s paintings. I’m also a fan of FDR. For me, the New Deal was the greatest government program of the twentieth century. It saved millions of people from the trauma of being out of work during the Great Depression. John Updike said of FDR,

Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by. [“Laissez-Faire is More,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007].

I totally agree. So where does that leave me, now that I know that Hopper, one of my favorite painters, “vehemently opposed the New Deal,” and considered FDR a “jackass”? Is it possible to continue loving his work knowing that he held such wretched anti-humanistic views? 

This raises that old vexing question – can you separate the art from the artist? Can you separate Faulkner’s racism from his Light in August? Can you separate Eliot’s anti-Semitism from his The Wasteland ? Can you separate Naipaul’s violence against his wife from his A Bend in the River? 

I don’t have the answer. I know Flaubert’s position: only the work matters; the life doesn’t. Nevertheless, once I know certain aspects of the life, I find it hard to forget them. Looking at Hopper’s wonderful Early Sunday Morning (1930), with its sunlight on the flat and ruddy brick, I find myself wondering how a guy with such a mean, narrow outlook could paint something so ravishing? Benfey, in his piece, offers a clue. He points out the absence of people in many of Hopper’s pictures. He says, “What Hopper discovered was that when people are gone, the buildings come to life.” Hopper, unlike, say, FDR, wasn’t a humanist. And this is reflected in his paintings. Maybe in this way, at least, his life and art are reconcilable. If he wasn’t the way he was, he wouldn’t have painted the way he did. Still, in light of Benfey’s revelations, I find myself looking at Hoppers slightly differently now. My love has been shaken. 

3 More for the Road: Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan's Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Travels in Siberia.

The travels described in this great book would not likely be possible today due to the Ukraine war. Just recently, the U.S. State Department issued an advisory: “Russia – Do Not Travel.” Frazier lucked out. His infatuation with Russia occurred at a rare moment in history, between the fall of the Soviet Union (1991) and Putin’s annexation of Crimea (2014), when American relations with Russia weren’t so bad. His book is a window on that particular time and place – a window that is now shuttered, possibly for a long, long time. Is that why I decided to reread it? To visit Russia when it isn’t at war? To experience Russia-love, not Russia-hate? No, not really. I reread it because I wanted to once again experience the pleasure of its prose. It’s a sublimely written narrative – one of the most engaging, satisfying, enjoyable works of literature I’ve ever read.

The book is divided into five Parts:

Part I – Tells about Frazier’s first trip to Russia, in late July, 1993, when he visited Moscow, and then went to Omsk and Lake Baikal, in Siberia. This Part is memorable for, among other things, his description of the men’s room at the Omsk airport:

The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of the hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpungible from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.

Part I also tells about several trips Frazier took to Anchorage and Nome, culminating in a 1999 flight from Nome to the city of Provideniya, in Chukotka, Siberia. From there he went by truck, and then boat, to a Chukchi fish camp at the mouth of the Hot Springs River. This is one of my favorite parts of the book. Frazier and his guide, Vladimir Bychkov, hiked to an ancient burial site marked by a line of large bowhead whale skulls:

A distance away in the knee-high grasses, two whale jawbones of great length had been set upright; they curved toward each other like parentheses, making an almost-completed arc against the hillside backdrop of green. To me, the minimalist eloquence of native sites tops the fanciest cathedral any day. Vladimir told me there was also a cemetery hundreds of years old on the crest of the hill above. While he took photographs of the skulls, I hiked to it – no easy deal, given the steepness and the thick growth of angelica plants. Here and there a large bear had preceded me, pressing down the plants and leaving tufts of ginger-colored fur. When I reached the cemetery, an unfenced saddle of bare ground inlaid with rectangular stone graves, I saw that the drop from it on one side was as precipitous as the first hill on a rollercoaster. For a moment the clouds and fog over the ocean opened out and afforded a view that was, approximately, eternal. With just bare land, sky, and empty sea up ahead of me, I had for the first time an astronomical awareness that I was standing on a planet – perhaps the way a visitor would feel walking on Mars.

Frazier enjoyed his time at the fish camp (as did I, through his writing). He was there only about a week in all, but he says, “I felt I could have lived there for months. The routine suited me.”

Part II – Tells about his trip to St. Petersburg, in July, 2000, when he “suffered Russia-infatuation all over again.” He visited the Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic, where by chance, he met the Museum’s director of publicity, Victor Serov. Serov was also a “guide who specialized in extreme adventure, and expeditions to most of the cold places on earth you can name.” When Frazier told him he wants to cross Siberia by car, Serov said he could help him. 

Part II also tells about another St. Petersburg trip that Frazier took in January, 2001, for the purpose of, among other things, meeting with Serov to plan the cross-Siberia trip. While there, he visited Peterhof, “the grand palace built by Peter the Great twenty-five miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland.” His description of this visit is classic Frazier – avid, attentive, evocative. I particularly like his depiction of the Cottage Palace:

On the top floor was a snug, comfortably furnished room called the Morskoi Kabinet. (The name means “Sea Office.”) This was like a study or an aerie for the tsar. Its intricately patterned parquet floor and the green trompe l’oeil curtains set off the soaring distance in its windows. Through wood-mullioned double French doors leading to a small roofed balcony, one looked both downward and dizzyingly far across the gulf. On a table before the French doors sat a long brass telescope and a speaking trumpet; sometimes the tsar directed naval exercises from the balcony, calling orders to aides who relayed them to the assembled fleet. 

Part II also tells about a trip that Frazier took to Nome, Alaska, in March, 2001. From Nome, he flew to Wales, Alaska, and then from there went by helicopter to Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Frazier writes,

Little Diomede, the village, was a hardscrabble place if I ever saw one. At the time its population was 178. Its public buildings and houses ascended the island’s steep rock in a shallow out-of-the-wind indentation on its northwest side, one small structure mounting above another like the apartments of desert cliff dwellers. The village’s vertical access ways were zigzag staircases carved into the cement-hard snow. I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours, stepping into a store or office now and then to get warm. I saw a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building, and a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame, and two boys shooting a small black dog out by the village dump, and a guy carrying cans of soda pop on his shoulders into the general store when the cans exploded in the cold and sent soda cascading all over him and down the back of his neck. I spent a good while examining a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town. Almost nobody makes skin boats anymore. Splitting the skins and sewing them requires skills both physical and spiritual; you have to have absolute quiet in your soul to sew the skin covering to the willow frame. This twenty-foot boat, a museum-quality object, was obviously still being used.

That “I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours …” is so typical of Frazier’s approach to travel. He loves to nose around places, seeing what there is to see. And I’m happy to nose around with him.

Part III – Chronicles Frazier’s nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, starting in St. Petersburg, August 5, 2001, and ending five weeks, two days later on the shore of Olga Bay, September 11, 2001. 

It unfolds like this: St. Petersburg to Pikalevo to Pestovo to Vologda to Velikii Ustyug to Esiplovo to Kirov to Perm to Ekaterinburg to Maltsevo to Pokrovskoye to Berezovyi Yar to Tobolsk to Omsk to Neudachino to Klubnika to Sekti to Chertokulich to Kargat to Novosibirsk to Akademgorodok to Kemerovo to Achinsk to Krasnoyarsk to Ust’-Mana to Kuskun to Kansk to Tulun to Irkutsk to Lake Baikal to Ulan-Ude to Chita to Chernyshevsk to Magdagachi to Svobodnyi to Blagoveshchensk to Birobidzhan to Volochaevka to Khabarovsk to Korfovskii to Bikin to Rudnyi to Olga Bay. 

What a trip! Here are some of my favorite moments:

Pikalevo, where Frazier and his two guides, Sergei Lunev and Vladimir “Volodya” Chumak, stop to buy bread and their van, a used Renault step van, won’t start:

When Sergei opened the van door, his cell phone, which he had said would provide a backup to my satellite phone, slid from the car seat and fell into a puddle. As far as know, it never worked again. And when he returned with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm like a volleyball – in most Russian stores, you bring your own shopping bags – he hopped into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and received not a sound in response. Multiple tries produced the same result. The van would not start. A red film of rage crossed my eyes. How could he not have done a better job of checking out this vehicle before we left? I held my tongue for the time being. He and Volodya persuaded the driver of a passing microbus to pull us for a jump start. They crawled under the bumpers, tied a rope to the frames of both vehicles, and with a quick tug we were running again. Volodya and Sergei acted as if this were just the normal way you start a car.

Informal rest area on the Vologda road, somewhere between Pikalevo and Pestovo, where the trio stop to take a break and Frazier notices all the trash:

Here for the first time I encountered big-time Russian roadside trash. Very, very few trash receptacles exist along the roads of Russia. Thus rest area and its ad hoc picnic spots with their benches of downed tree trunks, featured a ground layer of trash basically everywhere, except in a few places, where there was more. In the all-trash encirclement, trash items had piled themselves together here and there in heaps three and four feet tall, as if making common cause. With a quick kicking and scuffing of nearby fragments, Sergei rendered a place beside a log bench relatively trash-free and then laid out our cold chicken lunch on pieces of cellophane on the ground. I ate hungrily, though I did notice through the cellophane many little pieces of broken eggshell from some previous traveler’s meal.

Russian trash is one of the book's subthemes.

While staying at a hotel in Novosibirsk, Frazier puts his laundry out to dry and the wind blows it away:

In the early afternoon, still with no sign of the guys, I decided to wash some laundry in the sink in the communal bathroom. After rinsing and wringing out the clothes, I draped them on the railing of the porch outside the TV room to dry. But I had forgotten the wind, which in just a few minutes had blown the clothes off the rail, whence they had fallen six stories onto the roof of the building’s entryway.

I ran to the elevator and went down to the first floor and outside. My clothes were in the middle of the entryway roof where I couldn’t possibly get them. I rode the elevator back upstairs depressed about the shirts, socks, and underwear I would be leaving permanently in Novosibirsk. But when I looked half an hour later, I saw that the wind had swept them away yet again, and they were now scattered on the sidewalk and across the lawn. People were walking around them. I hurried down and collected them. 

That scene made me smile. Frazier is a genius at converting seemingly mundane incidents into delightful narrative art. 

At a campsite somewhere beyond Krasnoyarsk, Frazier climbs the stones of the roadbed of the Trans-Siberian Railway, looks down at the rails, and senses the presence of ghosts:

As on the old Sibirskii Trakt, phantoms thronged along the railway. I pictured the flag-bedecked, celebratory trains that passed by here when the railway was first completed in tsarist times, and the soldiers of the Czech Legion in their slow-moving armored trains in 1919, and the White Army soldiers dying of typhus by the thousands along the route, and the slave laborers who laid the second set of tracks in the 1930s, and the countless sealed Stolypin cars of prisoners dragged along these tracks to the deadly gulag camps of the Soviet Far East. Osip Mandelstam, the great poet on his way to death, at the Second River transit prison in Vladivostok, had gone along this line. The ties and the steel rails and the overhead catenary wires all leading determinedly eastward still had a certain grimness, as if permanently blackened by history.

On the car-carrying train from Chernyshevsk to Magdagachi, Frazier looks out at the passing landscape and describes what he sees:

Quietly, I slid from the van and went to the passageway for a look outside. The sun had risen on a cool clear day in early fall. Our train was making a steady twenty miles per hour through taiga mixed with hayfields. During the night a heavy frost had covered the countryside. It rimed the leaves of the birch trees, some of which had already turned yellow, and made the needles and knobby branches of a tree I took to be a larch a soft white. At this speed I could see the trackside weeds curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them, the frost on the web strands glistening in the sun. When the tracks went around a bend, the rest of the train was revealed extending far ahead. Our vagon was the second-to-last car. A broad hayfield we passed had just been cut. The short stubble, all frost-white, lay like carpet among the haystacks spaced regularly across it. In the cool morning air, the top of every haystack was steaming, and each wisp of steam leaned eastward, the direction we were going. 

That “At this speed I could see the trackside weeds curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them” is inspired!

Part IV – Tells about Frazier’s first winter trip in Siberia. It’s a momentous trip because it takes him to something he’s always wanted to see – a lager, i.e., a Soviet-era prison camp. On March 6, 2005, he flies from New York to Anchorage to Seoul. From there he flies to Vladivostok, where he meets Sergei and Volodya. He spends a few days in Vladivostok (“Blackened ruts of ice ran down the middle of many streets and the sidewalks were all hard-polished snow”), then he and Sergei fly to Irkutsk (“finally, true Siberian cold”). After two days there, they take a train to Ulan-Ude (“sooty and gray, as before, but now fiercely cold”). From there, they travel by bus along Lake Baikal to the town of Ust-Barguzin, where they arrange to be driven to the city of Severobaikalsk, two hundred and thirty miles away, at the north end of the lake. Thence from Severobaikalsk (“as charming as any Soviet-era relic could be”), they go by train for about fifty-three hours, then by hired car for another eight to the city Yakutsk (“still a frontier place, still hanging on to the writhing wilderness by its fingernails”). In Yakutsk, he visits, among other places, the paleontology museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences: 

There were mammoth tusks curling like untrimmed parentheses, and mammoth teeth, and pieces of fossilized mammoth hide with fur still on them, and a photo on the wall of a famous “mammoth graveyard” along a riverbank, where thousands of specimens had been found.

In Yakutsk, they arrange to be driven the two-hundred-some miles to the village of Khanyga. From there, they go to the village of Tyoplyi Kliuch, where Frazier visits a museum about the gulag. Eighteen miles past Tyoplyi Kliuch, they turn onto a prison highway called the Topolinskaya Trassa. Frazier says, “I traveled many thousands of miles in Siberia, and this is the most remarkable road I was ever on…. If most Russian construction looks handmade, this road appears to have been beaten into the earth by hands, feet, and bodies.” They drive the Topolinskaya Trassa for 117 miles, ending in the village of Topolinoe. Frazier finds this drive so dangerous that, at one point, when they stop to take a break, he pens a farewell note to his family, “just in case.” He describes the road:

Farther and higher into the mountains, the road went over pass after pass. Each unnerved me worse than the one before it. In my mind I still picture them – guardrailless, downward sloping at the outward edges, sidewalk-narrow above drop-offs of thousands of feet, with Tinkertoy wrecked vehicles at the far, far distant bottoms. (My fear may have supplied the Tinkertoy wreckage, though I’m sure I did see a lost truck or two.) 

After an overnight stay in Topolinoe, Frazier and Sergei head back to Khandyga, traveling the prison road again. On the way, in the light of day, they see evidence of derelict lagers. They stop to check one out:

At first view the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts several yards beyond, and the low, shameful barracks with its two doors and three windows fit exactly the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its genericness and became this particular Russian structure of its own.

Frazier describes the lager in detail – the boards, the plaster, the roof, the floor, the iron stove, the bunks. He says, “This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held.” He’s struck by the place’s “overwhelming aura of absence.” He thinks of Stalin: “By this metaphysic, the camp I was looking at, and all the camps along this road, and the road itself, were Stalin. His was the animating spirit of the place.” In one of the book’s most memorable passages, he writes,

The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.

Part V – Tells about Frazier’s fifth and shortest Siberian journey – his trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. He visits, among other places, the Novosibirsk Regional Museum and the Novosibirsk State Art Museum. He takes in a movie, Tsar, about Ivan the Terrible, at the Pobeda (Victory) theatre. He takes the subway to a giant shopping mall. Here’s his description of the subway ride:

One morning I set out to find this mall. I had heard it was on the city’s outskirts, so I went down into the Lenin Square metro, boarded a subway train, and rode to the last stop. The weather was as cold as usual but the station was heated to stuffiness. A drowsy warmth filled the subway car, too – until the train emerged onto the bridge over the Ob River, supposedly the longest subway-train bridge in the world. I noticed the passengers all rebuttoning and adjusting scarves. After a few minutes, the car’s temperature dropped to the subzero cold outside, and everybody was breathing steam. In another few minutes, the train went back underground and the car became warm again.

The only part of the mall that he really likes is “right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold. Mixed with that air, a strong scent of Russian diesel blasted muscular alternative to the retail atmosphere.”

Of all the things that Frazier does while in Novosibirsk, my favorite is his visit to the Museum of Siberian Communications:

The humorous blonde woman with Nefertiti eyes who showed me around laughed about the huge old radios, the suitcase-size adding machines, the bulbous green telephone that had come from East Germany, the almost-primitive Yenisei TV set made in Krasnoyarsk, the Brezhnev-era TV that was the size of a desk and that everybody in the 1970s dreamed of owning, and the 1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water. 

I love that list, especially the last item – the 1950s TV with the “large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water.” What a marvelous detail! Travels in Siberia brims with such things – the Northern Lights diorama in St. Petersburg’s Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic (“On the exhibit’s midnight-blue sky, iridescent Northern Lights began to pulse and flash in the dark”), the elaborate clock in the Cottage Palace (“on the clock’s large glass face were sixty-seven smaller clocks each showing the time in a different one of Russia’s sixty-six provinces and Alaska”), the walrus-skin boat in Little Diomede, the campsite oatmeal with “a few mosquito bodies in it,” Sergei’s use of the van’s windshield wiper as a squeegee, the ubiquitous bottle-bottom cups, the honey cure for laryngitis, Admiral Kolchak Beer, Severobaikalsk’s winter garden (“There were ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of heat”), the glass beach outside Vladivostock (“Each wave as it curled on the shore picked up a load of water-smoothed, shiny-wet glass fragments and then tumbled them and set them down and spread them out”), on and on. I haven’t come close to doing this great book justice. It’s so rich in incident and detail. Maybe in future posts, I can do better, explore it more deeply. My next post in this series will be on structure. 

Postscript: Portions of Travels in Siberia originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker: see “Travels in Siberia – I” (August 3, 2009); “Travels in Siberia – II” (August 10 & 17, 2009); and “On the Prison Highway” (August 30, 2010).