On Janet Malcolm's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa."

From Janet Malcolm's Diana & Nikon (1980)

Janet Malcolm was always comparing; it’s one of her signature analytical moves. In her brilliant “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her great 1980 essay collection Diana and Nikon), she compared three versions of a famous Walker Evans portrait: (1) “Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife” (1936), published in Evans’ American Photographs (1938); (2) untitled portrait, published in James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); and (3) “Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama” (1936), published in Walker Evans: First and Last (1978). Malcolm wrote,

The 1938 version shows a young woman of the most delicate, aristocratic beauty, with elegant bones, clear eyes, and smooth white skin, gazing confidently into the camera with a slight smile of humorous indomitability on her lips – a woman who, in her poverty, has the sort of profound beauty that her more fortunate sisters may envy but will seek in their hairdressers’ and dressmakers’. The version in Walker Evans: First and Last shows an ugly hag, her face covered with lines and wrinkles, her brow furrowed with anxiety, her mouth set in a bitter line, her eyes looking out in the expectation of seeing nothing good. What one feels looking at this portrait is no longer envy but outrage at the conditions that should have turned a beautiful woman into such a defeated and desexed being – a member of what James Agee, writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” The photograph of the sharecropper’s wife that appears in Agee’s book gives the same impression of beauty and indomitability as the one in American Photographs, even though it comes from the same negative that is used in the 1978 book. The poor printing of forty years ago did a cosmetic job, washing out lines, smoothing out the brow, minimizing the damage. The printer of the new book has performed an act of restitution, and his mercilessly scrutinizing prints are consequently more in line with Agee’s book: the pictures and the text don’t agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers’ lives. “How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it?” Agee cries. “Don’t listen to him,” the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. “He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It’s not as bad as he says.”

This paragraph contains three arresting revelations: (1) there are three versions of this iconic photo; (2) the 1938 version is slightly different from the other two; and (3) the 1941 version – the one in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – is a “cosmetic” version of the one that appeared in 1978. Malcolm’s passage also contains an interesting opinion – that the 1978 “ugly hag” version is the one “more in line with Agee’s text.” Is Malcolm right? I don’t think so. 

In the text, Allie Mae Burroughs is named Annie May Gudger. At least twice, Agee describes her as beautiful:  

1. Saturday is the day of leaving the farm and going to Cookstown, and from the earliest morning on I can see that she is thinking of it. It is after she has done the housework in a little hurry and got the children ready that she bathes and prepares herself, and as she comes from the bedroom, with her hat on, ready to go, her eyes, in ambush even to herself, look for what I am thinking in such a way that I want to tell her how beautiful she is; and I would not be lying.

2. ... and now for the first time in all this hour we have sat here, Annie Mae takes her stiff hands from her ears and slowly lifts her beautiful face with a long strip of tears drawn, vertical, beneath each eye, and looks at us gravely, saying nothing.

It's true that Agee sees beauty in things that many people would consider ugly, e.g., a tenant farmer’s rough wooden shack, a tenant farmer’s worn overhauls. He eventually has this to say about his sense of beauty: 

They live on land, and in houses, and under skies and seasons, which all happen to seem to me beautiful beyond almost anything else I know, and they themselves, and the clothes they wear, and their motions, and their speech, are beautiful in the same intense and final commonness and purity.

The photo of Allie Mae Burroughs that Evans included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is very much in line with Agee’s sense of her beauty, as expressed in his text. Malcolm’s idea that the “ugly hag” version would’ve been a better match strikes me as wrong. I think it would’ve struck Evans and Agee that way, too. 

From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

 

August 21, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is David Owen’s absorbing “There and Back Again,” a report on the “rapidly evolving but still only semi-visible economic universe known as the reverse supply chain.” Owen tells about attending “a three-day conference, in Las Vegas, conducted by the Reverse Logistics Association, a trade group whose members deal in various ways with product returns, unsold inventories, and other capitalist jetsam.” He sketches the history of refunds, tracing it back to J. C. Penney (“Among his innovations was allowing customers to return anything, no questions asked”). He describes visiting a liquidation business called America’s Remanufacturing Company (A.R.C.), based in Georgia:

We walked through the receiving area, a large, open space that was filled with recent arrivals—tilting piles of household appliances, stacks of yellow bins containing miscellaneous Amazon returns—and stopped in front of a pallet on which half a dozen Husqvarna two-thousand-pounds-per square-inch electric pressure washers, made under a license by Briggs & Stratton, had been stacked and bound with plastic stretch wrap. (A pressure washer is many homeowners’ second-favorite power tool, after their chainsaw. It shoots a stream of water at high velocity, and can be used to clean a roof, blast mold off a wooden deck, or scare away a bear, as a friend of mine did after being surprised by one while scrubbing down the inside of his swimming pool.) As Adamson and I watched, workers sorted units by model and year of manufacture. They checked electrical components and replaced damaged parts with parts they’d salvaged from returns they couldn’t repair. Much of the refurbishing was done on a manufacturing line that A.R.C. bought from a Briggs & Stratton plant, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and modified, in part by adding a car-wash-like cleaning system to one end.

The rampant consumerism underlying the reverse supply chain is appalling. But the innovative way the market responds to it is impressive. The reverse supply chain is a great subject. Owen writes about it clearly and engagingly.

Acts of Seeing: Brandon, Manitoba

Brandon, Manitoba, 2023 (Photo by John MacDougall)

Why? Why this photo of a grungy, no-account alley in Brandon, Manitoba? Because it speaks to me in ways more “beautiful” photos don’t. The broken pavement, the weeds, the strands of overhead wires, the leaning wooden power poles, the three gray transformers, their grayness rhyming with the sad grayness of the sky, the rusted dumpster, the black fire escape, and most of all, the graffiti painted on the brick walls. I love it all. It’s hard to explain. It has something to do with texture, and with melancholy, and with influence. I’ve been heavily influenced by the work of Walker Evans. Some of his best photos feature power lines and telephone poles: see, for example Commercial Quarter, Steel Mill and Workers’ Houses, Birmingham, Alabama (1936), South 3rd St., Paducah, Kentucky (1947), and the great Street and Graveyard in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1936). 

Interesting Emendations: Burkhard Bilger's "Fatherland"

I’m currently reading Burkhard Bilger’s absorbing family memoir Fatherland (2023). I’ve just finished chapter 8, called “Ghost.” It’s about Bilger’s participation in a Familienaufstellung. Reading it, I recall that Bilger wrote about this experience before in a New Yorker piece titled “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016). Comparing the two versions, I see a number of interesting changes. For example, both versions define a Familienaufstellung as “part theatre, part therapy, part séance—a measure of just how far Germans will go to come to terms with their past.” Both versions compare it to “family sculpting, in which patients take turns posing one another in groups to depict key moments in their lives.” Both versions note that a Familienaufstellung is “both more impersonal and more weirdly intimate” than family sculpting. Where the two versions differ is that the New Yorker piece is more detailed about the origins of the Familienaufstellung. Bilger notes that it “grew out of the work of Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist and former Catholic priest.” He writes,

Hellinger’s method is reminiscent of psychodrama—an early form of Viennese psychotherapy in which patients act out traumatic memories, often on stage or with props. But it’s closest to family sculpting, a type of group therapy developed by the psychologist Virginia Satir in the early nineteen-sixties. In Satir’s method, patients take turns posing one another in groups to depict key moments in their lives. How and where people stand—whether a wife faces her husband or has her back to him, or a son is alone in a corner or encircled by siblings—embodies their relationship. Sometimes it helps people see that relationship clearly for the first time.

At times, the behavior in these sessions is bizarre. Bilger says,

By the end of the second day, I’d been a brother, a grandfather, Restlessness, and the country of Germany. I’d watched people burst into tears, climb into one another’s laps, and pretend to be God. I’d heard a woman scream that she was bleeding from her vagina and that crows had eaten her baby. At times, the sobs and shouting rose to such a pitch that I worried that the police might come. 

Bilger is skeptical of the process, but not dismissive. He says, “The very act of empathizing so deeply could help people understand themselves.” But in the magazine version, he also says,

Whether it’s true, I can’t say. I never found any trace of those victims in German or French archives. Like a lot of the revelations in Baring’s sessions, this one struck me as a little too convenient. When you’re haunted by an ancestor’s past, you want nothing more than to hear him confess his sins—to condemn or forgive him once and for all, and then banish his ghost to history. But it’s rarely that simple.

Bilger’s “Ghost Stories” is one of the most personal pieces he’s ever written, and one of his best. It’s great to see a version of it preserved between hard covers. 

August 14, 2023 Issue

Anthony Lane, in his review of Ira Sachs’s new movie Passages, in this week’s issue, says, “It’s the unhappiest film I’ve watched in a long while, steeped in Freudian pessimism—that is to say, you can meet the demands of the libido, in full, but don’t expect your world not to fall apart. Once satisfaction is guaranteed, so is chaos” [“Most Wanted”]. In contrast, Richard Brody finds Passages “exhilarating.” Instead of pessimism, he finds “positivity”: 

The positivity of “Passages” is inseparable from its sex positivity. There are sex scenes of a rare dramatic power, whether in the animal athleticism that marks the erotic bond of Martin and Tomas (Sachs films their scenes in long, tense, extended takes), in the howling delight that Tomas finds in his relationship with Agathe, or in his tender and wonderstruck gaze at her face as he caresses her to orgasm. [“ ‘Passages’ and an Art Monster’s Fierce Purity,” newyorker.com, August 8, 2023]

Lane disagrees. He says of the movie’s sex scenes, 

Here and there, “Passages” has been described as “sexy,” but that’s the last thing it is. To be sure, there are writhings on view, gay and straight, but the sex has the animus of violence: a desperate grapple, with one person’s legs wrapped around another’s back. Agathe keeps her heavy boots on, and almost bangs her head on the edge of a desk. Nothing here is solved or softened by the making of love. Rather, the effect of all the lusting is to hammer people further into unwisdom and despair. 

So which is it – positive (Brody) or negative (Lane)? Sexy (Brody) or unsexy (Lane)? Exhilarating (Brody) or despairing (Lane)?  My interest is piqued. I guess I’ll have to watch the film and make up my own mind.

On Jonathan Franzen's "The Problem of Nature Writing"

Sand Dunes, Prince Edward Island (Photo by John MacDougall)

Jonathan Franzen, in his absorbing “The Problem of Nature Writing” (newyorker.com, August 12, 2023), argues (1) nature writing should be evangelical; (2) in order for nature writing to succeed as evangelism, it must tell a strong story: and (3) without story, description of nature is tedious. I disagree with all three points. 

I love nature writing. I read a lot of it. I’ve never considered it a form of evangelism. To me, it’s quintessentially a descriptive art. If it helps to get people to care about preserving the natural world, so much the better. But, for me, that’s not its primary aim. Its primary aim is to describe nature’s beauty. For example, Robert Macfarlane’s description of the vast shingle peninsulas that jut from east England’s coastline:

There is exquisite patterning to the structure of these spits. They organize themselves in designs so large that they are best witnessed from the vantage of a falcon or an airman. At Dungeness, the shingle is arranged into giant floriate blooms. Orford forms itself in long parallel ridges, each of which marks a time when a storm cast up thousands of tonnes of gravel along the shore, and fattened the spit. These ridges are the stone equivalents of growth rings in a tree trunk. Aerial images of Blakeney show it to possess the complex beauty of a neuron: the long stem of the spit, and to its leeward a marshland that floods and emerges with every tide – a continually self-revising labyrinth of channel and scarp. [The Wild Places, 2007]

Or Edward Hoagland’s description of a wolf:

Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

Or Redmond O’Hanlon’s description of an anglerfish:

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler, 20003].

I relish such descriptions. My enjoyment has nothing to do with story. My enjoyment is sourced in the writer’s art – in that “mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” There’s no plot in landscape, only the contingencies of rock, river, and wild animal. Narrative in nature books is usually simple – a chronological telling of a hike or a canoe trip or a mountain climb. 

Franzen’s most annoying statement is that nature description is tedious. I could quote a thousand passages to show that it is not. Here’s one more, from John McPhee’s great Coming into the Country (1977):

Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

August 7, 2023 Issue

This week’s issue launches the new “Goings On” section. The magazine calls it “evolution.” I’m not sure about that. It looks more like impoverishment. The loss is substantial. The number of pages is reduced from six to two. The lead photo is shrunk from full-page to quarter-page. “Tables For Two” is cut from three columns to two. Art writers Andrea K. Scott and Johanna Fateman have disappeared. Vince Aletti on photography is gone. So is Steve Futtterman’s weekly jazz note. I looked forward to reading these writers each week. The magazine’s pleasure quotient is considerably reduced. 

I’ve decided it’s time for me to evolve, too. Previously I tried to comment on some aspect of each weekly issue. No more. From now on I’ll blog about The New Yorker only when there’s a piece in it that really grabs me. 

Taking a Break

Tomorrow Lorna and I head to Brandon, Manitoba to see a week’s worth of softball. Our granddaughter Addie is catcher on the Prince Edward Island Whitecaps. The team is competing in the 2023 U15 Girl’s Canadian Fast Pitch Championship in Brandon. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about August 15. Go Caps Go!

The Rijksamuseum's "Vermeer": 3 Reviews

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)

I want to compare three reviews of the Rijksamuseum’s recent blockbuster Vermeer show (February 10 – June 4, 2023) that brought together an unprecedented twenty-eight Vermeers: Rebecca Mead’s “Dutch Treat” (The New Yorker, February 27, 2023); Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside” (London Review of Books, May 18, 2023); and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light” (The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2023).

Mead, in her piece, points out that the show is “organized thematically—Vermeer’s use of musical instruments; Vermeer’s depiction of gentleman callers—with works from differing periods placed together to show them to their best effect, like artfully rumpled drapery.”

She comments on several of the paintings, including Mistress and Maid, A Lady Writing, View of Delft, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Girl with the Red Hat, Lacemaker, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and The Milkmaid.

She says of Mistress and Maid and A Lady Writing,

The two paintings have thematic and stylistic commonalities. Each shows a fair-haired woman, finely dressed in a yellow satin jacket and seated at a table, with a pen in her right hand and a sheet of paper at the ready. Each displays Vermeer’s uncanny command of optical effects, with a dissolving focus on the fur trim of the jacket and a sheeny light reflected from a pearl earring. A blue tablecloth is rucked up in almost identical disarray, a circumstance that would be nothing but an annoyance to an actual letter writer—who doesn’t prefer to lay paper on a smooth surface?—but which reminds a viewer that these are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna. It is peculiarly moving to see these two works, which were painted within two years of each other, in juxtaposition. A viewer can take in one, and then the other, with a turn of the head no greater than that of the woman represented in either painting. Between them, these works consumed perhaps a year of Vermeer’s labor—a scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances and a faithful imagining of internal lives, which might better be described as an act of devotion. 

Note Mead’s reference to Vermeer’s “uncanny command of optical effects” and his “scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances.” These are two aspects of Vermeer’s art that I admire immensely. She also points out something new to me – that these paintings “are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna.” Call me naïve, but until I read this, it never occurred to me that Vermeer staged the subjects of his paintings. 

Another painting that Mead comments on is View of Delft – one of my favorite Vermeers. She writes,

Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. But the painting also conveys the sensation of atmospheric humidity. In a catalogue essay, Pieter Roelofs, one of the show’s curators and the head of paintings and sculpture at the museum, points out that Vermeer hangs this sky with low cumulus clouds of a sort that were almost never represented by his contemporaries. In this canvas, as in “The Little Street,” with its weeping brickwork and stained whitewash, Vermeer paints dampness as well as light.

That first line is exquisite, beautifully expressing my own view of Vermeer as a master painter of light.

Was Vermeer a trickster? Mead thinks so. She says of his superb The Milkmaid,

“The Milkmaid” is an exploration of minimalism, three hundred years avant la lettre. A recent analysis of the painting’s surface revealed that Vermeer painted over a row of jugs that once hung behind the milkmaid’s head, leaving a bare wall with the tonal nuances of a Morandi. The wall’s surface is rendered with infinite care, its nails and holes painted in sharp relief. The graduation of shadow and light contributes to the sense of verisimilitude, though Vermeer adjusts optics for the sake of art by painting the jigsaw piece of wall between the jug and the milkmaid’s arm a brighter hue, the better to accentuate her gesture. The eye is tricked into believing that it sees the world reproduced; what it actually sees is the world enhanced.

Vermeer as an enhancer of reality, adjusting optics for the sake of art – that’s a view of him that I struggle with. Rightly or wrongly, I associate him with accuracy. “Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination / stealing like the tide across a map / to his girl solid with yearning,” Robert Lowell wrote in his great poem “Epilogue.” To me, Vermeer is a consummate describer. That implies accuracy. I find accuracy and enhancement hard to reconcile.

Let’s consider another review – Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside.” It begins where Mead’s piece ends, with a look at one of Vermeer’s walls. This time it’s the wall in Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. Bell writes,

Nothing could be more positive than that clean, firm whitewashed wall. Creamy dabs and droplets, heavy with bright lead carbonate, have come down here and there on the more convoluted surfaces, on the gilt frame and the musician’s satin skirts. But the flat planes are immutable blocks of tone and no mark suggests that their outlines could alter. What are we to know of the objects to which they belong? Only their interactions with light.

I love that last line. Any critic praising Vermeer for his skill at painting light gets my vote. It may not be the most original approach to Vermeer’s art, but, for me, it’s the surest and most compelling. 

Bell also considers another established perspective on Vermeer – the photo-like accuracy of his work. He says, “His art seems to record appearance as tonally as a photosensitive sheet, with as little reliance on contours, and the question of how much he relied on lens technologies has been a constant of subsequent scholarship.” He quotes Kenneth Clark’s praise of View of Delft: “the nearest which painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.” But Bell dissents. He says, when you see the actual paintings hanging in the Rijksmuseum, you “discover how different in fact they are from photographs:

There in the opening gallery stands View of Delft, and there in its middle band – the town buildings sandwiched between thin air and yielding water – the oils are caked and burly. Gritty earth-colour gouts lay down the masonries of brick, mortar, slate and limestone. Facing Vermeer’s home town, we encounter the tension posed by his single-figure interiors: between the concrete fact and its not-hereness. This is the testament of an insider who needs to stand outside, who requires a far bank from which to grasp his own city’s substance. The morning river may be still and the figures on its foreshore few, small and faceless, yet there is a zeal to the gunky highlights that stud the sunlit roofs, a kind of staccato fury.

This is a valuable observation, emphasizing the texture of Vermeer’s painting. Simon Schama made a similar point in his excellent “Through a Glass Brightly” (included in his 2004 collection Hang-Ups), a review of a Vermeer show at the National Gallery in 1995. Looking at View of Delft, he says, “The texture of the red-tiled roofs at left, for example, was made more dense by mixing sand into the pigment, almost as if Vermeer was as much rebuilder as image-maker.”

My favorite lines in Bell’s piece occur in his consideration of the infrared images of The Milkmaid. He writes,

They show cluttered shelves behind the serving woman, which were afterwards smoothed out to leave a bare wall. To isolate in this way the central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle, was a potent decision. 

That “central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle” is inspired.

What to make of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light”? I find it the least satisfying of the three reviews under consideration. Yeazell considers the Rijksmuseum show in terms of its organization and crowd management. But, amazingly and disappointingly, she doesn’t discuss (or describe) any of the paintings on display. She considers several theories on Vermeer’s art, some of them pretty far out, if you ask me, e.g., that Vermeer’s figures can be divided into “extroverts” and “introverts,” that the Jesuits “provided the chief inspiration for his treatment of light as a spiritual phenomenon,” that there’s a “suggestive analogy between the remoteness of Petrarch’s beloved Laura and the various strategies Vermeer devises for rendering his own objects of desire at once alluring and unobtainable.” Did Vermeer even read Petrarch? She doesn’t say.

Yeazell also considers a theory that seems to me to have been around forever – that Vermeer used a camera obscura. She concludes, “no definitive evidence has emerged to link Vermeer to such an instrument.” There, you’d think (and hope) that would finally settle it. But no, a few paragraphs later, she undermines her conclusion, buying into Gregor J. M. Weber’s “informed speculation” that “the local Jesuits probably did serve as the conduit for Vermeer’s knowledge of the camera obscura.”

So where does that leave us? It leaves me savoring that wonderful Rebecca Mead description of View of Delft: “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream.”

July 31, 2023 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most is Robert Sullivan’s “Talk of the Town” story “Not a Shark.” It’s about an aquatic drone called WasteShark that filters urban waters for trash. Hudson River Park acquired one for use on the Hudson River. Park employees Carrie Roble and Siddhartha Hayes recently took it out for a test run. Sullivan accompanied them. He writes, 

WasteShark’s latest test run in the Hudson happened to take place on the very day that forest fires in Quebec turned New York into a Mars-scape, adding a sense of urgency to WasteShark’s mission. 

He describes the launch:

They lugged WasteShark down a gangway to a dock floating in a cove bounded by Pier 40 and the pier leading to the Holland Tunnel ventilation shaft—discharging carbon monoxide and pulling in what was passing that day for fresh air. A wake caused by a ferry buffeted the dock, sending an observer to his knees. Hayes knelt by WasteShark, touching its stern. “O.K., so these are the thrusters,” he said, pressing the start button. “I’m holding it until it’s blue.”

This being Sullivan, he’s alert to everything happening around him. He catches a bystander’s comment:

A waft of trash came up from under the pier, and a gaggle of high schoolers walked out onto the pier to take pictures of the orange sky. “It’s the end of the world,” one of them shouted—then he spotted WasteShark. “Wait, are you guys monitoring something?”

My favorite part is the ending:

After an hour, WasteShark was heaved onto the dock, and Roble and Hayes, wearing surgical gloves, picked through its haul: a baseball, bits of wood, a Diet Coke can, a water chestnut, a cigar wrapper, a toy-A.T.V. part (“Always a lot of toys,” Roble said), an amphipod, a glop of gray mush not immediately identifiable, a bag of Utz barbecue-flavored Ripples, bladder wrack, seaweed (“Good adaptation,” Hayes said), a Canada-goose gosling (deceased), a coffee-cup lid, and an Amazon bag.

Of course there’s a coffee-cup lid. No Sullivan piece would be complete without one. Sullivan is a connoisseur of coffee-cup lids: see his great 2006 travelogue Cross Country. 

3 More for the Road: First Person

This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favorite 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 focus on their use of the first person.

All three of these books are written in the first person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Bailey, Sullivan, and Frazier were actually there – driving along the Iron Curtain (Bailey), driving across the U.S. (Sullivan), driving across Siberia (Frazier). They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality. 

But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Sullivan and Frazier are more self-revealing than Bailey. Sullivan writes about his “worst cross-country trip ever,” in which, at his lowest point, he “broke down, as in wept.” He writes, “I would say I wept openly except that no one seemed too concerned with me: I wept in the vacuum of the landscape that is the side of the road.” Frazier also has a moment in his journey when, due to deteriorating relations with his two Russian guides, he nearly abandons his road trip. He says, “Following this incident [Sergei yelling at him for taking pictures of a “supposed prison”], I became deeply uncertain of everything around me and briefly considered asking Sergei to drop me off at a train station so I could continue on my own.”

There’s more personal context in Sullivan and Frazier’s narratives than there is in Bailey’s. We see Sullivan and Frazier preparing for their trips. Sullivan describes a visit that he and his family make to an AAA office in Manhattan to get a personalized TripTik (“We described our route, and as we did, his yellow highlighting pen made its way across the map”). Frazier tells about his Russian language lessons (“Now might be as good a moment as any to talk about what it was like learning Russian or attempting to”). 

Sullivan and Frazier show more emotion than Bailey does. Sullivan constantly rages at his “shredded, moan-making” rooftop pack (“the pack on top of the Impala begins to freak out again and I have to pull over and rearrange the straps, and as I pull the straps tighter, I swear under my breath, repeatedly”). Frazier rages at his constantly malfunctioning Renault step van (“Multiple tries produced the same result. The van would not start. A red film of rage crossed my eyes”).

Sullivan and Frazier seem more prone to mishaps than Bailey. Sullivan experiences that nightmarish Minnesota journey – “the worst cross-country trip I have ever taken.” He also locks his car keys in the Impala’s trunk (“And then, when I finished packing the bags in the trunk, when I was feeling organized and purposeful, I locked the keys in the trunk. I realized that they were in the trunk during the half a second or so that it took for the trunk to slam down”). Frazier suffers food poisoning and laryngitis. He goes for a swim in the Severnaya Dvina River and is bit by leeches (“The water was warm and the bottom muddy to the point of inextricability. As I came out I found several ink-black leeches dangling from my legs. When I brushed them off, the holes they left bled impressively”). In one of my favorite scenes, he loses his laundry in the wind:

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. 

In comparison, Bailey’s trip is smooth. The only rage he experiences is at the Russians for building the Iron Curtain. The only jarring incident is his encounter with a strange witchlike hitchhiker:

Just outside the next village of Croya a lumpy human shape was standing rather perilously out in the road, and as I swerved the car around it, it – an elderly woman – waved a hand up and down. I stopped. She approached the car. Then having worked out that she could not get in what she thought was the passenger door, she came around to the other side of my Saab (which has right-hand steering for British roads) and got in. Clearly, I was giving her a lift. She was wearing a sheet of clear plastic over the shoulders of an ancient black dress. (Although the morning was gray, it wasn’t raining.) She began to talk and I didn’t understand a word. I think that even if my knowledge of German had been magnificent, I would not have understood her. She was speaking or rather barking a country dialect, and it may have been that even in that she wasn’t making much sense. Now that she was seated next to me I noticed that she had in her lap an apparently empty shopping bag and wore plastic bags on her hands as if she had been brought up to wear gloves when going out. Bristly black hairs sprouted from her chin and upper lip. Her eyes didn’t seem to focussed on anything external. She was visibly filthy and gave off a strong smell of urine. All in all, she was an absolute shock – there in my relatively clean and tidy car on the well-maintained road running through prosperous West German countryside; for a few minutes her presence drove all thoughts of the border and the modern world out of my head. Possibly it was a test. If she wasn’t Howard Hughes reincarnated as a witch, she was perhaps one of the old gods or goddesses in disguise, checking up to see how friendly people might be to a distressed wayfarer of no obvious charm – rather the opposite. Maybe she had been sent to tell me something I ought to know. But if it was a test, I failed it. I had mentioned Wolfsburg as she got in, and this had produced no sign of disapproval, but now, passing through the small town of Rühen, gallantry and respect for the gods faded before the overpowering smell. I was afraid that I would have to discard or at least steam-clean the front passenger seat if she stayed aboard another minute. I pulled up, said that I was going to the post office and showed her how to open her door. She clambered out, bits of plastic hanging. When I came back from Rühen post office, having made a token purchase of a few stamps, she had walked on, still well out in the road. As I drove past I didn’t look at her for fear of meeting those strange vacant eyes. If it was you, Pallas Athene, my apologies. 

All three of these books feature the kind of active first-person sentence I devour. Examples:

I turn inland from the beach and follow the border for its first kilometer or so south – first across the thin neck of the Priwall peninsula, summer cottages on one side, border markers and thick East German scrub on the other. [Along the Edge of the Forest]

Driving through Celilo, we see abandoned houses, and then a few houses that seem as if they might be abandoned but probably aren’t, and then a few houses that are well kept. We see trucks parked on the grass beneath the dry cliffs, trucks that appear to still work, and then fields of cars that probably do not. We see no people, but we do see a large longhouse, where, I have read, seasonal celebrations still take place. And we hear the soft rush of the interstate, acting like an echo of the long-silenced rush of the falls. [Cross Country]

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. [Travels in Siberia]

Early one morning I took a #29 bus from the Kurfürstendamm, off which, in a quiet side street, I had rooms in a small turn-of-the-century hotel of great charm. The 29 took me to the junction of the Kochstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and I walked up to Checkpoint Charlie to join a U.S. military patrol for a trip along the wall. [Along the Edge of the Forest]

We cross the Maumee River, the river of Toledo, and we look left and see Toledo’s downtown bristle, and after a stretch of pretty much flat but sometimes rolling Ohio of the turnpike, we pass several men dressed in black T-shirts with cutoff sleeves, black pants, and silver belts, all surrounding a broken-down van, inspecting the engine that had broken down on the Sandusky County line. [Cross Country]

Soon after Bikin we suddenly entered a weird all-watermelon area. Watermelon sellers crowded both sides of the road under big umbrellas in beach-ball colors among wildly painted wooden signs. Sergei pulled over and bought a watermelon for a ruble, but as we went along, the heaps of them kept growing until melons were spilling into the road and the sellers were giving them away. A man with teeth like a crazy fence hailed us and in high hilarity thrust two watermelons through the passenger-side window. By the time we had emerged on the other side of the watermelon gauntlet, we had a dozen or more in the van. The watermelons were almost spherical, antifreeze green, and slightly smaller than soccer balls. We cut one open – delicious. This was not a part of the world I had previously thought of as a great place for watermelons. [Travels in Siberia]

An active verb, a line of specific description, and the indispensable “I”/“we” – these are the ingredients of my favourite kind of sentence. These three books abound with them.

Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.