Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”

The Art of Journalism

Ian Frazier (Photo by Sara Barrett)

Brian Dillon says of Cyril Connolly, “His failure as a writer was due not only to the temptations of journalism” (Essayism, 2017). Och, hard to believe that old prejudice – journalism as inferior art – is still hanging around. Dillon isn’t the only one guilty of it. James Wood, in a review of John Updike’s Licks of Love, says, “Every published word – if we mean art rather than journalism – should be as fine as it can possibly be” (“Gossip in Gilt,” London Review of Books, April 19, 2001). Janet Malcolm, in her Diana & Nikon (1980), writes, “If, then, photography is the (uppity) housemaid of painting (as journalism and criticism are the poor relations of poetry and fiction, where does that leave Photo-Realist photography?”

Journalism is the poor relation of poetry and fiction? Not in this eye, among beholders. For me, journalism is as much an art as any other form of writing – maybe even more so because journalism, unlike fiction, must be faithful to fact. That, in my view, makes it more difficult to do.

As a counterweight to Dillon, Wood and Malcolm’s condescension, I offer this:

Early on a recent morning, the sun came down the city’s canyons, hitting the white blooms of the pear trees behind the church. Construction workers walked west from the subway stops and kept going, to the under-construction buildings bordering the Hudson River, and soon the cranes started swinging against the blue sky and the elevators on tracks outside the buildings’ steel frameworks were going up and down. By eight o’clock, most of the staff had shown up, and some were preparing that day’s entrée—baked ham with sweet potato. Seagulls shrieked as they swirled overhead toward the river. First in line, by the church gate, a man in two hooded coats sat with his back against the fence, knees up, reading the News. White vans and box trucks pulled to the curb on Ninth Avenue and unloaded crates of broccoli and olive oil. Christopher Molinari, the head chef and culinary manager, said, “When all the restaurants started closing, some sent us their leftover supplies, and we’re still improvising menus from what we got. The food-service situation in the city changed so fast, some of the potatoes they sent us were already peeled."

That is from Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Still Open” (The New Yorker, April 6, 2020), a “Talk of the Town” piece on the soup kitchen at the Church of the Holy Apostles. Surely such splendid factual writing – so clear, specific, and vivid – ranks with the best that fiction and poetry have to offer.