Svetlana Alpers's "Is Art History?"

Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing (1983) is one of my touchstones. It’s a study of Dutch art in the 17th century. It argues that central aspects of that art can best be understood as being an art of describing as distinguished from the narrative art of Italy. It’s basically a defence of description: “Meaning resides in the careful representation of the world,” Alpers says. I read that over forty years ago; it’s been part of my personal credo ever since.

Alpers has a beautiful new book out – Is Art History? (2024). It’s a collection of her essays, including the great “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation” (1976), in which she plants the seed that later burgeons into The Art of Describing. Is Art History? surprises in that it contains not only essays on old masters like Bruegel, Velázquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, but also pieces on modern artists such as Alex Katz, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Catherine Murphy, and Shirley Jaffe. One of my favorites is “Rebecca Horn: Chorus of the Locusts I and II,” a delightful account of Alpers’s discovery of two of Horn’s installations in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It begins wonderfully: “I came upon this pair of works by Rebecca Horn on a miserable rainy day in late winter in Hamburg.” Alpers explores the main floors of the museum and finds several “singular things” (e.g., “a dark vertical canvas filled to the top with a flower bed lit from the front – an alternative to a still life painted, surprisingly, by the young Renoir”). She finds herself in a happy and receptive mood – “happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking.” Then she happens on the two Horns. She writes,

Near the top of the building there was another staircase, as if to an attic. Worth the effort? I went up anyway and emerged in an odd room. I’d never seen anything quite like it. The ceiling was lined with rows of typewriters, neatly arranged. Monumental, out-of-date office machines hung upside down. Here and there and now and then one or two typed away for a time and then stopped. The beat was kept (was that the point?) by a blind man’s stick, white and hanging loosely down. The ribbon spewed out from one machine (had something gone wrong? could it be fixed?) onto the bare gallery floor. There was no real reason to bother with something like this, but I was intrigued and stayed on, attending to the erratic noise and trying to connect it to the movements that were going on. It took time. I never succeeded in getting it quite right.

Turning, I saw another room, companion to the first. This time the ceiling was bare, but the floor was covered for no apparent reason with row upon row of empty wineglasses – four thousand of them, Horn has noted – carefully set in place. The rims and bowls were glistening, reflecting the available light. Were they meant to contrast with the dull, black metal of the suspended typewriters next door? Perhaps seeing them this way, as still lifes grown to the size of a room, comes from looking at photographs of them after the fact. But there and then something moved ever so slightly. From the midst of many glasses certain ones struck their neighbors to make a distinctive, dull clink. The movement and the sound brough the objects to life. As in the first room, this put one in the mood for some attentive looking, the essential museum mood, one might say. The intermittent chatter of tapping keys and now, in addition, the occasional chatter of clinking glasses continued. Otherwise isolated objects or beings had been brought together and began to perform some odd ritual of their own. It was a clever construct, but also a melancholy one. 

I love Alpers’s description of the two installations. I love that she doesn’t strain to extract a meaning from them. She asks questions, and that’s enough. The pleasure of looking is the point (“happy because I was enjoyably involved in looking”). 

Susan Tallman, in her absorbing “The Occupation of Looking” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2024), a review of Is Art History?, praises Alpers’s “habits of slow looking.” She says, “It’s fun to watch her question her own responses, take things apart, look again.” The title of Tallman’s piece perfectly encapsulates Alpers’s approach.

Svetlana Alpers' "Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch"

I’m a fan of Walker Evans’s photography. I first encountered it forty years ago when a friend gave me a slim, elegant volume of Evans’s photos published by Aperture – #10 in its series Masters of Photography. I’m also a fan of Svetlana Alpers’ writing. I first encountered it in 1983, when I read her superb The Art of Describing. Both these items – Evans’s photography and Alpers’ writing – come together deliciously in Alpers’ new book Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. It’s a study of the way Evans made his pictures. It moves sagaciously, omnivorously through Evans’s oeuvre, starting with his brilliant Corrugated Tin Façade, Moundville, Alabama (1936), looping back to his first pictures (e.g., Girl in Fulton Street, New York, 1929), then proceeding chronologically through his work (Interior Detail of a Portuguese House, Vagrant in the Prado of Havana, Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, and many, many more) right up to his death in 1975, tracking the development of his style. 

Ah, yes, Evans’s incomparable style – how to describe it? Alpers shows the way. She says of his Girl in Fulton Street:

But it was the woman on Fulton Street who caught Evans’s eye – a more firmly stationed version of the one in France, face three-quarter viewed, head defined by a fitted black cloche, coat marked by a large fur collar and muff. A strip of three negatives (unfortunately not numbered) leaves a trail of Evans’s pursuit. Both she and he hold still (he here with a small camera), while men wearing fedora hats move by and in between. Evans was attracted to reflections in the window glass behind her, the rising diagonal of the crane near her head, the sign with the letter R, more bits of sign over the window and the lettering SPAGHETTI above her head. The reflecting band widens and wanes, faces and hats come in between, and finally he gets his shot. In the mid-sized reflection there is a building, the figure of a hatted man and things not quite possible to read. To capture it all he sacrificed the sign with letters spelling out SPAGHETTI, but he retained its lower frame above her head.

Not content to just describe, Alpers also analyzes:

It is hard to put one’s finger on what is so remarkable here, but it is worth trying because the elements occur again and again in Evans’s work. First, there is the distant take he has on a woman seen. Her power is in her presence – the set look of the features and her costume. Given the formality of his address she seems not simply dressed, but in costume. He does not probe further. He likes what he sees and lets her be. There is a resistance to judge or intervene in any way. That holding back, that keeping his distance, is a great skill. I could say (and I do believe) that that is the basis to the nature of photography. But indeed it is Evans with the camera. She is still while around her swirls the world. – Fulton Street, the city. The swirl is provisional, thrown together from pieces of steel, iron, glass, cloth, stone. And her presence holds out, as it were, against the world. Surely when he saw the woman the periphery also caught his eye.

I find such descriptive analysis thrilling. Alpers’ book brims with it.

Walker Evans, Girl in Fulton Street, New York (1929)

But Alpers also makes some questionable statements. For example, in the Preface, she says, “First of all, photographs are not singular.” Later in the book, she contradicts herself. She says of Evans’s famous portrait of Ellie Mae Burroughs (Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936), “Evans’s photograph of Burroughs is a singular image, though not a portrait of someone great. How is it singular? How did that come about?” 

She continues,

Attempts to explain it have dwelt on the special encounter between the photographer and his subject. Evans with his 8 x 10 view camera stood less than three feet away from the serious, gaunt woman backed up against the clapboard wall of her house. She takes her place before the camera and establishes herself as a subject in her own right rather than serving as an object before Evans’s camera. That makes the singularity of the woman in the photograph a matter of relationship – photographer and subject rather than photographer and object. It was famously praised in those terms by Lionel Trilling.

Surely, Alpers is right about the Burroughs portrait; it is singular. And so are Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931), Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania (1935), and many, many other Evans images. So it strikes me as a curious thing to say, at the beginning of her book, that photographs aren’t singular, when the rest of her text argues they are. 

Another questionable observation she makes is “An essential quality of a great photograph is that it makes the world strange.” Really? What is strange about Evans’s photos? Alpers appears to define “strange” in terms of either surrealism or abstraction. She says, “Though we have become used to them in the almost two centuries since their invention, photographs are visually unexpected and strange in nature. Surreal is a default of photography.” A few lines later, she adds, “Another default of photography on exhibit at Levy’s gallery during those years was abstraction.” But later, she contends that Evans avoided surrealism and abstraction:

The surreal and the abstract are defaults for the camera. They are seductive moves for a photographer. Neither surrealism nor abstraction was a possibility of the medium for Evans. They were seductions that he avoided.

So in what way are Evans’s photos strange? I question Alpers’ premise. Not all photographers make the world strange. Many – Evans included, I’d argue – are just out to show the world as it is. Evans’s style is nothing if not matter-of-fact. I find it difficult to square his factual style with a word like “strange.” Maybe I’m just hung up on the word. “Strange” to me means peculiar, weird, odd, bizarre. Evans’s photos don’t strike me as any of those things. But as soon as I say that, I recall Geoff Dyer’s wonderful reading of Evans’s Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931):

And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems, for the street looks like it might not be a street and could actually pass for a canal or river. Asked, rhetorically, what he most loves Joseph Brodsky replies, unhesitatingly, “Rivers and streets – the long things of life.” Evans’s photo is the representation of this longed for elision. Not so much parked as moored, the cars seem oddly amphibious. The trees have something of the watery melancholy of weeping willows. There is a touch of Venice or Amsterdam about the scene. You feel that if you wanted to cross this wet road a bridge would come in handy. The impression of a street as waterway is enhanced by the way it kinks, bends, before dissolving not in countryside or suburbs but into a damp mist that might be the sea. The carefully incremented details – cars, trees, buildings – fade and recede into an unfathomable, indistinct mass of grey. That’s when you realize that although it may be a picture of a street that looks like a river, its real subject is time. And it was not quite right to say that “to look at this photograph is to walk down the street shown in it.” More accurately – and even more remarkably – it is to have walked down it, before returning to one’s room at the United States Hotel and looking down at the rain-slick street. [The Ongoing Moment, 2005]

Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931)

And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems … – So there you go, I’ve contradicted my own argument. Perhaps every photo, if looked at closely enough, imaginatively enough, appears strange. I just wish Alpers had elaborated a bit more on what she means by “making the world strange,” especially in view of her ruling out, in Evans’s case, both surrealism and abstraction. 

Another curious statement made by Alpers is that “It is in the nature of a photograph by Evans, that a story is promised.” I’m not sure about that. Later in the book, Alpers quotes John Szarkowski as saying, “Intuitively, he [the photographer] sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned toward symbol.” Incapable of narrative – this is closer to my own view of Evans’s photos. I see them as images – pure images – not stories, not symbols – images that stand for themselves. It seems to me that Alpers eventually swings around to this viewpoint when she says, “Put succinctly, a photograph by Evans is seeing and (in my own words) also telling. The word telling used here not so much as in ‘to tell a story,’ but as in 'having a striking or telling effect.' ” 

So these are some of the questions arising from my reading of this absorbing book. But they’re mere quibbles compared to the many satisfactions it affords. This book helped me grasp why I love Evans’s photos so much. It abounds in illuminating observations. For example:

Keep in mind his taste for tin. It was a humble American material and attracted Evans’s eye.

But finding the right place to stand, the right view, is the heart of the matter for Evans.

It is not only the look of his photographs that is classic, but also their making.

The flatness and right-angled structure of buildings built from over-lapping strips of wood painted white or left bare are the American county churches and houses of Evans’s photographs. Not thick halls of marble, but thin walls of wood. Evans’s level, centered, straight-on photography is at one with that aesthetic.

Reading Flaubert sharpens our looking at Evans.

Evans repeatedly does re-takes on Atget – mirrors, carts, the wild cactus in Truro seen in one of the interiors favored for a lifetime by Evans and before by Atget.

Evans made the expected photographs of a much-admired, new modern house, but preferred to photograph an old fisherman. 

Evans had a taste for brooms in his interiors. There is a sense in which, metaphorically, they emphasize the clean style of his photographic address.

The finest photographs are the tightest and leanest.

Following Evans along the trail of photographs made, reproduced, admired, and written about is different from following the trail of the life.

To me, it seems likely that it was something simpler, more basic: that in the strange, withdrawn state of the individuals down in the subway he found versions of himself.

Forget the vernacular as such for its own sake, what interests him is the beauty of what, in a dense phrase, he describes as (let me repeat) the esthetically rejected object.

At the end of the day and of his life, the photographer for us to turn to when we look at how Evans approached the end is Eugène Atget.

I admire Alpers’ writing immensely. She lets the reader in on her thought processes. Her analytical moves are dazzling. “Let us begin with three Cuban photographs and see where they lead,” she says, and I’m right there with her, happy to tag along.

My favorite sentence in Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch occurs during Alpers’ description of Evans’s great Moving Truck and Bureau Mirror, Brooklyn, New York (1929-31). Noting the “tightly knit jumble of things captured by Evans’s photograph,” she says, “It is the Flaubertian airlessness of the cactus at Truro all over again.”

The book is beautifully produced, with a gallery of 143 Evans photos at the front. Each photo is numbered, and the number helpfully appears in the margin of the text, whenever a photo is discussed. Time and again, I found myself using this feature to quickly flip back to the portfolio, looking afresh at the pictures in light of Alpers’ insightful commentary. 

James Wood's "The Nearest Thing to Life"

What does criticism gain by being personal? By “personal” I don’t mean ad hominem. I mean autobiographical. What is a critic aiming to accomplish when he includes a chunk of his own personal experience in his writing? In his new collection, The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood serves up four essays, each of which contains a personal component. This is a departure for Wood. Most of his work consists of reviews – among the best in the business. He’s also written at least two personal essays – “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” and “Packing My Father-In-Law’s Library” – both collected in his great The Fun Stuff (2012). The pieces in The Nearest Thing To Life weave together personal history and literary commentary. They’re more ruminative than analytical. They’re like autobiography set to literary theory. For example, the first essay in the book, titled “Why?” (originally published in the December 9, 2013 New Yorker) is a meditation on death and fictional form. It begins with an account of a memorial service that Wood attended and ends with an examination of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. In between, it discusses death, religion, Wood’s strict religious upbringing, his discovery of fiction’s freedom (“I still remember that adolescent thrill, that sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered”), and propounds a theory – “To read the novel is to be constantly moving between secular and religious modes, between what could be called instance and form.” The piece is a shade heavy on religion for my taste, but in light of Wood’s upbringing (“The scriptures saturated everything”), that’s forgivable. The real question is whether this form of essay is preferable to Wood’s essay-reviews. Before I answer, let’s briefly consider the other three pieces in The Nearest Thing to Life.

The second piece is “Serious Noticing” – my favorite of the four. It extends and amplifies Wood’s splendid philosophy of “detail.” In his How Fiction Works (2008), he says, “In life as in literature, we navigate via the stars of detail.” Wood has a jeweler’s eye for detail. He distinguishes between real and literary detail, relevant and irrelevant detail, “off-duty” and “on-duty” detail. In “Serious Noticing,” his consideration of Chekhov’s “The Kiss” (“The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories”) leads to a reminiscence about growing up in the northern English town of Durham (there’s a wonderful line describing coal pouring down a chute into the basement of his family’s house – “I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders”). The piece advances a theory of “life-surplus” (“the life-surplus of a story lies in its details”); talks about “serious noticing” (serious noticing is a way of “rescuing the life of things from their death”); and concludes by observing, “We can bring the dead back by applying the same attentiveness to their shades as we apply to the world around us – by looking harder: by transfiguring the object.” I question that last bit about “transfiguring the object.” It connects with an observation that Wood makes earlier in the piece: “Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery.” So when Wood says, “by looking harder: by transfiguring the object,” he seems to be saying “looking harder” means looking at something in terms of its potential for metaphor and imagery. I disagree. For me, “looking harder” means seeing things exactly as they are. C. K. Williams, in his On Whitman (2010), says,

As for the body of the world, of existence – Whitman isn’t trying to raise reality through his poetry to another level of being, another realm of possibility: his poetry embodies rather the gigantic illuminations that are evident in perception. Unlike Rilke’s earth that desires only to be transformed; unlike Traherne’s “The corn was orient and immortal wheat,” Whitman’s vegetation is itself, his poems don’t need or want a mode of existence that depends on transformation: his metaphoric stuff is inherent in his perceptions; rather than using mind to alter reality, he finds ways to enlarge the underused senses of the mind, to fling the eyes and ears open wider, to make more sensitive the endings of the nerves.

Wood’s theory of transformation aside, his philosophy of detail, as expressed in How Fiction Works, and elaborated in “Serious Noticing,” seems to me one of the most useful, beautiful ideas in all of literary criticism. His love of detail is palpable. When he says, in “Serious Noticing,” “I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them,” I feel his passion. I want to touch them, too.

The Nearest Thing to Life’s third essay is called “Using Everything.” It’s about the practice of literary criticism. It contains a few surprises. One of them is Wood’s revelation that “A lot of the criticism I most admire is not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate rediscription.” He explains that by “passionate rediscription” he means “an act of critique that is at the same time a revoicing.” I like this idea of the critic as sort of jazz singer – the critic jazzing his subject text. But my first love is analysis. It’s why I read criticism. It’s why I devour Wood. He’s an excellent analyst of style, of structure and language. Here’s a quick example. In his How Fiction Works (2008), he quotes this long, remarkable sentence from Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre –

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenk’s uberous breasts – uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit – suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest longings for his late little mother.

 – and says,

This is an amazingly blasphemous little mélange. This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt – matter out of place, which is itself a definition of high and low dictions. But why would Roth engage in such baroque deferrals and shifts. Why write it so complicatedly? If you render the simple matter of his sentence and keep everything in place – i.e., remove the jostle of registers – you see why. A simple version would go like this: “Lately, when Sabbath sucked Drenka’s breasts, he was pierced by the sharpest longing for his mother.” It is still funny, because of the slide from lover to mother, but it is not exuberant. So the first thing the complexity achieves is to enact the exuberance, the hasty joy and chaotic desire, of sex. Second, the long, mock-pedantic, suspended subclause about the Latin origin of “uberous” and Tintoretto’s painting of Juno works, in proper music-hall fashion, to delay the punchline of “he was pieced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.” (It also delays, and makes more shocking and unexpected, the entrance of “cunt.”) Third, since the comedy of the subject matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another – from a lover’s breast to a mother’s – it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift, by engaging in its own stylistic shifts, going up and down like a manic EKG: so we have “suckled” (high diction), “breasts” (medium), “uberare” (high), “Tintoretto’s painting” (high), “where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit” (low), “unrelenting frenzy” (high, rather formal diction), “as Juno herself may have once groaned” (still quite high), “cunt” (very low), “pierced by the sharpest of longings” (high, formal diction again). By insisting on equalizing all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, and the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalizing different registers.

Wood’s criticism abounds with such analysis or redescription or descriptive analysis. Wood can call it whatever he wants so long as he keeps writing it. I can’t get enough of it.

Another surprise in “Using Everything” is Wood’s view of criticism as a form of storytelling. He says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Really? What I like about criticism, in general, and Wood’s reviews, in particular, is that they aren’t stories. They’re description; they’re analysis; they’re argument. “Give me some straight talk. Give me a little humor. Give me something real. Above all, give me an argument,” Dwight Garner says, in “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2012). I agree.

The great value of “Using Everything,” as far as I’m concerned, lies in its appreciation of criticism as literature. The best critics, Wood says, “speak to literature in its own language.” This is a refreshing corrective to the dismal views expressed by Adam Gopnik (“Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it”: see “Postscript:Robert Hughes,” newyorker.com, August 7, 2012) and Richard Brody (“Criticism is a parasitical operation”: see “How To Be A Critic,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012). For me, criticism – “writerly criticism,” as Wood calls it – is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing) – I could go on and on – are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely.

The fourth essay in The Nearest Thing to Life is “Secular Homelessness.” I praised it when it originally appeared in the London Review of Books (February 20, 2014) under the title “On Not Going Home” (see my comment here). But rereading it in The Nearest Thing to Life, I’ve had second thoughts. It is a great essay – I’m still convinced of that – the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine, in which materials as diverse as Thomas Tallis’s “O Nata Lux,” Durham Cathedral, the Hudson River, Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” a Green Card, a bumper sticker, Boar’s Head trucks, Deltic diesels, W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants are conjoined to make an arresting meditation on homelessness. But Wood’s mirroring off exilic literature strikes me as a bit much. His life is not in the least comparable to Said’s and Sebald’s tragic exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. And his statement that after eighteen years living in the U.S., he looks down his Boston Street and “feels nothing” is hard to comprehend. Compare it with Aleksandar Hemon’s immigrant experience, as described in his superb "Mapping Home" (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011). In March, 1992, Hemon, a Bosnian citizen, arrived in Chicago on a cultural exchange. He planned to stay only a month. But in April, the Bosnian War began and Hemon decided to stay in Chicago. To get to know the place better, he did a lot of walking. He says, “I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.” Eventually, he settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater. “Little by little,” he writes,

people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Overtime, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a coffee shop with a steady set of colorful characters – which were, as I’d learned in Sarajevo, the necessary knots in my personal urban network. I discovered that the process of transforming an American city into a space you could call your own required starting in a particular neighborhood. Soon I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local.

This is quite a different story from Wood’s. My point is that not all immigrants feel homeless. It’s possible to make a home in a new place. But you have to want to; like Hemon, you have to want “a geography of the soul.” I suspect that the only place in which Wood truly feels at home is his books. This would be the case even if he'd stayed in England.

And now to return to my initial question: Are the hybrid essays in The Nearest Thing to Life preferable to Wood’s reviews? The answer is no they aren’t. I relish the descriptive analysis of his reviews. They are a form of art. Long may he keep writing them.

Paper Rooms: The Art of Interior Description in "New Yorker" Profiles

Fairfield Porter, Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969)

Alec Wilkinson, in his recent “Jazz Hands” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2013), a profile of the jazz pianist Jason Moran, misses a glorious opportunity to describe Moran’s Harlem apartment. He says that the living room has “a view of the Hudson River” and that it contains an “upright piano from his parents’ house.” But with regard to how the room is furnished and decorated, he doesn’t say. Wilkinson would no doubt scoff at my hunger for such details. “Jazz Hands” is, after all, a piece about jazz, not interior decoration. Nevertheless, descriptions of the rooms in which people live help illumine their character.

John Updike, in his absorbing essay “Fictional Houses” (Odd Jobs, 1991), refers to “the cozy quality of the brick rows of Pennsylvania small towns” and “the many subtle styles, much patched and revised, of wooden farmhouses” in New England, and says, “To describe these houses is halfway to describe the life lived in them.” In my opinion, the same can be said about the rooms, apartments, lofts, offices, and other places that the subjects of New Yorker profiles live, work, and hang out in: to describe these places is “halfway to describe the life lived in them.”

Whitney Balliett, in his great jazz profiles, often depicted the rooms his subjects lived and performed in. For example, in his “The Human Sound” (The New Yorker, December 26, 1970; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American Singers), a profile of Bobby Short, he describes Short’s Carnegie Hall apartment as follows:

The small foyer on the first floor contained a desk, a big Queen Anne armchair, a bicycle, and a staircase. A turn-around kitchen opened off it. The living room, at the top of the stairs, was two stories high, with a vaulted ceiling and a row of high windows facing north. At one end were a small bar, a bathroom, and a second set of stairs. The stairs led to a spacious balcony, which served as Short’s bedroom. A bedroom window faced a small roof, where his cats, Rufus and Miss Brown, were aired. The furnishings were high-class Camp. A heavy glass-topped coffee table rested on a zebra-skin rug, and on the rug, beneath the table, were two metal lizards—one gilt, one brass. A pair of big daybeds, which were covered with bright African-looking material and leopard-skin pillows, flanked the table. Near the foyer stairs were a huge wooden lion, a stolid eighteenth-century Italian refectory table, and one of those roofed-in wicker wing chairs that still haunt old summer cottages on Naushon Island. An antler chandelier hung in the living room, and it was echoed by a Teddy Roosevelt leather chair with tusks as arms. Pictures of every description jammed the walls, and the window side of the room was lined with books and bric-a-brac.

Balliett’s room descriptions are so lovingly detailed, I want to enter them, sit in that Teddy Roosevelt chair with the tusk arms, and soak up the atmosphere. Here’s another Balliett apartment description – this from his great Jim Hall profile, “The Answer Is Yes” (The New Yorker, March 31, 1975; included in his 1977 collection Improvising):

When the Halls were married, he moved into her apartment, on West Twelfth Street. It faces south and is at eye level with chimney pots and the tops of ailanthus trees. Sunlight fills the living room all day. The off-white walls are hung with a lively assortment of lithographs, oils, and drawings. A tall cabinet, which contains hundreds of L.P.s, is flanked by full bookshelves. A sofa, a hassock, a fat floor pillow, a couple of canvas Japanese chairs, and a coffee table ring the window end of the room. An upright piano sits by the front door, and Hall’s electric guitar rests on a stand by the kitchen door.

The above-quoted passages are typical Balliett apartment descriptions. They’re almost “description for description’s sake,” akin to 17^th century Dutch still life – “devised as a feast for the attentive eye” (Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1983).

It seems to me that New Yorker descriptions of physical interiors divide into at least three categories:

1. Description done purely for the pleasure of describing interesting, beautiful things;

2. Description that illumines the subject’s character;

3. Description that furthers narrative.

The first two types are closely linked. For instance, Balliett descriptions are both “feasts for the attentive eye” and illustrations of the occupants’ lifestyle. A classic example of the third category is found in Janet Malcolm’s Ingrid Sischy profile, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” (The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1986; included in Malcolm’s 1992 collection The Purloined Clinic). Malcolm begins her brilliant piece with a description of Rosalind Krauss’s loft:

Rosalind Krauss’s loft, on Greene Street, is one of the most beautiful living places in New York. Its beauty has a dark, forceful, willful character. Each piece of furniture and every object of use or decoration has evidently had to pass a severe test before being admitted into this disdainfully interesting room – a long, mildly begloomed rectangle with tall windows at either end, a sachlich white kitchen area in the center, a study, and a sleeping balcony. An arrangement of geometric dark-blue armchairs around a coffee table forms the loft’s sitting room, also furnished with, among other rarities, an antique armchair on splayed, carved feet and upholstered in a dark William Morris fabric; an assertive all-black Minimalist shaped-felt piece; a strange black-and-white photograph of ocean water; and a gold owl-shaped Art Deco table clock. But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of “good taste” and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

Malcolm’s piece is structured around apartments, lofts, and studios. It uses them not just as organizing principles, but as a means of analyzing their occupants’ various notions of style.

An example of a room description that falls in all three of the above categories is Mark Singer’s memorable depiction of Goodman Ace’s living room (“Goody,” The New Yorker, April 4, 1977; re-titled “Words Fool Me,” and included in Singer’s wonderful 1988 collection Mr. Personality):

These days, the cottage of Ace’s own cottage industry is his apartment in the Ritz Tower – four spacious rooms of white walls and black-and-white tiles. The living room leads to a terrace that offers a view of Park Avenue below and Central Park to the northwest. Ace often used to sit on the terrace and read and work – a habit he sustained until a few years ago, when flocks of pigeons began to roost there. “Shoo, pigeons!” didn’t get rid of the birds, nor did the pigeon repellants, plastic windmills, or signs that said “No Pigeons Allowed,” so he finally gave up and retreated indoors. The apartment contains the same furniture that it has had for twenty years – off-white leather upholstery, a vague flavor of Art-Deco-in-decline, the aura of a stage setting. On one of the armchairs, there is a green cushion with white lettering  that says, “LAUGHTER IS THE MUSIC OF THE HEART.” A white grand piano stands in one corner of the room, and atop the piano are a ceramic vase filled with artificial roses, a thirty-year-old photograph of Jane Ace, an unframed photograph of Groucho inscribed “Dear Goody, Here Is Me. Groucho,” and an ineluctably stubborn pile of unanswered mail.

That “ineluctably stubborn pile of unanswered mail” functions as a segue to a discussion of Ace’s letter writing, particularly his Groucho Marx correspondence.

Interior description in today’s New Yorker profiles isn’t as detailed as it once was. The mention of one or two telling particulars appears to be preferred to extensive notation of a room’s contents. For example, here is the extent of David Remnick’s description of Israeli spymaster Meir Dagan’s Tel Aviv apartment: “The apartment is decorated with his canvases. They are naïve, sentimental, Orientalist—desert landscapes, a Bedouin, an old man in the Iranian town of Tabriz” (“The Vegetarian,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2012). In two quick, vivid strokes, Lauren Collins sketches the Paris office of Gerard Depaerdieu’s lawyer, Hervé Temime: “Temime, who represented Roman Polanski, sat at a desk, in front of spectacular windows framed by bright-yellow velour curtains. His printer was filled with bright-yellow paper” (“L’Étranger,” The New Yorker, February 25, 2013). Elizabeth Kolbert vivifies a room in Oostvaardersplassen’s administrative offices when she writes, “Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large black Heck bull” (“Recall of the Wild” (The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012).

There are exceptions to the minimalist approach. Jeffrey Toobin, in his “Madoff’s Curveball” (The New Yorker, May 30, 2011) neatly conveys the look of Fred Wilpon’s office as follows:

The headquarters of the Wilpon empire resembles an English manor house transplanted to a high floor in Rockefeller Center. Wood panelling, thick carpets, and pastoral landscapes in heavy frames offer a serene contrast to the hubbub below. Soft drinks are decanted into crystal glasses. (No Coke; Pepsi is a Mets sponsor.) True, the muted television in the reception area is set to SNY—the Wilpons’ successful cable sports channel—and there is the obligatory LeRoy Neiman painting. But the Neiman shows the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, rather than his customary jock kitsch, and the over-all feel of the offices is boardroom, not locker room.

Judith Thurman, in her “Ask Betty” (The New Yorker, November 12, 2012), unreels an admirable Balliettian run of interior detailing when she describes Betty Halbreich’s Park Avenue apartment:

You could not describe Halbreich’s décor as soberly tailored. The den is paneled in knotty cypress (“big in the fifties”), with pink chintz upholstery (“It used to be tartan”). The master bedroom has gingham walls and needlepoint rugs. There is a laundry suite, and a walk-in closet dedicated to Christmas decorations. In the formal dining room (Wedgwood-blue walls, opaline-glass chandelier, antique breakfront groaning with heirloom china), Halbreich’s banquet table was set for two.

But these depictions pale in comparison with my all-time favorite New Yorker interior description – John McPhee’s masterful evocation of the room in Otto’s farmhouse restaurant “where the customers sit and have their aperitifs while they wait for a message from the kitchen that it is time to go to table for dinner” (“Brigade de Cuisine,” The New Yorker, February 19, 1979; included in McPhee’s classic 1979 collection Giving Good Weight):

I remember from the first moment I walked into it the compact and offhand rural European character and feeling of that room. With its nonchalant miscellany of detail, it was beyond the margins of formal design, but it was too pleasurable merely to have been flung together and too thematic not to imply a tale. There were a pair of bullfighter prints – one called “La Lidia” and the other a depiction of a desencajonamiento – and protruding sharp-horned from the wall between these pictures was the head of a fighting bull. The animal had been raised on the dehesa of Pepe Alvarez and killed in the ring with a sword. Crossed Spanish swords had been hung above the fire. All around the room were wrought-iron Spanish sconces with small amber bulbs. There was a three-hundred-year-old map of the Danube, a two-hundred-year-old map of “Magna Britannia.” There were hand-carved cabinets. There were tall wicker chairs, Queen Anne chairs, and Spanish brass-studded leather chairs in groups on a red tile floor. I eventually learned that many of these things had come down through the chef’s family – to America from England via Spain. There were heavy red curtains on brass rods. The ceiling slanted upward in the mansard manner, with boards of tongue and groove. The silent paddle fan hung down between exposed checked beams. Staring back at the bull were the small glass eyes of a taxidermal fox – just its head and neck, on a plaque – and near it were photographs made in Alaska of dog foxes and vixens. A poster in one corner said “Extinct is forever” and presented line drawings of vanishing and vanished creatures – Cape lion (1860), quagga (1883), Labrador duck (1875), solenodon, snow leopard, northern kit fox.

Lofts, apartments, offices, farmhouses, rooms, having been willfully acquired, furnished, and decorated tell us much about their occupants, and their description is a major resource of the art of the profile.

In Praise of Criticism - II (Contra Brody)

I’m dismayed by some of the things Richard Brody says in his “How To Be A Critic” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, August 22, 2012), e.g., “Criticism is a damned and doomed activity,” “Criticism is a parasitical operation.” I’ve never felt this way. For me, criticism, when it’s done well, is one of the most stimulating, satisfying, nourishing sources of reading pleasure – “done well” meaning brimming with analysis, description, quotation, argument, verve, cool, bliss, and fervor. Janet Malcolm’s deconstruction of Sylvia Plath biographies (The Silent Woman), Richard Ellmann’s tracing of the sources of Joyce’s “The Dead” (James Joyce), Helen Vendler’s analysis of the grammatical shifts in Seamus Heaney’s style (The Breaking of Style), Susan Sontag’s dissection of Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics (Under the Sign of Saturn), Pauline Kael’s analysis of Orson Welles’s directorial style in Citizen Kane (The Citizen Kane Book), Arlene Croce’s detailed descriptions of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance numbers (The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book), Michael Fried’s analysis of the structures of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration), Svetlana Alpers’s argument for the importance of the distinction between description and narration (The Art of Describing), Whitney Balliett’s descriptive analysis of Big Sid Catlett’s drumming technique (Collected Works), James Wood's exquisite definition of thisness (How Fiction Works), Alex Ross’s explication of Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” (Listen to This), B. J. Leggett’s study of intertexts in Philip Larkin’s jazz poems (Larkin’s Blues), Howard Moss's list of eighteen instances of Proust memory (The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust), Carol Zemel's comparative analysis of Van Gogh's thirty-eight self-portraits (Van Gogh's Progress) – I could go on and on. These books, and many others besides, are every bit as artful and creative as the great works they take as their subjects. They are literature. I value them immensely. Brody’s view of them as parasitical is abhorrent!

Credit: The above photo of Janet Malcolm is by Kevin Sturman.