Hilaire Belloc's Flawed Genius (Contra Calvin Tomkins)

Calvin Tomkins, in his “The Inexplicably Enduring Appeal of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales” (newyorker.com, September 5, 2017), says, “Belloc had the bad luck to mistake himself for a serious writer.” I think Tomkins is the one who’s mistaken. At the level of diction, rhythm, and syntax, Belloc was a genius. Wilfrid Sheed called him “a grand master of language” (The Morning After, 1972). This points us in the right direction. Consider these passages from Belloc's classic 1902 travelogue The Path to Rome:

It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till I came to the road that goes up along the Moselle.

So I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and offered me bread

When I awoke it was full eight o’clock, and the sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at me through the branches of my tree like a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of insects which marks the strength of the sun.

Then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and to cast aside all haste and folly

There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds of Gaul, an island city.

Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers.

As this was the first really great height, so this was the first really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining sun and noting all I saw.

When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece together the whole road.

By the time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.

For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day, because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.

This book is endlessly quotable. Unfortunately, it’s marred by two or three passages of anti-Semitism. Belloc was both a considerable writer and a considerable anti-Semite.

September 4, 2017 Issue

What’s this – a TV-themed New Yorker? Cancel my subscription. Just kidding. I’ll get over it. TV isn’t the only subject covered in this week’s issue, thank God. “Goings On About Town” brims with wonderful items. For example: “cinched whirlpools of deconstructed menswear and gingham frocks deformed by asymmetrical humps” (“Art: Metropolitan Museum: Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between”); “drumbeats soft and clipping, synths modulated into shivers, with vocals sneaking acid-dream motifs in through the fuzz” (“Night Life: Neon Indian”); “malab iyo malawax, sweet crepes soaked in honey and dusted with cinnamon, and a mug of steaming qaxwo, pungent black coffee spiked with ginger” (Nicolas Niarchos, “Tables For Two: Safari”).

I also enjoyed the two book reviews – Adam Kirsch’s “Voices from the Void” and Dan Chiasson’s “Merry War.” Kirsch’s piece is illustrated with an exquisite Riccardo Vecchio portrait of Fernando Pessoa that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker artwork.

Postscript: John Ashbery 1927 - 2017

John Ashbery, in his poem “The Skaters,” asks, “How much survives? How much of any one of us survives?” In Ashbery’s case, there’s no question his poetry will survive. Dan Chiasson calls him the “greatest American poet of the last fifty years” (“Postscript: John Ashbery,” newyorker.com, September 4, 2017). But Ashbery was also an inspired art critic. His Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957 – 1987 deserves to survive, too. Here, for example, from his essay “Jane Freilicher,” is his description of her great The Painting Table:

“The Painting Table” is a congeries of conflicting pictorial grammars. There is a gold paint can rendered with a mellow realism that suggests Dutch still-life painting, but in the background there is a reddish coffee can (Savarin?) that is crudely scumbled in, whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse – one understands that this wasn’t the shape of the can, but that the painter decided on a whim that it would be this way for the purpose of the picture. Other objects on the table are painted with varying degrees of realism, some of them – the flattened tubes of paint and the blobs of pigment – hardly realistic at all. There is even a kind of humor in the way the pigment is painted. What better way than to just squeeze it out of the tube onto the flat surface of the canvas, the way it is in fact lying on the surface of the table, reality “standing in” for itself? But she doesn’t leave it entirely at that; there are places where she paints the image of the pigment too, so that one can’t be exactly sure where reality leaves off and illusion begins. The tabletop slants up, the way tabletops are known to do in art since Cézanne – but this seems not the result of any Expressionist urge to set things on edge but rather an acknowledgment that things sometimes look this way in the twentieth century, just as the gold tin can is allowed to have its way and be classical, since that is apparently what it wants. The tall, narrow blue can of turpentine accommodates itself politely to this exaggerated perspective, but the other objects aren’t sure they want to go along, and take all kinds of positions in connivance with and against each other. The surrounding room is barely indicated except for the white wall and a partly open window giving on flat darkness. (Is it that these objects have come to life at night, like toys in some boutique fantasque?) The result is a little anthology of ways of seeing, feeling and painting, with no suggestion that any one way is better than another. What is better than anything is the renewed realization that all kinds of things can and must exist side by side at any given moment, and that this is what life and creating are all about.

That comment on the “crudely scumbled” coffee can, “whose rim is an arbitrarily squeezed ellipse,” is brilliant! Reported Sightings brims with such observations. Ashbery was not only the “greatest American poet of the last fifty years”; he was a terrific art critic, too.

August 28, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker is loaded with good things to read and think about. First and foremost – Ian Frazier’s terrific “Drive Time,” a personal history piece on the pleasure he gets from driving in New York City. “For me,” he says, “the dreamy part of metro-driving happens when the traffic is light and every highway on my phone’s congestion map glows green.” But often the traffic isn’t light. He reports that he was recently involved in a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway. His detailed account of that experience is one of the highlights of the piece. My favorite part is his description of an early-morning drive he takes from his New Jersey home, across the George Washington Bridge, into the Bronx (“The slanted early-morning sun amid the pillars colors the sides of bread trucks moving slowly on their deliveries”), across the Harlem River on the Madison Avenue Bridge, into Manhattan on the F.D.R. Drive (“cruising by the high-rises and the hospitals of the Upper East Side and under the tower of the United Nations”), across the Brooklyn Bridge (“maybe the most glorious bridge in the world, its cables radiating from their junction points at the top of its towers like beams of light”), into Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Belt Parkway to J.F.K. Airport, then, via the Belt Parkway, back to Brooklyn, up the ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, across the bridge, onto the Staten Island Expressway, then across the Goethals Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike, at which point, Frazier writes,

Here is the best part of the route, because when the landing patterns at Newark Airport are configured in a certain way the planes coming in fly parallel to the turnpike and directly above it. If everything is in synch, I can be motoring up the highway among lanes of cars and trucks (the turnpike is busy at any hour) with the freight-train tracks on the right and all the earthbound vectors lining up as an incoming jet roars overhead, outdistances everybody, diverges to the left, and sets down on a shimmery runway. The music on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve found that a big, anthemic prog-rock song makes a good accompaniment. Every tristate-area driver should experience this cool convergence once in a while.

After that, Frazier takes the I-78 west, Garden State Parkway north to Exit 151, then west on Watchung Avenue, south on Grove Street, and he’s home—“five boroughs, four major bridges, two airports, two states, and back in time for breakfast.”

Quite a trip! I enjoyed it immensely.

Other absorbing pieces in this week’s issue: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Content of No Content” (“If Amazon has its way, even artisanal cheese will soon be delivered by drone”); Nick Paumgarten’s “Singer of Secrets” (“Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands”); Louis Menand’s “The Stone Guest” (“Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania”); and James Wood’s “Entanglement Theory” (“Øyehaug’s text enacts what Barthes theorizes, exalting an ‘object’ that is itself just a sentence—while also registering some brief flash of consciousness, some small explosion of longing, that, like Anna Bae’s discovery in Rimbaud’s biography, seems true to our own experience of passionate reading: jouissance, to be precise”).  

Interesting Emendations: Rebecca West's "Extraordinary Exile"

Rebecca West (in the 1930s)

Ian Buruma, in his absorbing “Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?” (The New York Review of Books, August 17, 2017), a review of Marcel Ophuls 1976 documentary The Memory of Justice, quotes Rebecca West. He writes, “The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a ‘citadel of boredom.’ ”

The piece Buruma is quoting from is called “Extraordinary Exile,” which appeared in the September 7, 1946, New Yorker. West later retitled it “Greenhouse with Cyclamens I” and included it in her great 1955 collection A Train of Powder. Comparing the New Yorker piece with the book version, I find almost every sentence is different. For example, the “citadel of boredom” phrase quoted by Buruma comes from the piece’s opening paragraph. Here’s the New Yorker version:

There rushes up toward the plane the astonishing face of the world’s enemy: pine woods on little hills, gray-green, glossy lakes too small to be anything but smooth, gardens tall with red-tongued beans, fields striped with red-gold wheat, russet-roofed villages with high gables, and pumpkin-steepled churches that no architect over seven could have designed. Another minute and the plane drops to the heart of the world’s enemy: Nuremberg. In not many more minutes, one is in the courtroom where the world’s enemy is being tried for his sins, and immediately one forgets those sins in wonder at a conflict going on in that court which has nothing to do with the indictments it is considering. The trial is now in its tenth month, and the courtroom is a citadel of boredom. Every person attending it is in the grip of extreme tedium. This is not to say that the work at hand is being performed in a languid or perfunctory way. An iron discipline meets that tedium head on and does not yield an inch to it. But all the same, the most spectacular process in the court today is a certain tug of war concerning time. Some of those present are fiercely desiring that the tedium should come to an end at the first possible moment, and the others are as fiercely desiring that it should last forever.

And here’s the Train of Powder version:

There rushed up toward the plane the astonishing face of the world’s enemy: pine woods on little hills, gray-green glossy lakes, too small ever to be anything but smooth, gardens tall with red-tongued beans, fields striped with copper wheat, russet-roofed villages with headlong gables, and pumpkin-steeple churches that no architect over seven could have designed. Another minute and the plane dropped to the heart of the world’s enemy: Nuremberg. It took not many more minutes, to get to the courtroom where the world’s enemy was being tried for his sins; but immediately those sins were forgotten in wonder at a conflict which was going on in that court, though it had nothing to do with the indictments considered by it. The trial was then in its eleventh month, and the courtroom was a citadel of boredom. Every person within its walk was in the grip of extreme tedium. This is not to say that the work in hand was being performed languidly. An iron discipline meets that tedium head on and does not yield an inch to it. But all the same, the most spectacular process in the court was by then a certain tug-of-war concerning time. Some of those present were fiercely desiring that the tedium should come to an end at the first possible moment, and the others were as fiercely desiring that it should last for ever and ever.

First, note the change in tense – from present in the New Yorker version to past in the Train of Powder version. Second, “glossy lakes too small to be anything but smooth” (New Yorker) is changed to “glossy lakes, too small ever to be anything but smooth” (Train of Powder). Third, “red-gold wheat,” “high gables,” and “pumpkin-steepled churches” (New Yorker) become “copper wheat,” “headlong gables,” and “pumpkin-steeple churches” (Train of Powder). Fourth, “In not many more minutes, one is in the courtroom where the world’s enemy is being tried for his sins” (New Yorker) is changed to “It took not many more minutes to get to the courtroom where the world’s enemy was being tried for his sins” (Train of Powder). Fifth, “and immediately one forgets those sins in wonder at a conflict going on in that court which has nothing to do with the indictments it is considering” (New Yorker) is changed to “but immediately those sins were forgotten in wonder at a conflict which was going on in that court, though it had nothing to do with the indictments considered by it” (Train of Powder). Sixth, note the change from “The trial is now in its tenth month” (New Yorker) to “The trial was then in its eleventh month” (Train of Powder). Seventh, “Every person attending it is in the grip of extreme tedium” (New Yorker) becomes “Every person within its walk was in the grip of extreme tedium” (Train of Powder). Eighth, “This is not to say that the work at hand is being performed in a languid or perfunctory way” (New Yorker) is changed to “This is not to say that the work in hand was being performed languidly” (Train of Powder). Ninth, “and the others are as fiercely desiring that it should last forever” (New Yorker) is changed to “and the others were as fiercely desiring that it should last for ever and ever” (Train of Powder).

The New Yorker version strikes me as slightly more elegant. Both versions are brilliant. Both use the exact same words to describe the Nuremburg courtroom, the words quoted by Buruma – “a citadel of boredom.”

Credit: The above photo of Rebecca West is from Brian Hall’s “Rebecca West’s War” (The New Yorker, April 15, 1996).

August 21, 2017 Issue

“Phil Stewart, an affably geeky, sandy-haired strawberry geneticist, offered me a yellowish-white specimen with rosy stains, like a skinned knee when the blood starts seeping through.” I enjoyed that sentence. It’s from Dana Goodyear’s absorbing “Strawberry Valley,” in this week’s issue. The piece is about Driscoll’s, “the world’s largest berry company,” and its attempt to breed the perfect strawberry. It’s also about rival strawberry breeding programs – Driscoll’s proprietary program versus the “public, open, non-exclusive” program of the University of California, Davis. Until I read Goodyear’s piece, I had no idea the berry business was so brass-knuckle. Lawsuits, talent raids, illegal breeding – it’s war!

Another piece in this week’s issue that hooked my attention is Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Man Without a Country,” a sequel to his great “No Secrets” (The New Yorker, June 7, 2010). Both pieces profile WikiLeaks's embattled founder, Julian Assange. In “No Secrets,” WikiLeaks is still a work in progress; Assange is portrayed as a “mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity.” Khatchadourian writes, “Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.”

In “Man Without a Country,” that paradox still hasn’t been confronted; Assange’s portrait is much darker; WikiLeaks appears to be an instrument of Russian state hackers. Khatchadourian writes, “Whatever one thinks of Assange’s election disclosures, accepting his contention that they shared no ties with the two Russian fronts requires willful blindness.”

Khatchadourian’s “I” is more pronounced in “Man Without a Country” than it is in “No Secrets.” His own attempt to understand Assange is part of the story. For this reason, I think I prefer it slightly more. Both pieces are superb – intricate portraits of a brilliant, combative, possibly crazy cryptographer, who craves the world’s attention.

Nothing "Mere" About It (Contra George Saunders)

Photoillustration by John Ritter (from Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting bin Laden")

George Saunders, in his Introduction to A Grace Paley Reader (2017), says of Paley, "Mere straightforward representation is not her game." That “mere” irks me. It condescends to straightforward representation, i.e., description of reality as it actually is, treating it as a lesser art than fiction. I disagree. There’s nothing “mere” about great reporting pieces such as William Finnegan’s “Silver or Lead” (The New Yorker, May 31, 2010), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting bin Laden” (The New Yorker, August 8, 2011), Jill Lepore’s “Battleground America” (The New Yorker, April 23, 2012), Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2014), and Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), to name five that quickly come to mind. These extraordinary pieces, in their detail, structure, imagery, rhythm, clarity, and texture, are as artful as any fiction, perhaps more so, because, unlike, say, Saunders’s cartoonish fictions, which distort reality, they report it as accurately as possible. 

On the Horizon: John McPhee's "Draft No. 4"

On September 5, 2017, one of the most significant literary events of the year will occur – the publication of John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. I pre-ordered my copy months ago. I have a rough idea what it will contain: McPhee’s wonderful New Yorker series “The Writing Life,” a vivid, personal, practical account of how he composed some of his finest pieces. I devoured this series when it appeared in the magazine, 2011 – 2015. I look forward to revisiting it in hardcover.

Ethan Iverson’s Superb “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City”

Duke Ellington (Photo by Marty Lederhandler)

A cool piece of jazz criticism appeared yesterday at newyorker.com – Ethan Iverson’s “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City” (“Culture Desk,” August 17, 2017). It’s a comparative analysis of “Ellington and Evans both playing an Ellington standard, ‘In a Sentimental Mood,’ on the same hot Thursday night in New York City—August 17, 1967.” It begins by helpfully providing links to the two performances:

Here is Ellington’s version, at the Rainbow Grill, with the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, along with John Lamb on bass and Steve Little on drums. And here is Evans’s version, at the Village Vanguard, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

Then it focuses on Ellington’s version, describing it as a blend of two interpretations of the song – “old style” (“The first chorus is piano in D minor/F major, the ‘old style,’ fairly close to the first 1935 recording”) and “new style” (“After the ‘old-style’ chorus, Duke modulates to Bb minor/Db major for Gonsalves’s entrance, the same key used for the ‘new style’ version of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ tracked with John Coltrane, in 1962”).

Of Ellington’s performance, Iverson writes,

Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s “new-style” arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs. It would be hard to find ballad accompaniment this busy anywhere else.

That “heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs” is excellent.

Iverson then turns to Bill Evans’s version. He writes,

Bill Evans recorded “In a Sentimental Mood” a few times over the years, usually as a ballad, but at the Vanguard that night it was a medium swinger. There are three different takes from three different sets on August 17th and 18th, but the piano part is consistent. Gomez and Jones make all the rhythmic hits and substitute changes with the pianist, but they are also free to offer tasteful commentary. Over all, this is a much more modern and interactive approach to the rhythm section than Lamb and Little with Ellington at the Rainbow Grill. Unlike Ellington’s unwinding scroll, conventional small-band jazz practice dictated an identical “melody in” and “melody out.”

I like that bit about “Ellington’s unwinding scroll.” Remember Adam Gopnik’s opinion that Ellington played “no better than O.K. piano” (“Two Bands,” December 23 & 30, 2013)? (I criticized it here.) Well, Iverson provides a welcome corrective. He describes Ellington’s playing as “mysterious” and “detailed.” He says, “Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe.” Referring to Ellington’s playing on John Coltrane’s 1962 version of “In a Sentimental Mood,” Iverson says,

Coltrane then leaves the star solo turn to Ellington, who offers one of the most perfect piano improvisations in the whole Duke canon: mysterious, searching, surreal. That surreal piano chorus is in stark contrast to Evans’s professional and clean chorus with Gomez and Philly Joe, where each note of attractive melodic improvisation in the right hand fits perfectly with the added-note harmony (and implied chord scale) beneath.

Iverson favors Ellington over Evans. He says,

Ellington could connect all the dots—the social, the modernist, the intellectual, the populist, the personally poetic—for a vision of American music truly epic in scope. As great as Evans was, he didn’t have that kind of command.

Iverson’s exquisite piece led me in several different directions. It led me to Whitney Balliett to see if the Master covered either of these gigs. Sure enough, he attended Ellington’s stand at the Rainbow Grill (see his “Small Band,” Ecstasy at the Onion, 1971, in which he describes Ellington’s playing as “first-rate,” and says of Johnny Hodge’s rendition of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” he “left fat, dying notes all over the bandstand”). It led me to Gopnik’s appallingly wrong-headed piece, aforesaid. And, of course, it led me to the music. I’m listening to Ellington’s 1967 version of “In a Sentimental Mood,” as I write this, savoring those “heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs.”