James Wolcott on John Updike

Portrait of John Updike by David Levine

A special shout-out to James Wolcott for his brilliant, witty, perceptive “What you can get away with” in the February 19 London Review of Books. It’s a review of John Updike: A Life in Letters. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s a reconsideration of Updike’s life and work. Wolcott says, “Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him.” 

Reading that, I found myself getting annoyed. Updike is one of my heroes. He hasn’t fallen out of fashion or favour with me. But as Wolcott proceeds with his review, it becomes clear that he, too, is an admirer, subject to certain caveats. Of the letters, he says, 

It’s easy to peck and paw at the letters, that’s what these cockspurs are for, but there’s no belying the tremendous heft of this selection, amounting to an authoritative autobiography supplemented with photographs, chronology and an index that doesn’t skimp. It’s all here, Updike in full, and almost none of it has gone stale. An unbroken arc from boyhood to infirmity, the gravity’s rainbow of a life, career and mind.

Wolcott is excellent on Updike’s relationship with The New Yorker. He says, “The longest, purest romance of Updike’s life was with the New Yorker, which began as an ‘adolescent crush’ – pre-adolescent, really: ‘I fell in love with the NYer when I was about eleven, and never fell out’ – and ripened into one of the most inspiring matings of man and magazine in the annals of troubadour song.”

He says further, “Updike went on to become one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors, his sentences nimble, airy and balletically turned out, his observational acuity on a whole other optical level, as if Eustace Tilley’s trademark monocle had conferred X-ray vision.”

The one aspect of Updike’s work that Wolcott deplores is Updike’s misogyny. He says, 

The reason Updike has fallen out of favour is more resistant to remedy. His stature as a literary artist precariously balances on a Woman Problem that was zeroed in on by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB (10 October 2019), piloting the Millennium Falcon through the corpus. 

Yes, I remember that Lockwood piece. What a bloodbath! Wolcott’s review provides a more positive, congenial view of Updike. Highly recommended. 

Postscript: See also Wolcott’s superb “Caretaker/Pallbearer” (London Review of Books, January 1, 2009), a review of Updike’s The Widows of Eastwick. Wolcott says that Updike’s eye and mind are “the greatest notational devices of any postwar American novelist, precision instruments unimpaired by age and wear.” This piece contains one of Wolcott’s most inspired lines: “America my have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm.”   

3 Great Thematic Travelogues: Lawrence Osborne's "The Wet and the Dry"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Osborne’s superb The Wet and the Dry.

Begin in Milan, at the mega-swank Town House Galleria. 6:10 pm, Osborne is in his element, in the lounge, having a gin and tonic:

In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.

I love that passage. It’s the book’s opening paragraph. What an opener! I love its celebration of drink. I love its celebration of pleasure. Osborne is a hedonist. His god, as he says later, is Dionysus – “god as summer’s light itself.”

What happens when a Dionysian travels in the Muslim world? How does he respond to prohibition? Where does he find a drink? Does he find a drink? These are the questions that drive Osborne’s narrative. In his view, the relevant dichotomy isn’t East/West; it’s Wet/Dry. He struggles to comprehend Dry. At one point, remembering a time when he was in the religious city of Solo, in Java, he says, “Six hundred thousand people, I kept thinking, and not a single bar. It seemed like a recipe for madness.”

The Wet and the Dry consists of fifteen chapters. Each one tells about a particular trip and a particular drinking experience. For example, chapter 2, delectably titled “A Glass of Arak in Beirut,” finds Osborne in his natural element – a bar. This one is in the Bristol Hotel, Beirut. He writes,

At Le Bristol, as soon as I am alone and the lights have come up, I order a vodka martini shaken and chilled with a canned olive speared on a stick – being shaken in the Bond manner, the drink is actually less alcoholic in its effects because more of the ice passes into the concoction. I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools. It is l’heure du cocktail, and I am content.

Osborne likes drinking alone. Later in the book, he approvingly quotes Luis Buñuel’s definition of the perfect bar: “The bar is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable – and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn’t like to talk.”

Sipping his vodka martini at the bar in the Bristol, Osborne is content: “I light a cigarette and wonder if it is still allowed – even here in Beirut – and then I melt like a raindrop into the vodka martini itself. Vodka and smoke go well together, they seem to have been conjured out of the same essence.”

Wherever he is, whatever city he’s visiting – Milan, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat, Islamabad, Istanbul, Cairo – Osborne seeks bars. “One needs a bar almost as much as one needs oxygen,” he says. Some are mentioned just in passing, others are fondly described in detail. Here, for example, is his depiction of the Windsor bar in Cairo:

The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officer’s mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.

He goes on:

The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.

Interestingly, in a book drenched in alcohol, one of its most transfixing parts has nothing to do with drink. It’s an account of Osborne’s visit to the Nurettin Cerrah Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school in the back streets of Istanbul. Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, takes him there. Osborne writes,

Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skull caps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.

Eventually, Osborne and Sébastien move into the main prayer room where they witness an astonishing event:

A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.

The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.

Osborne is an excellent describer. In the book’s final chapter, “Twilight at the Windsor Hotel,” there’s a long extraordinary passage that takes us deep into Cairo’s back alleys. Here’s an excerpt:

In downtown once can keep moving from baladi to baladi, because they have not yet been closed down, but you have to know where they are: using them requires a casual street knowledge that can be picked up only orally or through incessant trial and error. None of them are advertised. Most lie at the bottom of narrow unlit alleys and passageways, and no city is more a labyrinth than Cairo. Off 26th July, again, but closer to Tahrir Square, there is a strange place called the Nile Munchen, with its outdoor restaurant closed in all sides by the backs of tenements and its ground floor belly-dance bar. There is the touristy El-Hourreys, where the foreign journalists like to pose, and the seedier and more heartfelt Cap d’Or off Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, a den of dark varnished wood paneling and glaring light, where men pass between the all-male tables selling pistachios.

There is the splendid gloom of the Horris, a bar elevated above 26th July by a flight of steps and concealed behind anonymous glass doors, and the lofty hotel bar of the Odeon near Marouf, with its decayed oil paintings and terrible food and a terrace where sooty winds embrace the drinker.

I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril – a barman in a neat white turban – and hang about inside them like a fly that cannot quite decide where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplating death and the inconsequential things that come just before it.

I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men disheveled and worn-down looking in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.

Osborne worries that bars like Cap d’Or are endangered by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. This is the issue that haunts his book. What if religious fundamentalism becomes the norm, not just in the Middle East, but across the world? For him, bars represent freedom.

In future posts, I’ll explore this remarkable book further. My next post in this series will be on structure. 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #6 John McPhee's "Season on the Chalk"

Photo by John Holloway, from John McPhee's "Season on the Chalk"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is John McPhee’s “Season on the Chalk” (March 12, 2007).

In this splendid piece, McPhee explores the geology and geography of the chalk-based landscape that extends from the downs and sea cliffs of southeast England to the Champagne country of northern France. It contains one of the most beautiful landscape descriptions in all of New Yorker writing. Before I get to it, I want to set the scene.

McPhee starts in Gravesend, England, and introduces his theme immediately:

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter “R.” Two of his grandsons, Tommaso and Leandro, are with him. 

Notice McPhee’s use of the present tense. Tomasso appears. The tide is out. Boats are at rest on the riverbed. Tomasso cracks the cobble. Everything is happening now. The immediacy of McPhee’s writing distinguishes it from the retrospective accounts of the previous four pieces in this series. I relish it.

“Season on the Chalk” unfolds in seven untitled segments. Segment 1 describes the chalk landscape of southern England – the town of Chalk (“with a thoroughfare called Chalk Road, a barber’s called Chalk Cuts, and a neighborhood called Chalk Park, where mobile homes have tile roofs”), the cliffs of Dover (“the chalk cliffs under their cap of vegetation are like the filling in a broken wafer, a cross-sectional exposure of the nation’s basement”), the North Downs, and the South Downs:

In billows of chalk, the Downs rise from the sea and go on rising northward to elevations approaching a thousand feet, culminating in the escarpment that plunges to the Weald. 

Segment 2 takes us to a vineyard in a small, deep South Downs valley, “countersunk in the highest chalk,” called Breaky Bottom. McPhee visits there with his friend Hal Doyne-Ditmas. McPhee writes, 

We descend, helically, and park under a horse chestnut near a flint wall, a house, a flint barn. We step into a scene of utter quiet. Call this the most peaceful place in Europe—willows over the flint garden wall, a line of poplars against the sky, cattle like brown pebbles far up the circumvallate grazings, fewer than few human inhabitants, proprietor nowhere in sight. He is in his kitchen, conferring with a buyer.

Notice the mention of flint. It’s a secondary theme of this piece. McPhee will have more to say about it in segment 6.  

The owner of the Breaky Bottom vineyard is Peter Hall. He gives McPhee and Doyne-Ditmas a tour of his flint barn where his fermentation tanks and wine press are located. They then adjourn to Hall’s kitchen and engage in some wine-tasting. McPhee writes, 

The kitchen in Breaky Bottom’s farmhouse trails modern kitchens by about a hundred years and is a hundred times as pleasant, with its apparatus in heavy black iron, its slanting window light, its glasses and bottles on the blue oilcloth of a large wooden table. Listening to Peter Hall, we sit and sip, appreciate, spit. A pitcher is in service as a glass spittoon. A 2003 still wine is “like sucking a lemon at half time,” we are told. “It’s refreshing, zestful.” A 1996 Müller-Thurgau is “elegantly shaped, like a Gewürztraminer, but it has backed off from there.” The main events are the champagnes (a term he doesn’t use). “This young ’03 is pretty zesty, sharp, punchy stuff.” This 1999 is “more rounded, bigger flavor—quite a drink. . . . I’m growing Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Seyval Blanc now principally with fizz in mind, to see what comes off this chalk.” Already, his production is “preponderantly fizzy,” and soon, he says, he might decide “to go a hundred per cent fizz.”

McPhee says, “For my part, I am not ejecting a whole lot of what I am sipping, and I am getting a little drunk.”

In segment 3, McPhee is on the French chalk. The transition is a beauty:

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk—the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. Here the French fieldstone is chalk, and the quarry stone—white drywalls, white barns, white churches. The chalk church of Orvilliers-Saint-Julien. The chalk around the sunflowers of Rigny-la-Nonneuse. The chalkstone walls at Marcilly-le-Hayer. Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Oh, man! That is a gorgeous piece of writing. I love its specificity. I love its vividness. I love its rhythm. I love its use of sentence fragments. I love its use of place names. It’s an inspired prose poem! 

In this segment, McPhee drives the roads and lanes that connect the Champagne vineyards: “Up in the vineyards over Ay, a Sunday afternoon in steady rain, the green vines glisten, while water on the chalk roads runs like milk. Your car goes up to its hubcaps in milk.”

He visits the Église Abbatiale, in Hautvillers, where the Benedictine monk Pierre Pérignon is reputed to have invented champagne. But McPhee says no: 

He was a skilled blender, according to the geologist James E. Wilson’s “Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate, and Culture in the Making of French Wines,” but, contrary to Pérignon’s worldwide reputation, he did not add to the wines the magic bits of sugar and yeast that enhance carbonation in the second fermentation and result in champagne as we know it and he did not.

McPhee also visits the extensive storage tunnels of Moët & Chandon: 

Dimly lighted passages reach so far into a mournful and brooding gloom that the eye is stopped not by rock but by darkness. Along the sides, as in a catacomb, are vaults, crypts—a seemingly endless series of crypts, typically six feet by sixteen feet, like one-fifth of your one-room apartment. The tight space notwithstanding, in each crypt lie some twenty thousand bottles of champagne.

Segment 4 is a brief essay on the geology of the massive chalk landscape – the English downlands and white sea cliffs, the bottom of the Channel, and the Champagne region – that McPhee is exploring. The key geologic period is the Cretaceous, which began a hundred and forty-five million years ago and lasted for eighty million years. “Cretaceous” derives from the chalk that formed during that period. McPhee writes,

The chalk it is named for developed during roughly half of Cretaceous time—temporally the more recent half, stratigraphically the upper half. The chalk is made of the calcareous remains of microscopic marine plants and animals that lived in the water column and sank after death—slower than riddled yeast—in epicontinental seas. The chalk accumulated at the rate of about one millimetre in a century, and the thickness got past three hundred metres in some thirty-five million years.

McPhee visits the heavily chalked city of Maastricht – chalk basilicas, chalk churches. Where was all that chalk quarried? Answer: just five miles up the River Maas, in Sint Pietersberg. McPhee travels there by boat:

The breeze is cool on the open deck, and the boat is soon running past saturated fields that resemble the fens of Cambridgeshire which are also on the chalk. Jet Skis circle the boat, and weave Olympic rings around slow-moving barges full of crushed cars. Other barges, carrying ores and grains, are everywhere on the river, as are private cabin boats, nosing around the barges like pretentious tugs.

In Sint Pietersberg, McPhee tours the Grotten Sint Pietersberg – a chalk quarry:

In a group, you follow a guide with two electric lanterns, suspended from bails like railroad lanterns. He hands one to the last guidee in line, then leads the way into darkness, cracking jokes in English. His name is Leon Frissen. He is short, stocky, balding, and friendly. You follow him down and down through a gallery system, and if you’ve ever been in a salt mine the place reminds you of a salt mine. The constant temperature is ten degrees Celsius and you shiver. Now you are about thirty-five metres below the surface. The gallery walls are seven metres high. The lantern light is the only light. It throws awkward, lurching shadows. Seeing me struggle to write notes, Frissen takes a flashlight out of his pocket and gives it to me. Rounding a corner, we look down a straight corridor into a mournful and infinite gloom. Frissen says the corridor goes on for several kilometres before the next bend. He says there are three hundred and fifty kilometres of galleries in and beyond the mountain, hewn, by blokbrekers, with three tools: chisel, hammer, and saw. The quarrying resumed in the thirteenth century and continued until 1926.

In segment 5, McPhee writes about the Cretaceous Extinction, in which some two-thirds of all species on earth perished. What happened? McPhee appears to subscribe to the “bad luck theory” – a bunch of natural events like continental drift, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and glaciation piling up at once. He concludes, “While the earth moves on toward the first mass extinction caused by a living species, debates about earlier ones are really unresolved.”

Segment 6 cuts back to the English Downs. McPhee and Doyne-Ditmas are atop the chalk cliffs of Sussex – “Cuckmere Haven to Beachy Head—the whitest in the Cretaceous Terrain, fairly glaring in the sun when there’s a sun. Eroded in a rhythm of reëntrants and promontories, they call to mind a row of clerestory windows. Almost straight down them—hundreds of feet—are waves.” 

McPhee reports that the cliffs of Sussex are being eroded at an average rate of about thirty-five centimetres a year. He observes that close up, “the chalk cliffs appear to be studded, almost like formal shirts, with uniform black dots.” Those dots are chunks of flint, McPhee says. He describes them:

The shingle beaches below the white cliffs consist almost entirely of flint cobbles the size of ostrich eggs. If you stand next to a chalk cliff and lift your head, you look up a wall spiky with projecting flints. When they fall, they sometimes break. A cracked-open surface, opaque and light to dark gray, is smooth and shines like glass. The old structures of half of Sussex, not to mention Surrey, seem to be made of flint—flint churches, flint terraces, flint houses reinforced with bricks at the corners, flint retaining walls bordering sunken lanes. Doyne-Ditmas seems especially fond of the big flint prison in Lewes, its flints, black and gray, “giving it a sort of piebald aspect.” In some flint construction, the nodules were left whole. More often, they were hammered open—cracked like walnuts—so that their flat glassy surfaces would shine. The process is known as knapping and the results are knapped flints. Some flints were knapped so painstakingly that their outer surfaces were not only flat but also rectangular. In building walls they seem to be obsidian bricks.

In segment 7, the final section of the piece, McPhee visits Charles Darwin’s Down House, on the North Downs. He writes,

If you drive here from, say, the north side of the Thames, you move very slowly from stoplight to stoplight through the heavy density of South London, scarcely a patch of green, and then, suddenly, you’re in Darwin’s Downe, on swelling land among pony carts and open fields, horses, jodhpurred women perched in saddles, knapped flints like oyster shells up the wall of a country teahouse called Evolution 1.

In Newton Stacey, he walks through fields down to where the River Dever meets the River Test. He writes,

Coot are swimming on the River Test, two swans and four cygnets on the Dever. Over the junction pool, an ash ripe with ash keys spreads its canopy across the two rivers. They are surprisingly narrow and intimate, not much more than brooks—the Test, the mother stream, scarcely three feet deep and thirty wide. Its bank, squared off and shored with planking, is level and closely mowed so that anglers can walk beside the water unimpeded, dry shod, with no thought of stepping in. It just isn’t done, stepping in. The air is full of damselflies, midges, mayflies, swifts, and swallows, the sandy chalky bottom thick with cress and water crowfoot. The angler is wise to creep along the footpath, or, at least, to tiptoe. One unwary step and a two-pound brown explodes from cover under the lip of the bank and vanishes upstream. You sit down on a bench and think it over. Arctic grayling, which have even higher standards of water quality than trout do, share this sacred water, as does Esox lucius—the piscivorous Devil, the savage Fiend, the pike—known to grow as large as one stone three consuming trout. The underwater water crowfoot grows so fast that the waterkeeper mows it like the grass. In his fish garden, beside the Dever, the waterkeeper’s shed roofs are thatched, a bull trout is memorialized that was “killed August 1934,” and drying at the tops of posts are the heads of four huge pike.

A vivid ending to a wonderful trip. I enjoyed it immensely.

March 9, 2026, Issue

I love photography writing. There’s an interesting piece by Hilton Als in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a review of “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” at the International Center of Photography. Als likes the show. He says he’s “grateful for any opportunity to investigate this essentially mysterious work, which pushes you away even as it pulls you in.”

I’m not sure what Als means when he says Atget’s photos “push you away.” Maybe he’s referring to their silence. He writes,

When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place.

I like that passage, although I’d alter it slightly. Instead of “full of story,” I’d say “full of time and place.” Atget’s photos are an epic record of time and place. 

Postscript: Another excellent New Yorker piece on Atget’s photography is Anthony Lane’s “A Balzac of the Camera” (April 25, 1994). Lane says, “Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice.” Right there, I think, is the essence of Atget’s brilliant art. 

Eugène Atget, Bourg-la-Reine, ferme Camille Desmoulins (1901)

March 2, 2026, Issue

Ben McGrath’s wonderful “Talk” story “Ice Capades,” in this week’s issue, tells about his recent visit to Red Bank, New Jersey, to see a legendary iceboat race called the Van Nostrand Challenge. McGrath talks with some of the iceboaters and observes the scene on the frozen Navesink River:

The fourth running of the Van Nostrand, when it finally transpired, after two days of postponement, featured three boats from the Shrewsbury club and three from New York. All, per the rules, were so-called “A” boats: restored antiques, wooden, with gaffed rigs. From a squinting distance, they resembled Hudson River sloops. Up close, they were more like giant crosses atop machetes. The wind was a fluky northwesterly, gusty at the starting gun, such that a couple of blades levitated briefly, as if launching into flight. Then came the lulls, and a reminder that sailing, even on sherbert, can be a “hurry up and wait” kind of sport. Dan Lawrence’s son, Luke, piloting Ariel, which once belonged to the Roosevelts’ neighbor Archie Rogers, took the first heat, and then the second, obviating the need for a third. No team scores needed this time. The New Yorkers had won, and the cup was going home to Newburgh after a hundred and thirty-five years.

Iceboating is a great subject. McGrath captures it marvelously in just 794 well-chosen words. 

Postscript: Edward Hoagland 1932-2026

Edward Hoagland (Photo by Michael Cummo)

I see in the Times that Edward Hoagland has died, age 93. He’s one of my literary heroes. His Notes from the Century Before (1969) is one of my favorite books. His “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his wonderful 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River) is one of my favorite essays. John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation.” I think this is true. 

Hoagland’s writing style was unmistakably his own – an associational way of linking thought and observation in fresh, surprising, delightful combinations. Consider this beauty – the opening paragraph of “Of Cows and Cambodia”:

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

Hoagland had total faith in the validity of his own experience, his own way of seeing. He was subjective to the bone. His masterpiece, Notes from the Century Before, chronicles his 1966 trip up British Columbia’s Stikine River, “left as it was in the nineteenth century by a fluke of geography.” The geography is breathtaking – eighty thousand square miles ("like two Ohios") of wild rivers, snow-topped mountains, and thick forests, containing tiny villages that are “unimaginably isolated.” Hoagland traveled by boat, plane, and truck. He did a lot of walking, roaming the settlements, talking to old-timers, seeing what there was to see, noting it all down – detail after amazing detail. Here, for example, is his description of the village of Eddontenajon:

The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in the fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps. 

And here’s his portrait of Willie Campbell, one of the oldest residents of Telegraph Creek:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. He was wearing hide mittens and shoes, and he pointed across the Stkine to where he had seen a grizzly the day before.

And here’s his depiction of a young man in Eddontenajon roasting a moose head over a fire:

On the scaffold overhead a batch of pink trout was drying. Pieces of meat hung down, a hole punched in each and a rope strung through. Some rib cuts were drying too, but mainly the fire was roasting the head of a moose, kept in its skin so the meat wouldn’t burn. It rotated steadily at the end of a wire which he wound by twisting from time to time. The eyes were closed, the hair was blackened and sometimes afire, the antlers were gone, the ears had been cut off to feed the dogs, yet it was as recognizable as a moose as in life – as at peace as a comic strip, humorous moose. He said the head would feed his family for a meal or two and that the body would keep them provisioned for the whole summer while he was away on a job.

Hoagland was incapable of writing vaguely. He dealt in particulars. He was a brilliant crafter of metaphor and simile. In Notes from the Century Before, he says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this one, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

I could go on and on quoting Hoagland. He was the consummate writer. He’s gone now, but his splendid work lives on. I cherish it immensely. 

February 16 & 23, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Helen Rosner, in “Tables for Two,” manages (with help from “a very fancy friend”) to snag a reservation at the “mega-swank” steak house The Eighty-Six in the West Village. She has a blast. First, she has an apple-wood-smoked Martini, “theatrically poured tableside atop a stalagmite of ice grown, science-fair-style, from hyper-chilled water.” She says it was “excellent, and potent as hell.” I mentally sipped it right along with her. Then she has a steak dinner, which she delectably describes as follows:

The exterior, salted and peppered, crackled from a hard sear; the inside was tender pink from edge to edge. The sauces I’d ordered alongside were hardly necessary: an eggy, vinegar-tart béarnaise, and a wiggly, wobbly gelée-adjacent steak sauce made with veal demi-glace. I dipped my fries into them, at least, and enjoyed a whole phalanx of steak-house sides: garlicky spinach; butter-laden mashed potatoes; a strikingly photogenic creamed-corn potpie with a swirly croissant top; snappy green and yellow long beans, dressed in a sharp lemon vinaigrette that sliced through the density of the rest of the food.

That “I dipped my fries into them” made me smile (and salivate). It’s exactly what I’d do.

2. Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” a profile of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, is excellent. See my post yesterday.

3. One of the best New Yorker book reviews I’ve read recently is Hannah Goldfield’s “Daily Bread.” It’s a survey of food diaries – a genre or subgenre I’ve not paid any attention to. But I will now, as a result of reading Goldfield’s illuminating piece. She mentions three books I think I’ll check out: Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries; Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life; and Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. 

4. I enjoyed Zachary Fine’s “Monster Mash” – a review of Pierre Huyghe’s “Liminals,” showing in Berlin, at Halle am Berghain. Fine calls “Liminals” “an absolutely terrifying work of art.” But he doesn’t stop there. He asks why: “Why is this so terrifying?” That question is a sign of a true critic. He’s not content with just stating his response. He digs into the underlying reasons for it. Fine’s answer made me smile. “Well, first of all,” he says, “there’s the missing face.” I also like Fine’s mindfulness of beauty. In the concluding lines of his piece, he writes, “But the film persuades with its frightening beauty: the shimmering flesh-colored rocks, the throbbing soundtrack, the smoothness of the creature’s skin. It’s all too human, but not.” 

Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Photo by Nicholas J.R. White, from Rebecca Mead's "The Landscape Artist"

Rebecca Mead’s “The Landscape Artist,” in the February 16 & 23 New Yorker, profiles British landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Mead visits him at his home in Penpont, Scotland. She hikes with him and a party of visitors to the site of his 1989 stone wall called “Give and Take Wall.” She goes on an outing with him to view the site where he intends to install a project called “Gravestones.” And she tours some graveyards with him. 

It’s an absorbing, beautifully written piece. But as I read it, I found myself resisting its charms. One thing that put me off was Mead’s mention that Goldsworthy used ten thousand cattails to create one of the works in his “Fifty Years” exhibition at Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy. Maybe I’m overreacting, but the removal of ten thousand cattails from their fragile natural habitat (marshes, bogs, wetlands) strikes me as appallingly destructive. What’s the point of it? This question touches on the other aspect of Mead’s piece that bugs me – the lack of any clear rationale for what Goldsworthy is doing. Mead mentions “the sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work.” Okay, but what if your idea of beauty is a landscape unblemished by any manmade objects? What if you prefer, as I do, natural beauty?

Mead’s piece is illustrated by a wonderful photo of Goldsworthy sitting on a green-gold grassy hillside (see above). The photo is by Nicholas J.R. White. Under the photo, there’s a caption that says, “Goldsworthy, near hilltop where his work ‘Gravestones’ will be installed.” I look at the photo and think what a pity, because here’s what Goldsworthy has in mind for that hill: “four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.” This is Goldsworthy’s idea of beauty. Is it valid? I’m not sure. 

I thought about Goldsworthy’s stone walls as Lorna and I cycled the back roads of Tavira, Portugal. The roads are lined with ancient stone walls. Many of them are cased in white plaster. Here and there, the plaster has cracked open. You can see the old ochre stones inside. These walls are phenomenal to look at – their form, composition, color, and texture. My eyes devour them. I constantly stopped to take pictures of them. Each one is different. To me, they are found works of art. The impulse to photograph them and describe them in words is, to me, understandable. If I were a painter, I’d want to paint them. And if I were a sculptor like Goldsworthy, I’d want to try my hand at building my own stone walls. 

There was a day when these Portuguese stone walls were new. In the centuries since they were first built, they’ve crumbled and eroded. Time and weather have worn them down. They’ve melded with their natural surroundings. The landscape has absorbed them. I recall the phrase “part of nature, part of us” from my readings of Helen Vendler’s book of the same name. It refers, if I remember correctly, to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It’s an excellent description of those old Portuguese walls. It applies to Goldsworthy’s art, too. Mead, in her piece, mentions how Goldsworthy’s “Give and Take Wall” had a “dense covering of moss.” Nature is taking it back. Time and weather are doing their work. Transience is all.  

Taking a Break

Portugal, 2024 (Photo by Lorna MacDougall)

Tomorrow Lorna and I head back to our old haunt Tavira, on the south coast of Portugal, to do some cycling. We’ll be gone three weeks. I’ll take the February 16 & 23 New Yorker with me, and post my review when I return. It appears to be a particularly rich issue. I'm especially interested in the piece by Rebecca Mead on the landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy. The New Yorker & Me will resume on or about March 14. 

Ian Frazier's New Book "The Snakes That Ate Florida"

This is just a quick note to report the publication of a new book by Ian Frazier – The Snakes That Ate Florida. It’s a collection of his reporting, essays, and criticism. I avidly look forward to reading it. The New Yorker’s “The Best Books of 2026 So Far” provides this excellent capsule review of it:

In this collection of essays, reported pieces, and criticism dating back to the nineteen-seventies, Frazier’s sharp eye for finding the complex in the quotidian is on full display. From tales about monster trucks and the Maraschino-cherry empire to musings about lantern flies and Lolita, the collection—much of which was published in this magazine—spotlights the vibrancy of topics often under-noticed. In the playful and diligent hands of the seasoned staff writer, these ordinary things feel extraordinary.

Inspired Sentence 8

There is an odd rakishness, a mettlesome spirit, running through the cubism of the rocks of this natural esplanade, which must be the combined effect of its undulant surface, the general twist the nearby fault has given to the vicinity, and the carefree poise of a square-faced block – I am sure it must measure forty feet each way – that has detached itself from the cliff against which it leans one elbow, and stands on two fat little legs looking as if it were about to skip into the sea with the ponderous charm of one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls.

That’s from Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1985) – one of the great landscape books. Robinson is describing a section of the north-western coast of Aran. I love that “the cubism of the rocks” and the way the metaphor is picked up again at the end in the description of the square-faced block that “leans one elbow” against the cliff. When was the last time you saw a giant chunk of coastal stone compared to “one of Picasso’s surreal beach girls”? Probably never. It’s a surprising, imaginative, original image – one of dozens in this extraordinary book.  

4 Ways of Looking at Andrew Wyeth's "Wind from the Sea"

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea (1947)

Nancy K. Anderson, in her absorbing essay “Wind from the Sea: Painting Truth beneath the Facts” (in Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock, 2014), writes,

Wind from the Sea is first, a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill. Far from a replication of a bedroom window, the painting is a disciplined distillation of object and experience with an expansive subtext of personal symbolism. For Wyeth, the painting became a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness, and also a metaphorical portrait of Christina – stoic, strong, yet feminine. Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This passage suggests at least four ways of looking at Wyeth’s great picture:

1. As “a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill”;

2. As “a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness”;

3. As “a metaphorical portrait of Christina”;

4. As “an image haunted by death.”

These four perspectives intrigue me. I want to consider each them in more detail. 

1. A Superbly Constructed Image

I like this perspective. It admires Wind from the Sea for the artful way it’s painted. You don’t have to know the picture’s backstory to appreciate the technical virtuosity of its brushwork – the way Wyeth conveys the delicate lace curtains billowing in the wind, the way he renders their bird-and-flower pattern, the way he captures their disintegrating texture. It’s all right there on the surface. All you have to do is look. It’s a mimetic triumph. 

2.  A Reflection of Maine

Well, maybe. What is it about the picture that tells you it’s Maine and not, say, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, or New Brunswick? I don’t see any clues that connect this painting specifically to Maine. In order to make that connection, you have to know something about its background. At a minimum, you have to know that Wyeth painted it in Maine and that it depicts a Maine landscape as seen by Wyeth out the third-floor bedroom window of an old Maine farmhouse. 

3. A Metaphorical Portrait of Christina

Now we’re really delving into this painting’s backstory. Anderson, in her essay, tells us that Christina is Christina Olson. She and her brother Alvaro lived in a three-story, eighteenth-century, saltwater farmhouse on Hathorn Point, Cushing, Maine. The house was built by their maternal ancestors, the Hathorns. Christina, crippled by a degenerative muscle condition, couldn’t walk, climb stairs, or groom herself. Alvaro looked after her. The house was in poor condition. Rags were stuffed in broken windows. The clapboard exterior, originally painted white, had been stripped bare by sun and wind. Inside, the wallpaper was curling away from the walls. The curtains hung in tatters. Christina and Alvaro lived mostly on the ground floor. Rooms on the upper floors were rarely used. 

Wyeth first met Christina in the summer of 1939. Betsy James, soon to become Wyeth’s wife, introduced him to her at the Olson house. While he was there, Wyeth made a watercolor of the place. Following that first visit, Wyeth returned to the house every summer. As his friendship with the Olsons deepened, he was given free run of the place. Over time he studied it from every angle, inside and out. 

On a hot August day, 1947, Wyeth was at the Olson house, in an abandoned third-floor bedroom, intending to make a watercolor study of a dormer window. Anderson, in her essay, tells what happened next:

When noonday sun sent the temperature soaring, he crossed to the other side of the room and opened a window with a view to the sea. A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly. Wyeth made a quick sketch and later told a friend that the chance event had made his “hair stand on end.” By early fall, he had translated that momentary experience into one of his most remarkable paintings, Wind from the Sea.

Once you’ve read that, you see the painting in a completely different way. You see it as a live image, a record of a real event. But do you see it as a metaphorical portrait of Christina? That seems more of a stretch. Anderson writes,

Knowing Wyeth’s predilection for investing images with symbolic references, it is easy to see how the solid straight window frame that anchors Wind from the Sea came to serve him as a metaphor for Christina’s strength of character and how the delicate birds on the disintegrating lace reflected her feminine grace.

Okay, fair enough. But not everyone who views Wind from the Sea will know about its connection with Christina. That connection is not apparent on the face of the painting.

4. An Image Haunted by Death

Anderson writes,

Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This is interesting. Anderson tells me something I would not have realized on my own – that those tiny specks of white on the far shore are grave markers. Is the presence of those grave markers sufficient evidence to support Anderson’s “haunted by death” reading? Maybe, especially if you read it in conjunction with her observation that the “interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay.” 

Unquestionably, Wyeth is interested in subjects that show “the passage of time and the onset of decay.” I share this interest. It’s one of the reasons I love his work. His paintings exude a delicious melancholy. But to say Wind from the Sea is death-haunted seems to me to conflict with the way the breeze has stirred those old curtains to life. Isn’t that the real point of the picture? “A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly.” Wind from the Sea has the breath of life.