Shrugging At Description

Charles Wright, 1991; photograph by Nancy Crampton

Dan Chiasson, in his brilliant review of Charles Wright’s Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems (“ ‘So Fluid, So Limpid, So Musical’, ” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2014), commenting on the “slackened description” he finds in some of Wright’s late poems, says:

The absurdity of trying to come up with fresh language every time the sun sets or the weather changes: one way to represent this problem is to eschew masterly phrasing entirely, and, finding language that feels decidedly minor, to shrug in the direction of description.

While I admire Chiasson’s attempt to defend the “blanched vocabulary” of Wright’s late style, I question the wisdom of “shrugging in the direction of description.” It’s the descriptive aspects of poetry that hold my attention.

Wright is a superb describer. Here, for example, is his wonderful meditation on the metamorphosis of a mayfly:

                                                  Then

Emergence: leaf drift and detritus; skin split,

The image forced from the self.

And rests, wings drying, eyes compressed,

Legs compressed, constricted

Between the dun and the watershine –

Incipient spinner, set for the take-off …

And does, in clean tear: imago rising out of herself

For the last time, slate-winged and many-eyed.

And joins, and drops to her destiny,

Flesh to the surface, wings flush on the slate film.

                                 

                                   [from Part 6 of “Skins” (1974)]

Helen Vendler, in her “The Transcendant ‘I’ ” (The New Yorker, October 29, 1979; included in her great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us) quoted the above lines and said,

This is almost too ravishing in sound and sight, in its mimetic instability between the grotesque and the exquisite, to be thought about. The mind of the reader is delayed by the felicities of the slate wings on the slate water-film, by the dun detritus of chrysalis played off against the watershine, by flesh flush on the surface, by the conjugation of drift and force, compression and incipience, and by the brief cycle of wings drying, rising, dropping.

In his piece, Chiasson mentions Wright’s “luscious descriptions,” but he doesn’t provide any samples. Instead, he dwells on Wright’s metaphysics. He says,

Wright has made a potentially pat and overfamiliar metaphysics, one that downgrades the tangible particulars of “reality” in favor of the spirit’s hunches and hints, into something really thrilling: the practical aesthetic problem of how such a metaphysics might be represented in language.

What Chiasson finds “really thrilling,” I find lamentable. Compared to those slate wings on slate water-film, talk of metaphysics strikes me as impoverished. But there’s at least one poem in Bye-and-Bye that doesn’t shrug at description. Chiasson doesn’t mention it. I’m referring to Wright’s exquisite “Citronella”:

Moonlight blank newsprint across the lawn,

Three-quarters moon, give or take,

                 empty notebook, no wind.

When it’s over it’s over,

Cloud crossing moon, half-clear sky, then

          candle-sputter, shadow-crawl.

Well, that’s a couple of miles down the road,

                      he said to himself,

Watching the moonlight lacquer and mat.

Surely a mile and then some,

Watching the clouds come and the clouds go.

Citronella against the tiny ones, the biters,

Sky pewter-colored and suddenly indistinct now –

Sweet smell of citronella,

                     beautiful, endless youth.

The book of moonlight has two pages and this one’s the

     first one.

Forsake me not utterly,

Beato immaculate,

                    and make me marvellous
                        in your eyes.

September 22, 2014 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nick Paumgarten’s "We Are A Camera." It’s about the GoPro camera – “a perfect instrument for the look-at-me age,” Paumgarten says. The piece reports on the morning of GoPro’s stock market launch (“Woodman, in jeans and a dark-blue button-down shirt, tan and fit with white teeth and spiky dark hair, led them in impromptu banshee howls, the feral woo-hoos of joyriders everywhere, and chants of ‘Go Pro! Go Pro! Go Pro!’ and with his non-GoPro hand flashed the surfer’s hang-loose shaka sign”). It describes a GoPro video of three men parachuting from the top of One World Trade Center (“Most striking of all is the vision, once the plummet begins, of the illuminated glass façade of the tower sliding past, the pace accelerating yet oddly slow, almost elegant, with no trace really of violence or terror”). It chronicles Paumgarten’s attendance at the GoPro Mountain Games, in Vail, Colorado, where he went whitewater kayaking (“On bridges and banks: GoPros everywhere. We were mayflies, flashing through the frames of strangers”). My favorite part of “We Are A Camera” is Paumgarten’s descriptive analysis of his ten-year-old son’s GoPro ski video:

Even though the camera was turned outward, filled mainly by the sight of the terrain sliding past, it provided, more than anything, a glimpse into the mind of a dreamy and quiet boy—who, to my eyes, during the day, had been just a nose, his features and expressions otherwise hidden by helmet, neck gaiter, and goggles. I didn’t need a camera to show me what he looked like to the world, but was delighted to find one that could show me what the world looked like to him.

“We Are A Camera” brims with superb descriptions and illuminating perceptions. In other words, it's quintessential Paumgarten. I enjoyed it immensely.

September 15, 2014 Issue

I’m a latecomer to Jerome Groopman’s writing. Earlier this summer, I read my first Groopman – “How Memory Works” (The New York Review of Books, May 22, 2014). I was surprised to find myself enjoying it – “surprised” because I’m not used to seeing science written about from the “I” perspective. Science is generally a third-person discourse. But Groopman writes gloriously in the “I.” His “The Transformation,” in this week’s issue, exemplifies his personal approach. It’s about an experimental new drug that causes leukemic cells to mature into healthier ones. In it, he visits the laboratory where the new drug, AG-221, was developed. He writes,

That afternoon, I examined microscope images of the bone marrow of a patient who had not been treated with the drug. As a hematologist, I often dread taking in this view. Up close, healthy marrow looks like an Impressionist painting—a variegated landscape of cell types and colors. Leukemic marrow is a monotonous canvas of cancer cells; the images I was looking at showed hardly any normal blood cells being made. Then I examined images from a patient who had received the Agios drug. Typically, when a patient with A.M.L. is treated with high doses of chemotherapy, the marrow is emptied of all living cells; what’s left is a moonscape of fat globules and fibrous tissue. The images at Agios showed robust marrow: the leukemic cells had been forced to mature and had reverted to functioning white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets. They were transformed.

That “moonscape of fat globules and fibrous tissue” is very fine. Groopman’s words call up pictures. He makes medical science vivid.

Postscript: William Finnegan’s “Dignity,” in this week’s issue, is one of the most moving, brilliant, effective pieces on economic inequality that I’ve read in a long time. I say “effective” because it not only describes the workers’ predicament (miserable pay); it suggests a powerful remedy – labor activism. The piece reports on the growing campaign to unionize fast-food workers. Finnegan immerses himself in the life of Arisleyda Tapia, a worker at a New York City McDonald’s. He describes her workplace (“the deep fryer and the meat freezer, the clamshell grill and the egg station, the order screens and the endless hospital-like beeping of timers”); he accompanies her on a bus to a national conference of the fast-food workers’ movement in Chicago (“Shantel Walker, who works at a Papa John’s in Brooklyn, jumped up as the bus approached Chicago. She wore a gold-billed cap and a big crucifix. She had a microphone. ‘I work too hard,’ she chanted, ‘for a little income.’ The bus erupted, workers chanting the lyrics after her. ‘Your story is an inspiration / People are with you / New York is proud of you, HEY’ ’’); he talks to the conference-goers (“Jorel Ware worked at a McDonald’s in midtown. He was thirty-one. He still made minimum wage, after two years. ‘They say the franchisee is just a small man in the middle,’ he said. ‘If that’s true, then who am I? I’m just a dot on the wall. I just want to be able to get an unlimited MetroCard. I can’t afford nothing’ ”); he observes a sit-in outside a McDonald’s (Some of the marchers wore their McDonald’s uniforms. Tapia was in civilian clothes. It was midday, hot. She and the rest of the protesters were steered by police into a containment pen, built of interlocking metal barricades, on the east side of Eighth”); he describes the arrest of some of the demonstrators (“The police used disposable restraints—white plastic ‘flexicuffs.’ They led their captives toward two large white vans, herded them inside, and shut the doors”). Anyone frustrated (as I am) by the lack of political response to the recent surge in inequality will find “Dignity” inspiring. It shows workers bravely taking matters into their own hands, using collective action as a means of reform.

September 8, 2014 Issue

I enjoy GOAT’s capsule movie reviews. Some are originals, e.g., Richard Brody’s beautiful “Night at the Crossroads” in this week’s issue. Others are reductions of pieces that previously appeared in “The Critics.” Regarding this latter type, it’s interesting from a compositional perspective to compare the “Critics” version with the “GOAT” version and note the modifications involved in condensing, say, a 1500-word review to a 180-word miniature.

Two such “capsules” in this week’s issue caught my eye: Pauline Kael’s “Hairspray” and David Denby’s “The Trip to Italy.” Kael’s note (a slightly longer version of which appears in her great 5001 Nights at the Movies) is based on her March 7, 1988 New Yorker review (included in her 1989 collection Hooked). The description that makes this “capsule” notable for me is “pop dadaist musical comedy.” It’s a recasting of “an entertainingly imbecilic musical comedy – a piece of pop dadaism,” in Kael’s original. I prefer the compression of the “capsule” version.

Denby’s “capsule” of The Trip to Italy contains the inspired phrase “hedonistic japery” (“This hedonistic japery is shot through with middle-aged melancholy and the fear of death”), which doesn’t appear in his original review (“Lasting Impressions,” September 1, 2014). The original does contain the word “japes” (“The Trip to Italy, for all its japes, is haunted by mortality …”).

All of which goes to show that even though you’ve read the “Critics’ version of a movie review, it pays to read the “GOAT” version, too – fresh felicities of language are there to be found.

Postscript: I relish John McPhee’s specificity – especially his use of place names. It’s one of the key ingredients of his style. Many of the names in his “Phi Beta Football,” in this week’s issue, are unfamiliar. They’re from a world – Ivy League football – totally foreign to me. But one name he mentions – “Penobscot River” – is pregnant with meaning. It recalls his great “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3, 1975 (“We drove the last hour into the woods on those roads, and put the canoes into the West Branch of the Penobscot River at six in the evening”), perhaps the finest “Reporter At Large” piece ever to appear in the magazine.

“But You Can’t Move That Bear”: Why Narrative Construction in Nonfiction Is Less Artificial Than in Fiction (Contra McCallum-Smith)

I enjoyed Susan McCallum-Smith’s “Geoff at Sea” (Los Angeles Review of Books, September 1, 2014). But something she says about factual writing bothers me. She equates its narrative structure with that of fiction. She says, “Narrative construction in nonfiction is no less artificial than in fiction, but that does not necessarily imply that Dyer — with his coy self-deprecation and flâneur facade — is more manipulative or his intent less true.” No less artificial than in fiction – is this true? I don’t think so. Reading McCallum-Smith’s observation, I thought of John McPhee’s classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s great Coming into the Country, 1977), which begins in the middle of a canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range of Alaska. The first part is written in the present tense. The writing comes to the end of the journey and then it flashes back to the beginning of the trip. After that, it’s in the past tense, and the piece ends with McPhee in the canoe, somewhere relatively early in the journey, seeing a grizzly bear. The piece makes a circle, enacting its title. In an interview in The Paris Review (Spring 2010), McPhee describes how he conceived “The Encircled River” ’s brilliant structure:

But once I started writing, I had to tell a story. It’s the story of a journey. Within that journey certain things happened, such as an encounter with a big grizzly. That grizzly encounter was a pretty exciting thing, and it happened near the beginning of the trip. That was somewhat inconvenient structurally, because it’s such a climactic event. But you can’t move that bear, because this is a piece of nonfiction writing.

But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you’re really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for the climax. That’s what’s exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case, it’s a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past.

But you can’t move that bear – right there is the rub, nonfiction’s ironclad rule – you can’t mess with the facts. It’s what makes nonfiction real – much realer than fiction, in my opinion. Fiction writers are under no such constraint. They don’t have to worry about making their story conform to the way things actually happened. Andrew O’Hagan, in his review of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22, talks about the gap “between what Ernie wanted to happen and what actually happened to him – a vacuum that could only be occupied by myth” (“Issues for His Prose Style,” London Review of Books, June 7, 2012). O’Hagan provides this example:

Hemingway was rejected by the regular army. He was giving out chocolate for the Red Cross when the mortar exploded that damaged his legs. (The subjective correlative in a Farewell to Arms is the basin of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.)

Nonfiction takes its “plot” from real (as opposed to imaginary) life. As McPhee says in his Paris Review interview, structure in a fact piece “arises organically from the material once you have it.” This, to my mind, is what makes nonfiction’s narrative construction, contrary to McCallum-Smith’s view, far less artificial than fiction’s.

Credit: The above artwork is by Stephen Doyle (photographed by Grant Cornett); it appears in The New Yorker (January 14, 2013), as an illustration for John McPhee’s “Structure.”

September 1, 2014 Issue

An intriguing form of book review is emerging at The New Yorker, one that uses personal history as a springboard for discussion of new books. This week’s issue contains two such pieces – Nathan Heller’s "Poison Ivy" and Adam Gopnik’s "Heaven's Gaits." In “Poison Ivy,” Heller talks about his college experiences as a lead-in to his consideration of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. I read the opening line – “I went to college early in this century, when the drug of choice on campus was sleep deprivation” – and I was hooked. I don’t agree with everything Heller says in the piece (he scoffs at Deresiewicz’s humanist vision of university education, calling it “brochure balladry”), but I was charmed by his personal approach, particularly this line:

Once, I woke up at my desk—or, more precisely, on my desk, face down, arms splayed out, murder-in-the-study style—with a caffeine-induced cramp freezing my left leg and the imprint of a notebook spiral winding down my cheek.

Gopnik’s “Heaven’s Gaits” looks at two books, Matthew Algeo’s Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport and Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking. Neither book appeals to me. But the final section of the review, a description of Gopnik’s own affinity for walking around New York City, is a beauty. Gopnik writes,

You could walk anywhere. Saturday all day, Sunday all day, I’d tramp through the lower-Manhattan neighborhoods. The differences, architectural and social, among Tribeca and SoHo and the East Village, to name only contiguous areas, were distinct and vivid and nameable then: cast-iron buildings shading off into old egg- and paper-carton factories sweetly interrupted by small triangular parks, and edging over, as you walked east, into poor-law tenements that were just being reclaimed by painters.

Autobiographical critical pieces, such as Heller’s “Poison Ivy,” his earlier, wonderful "Semi-Charmed Life" (The New Yorker, January 14, 2013), Gopnik’s “Heaven’s Gaits,” and James Wood’s brilliant "On Not Going Home" (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), constitute an interesting new trend in book reviewing. I hope it continues.