This is just a quick note to say how much I’m enjoying
Michael Hofmann’s new essay collection, Where
Have You Been?. Hofmann isn’t a New
Yorker writer. But his dazzling, delicious book connects with the magazine
in several interesting ways. For example, it contains two excellent essays on
Elizabeth Bishop, who contributed more than fifty poems and five short stories
to The New Yorker. In “Bishop/Lowell Correspondence,” a review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence
Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Hofmann catalogues the
differences between the two poets:
Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive,
solicitous, moody, Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly
productive; she is anxious, he when not shockingly and I think genuinely
self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this
is an understatement—"sometimes nothing is so solid to me as
writing"; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small-scale, barely
worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his
are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed.
At one point, Hofmann says, “Bishop likes strong Brazilian
coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he's not
sure).” In comparing Bishop’s and Lowell’s letters, Hofmann pulls no punches;
he likes Bishop’s better: “Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention,
interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him
(even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down
to something like focal length—his is about a foot.”
For a kinder view of Lowell’s letter writing, see Dan
Chiasson’s "Works On Paper" (The New Yorker, November 3, 2008), in which he calls Lowell’s recovery letters “among
the most brilliant letters ever written, for the simple reason that the writing
of them operates against such tragic stakes.”
Another piece in Hofmann’s collection that links with The New Yorker is “James Schuyler.”
Schuyler contributed at least a dozen poems to The New Yorker and was the subject of a wonderful essay, called
“Whatever Is Moving,” by longtime New
Yorker poetry editor, Howard Moss. Hofmann mentions Moss’s piece in his
essay. Regarding Schuyler, Hofmann says he is “at once a painterly poet,
descriptive and objective, and at the same time he uses all the subliminal,
microbial quirks of language.”
A third New Yorker
connection came to mind when I read Hofmann’s piece on Zbigniew Herbert. The New Yorker published a number of
Herbert’s poems, including the John and Bogdana Carpenter translation of "Mr. Cogito on a Set Theme: 'Friends Depart,' " (June 28, 2004), which Hofmann
quotes, using the Alissa Valles translation. Hofmann rips Valles’s translation
of Herbert, calling it, among other things, “slack, chattersome, hysterical,
full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect.”
And fourthly, reading Hofmann’s absorbing piece on Max
Beckmann, I recalled Peter Schjeldahl’s New
Yorker review of Saint Louis Art Museum’s “Max Beckmann and Paris” ("The French Disconnection," March 8, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s 2008 collection,
Let’s See), which contains this
memorable description of Beckmann’s great Quappi
in Blue: “In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry
expression while visually exploding like a grenade.” Hofmann, in his “Max
Beckmann," also notes the detonative character of Beckmann’s work. He says, “In
its drama and clutter and burstingness, it regularly challenges the very idea
of what can be done in a painting.”
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