Two Excellent Critical Pieces

Camille Pissarro, Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873)

I want to note the recent appearance of two extraordinary essay-reviews by two of my favorite writers: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Wendell Berry’s High Horse” (The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2020) and T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020). 

Klinkenborg’s piece is a biting critique of Wendell Berry’s collected essays What I Stand On. “All too often,” Klinkenborg says, “I’m disturbed, to the point of physical unease, by the involuted, strangely patristic way his writing and thinking move.” He says that Berry “often fails to do the first important job of a writer – ‘even’ a nonfiction writer – which is to make sentences that breathe with the life of the body, even when that body happens to be thinking.” He notes “the extraordinarily high degree of abstraction and generalization” in Berry’s prose. Klinkenborg’s close analysis of Berry’s sentences is thrilling. So is his skewering of the way Berry uses metaphor:

There’s also a kind of skittering in The Long-Legged House that reminds me of Thoreau – an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge. You can hear a version of this in the way that Thoreau – like Berry – uses metaphor. The instantaneous fusion of resemblance and dissonance that I hope to find in a good metaphor – the suddenness of perception – isn’t much use to Thoreau, because he it’s hard to moralize one that works that way. Every actual thing in his prose seems to quiver with the desire to become metaphorical or symbolic, like the dead horse in Walden whose strong scent causes Thoreau to think of the myriads of creatures squashed and gobbled and “run over in the road,” ending in a vision of “universal innocence.” It’s a relief when things remain merely themselves.

That “an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge” is brilliant! The whole piece is brilliant – a vigorous application of the dictum that Klinkenborg set out in his great Several short sentences about writing (2012): The goal is “To get your words, your phrases, as close as you can to the solidity of the world your noticing.”

T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” is a wonderful comparative analysis of Pissarro and Cézanne. It brims with delicious description. Clark says of Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873),

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.

Yes, and there are many such wonders in Clark’s piece, too. Here’s another – a comparison of Pissarro’s Louveciennes (1871) with Cézanne’s Louveciennes (c.1873):

Colour in the Cézanne is not primarily an aspect – a felt reality – of an atmosphere: it adheres somewhat perfunctorily to things. Look, for example, at the yellows and oranges on the old bulwark at the side of the road, or the yellows and browns making the screen of trees to the right of the two figures, over the low wall. Equally, space in Cézanne’s copy is not a filled emptiness. It is not something grounded and contained. It does not approach the viewer along the modest dirt road, across a solid proximity, offering us a way into the illusion. ‘Way’ is a notion foreign to Cézanne’s vision. Where in general we might be in space is an enigma in the copy: the houses in the distance in the original enter a kind of non-distance, or anti-distance, when Cézanne redoes them – not that that means they are nearer, more tangible. The highest house is an epitome of this. Cézanne takes Pissarro’s gentle indications of a road climbing the hill to the house and zigzagging left towards it, and turns the whole collocation into a crisp folding of edges and collision of overlapping planes.

Who would not want such sublime writing to continue forever? Reading “Strange Apprentice,” I found myself slowing down to prolong the pleasure. I didn’t want it to end.

Both these splendid pieces went straight into my personal anthology of great criticism.