August 24, 2015 Issue

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a note at the end of his unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941), observed, “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” I thought of this adage as I read Alice McDermott’s wonderful "These Short, Dark Days," in this week’s issue. It’s a portrait of a sixty-four-year-old nun, Sister St. Savior, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, who, walking back to the convent one dark February evening, happens on an emergency – an apartment fire, a man asphyxiated, his young wife in despair. McDermott uses action to reveal Sister St. Savior’s remarkable character. Sister boldly enters the building and takes charge of the young woman’s care. The story is like a nun’s version of a police procedural. Sister learns from a policeman that the asphyxiated husband committed suicide, a fact that the reader already knows because McDermott shows us his preparations in the opening part of the story. Her response to this information is interesting:

Sister accepted the information with only a discreet nod. When she looked up again—her eyes behind her glasses were small and brown and caught the light the way only a hard surface would, marble or black tin, nothing watery—the truth of the suicide was both acknowledged and put away. She had entered the homes of strangers and seen the bottles in the bin, the poor contents of a cupboard, the bruise in a hidden place, seen as well, once, a pale, thumb-size infant in a basin filled with blood and had bowed her head and nodded in just the same way.

Hard eyes, soft heart – a paradoxical combination that complicates Sister’s character. She’s determined to circumvent church rules that forbid the burial of a suicide in a church cemetery. She says to the young widow:

“Your man fell asleep,” Sister St. Savior whispered now. “The flame went out. It was a wet and unfortunate day.” She paused to make sure the girl had heard. “He belongs in Calvary,” she said. “You paid for the plot, didn’t you?” The girl nodded slowly. “Well, that’s where he’ll go.”

The story’s tone is tender but unsentimental. Even the slightest phrases bloom in the damp, gray atmosphere: “the terrible scent of doused fire on the winter air”; “a glass of tea on the edge of a folded newspaper”; “a green scent coaxed out of dried reeds”; “the rusty stains on the blue ticking of the mattress”; two nuns side by side on a couch, asleep, “puffed into their black cloaks like gulls on a pier.”

Was Sister St. Savior successful in getting the young man’s body buried in Calvary Cemetery? The ending suggests she wasn’t. But it’s not clear. The ending is satisfyingly ambiguous. “These Short, Dark Days” is a great story. I enjoyed it immensely.

Teju Cole's "Flat" Description

I’m still trying to figure out what James Wood meant by “‘flat’ description” in his review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In his piece, Wood talks about a particularly vivid image that occurs near the end of Open City: Julius, the novel’s narrator, is attending a Carnegie Hall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; he sees an elderly lady walking up the aisle. Cole describes her as follows:

She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.

Wood says,

Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.

“Flat” in the sense that Cole’s description is dull and lifeless? I don’t think that’s what Wood means. The fact that he sets “flat” in quotation marks indicates that he’s using the word in a particular way – to denote a particular style of description. There’s a hint as to what he means when he says the image of the old woman “seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.” We know that Wood dislikes overly rich description. In his essay “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate), he disdainfully refers to Updike’s “puffy lyricism” and “slathered detail.” He’s an anti-inflationist. When it comes to verbal representation of reality, he seems to prefer an almost literal transcription – the thing itself. It’s the kind of description that Teju Cole abundantly provides in Open City. For example, here’s Cole’s depiction of a section of Wall Street:

I walked toward the west. People bought food from a falafel vendor whose van was parked on the corner, or walked alone, in pairs, in threes. I saw black women in charcoal grey skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men. Just past Federal Hall, I walked past the glass frontage of the New York Sports Club. Right up against the glass in its brightly lit interior was a single row of exercise bicycles, all of them occupied by men and women in Lycra who pedaled in the silence and looked out at the commuters in the dusk. Near the corner of Nassau, a man in a scarf and fedora hat stood with an easel before him and painted the Stock Exchange in grisaille on a large canvas. A stack of completed paintings, also grisaille, of the same building seen from different angles, lay at his feet. I watched him work for a moment, as he loaded his brush, and with careful gestures applied white highlights to the acanthus of the six massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange.

“I saw,” I watched,” “I noticed,” “I scrutinized” – these words occur frequently in Cole’s writing. His descriptions are built on data received through the eye. He rarely constructs a metaphor or simile, and when he does, it’s usually a fairly plain one (e.g., “The just risen sun came at the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river gleamed like aluminum roofing”).

There’s a Hopperesque quality to many of Cole’s descriptions that I really like. That image of the men and women on their exercise bicycles pedaling “in the silence,” looking out “at the commuters in the dusk,” in the above-quoted passage, for example, seems to me a scene that might’ve caught Hopper’s eye.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Cole’s “flat” description – what I understand “flat” to mean, at any rate – is his use of catalog. For example, here’s a passage from Open City in which he catalogs the details of the interior of a Chinese shop:

The shop, of which I was the sole customer, was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects: a profusion of bamboo cages as well as finely worked metal ones, hanging like lampshades from the ceiling; hand-carved chess sets on the ancient-looking bar between the customer and the shopkeeper’s bay; imitation Ming Dynasty lacquerware, which ranged in size from tiny decorative pots to round-bellied vases large enough to conceal a man; humorous pamphlets of the “Confucius say” variety, which had been printed in English in Hong Kong and which gave advice to those gentlemen who wished to find success with women; fine wooden chopsticks set on porcelain chopstick stands; glass bowls of every hue, thickness, and design; and, in a seemingly endless glass-fronted gallery high above the regular shelves, a series of brightly painted masks that run through every facial expression possible in the dramatist’s art.

I’m a sucker for compendiums of detail like the one above. They seem to me to be one of the most effective ways for a writer to reproduce reality. The trick is in knowing how to make something good, something artful, out of them. There’s an intriguing scrap of catalog writing under the title “Descriptions of Things and Atmosphere” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nonfiction collection The Crack Up that reads as follows:

Seen in a Junk Yard: Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs, plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water, pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dinghy, box of bolts, (No.1), van, stove, auto stuff (No.2), army trucks, cast iron body, hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.

Fitzgerald must’ve made this entry in his notebook with the intention of someday turning it into something – a scene in a novel or short story, maybe. But, unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to do so. In Open City, Teju Cole integrates his catalogs of urban details into a larger narrative about a young man for whom walking in the city is “a release,” “a reminder of freedom.” He’s successfully done what all artists strive to do - shape reality’s welter into something meaningful.

September 27, 2010 Issue

There are no rules in critical writing, but a useful guideline is the one articulated by Edmund Wilson many years ago: a critic must first describe what he or she is going to criticize. Rebecca Mead, in her interesting piece “Adaptation,” in this week’s issue, does an excellent job describing “Gatz,” a translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” to the stage by the experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service. Mead describes “Gatz" 's “dilapidated office” setting. And she describes what happens in that setting: “the text of ‘The Great Gatsby’ is spoken aloud, all forty-nine thousand words of it, and the action unfolds solely within the shabby office space.” She says, “The show lasts for a Wagnerian eight hours, including two short intermissions and a dinner break.” Mead ably fulfills the first part of the Wilsonian precept: she describes “Gatz.” But when it comes time to do the actual critical work, she chickens out. It seems to me anyone reasonably familiar with “The Great Gatsby,” who reads her description of “Gatz” – eight hours in a theatre looking at the same shabby office set, listening to actors (some of them impersonating more than one character) read all fort-nine thousand words of the novel, including, as Mead points out, “every ‘he said’ and ‘she said’” – would have no problem concluding that the production is from beginning to end a wrong-headed, ill-conceived, totally cock-eyed folly. Mead appears to suspend judgment. She says, “What could have been a tiresome gimmick achieves, in the course of the show, a kind of sublimity.” What kind of sublimity might that be? Somnolence? She also says, “Gatz immerses the audience in the beauty of Fitzgerald’s incantatory prose.” “Incantatory” is an odd choice of word to describe Fitzgerald’s writing in “The Great Gatsby.” It seems to suggest that it is the type of writing that is best appreciated when heard read aloud. On the contrary, Fitzgerald’s exquisitely textured writing – in “The Great Gatsby,” at least – is, in my opinion, best appreciated when read on the page. For example, consider this line about Daisy: “A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek.” “Damp,” “streak,” “hair,” “dash,” “blue,” “paint,” “cheek” – these vivid, monosyllabic, consonantal words are themselves like dabs of paint that create an almost cubist picture of Daisy’s face. It’s an astonishing sentence – one among many in Fitzgerald’s great work – and I think the astonishment would be greatly diminished if, instead of reading Fitzgerald’s words, you had them read to you. I think if you simply listen to the words, you lose touch with the writing act, with the writer’s art. And this is one reason why I think Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Gatz,” as described by Rebecca Mead, is so ludicrous – that and the “Wagnerian” eight-hour endurance test. Implicit in the aforementioned quotations from Mead’s piece is that she liked “Gatz.” But she also says, “Everybody in the room, audience and cast alike, experiences ‘Gatz’ as an event – one that is, by turns, thrilling, amusing, and enervating.” Note that last word; she doesn’t say “energizing,” she says “enervating,” as in “causing one to feel drained of energy or vitality.” I think Mead is less enthused about her “Gatz” experience than she lets on. Any “adaptation” of “The Great Gatsby” that leaves you enervated is a dud and should be judged, if the critic is truly exercising her critical powers, as such.

Second Thoughts: On further reflection, I think I may have been too harsh. Mead’s article is more an arts report than it is a review or a critical piece. She is bringing us news of an honorable yet foolhardy theatrical experiment. Wright Morris, in his book “About Fiction” (1975), said that “Few books come into this world with the perfection of a bird’s egg, and this [“The Great Gatsby”] is one of them.” Elevator Repair Service has scooped up this perfect egg and used it to cook what appears to be a rather unpalatable dish.