Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

Time to kick off my “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' " (July 26, 2012):

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in his An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great "The Treasure of Comanche County" (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

November 27, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rachel Aviv’s “Personal Statement,” a profile of writer Joyce Carol Oates. This piece differs from most New Yorker literary profiles. It has a clear, strong theme, captured in its tagline: “Joyce Carol Oates’s relentless search for self.” Okay, sign me up, I’ll read that. How we become who we are is, for me, one of life’s central mysteries. Aviv does an excellent job exploring it in this piece. It’s fascinating to read about an eighty-five-year-old writer, author of “sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children’s novels, and books of poetry” and see how insecure she is about her own identity. Aviv writes,

Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity. There are only so many ways to dramatize the problem of being a self, one might think, but Oates keeps coming back to it, as if there is something she still needs to figure out.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s fiction. But I devour her book reviews, a number of which have appeared in The New Yorker: see, for example, “Earthly Delights” (February 5, 2001); “Love Crazy” (March 3, 2003); “Rack and Ruin” (April 30, 2007); “The Death Factory” (September 29, 2014); and “Ocular Proof” (February 26, 2018). My favorite Oates reviews are “The Treasure of Comanche Country” (on Cormac McCarthy) and “In Rough Country” (on Annie Proulx), included in her great 2010 essay collection In Rough Country. Oates is an excellent critic – descriptive and analytical. If she’s insecure in her identity, I don’t detect it in her reviews. She appears completely self-assured.

Not that I’m questioning Aviv’s assessment. Her “quest for identity” theme threads her piece from beginning to end: “The persona was perhaps no more real than the ladylike role she inhabited at parties”; “Her short stories from the time, many of which revolve around romantic betrayals, are so precise about the impossibility of trying to cohere as a personality in the world”; “The work had piled up, giving form to aspects of her identity that she couldn’t otherwise see, but the process didn’t seem to have really changed her.” 

My favorite line in “Personal Statement” is “She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal.” That “uniquely incurious” made me smile. In Aviv’s piece, a savvy journalist-detective comes up against a foxy, guarded genius. 

Becky Cooper's "We Keep the Dead Close"

I see Becky Cooper has a book out. It’s titled We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence. Joyce Carol Oates gives it a positive review in this month’s New York Review of Books. She says,

We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper is a brilliantly idiosyncratic variant of generic true crime, rather more a memoir than a conventional work of reportage, so structured that the revelation of the murderer is not the conclusion or even the most important feature of the book. Instead, the journey to the revelation – “the absence of mystery, of narrative echo, of symmetry or rhyme or sense” – becomes the memoirist’s subject.

Cooper used to write for The New Yorker. Her “Tables For Two: Mermaid Spa” is one of my all-time favorite “Goings On About Town” pieces. Here it is in full:

The smell of chlorine emanating from the concrete building is the first hint that Mermaid Spa, in Coney Island, isn’t Spa Castle. There are no crystal rooms, no “color therapy” experiences, and, thankfully, no uniforms reminiscent of a totalitarian regime. This is a Ukrainian-Russian community center, a blustery twenty-minute walk from the subway, as traditional as banyas get in New York City, with a clientele that takes its sweating very seriously. There is, happily, also a restaurant, which serves some solid Russian classics.

The dining room, guarded by golden mermaids, is built around a hot tub. There are older men in groups; younger, shiny men in groups; and fit couples throwing back plastic pints of beer. Everyone is wearing towels, and most are in felt hats that, counterintuitively, help with the heat. Claim a table—it’s yours for the day—and head into the sauna. Sweat until you can’t stand it, and escape to the cold shower. Pull the chain and a torrent of ice water rushes over you. Then go to the steam room and get lost in the fog, before plunging into the ice pools. Jump out, gasp for breath, and feel your head pound with shock and relief. Repeat until you’re jelly, and then it’s time to eat.

Many tables stick with giant bottles of water and platters of fresh fruit. But you came for the food, so go for it. The large meat dishes—lamb leg, beef stroganoff, chicken tabaka—are hefty in a way that seems ill-advised in the setting. The hot appetizers are a better idea. The borscht is rich and thick. The garlicky French fries, piled on a sizzling iron skillet, though not exactly what you’d picture eating in a bathing suit, are a banya staple. Even more traditional are the pelmeni, filled with beef, lamb, and veal, and topped with mushroom gravy, which are addictive until they congeal at room temperature. Luckily, the dish is too good to leave for long. The best, though, are the cold appetizers, especially the pickled herring or, if you dare, the salo—raw pig lard, frozen and sliced thin. The procedure is half the fun: Layer it over some brown bread. Salt it. Pick up a raw garlic clove. Salt that. Bite one, then the other. The sharp fire of the raw garlic gives way to the sweetness of the bread, and to the soothing fat as it melts. It’s more bracing than the ice pools.

On the way out, do yourself a favor and stop by the beach, whose winter charm doesn’t get enough credit. The steam rises off your skin. The coastline extends as far as you can see, populated by no one. What a gift the quiet is. 

That is tremendously alive, and it's the knowing sensual instructions (“Sweat until you can’t stand it,” “Pull the chain,” “Repeat until you’re jelly,” “Salt it,” “Pick up a raw garlic clove,” “Bite one, then the other”) that make it so.

Cooper’s new book sounds intriguing. I think I’ll check it out. 

On Joyce Carol Oates's "Acceleration Near the Point of Impact"

Joyce Carol Oates (Photo by Richard Avedon)

I find myself still thinking about Joyce Carol Oates (thanks to Leo Robson’s recent New Yorker piece). I woke this morning with the title of her poem “Acceleration Near the Point of Impact” in my mind. I first read it forty-eight years ago in Esquire. Here’s the poem:

the needles are starved, brown
fire-hazards warned of in the papers
but the yew tree rises miraculous
red and green ornaments
at its peak the hand-sized angel

again the release of dirty snow
the melting rush of sewers
the church bells’ ambitions
a Sunday of parades

rockets, ten-cent bombs
end of summer sales
bins of heaped-up bathing suits
sandals and shoes with cork heels

and tactile November skies
by minutes and inches pushing us
into history

What does it mean? I’m not sure. I think it’s about the onrush of time. I love the title – “Acceleration Near the Point of Impact.” It’s like a phrase from a horrific accident report indicating intent to injure, possibly suicide. Oates repurposes this chilling forensic expression, applying it to time’s current, flowing faster and faster as it sweeps us to our deaths.

July 6 & 13, 2020 Issue

I always enjoy Leo Robson’s book reviews. His “The Art of the Unruly,” in this week’s issue, is excellent. It’s an assessment of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel Night, Sleep, Death, The Stars. Robson says it’s “enormous and frequently brilliant.” He views it as an instance of what he calls Oates’s “counter-aesthetic” – her style of “rousing roughness.” He says,

Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment. Human existence, in her handling, seems a primarily somatic enterprise, and her greedily adjectival prose can sometimes read like a sort of dramatized phenomenology. Even on a bustling city street, her characters can come across as frontierspeople, or toilers on a polar expedition. As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill.

I like that “greedily adjectival prose.” I wish Robson had provided an example of it. He also refers to Oates’s “sentences both snaking and staccato,” but, again, no examples. In one of his best lines, he describes Oates’s introduction of a character as “the syntactic equivalent of a four-car pileup,” and this time he follows up with a quotation to prove his point:

Just a glance at Thom McClaren, tall and rangy-limbed, sandy-haired, handsome face now just perceptibly beginning to thicken, in his late thirties—(Virgil often stared, when [he believed] Thom wasn’t aware of him)—you could see that Thom was one of those persons who feels very good about himself, and his self-estimate is (largely) shared by those who gaze upon him.

As Robson points out, the brackets are Oates's.

I confess I haven’t read any of Oates’s novels. But I devour her book reviews. They brim with artful quotation and illuminating commentary: see, for example, “In Rough Country” (The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008) and “The Treasure of Comanche County” (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005).

Robson says that among contemporary American fiction writers, Oates “possesses a strong claim to preëminence.” She’s also one of our best critics.

February 26, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, in a piece called “Ocular Proof,” a review of A. J. Finn’s thriller The Woman in the Window, Joyce Carol Oates likens the mystery novel to a Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet. She says, “If the mystery genre does not abide much reality, it should be recalled that no Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet—no work of art in which the constraints of form are exacting—is likely to withstand the bracing winds of common sense.”

Oates has made this comparison before. In her “Earthly Delights” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), a review of Michael Connelly’s crime novel A Darkness More Than Night, she writes,

The most talented of crime writers, like Michael Connelly, work with genre formula as poets work with “fixed” yet malleable forms like sonnets and sestinas; they affix their signatures to the archetype. It’s an art of scrupulous realism conjoined with the abiding fantasy of a resolution in which the terrifying mysteries of mankind’s inhumanity to man, suffering, dying, death are explained and dispelled.

It’s an interesting analogy. I don’t have much basis for questioning it. The only crime novels I’ve read are George V. Higgins’ three early works, The Friends of Eddy Coyle (1970), The Diggers Game (1973), and Cogan’s Trade (1974) – all superb. They aren’t formulaic. And there’s no “abiding fantasy of a resolution” in them. They’re among the grittiest, most realistic novels I’ve ever read. I’m not sure Oates’ “sonnets and sestinas” comparison applies to them.

September 29, 2014 Issue

One of the most impressive aspects of Dexter Filkins’s “The Fight of Their Lives,” in this week’s issue, is that it’s written from the field. The piece reports on the Kurds’ war against the barbaric Islamic State, also called ISIS. In the piece’s riveting opening section, Filkins interviews Kurdish army commander Najat Ali Saleh as the battle with ISIS rages nearby: “When I saw Saleh, on a recent visit, his men had just recaptured a village called Baqert. With mortars still thudding nearby, he exuded a heavy calm, cut by anger. I asked him if he’d taken any prisoners. “Only dead,” he said.”

ISIS is exceptional for its cult of sadism – the beheadings, crucifixions, tortures, rapes and slaughter of captives, children, women, Christians, and Shiites. The U.S. and its allies have publicly committed to degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS. But none of the Western powers are willing to commit ground troops to the battle. Apparently the only people willing to fight ISIS on the ground are the Kurds. They do so because, as Filkins explains, they’re defending a territory, Iraqi Kurdistan, that they’ve been fighting for decades to establish an independent state.

We want the Kurds to keep fighting ISIS. Our security depends on it. Yet, as Filkins points out, the U.S. is frustrating the Kurds, wanting them “to do two potentially incompatible things. The first is to serve as a crucial ally in the campaign to destroy ISIS, with all the military funding and equipment that such a role entails. The second is to resist seceding from the Iraqi state.”

“The Fight of Their Lives” ’s underlying message is clear: the U.S. should drop its “One Iraq” policy and throw its support solidly behind the Kurdish drive for independence. Filkins makes this point in his concluding section:

Peter Galbraith, the longtime diplomat and advocate of the Kurds, also served in East Timor and Croatia, regions that surmounted enormous difficulties to become separate states. He believes that once a people decide on independence almost nothing will dissuade them. “The desire to become independent is part of the consciousness of every Kurd,” Galbraith said. “They really feel like they are fighting and dying for something.”

“The Fight of Their Lives” says what needs to be said. The Kurds are entitled to their independence. It’s time for the U.S. and its allies to recognize the separate state of Kurdistan.

Postscript: Two of the best literary critics in the business are in this week’s issue – James Wood and Joyce Carol Oates. Wood reviews Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing; Oates reviews Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. Both pieces are terrific. Both critics analyze at the level of language. For example, in his piece, Wood says of McBride,

But McBride’s language also justifies its strangeness on every page. Her prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can.

Oates, in her review, pounces on this Amis sentence, “The Sonders have suffered Seelenmord – death of the soul,” and says, “The author of the novel, not the narrator of the chapter, wants to highlight certain phrases for the benefit of the reader, but the mannerism is as distracting as a nudge in the ribs.” I enjoyed these two reviews immensely.  

George Bellows’s "Stag at Sharkey’s" and "Both Members of This Club"

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said, in her great “In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy” (In Rough Country, 2010), about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates likes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

Credit: The above painting is George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s (1909).

Knife-Fight / Tire-Change: The Elegiac Impulse in Cormac McCarthy's "Cities of the Plain"

The most memorable scene in Cormac McCarthy’s great Cities of the Plain is, without a doubt, the blood-soaked knife fight between Eduardo and John Grady Cole. Joyce Carol Oates describes it as “a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence … stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play” (“The Treasure of Comanche Country," The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005). If you choose to understand Cities of the Plain solely in terms of its violence, you’ll likely focus on the knife fight. But if you’re more inclined, as I am, to interpret McCarthy’s novel as an elegy for a vanishing way of life, you may want to consider some of the book’s less dramatic passages.

One such scene is the tire-change: Billy and Troy are in a pick-up, driving through the desert night, heading back to the ranch. They meet “a truckload of Mexicans pulled off onto the grass. They stood almost into the road waving their hats.” Billy drives past them. But then he stops. Against Troy’s objections (“You’re fixin to get us in a jackpot here we won’t get home till daylight”), Billy puts the truck in reverse and backs down the highway to the Mexicans’ location. The Mexicans’ truck has a flat tire. Billy speaks to the Mexicans in Spanish. They need a jack. Billy loans them one from the back of his truck. The Mexicans jack up the front end of their truck. “They had two spares and neither of them would hold air. They spelled each other at the antique tirepump. Finally they raised up and looked at Billy.” Billy gets his tire tools, patch kit, and flashlight from his truck. He removes the inner tube from one of the spares, patches it, puts it back inside the spare, and laboriously pumps it up. When it’s fully inflated, the Mexicans install it on the truck.

My rough summary of the tire-change makes it seem mundane and ordinary – hardly worth bothering with, you’d think. Most writers probably wouldn’t even mention such a routine matter. If they did mention it, they’d likely just sketch it, in a line or two, and quickly move on. But McCarthy lingers over the scene, lavishing more than a thousand exact, luminous words on its description, detailing everything from the inner tube (“The innertube that he snaked out of the tire’s inner cavity was made of red rubber and there was a whole plague of patches upon it”) to the wrench (“made from a socket welded onto a length of heavy pipe”). The precision and vividness of his imagery are amazing! Consider this extraordinary passage, for example:

Billy took the stub of chalk from the patchkit and circled the leaks in the tube and they unscrewed the valvestem from the valve and sat on the tubes and then walked it down till it was dead flat. Then they sat in the road with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife, and they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets. They scuffed the rubber with the little tin grater stamped into the lid of the kit and they laid on the patches and fired them with a match one by one till all were fused and all were done. When they had the tube pumped up again they sat in the road in the quiet desert and listened.

That image of the men sitting in the road “with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife” is very fine.

Why does McCarthy concentrate the full force of his immense descriptive power on something as tedious as a tire-change? My theory is that McCarthy deeply admires the craftsmanship of Billy’s work. He wants us to appreciate it, too, because he sees it as an aspect of a way of life that’s rapidly disappearing. That’s why he describes it so precisely, in such scrupulous detail. He sees cowboys like John Grady Cole and Billy Parham as craftsmen and, as such, endangered species that modernization is rapidly wiping out. Note, in the above quotation, McCarthy’s reference to two other types of craftsmen, namely, tailors and menders of nets (“they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets”). And note the careful detail of another work-related scene that McCarthy describes later in the novel:

He waited until the calf had bucked itself into a clear space among the creosote and then he put the horse forward at a gallop. He paid the slack rope over the horse’s head and overtook the calf on its off side. The calf went trotting. The rope ran from its neck along the ground on the near side and trailed in a curve behind its legs and ran forward up the off side following the horse. John Grady checked his dally and then stood in one stirrup and cleared his other leg of the trailing rope. When the rope snapped taut it jerked the calf’s head backward and snatched its hind legs from under it. The calf turned endwise in the air and slammed to the ground in a cloud of dust and lay there.

This is skillful, specialized ranch work that’s been closely observed and precisely rendered. The writing enacts the craftsmanship of the work it describes.

My “craftsman” interpretation is one way of considering the tire-change scene, but not the only one. The New Yorker’s brief review of Cities of the Plain suggests another approach. The anonymous reviewer writes:

This tragic last volume of the Border Trilogy sees the American West enter the modern world, as the cowboy John Grady looks down from a rock bluff at the city lights “strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweller’s blackcloth.”

McCarthy’s language carries a brooding, evolutionary sense of time and labor – in his hands the changing of a tire on an old truck becomes a mythic deed.

The weight of history rests on the shoulders of John Grady, too, and he’s doomed to learn that “when things are gone they’re gone. They ain’t comin back.” [“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, August 10, 1998]

This is an excellent description of Cities of the Plain, distilling the book’s elegiac theme into three swift paragraphs. But I’m perplexed by that second paragraph. In what way is the tire-change mythic? James Wood, in his stimulating “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 5, 2005), a review of McCarthy’s work, says that “McCarthy’s novels are deeply engaged with founding American myths, in particular those of regeneration through violence, Southern pastoral, the figure of the sacred hunter, and the frontiersman’s conquest of the endless Western spaces.” None of these myths appear to apply to the tire-changing scene. In my opinion, when McCarthy wrote the scene, he was not mythologizing. He was memorializing an instance of Billy’s craft of experience in action. Joyce Carol Oates, in her “In Rough Country 1: Cormac McCarthy,” says that the Border novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are “elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world.” I submit that the tire-change scene is best understood as an aspect of that elegiac impulse.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by David Levine.

Two "Paris Review" Interviews: Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm

Two long-time New Yorker contributors, Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm, are interviewed in the current issue of The Paris Review. Comparing the two interviews, I find Beattie much more interesting and open in her discussion of her “art” than I do Malcolm. In talking about her writing technique, Beattie doesn’t use the word “art”; instead, she says, “I only have a certain bag of tricks.” One of the “tricks” she mentions is bringing into the narrative “something unexpected that has a lot of immediacy.” She says, “If you write a fictional letter, the reader will perk up and think, Oh, a letter. All the rest of it’s been narrative – but this is an actual letter.” She says, “You can also do something similar with songs. Just pick a song that’s well known enough, or a musician whose sound is well known enough, and the reader will play a sound track for you.”

Reading Beattie’s interview, I was fascinated to learn how deliberate she is in trying to avoid what she calls “the temptation of tying it all together formally.” She says, “In general I end my stories before I get a chance to do something more aesthetically pleasing to me.” She’s leery of stories that are written “too carefully.” At one point, she says, “I avoided eloquence as much as possible.” At another point, she states, “In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character’s head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.” In Beattie’s studious avoidance of narrative closure, and in her decided preference for the haphazard, I detect a distrust of the “well-made story” similar to the one Janet Malcolm expresses in her brilliant review of Donald P. Spence’s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (“Six Roses ou Cirrhose?”, The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in Malcolm’s great essay collection The Purloined Clinic, 1992), in which she memorably observes, “Our lives are not like novels.”

Interestingly, Malcolm, in her Paris Review interview, doesn’t mention her wariness of narrative truth. What she does say is that,

What nonfiction writers take from novelists and short-story writers (as well as from other nonfiction writers) are the devices of narration. Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way. There’s an art to it.

Malcolm doesn’t give examples of what she means by “devices of narration,” and the interviewer (Katie Roiphe) doesn’t ask her to provide any. I wonder if she would consider the heightening of drama (or, in Beattie’s case, the deliberate understatement of drama) as such a device. There’s a difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction: the latter activity is subject to the ironclad rule “Don’t mess with the facts.” Malcolm’s observation that “Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way” could be true, I suppose, so long as the aforesaid “rule” is borne in mind. But on this point, Malcolm worries me. In the interview, she quotes a passage from the afterword of her The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she says,

The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way – the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the dispassionate observer of life.

I find it hard to accept that the “I” in, say, Ian Frazier’s work is “almost pure invention.” On the contrary, I consider Frazier’s “I” one of the truest, most reliable narrators in reportage literature. His “I” is true and reliable because, far from setting himself up as “an embodiment of the dispassionate observer,” he is, in his writings, so subjectively, idiosyncratically human. For example, when he says in Travels In Siberia, “Aside from the rain and wind and chill, and the chronically damp clothes, I enjoyed the fish camp,” I interpret his “I” not as an “ad hoc creation,” but as Ian Frazier, the man himself, the guy I've happily accompanied (vicariously, of course) on many a great trip. The same goes for the “I” of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, to name a few of my favorite New Yorker writers – writers whose voices on the page strike me as absolutely true, authentic, real, consistent. Joyce Carol Oates, in the preface to her essay collection Uncensored (2005), says,

In virtually none of my prose fiction, with the possible exception of the novel I’ll Take You There, and in that novel only intermittently, do I allow myself to speak in my “own” voice, but in my non-fiction prose, it is always my “own” voice that speaks.

Is Oates kidding herself? I don’t think so. It’s Malcolm who’s got it wrong. It’s time her viewpoint on this matter was challenged.