March 25, 2024 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his “All That Glitters,” in this week’s New Yorker, calls T. J. Clark “the most eloquent Klimt hater.” What’s that based on? I had to dig to find out. It turns out that, in 2010, Clark wrote a letter to the London Review of Books, responding to correspondence generated by Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” (London Review of Books, January 28, 2010), a review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, in which he (Hofmann) refers to Klimt as “the Kitschmeister.” Clark writes,

I have no dog in the ring as regards Stefan Zweig; but as Gustav Klimt has come up in your correspondence, and even been claimed as ‘one of the greatest painters ever’, I do want to say that when I read Michael Hofmann’s verdict on the artist I found myself breathing a sigh of relief (Letters, 11 February). At last someone had dared state the obvious. As for ‘greatest painters ever’, there is a special place in the hell of reputations for those who tried hardest for the title in the first years of the 20th century: the Frank Brangwyns, the Eugène Carrières, the Anders Zorns, the John Singer Sargents, the Giovanni Segantinis. Not that these artists are uninteresting. Someone with a strong stomach and a taste for tragic irony should write a book about large-scale and mural painting in the two decades leading to Mons and Passchendaele. But taken at all seriously – compared with their contemporary Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for example, let alone the last achievements of Puvis de Chavannes – the greats of Edwardian Euro-America strike me as Kitschmeisters through and through: early specialists in the new century’s pretend difficulty and ‘opacity’, pretend mystery and profundity, pretend eroticism and excess. Klimt has a place of honour in their ranks.

Arn is right. There's no love there. By the way, I wasn't doubting Arn's word. I just couldn't recall ever reading anything by Clark about Klimt. And I've read a lot of Clark. I devour him.

Postscript: Just as an off-set to Clark’s acid verdict, consider what Peter Schjeldahl said about Klimt’s “Adele”:

With the best of will—and I have tried—“Adele” makes no formal sense. The parts—including the silky brushwork of the young lady’s face and hands, which poke through the bumpy ground as through a carnival prop—drift, generating no mutual tensions. The size feels arbitrary, without integral scale in relation to the viewer: bigger or smaller would make no difference. The content of the gorgeous whatsit seems a rhyming of conspicuously consumed wealth with show-off eroticism. She’s a vamp, is Adele; and for whom would she be simpering but the randy master, Herr Klimt? The effect is a closed loop of his and her narcissisms. They’re them, and we aren’t. I think we are supposed to be impressed. And let’s be. Why not? Our age will be bookmarked in history by the self-adoring gestures of the incredibly rich. Aesthetics ride coach. ["Changing My Mind About Gustav Klimt's 'Adele' "]

I love that “gorgeous whatsit.” Can kitsch be beautiful? Schjeldahl said yes. 

Ange Mlinko's "Acts of Extreme Attention"

Karen Solie (Photo by Barbara Stoneham)

Ange Mlinko, in her “Acts of Extreme Attention” (The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2019), brilliantly connects two of my favorite poems: Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and Karen Solie’s “Sturgeon.” Commenting on Solie’s work, Mlinko says,

An affinity with the poetry of Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, certainly, is evident as early as “Sturgeon,” a rewriting of Bishop’s “The Fish,” which descends from Moore’s “The Fish.” In her version, Solie narrates the story of teenagers tormenting a beached sturgeon, “a lost lure in his lip”:

On an afternoon mean as a hook

    we hauled him

up to his nightmare of us and

     laughed

at his ugliness …

The imagery, not to mention the sounds – the h’s and l’s and f of hook and haul, lost and laughed – echo Bishop’s held, half, hook, fast: “I caught a tremendous fish / and held him beside the boat / half out of water, with my hook / fast in a corner of his mouth.”

Mlinko notes other similarities: 

Solie: “Ancient grunt of sea.” Bishop: “He hung a grunting weight.” Solie: “soft sucker mouth opening / closing on air that must have felt like ground glass.” Bishop: “His eyes … of old scratched isinglass.” Solie: “his body’s quiet armour.” Bishop: “His lower lip … grim, wet, and weapon-like” (and the “lost lure in his lip,” above, is surely a misprision of “his lower lip”). 

Mlinko’s suggestion that Solie’s “Sturgeon” is a “rewriting” of Bishop’s “The Fish” is intriguing. She goes on to say,

But in a reversal of Bishop’s poem, the teenagers don’t have an epiphany and “let the fish go.” Solie’s fish, quite by surprise, leaps back into the river, preempting the self-congratulation that accompanies poetic epiphany. Solie’s narrator is startled into respect for “the old current he had for a mind.”

Mlinko’s piece brought to mind another excellent review of Solie’s poetry – Michael Hofmann’s “All Fresh Today” (London Review of Books, April 3, 2014; included in his 2014 collection Where Have You Been?), in which he says, “It’s one of the great things about Solie: so much is primary, hasn’t been written about before, pays no dues, does without obeisance or retreading or sheepishness.” I know what he means; Solie finds poetry in the most unlikely places – a coffee shop (“Tiny friendless salads make you weep”), a motel room (“They could lie with hands / in each other’s hair but for the wall”), a bar (“The bar / shucked bass into the street, / an unknown band from way down / east”). This is exactly what I love about her work. But to say she “pays no dues” is incorrect. Thanks to Mlinko’s illuminating analysis, we see the signs of at least one influence – Elizabeth Bishop. 

October 10, 2016, Issue

James Wood’s superb “Male Gaze,” in this week’s issue, seems to praise David Szalay’s All That Man Is for the very practice that he (Wood), in his classic “Coetzee’s Disgrace,” criticized J. M. Coetzee for – use of shorthand description (“Thus at the simplest level, no one is ever adequately described as simply ‘tall and wiry … a thin goatee and an ear-ring … black leather jacket.’ This is only the beginning of description”). In “Male Gaze,” he says of Szalay’s novel,

Characters are lightly, but also terminally, blocked in, as they are in movie scripts: “He is short, blonde, with a moustache—Asterix, basically.” As the Russian oligarch moves through the London streets in his luxury Maybach, we get: “Sloane Street, its familiar shops—Hermès, Ermenegildo Zegna. Cheyne Walk.” In the same story, when Lars, Aleksandr’s lawyer, takes off his sunglasses, he is peremptorily dispatched. We’d been given a brisk inventory of his apparel; now we’re informed, “The understated tan sharpens the blue of his eyes. He is in his mid-forties: he looks younger.” And that’s it for Lars. We get no more physical description—just dialogue. Lars is up and running.

Wood calls Szalay’s use of reduced language “startup mimesis” (“Szalay practices a kind of startup mimesis: in canny, broad strokes, full of intelligently managed detail, each story funds its new fictional enterprise, as if he were calling out, each time, ‘Where do you want to go? Poland? Copenhagen? Málaga? Berlin? I can do them all. Let’s go’”).

I’d like to hear more from Wood on why Szalay’s broad strokes are “canny,” whereas Coetzee’s are “sheerest conventionality.”

Similarly, there appears to be an inconsistency between Wood’s criticism of Emma Cline’s use of sentence fragments (see his “Making the Cut,” in which he says such usage “fetishizes detail and the rendering of detail”) and his seeming admiration for Szalay’s use of them (“The men in these stories, as if writing lyrics in their heads, express themselves in passionate stutters”).

Where Wood’s piece shines is in its comparison of Szalay’s book with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. At one point, Wood brilliantly observes,

Reality is very sticky in both writers: brand names, objects, humdrum details of all kinds adhere to the text.

Later in his piece, he writes,

When Knausgaard talks about a VW Beetle, he seems obsessed by its tormenting VW-ness; for Szalay, a VW Passat is just a VW Passat, the detail doing its functional, reflexive duty.

That “tormenting VW-ness” is inspired! Wood’s “Male Gaze” is the second review of All That Man Is I’ve read. The first – also excellent – was Michael Hofmann’s “Muted Ragu Tones” (London Review of Books, April 21, 2016). Hofmann says of Szalay’s writing,

There is a cheerful and ghastly sordidness to everything, and Szalay’s prose with its ruthlessly banal dialogue, arm-twisting present tense, shard-like fragments, and every other page or so an irresistibly brilliant epithet or startlingly quotable phrase, lets nothing go to waste. Even if it’s something as simple as a man putting up an umbrella, to go out into the rain and try to talk down his unhappy mistress, it’s unforgettable: “It bangs into place above him, and immediately fills with sound.”

A writer who excites two of the world’s best literary critics is worth checking out. I don’t read much fiction. But I’m looking forward to reading David Szalay’s All That Man Is.

Favorite Books of 2015

Here are five books published in 2015 that I enjoyed immensely:

1. James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of four extraordinary essays blending personal history with literary criticism. One of the pieces, "Why?," originally appeared in The New Yorker. (See my post here.)

2. Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, a brilliant essay collection on poets and poetry, including two wonderful New Yorker pieces, “American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry” and “Ardor and Artifice: Merrill’s Mozartian Touch.” (See my posts here and here.)

3. Julian Bell’s Van Gogh: A Power Seething, a superb, concise, stimulating study of Van Gogh’s life and work by one of my favorite art critics. (See my post here.)

4. Michael Hofmann’s Where Have You Been?, a delicious collection of essays on James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and Les Murray, among others. It also contains an excellent piece on my favorite Canadian poet, Karen Solie. (See my post here.)

5. Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop, an exquisite study of Bishop’s poetry, including her great New Yorker poem, “At the Fishhouses,” which Tóibín ingeniously connects with James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (See my post here.)

Correction: I see now that Michael Hofmann's Where Have You Been? is not a 2015 book. It was published in 2014. But I read it this year, and so I'm going to keep it on my 2015 list. 

Michael Hofmann's "Where Have You Been?"

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.”

All of these connections are worth exploring further. Where Have You Been? is a rich, spirited collection. I’m enjoying it immensely.