In Praise of the Unfiltered View

Edward Hoagland, in the Introduction to a 1993 re-issue of two of his essay collections – The Courage of Turtles and Walking the Dead Diamond River – talks about how he shifted in his late thirties from being a novelist to being an essay-writer. He says,

Now, however, I wrote the thirty-four essays in these two books breezily abruptly in just four years, with a new baby enlivening the house besides, and published many of them in the Village Voice, whose offices were located a few blocks down the street from where I lived. My stuff thus came out immediately, and instead of reaching three or four thousand people, might be placed in the hands of one hundred and fifty thousand. On Staten Island ferry or the Coney Island subway I could see it read, and was plumbing heartfelt material, not filtered through the artifices of fiction.

Not filtered through the artifices of fiction – that is exactly why I prefer factual writing to fiction. It strives to see life plain – no distortion, no embellishment, no fabrication. 

Vladimir Nabokov, among others, would disagree. In his view, “The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction” (“Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, 1980). But seeing the world this way misses so much! It misses the beauty and strangeness of what actually happens. In support of the unfiltered view, I quote Philip Larkin: “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” Required Writing, 1983). 

Postscript: Martin Amis 1949 - 2023

Martin Amis (Photo by Jennifer S. Altman)

I see in the Times that Martin Amis has died. He’s likely best known as a novelist. But, for me, his criticism is what matters. Dwight Garner, in his “Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73” (The New York Times, May 20, 2023), writes,

He also demonstrated, in the reviews and essays collected in “The War Against Cliché” (2001), that he was among the fiercest and most intelligent literary critics of his time. His reviews were an important part of his reputation.

I agree. My favourite Amis critical piece is “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a passionate defence of Philip Larkin. At the time it appeared, Larkin was under savage posthumous attack, largely because of revelations of his politically incorrect prejudices. Amis based his defence on Larkin’s work:

The recent attempts, by Motion and others, to pass judgment on Larkin look awfully green and pale compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No. He judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.

James Wood, in his tribute (“Martin Amis’s Comic Music,” newyorker.com, May 20, 2023), praises Amis’s comedy. He says,

Amis’s style combined many of the classic elements of English literary comedy: exaggeration, and its dry parent, understatement; picaresque farce; caustic authorial intervention; caricature and grotesquerie; a wonderful ear for ironic registration.

This is well said. But what I relate to isn’t Amis’s comedy; it’s his anger. Anger powers some of his best writing. For example, in his brilliant Koba the Dread (2002), he included a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens, questioning Hitchen’s admiration for Trotsky, calling Trotsky “a murderous bastard and a fucking liar.” The letter goes on:

Let us laboriously imagine that the “paradise” Trotsky promised to “build” suddenly appeared on the bulldozed site of 1921. Knowing that 15 million lives had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it? A paradise so bought is no paradise. I take it you would not want to second Eric Hobsbawm’s disgraceful “Yes” to a paradise so bought.

Whatever his subject – Stalin, Nabokov, Trump, Updike, Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden, the list goes on and on – Amis wrote freshly, zestfully, beautifully. Recall the inspired final paragraph of his “Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra” (included in his 2017 collection The Rub of Time):

It is the prose itself that provides the permanent affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of Lolita, The Enchanter, dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Métro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his sublime energy.

I love that “unresting responsiveness.” It applies to Amis’s writing, too. 

Fighting Off Larkin: Seamus Heaney and "Aubade"

Seamus Heaney (Photo by Nancy Crampton)

I’ve just finished reading Michael Cavanagh’s absorbing Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (2009). For me, the most interesting part is its consideration of Heaney’s great essay “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B, Yeats and Philip Larkin,” included in Heaney’s 1995 collection The Redress of Poetry. Cavanagh calls it, among other things, “Heaney’s denigration of Larkin.” This seems harsh. Yes, Heaney’s essay attacks Larkin’s “Aubade” for accepting “the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death” and denying “the ecstatic presence of the supernatural.” But it also praises “Aubade” for its “high poetic achievement,” and, in a most original analytic move, tries to use that achievement to argue that “Aubade,” for all its bleakness, is really “on the side of life.” Heaney says,

Still, when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In this fundamentally artistic way, then, Larkin’s “Aubade” does not go over to the side of the adversary. But its argument does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favour of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld; it does not make the Orphic effort to haul life back up the slope against all odds. For all its heart-breaking truths and beauties, “Aubade” reneges on what Yeats called the “spiritual intellect’s great work.”

Cavanagh sees “Joy or Night” as a departure from Heaney’s “insistence on the reality principle.” But, to me, Heaney isn’t a realist; he’s a transcendentalist. He believes in the supernatural. Larkin doesn’t. For him, “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” included in Larkin’s 1983 collection, Required Writing). I’m with Larkin. Nevertheless, I admire the hell out of Heaney’s “Joy or Night.” It’s one of the most spirited arguments I know of on whether “death is no different whined at than withstood.” 

Mark Ford on Philip Larkin

Ralph Steadman, "Philip Larkin"

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at the beach, sitting under our blue umbrella-tent (using rocks instead of pegs to hold it in place), re-reading Clive James's four wonderful essays on Philip Larkin in his Reliable Essays (2001). Why Larkin? Because Mark Ford’s absorbing “Here you are talking about duck again” (London Review of Books, June 20, 2019) got me thinking about him. I relish Larkin’s style, particularly his devastating candor (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”).  

Ford reviews Philip Larkin: Letters Home, 1936-77 (edited by James Booth). It’s a great piece, brimming with interesting quotation from Larkin’s letters and poems. Here’s a sample:

Larkin’s own sense that he had discovered his echt persona in poems such as ‘Spring’ (‘and me,/Threading my pursed-up way across the park,/An indigestible sterility’) or ‘Wants’ (‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone’) – both composed in 1950 – is reflected in some of his letters to his mother, as when he describes himself, writing from Belfast, as ‘enjoying life as far as it’s my character to do so’. Occasionally the inhibitions that stifle him are played off an elated sense of the world around him that mirrors the economy of the poems, in which the reader is often made aware – or at least invited to believe – that it is because Larkin is a ‘pursed-up … indigestible sterility’ that his vision is ‘mountain-clear’. ‘Can you feel the autumn where you are?’ he asks his mother, again from Belfast, in August 1953:

It seems to hang in the air here, and sharpen my senses, and again I feel a sense of a great waste in my life. We must go again up that road to the wood where we found the scarlet toadstool and listen to the wind in the trees. I’m sure it’s beautiful at this time of year. Here the moon is large and lemon-yellow and drifts up into the sky at night like a hollow phosphorescent fungoid growth. Do you watch it?

Beneath these words is a sketch of an old creature in a mob-cap, knitting before a window that looks out onto rooftops and a full moon, as if she were comically anticipating his own great moon poem, ‘Sad Steps’ of 1968. A couple of years later, shortly after moving to Hull, Larkin finds himself unexpectedly moved by the sight of ‘clumps of Michaelmas daisies, chill blurs of mauve’, growing in a churchyard, and is driven to reflect that ‘outside my own miserable cramped absurd life, the world is still its old beautiful self.’

Did Larkin have an “elated sense of the world around him”? Yes, but it was fragile. His dominant mood was pessimism. Ford writes, 

‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh’, as the last line of ‘The Trees’ (1967) would put it. But Larkin too was involved in a lifelong battle with melancholia: ‘bloody awful tripe,’ he wrote on the manuscript of this uplifting paean to spring, as if unable to allow the poem to escape his grasp without being marked by his own self-lacerating misery.

Clive James describes Larkin as a pessimist with one saving grace: “The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.”

Larkin the Photographer

Philip Larkin with his Rolleiflex, 1957

Philip Larkin as a shutterbug? It’s a surprising revision of the reclusive Larkin image. Nevertheless, it’s a fact, as reported by Lev Mendes in his fascinating "Philip Larkin's Life Behind the Camera" (newyorker.com, “Page-Turner,” January 29, 2016). Mendes describes Larkin roaming the countryside, taking pictures with his Rolleiflex. He writes, “Rather than a poet committed to monkish isolation and routine, Larkin the photographer appears as an eager traveller through Britain and Ireland, with [Monica] Jones often in tow.” According to Mendes, Larkin took at least five thousand pictures, two hundred of which have now been assembled for the first time in a book titled The Importance of Elsewhere.

Mendes asks, “What drew Larkin to take pictures?” His conclusion – “Photography, like poetry, may have simply provided him a way of noticing and preserving” – strikes me as brilliant. It fits with Larkin’s view of poetry as set out in his “Statement” (Required Writing, 1983), one of the most compelling expressions of artistic purpose I’ve ever read:

I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.

Vendler On Larkin

“Art, if it knows how to wait, wins out,” Clive James perceptively wrote, twenty-five years ago, in “Somewhere Becoming Rain” (The New Yorker, July 17, 1989; included in his excellent 2002 collection Reliable Essays), an absorbing review of Philip Larkin: Collected Poems. After years of bruising attacks on his personal reputation, it seems Larkin’s art is now beginning to win out. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this turnaround is Helen Vendler’s recent piece, "Why aren't they screaming?" (London Review of Books, November 6, 2014), a review of James Booth’s biography Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. Vendler says, “Essays on Larkin have proliferated in journals and edited collections, but we lack a variety of impartial books focusing on the poetry itself.” She proceeds to provide brilliant stylistic analysis of two Larkin poems – “Counting” and “The Old Fools.”

As a lead-in to her consideration of “Counting,” Vendler says of Larkin’s poetry, “But the lines he constructs can seem artless, so devoid are they of the visible accouterments of art.” In so saying, she touches on one of the qualities that draws me to Larkin’s work – its rich simplicity. Regarding “Counting,” she says it “austerely allows itself only small words; small lines (of two beats or three); small units (couplets); small rhymes (monosyllables, all but one); invariant and insistent appearances of the baleful word ‘one’; and – a tour de force – the tiny simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the wishful word ‘two.’ ” Here’s the poem:

Thinking in terms of one

Is easily done –

One room, one bed, one chair,

One person there,

Makes perfect sense; one set

Of wishes can be met,

One coffin filled.

But counting up to two

Is harder to do;

For one must be denied

Before its tried.

So good is Vendler’s commentary on “Counting,” I can’t resist quoting another paragraph of it:

It’s only by looking for it that the art can be found: it hides itself in the sinisterly unpartnered and unrhymed line “One coffin filled”; in the way the “co” of “coffin” loops the word immediately to the next line’s “counting” and to the “Counting” of the title; in the magnetic antonymic attraction that clasps together “Thinking” and “Counting,” and “easily” and “harder”; and in the ineluctable logic of the final rhyme as “denied” undoes “tried” – and undoes it without even permitting the trying. Such little links – not omitting the white space between the one coffin and the stifled attempt at “two” – give the sting of aesthetic fulfilment as the prose in the letter doesn’t.

That last line is a reference to a letter that Larkin wrote in 1946, in which he talks about his opposition to marriage. Vendler, in another of her inspired analytic moves, compares the writing in the letter to the writing in “Counting” to highlight the latter’s artful minimalism.

Vendler’s consideration of “The Old Fools” is equally illuminating. At one point, she says of it, “After its amplitude, every stanza flings a knife in its final words, mutilating the expected conclusive pentameter into two beats: ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ ” That “flings a knife in its final words” is marvelously fine, getting at another aspect of Larkin’s writing that I admire immensely – his cutting frankness. Vendler’s vivid language is a clear sign of her deep engagement with the poem. She not only calls for criticism focusing on the work itself; she shows the way.

Credit: The above portrait of Philip Larkin is by Gerald Scarfe; it appears in the July 12, 1993 New Yorker, as an illustration for Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hull.” 

December 9, 2013 Issue

James Thurber, in his “Preface to a Life” (The Thurber Carnival, 1945), concludes his meditation on autobiography with this memorable reference to death’s inescapability:

It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life cannot lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson-Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.

James Wood’s absorbing “Why?,” in this week’s New Yorker, conveys a similar message. In his piece, Wood observes, “Fictional form is a kind of death”; it gives us “that formal insight into the shape of someone’s life,” a secular version of the insight that death often affords – “the awful privilege of seeing a life whole.” He proposes what might be called the “instance and form” theory of the novel. He says,

To read the novel is to be constantly moving between the secular and religious modes, between what you could call instance and form. The novel’s secular impulse is toward expanding and extending life; the novel is the great trader in the shares of the ordinary. It expands the instances of our lives into scenes and details; it strives to run these instances at a rhythm close to real time.

On the other hand, he says, the novel’s form, what he calls its religious mode, “reminds us that life is bounded by death, that life is just death-in-waiting.” He observes,

The novel often gives us that formal insight into the shape of someone’s life: we can see the beginning and the end of many fictional lives; their developments and errors; stasis and drift.

That “life is just death-in-waiting” is a neat, hard epigram, almost as catchy as Hopkinson-Smith’s “the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” Wood’s theory is impressive, but his reference to the novel’s form as the “religious mode” is, for me (a nonbeliever), problematic. Wood says, “What makes the mode religious is that it shares the religious tendency to see life as the mere antechamber to the afterlife.” As far as I’m concerned, there’s no afterlife. To quote Philip Larkin’s great “Aubade,” there’s only “The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.”

Postscript: Zadie Smith’s “Man vs. Corpse” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2013) begins where Wood’s “Why?” ends. At the conclusion of his piece, Wood refers to Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar and says, “Mr. Palomar would like to learn how to be dead.” In “Man vs. Corpse” ’s first section, Smith invites us to “Imagine being a corpse.” The two pieces converge on another point, as well. Both value immersion. Wood calls it “secular forgetting” – “the novel is so full of its own life that human life seen under the eye of eternity has been carelessly banished.” Note that “carelessly.” Wood is preoccupied with death; anything that diverts us from death’s reality is “profane.” Smith mentions immersion explicitly. Adverting to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tao Lin, she says,

Both Lin and Knausgaard eschew the solutions of minimalism and abstraction in interesting ways, opting instead for full immersion. Come with me, they seem to say, come into this life. If you can’t beat us, join us, here in the real. It might not be pretty – but this is life.

Smith ends her piece by exhorting us to “switch off our smart phones” and get out there and live, because everybody is really going to die someday, “and be dead forever, and shouldn’t a person live – truly live, a real life – while they’re alive?”

Smith’s conclusion is a powerful memento mori. In response, I’m moved to quickly post this note, shut down my laptop, and get my ass outdoors. 

"Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century"

Even though it’s been over two months since I read Peter Schjeldahl’s stimulating piece on the Met’s “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century” (“Inside Story,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), I find myself still grappling with what he meant by “otherizing” (“It needs only a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing”). I see Sanford Schwartz, in his excellent review of the same show (“Looking into the Beyond,” The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2011), agrees with Sabine Rewald’s interpretation of the “open window” pictures. He says, “Sabine Rewald writes that the open window, as Friedrich and some of her other artists saw it, is about ‘yearning’ and ‘unfulfilled longing,’ and surely this is right.” You’ll recall that Schjeldahl held that “the notion of longing reduces the complexity of Friedrich.” Both Schwartz and Schjeldahl hazard other constructions, as well. For example, Schwartz says, “As his window drawings make clear, Friedrich’s deepest subject was not the force and pageant of nature but our response to it – how we literally approach the world from outside ourselves – and it took him years to find a way to express this most fully.” It’s fascinating to read the thoughts of these two great critics as they attempt to tease out the meaning of Friedrich’s window views. Both seem to reach for psychological explanations. But I wonder if the meaning isn’t right there on the surface, in the precision of the drawings, in the depiction of light coming in the windows.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Peter Campbell’s excellent “Am I intruding?” (London Review of Books, November 3, 2011), a review of Sabine Rewald’s Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. Regarding Friedrich’s window pictures, Campbell notes “Friedrich’s cool insistence that you enter his anonymous space and find its unspecified meaning for yourself.” He says, “It isn’t the painting itself but the stage it offers the imagination that is effective.” He talks about “Friedrichian poetics” – the poetry of solitude, of “feelings about being alone in a bare room.” He says, “The exercise Friedrich’s window pictures offer the imagination comes more often with poetry. Most obviously, in the last lines of Larkin’s ‘High Windows’” (“And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”).