Postscript: Edward Hoagland 1932-2026

Edward Hoagland (Photo by Michael Cummo)

I see in the Times that Edward Hoagland has died, age 93. He’s one of my literary heroes. His Notes from the Century Before (1969) is one of my favorite books. His “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his wonderful 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River) is one of my favorite essays. John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation.” I think this is true. 

Hoagland’s writing style was unmistakably his own – an associational way of linking thought and observation in fresh, surprising, delightful combinations. Consider this beauty – the opening paragraph of “Of Cows and Cambodia”:

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

Hoagland had total faith in the validity of his own experience, his own way of seeing. He was subjective to the bone. His masterpiece, Notes from the Century Before, chronicles his 1966 trip up British Columbia’s Stikine River, “left as it was in the nineteenth century by a fluke of geography.” The geography is breathtaking – eighty thousand square miles ("like two Ohios") of wild rivers, snow-topped mountains, and thick forests, containing tiny villages that are “unimaginably isolated.” Hoagland traveled by boat, plane, and truck. He did a lot of walking, roaming the settlements, talking to old-timers, seeing what there was to see, noting it all down – detail after amazing detail. Here, for example, is his description of the village of Eddontenajon:

The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in the fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps. 

And here’s his portrait of Willie Campbell, one of the oldest residents of Telegraph Creek:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. He was wearing hide mittens and shoes, and he pointed across the Stkine to where he had seen a grizzly the day before.

And here’s his depiction of a young man in Eddontenajon roasting a moose head over a fire:

On the scaffold overhead a batch of pink trout was drying. Pieces of meat hung down, a hole punched in each and a rope strung through. Some rib cuts were drying too, but mainly the fire was roasting the head of a moose, kept in its skin so the meat wouldn’t burn. It rotated steadily at the end of a wire which he wound by twisting from time to time. The eyes were closed, the hair was blackened and sometimes afire, the antlers were gone, the ears had been cut off to feed the dogs, yet it was as recognizable as a moose as in life – as at peace as a comic strip, humorous moose. He said the head would feed his family for a meal or two and that the body would keep them provisioned for the whole summer while he was away on a job.

Hoagland was incapable of writing vaguely. He dealt in particulars. He was a brilliant crafter of metaphor and simile. In Notes from the Century Before, he says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this one, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

I could go on and on quoting Hoagland. He was the consummate writer. He’s gone now, but his splendid work lives on. I cherish it immensely. 

Postscript: Jonathan Lear 1948 - 2025

Jonathan Lear (Photo from The New York Times)

I see in the Times that Jonathan Lear died: “Jonathan Lear, Philosopher Who Embraced Freud, Dies at 76.” Over the years, I’ve dipped into a few of his books [e.g., Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), and, most recently, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022)]. Lear is a great analyst. I enjoy watching him make his moves on the page. Sample: 

This looks like a dilemma: Either one accepts that Aristotle made a logical error in the opening sentence of his fundamental ethical work or one must make coherent sense of what he is saying. Rather than choose, however, I should like to shift the question away from what Aristotle is saying and ask instead what he is doing. I would like to suggest that Aristotle is here participating in a peculiar kind of inaugural instantiation. He is attempting to inject the concept of “the good” into our lives – and he thereby changes our lives by changing our life with concepts. [Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life]

I love that passage, especially the refusal to choose and the shifting of the question. I have no idea what “inaugural instantiation” means. But I’ve never forgotten it. 

Lear was never satisfied with orthodox interpretations. He always sought deeper considerations. For example, in his absorbing Radical Hope, he analyzed the meaning of a statement made by the last great chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups. Here's what Plenty Coups said:

I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

After this nothing happened – what could Plenty Coups' utterance mean? As Lear points out, a psychological interpretation suggests that Plenty Coups was depressed, or that he was giving voice to the depression that engulfed his tribe. For Lear, this interpretation is too easy. He asks, “Might he not be giving utterance to a darker thought, one that is more difficult for us to understand? If so, then the psychological interpretation is in too much of a rush."

I relish that last line. When interpreting, take your time, never rush to judgment – that’s my takeaway from Lear, one of them, anyway.

Lear goes on to propose an even darker take on Plenty Coups' words. As usual, he expresses it in a string of brilliant questions: 

But what if his remark went deeper? What if it gave expression to an insight into the structure of temporality: that at a certain point things stopped happening? What would he have meant if he meant that?

For Lear, there was never an analytical endpoint. There was always another question, and another, and another. He had a subtle, original mind. He’s gone now. But he lives on in his thought-enriching books.  

Postscript: Arlene Croce 1934 - 2024

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just discovered yesterday, in the January 16, 2025 New York Review of Books, that Arlene Croce died last month. She was 90. 

Croce was The New Yorker’s dance critic from 1973 to 1996. I’m not a fan of ballet. But I do love movies. Croce wrote one of the great movie studies – The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book (1972). Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance – if you love these movies, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Croce’s book. Here are a few samples:

Two big Cossacks have to carry him protesting onto the dance floor, and there he does his longest and most absorbing solo of the series so far, full of stork-legged steps on toe, wheeling pirouettes in which he seems to be winding one leg around the other, and those ratcheting tap clusters that fall like loose change from his pockets.

Later on in the film there’s a dance reprise, the first formal romantic adagio to be created by Astaire for himself and Rogers – and for the beautiful supple back that let her arch from his arms like a black lily. The dance is almost humble in its brevity and simplicity – a few walking steps, a sudden plunge, a silky recovery, and it’s over. But the spell that blooms while you are watching it is powerful, and there are astonishing moments, like his very tender gesture of pressing her head to his shoulder as they walk.

The dance is one of their simplest and most daring, the steps mostly walking steps done with a slight retard. The withheld impetus makes the dance look dragged by destiny, all the quick little circling steps pulled as if on a single thread. 

What I find most moving in this noble and almost absurdly glamorous dance is the absence of self-enchantment in the performance. Astaire and Rogers yield nothing to Garbo’s throat or Pavlova’s Swan as icons of the sublime, yet their manner is brisk. Briskly they immolate themselves. 

Croce was a superb describer of dance. She’s gone now. But her enchanting The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book endures.

Credit: The above photo of Arlene Croce is by Duane Michals. 

Postscript: David Lodge 1935 - 2025

David Lodge (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo)

I see in the Times that David Lodge has died. He’s probably best known as a novelist. But he was also an excellent literary critic. Three of his reviews that I remember with pleasure are “Simon Gray’s Diaries” (The Guardian, November 22, 2008; included in his 2014 Lives in Writing), “The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis” (The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007; also included in Lives in Writing), and “Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor” (The New York Review of Books, July 5, 2001; included in his 2002 collection Consciousness and the Novel). 

In another piece, “History Boy” (The New York Review of Books, May 11, 2006; also included in Lives in Writing), a review of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, Lodge made a comment that went straight into my personal anthology of great literary quotations:

Again and again in this book he [Alan Bennett] demonstrates that almost anything that happens to a person can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough.

Postscript: Victor Brombert 1923 - 2024

Victor Brombert (photo from dailyprincetonian.com)

I see in the Times that Victor Brombert died. He wrote a great little book called Musings on Mortality (2013), in which he traces the theme of death through the works of eight novelists – Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Woolf, Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi. Of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, he wrote,

Tolstoy’s singular achievement is that he conveys Ivan Ilych’s terror in the face of death not in philosophical or abstract terms but as a subjective and visceral experience.

On Camus’s The Plague:

The horrors of the epidemic – the inguinal fevers, the inflamed buboes, the dreadful agonies, the piles of corpses, the smell of death – should press home a lesson in reality.

On Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis:

Death viewed through the filter of time is the main theme of Bassani’s novel. The prologue unfolds under the triple sign of tombs, mourning, and memory.

Death is one of literature's great themes. Brombert tracked it brilliantly. 

Postscript: Sandra M. Gilbert 1936 - 2024

I see in the Times that Sandra M. Gilbert has died. She wrote one of my favorite literary studies – Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1972). She held that “descriptive attention” is at the heart of Lawrence’s style. She called him “a poet of pure attention.” She said,

For him the poem is a perceptual experience that the poet himself – and the reader along with him – must undergo, an act of attention whose purpose is epistemological: discovery through a certain process of attention, and the process or experience of discovery is as much the subject of the poem as the ostensible subject itself.

The poem as an act of attention is a brilliant notion. Lawrence conceived it. Gilbert explored and developed it. In doing so, she made a valuable contribution to literary criticism. 

Postscript: Robert Coover 1932 - 2024

Robert Coover

I see in the Times that Robert Coover died (“Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92”). A long time ago (late 60s, early 70s), I used to read novels. I developed a taste for experimental American fiction, e.g., Don DeLillo’s End Zone, Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade. My favorite was Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968). It’s about an accountant named J. Henry Waugh, who is fascinated by the laws of chance and probability. He invents a baseball game whose every action is determined by a throw of the dice. “I also keep financial ledgers for each club,” he explains. “And a running journalization of the activity, posting of it all into permanent record books. Politics, too. Every four years the Association elects officers. I have to keep an eye on that. And then there are boxscores to be audited, trial balances along the way, seasonal inventories, rewards and punishments to be meted out, life histories to be overseen.... People die, you know.”  

One death, in particular, that of the great rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford, hits Waugh hard, to the point that he appears to lose his grip on reality. It’s a memorable story, a sort of parable illustrating the perils of living too deeply inside one’s own head. 

I bought The Universal Baseball Association when it first came out, in 1968. It’s a first edition. I treasure it – one of my favorite books. 

Credit: The above portrait is by Suzanne DeChillo.

Postscript: Luis Tiant 1940 - 2024

Luis Tiant (Photo by Rich Pilling)

I see in the Times that the great Cuban baseball pitcher Luis Tiant died: see “Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83.” Tiant figures centrally in Roger Angell’s brilliant “Agincourt and After” (The New Yorker, November 17, 1975), an account of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Angell wrote,

Conjecture thickened through most of the opening game, which was absolutely close for most of the distance, and then suddenly not close at all. Don Gullett, a powerful left-hander, kept the Red Sox in check for six innings, but was slightly out pitched and vastly outacted over the same distance by Tiant. The venerable stopper (he is listed as being thirty-four and rumored as being a little or a great deal older) did not have much of a fastball on this particular afternoon, so we were treated to the splendid full range of Tiantic mime. His repertoire begins with an exaggerated mid-windup pivot, during which he turns his back on the batter and seems to examine the infield directly behind the mound for signs of crabgrass. With men on bases, his stretch consists of a succession of minute downward waggles and pauses of the glove, and a menacing sidewise, slit-eyed, Valentino-like gaze over his shoulder at the base runner. The full flower of his art, however, comes during the actual delivery, which is executed with a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations. I had begun to take notes during my recent observations of the Cuban Garrick, and now, as he set down the Reds with only minimal interruptions (including one balk call, in the fourth), I arrived at some tentative codifications. The basic Tiant repertoire seems to include:

(1) Call the Osteopath: In mid-pitch, the man suffers an agonizing seizure in the central cervical region, which he attempts to fight off with a sharp backward twist of the head.

(2) Out of the Woodshed: Just before releasing the ball, he steps over a raised sill and simultaneously ducks his head to avoid conking it on the low door frame.

(3) The Runaway Taxi: Before the pivot, he sees a vehicle bearing down on him at top speed, and pulls back his entire upper body just in time to avoid a nasty accident.

(4) Falling Off the Fence: An attack of vertigo nearly causes him to topple over backward on the mound. Strongly suggests a careless dude on the top rung of the corral.

(5) The Slipper-Kick: In mid-pitch, he surprisingly decides to get rid of his left shoe.

(6) The Low-Flying Plane (a subtle development and amalgam of 1, 3, and 4, above): While he is pivoting, an F-105 buzzes the ballpark, passing over the infield from the third-base to the first-base side at a height of eighty feet. He follows it all the way with his eyes.

That is one of the most inspired baseball descriptions ever written. It makes me smile every time I read it. Tiant is gone now, but he lives on in Angell’s classic piece. 

Postscript: Lore Segal 1928 - 2024

Lore Segal (Photo by Ellen Dubin) 

I see in the Times that Lore Segal has died. She wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker memory pieces – “Spry for Frying” (April 18, 2011; included in her The Journal I Did Not Keep, 2019). It’s only three pages long, but it’s unforgettable. Perhaps its brevity contributes to its indelibility. It’s a recollection of Segal’s arrival in America, when she was twenty-three. It’s an attempt to remember. Not everything is clear. Segal begins, 

In memories of journeys past, some portions remain stubbornly unavailable to recollection. I can call up no mental picture of my mother and me boarding the plane in Santo Domingo—in those days it was called Ciudad Trujillo—nor do I remember arriving in New York. (I’ve always intended to Google the airport at which we must have landed. This was May 1, 1951.) And then did we take the bus, the subway, a taxi? Did Paul, my uncle, come to pick us up?

One thing she does recall is the “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” sign “blinking on and off from the New Jersey shore.” She writes,

While my mother, on that first evening in New York, stayed in the apartment with my grandmother, Paul walked me the one block to Riverside Drive. The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple. “This would be prettier than the Thames Embankment if it weren’t all so commercial,” I pronounced. At twenty-three, I had many opinions, and that America was commercial was one I had imbibed in England. It was to England that I had longed, during the drag of the years in the Dominican Republic, to return.

That “The advertisement laid shivering paths of light across the black water of the Hudson River and turned the American sky purple” is wonderful. Segal’s memory coalesces around the sign. Then one day the sign disappears. She says,

There must have been a particular day when I looked across the Hudson and there was no “Spry for Frying, Spry for Baking” in the New Jersey sky. I felt surprised, and deprived. True, I hadn’t seen the brand name on any product—hadn’t looked for or missed it in the supermarket. (Google “Spry.” When had it changed its name, merged with another brand, gone belly up?) Again and yet again, and still I look across the Hudson River, surprised, by now, that I am surprised at the naked sky and unable to complete the picture in my mind: Was the second element “Spry for Cooking” or was it “Spry for Baking”? Do I remember correctly that it blinked?

The sign becomes a symbol of life’s transience. The piece ends poignantly:

The refugee in me still tends to feel displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down my new-grown roots. It is in Manhattan. And I have a plan for the completion of my naturalization: I would like my compliant ashes to be strewn—I hope it’s not illegal—on Riverside Drive. Let me blow across the Hudson, and go where Spry is gone. 

That last line is inspired! Segal embraces her own ephemerality. 

Postscript: Helen Vendler 1933 - 2024

Helen Vendler (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Helen Vendler died April 23, 2024, age 90.  She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. I first encountered her work in The New Yorker. I remember the piece – “On Marianne Moore” (October 16, 1978; included in Vendler’s great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us). I remember the line that hooked me: “Marguerite Young told, in a festschrift for Moore’s seventy-seventh birthday, how the poem ‘Nevertheless’ arose: Moore, seeing in a box of strawberries a misshapen green one, almost all seeds, said, ‘Here’s a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle,’ and found thereby a first line.” 

Here's a strawberry that’s had quite a struggle – I love that line. It belongs to Moore, not Vendler. But credit Vendler for including the circumstances of its origin in her brilliant essay. Vendler was always interested in the “how” of poetry – how it's conceived, how it’s constructed, how it achieves its effects. She was a formalist extraordinaire. Her writing taught me that style matters immensely. As she said of the poets she reviewed in her great Soul Says (1995), “Each has left a mark on language, has found a style. And it is that style – the compelling aesthetic signature of each – that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.” Her responses are among the glories of literary criticism. For example:

On Seamus Heaney’s “The Grauballe Man”: “Probe after probe enters the reclining figure’s unknown substance: Is he stone? Is he tough bird-tissue? Is he a gnarled root? The probes are successively visual and tactile, and are sometimes two-dimensional (“the grain of his wrists”), sometimes three-dimensional (“the ball of his heel”). The corpse, at this point, is still unressurected: it is stony, wooden, cold, alien, made of disarticulated parts. But as the similes turn to metaphors, the corpse begins to stir.” [The Breaking of Style, 1995]

On Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”: “The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.” [Part of Nature, Part of Us, 1980]

On James Schuyler’s “Used Hankerchiefs 5¢”: “Hopkins would have liked this writing, with its exquisite texture of letters and sounds, its slippage from description to theory of style, its noticing of visual effects, both accidental (crush marks) and intended (cross-stitching). In this affectionate piece, Schuyler allies himself with an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade – with Stevens’ Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet, with Elizabeth Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute. 'Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?' says Bishop’s Crusoe.” [Soul Says, 1995]

Note that “exquisite texture of letters and sounds.” Vendler relished verbal texture. In her superb “A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1989; collected in Soul Says), a review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, she wrote, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page.” It's the art of Vendler's criticism, too. She was a master of it.

Postscript: Joan Acocella 1945 - 2024

Joan Acocella (Photo by Bob Sacha)

New Yorker critic Joan Acocella died January 7, 2024, age 78. She was primarily a dance critic. But she also wrote many wonderful book reviews, several of which are included in her 2007 essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. Acocella appreciated candor. She says of Susan Sontag, “She talked very straight” (“The Hunger Artist”). This applies to Acocella, too. Here, as a form of tribute, are some of my favorite lines from her work:

Butler’s chapter on Cather is not a chapter on Cather; it is an essay on politics in which Cather’s text lies bound and gagged. (“Cather and the Academy”)

Always plainspoken, she became more so. (“Feasting on Life”)

These are superb letters – long, meaty, intimate, conversational. You can practically hear her breathing. And they remind us of her faithfulness to reality, her ability to let things stay mixed and strange – to let them grow at the edges and stay loose in the center. (“Feasting on Life”)

We also needed more footnotes. But never mind. This is a priceless book: a whole life, a serious life, eighty-four years long. (“Feasting on Life”)

The grand cascading sentences ... (“Finding Augie March”)

One must love the book on artistic grounds – for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles – and also, still, for its hopefulness. (“Finding Augie March”)

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation. (“Piecework”)

Her sentences are frequently incomplete, her grammar nonstandard, her chapter titles a brazen lie. (“Piecework”)

In Bedford’s world, nobody is going to get ahead, or nobody nice, but meanwhile there is mercy, free hors d’oeuvres. (“Piecework”)

I don’t know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it. (“Piecework”)

She should stop apologizing. If Quicksands is a sort of rummage sale, what of it? (“Piecework”)

We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at Maman in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Don’t laugh – Fitzgerald believes the same thing. She combines an old-world faith with a completely modern pessimism. (“Assassination on a Small Scale”)

And the writing was marvelous – high-toned, Brahmin, but full of zest and the pleasure of performing. Her openers were always thrown down with a great flourish. (“The Hunger Artist”)

Whatever she felt was fed back into her argument, a short, violent conflagration at the end of which any idea that illness is a mark of ennoblement or of shame—something that the victim caused or, by virtue of personality, was doomed to—lies like a burnt cinder at the bottom of Sontag’s rhetorical furnace. (“The Hunger Artist”)

But the montage is not surreal – it’s real, it’s New York City – and the objects don’t fly around in that self-important, dérèglement des sens way. They stay put, and honk the way they should. Waterfalls pour from the sky, but they’re really there, on a billboard. In the city O’Hara found his own, more modest version of Surrealist hallucination. (“Perfectly Frank”)

O’Hara loved things that lived in time, things that moved – ballet, movies, Action painting, New York – and he made himself the partner of time. [“Perfectly Frank”]

But the poems were manifesto enough. With their colloquialism, with their empirical record of daily events, with the friends wandering in and out – “Jap” (Jasper Johns) waiting at the train station, “Allen” (Ginsberg, hung over) throwing up in the bathroom – and, above all, with their craft so lightly worn, the poems constituted a clear refusal, if not of the high mission of poetry, then any duty to kneel before the throne. (“Perfectly Frank”)

In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way. (“Devil’s Work”)

I have stressed the dramatis diaboli, but in most of mantel’s novels there is a regular English reality going on that might make you wish for Hell instead. (“Devil’s Work”)

Ugly families, though, are only a subspecialty. Mantel is a master of ugliness in general. (“Devil’s Work”)

Art redeems us from time: in Hadrian’s case, by shaping his life into a meaningful curve (ambition to mastery to exaltation to disaster to reconciliation); in Yourcenar’s case, by enabling her to do the shaping, and in the process to write her first great novel, save her own life. (“Becoming the Emperor”)  

Postscript: A. S. Byatt 1936 - 2023

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

I see in the Times that A. S. Byatt has died (“A.S. Byatt, Scholar Who Found Fame With Fiction, Dies at 87,” November 17, 2023). The Times writer, Rebecca Chace, emphasizes Byatt’s achievements as a fiction writer, particularly her Booker prize-winning novel Possession. A friend gave me that book many years ago and urged me to read it. I tried, but never made it very far. Romance in the Victorian Age is not my thing. Maybe someday I’ll give it another shot. But there is a piece by Byatt that I treasure – her brilliant “Van Gogh, Death and Summer,” included in her 1991 essay collection A Passion of the Mind. 

“Van Gogh, Death and Passion” starts out as a review of Tsukasa Kodera’s Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature (1990). But it soon morphs into something vaster and more profound: an appreciation of Van Gogh’s letters; a consideration of his “sense of the real”; an exploration of his ideas about color. She quotes liberally from his letters. She quotes Bataille, Artaud, Rilke, Freud, Stevens, De Quincey. She praises De Quincey’s concept of the involute – “the way in which the human mind thinks and feels in ‘perplexed combinations of concrete objects’ or ‘compound objects, incapable of being disentangled.’ ” She writes, “De Quincey’s Romantic involute, Stevens’s abstract and sensuous meditation on the relations between sun, earth, mortality, myth and metaphor, have become, with Van Gogh’s letters and paintings, part of a new involute for me.”

It's an extraordinary essay, a ravishing involute of her own making, drenched in Van Gogh’s colors, ending in a meditation on death, and one last quotation from Van Gogh:

Work is going pretty well – I am struggling with a canvas begun some days before my indisposition, a “Reaper”; the study is all yellow, terribly thick painted, but the subject was fine and simple. For I see in this reaper – a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of heat to get to the end of his task – I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is – if you like – the opposite of that sower I tried to do before. But there’s nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold. 

Postscript: Tony Bennett 1926 - 2023

Tony Bennett (Photo by Wyatt Counts)

I see in the Times that Tony Bennett died. He is the subject of one of Whitney Balliett’s finest pieces – “A Quality That Let’s You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in his great 1979 collection American Singers). Balliett called Bennett an “elusive singer.” He wrote,

He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos. He drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer. But Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together. It is pitched slightly higher than Sinatra’s. (It was once a tenor, but it has deepened over the years), and it has a rich, expanding quality that is immediately identifiable. It has a joyous quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality. It has, in a modest way, something of the hallelujah strain of Mahalia Jackson.

Balliett described Bennett’s face as being “easily sculptured by light.” He said,

In broad daytime, he tends to look jagged and awkwardly composed: his generous Roman nose booms and his pale-green eyes become slits. But the subdued lighting in the Amalfi [where Bennett was having supper] made him handsome and compact. His eyes became melancholy and shone darkly, the deep lines that run past his mouth were stoical, and his nose was regal. His voice, though, never changed. It is a singer’s voice – soft, slightly hoarse, and always on the verge of sliding into melody.

I’m listening to Bennett’s superb 2015 album The Silver Lining, as I write this. The way he nails the soaring high note at the end of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” is thrilling. To think he was almost ninety when he did that. The guy was a marvel – one of the great jazz singers of all time. 

Postscript: Alan Arkin 1934 - 2023

I see in the Times that Alan Arkin died. I remember him for his extraordinary performance as the deaf-mute in Robert Ellis Miller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I saw that film when it first came out, in 1968. I was fifteen, just embarking on my love affair with movies. It was a great time to start. Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, and In the Heat of the Night had all appeared the previous year. The acting in those films impressed me immensely. Then I saw Arkin’s performance in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It bowled me over. For years after, when anyone asked me who my favorite actors were, I’d answer Paul Newman, Rod Steiger and Alan Arkin. Today, looking at old reviews of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, I see that Renata Adler, in The New York Times, wrote, “Alan Arkin, as Singer, is extraordinary, deep and sound.” This strikes me as exactly right.     

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. 

Postscript: Mimi Sheraton 1926 - 2023

Mimi Sheraton (Photo by Julien Jourdes)

I see in the Times that Mimi Sheraton has died: see “Mimi Sheraton, Innovative New York Times Food Critic, Dies at 97.” Sheraton wrote one of my favorite New Yorker pieces – “Spit Cake” (November 23, 2009). It’s an account of her search for an authentic Baumkuchen, “a towering cake that is improbable both for the way in which it is produced and for the strong appeal of its simple, innocent flavor, redolent of butter, flour or cornstarch, eggs, sugar, and gently sweet hints of marzipan, rum, or vanilla.” She finds it in a pastry shop in Chicago. She observes it being made:

The Lutz Baumkuchen does not taper, because Kozik does not use a cone; before preheating the tubular spit, he wraps it in many layers of aluminum foil. Nor does he ladle the deliciously sweet batter on. Instead, he pours small quantities into the trough beneath the spit. Then he releases a lever that lowers the spit into the trough, where it revolves and picks up the batter before it is hoisted back up to cook. After about the eighth layer, Kozik holds a long wooden comb against the sides of the revolving cake to impress the ridges, a process that is repeated about six times until the ridges are firmly set. Then subsequent layers are baked on, and the drippings are smoothed off against a board as they turn. The process takes about two hours for a Baumkuchen that has twenty-four ridges, or is about forty-eight inches tall, with sixteen to eighteen layers of batter and weighing six pounds. The result was the closest to Kreutzkamm’s that I have found, but with slightly less defined rings and a milder flavor devoid of marzipan.

Rereading “Spit Cake” just now, I realize that the passage I most relish isn't about Baumkuchen; it's about the making of a Polish spit cake called sekacz. Here’s the passage:

Gradually blushing red-faced as we sweltered in the Sweet World’s tiny utility room, where Ryba clocks a three- to four-hour watch over his rotating sekacz, he demonstrated the most traditional method. First, he preheated a big, worn vertical gas-fired oven that looks like a Rube Goldberg improvisation of a sheet-metal barbecue grill. After wrapping a large metal cone in layers of parchment, he slid it over the spit’s spindle, where it establishes the cake’s tapering form. He then let the whole thing turn and heat for about fifteen minutes. “Cone must be hot, so first layer of batter sticks and also bakes the cake from the inside,” he explained. The turning of the spit also kept the batter clinging as it wrapped around itself.

Donning a protective clear plastic face mask, somewhat like a welder’s, as the heat built up, Ryba ladled the batter from a big pail. Every ladleful was poured into a trough under the spit so that it would become more liquid. As each layer toasted to a golden-brown glaze, the next was poured over, and so on until the desired width was achieved, thereby creating the defining brown rings one sees when the cake is sliced. With its rustic, nicely browned crust and the crunchy protruding brambles that developed as the drippings baked on, the cut sekacz revealed a buff-gold cake that had seductively dense sweet-smoky and slightly ripe overtones.

Mm, that description is crazy good!

Sheraton connects with The New Yorker in another way. In  1979, she wrote a piece for The New York Times, blowing the cover of the chef named Otto in John McPhee’s now classic “Brigade de Cuisine” (The New Yorker, February 19, 1979; later retitled "A Philosopher in the Kitchen"). According to Sheraton, McPhee pleaded with her not to publish her piece. She says, in her memoir Eating My Words (2004), that McPhee accused her of breach of trust. She replied,

“It’s not my breach,” I said. “I never promised Lieb [the chef’] or anyone else anything and you should not have, either, if you were going to write about him in The New Yorker. Anyway, the story is already in and the paper will be dropped on my doorstep in an hour or two. You made this a matter of public interest, especially when food is such a hot topic.

Maybe someday, I’ll delve into this ruckus in more detail. Today, I want to pay tribute to Sheraton as the writer of “Spit Cake” – one of the best food pieces ever to appear in The New Yorker. 

Postscript: Charles Simic 1938 - 2023

Charles Simic (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just found out today that Charles Simic died last month, age eighty-four. He wrote several critical pieces that are among my touchstones. One of them is “Aberlardo Morell’s Poetry of Appearances” (included in his 2003 collection The Metaphysician in the Dark), in which he said of Morell’s photos,

The commonplace object is singled out, brought out of its anonymity, so that it stands before us fully revealed in its uniqueness and its otherness. In the metaphysical solitude of the object we catch a glimpse of our own. Here is the unknowable ground of appearances, that something that is always there without being perceived, the world in its nameless, uninterpreted presence which the camera makes visible. That’s what casts the spell on me in Morell’s photographs: the evidence that our daily lives are the sight of momentary insights and beauties which lie around us to be recovered.

Another piece I treasure is his “Poetry in Unlikely Places” (The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003; included in his 2006 collection Memory Piano), a review of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Simic wrote:

Nevertheless, he is a far more original poet in my view when he had no plan in mind, when a poem came to him in the fish soup he was eating, as it were. Something close at hand, perfectly familiar, and yet somehow never fully noticed in its peculiarity set his imagination going. Can’t you see how interesting artichokes are? the poem about them says. For Neruda almost everything that exists deserves equal reverence and can become a subject of poetry.

My favorite Simic essay is “The Life of Images” (collected in his 2015 book of the same name). It’s a consideration of the photography of Berenice Abbott. It concludes:

The enigma of the ordinary – that’s what makes old photographs so poignant: An ancient streetcar in sepia color. A few men holding on to their hats on a windy day. They hurry with their faces averted except for one befuddled old fellow who has stopped and is looking over his shoulder at what we cannot see, but where, we suspect, we ourselves will be coming into view someday, as hurried and ephemeral as any one of them.

“The enigma of the ordinary” – right there is Simic’s great subject. I say “is” because, for me, his essays will always be alive. 

Postscript: Ronald Blythe 1922 - 2023

Ronald Blythe (Photo by Eamonn McCabe)

I see in the Times that Ronald Blythe has died: “Ronald Blythe, Scribe of the English Countryside, Dies at 100” (The New York Times, February 8, 2023). Blythe wrote Akenfield (1969), one of my favorite books. It’s a powerful elegy for the fading of “the old pattern of life” in a Suffolk village. Blythe asked, “How much preserved? How much lost?” Pig farmer, sheep farmer, blacksmith, ploughman, nurse, gravedigger, orchard worker, thatcher, veterinarian, horseman, harness maker, magistrate, teacher – Blythe talked to them all, and many others as well. One of his most memorable portraits is of “the ringing men”:

The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants, as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art-pastime-worship based on blocks of circulating figures which look like one of those numeric keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a clashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the “attempt” the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them.

That “The world to them is a vision of belfries” is very fine. The book brims with surprising, original, delightful sentences:

The clay acres themselves are the only tablets on which generations of village men have written, as John Clare did, I am, but nothing remains of these sharp, straight signatures.

His own life and the life of the corn and fruit and creatures clocks along with the same fatalistic movement. Spring-birth, winter-death and in between the harvest. This year, next year and forever – for that was the promise. 

The older farmers, too, are still emotionally caught up in what they called at the time the “coming down process” and have vivid memories of being young in a twitch-ridden landscape, with water spread in thin lakes on top of the undrained clay and buildings sliding down into nettles.

Yet the one certain thing about Davie is his crushing sanity.

It is a suitable climate for a little arable kingdom where flints are the jewels and where existence is sharp-edged.

Blythe is gone now, but his splendid Akenfield ensures he will not be forgotten. 

Postscript: Jonathan Raban 1942 - 2023

Jonathan Raban (Photo by Dan Lamont)

I see in the Times that Jonathan Raban has died. This is sad news. Raban is one of my favorite writers. His Old Glory (1981) and Passage to Juneau (1999) are in my personal canon of great books. Passage to Juneau is one of the three travelogues I reviewed in my “3 for the Sea” last year. It contains some of the most exquisite descriptions of water I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample:

The only motion was that of the incoming tide, stealing smoothly through the forest at one knot. Where fallen branches obstructed the current near the shore, they sprouted whiskers of turbulence that were steadily maturing into braided beards. The water was moving just fast enough to feel the abrasion of the air against it, and its surface was altering from glassy to stippled with the strengthening flood. Soon the false wind, brushing against the tide, created a trellis-like pattern of interlocked wavelets, their raised edges only a millimetre or two high; just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light. 

How I love that “just deep enough to catch, and shape, a scoop of light.”

An excerpt from Passage to Juneau, titled "Sailing into the Sublime," appeared in the August 23, 1999 New Yorker.

Raban is gone now. But he lives on in his books. Open Passage to Juneau almost anywhere and there you’ll find him in the cockpit of his boat, steering through turbulence, studying the waves, savoring the light.

Postscript: Gerald Stern 1925 - 2022

Gerald Stern (Photo by Frank C. Dougherty)

I see in the Times that Gerald Stern has died, age ninety-seven. He had one of the most distinctive “voices” I know of – a wild on-rushing talking voice streaming down the page. I wrote about him here, when his delightful “Warbler” appeared in the January 6, 2020, New Yorker. Over the years, the magazine published thirty-four of his poems, including the extraordinary “The World We Should’ve Stayed In” (October 6, 2014):

The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron
flower tables, the glass-and-wood-fluted doorknob
but most of all the baby girls holding
chicks in one arm and grapes in the other
just before the murder of the Gypsies
under Tiso the priest, Slovak, Roman Catholic,
no cousin to Andy, he Carpatho-Russian
or most of all Peter Oresick, he of Ford City,
he of Highland Park and East Liberty
Carpatho-Russian too, or just Ruthenian,
me staring at a coconut tree, I swear it,
listening late on a Saturday afternoon
a few weeks before my 88th to
airplane after airplane and reading the trailers
by the underwater lights of yon organ-shaped
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool
the noise a kind of roar when they got close
I’m watching from the fifth floor up, Warholean
here and there oh mostly on the elevator but
certainly by the pool, his European relatives
basking under his long serrated leaves
coconuts near the top—ripe and dangerous—
like Peter, coming from one of the villages inside
Pittsburgh, like me, half eastern Poland, half southern
Ukraine born in the Hill, on Wylie Avenue,
the first village east of downtown Pittsburgh,
Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill,
two blocks—at least—a string of small stores and
Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s, I was
born at the end of an era, I hung on with
my fingers then with my nails, Judith Vollmer’s
family was Polish but they were twelve miles away from
Peter’s village, this was a meal at Weinstein’s:
chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then
matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by
roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish
or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw
and Jewish pickles on the side and plates
of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel,
Yiddish the lingua franca, tea in a glass,
the world we should have stayed in, for in America
you burn in one place, then another.

Wow! The connections are flying here – from “nickel-coated iron flower tables” to “the murder of the Gypsies” to Andy Warhol to Peter Oresick to “me staring at a coconut tree” to “airplane after airplane” to “reading the trailers / by the underwater lights” to “organ-shaped / squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool” to an elevator to “long serrated leaves / coconuts near the top – ripe and dangerous” to “downtown Pittsburgh” to “Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill” to “a string of small stores and / Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s” to “Judith Vollmer’s / family” to the amazing “meal at Weinstein’s” described in seven glorious lines of delectable detail – lines that make me smile every time I read them. No one else could’ve written it. Stern was a true eccentric, authentically himself in every word and line.