The Art of Quotation (Part VII)

I’ve always admired the “fishnet” image that Robert Lowell used to describe his poetic endeavour. In his poem “Fishnet” (included in his 1973 collection The Dolphin), he wrote,

I’ve gladdened a lifetime

knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Helen Vendler cherished these lines, too. She quoted them in two essays – “A Difficult Grandeur” (included in her 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us) and “Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell’s Day by Day” (in her 2010 collection Last Looks, Last Books). In the first piece, she quoted the above lines and offered this interpretation: 

The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct, like all other natural species devoured by time, but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell’s votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.

I like how she reused Lowell’s “bronze,” converting it to “bronzed” – “bronzed to imperishability,” a wonderful phrase.

In the second essay, Vendler provided this interpretation of Lowell’s beautiful lines:

The poet’s net of forms in The Dolphin will remain, in his hammered phrase, “nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.”

Note the way she builds on Lowell’s “fishnet” and “bronze” metaphors – “the poet’s net of forms,” “his hammered phrase” – deepening their meaning. 

Credit: The above portrait of Helen Vendler is by Stephanie Mitchell. 

The Rijksamuseum's "Vermeer": 3 Reviews

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft (circa 1660)

I want to compare three reviews of the Rijksamuseum’s recent blockbuster Vermeer show (February 10 – June 4, 2023) that brought together an unprecedented twenty-eight Vermeers: Rebecca Mead’s “Dutch Treat” (The New Yorker, February 27, 2023); Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside” (London Review of Books, May 18, 2023); and Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light” (The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2023).

Mead, in her piece, points out that the show is “organized thematically—Vermeer’s use of musical instruments; Vermeer’s depiction of gentleman callers—with works from differing periods placed together to show them to their best effect, like artfully rumpled drapery.”

She comments on several of the paintings, including Mistress and Maid, A Lady Writing, View of Delft, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Girl with the Red Hat, Lacemaker, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and The Milkmaid.

She says of Mistress and Maid and A Lady Writing,

The two paintings have thematic and stylistic commonalities. Each shows a fair-haired woman, finely dressed in a yellow satin jacket and seated at a table, with a pen in her right hand and a sheet of paper at the ready. Each displays Vermeer’s uncanny command of optical effects, with a dissolving focus on the fur trim of the jacket and a sheeny light reflected from a pearl earring. A blue tablecloth is rucked up in almost identical disarray, a circumstance that would be nothing but an annoyance to an actual letter writer—who doesn’t prefer to lay paper on a smooth surface?—but which reminds a viewer that these are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna. It is peculiarly moving to see these two works, which were painted within two years of each other, in juxtaposition. A viewer can take in one, and then the other, with a turn of the head no greater than that of the woman represented in either painting. Between them, these works consumed perhaps a year of Vermeer’s labor—a scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances and a faithful imagining of internal lives, which might better be described as an act of devotion. 

Note Mead’s reference to Vermeer’s “uncanny command of optical effects” and his “scrupulous rendering of bourgeois appurtenances.” These are two aspects of Vermeer’s art that I admire immensely. She also points out something new to me – that these paintings “are carefully staged scenes, with the folds of those draperies as deliberately arranged as the garments of a Renaissance Madonna.” Call me naïve, but until I read this, it never occurred to me that Vermeer staged the subjects of his paintings. 

Another painting that Mead comments on is View of Delft – one of my favorite Vermeers. She writes,

Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream. But the painting also conveys the sensation of atmospheric humidity. In a catalogue essay, Pieter Roelofs, one of the show’s curators and the head of paintings and sculpture at the museum, points out that Vermeer hangs this sky with low cumulus clouds of a sort that were almost never represented by his contemporaries. In this canvas, as in “The Little Street,” with its weeping brickwork and stained whitewash, Vermeer paints dampness as well as light.

That first line is exquisite, beautifully expressing my own view of Vermeer as a master painter of light.

Was Vermeer a trickster? Mead thinks so. She says of his superb The Milkmaid,

“The Milkmaid” is an exploration of minimalism, three hundred years avant la lettre. A recent analysis of the painting’s surface revealed that Vermeer painted over a row of jugs that once hung behind the milkmaid’s head, leaving a bare wall with the tonal nuances of a Morandi. The wall’s surface is rendered with infinite care, its nails and holes painted in sharp relief. The graduation of shadow and light contributes to the sense of verisimilitude, though Vermeer adjusts optics for the sake of art by painting the jigsaw piece of wall between the jug and the milkmaid’s arm a brighter hue, the better to accentuate her gesture. The eye is tricked into believing that it sees the world reproduced; what it actually sees is the world enhanced.

Vermeer as an enhancer of reality, adjusting optics for the sake of art – that’s a view of him that I struggle with. Rightly or wrongly, I associate him with accuracy. “Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination / stealing like the tide across a map / to his girl solid with yearning,” Robert Lowell wrote in his great poem “Epilogue.” To me, Vermeer is a consummate describer. That implies accuracy. I find accuracy and enhancement hard to reconcile.

Let’s consider another review – Julian Bell’s “Insider Outside.” It begins where Mead’s piece ends, with a look at one of Vermeer’s walls. This time it’s the wall in Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. Bell writes,

Nothing could be more positive than that clean, firm whitewashed wall. Creamy dabs and droplets, heavy with bright lead carbonate, have come down here and there on the more convoluted surfaces, on the gilt frame and the musician’s satin skirts. But the flat planes are immutable blocks of tone and no mark suggests that their outlines could alter. What are we to know of the objects to which they belong? Only their interactions with light.

I love that last line. Any critic praising Vermeer for his skill at painting light gets my vote. It may not be the most original approach to Vermeer’s art, but, for me, it’s the surest and most compelling. 

Bell also considers another established perspective on Vermeer – the photo-like accuracy of his work. He says, “His art seems to record appearance as tonally as a photosensitive sheet, with as little reliance on contours, and the question of how much he relied on lens technologies has been a constant of subsequent scholarship.” He quotes Kenneth Clark’s praise of View of Delft: “the nearest which painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.” But Bell dissents. He says, when you see the actual paintings hanging in the Rijksmuseum, you “discover how different in fact they are from photographs:

There in the opening gallery stands View of Delft, and there in its middle band – the town buildings sandwiched between thin air and yielding water – the oils are caked and burly. Gritty earth-colour gouts lay down the masonries of brick, mortar, slate and limestone. Facing Vermeer’s home town, we encounter the tension posed by his single-figure interiors: between the concrete fact and its not-hereness. This is the testament of an insider who needs to stand outside, who requires a far bank from which to grasp his own city’s substance. The morning river may be still and the figures on its foreshore few, small and faceless, yet there is a zeal to the gunky highlights that stud the sunlit roofs, a kind of staccato fury.

This is a valuable observation, emphasizing the texture of Vermeer’s painting. Simon Schama made a similar point in his excellent “Through a Glass Brightly” (included in his 2004 collection Hang-Ups), a review of a Vermeer show at the National Gallery in 1995. Looking at View of Delft, he says, “The texture of the red-tiled roofs at left, for example, was made more dense by mixing sand into the pigment, almost as if Vermeer was as much rebuilder as image-maker.”

My favorite lines in Bell’s piece occur in his consideration of the infrared images of The Milkmaid. He writes,

They show cluttered shelves behind the serving woman, which were afterwards smoothed out to leave a bare wall. To isolate in this way the central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle, was a potent decision. 

That “central mystery of the milk jug’s dark mouth, its dazzling descending trickle” is inspired.

What to make of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Life Made Light”? I find it the least satisfying of the three reviews under consideration. Yeazell considers the Rijksmuseum show in terms of its organization and crowd management. But, amazingly and disappointingly, she doesn’t discuss (or describe) any of the paintings on display. She considers several theories on Vermeer’s art, some of them pretty far out, if you ask me, e.g., that Vermeer’s figures can be divided into “extroverts” and “introverts,” that the Jesuits “provided the chief inspiration for his treatment of light as a spiritual phenomenon,” that there’s a “suggestive analogy between the remoteness of Petrarch’s beloved Laura and the various strategies Vermeer devises for rendering his own objects of desire at once alluring and unobtainable.” Did Vermeer even read Petrarch? She doesn’t say.

Yeazell also considers a theory that seems to me to have been around forever – that Vermeer used a camera obscura. She concludes, “no definitive evidence has emerged to link Vermeer to such an instrument.” There, you’d think (and hope) that would finally settle it. But no, a few paragraphs later, she undermines her conclusion, buying into Gregor J. M. Weber’s “informed speculation” that “the local Jesuits probably did serve as the conduit for Vermeer’s knowledge of the camera obscura.”

So where does that leave us? It leaves me savoring that wonderful Rebecca Mead description of View of Delft: “Its subject is light, which, as the artist expertly renders it, turns the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk a pale buttercream.”

"Yet why not say what happened?"

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah)

Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue” is one of my favorite poems. I’ve long viewed it as an argument for factuality. The first part of it appears to be just the opposite – a rejection of facticity for being literal-minded (“paralyzed by fact”) and unimaginative (“the threadbare art of my eye”). Lowell seems to regret his “snapshot” poetics (“lurid, rapid, garish, grouped”). But then he thrillingly pivots and declares his fidelity to fact:

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

Yet why not say what happened? In the contest between fact and fiction, it’s a cardinal question. Why make it up? Why not say exactly what happened? Lowell sided with fact. I applaud him. 

Interestingly, Lowell borrowed the question from his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Langdon Hammer, in his absorbing “The Art of Losing” (The New York Review of Books, December 19, 2019, writes,

He doesn’t indicate it in the poem, but Lowell quoted that question – “Yet why not say what happened?” – from Hardwick, who had posed it to him when he was blocked while writing Life Studies, and he found the advice enabling. 

Hardwick’s question would’ve been lost to history. By remembering it and including it in his superb “Epilogue,” Lowell preserved it.  

December 16, 2019 Issue

Thomas Mallon’s absorbing “Word for Word,” in this week’s issue, shows that Robert Lowell, in using the letters of his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, to write The Dolphin, changed their wording. Mallon says,

A letter Hardwick wrote to Blackwood about arrangements for Harriet, on March 12, 1971, contains this sentence: “She knows that she will have very little of him from now on and that he belongs to you and all of your children, since his physical presence there and absence here is the most real thing.” In Lowell’s “Green Sore,” we get instead:

                She knows she will seldom see him;
the physical presence or absence is the thing.

He has deleted any explanation of whom he belongs to, and made the mere fact of his existence (“presence” or “absence”), not his location (“there” or “here”), all that seems to matter. It is no longer “the most real thing”—one concern among many—but simply “the thing,” ineffable and all-consuming. These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith. 

This is a remarkable passage for two reasons: (1) it shows that Lowell distorted Hardwick’s letter; (2) it’s a tonic departure from the usual view that poetry’s purpose is to transform reality (as opposed to showing it precisely as it is). In Mallon’s view, Hardwick’s letter is gold; Lowell’s distortion of it is lead. I agree. I applaud Mallon for having the guts to say so. 

Helen Vendler's Brilliant "Lowell's Persistence"

Robert Lowell (Photo by Steve Shapiro)

Dan Chiasson, in his “The Mania and the Muse” (The New Yorker, March 20, 2017), a review of Kay Redfield Jamison’s Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, says, “Jamison’s study tells us a lot about bipolar disorder, but it can’t quite connect the dots to Lowell’s work. Poetry doesn’t coöperate much with clinical diagnosis.” A study that does connect those dots and shows the ways Lowell represented his depression in verse is Helen Vendler’s brilliant “Lowell’s Persistence,” included in her 2015 collection The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar. Vendler notes a number of characteristics of Lowell’s depressed style, including obstructive line stoppages (“In For the Union Dead, Lowell’s stoppages reflect a mind moving sluggishly to organize its materials, as though it were an effort to find a piece of wit to join subject to object”), corrupted flashbacks (“But the seepage of compositorial depression corrupts the colors of the past, both by finding the simile of rot for the remembered hue of the rocks, and by aggressing against that false visual appearance of purple by insisting on the true and banal substratum of gray”), and immobility (“The depressed mind, even if capable of momentary relief, knows the immobile backdrop is always there unchangingly waiting: ‘water, stone, grass and sky’ ”).

Lowell’s depressive style isn’t totally negative. It has, as Vendler points out, its beautiful aspects. One is its beauty of accuracy. Another is its beauty of vividness, of the arresting image. Vendler says of Lowell’s “Florence,”

Just as the monsters are wonderfully found images for the formless, nonthinking, “decapitated,” foundering, and festering state of the depressed body, so the phrase “my heart bleeds black blood,” with its spondaic and alliterative monosyllables and its gradually thickening vowels – from the scream of “ee” to the flatness of “a” to the subvocalic clotting of “uh” – offers a feeling image (in appropriate language) for the festering, oozing decline of the depressed soul.

Vendler’s great essay expands my appreciation of Lowell’s aesthetic. She shows him to be a powerful artist of the inner life, “not flinching before its deserts of drought and paralysis.”

On Jonathan Galassi's "Updike's Violin"

Jonathan Galassi, in his absorbing “Updike’s Violin” (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2015), criticizes John Updike’s poetry for failing to be transformative. Galassi says, “He sees, he denotes, but he does not transform. His observations nearly always remain the beginning and the end of his writing in verse.” I agree that Updike’s poems, particularly the brilliant ten-poem sequence, “Endpoint,” that appeared in the March 16, 2009 New Yorker, aren’t transformative. That’s exactly why I treasure them. They are poems of untransformed reality. For example, consider "Fred Muth, Peggy Lutz," the seventh poem in the “Endpoint” sequence:

December 13, 2008

They’ve been in my fiction; both now dead,

Peggy just recently, long stricken (like

my Grandma) with Parkinson’s disease.

But what a peppy knockout Peggy was!—

cheerleader, hockey star, May Queen, RN.

Pigtailed in kindergarten, she caught my mother’s

eye, but she was too much girl for me.

Fred—so bright, so quietly wry—his

mother’s eye fell on me, a “nicer” boy

than her son’s pet pals. Fred’s slight wild streak

was tamed by diabetes. At the end,

it took his toes and feet. Last time we met,

his walk rolled wildly, fetching my coat. With health

he might have soared. As was, he taught me smarts.

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,

scant hundred of you, for providing a

sufficiency of human types: beauty,

bully, hanger-on, natural,

twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,

all there in Shillington, its trolley cars

and little factories, cornfields and trees,

leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life. Even then were tears

and fear and struggle, but the town itself

draped in plain glory the passing days.

The town forgave me for existing; it

included me in Christmas carols, songfests

(though I sang poorly) at the Shillington,

the local movie house. My father stood,

in back, too restless to sit, but everybody

knew his name, and mine. In turn I knew

my Granddad in the overalled town crew.

I’ve written these before, these modest facts,

but their meaning has no bottom in my mind.

The fragments in their jiggled scope collide

to form more sacred windows. I had to move

to beautiful New England—its triple

deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets—

to learn how drear and deadly life can be.

That “The town forgave me for existing” gets to me every time I read it. The poem is an exceptionally beautiful, heartfelt tribute to Updike’s hometown of Shillington. The reference to “these modest facts” reminds me of Lowell’s “poor passing facts” in his great “Epilogue.” Galassi is right when he says the “Endpoint” poems “recall Robert Lowell’s work of the late 1960s and 1970s.” Reviewing Lowell’s Day by Day (1977), Helen Vendler said, “Accuracy and fidelity to perception have rarely received such a desperate pledge of faith” (Part of Nature, Part of Us). 

Accuracy and fidelity to perception – these, it seems to me, are the hallmarks of Updike’s late style, as expressed in his magnificent “Endpoint” poems – poems that do not alter, dramatize, fictionalize, or otherwise transform the world, but strive to show it exactly as he sees it.