In Praise of Rebecca Clarke's Portraits

Rebecca Clarke, Patricia Lockwood

A shoutout to Rebecca Clarke for her wonderful color portraits of writers that now and again appear in The New York Times Book Review. There’s one of Patricia Lockwood in last week’s issue: see above. I collect these portraits. Here are two of my favorites:

Rebecca Clarke, Brenda Wineapple

Rebecca Clarke, Joy Williams

Vendler on Glück

Louise Glück (Photo by Webb Chappell)

Dwight Garner, in his “Louise Glück, a Nobel Winner Whose Poems Have Abundant Intellect and Deep Feeling” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 8, 2020), quotes my favorite literary critic, Helen Vendler. He says, “Helen Vendler, writing in The New Republic, said that Glück’s poems ‘have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of those words.’ ” The quote is from Vendler’s “Flower Power: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris” (The New Republic, May 24, 1993; included in Vendler’s 1995 Soul Says). 

Vendler wrote another great New Republic piece on Glück – “The Poetry of Louise Glück” (June 17, 1978; collected in Vendler’s 1980 Part of Nature, Part of Us. In this earlier essay, Vendler says of Glück, “She sees experience from very far off, almost through the wrong end of a telescope.” That strikes me as valid. I find Glück’s poetry remote, detached, cold – far removed from what Tolstoy called “the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind.” But as abstraction, it’s exquisite. For example, “Messengers”:

And the deer—
how beautiful they are,
as though their bodies did not impede them.
Slowly they drift into the open
through bronze panels of the sunlight.

Peter Schjeldahl's New Collection "Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light"

I see Peter Schjeldahl has a new book out titled Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018. Charles Finch reviews it in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Finch says Schjeldahl “writes with remarkable tensile beauty and closeness of observation.” I agree. Schjeldahl is one of my favorite New Yorker writers. I look forward to reading his new collection. 

Double Bliss: John McPhee's "Draft No. 4"

Remember Warren Elmer in John McPhee’s superb “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1975)? He’s the guy in the bow of Henri Vaillancourt’s canoe who shouted, “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!” Well, it turns out that’s not exactly what Elmer said. What he really said, according to McPhee, in his fascinating new book, Draft No. 4, is “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” But in 1975, when the piece was written, “fucking” was still a shocker. New Yorker editor, William Shawn, wouldn’t allow it in the magazine. And, as McPhee points out,

There were no alternatives like “f---” or “f**k” or “[expletive deleted],” which sounds like so much gravel going down a chute. If the magazine had employed such devices, which it didn’t, I would have shunned them. “F-word” was not an expression in use then and the country would be better off if it had not become one. So Warren Elmer said “fucking” on Caucomgomoc Lake, but the quote in The New Yorker was “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”

Remember McPhee’s question about the fat gob behind the caribou’s eye in his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977)? Removed from its context, it’s one of the most delightfully surreal lines ever to appear in The New Yorker:

To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

In Draft No. 4, McPhee describes Shawn’s queasy response to the above-noted question:

There was in those days something known as “the Shawn proof.” From fact-checkers, other editors, and usage geniuses known as “readers,” there were plenty of proofs, but this austere one stood alone and seldom had much on it, just isolated notations of gravest concern to Mr. Shawn. If he had an aversion to cold places, it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food. I had little experience with him in restaurants, but when I did go to a restaurant with him his choice of entrée ran to cornflakes. He seemed to look over his serving flake by flake to see if any were moving. On the Shawn proof beside the words quoted above, he had written in the wide, white margin – in the tiny letters of his fine script – “the pop tart.”

Draft No. 4 brims with such stories. “It’s McPhee on McPhee,” as Parul Sehgal says in her “The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 13, 2017). In other words, it’s double bliss – an enthralling tour of some of McPhee’s finest works, conducted by the Master himself. I’m enjoying it immensely.

Cheever's Exhilarating, Self-excoriating, Disheveling Journals

Parul Sehgal, in her wonderful “Remains of the Day” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, July 30, 2017), a review of Christa Wolf’s diary One Day a Year: 2001-2011, writes,

For Wolf, time is fugitive (“History often seems to me like a funnel, down which our lives swirl, never to be seen again”), but her book is a sieve, a way to snare what can be caught, those strings of seeming banalities — that gherkin, an odd detail from a dream, how her husband learns to roll up her surgical stockings for her when she falls asleep in front of the television, that she suddenly needs surgical stockings in the first place.

I like Sehgal’s image of Wolf’s diary as a sieve, “a way to snare what can be caught.” Diary-writing is an undervalued literary form. Sehgal is one of the few critics who appreciate it. A few years ago, she wrote a memorable piece on The Journals of John Cheever (1991), calling it a “disheveling, debauching book,” “even a dangerous book: it invites you to contemplate — even embrace — your corruption” (“A Year in Reading,” The Millions, December 16, 2011). She says,

I love this Cheever, so lust-worn, fatigued, wise. The Cheever who observes, “I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.” But I love him more when he’s cross, crass, and ornery. When he’s querulous and moaning for “a more muscular vocabulary,” his face on a postage stamp, a more reliable erection. When he carps about his contemporaries (Calvino: “cute,” Nabokov: “all those sugared violets”). But Cheever the ecstatic, who merges with the mountain air and streams, who finds in writing and sex a bridge between the sacred and the profane and is as spontaneous and easy as a child — he is indispensable.

Geoff Dyer, in his “John Cheever: The Journals” (included in his excellent 2011 essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition), suggests that The Journals of John Cheever “represents Cheever’s greatest achievement, his principal claim to literary survival.” I agree. Excerpts from Cheever’s journals appeared in The New Yorker (“From the Late Forties and Fifties,” August 6 & 13, 1990; “From the Sixties,” January 21 & 28, 1991; “From the Seventies and Early Eighties,” August 12 & 19, 1991). They’re among the magazine’s most inspired writings. Someday, I’ll post a more detailed appreciation of them.

William Christenberry - Visual Poet

William Christenberry, "Tool Shed - near Stewart, Alabama" (1977)

I want to pay tribute to one of my favorite photographers, William Christenberry, who died November 28, 2016. He was, for me, one of the best photographers of old shacks, sheds, barns, and other ephemeral places. He worked mostly in the documentary tradition of Walker Evans. Richard B. Woodward, in his “Country Roads” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 3, 2006), says that Christenberry “moved in and out of the Evans penumbra all his life.” A brief “Goings On About Town” note in the January 9^th New Yorker calls him “a visual poet of the American south.” The note, a capsule review of a Christenberry exhibition at Pace/MacGill gallery, goes on to say,

The attention that Christenberry paid to his subjects, which he often photographed years apart, bordered on the devotional. Here, his deceptively modest images are poignant monuments to the passage—and the ravages—of time.

That last line neatly expresses one reason I’m drawn to Christenberry’s photos. Another reason is his feeling for a range of rich, corroded, distressed textures – thick rust, weather-beaten boards, eroded brick. Christenberry’s pictures show the texture of time.

The Inexplicable Omission of Ian Frazier’s “Hogs Wild” from The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2016”

I see the editors of The New York Times Book Review have selected their “100 Notable Books of 2016.” It’s a fine list, except for one whopping flaw – the inexplicable omission of Ian Frazier’s brilliant collection of New Yorker reporting pieces, Hogs Wild. Frazier is one of the all-time great literary journalists – in a class with A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and John McPhee. Hogs Wild is his richest collection. It should not only be in the Top 100; it should be in the Top 10. The Times’ failure to include it on its list is baffling.

Samanth Subramanian's "Following Fish"

I see Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish is mentioned in Simon Winchester’s excellent travel book "roundup," in this week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. Subramanian is an occasional New Yorker contributor. See, for example, his terrific "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September 2, 2013). Following Fish is one of my favorite books. Last year, I posted a review of it here. I also recommend Subramanian’s "Breach Candy" (Granta, Winter 2015), about an old colonial Mumbai club and a legal challenge to its “arch commandment” that only Europeans are allowed to be trust members. Here’s a taste:

He [Gerry Shirley, one of the litigants] remained alert even through the otherwise slackening texture of a day in court: the buzz of the first hour, then the settled keenness, the post-lunch torpor, the gradual straying of eyes to clocks, the dense energy of a system at work dissipating through the afternoon.

Anyone who’s spent a day in court will relate to that “gradual straying of eyes to clocks.”

November 16, 2015 Issue

Judith Thurman’s "Silent Partner," in this week’s issue, is the fourth review of Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra that I’ve read. The others are Michael Wood’s "Dear Poochums" (London Review of Books, October 23, 2014), Martin Amis’s "In 'Letters to Véra,' Vladimir Nabokov Writes to His Wife" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 10, 2015), and Stacy Schiff’s " 'His Joy, His Life' " (The New York Review of Books, November 19, 2015). Of course, I want to compare them. Amis’s piece is the most adoring. It focuses on Nabokov’s prose:

It is the prose itself that provides the lasting 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 Metro); 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 divine energy.

Schiff concurs: “He sounds unmistakably like himself, if without the polish, the mandarin disdain, the stage-managing. The jewels skitter helter-skelter across the page, from an émigré’s “stoop-shouldered speech” to a 3:00 AM encounter with a “very hungry, very lonely, very professional mosquito,” to a “waiter sweating hailstones.” Wood dissents: “Not much memorable writing though, unless you’re fond of the purpler shades of Nabokov.” Thurman’s opinion is mixed. She says, “The earliest letters, intoxicated with language and desire, are intoxicating to read.” But later in her piece, she writes, “Boyd and Schiff both drew upon these letters for their biographies, so they contain few surprises, except for the revelation—a disconcerting one, for a lover of Nabokov’s fiction—that he could be a bore.”

Of the four reviewers, only Thurman considers what it might’ve been like to actually live with Nabokov. She says,

There is little doubt that Mrs. Nabokov took a keen interest in her husband’s every triumph, toothache, and fried egg. But it is also possible to imagine that, in bleak moments, she tired of his endearments (“my little sunshine”), bridled at his pet names (“lumpikin”), and resented the ostentation of a love that can be hard to distinguish from self-infatuation (“It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts”).

Wood, Schiff, and Thurman all note the one-sidedness of the correspondence; Amis seems oblivious to it. Wood writes, “There are no letters from Véra in this book. There are none extant: she got rid of them all.” Schiff says,

In the end all of the correspondence would be his. Somewhere along the line, Véra’s letters disappeared. Dmitri Nabokov maintained that his mother—pathologically private, and well aware who the writer in the household was—destroyed them, although there is no evidence that she did so. It is just as likely that their recipient misplaced them; he was a man in whose hands telephone numbers evaporated, who could lose a book of matches in a tiny room, who might entrust his return ticket to the train conductor. We are left to reconstruct the object of Nabokov’s affection entirely from his side of the correspondence.

Wood and Schiff appear to accept the one-sidedness without question. But Thurman takes a different view. She writes,

At the end of this volume, you have to wonder what Véra’s qualms were as she disposed of her letters. She must have had some. The truth of her past would never be complete without them. Was it the act of a morbidly private woman refusing to expose herself—and thus, consciously or not, enshrining her mystique? Or an auto-da-fé that destroyed the evidence of wifely heresy? These questions reverberate in the echo chamber of “Letters to Véra.” “You are my mask,” Nabokov told her.

I find Thurman’s skepticism refreshing. All four reviews are absorbing. They raise the old question about what bearing, if any, our knowledge of a writer’s private life should have on our appreciation of his or her work. In Nabokov’s case, the answer appears to be that without Véra, he may not have been the writer he was. As Thurman says, “Each of them found a lodestar in the other.”

In Praise of John Updike's Poetry (Contra Dan Chiasson)

John Updike (Photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

I’m not sure Dan Chiasson’s "Boston Boys" (The New Yorker, November 2, 2015) does full justice to John Updike’s poetry. Yes, it strongly recommends the new Selected Poems (“a book that anybody who loves Updike, or poetry, or Cape Ann—or, for that matter, golf or sex—should read”). And yes, it calls “Endpoint” “a perfect sonnet sequence.” But it also says things like, “The problem is that all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him, and we don’t associate cheer with great poetry,” and “Updike’s poems level our intrinsic ranking of occasions,” and “Vocabulary is the most overrated element of good writing, or so these poems tempt us to conclude.”

These are questionable criticisms. The claim that “all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him” is easily disproved. Take, for example, his superb "Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth" (The New Yorker, March 16, 2009), in which he pays tribute to his hometown of Shillington (“all a writer needs, / all there in Shillington, its trolley cars / and little factories, cornfields and trees, / leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines”), and concludes, “I had to move / to beautiful New England—its triple / deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets— / to learn how drear and deadly life can be.” I don’t detect any cheer there. In his great “Perfection Wasted” (The New Yorker, May 7, 1990), he contemplates death:

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

which took a whole life to develop and market—

the quips, the witticisms, the slant

adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

their tears confused with their diamond earrings,

their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

their response and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;

imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

No cheer there, either. See also the recently published "Coming Into New York" (The New Yorker, October 5, 2015), in which Updike travels to New York City, likening his arrival to an encounter with death:

After Providence, Connecticut—

the green defiant landscape, unrelieved

except by ordered cities, smart and smug,

in spirit villages, too full of life

to be so called, too small to seem sincere.

And then like Death it comes upon us:

the plain of steaming trash, the tinge of brown

that colors now the trees and grass as though

exposed to rays sent from the core of heat—

these are the signs we see in retrospect.

But we look up amazed and wonder that

the green is gone out of our window, that

horizon on all sides is segmented

into so many tiny lines that we

mistake it for the profile of a wooded

hill against the sky, or that as far

as mind can go are buildings, paving, streets.

The tall ones rise into the mist like gods

serene and watchful, yet we fear, for we

have witnessed from this train the struggle to

complexity: the leaf has turned to stone.

Several other examples could be cited, but these three are sufficient to show that Chiasson’s view (“all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him”) is mistaken.

With respect to Chiasson’s argument that Updike’s poems “level our intrinsic ranking of occasion,” it seems to miss Updike’s point, which is that almost anything can be the subject of poetry, including bowel movements, earthworms, and telephone poles, if the poet’s aim is, in Updike’s famous words, “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”  In his piece, Chiasson says, “ ‘The Beautiful Bowel Movement’ and ‘Fellatio’ and ‘Rats’ and the Phi Beta Kappa poem, ‘Apologies to Harvard,’ are not so different from one another, while bowel movements, fellatio, rats, and Harvard in fact are.” Well, yes, of course, they are. But, as Updike shows, they’re all equally worthy as poetry subjects. Chiasson’s argument against “leveling” flies in the face of the great Whitmanesque project of cataloguing the open fields of American experience in which, as Updike observed, in his essay “Whitman’s Egotheism,” “An ideal equality is extended not only to persons but to things as well.”

Chiasson’s most serious criticism of Updike’s poetry is that its vocabulary is “overrated.” He says,

Everywhere, the ingenious adjective turns up to alter its noun, where “adjective” stands for the imagination and “noun” for reality prior to aesthetic transformation. This formula is so consistent as to render its local applications interchangeable. An “unchurched grandma” in a “foursquare house” might as well be a foursquare grandma in an unchurched house. The verbs all seem chosen from a list written in marker on a cinder-block wall, or taken from a word-of-the-day calendar. Vocabulary is the most overrated element of good writing, or so these poems tempt us to conclude.

In this passage, the word “formula” jumps out. Chiasson uses it again, in the next paragraph, when he says, “Updike loved writing so much that he couldn’t help himself from doing it whenever possible. The poems do not slow, or substantially darken, when he learns of his terminal illness, but the formula has a new urgency and poignancy.” To my knowledge, this is the first time Updike has been accused of formulaic writing. The charge takes my breath away. I will attempt to refute it by referring to the diction in three of my favorite Updike poems – the above-quoted “Perfection Wasted,” “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting” (in Endpoint and Other Poems, 2009), and “Bindweed” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991).

“Perfection Wasted” contains seventeen unmodified nouns: death, magic, quips, witticisms, slant, lip, stage, laughter, tears, heartbeat, response, performance, joke, phone, memories, imitators, descendants. Chiasson alleges, “Everywhere, the ingenious adjective turns up to alter its noun.” Where are they? Well, in “Perfection Wasted,” there are nine nouns modified by adjectives: regrettable thing, whole life, loved ones, soft faces, footlight glow, diamond earrings, warm pooled breath, rapid-access file, whole act. I submit that none of the aforesaid adjectives fall in the category of “ingenious”; they’re all plain, basic words. Let’s look at the verbs and gerunds. There are five of them: is, ceasing, took, do, aren’t. And there are five used as adjectives: adjusted, blanched, confused, twinned, packed. Do these verbs “seem chosen from a list written in marker on a cinder-block wall, or taken from a word-of-the-day calendar”? Most of them are just simple ordinary words – certainly not word-of-the-day calendar material.

Let’s look at the marvelous “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting.” It reads as follows:

The hedge must have seemed as ever,

seeds and yew berries secreted beneath,

small edible matter only a bird’s eye could see,

mixed with the brown of shed needles and earth—

a safe quiet cave such as nature affords the meek,

entered low, on foot, the feathered head

alert to what it sought, bright eyes darting

everywhere but above, where net had been laid.

  

Then, at some moment mercifully unwitnessed,

an attempt to rise higher, to fly,

met by an all but invisible limit, beating wings

pinioned, ground instinct denied. The panicky

thrashing and flutter, in daylight and air,

their freedom impossibly close, all about!

  

How many starved hours of struggle resumed

in fits of life’s irritation did it take

to seal and sew shut the berry-bright eyes

and untie the tiny wild knot of a heart?

I cannot know, discovering this wad

of junco-fluff, weightless and wordless

in its corner of netting deer cannot chew through

nor gravity-defying bird bones break.

This poem contains sixteen unmodified nouns (hedge, seeds, yew berries, earth, nature, net, attempt, daylight, air, freedom, fits, heart, wad, junco-fluff, corner, deer), fourteen modified nouns (small edible matter, bird’s eye, shed needles, safe quiet cave, feathered head, bright eyes, invisible limit, beating wings, ground instinct, starved hours, life’s irritation, berry-bright eyes, tiny wild knot, gravity-defying bird bones), and seventeen verbs and gerunds (seemed, secreted, see, mixed, affords, entered, sought, darting, met, resumed, take, seal, sew, untie, cannot, discovering, break). Again, I don’t see any evidence of the alleged formula. The majority of the nouns are unmodified; where there is modification, the adjectives used are hardly what I’d call “ingenious.” The verbs are mostly ordinary.

One more example – the wonderful “Bindweed”:

Intelligence is sometimes a help.

The bindweed doesn’t know

when it begins to climb a wand of grass

that this is no tree and will bend

its flourishing dependent back to earth.

But bindweed has a trick: self-

stiffening, entwining two- or three-ply,

to boost itself up, into the lilacs.

Without much forethought it manages

to imitate the lilac leaves and lose

itself to all but the avidest clippers.

To spy it out, to clip near the root

and unwind the climbing tight spiral

with a motion the reverse of its own

feels like treachery – death to a plotter

whose intelligence mirrors ours, twist for twist.

It has sixteen unmodified nouns (intelligence, help, bindweed, wand, grass, tree, earth, trick, lilacs, forethought, root, motion, treachery, death, plotter, twist), four modified nouns (flourishing dependent, lilac leaves, avidest clippers, climbing tight spiral), and seventeen verbs and gerunds (is, doesn’t, know, begins, climbs, bend, has, entwining, boost, manages, imitate, lose, spy, clip, unwind, feels, mirrors). Looking at “Bindweed,” I don’t see the formula that Chiasson speaks of. In fact, I would go so far as to say that transformation is not what Updike was trying to achieve in his poetry. Descriptive accuracy was his aim. Clive James, in his excellent "Final Act" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 28, 2009), a review of Updike’s Endpoint and Other Poems, says, “But from the thematic angle there is a strict discipline in operation. Every recollection has to be specific.” Chiasson makes this point, too, I think, when he says, in his piece, that he remembers reading the “Endpoint” poems in The New Yorker and “marveling at their authenticity.” By “authenticity” I think he means realness – the thing itself. That’s the quality in Updike’s poetry that I treasure.