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. 

Best of 2018: The Critics

Chris Gash, illustration for Alexandra Schwartz's "Margin of Error"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2018 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “No Escape,” November 19, 2018 (“Speaking of color, a room in which many of Warhol’s multihued “Flowers” of the sixties adorn his chartreuse-and-cerise “Cow Wallpaper,” from the same period, is like a chromatic car wash. You emerge with your optic nerve cleansed, buffed, and sparkling”).

2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” February 5, 2018 (“Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires”).

3. Peter Schjeldahl, “Performance,” October 1, 2018 (“A frontal, tumultuous scrum of two big cats, three horses, and five Arabian hunters threatens to burst from the canvas. Claws, hooves, teeth, and scimitars contend. Primary colors blaze. Black resounds. It’s a dazzling picture, but Delacroix’s open competition with Rubens, who was denied a riposte by virtue of being two centuries deceased, gives it the air of an elephantine bagatelle”).

4. Anthony Lane, “Unusual Suspects,” April 2, 2018 [“James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on ‘The Rose Tattoo’ (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park”].

5. James Wood, “Departure Lounge,” October 1, 2018 (“There is the utopian theory of mobility and endless curiosity, and there is our daily reality, which is composed of a billion familiar details, most of them indescribable—the rooms we sit in, and the dimmer rooms we were once raised in; the streets we live on, and the old streets we grew up on, which truly exist now only in our heads. There is the desirable horizon, but there is also the furrowed field, which we know so well and which has made us who we are”).

6. Dan Chiasson, “Anybody There?,” April 23, 2018 (“On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from ‘2001’ looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture”).

7. Lidija Haas, “The Disbelieved,” June 4 & 11, 2018 (“She warns that ‘nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.’ This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey”).

8. Thomas Mallon, “Shots in the Dark,” May 28, 2018 (“With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees”).

9. Andrew Marantz, “Friends in High Places,” January 8, 2018 [“In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool)”].

10. Alexandra Schwartz, “Margin of Error,” October 29, 2018 (“His John, by turns petty, aggressive, and self-pitying, looms a head above Radcliffe’s Jim, pouring whiskey and slinging insults, plus the occasional fist, as the younger man stands his ground, piously pelting him with inaccuracy after inaccuracy”).

May 28, 2018 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue I enjoyed most is Thomas Mallon’s “Shots in the Dark,” a review of Christopher Bonanos’s Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous. Mallon approaches Weegee from various angles – voyeur, exhibitionist, street photographer, artist. He calls him a “night-crawling creature of newsprint.” He notes that Weegee staged some of his pictures. But he also says,

There were plenty of occasions when circumstances arranged themselves without need of manipulation—ones Weegee recognized for their unlikely, organic beauty, and took pains to capture before they could disappear from his viewfinder. “Extra! Weegee!” reproduces his photograph of a church fire on West 122nd Street, where the water arcs made by several fire hoses appear to be flying buttresses, permanent parts of the structure they’ve just come to save. In a nighttime picture, a thin man near a lamppost looks like one of Giacometti’s elongated sculptures. A shot through the open doors of a paddy wagon reveals two men on opposite sides of the van’s spare tire, covering their faces with hats; the result is a comic mystery and a sort of Mickey Mouse silhouette, in which their hats look like ears.

My favorite passage in Mallon’s piece describes the transformative power of Weegee’s art:

With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees. For a split second, the immigrant scrapper could be God, or, at least, Lucifer.

“Shots in the Dark” is an excellent appreciation of Weegee’s gritty, grisly aesthetic. I enjoyed it immensely. 

February 5, 2018 Issue

This week’s issue contains four excellent pieces: Michael Chabon’s “The Recipe for Life,” Ian Frazier’s “Airborne,” Peter Schjeldahl’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Thomas Mallon’s “House Style.”

Chabon’s “The Recipe for Life” is a vivid exploration of his memories as a kid tagging along with his father, a doctor, on his evening visits to people’s homes to conduct insurance physicals. The piece is marvelously specific. Here, for example, is Chabon comparing his toy doctor bag, which he brings with him on these outings, with his father’s real one:

My black bag is plastic, too, a flimsy, lightweight affair with none of the pachyderm heft and dignity of my father’s. The mouth of my father’s bag opens and closes smoothly on the hinges of a secret armature, clasped by a heavy brass tongue that slides home with a satisfying click. Mine pops open when you flip a plastic tab that has begun to shear loose and will soon snap off. A vial of candy “pills” was the sole advantage that my black bag possessed over my father’s, but I have long since prescribed and administered them to myself. The empty vial rolls around at the bottom of the bag.

That “clasped by a heavy brass tongue that slides home with a satisfying click” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! It ends beautifully with Chabon lying beside his frail father, both of them watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on TV (“We lie there for a long time, contemplating Lang’s quaint dystopia as it silently unravels”). Chabon has an epiphany:

And then, equally unbidden, comes a thought: This is how it will be when he is gone. I will be lying on a bed somewhere, watching “Citizen Kane,” or “A Night at the Opera,” or “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” or some other film that became beloved to me through my father’s own loving intervention, and, even though he won’t be there anymore, I will still be watching it with him. I will hear his voice then the way I am hearing it now, in my head, this instrument that was tuned to my father’s signal long ago, angled to catch the flow of his information, his opinions, all the million great and minor things he knows. After he’s gone into that all too imaginable darkness—soon enough now—I will find another purpose for the superpower that my father discovered in me, one evening half a century ago, riding the solitary rails of my imagination into our mutual story, into the future we envisioned and the history we actually accumulated; into the vanished world that he once inhabited. 

Chabon wrings deep meditated meaning from those long ago father-and-son house calls. “The Recipe for Life” is a “Personal History” masterpiece.

Ian Frazier’s “Airborne” is about (to quote the story’s tagline) “the rise of drone racing and its elite pilots.” Normally, I’d take a pass on such a subject. I’m just not interested in electronic games. But this is a Frazier piece, and Frazier is my idol. So I reluctantly plunged in. The first paragraph grabbed me:

In a canyon in the Rocky Mountain Front above Fort Collins, Colorado, a young man named Jordan Temkin is flying his drone. He wears goggles that show him a video feed from a camera built into the drone, and he holds a console with twin joysticks that control the direction, angle, pitch, yaw, and speed of the flight. He sets the drone on the gravel at his feet. Just downhill is the Cache la Poudre River. The canyon rises to maybe three hundred feet above. He gives a command and the drone leaps to the top of the canyon in an instant. Then it is soaring over the highest places, looking down on Temkin, a small figure sitting on the tailgate of his car. At eighty miles an hour, the shadow of the drone flashes across the face of the rocks. Then Temkin swoops it down to the surface of the river, where it zips a few feet above the water. Because of where the sun is, the river is a blast of silver light. Temkin takes the drone upward again and veers into an intersecting canyon.

I relished Frazier’s use of the present tense, and that “Because of where the sun is, the river is a blast of silver light” is wonderful. I continued reading, savoring the Frazierian touches, e.g., his finding a small drone caught in a tree (“I examined it in wonder, as if I were Stone Age Man”), his visit to the home of two ace drone pilots in Fort Collins, Colorado (“I was amazed to find their domestic arrangements so orderly, and not like the chaos I inhabited when I was twenty-six”), and, most enjoyable, his inventory of the stuff in the pilots’ basement:

Soldering equipment, extension cords, boxes upon boxes of batteries in various states of freshness, quad motors, control consoles, F.P.V. goggles with the name Fat Shark (the main goggle manufacturer) prominently displayed, quads of many sizes—down to the pocket-size minis that the pilots use to make insect-eye-view videos of their living room and kitchen, flying the little drones between chair legs and couch sections and around the peanut-butter jar on the counter—such a profusion of gear gave the basement a sorcerer’s-workshop richness. 

Frazier’s delightful piece proves the old saw that almost any subject can be interesting if you write about it well enough.

Peter Schjeldahl’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a review of the Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition of photographs by Peter Hujar. Schjeldahl writes,

Each photograph shoulders aside its neighbors and stops you dead: a glittering nocturnal view of a West Side high-rise above a soulfully trusting Italian donkey, a naked young man and an expanse of unquiet Hudson River waters, William S. Burroughs being typically saturnine and a young man placidly sucking on his own big toe, a suavely pensive older man and a pair of high heels found amid trash in Newark, a dead seagull on a beach and a Hujar self-portrait. The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires. 

In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Schjeldahl eschews stylistic analysis in favor of sensual response. That “The works have in common less a visual vocabulary than a uniform intensity and practically a smell, as of smoldering electrical wires” is brilliant.

Thomas Mallon’s absorbing “House Style” is a review of Martin Amis’s new essay collection The Rub of Time. Mallon says,

Amis’s efforts toward precision and freshness—an explicator’s attempt to “make it new” whenever he can—are everywhere apparent. He may, like most writers, aspire to aphorism (“envy being best understood as empathy gone wrong”), but, by the nature of its brevity, aphorism is evidence-free, and what Amis enjoys most—outside those priestly moments of Bellow recitation—is offering the proof of things: opening up the patient, putting the organs on the table, and taking a poke at the evidence. 

I agree. Amis is a great literary critic, right up there with John Updike and James Wood. What they have in common is a love of quotation – “offering the proof of things,” as Mallon puts it.

Mallon himself has written some memorable reviews. My favorite is “The Norman Context” (In Fact, 2001), which begins,

Howard Norman’s four works of fiction amount to only about a thousand pages and seem somehow less like an oeuvre than an eccentric stash, similar to the cryptic paintings and antique radios and wooden bird decoys that line the pages of the books themselves. And yet, for all their humble clutter, they prove exquisite, like pieces of folk art whose simplicity postpones a sly impact.

Mallon's “House Style,” in this week’s issue, is one of his best.

February 4, 2013 Issue

Thomas Mallon’s “Wag the Dog,” in this week’s issue, is a tonic affirmation of nonfiction’s fundamental principle: stick to the facts. This principle is under assault these days by writers who proffer fictional truth as a substitute for the real thing. For example, James Wood appears quite comfortable with essayists who mingle fact and fiction. In his review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection Pulphead, he praises the contemporary essay’s “sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality” (“Reality Effects,” The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011). Mallon admirably dissents from this slippery approach. In “Wag the Dog,” a review of two books about Richard Nixon – Kevin Mattson’s Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952 and Jeffrey Frank’s Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage – Mallon laudably upholds the distinction between fact and fiction, emphasizing that it’s not the role of the historian to “novelize.” He says, “Mattson makes clear from the first page of Just Plain Dick that he would really rather be writing a novel.” Regarding Frank’s book, he writes,

Unlike Mattson, Frank does not surrender to any temptation to novelize, even though he is a novelist, the author of a well-regarded “Washington trilogy” that includes The Columnist (2001). Ike and Dick shows how much life remains in artfully straightforward narrative history.

I applaud Mallon’s criticism of Mattson’s novelizing impulse. It upholds factual writing’s core value: accuracy. 

Mendelsohn's Malice

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his malicious “The Truman Show” (The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004; included in Mendelsohn’s 2008 collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken) looks down his nose at Truman Capote and judges him to be a failure. He says it three times: (1) “In his inexorable disintegration, Capote represents a distinct type of American failure – the artist whose early success is so spectacular that both life and art are forever trapped by, and associated with, long-past triumphs”; (2) “Thus seduced by his own reputation, he failed to pursue an artistic avenue that could well have led him to greater success”; (3) “Together, they [a volume of Capote’s letters entitled Too Brief a Treat and The Complete Short Stories of Truman Capote] provide intriguing insights into the nature both of his gift and of his terrible failure.” Terrible failure? We are talking here about the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood, and – my favorite Capote work – The Muses are Heard. Rather than focusing on Capote’s writing, Mendelsohn dwells on Capote’s personal life. In addition to calling Capote a failure, he also calls him an “inveterate liar.” I find this ad hominem form of book reviewing despicable. I’m interested in the writing, not the writer. Compare Mendelsohn’s piece with Thomas Mallon’s New Yorker review of the same two Capote books (“Golden Boy,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2004). Mallon says,

To best experience Capote the stylist, one must go back to his short fiction, his work in the form that he called his “great love”; it was a genre he neglected through the nineteen-sixties, and then, near the end of his life, began to woo again. In fewer than four hundred pages, Random House has just given us “The Complete Stories of Truman Capote” ($24.95). If some of the earliest, most precocious efforts seem derivative (“My Side of the Matter” now feels awfully like Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”), one experiences as strongly as ever his gift for concrete abstraction (“She had a hectic brightness”) and his spectacular observancy: the eyes of a woman taking off her glasses seem “stunned by freedom; the skimpily lashed lids fluttered like long-captive birds abruptly let loose.” Again and again, his lyricim, to poignant effect, stops just short of overripeness: a parked car, buried in new snow, “winked its headlights: help! help! silent, like the heart’s distress.”

By staying close to Capote’s writing, Mallon's piece is much fairer than Mendelsohn’s.

Here are two more examples of Capote’s “spectacular observancy.” The first one is from his great The Muses are Heard, which ran as a two-part article in The New Yorker (October 20 & 27, 1956), and the second one is from his much maligned “La Côte Basque,” which is a fragment of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, published in 1986:

Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, we rode for forty minutes through the blackened acres of bombed-out East Berlin. The two additional buses, with the rest of the company, had arrived at the station before us. We joined the others on the platform where The Blue Express waited. Mrs. Gershwin was there, supervising the loading of her luggage onto the train. She was wearing a nutria coat and, over her arm, carried a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag.

Even for this those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can’t refuse: Dom Pérignon, and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash.

Those acutely seen details – “a mink coat zippered into a plastic bag,” champagne “bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze” – are the mark of a terrific describer. Capote’s writing brims with such details. I think, in the long run, Judge Time will be kind to it. Meanwhile, we’ll have to put up with moralizing critics like Daniel Mendelsohn who judge Capote’s life, not his work.

Credit: The above 1973 photograph of Truman Capote is by Henry Diltz, and is used to illustrate Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show,” The New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2004.