Approaches to Writing: McPhee v. Klinkenborg

John McPhee and Verlyn Klinkenborg, two of my favorite writers, approach composition quite differently from each other. McPhee is a structuralist. He always starts by making a plan, conceptualizing his entire piece in outline. In his Draft No. 4 (2017), he says, “I always know where I intend to end before I have much begun to write.” Klinkenborg is an anti-structuralist. He’s against outlines. In his Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012), he says,

You’re more likely to find the right path –
The interesting path through your subject and thoughts –
In a sentence-by-sentence search than in an outline.

Who is right? I can see the merits of McPhee’s structuralism. But Klinkenborg’s sentence-by-sentence search appeals to me, too. Neither writer is dogmatic about his method. McPhee says, “What counts is a finished piece, and how you get there is idiosyncratic.” Klinkenborg says, “You decide what works for you.” 

Composing these ephemeral blog notes, I find I’m more Klinkenborg than McPhee. One point both writers agree on is the importance of following your interests. McPhee says, “I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me.” Klinkenborg says, “Start by learning to recognize what interests you.” That is one of this blog’s main aims.

Two Excellent Critical Pieces

Camille Pissarro, Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873)

I want to note the recent appearance of two extraordinary essay-reviews by two of my favorite writers: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Wendell Berry’s High Horse” (The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2020) and T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020). 

Klinkenborg’s piece is a biting critique of Wendell Berry’s collected essays What I Stand On. “All too often,” Klinkenborg says, “I’m disturbed, to the point of physical unease, by the involuted, strangely patristic way his writing and thinking move.” He says that Berry “often fails to do the first important job of a writer – ‘even’ a nonfiction writer – which is to make sentences that breathe with the life of the body, even when that body happens to be thinking.” He notes “the extraordinarily high degree of abstraction and generalization” in Berry’s prose. Klinkenborg’s close analysis of Berry’s sentences is thrilling. So is his skewering of the way Berry uses metaphor:

There’s also a kind of skittering in The Long-Legged House that reminds me of Thoreau – an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge. You can hear a version of this in the way that Thoreau – like Berry – uses metaphor. The instantaneous fusion of resemblance and dissonance that I hope to find in a good metaphor – the suddenness of perception – isn’t much use to Thoreau, because he it’s hard to moralize one that works that way. Every actual thing in his prose seems to quiver with the desire to become metaphorical or symbolic, like the dead horse in Walden whose strong scent causes Thoreau to think of the myriads of creatures squashed and gobbled and “run over in the road,” ending in a vision of “universal innocence.” It’s a relief when things remain merely themselves.

That “an uncannily quick movement from local to universal and back again, as if the writer were just waiting to slip an abstraction through a gap in the hedge” is brilliant! The whole piece is brilliant – a vigorous application of the dictum that Klinkenborg set out in his great Several short sentences about writing (2012): The goal is “To get your words, your phrases, as close as you can to the solidity of the world your noticing.”

T. J. Clark’s “Strange Apprentice” is a wonderful comparative analysis of Pissarro and Cézanne. It brims with delicious description. Clark says of Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873),

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders.

Yes, and there are many such wonders in Clark’s piece, too. Here’s another – a comparison of Pissarro’s Louveciennes (1871) with Cézanne’s Louveciennes (c.1873):

Colour in the Cézanne is not primarily an aspect – a felt reality – of an atmosphere: it adheres somewhat perfunctorily to things. Look, for example, at the yellows and oranges on the old bulwark at the side of the road, or the yellows and browns making the screen of trees to the right of the two figures, over the low wall. Equally, space in Cézanne’s copy is not a filled emptiness. It is not something grounded and contained. It does not approach the viewer along the modest dirt road, across a solid proximity, offering us a way into the illusion. ‘Way’ is a notion foreign to Cézanne’s vision. Where in general we might be in space is an enigma in the copy: the houses in the distance in the original enter a kind of non-distance, or anti-distance, when Cézanne redoes them – not that that means they are nearer, more tangible. The highest house is an epitome of this. Cézanne takes Pissarro’s gentle indications of a road climbing the hill to the house and zigzagging left towards it, and turns the whole collocation into a crisp folding of edges and collision of overlapping planes.

Who would not want such sublime writing to continue forever? Reading “Strange Apprentice,” I found myself slowing down to prolong the pleasure. I didn’t want it to end.

Both these splendid pieces went straight into my personal anthology of great criticism.

Verlyn Klinkenborg and the Art of Description

Husqvarna Viking Automatic Type 21E

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a machinery rhapsodist extraordinaire. Recall his brilliant description of a 1979 International Harvester 230 windrower in his great Making Hay (1986). This week, in NYR Daily’s excellent “Pandemic Journal” series, he posted a piece on making face masks that contains a wonderful description of a Husqvarna Viking 21A sewing machine: 

The Husqvarna Viking 21a is a sleek, tubular machine the color of the 1950s—a pale, aqueous turquoise. I press the foot pedal and the electric motor begins to hum, and then the needle moves up and down. I know, from having taken it apart, how elaborate the inner workings of this machine are—belts, cogs, shafts, and gears shuttling round and round and back and forth in perfect synchrony. It is really a world of its own, a miniature factory. The internal light gleams down upon the arm, the feed dogs pull the cloth along, upper and lower threads intertwine in a stitch, and there is the harmonious sound of elaborate integration. At low speeds, the 21a sounds a little like a railroad engine moving slowly over the tracks. At higher speeds, it begins to whir. It does exactly what it was engineered to do, and it does it brilliantly.

That “The internal light gleams down upon the arm, the feed dogs pull the cloth along, upper and lower threads intertwine in a stitch, and there is the harmonious sound of elaborate integration” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – a superb example of the art of description. 

November 23, 2015 Issue

Kathryn Schulz’s "Writers in the Storm," in this week’s issue, tracks what she calls “the over-all decline of weather in literature.” She writes, “While meteorology was advancing, then, the role of weather in literature began to decline.” This doesn’t mesh with my own reading experience. My favorite books brim with weather:

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. [Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989]

The day was growing overcast, and we walked out of the woods and headed toward the Meadowlands despite Victor’s misgivings. [Robert Sullivan, The Meadowlands, 1998]

Woke up in brilliant sunshine in the shaking train, going through the Rocky Mountain Trench, as it is called, a long straight fault valley on the west slopes, with snow ranges on either side, an area where they were building a road in 1960 – but still no road. [Edward Hoagland, Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. [John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977]

On sunny, crystal clear mornings in the fall, when it is possible to see into the water, he gets in one of his boats and rows out into the flats and catches some river shrimp. [Joseph Mitchell, The Bottom of the Harbor, 1959]

Afternoon light, clinging to the land, seemed to flee to the snowy sky as twilight drew on. [Verlyn Klinkenborg, Making Hay, 1986]

The wind is steady out of the east, a strong breeze of maybe thirty to thirty-five. [Anthony Bailey, The Outer Banks, 1989]

The cabin emerges silently up ahead in the blowing snow as the storm closes in. [Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, 1986]

The rising sun shot hard, bright beams straight down the canyon east to west, bleeding in a muscular heat. [Sallie Tisdale, Stepping Westward, 1991]

But the boat was safe here, displaced from the world in its cocoon of fog, and I was glad to stay. [Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau, 1999]

My list could go on and on. Schulz’s theory is too sweeping; her definition of literature is too narrow. She fails to consider the many splendid nature and travel books in which weather is central.

October 11, 2010 Issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg’s lyrical reconstruction of Buffalo’s East Side, as it was in 1947 (see my “Interesting Emendations” post here ), was still fresh in my mind when I opened this week’s issue of the magazine and found an article with the heading “Letter From Buffalo.” The article, called "Pay Up," is by Jake Halpern. It’s about a small-time debt collector named Jimmy, and it describes a present-day Buffalo that is very different from Klinkenborg’s pulsing, thriving post-war metropolis. In 1947, Buffalo was, in Klinkenborg’s words, “still an outpost of the big time.” In 2010, Buffalo is, in Halpern’s words, “among the poorest cities in the nation.” Halpern hangs out with Jimmy, drives around with him in what Jimmy calls his “raggedy-ass truck,” visits Jimmy’s office, which is located in a former karate academy “on a busy thoroughfare in a rough area,” meets his oldest son, Jimmy, Jr., whom Jimmy had once beaten, goes to church with him, meets a friend who runs a soul-food restaurant, is present at Jimmy’s office for what’s known in the debt collection business as a “talk-off,” which Halpern vividly describes. Halpern writes a plain, point-and-shoot prose that eschews similes and metaphors. At least that’s the way he’s written “Pay Up.” I’m not familiar with his other work. His strong suit appears to be dialogue, and in Jimmy he’s found a street-smart, loquacious talker. Here is Jimmy talking about raising his young set of twins on his own, because their mother was serving a four-year sentence in jail:

“‘Man, I was Mr. Mom,’ he recalled. ‘I’m breaking down crying, ironing these little-bitty-ass pants at five o’clock in the morning, trying to get these kids ready for school. Like, man, if you let them oversleep they going to have a rough day, man. You got to get them up. That was worse than any street situation I was in, but the reward was so good, man.’”

And here is one of Jimmy’s “point callers,” a former crack dealer named Jamal, describing Jimmy: “‘Jimmy was never the kind of person you fucked with, and he still ain’t,’ Jamal explained. ‘Don’t take his kindness for weakness. The street shit is always going to be in you.’” If you put priority on reality over theory, as I do, you are going to appreciate Halpern’s “Pay Up.” It delivers you exactly into the rub of things. (“Man, you right in the underbelly of it,” Jimmy says to Halpern, at one point in their travels through the Bailey-Delavan area, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Buffalo.) Halpern’s piece reminds me of Ian Frazier’s "The Rap" (The New Yorker, December 8, 2008), except it doesn’t have Frazier’s descriptive artistry. There are no inspired sentences in “Pay Up” like this one, for example, in “The Rap”: “Railroad tracks in a sunken road cut run along-side, and the wider neighborhood offers auto junk yards of crashed vehicles with their air bags deployed, vast no-name warehouses, and chain-link fences grafted to thickets of ailanthus trees.” But "Pay Up" has its own merits, not least of which is its realism. It's a realist's raw variation on Klinkenborg's gorgeous elegy for a once great city.

Interesting Emendations: Verlyn Klinkenborg's "George & Eddie's"

The blurb on the back of the paperback edition of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s The Last Fine Time (1991) says it is a “tour de force of lyrical style.” That’s the way it struck me when I read the New Yorker version of it, called “George & Eddie’s,” when it appeared in the magazine’s December 24, 1990 issue. “George & Eddie’s” is a recreation of Buffalo’s East Side, circa 1947, right down to “the milk-glass bulbs of the street lamps, mounted on shapely iron posts.” My favorite passage is the part about the insurance atlases. Klinkenborg ingeniously uses insurance atlases of the period – “immense bound volumes that plot the distribution of indemnity and risk” – to introduce us to 722 Sycamore Street, home of the Wenzek family and location of the Thomas Wenzek Restaurant, soon to become George & Eddie’s bar. Klinkenborg says, “For the East Side of Buffalo in 1947, such atlases seem to have whole chapters of two-and-a-half-story frame buildings, all rendered in outline from a serial aerial view.” The insurance atlases help Klinkenborg call up the past by sparking his imagination, not by what’s in them, but by what is absent. Klinkenborg says:

But the atlases do not record the presence of large, graceful elms in East Buffalo, or the way the streets were edged with square stone curbs, whose cutting and laying were the fiefdom of a potent Italian union. They do not mention the bricks that ran between the streetcar tracks, or the rumble the bricks caused when trucks crossed them, or the slithering roar of the streetcars themselves. They say nothing about the markets and the parks and the dusty shopfronts. From the records it is impossible to learn that the acres of two-and-a-half-story frame houses on Buffalo’s East Side had long since cohered into a Polish neighborhood, where each house was bound to the houses around it by an incalculable number of associations – associations that in many cases reached back past the Atlantic voyage, past the crowded North Sea docks, and into the partitioned Old Country itself.

How wonderful those details about the “rumble of the bricks” and the “slithering roar of the streetcars.” It is the achievement of this lovely piece to bring the insurance atlases to life. Klinkenborg makes the Wenzek’s lives specific, bringing us close to their lived experience, thereby rescuing them from oblivion. He has a profound sense of life’s transience. At one point, he says, “Though no one sees the change coming, it surrounds them, in small ways as yet.” Interestingly, The Last Fine Time contains a different version of the above-quoted “insurance atlases” passage. Here is the passage as set out in the book:

Insurance atlases of the period do not record the presence of large, graceful trees in East Buffalo, or the way the streets were edged with square stone curbs, whose cutting and laying were the fiefdom of a potent Italian union. They do not mention the bricks that ran between the streetcar tracks or the rumble they caused when trucks turned across them or the slithering roar of the streetcars themselves. They say nothing about the markets and the parks and the dusty shopfronts. Nowhere do you find it written that this was part of town where a woman’s hands smelled different every day of the week – lye soap one morning, the next morning flour. From their commentary it is impossible to learn how the acres of two-and-a-half-story wood frame houses that rose up like a climax forest years ago had long since cohered into a Polish neighborhood, where each house was bound to the houses around it by an incalculable, and undelineable, number of associations – associations that in many cases reached past the Atlantic voyage, past the crowded North Sea docks and their rail connections, and into the absorbent landscape of the partitioned Old Country itself. According to insurance maps, the only thing the houses of the East side could communicate was flame.

The Last Fine Time is a filled-out version of “George & Eddie’s.” It’s as if “George & Eddie’s” was a preliminary sketch for the later book. Did Klinkenborg carve it out of The Last Fine Time manuscript? Or was it a preliminary draft on which he based the later book? My guess is that the book came first. I say this because of such indicators as the changing of “trees” and “turned across” in the book to “elms” and “crossed” in the magazine, and the deletion of “that rose up like a climax forest years ago,” “undelineable,” “and their rail connections,” “the absorbent landscape,” and the whole sentence about a woman’s hands smelling "different every day of the week" from the magazine version. To my mind, the tighter, crisper New Yorker version is preferable, although the more luxuriant book version better conveys Klinkenborg’s lyrical intensity. And in the book (but not in the magazine) there’s a paragraph that precedes the one above-quoted that contains the following additional beautiful description of the insurance atlases, a description that also works as a statement of Klinkenborg’s artistic purpose:

Here, from some supernal height, is visible the universal grid of urban living, as delicate a tracery as the lace on a christening gown. The tiniest squares are houses, every house an invisible suite of rooms through which daylight crawls and the smells of cooking percolate like moods. The feeling they stir comes from knowing that private life is a grave of incident – once lived, soon forgotten – and from trying to imagine the incidents of so many private lives without submitting to generalities. It is a feeling like compassion, but it also resembles the faith that existence is too varied, too ample, to be contained.