The Art of Quotation (Part V)

A. S. Byatt (Photo by Ozier Muhammad)

A. S. Byatt, in the Introduction to her essay collection On Histories and Stories (2000), wrote,

I should finally like to say something about the style of these essays. I quote extensively and at length. I tell the stories of books, I describe plots. When I first studied English, extensive quotation was a necessary part of the work of the critic. I. A. Richards showed his students that they were not really reading the words as they were written. He diagnosed and exposed stock responses. And whatever Leavis’s faults of dogmatic dismissal, irascibility prescriptiveness, he was a quoter of genius, and I increasingly look on my early readings of – and reading around, and following up of – those quotations as the guarantee, the proof, that we were all indeed engaged in the common pursuit of true judgment. 

She went on to say, “My quotations are like the slides in an art historical lecture – they are the Thing Itself.” 

Byatt was an extraordinary quoter: see, for example, her great “Van Gogh, Death and Summer” (included in her 1991 essay collection Passions of the Mind), in which she quotes passage after glorious passage from Van Gogh’s letters, celebrating his passionate love of color. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #8 "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' "

Illustration by Eric Nyquist, from Kathryn Schulz's "Pond Scum"

This is the third post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Kathryn Schulz's 'Pond Scum' " (October 27, 2015):

Kathryn Schulz, in her virulent "Pond Scum" (The New Yorker, October 19, 2015), calls Henry David Thoreau "self-obsessed," "narcissistic," "fanatical," "parochial," "egotistical," "disingenuous," "arrogant," "sanctimonious," "hypocritical," and a “thoroughgoing misanthrope.” She says, “The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization.” Reading her evisceration of Thoreau’s character, I was reminded of John Updike’s comment on Lord Byron: he “was a monster of vanity and appetite, with one possibly redeeming quality: he could write.” Schulz doesn’t spend much time on Thoreau’s writing ability. She’s too busy excoriating him for, among other things, shunning coffee (“I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee”). 

“Pond Scum” contains a number of original poison-tipped barbs. My favorite is Schulz’s description of Walden as “less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” 

Granted, Schulz does praise Thoreau’s gift for nature description. She says,

Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden.

Yes, it is a pleasure to read him on those things, and many more besides. So what’s Schulz’s point? Robert Sullivan, in his wonderful The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), says, “A central theme that anyone considering Thoreau must face early on is the jerk factor. Was Thoreau a jerk?” Well, we know where Schulz stands on that question. According to her, he was a jerk par excellence. But if he hadn’t been a jerk, maybe he wouldn’t have written the way he did. Somewhere in his letters, Van Gogh says, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” Similarly, Thoreau could say, “And if I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t write.” Who cares if Thoreau was a jerk? Most of us are jerks one way or another. But not many of us can write like Thoreau. 

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. 

Acts of Seeing: Yellow Boat

Photo by John MacDougall

In this series, I look at some of my own photos and try to determine their governing aesthetic. 

I love fishing boats. I love reflections. And, like my hero Van Gogh, I love yellow. It all came together in this picture, taken on Miscou Island, New Brunswick, October 4, 2022. 

Down with "Dialogical"

Van Gogh, from letter to Émile Bernard, March 18, 1888

“Dialogical” – what an ugly word! It sounds like something left over from the wastelands of Soviet industrialism. It’s like a cross between “dialectical” and “diabolical.” It's like the sluggish churning sound of an old washing machine - dialogical dialogical dialogical. Patrick Grant, in his The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study (2014), uses it to describe Van Gogh’s writing. He suggests that “a dialogical interplay among religion, morality, and art provides an implicit, quasi-narrative structure to the correspondence.” He refers to “the dialogical evolution of Van Gogh’s thinking.” He views the shifts in Van Gogh’s idealism as a “dialogical process.” He refers to “the dialogical complexities of Van Gogh’s writing.” He talks about “the dialogical transformations that the letters record.” That’s a lot of “dialogical” to digest. What does it mean? I think it stems from the word “dialogue,” as in a dialogue between religion and morality or a dialogue between morality and art. Grant’s theory is that Van Gogh’s writing embodies such dialogues. Okay, I get it. Analytically, "dialogical" might be justified. Aesthetically - as a description of Van Gogh's glorious, direct, spontaneous, talking letters - it's a dud. 

Landscape and Specificity

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (1896-99)

Mark Strand, in his “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” (included in his 2000 essay collection The Weather of Words), said, “The reality of landscape has little to do with accuracy of depiction or representation.” He said that in seeing a landscape, “What is usually experienced is something general and atmospheric, an impulse to identify with certain light or the look of a terrain.” He said that landscape painting “represents an escape from particularity.” 

Is he right? I don’t think so. The landscape paintings I admire brim with specificity. See, for example, the many inspired accuracies of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) – the shimmering areas “where the green of the pines shows against the blue of the sky,” “the parts of the ochre trunks where shadows outline and intermix,” “the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass” (I’m quoting here from John Updike’s wonderful description of Pines and Rocks in his Just Looking, 1989).

See also the exhaustive specifics of color and shape in Van Gogh’s The Plain of Auvers (1890).

Vincent Van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (1890)

Look at what Van Gogh said about painting it:

I am totally absorbed by that immense plain covered with fields of wheat which extends beyond the hillside; it is wide as the sea, of a subtle yellow, a subtle tender green, with the subtle violet of a plowed and weeded patch and with neatly delineated green spots of potato fields in bloom. All this under a sky of delicate colors, blue and white and pink and purple. For the time being I am calm, almost too calm, thus in the proper state of mind to paint all that. [from Van Gogh’s letter to his mother, July, 1890]

Such words do not evince the sensibility of a generalist. Quite the opposite – they show an artist intent on capturing the subtlest qualities of the Auvers landscape.

One more example: Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650-51). 

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm (1650-51)

T. J. Clark, in his brilliant The Sight of Death (2006), says of it, “The details are exquisite and singular.” Details such as the two birches, of which Clark notes, 

Poussin has put a lot of effort separating the two birch trees and having the leaves of the right-hand one be closer to us, overlapping and partly obscuring the others, and certainly catching the light differently – catching it full on, seemingly, and reflecting more of it back. So that this tree is more a flimsy three-dimensional substance, to the other’s pure silhouette.

These are only three examples, but they’re sufficient, I submit, to cast doubt on Strand’s view. Far from escaping particularity, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Poussin immersed themselves in it. 

Van Gogh and the Meaning of "Difficult"

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun (1889)

Wayne Koestenbaum, in his “Punctuation” (included in his delectable new essay collection Figure It Out), notes the absence of a comma in a sentence by Van Gogh:

“Very difficult very difficult,” Vincent van Gogh repeated without a comma, in a letter to his brother Theo. Vincent was in the last year of his life; fresh from the asylum, he busied himself with forecasts. “For there are splendid autumn effects to do … [T]he olive trees are very characteristic, and I am struggling to capture them. They are silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre. But very difficult very difficult.” (“Mais fort difficile fort difficile.”) Is he bragging about the difficulty? Worried about it? Difficult for him, because of his addiction to infelicity, or difficult for anyone, even the most conventionally skilled?

No, I don’ think Vincent was bragging. And I don’t think he was worrying. When he said “But very difficult very difficult,” he was simply saying he found the olive trees of Provence hard to paint. He said this most vividly in a letter to Émile Bernard ten days after he wrote the above-quoted letter to Theo:

My god, it’s a mighty tricky bit of country this, everything is difficult to do if one wants to get at its inner character so that it is not merely something vaguely experienced, but the true soil of Provence. And to manage that one has to work very hard, whereupon the results become naturally a bit abstract; for it’s a question of giving the sun and the sky their full force and brilliance, of retaining the fine aroma of wild thyme which pervades the baked and melancholy earth. It’s the olive trees here, old man, which would be your cup of tea. I haven’t had much luck with them myself this year, but I’ll come back to them, at least I intend to. They are like silver in an orange and purplish landscape under a large white sun…. [October 8, 1889]

That’s what Van Gogh meant by “difficult.”

Notes on Peter Schjeldahl's "Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light"

1. I'm a big fan of Peter Schjeldahl's writing. Reading his new book, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, is pure nirvana. Among its many pleasures: forty-five of the best New Yorker pieces he’s written since the publication of his last collection – the superb Let’s See; twenty-nine Village Voice pieces – all new to me; twenty 7 Days pieces, including his great “A Van Gogh Portrait” (originally titled “Portrait of Joseph Roulin”); two wonderful artist profiles (“Laura Owens” and “Rachel Harrison”); and his excellent “The Ghent Alterpiece” on the conservation of a fifteenth-century masterpiece. 

2. Of the forty-five New Yorker pieces, I think my favorites are “Zubaron’s Citrons” (originally titled “Bearing Fruit”), “Henri Matisse II” (originally titled “The Road to Nice”), and “The Ghent Alterpiece” (originally titled “The Flip Side”). All three of these pieces contain bravura descriptions of specific artworks. For example, here’s Schjeldahl’s description of Matisse’s The Piano Lesson:

The brushy, big canvas (eight feet high by nearly seven wide) represents Matisse’s son Pierre at an oddly pink-topped piano, his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow, in a schematized room: cornerless gray wall; the pale-blue frame of a French window opening onto triangular swatches of green and gray; a salmon rectangle of curtain; and a black window grille that echoes the curlicues in a music rack bearing the instrument’s brand name, Pleyel, spelled out in reverse. There is a lighted candle (indicating that the time of day is dusk), a metronome (indicating time itself), and two earlier Matisses: a small sculpture of a sensual odalisque and a large image from a painting of a stern-seeming woman seated on a high stool, floating free on the gray wall. The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch. Like any successful art, “The Piano Lesson” generates tensions of antithetical qualities—lyrical and harsh, mysterious and blatant, intimate and grand—and resolves them. It’s terrific, but the past century affords many paintings (and not all of them by Matisse and Picasso) that are as good or better. My preference for it is not a considered judgment. It’s a reflex, like the one that twitches when I’m asked my favorite movie, and I automatically, helplessly, say “Psycho.” [“Henri Matisse II”]

That “his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow” is ravishing. I relish the way the passage moves from description to commentary (“The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch”). The surprising mention of Psycho at the end makes me smile every time I read it.

Henri Matisse, "The Piano Lesson" (1916)

3. The Village Voice pieces brim with piquant observations. For example: “De Kooning’s keynote is a self-engulfment in painting that demands every resource of wit and skill not to become a mess” (“Willem de Kooning”); “Scanning the details is like being knocked down and getting back up to be knocked down again” (“Picasso and the Weeping Women”); “I left the show with smells of makeup, sweat, and alcohol in my mind’s nostrils and a conviction that Toulouse-Lautrec is now the most living of fin de siècle Frenchmen” (“Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec”); “He activates the occult handshake of aesthetics and sex” (Henri Matisse – I”). Some of the comments are quite funny (e.g., on Lucian Freud: “To tax Freud with misogyny seems pointless, given that he obviously despises and in some sense wants to fuck everybody, himself included”). But if you relish descriptive analysis of specific artworks, as I do, you may find the Village Voice essays somewhat less satisfying than the New Yorker pieces. For instance, compare Schjeldahl’s Village Voice “Caspar David Friedrich” with his New Yorker “Caspar David Friedrich.” In the Village Voice piece, he says,

The buzz of a Friedrich occurs when what have seemed mere tints on a tonal composition combust as distinctly as scented hues – citron lights, plum darks – and you don’t so much look at a picture as breathe it.

That is very beautiful. But in Schjeldahl’s artful hands, it’s just the beginning. Look at what he does with it, ten years later, in The New Yorker:

The pictures don’t give; they take. Something is drawn out of us with a harrowing effect, which Friedrich’s use of color nudges toward intoxication. What at first seem to be mere tints in a tonal range combust into distinctly scented, disembodied hues: drenching purples and scratchy russets, plum darks and citron lights. One doesn’t so much look at a Friedrich as inhale it, like nicotine. Friedrich is an artist of dusky fire, of twilight that sears. It is well worth sticking around for his shuddery pleasures, laced with something cold and weird.

That is mind-blowingly gorgeous!

4. “A Van Gogh Portrait” is unquestionably one of Schjeldahl’s greatest hits. I first read it in his slim 1990 collection The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990. Now, twenty-nine years later, it reappears, subtly revised, in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light. It’s interesting to note the changes. Here’s the brilliant opening paragraph of the 7 Days version:

From a distance, the face is closed, hieratic, and perhaps intimidating. Up close, the eyes seem frightened – they stare without focusing – and the features spread, threatening to lose track of each other. It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius, or something. Maybe just by the craft of painting. Decide for yourself when you make the welcoming visit to Portrait of Joseph Roulin by Vincent van Gogh, a new acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

From a distance, the face is closed, hieratic, and a bit intimidating. Up close, the eyes seem frightened. They stare without focusing. The features spread, threatening to lose track of one another. It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius invested in the craft of painting. Decide when you make your welcoming visit to Portrait of Joseph Roulin (1889) by Vincent van Gogh, a new acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art.

“Perhaps intimidating,” in the first line, has been changed to “a bit intimidating.” The second line has been reconstructed: the dashes have been converted to periods; the phrase “and the features spread, threatening to lose track of each other” is now a separate sentence (“The features spread, threatening to lose track of one another”). “Unified by genius, or something” and the next sentence (“Maybe by the craft of painting”) have been combined and revised: “It is a deracinated face in a conflicted picture that is unified by genius invested in the craft of painting.” “For yourself,” in the next sentence, has been deleted; “the” is changed to “your.” 

The paragraph is now more concise. Concision is a hallmark of Schjeldahl’s style. His wonderful description of the Portrait of Joesph Roulin has also been made more concise. Here’s the 7 Days version:

Painted in van Gogh’s Japanese inspired mode, Roulin is boldly contoured against a floral-patterned background. The composition is rife with spiral motifs (rousing the sympathy of the nearby spiral-happy Starry Night) and is keyed to a clash of fresh blue in the uniform and moody green (the background). Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, the forthright yellow-gold of his buttons, and the rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping. The overall design is about as hyperactive as relative symmetry can get. Roulin’s flesh is rendered in medievalish green and red hatchings.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

Painted in van Gogh’s Japanese-inspired mode, Roulin is boldly contoured against a floral-patterned background. The composition is rife with spiral motifs (rousing the empathy of the nearby spiral-happy Starry Night) and is keyed to a clash of fresh blue in the uniform and moody green in the background. Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, forthright yellow-gold in the buttons, and rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping. The overall composition is as hyperactive as relative symmetry can be. Roulin’s flesh is rendered in medieval-ish green and red hatchings. 

“Sympathy” has been changed to “empathy.” The brackets around “the background” have been dropped. “Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, the forthright yellow-gold of his buttons, and the rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping” has been trimmed to “Variously spiced browns in Roulin’s beard, forthright yellow-gold in the buttons, and rust reds and pinks in the flower shapes keep your eye jumping.” “The overall design is about” is now “The overall composition is.” “Can get” is now “can be.” These are all subtle improvements, illuminating Schjeldahl’s approach to style.

Vincent van Gogh, "Portrait of Joseph Roulin" (1889)

My favourite part of “A Van Gogh Portrait” is the baseball figuration at the end. Here’s the 7 Days version:

So make your first visit to Roulin count. Then observe the work’s action on its peers. The pictures in the same room by Gauguin, Seurat, Munch, Redon, and Rousseau may seem as elated as the teammates of a slugger who, having hit a home run, returns to their midst, with high fives all around.

Here’s the Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light version:

Make your initial visit to Roulin count. Then observe the effect on its peers. Gauguin, Seurat, Munch, Redon, and Rousseau flock like teammates of a slugger who, having homered, returns to their midst with high fives all around.

“So” and “the pictures in the same room” have been deleted. "Effect" has been substituted for "work's action." “May seem as elated” has been changed to “flock like”; “hit a home run” shortened to “homered.” An inspired image has been sharpened.

Updike on Van Gogh

One of this blog’s aims is to note new books by New Yorker writers. Over the past nine years, I’ve reviewed at least twenty of them here. But, for whatever reason, I neglected to notice John Updike’s great posthumous essay collection Higher Gossip, when it appeared in 2011. I want to try to correct that oversight now by considering two of Higher Gossip’s best pieces: “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” and “The Purest of Styles.” Both are on van Gogh, my favorite painter.

“Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” is a review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2005 exhibition Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. It abounds with beautiful descriptions of van Gogh’s art:

The foreground to the otherwise staid Nursery on Schenkweg (1882) shows the weedy, reedy edges of a ditch with the calligraphic energy, the half-suppressed violence, that would become the hallmark of his mature style.

The somewhat damaged and time-altered Landscape in Drenthe (1883), of utterly flat country in the northeastern Netherlands, is strikingly minimalist, piling upon the twilit moors a nearly empty sky lightly laden with reckless scribbles, in early premonition of van Gogh’s insistence that the sky is never really empty.

The Blute-Fin Mill (1887) is dashing in its application of soft graphite to the paper; the swift parallel horizontal strokes of the stairs and the kindred vertical strokes of the low building beside them invite the viewer to relish the artist’s virtuosity.

Public Garden in the Place Lamartine… and Orchard with Arles in the Background possess a nearly full set of the calligraphic gestures – quick hatchings and zigzag scribbles, small circles and specks – that are evolving alongside remnants of his Dutch literalist manner, most noticeable in the carefully traced branchings of foreground trees.

Everything squirms and twists. Clouds and hills, mountains and vegetation appear moulded from one wormy, resistant substance (Wheat Fields with Cypresses, 1889).

In Walled Wheat Field with Rising Sun– a drawing that, the catalogue shrugs, might have preceded or followed its partner painting – the field hurtles toward the wall while a swollen sun emits concentric waves like a struck drumhead.

Looking at the “sinuous parallel arabesques” of van Gogh’s three reed-pen copies of his turbulent oil Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Updike comments, “The flamelike dark cypresses, writhing olive trees, blaring oversized suns, convulsed mountains, and vortically churning stars of van Gogh’s visionary madness are not far off.”

Vincent van Gogh, "Boats at Sea, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer" (1888)

My favourite passage in “Uncertain Skills, Determined Spirit” contrasts van Gogh’s two pen copies of his superb Harvest in Provence:

At the Metropolitan exhibit, the crowds, their eyes made bleary by dimlit chambers of pen-work, stood back with relief from Harvest in Provence (1888), a large golden oil canvas preceded by a detailed, lightly tinted drawing and followed by two rather differing pen versions for Émile Bernard and John Russell. The one for Bernard takes more liberties with the painting, and is freer in its use of van Gogh’s shorthand of hatching, squiggles, and dots. In the version for Russell, specks appear in the sky where the painting has a blank blue, and these, and concentric lines encircling the sun (A Summer Evening, 1888), become an almost compulsive feature of the drawings, as if van Gogh is saying that no space of nature is truly blank, devoid of color and of divine activity. The drawings brim with latent color.

That last line is inspired.

Vincent van Gogh, "Harvest in Provence" (1888)

Updike’s other van Gogh piece, “The Purest of Styles,” reviews the Morgan Library and Museum’s 2007 exhibition Vincent van Gogh – Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard. It contains, among other felicities, a wonderful description of two of van Gogh’s late paintings – Enclosed Field with Young Wheat and Rising Sun and A Corner of the Asylum and the Garden with a Heavy, Sawn-Off Tree (both 1888):

The latter is the very painting described as a picture of anxiety in his last letter to Bernard—circular swirls and flame-shaped arabesques move like a wind through the branches of the olive trees, against a yellow and blue sunset, while small human figures slowly become visible on the asylum grounds. In the former, the undulating field, blue and golden and green, rushes toward the viewer, and the blue mountains beyond seem a roiling river, under a bright yellow sky where the white sun is pinned like a medal. His impasto has become terrific—ridged ribbons of color as in a heavy brocade. 

In “The Purest of Styles,” Updike quotes a passage from van Gogh’s last letter to Bernard:

And by working very calmly, beautiful subjects will come of their own accord; it’s truly first and foremost a question of immersing oneself in reality again, with no plan made in advance, with no Parisian bias.

Updike identifies with van Gogh’s immersion in reality. He writes, 

Van Gogh’s achievement was to sublimate his own mysticism in the representation of reality, rather than inventing symbolic images. He made things themselves—worn shoes, a rush-seat chair, sunflowers—symbols, bristling with wordless meaning.

This accords with Updike’s own credo: “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (“Foreword,” The Early Stories: 1953 – 1975). 

Feinstein's Fine Line

Frank Sinatra (Photo by W. Eugene Smith)

Is politics taking over The New Yorker?

I’m not just talking about Trump, although the magazine’s Trump coverage verges on the excessive. I’m talking about sexual politics. This, for example, from a recent “Night Life” note on Michael Feinstein:

Feinstein is going to have to walk a very fine line as he celebrates the sexist, boozing, and crass-as-they-wanted-to-be kings of the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s fortunate that each was a masterly singer who embraced some of the most durable standards still heard today. [April 2, 2018]

I take it that the line Feinstein has to walk is the separation between the artist and his art. He’s allowed to sing Rodgers’ great The Lady Is A Tramp, a song that Sinatra swung magnificently, as long as he doesn’t say anything that could be construed as admiration for Sinatra’s playboy lifestyle. I’m sure Feinstein is capable of pulling this off. But it strikes me as a shade hypocritical, because Sinatra’s life and music are inseparable. Somewhere in his letters, van Gogh says, “If I weren’t as I am I wouldn’t paint.” The same applies to Sinatra. If he’d lived another way, he wouldn’t have been the singer he was.

Favorite Books of 2015

Here are five books published in 2015 that I enjoyed immensely:

1. James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of four extraordinary essays blending personal history with literary criticism. One of the pieces, "Why?," originally appeared in The New Yorker. (See my post here.)

2. Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar, a brilliant essay collection on poets and poetry, including two wonderful New Yorker pieces, “American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry” and “Ardor and Artifice: Merrill’s Mozartian Touch.” (See my posts here and here.)

3. Julian Bell’s Van Gogh: A Power Seething, a superb, concise, stimulating study of Van Gogh’s life and work by one of my favorite art critics. (See my post here.)

4. Michael Hofmann’s Where Have You Been?, a delicious collection of essays on James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and Les Murray, among others. It also contains an excellent piece on my favorite Canadian poet, Karen Solie. (See my post here.)

5. Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop, an exquisite study of Bishop’s poetry, including her great New Yorker poem, “At the Fishhouses,” which Tóibín ingeniously connects with James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (See my post here.)

Correction: I see now that Michael Hofmann's Where Have You Been? is not a 2015 book. It was published in 2014. But I read it this year, and so I'm going to keep it on my 2015 list. 

August 10 & 17, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. My pleasure-seeking eyes devoured the “Goings On About Town” capsule review of the Met’s “Van Gogh: Irises and Roses,” particularly the description of the roses: “pinwheels of thickly applied light blue, cream, and canary yellow.”

2. Amelia Lester’s “ ‘Did he say scallop sperm?’ He did, and it’s mild, sweet, and a little bit wobbly, like custard,” in her superb "Tables For Two: Shuko," is inspired.

3. Jake Halpern’s absorbing "The Cop" brings us face to face with the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. The officer’s name is Darren Wilson. Halpern says, “Many Americans believe that Wilson need not have killed Brown in order to protect himself, and might not have resorted to lethal force had Brown been white.” I share that belief. After reading Halpern’s detailed piece, I still believe it. Wilson didn’t shoot Brown in the back. But he did fire ten bullets at him. Halpern says that a few bullets missed him, “but he was hit in the chest, the forehead, and the arm.” This, in my view, is damning evidence of Wilson’s overreaction. His insistence that “I did my job that day” is outrageous.

Julian Bell's "Van Gogh: A Power Seething"

Evidently, Julian Bell rejects Hans Kaufmann’s and Rita Wildegans’s revisionist version of how van Gogh got his ear cut off. He doesn’t mention it in his Van Gogh: A Power Seething (2015). Kaufmann and Wildegans argue that it was Gauguin who accidentally severed van Gogh’s ear while brandishing a rapier: see Adam Gopnik’s "Van Gogh's Ear" (The New Yorker, January 4, 2010). Gopnik attaches considerable significance to the “ear” incident. He calls it “the Nativity fable and the Passion story of modern art.” He says,

When, after van Gogh’s suicide, in 1890, his fame grew, and the story of the severed ear began to circulate, it became a talisman of modern painting. Before that moment, modernism in the popular imagination was a sophisticated recreation; afterward, it was a substitute religion, an inspiring story of sacrifices made and sainthood attained by artists willing to lose their sanity, and their ears, on its behalf.

In contrast, Bell adopts the orthodox version of the story (i.e., the ear-slicing was an act of self-mutilation) and spends little time on it. His “preferred focus,” he says, “is on a corpus of astonishing paintings and letters rather than on a lump of bloody gristle to which a social misfit is no longer attached.” He takes the same approach regarding van Gogh’s alleged insanity. He says, “Insofar as Van Gogh the painter communicates to us, with an oeuvre that viewers for over a century have found uniquely thrilling and sustaining, it is not our business to call him mad.”

I find Bell’s approach refreshing. Instead of treating van Gogh’s life as some sort of parable, as Gopnik does, he concentrates on van Gogh’s art. For example, he describes van Gogh’s Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes (1887) as “a single resounding chord of yellow played out on various vegetal instruments, almost entirely freed up from perspective and chiaroscuro.” He further notes that “rather than using stained-glass compartments to generate complexity within this unity, Vincent created an over-all crackle of visual electricity through the emphatic, polyrhythmic hatching that was his and his alone.”

Descriptions such as this expand my appreciation of the work. Here’s another one:

Yet perhaps we should rather picture the seething of his mind as a surge of curling and hooking movements, translated by his handiwork into visible analogues to its hyperconnectivity. The Starry Night pictures a mystical consummation, although Vincent with his choice of bold modern means declined to call it “religious,” and at the same time, that great swirl was a vortex deeply structured in his soul.

How fine that “the seething of his mind as a surge of curling and hooking movements”! Bell’s Van Gogh brims with such descriptions. It takes me inside the heart of van Gogh’s incomparable art.