September 14, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Michigan noise trio Wolf Eyes may favor “blisteringly loud and astoundingly inaccessible textures” (Benjamin Shapiro, "Into the Woods"), but I certainly don’t. Much more to my liking is the Bill Charlap Trio, which "Goings On About Town: Night Life" calls “the premier mainstream piano trio of its day,” and says, “the suave interplay between the group’s leader and his longtime partners—Kenny Washington, on drums, and Peter Washington (no relation), on bass—is always a pleasure to hear.” I agree. Charlap is a remarkable improviser. Here’s what Whitney Balliett said about him:

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – flowed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us. [“The Natural,” The New Yorker, April 19, 1999].

2. I enjoyed Richard Brody’s capsule review of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (“Revealing the catastrophic impact of seemingly minor events on people who are struggling to subsist, De Sica endows slender side business and incidental pictorial details with high suspense and tragic grandeur. With a keen succession of tracking shots amid crowds at a market and a church, he transforms the sheer scale of the city and the vast number of residents in similarly desperate straits into a symphonic lament for the human condition”). But the title Bicycle Thieves is new to me. I’ve always known it as The Bicycle Thief. That’s what Pauline Kael called it (see her 5001 Nights at the Movies).

3. That “a paddle of shiso, whole and flat like a beautiful leaf pressing” in Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Ganso Yaki" is superb.

4. Atul Gawande’s "Postscript: Oliver Sacks" is a wonderful tribute. Gawande says of Sacks, “He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.”

5. Sack’s "Filter Fish" is immensely enjoyable. The detail of the fishmonger delivering the fish alive, “swimming in a pail of water,” is inspired.

6. John McPhee’s "Omission" is another piece in his excellent “The Writing life” series. This one focuses on deletion of material, what McPhee calls “the principle of leaving things out.” How does a writer decide what to omit? McPhee proposes the following criterion: “You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in – if not it stays out.” It sounds straightforward. But it’s not. McPhee illustrates the problem with a story about riding in a limo with Louis Marx, the toy manufacturer:

So this is the situation: Two-thirds of a century later, I am describing that ride to New York City in an article on the writing process that is focussed on the principle of leaving things out. I am with Mr. and Mrs. Monarch of Toys, whose friends a few years ago led various forms of the invasion of Europe. Do I leave that out? Help! Should I omit the lemony look on General Smith’s face the day he showed up late for lunch after his stomach was pumped? I am writing this, not reading it, and I don’t know what to retain and what to reject. The monarchical remark on being greater than the sum of Lionel and Gilbert—do I leave that out? I once saw Mr. Marx toss a broiled steak onto a rug so his bulldog could eat it. How relevant is that? Do I leave that out? Will it offend his survivors? In a recent year, his great-granddaughter was a sophomore in my college writing course. Her name was Barnett, not Marx. I did not know her beforehand, and had not even learned that my old roommate’s grandniece was at Princeton when her application for a place in the course came in. “You gave my grandmother her first kiss,” it began. How relevant is that? Should I cut that out? Mrs. Marx—Idella, stepmother of my roommate—was rumored among us Princeton sophomores of the time to be the sister of Lili St. Cyr. In the twenty-first century, in whose frame of reference is the strip dancer Lili St. Cyr? Better to exclude that? Best to exclude that Idella danced, too? This is about what you leave out, not what you take off. Writing is selection.

That “This is about what you leave out, not what you take off” made me smile. But the passage doesn’t really solve the question of whether that bit about Louis Marx tossing a broiled steak onto a rug so his bulldog could eat it should go in or stay out. Earlier in his piece, McPhee proposes “interest” as his main criterion for determining selection. But in the above passage he appears to use “relevance” as his guide. I prefer “interest.” Some details, such as that insouciant steak-toss to the bulldog on the rug, can be relished for their own sake. Of course, the true artist finds a way of making the interesting relevant. That’s what McPhee does in “Omission.”

September 7, 2015 Issue

If you relish descriptions of urban ruin, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Nick Paumgarten’s "The Death and Life of Atlantic City," in this week’s issue. It’s about a fight amongst a couple of vulture financiers over possession of an immense, luckless hotel and casino called Revel located in Atlantic City’s desolate east end. Paumgarten is a superb describer:

Abandonment, and the spectre of bankruptcy, intensified the bleakness of the winter in Atlantic City. At one end of the boardwalk, Revel loomed dark. At night, the blare of piped-in pop warped in the wind, and floodlight spilled out over the dunes, which, post-Sandy, were just a layer of sand atop an armature of giant sandbags.

The best parts of Paumgarten’s piece are his journal-like first-person reports on his own personal experiences exploring the city’s complex decay, e.g.,

The night of the luncheon, they had me up for a drink. Past a suite of paintings by Ringo Starr and a library shelved with scrapbooks chronicling Hill and Schultz’s twenty-seven years together, a loggia led to a heated pool, which they once filled with wine corks. Here and there were garish furnishings salvaged from the casinos: headboards from Trump Plaza, smokestacks and banquettes from the Showboat, chandeliers from the Sands.

In the piece’s most striking sentence, Paumgarten conjures a vivid metaphor:

Atlantic City, formerly a breeding ground for big ideas, was now a tar pit—trapping financial mastodons and big-eyed dreamers, whether or not their intentions were pure, as the capricious gods of commerce looked on.

“The Death and Life of Atlantic City” is one of two pieces in this week’s issue that most absorbed me. The other is Dan Chiasson’s excellent "Ecstasy of Influence," a review of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry. Chiasson finds Emerson’s “turbocharged prose” superior to his “rickshaw verse.” He says,

His poems sometimes feel intentionally slight, as though making way for the accelerating future, still at his back but quickly gaining on him. His prose was poetry by other means, calling for its own mirror image, a poetry whose “argument” trumped its forms.

That “his prose was poetry by other means” is inspired! In another brilliant line, Chiasson says, “But his quicksilver prose was poetry, its sentences like signal flares launched one after another into the ether.”  

Almost every line in “Ecstasy of Influence” shimmers with original style and perception. Chiasson raises criticism to the level of art. I enjoy his work immensely.

In Praise of John Updike's Criticism (Contra James Wood)

John Updike (Illustration by Tom Bachtell)

James Wood, in his recent interview with Isaac Chotiner (Slate, August 18, 2015), makes explicit what I’ve always suspected – his distaste for John Updike’s criticism. Chotiner says to him, “And yet, I never liked, say, John Updike’s criticism, just because I felt like he was always just sort of going through the motions of telling me what the book was about.” Wood replies,

I know, I never liked it either. The redescription in Updike’s criticism is obviously of a high order, and [of] a certain kind of generosity, too—that’s to say, he was a very patient and hospitable quoter of other people’s texts. But I always felt that there was a certain kind of ungenerousness in Updike’s work, too. The maddening equilibrium of his critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything could be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put onto the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself. That’s perhaps unfair. But I think his fiction worked in the same way, too, despite the passionate attention of his prose: It existed to clothe the world in superb words, to contain it, somehow.

Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The great literary critic of my life is Updike. His reviews are like no others; they show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.  

As an offset against Wood’s sour remarks, I want to quote a passage from Orhan Pamuk’s "Updike at Rest" (New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 17, 2014), a review of Adam Begley’s Updike:

In 1985, on my first visit to America, I found a copy of Updike’s recently published “Hugging the Shore” in a secondhand-book shop. In this collection of book reviews (written in large part for The New Yorker), I discovered an Updike who had been invisible from Istanbul: Updike the essayist. For years thereafter, I bought The New Yorker just in case it might contain one of his reviews. As his admirer Julian Barnes once wrote, it may be difficult to find anyone who has read all of Updike’s books. But I may well have read all of his essays, as collected in “Picked-Up Pieces,” “Hugging the Shore,” “Odd Jobs,” “More Matter,” “Due Considerations” and the posthumously published “Higher Gossip.” These book reviews and, later, his art reviews collected in “Just Looking,” “Still Looking” and the posthumously published “Always Looking,” have given me as much pleasure as his novels, and in fact reading Updike’s invariably sensitive, fair and entertaining essays has changed the way I read his fiction, armed with the knowledge that those novels and stories have been written by perhaps one of the world’s most distinguished men of letters.

These words make me smile; I totally identify with them. Updike’s critical writings have been a tremendous source of pleasure in my life, too. From the wonderful Updike collections that Pamuk mentions, here are a dozen of my favorite lines:

In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness. [“Remembrance of Things Past Remembered,” in Picked-Up Pieces]

He slices up ordinary experience into paper-thin transparencies and feeds it back in poetic printout. [“Layers of Ambiguity,” in Hugging the Shore]

Mind permeates Bellow’s renderings; permeability is the essence of his fluid, nervous, colorful mimetic art. [“Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil,” in Hugging the Shore]

And what is a cop kebap? The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being. [“Dutchmen and Turks,” in Odd Jobs]

Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars. [“Logic Is Beautiful,” in Still Looking]

The will to describe, the willingness to be transported by details of the humble actual, is a novelist’s requisite [“Worlds and Worlds,” in Hugging the Shore]

His lavish, rippling notations of persons, furniture, habiliments, and vistas awaken us to what is truly there. [“Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul,” in Hugging the Shore]

Love of language might be an answer – language as a semi-opaque medium whose colors and connotations can be worked into a supernatural, supermimetic bliss. [“The Doctor’s Son,” in Hugging the Shore]

Her details – which include the lyrics of the songs her characters overhear on the radio and the recipes of the rather junky food they eat – calmly accrue; her dialogue trails down the pages with an uncanny fidelity to the low-level heartbreaks behind the banal; her resolutely unmetaphorical style builds around us a maze of familiar truths that nevertheless has something airy, eerie, and in the end lovely about it. [“Stalled Starters,” in Hugging The Shore]

That nasal squeak like fingernails on silk shows an avid realism. [“Fairy Tales and Paradigms,” in Due Considerations]

They live, in short, and like all living feed on air, on the invisible; the spaces between the words are warm, and the strangeness is mysteriously exact, the strangeness of the vital. [“An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green,” in Hugging the Shore]

He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. [“Imperishable Maxwell,” in Higher Gossip]

Simic on Vendler: A Questionable Criticism

Helen Vendler (Photo by Janet Reider)

I want to consider a questionable comment on Helen Vendler’s criticism that Charles Simic makes in his “The Incomparable Critic” (The New York Review of Book, August 13, 2015), a review of Vendler’s recent essay collection The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar. Simic says,

 She’s drawn to ideas in poems, conveys them well, but tends at times to devalue physical setting, “what the eye beholds,” as if it were only a prop and not the hook that draws the reader in. The “poet’s sense of the world,” “the savor of life,”  “the vulgate of experience” as Stevens called it – she often doesn’t do justice to these in my view.

Simic supports his point with an example. He says,

I have in mind her analysis of a poem like “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where she follows the poet’s thinking well enough, but doesn’t show how closely tied Stevens’s meditation is to the changes taking place in the sea and the sky as the tropical night descends and the unknown woman walking along the shore sings her song, and why the speaker in the poem not only comes to understand what he is experiencing, but once he does is overcome with emotion, and so are we as readers. We are moved because we had experienced something like that once and couldn’t find words for it, and now have them. It’s that recognition that links the reader to the poet, and its interdependence of reality and imagination that Stevens strives to sort out in the poem.

If true, Simic’s comment would, for me, be a damning criticism of Vendler’s approach. In my opinion, one can’t respond meaningfully to an artwork to which one hasn’t responded sensually. But Vendler’s writing has never struck me as a devaluation of physical setting or an underestimation of “what the eye beholds.” On the contrary, her work has taught me the value of sensual apprehension. Her expressions of pleasure regarding physical description are among the most memorable passages in all her writings. For example, in “Elizabeth Bishop” (included in her great 1980 collection Part of Nature, Part of Us), she says of Bishop’s “The Moose,”

In the first half of the poem one of the geographies of the world is given an ineffable beauty, both plain and luxurious. Nova Scotia’s tides, sunsets, villages, fog, flora, fauna, and people are all summoned quietly into verse, as if for a last farewell, as the speaker journeys away to Boston. The verse, like the landscape, is “old-fashioned.”

The bus starts. The light
is deepening; the fog
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens’ feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage rosesand lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

The exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness, the evening harmony of settling and clinging and closing and creeping, the delicate touch of each clause, the valedictory air of the whole, the momentary identification with hens, sweet peas, and bumblebees all speak of the attentive and yielding soul through which the landscape is being articulated.

That “exquisitely noticed modulations of whiteness” is marvelously fine. There are many examples of Vendler’s sensuous appreciation of physical description. Here’s another one; it’s an excerpt from her “Seamus Heaney” (included in her brilliant 1988 collection The Music of What Happens):

He [Heaney] sees the long, dark body of the Grauballe man, preserved for nearly two thousand years, and almost numbers its bones:

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan's foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

If, in the end, the Grauballe man is made to stand, in one of Heaney’s anxious moralities, for “hooded victim, / slashed and dumped,” he is also, in the plainness of his utter amalgamation of all being (tar, water, wood, basalt, egg, swan, root, mussel, eel, mud, armor, leather), a figure of incomparable beauty.

Of course, there are many ways to appreciate poetry; sensual response is only one of them. I suppose that a poem such as Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” could be enjoyed purely as seascape (“the outer voice of sky / And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled”; “mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea”; “The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, / As the night descended, tilting in the air”), as Simic suggests. But reading it, particularly the words “But it was more than that,” you sense that Stevens intended something else, that description, however beautiful, was not his endpoint. Vendler, in her “Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers” (included in The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar), ingeniously interprets “The Idea of Order at Key West” as an elaboration of a new poetic that is “neither instinctual nor mimetic; it is an abstract one of intellectual artifice, of exact measurement, of geometric lines and demarcated spatial lines.” Vendler’s interpretation reveals, for me, at least, a newly perceived aspect of “The Idea of Order at Key West” – “the spirit’s mastery, by the geometrical abstraction afforded by lyric language, of the sublime landscape of the night sky.”  

August 31, 2015 Issue

If you relish “visit” pieces, as I do, you’ll devour Elif Batuman’s "The Big Dig," in this week’s issue. It’s a vivid, absorbing report on the Byzantine shipwrecks and other archeological marvels that came to light during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus. In it, Batuman visits the Yenikapı excavation site (“To one side stood an armada of long objects, wrapped in white plastic, resembling monstrously elongated pianos. They turned out to be escalators awaiting installation. The shipwrecks were likewise hidden from view, in long white plastic tents, where sprinklers kept them damp twenty-four hours a day”), a specially-constructed laboratory (“In several black rectangular pools, up to thirty metres long, dismembered ship pieces glimmered like eels”), the makeshift labs where all the artifacts are processed (“In a shed nearby, a noisy filtration machine was chugging its way through approximately two thousand sacks of Byzantine and Neolithic dirt”), a research center devoted to animal remains (“We entered through a padlocked iron gate, passed the word ‘osteoarcheology’ spelled out in bones, and eventually came to a narrow hallway lined, from floor to ceiling, with three hundred Byzantine horse skulls”), and the offices of Yüksel Construction, where she talks with Esat Tansev, a project director responsible for the Yenikapı-Taksim metro-line extension, the site where the largest number of ships were found. Two years after she saw the ships being excavated, she returns to the University of Istanbul lab to see their preservation (“I looked through the round window of the lab’s freeze-drying machine. In the gloom inside, distributed among six shelves, pieces of Byzantine ship were entering a new phase of existence”). Most memorably, in the final section of her piece, Batuman goes to the now completed Marmaray station and rides the train through the tunnel:

Few find a seat on Marmaray: each carriage accommodates five standing passengers for every seated passenger. Like Neolithic man, I crossed the Bosporus upright, “on foot on the highway.” I went to Asia and back again. I got off at the first European stop: Sirkeci Station, the old terminus of the Orient Express, where the Marmaray platform is connected to the surface of the earth by a twenty-story escalator—the longest in Turkey. Strange questions may pass through your mind as you travel on this escalator. If fifteen houses are built on top of one another, which one is the most important? Whose voices should be heard—those of the living or those of the dead? How can we all fit in this world, and how do we get where we’re going? 

It’s a great, epiphanic ending to a brilliant piece. Bravo, Ms. Batuman!  

Postscript: Other pleasures in this week’s issue include Richard Brody’s capsule review of Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (Hitchcock “draws a crucial line between love and lust and, in brilliant scene of mirrors and darkness, evokes the perilous loss of self that sexual passion entails”), Dan Chiasson’s analysis of Linda Gregerson’s poetry (“Gregerson’s syntax acts as a strong forward current, carving a jagged path through the stony resistance of her lines and stanzas”), and Peter Schjeldahl’s description of Whistler’s Mother (“The paint looks soft, almost fuzzy – as if it were exhaled onto the surface”).

August 24, 2015 Issue

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a note at the end of his unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941), observed, “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” I thought of this adage as I read Alice McDermott’s wonderful "These Short, Dark Days," in this week’s issue. It’s a portrait of a sixty-four-year-old nun, Sister St. Savior, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, who, walking back to the convent one dark February evening, happens on an emergency – an apartment fire, a man asphyxiated, his young wife in despair. McDermott uses action to reveal Sister St. Savior’s remarkable character. Sister boldly enters the building and takes charge of the young woman’s care. The story is like a nun’s version of a police procedural. Sister learns from a policeman that the asphyxiated husband committed suicide, a fact that the reader already knows because McDermott shows us his preparations in the opening part of the story. Her response to this information is interesting:

Sister accepted the information with only a discreet nod. When she looked up again—her eyes behind her glasses were small and brown and caught the light the way only a hard surface would, marble or black tin, nothing watery—the truth of the suicide was both acknowledged and put away. She had entered the homes of strangers and seen the bottles in the bin, the poor contents of a cupboard, the bruise in a hidden place, seen as well, once, a pale, thumb-size infant in a basin filled with blood and had bowed her head and nodded in just the same way.

Hard eyes, soft heart – a paradoxical combination that complicates Sister’s character. She’s determined to circumvent church rules that forbid the burial of a suicide in a church cemetery. She says to the young widow:

“Your man fell asleep,” Sister St. Savior whispered now. “The flame went out. It was a wet and unfortunate day.” She paused to make sure the girl had heard. “He belongs in Calvary,” she said. “You paid for the plot, didn’t you?” The girl nodded slowly. “Well, that’s where he’ll go.”

The story’s tone is tender but unsentimental. Even the slightest phrases bloom in the damp, gray atmosphere: “the terrible scent of doused fire on the winter air”; “a glass of tea on the edge of a folded newspaper”; “a green scent coaxed out of dried reeds”; “the rusty stains on the blue ticking of the mattress”; two nuns side by side on a couch, asleep, “puffed into their black cloaks like gulls on a pier.”

Was Sister St. Savior successful in getting the young man’s body buried in Calvary Cemetery? The ending suggests she wasn’t. But it’s not clear. The ending is satisfyingly ambiguous. “These Short, Dark Days” is a great story. I enjoyed it immensely.

Adam Begley's Brilliant "Updike"

This summer I’m reading Adam Begley’s Updike. I find it addictive. Begley’s biographical readings of Updike’s work are fascinating. For example, in his early chapters, he shows how immersed Updike was in his beloved Pennsylvania geography (Plowville, Shillington, Reading). He says of Updike’s great “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The New Yorker, January 3, 1959), “The farm, the town, the city – when an adult John Nordholm looks fondly back on the events of that night, Updike is taking us on a pilgrimage to all three of his holy sites.” Updike, in his “On Literary Biography” (Due Considerations, 2007), described George D. Painter’s masterly Marcel Proust as “a way of re-experiencing the novel [Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past], with a closeness, and a delight in seeing imagined details conjured back into real ones, that only this particular writer and his vast autobiographical masterpiece could provide.” Begley’s Updike works the same way in relation to Updike’s writing - mirroring the fiction back into reality. I’m enjoying it immensely.

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.

Samanth Subramanian's "Followig Fish"

I relish Samanth Subramanian’s writing. He crafts the kind of sturdy, specific, plain-style sentence – first person, active voice, spiced with a hint of adventure or exoticism – that I devour. “One morning earlier this year, I took the Delhi Metro to an eastern suburb called Ghaziabad, where the Aam Aadmi Party is headquartered,” he writes, in his absorbing "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September 2, 2013), and I instantly think, Okay, I’m with you. Let’s go! Subramanian’s wonderful Following Fish (2010), which I’ve just finished reading, brims with such lines:

One day, I accompanied Father Kattar to his home village of Veerapandiyapattinam, a community of roughly five thousand fishermen, forty-five minutes’ drive from Tuticorin and less than two kilometres from the temple town of Tiruchendur.

With nothing else to do, I began walking the promenade beside the River Mandovi, a procession of lemon-yellow and powder-blue walls across the road to my right, and moored riverboat casinos with names like Noah’s Ark and King’s Casino, dozing after the previous night’s excesses, to my left.

Climbing the few steps up into the temple – each rendered permanently sticky underfoot by the spilled juice of hundreds of smashed coconuts – I entered a small sanctum with two individual shrines.

Only on my final full day in Goa was I able to follow the second part of Alvares’ advice: to walk the beach from Calangute to Candolim.

In Veraval, thanks to Bapu, I wheedled my way for hours at a time into the yards of two master boat builders.

Following Fish is a brilliant, delicious travelogue, an account of Subramanian’s meanderings along “the long, magnificent necklace of India’s coastline,” exploring fish markets (“fisherwomen with toes reddened by fish blood squat behind cutters, little steel tubs of still-swimming catfish, and turmeric-smeared cuts of fish”), toddy shops (“This toddy had been tapped just a couple of hours earlier and was still so sweet that, when it was brought to our table, it managed to attract fruit flies out of nowhere”), eateries (“Out of the gloom, a waiter materialized and first brought me water in a squat, broad steel bowl, then a cool glass of the spiced kokum-coconut milk drink known as sol kadhi, and then a superb set lunch that sang of home: rice, fresh rotis, an elongated piece of fried fish, a bowl of curry, and a piece of curried fish”), beaches (“The beach had little sand to spare; the ground felt hard under my feet, not as if the sand had been packed by water but as if there were brick or clay just beneath”), and boat-building yards (“Here, a boy in his late teens was dipping strands of braided cotton into a mix of oil and resin, and then inserting the strands into the crevices between the planks with the help of a chisel and a mallet, pounding them into place until the crevices were full”).

My favorite chapter is “On seeking to eat as a city once ate,” in which Subramanian describes eating a meal in an old Mumbai “lunch home” or khanawal called Anantashram:

For the entirety of my meal, though, it was the curry that held my attention. It was more than anything else, a thick fish soup, flavoured heartily with mackerel, smooth with coconut, yellow with turmeric, tart with kokum, and finished with a flourish of tempered mustard seeds. I asked for a second helping of the curry, to go with the perfectly cylindrical serving of rice; of the curried mackerel itself, though, I was not a fan. It seemed to have given its all to its gravy and it now sat glistening but essence-less on the edge of my plate. When I rose after my meal, in fact, that remaining hunk of fish earned me a scolding from my waiter for not finishing my food.

Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish is a satisfying blend of stimulating travel and good eating. I enjoyed it immensely.  

"Mr. Hunter's Grave" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

It’s interesting to compare seven reviews of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015) and see the various ways they respond to Kunkel’s revelation that Mitchell fabricated certain aspects of his great “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). The seven reviews are:

1. Thomas Berenato’s "Progress of Stories" (Los Angeles Book Review, April 21, 2015)

2. Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015)

3. Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2015)

4. Blake Bailey’s " 'Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,' by Thomas Kunkel" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 19, 2015)

5. Thomas Powers’ "All I Can Stand" (London Review of Books, June 18, 2015)

6. John Williams’ "Review: 'Man in Profile" Studies Joseph Mitchell of 'The New Yorker' " (The New York Times, June 24, 2015)

7. Thomas Beller’s “Nowhere Man” (Bookforum, Summer 2015)

Before looking at these pieces, I want to set out the fabrications reported by Kunkel. There are six:

1. The single Saturday visit with Hunter, as described in the story, is actually a conflation of at least seven different interviews that Mitchell conducted with Hunter over a number of months.

2. The three long Hunter monologues in the story were constructed by splicing (and “embroidering”) quotations from related segments of multiple Mitchell-Hunter conversations. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.”

3. In the story, Mitchell’s first meeting with Hunter occurs in Hunter’s house; in actual fact, it took place at Sandy Ground’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

4. In the story, it’s Rev. Raymond Brock who steers Mitchell to Hunter; in actual fact, it was a man named James McCoy, sitting on the porch of a house in Sandy Ground, when Mitchell passed by, who first mentioned Hunter to Mitchell.

5. In the story, Mitchell first encounters Brock in St. Luke’s Cemetery; in actual fact, he didn’t meet him there. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked if could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which is one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission….”

6. In the story, Hunter takes the “BELOVED SON” wreath ribbon out of his wallet at the cemetery entrance. In actual fact, according to Kunkel, “Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.”

In Man in Profile, Kunkel asks, “Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He answers, “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

Well, let’s see what the seven appraisers listed above have to say. Thomas Berenato, in his “Progress of Stories,” writes,

What the “character” Mr. Hunter says in the story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is not verbatim what George H. Hunter told Mitchell in propria persona, but it is revelatory of his character, or at least of “character” period. Sometimes Mitchell sought, and received, permission from his subjects to rearrange or even reassign the dialogue that took place. Sometimes not. In any case, monologues unspool for pages at a time. Soliloquies as charming and harrowing as these are few to find outside the works of Joyce, Beckett, or Bernhard. They are all as unmistakably Mitchellian as Sebald’s are Sebaldian. Mitchell, Kunkel writes, “was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction.”

Implicit in this is that fact pieces that are considered “literature” are somehow exempt from the requirement that they be accurate.

Janet Malcolm, in her “The Master Writer of the City,” expresses a similar view. She refers to Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” Regarding “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” she says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm mocks the puritanical response to the liberties Mitchell takes with the facts. She says,

He [Mitchell] has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

Her view is that “Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat.” She says,

His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Malcolm suggests, “Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Charles McGrath, in his “The People You Meet,” takes a different view. He says, “More than we knew, or wanted to know, he [Mitchell] made things up.” Of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” McGrath says,

Mitchell’s best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell’s masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And yet the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.

McGrath’s view differs from Malcolm’s. She sees Mitchell’s fabrications as a function of his creative imagination. She holds that most journalists lack such an imagination (“There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads”). Whereas McGrath says, “As inglorious examples like Jayson Blair demonstrate, invention is often easier than reporting—you can do it without even leaving home—and requires no special talent other than nerve.”

McGrath doesn’t use literary values to excuse Mitchell the way Berenato and Malcolm do. But he does defend him. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

Blake Bailey, in his “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel,” calls Mitchell’s writing “a kind of hybrid nonfiction that encompassed (with the blessing of his editors) long embellished monologues delivered by old Mr. Flood and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the Gypsy king, who were actually composites of various New York characters with a piquant admixture of Mitchell himself.” Other than the “long embellished monologues,” Bailey makes no mention of any of the other fabrications reported by Kunkel. He calls Mitchell “arguably, our greatest literary journalist — a man who wrote about freaks, barkeeps, street preachers, grandiose hobos and other singular specimens of humanity with compassion and deep, hard-earned understanding, and above all with a novelist’s eyes and ears.”

Thomas Powers’ “All I Can Stand,” is a favorable assessment of Kunkel’s book and a wonderful review of several of Mitchell’s best stories, including “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (“To disappear is the common fate and it would have been Mr Hunter’s, too, were it not for one thing – Joe Mitchell’s refusal to let him go. In the way of writers, Mitchell has listened to Mr Hunter, told his story, and stayed the clock”). Interestingly, throughout his piece, Powers refers to Mitchell’s stories as “fact pieces” without qualification or acknowledgment of the “license” (Kunkel’s word) that Mitchell employed in writing them. Is Powers in denial of Mitchell’s fabrications? Or does he view them as irrelevant? His failure to comment on Kunkel’s revelations is a weakness in a piece that is otherwise an excellent appreciation of Mitchell’s writing.  

John Williams, in his “Review: Man in Profile Studies Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” calls Mitchell “a writer who observed and imagined his way to a brilliant, heightened version of reality.” He says, “It’s clear Mitchell did make things up.” He approvingly quotes Janet Malcolm’s Kunkel review (“But few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to”). It appears that Williams, like Berenato and Malcolm, sees Mitchell as a literary artist, exempt from journalism’s basic “don’t mess with the facts.”

Thomas Beller, in his “Nowhere Man,” observes that Mitchell’s pieces convey an “immersive sense of interest in their subjects, within which there is affection, even love.” He says Mitchell’s prose is “burnished with the warmth of empathy.” He doesn’t mention Mitchell’s fabrications other than to say that Mitchell wrestled with “guilt over liberties he took with facts,” and to point out that Mr. Flood was not Mitchell’s only composite character.

       

Until I read these reviews, I didn’t think of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as a “heightened version of reality” (Williams) or a “kind of hybrid nonfiction” (Bailey) or “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” (Malcolm). I thought of it the way Powers apparently still thinks of it – as a “fact piece.” I agree with McGrath when he says, “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

I resist reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as fiction. Mitchell didn’t intend it as such. In the Author’s Note of his great Up in the Old Hotel (1992), he classified it as “factual.” In my opinion, everything in it is factual, except the six fabrications listed above. They are sufficient to compromise the story’s status as a fact piece, but insufficient to justify reclassifying it as fiction. Bailey’s phrase – “a kind of hybrid nonfiction” – will have to do for now.  

August 3, 2015 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is a contest between Becky Cooper’s "Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge" (“Panties, petite enough to fit the models clustered around the bar, hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles”), Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Chomp Chomp" (“For dessert, get the banana fritters, eat them hot, and wait for the kiss of spice”), Ian Frazier’s, "Amo, Amas" (“Languages and facts flew like sparks from a grindstone and skidded bluely onto the board”), and Peter Schjeldahl’s "Shapes and Colors" (“At length, beauty does arrive, though clad in its judicial robes, as truth”).

And the winner is Becky Cooper’s “Bar Tab: Loosie Rouge” for superbly noticing those petite panties “hung like birthday bunting over the liquor bottles.”