My First "New Yorker"

I bought my first New Yorker – the March 1, 1976 issue – at Atlantic News in Halifax. I remember the circumstances. I was twenty-three years old. I’d quit university and was working as a gas jockey at the Spring Garden Road Esso. After work one evening, I decided to drop into Atlantic News and check out the magazine section. Perhaps I was looking for a new Esquire. At that time, I was an Esquire fan. But on this occasion it was The New Yorker that caught my eye. Its cover showed a strange scene, a ladder-carrying mob storming a towering statueless plinth. I leafed through it. What dense, strange type! No photos, no illustrations. Perusing its contents, I stumbled on this sentence: “On his last night of leave, Wednesday, September 3, 1969, Michael Eugene Mullen worked until ten o’clock on his family’s farm – a hundred-and-twenty-acre tract five miles northwest of La Porte City, in Black Hawk County, Iowa.” It was the kind of Hemingwayesque sentence I relished (still do) – concrete, hard-edged, factual. It was the opening line of the first installment of C. D. B. Bryan’s Vietnam War chronicle “Friendly Fire.” I bought the issue (75¢), took it home, and read “Friendly Fire – I” straight through in one sitting. It struck me as brilliant. I bought the next two issues, devouring “Friendly Fire – II” and “Friendly Fire – III” (the final installment). In the process, I discovered another arresting aspect of the magazine – Pauline Kael’s movie reviews. I found her avid, urgent, irreverent style thrilling. From that time on, I was hooked on The New Yorker – what’s turned out to be a thirty-nine-year addiction with no end in sight. If anything, it’s getting more intense.

October 5, 2015 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Superiority Burger" (“A slip of flavorless iceberg lettuce is pure signifier”), Colin Stokes’s "Bar Tab: Covenhoven" (“Cavernous fridges illuminate the slim space, as well as the faces of customers poring over the panoply of alcohol therein”), Nick Paumgarten’s "Amerks" (“Dutton, eighty-two, had a brush cut, a firm jawline, and teeth that looked suspiciously like replacements for a set scattered on a frozen pond”), Scaachi Koul’s "The Dad Restaurant" (“Served the way it’s supposed to be: near-frozen, sure to give you severe brain freeze halfway through, as it always does, and mostly foam”), John Updike’s "Coming Into New York" (“And then like Death it comes upon us: / the plain of steaming trash, the tinge of brown / that colors now the trees and grass as though / exposed to rays sent from the core of heat – / these are the signs we see in retrospect”), William Finnegan’s "The Man Who Wouldn't Sit Down" (“Ramos, standing alone, seemed to fold into himself. His expulsion had been tense, uncomfortable, heart-pounding stuff. Everyone involved was surely agitated. But Ramos seemed calm, as if his pulse had slowed”), and Alexandra Schwartz’s "The Unforgotten" (“Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction’s righteous mission, and ‘Honeymoon’ performs it beautifully. But truthfulness isn’t the same as the truth”). A special shout-out to Philip Montgomery for his striking portrait of Jorge Ramos, illustrating “The Man Who Wouldn’t Sit Down.”

Kael's Combines

Pauline Kael (Photo by Jerry Bauer)

Charles McGrath, in his "Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic?" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 1, 2015), says, “The great critic of my life was Pauline Kael (who deserves some renewed appreciation now that Renata Adler’s famous takedown of her is back in circulation).” McGrath’s comment resonates with me. Kael was one of the great critics of my life, too. In response to McGrath’s call for “renewed appreciation” of Kael’s work, I want to focus on what I call her “combines” – delightful, surprising, collage-like constructs of description, quotation, reference, and response. For example,

There’s a pleasant matte of Manhattan with five Chrysler Buildings, and there are charming, slightly miniaturized yellow Checker cabs that suggest Red Grooms, but then when Dorothy and her companions arrive to see the Wiz at the Emerald City and it’s the World Trade Center Plaza, you think, My God, that’s where King Kong died.

That’s from Kael’s marvelous “Saint Dorothy,” a review of Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz. The unlikely combination of “matte,” “Manhattan,” “five Chrysler Buildings,” “slightly miniaturized yellow Checker cabs,” “Red Grooms,” “Dorothy,” “Wiz,” “Emerald City,” “World Trade Center Plaza,” and “King Kong” is ingenious. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box. Here’s another one, also from “Saint Dorothy”:

Nipsey Russell is a vast improvement; his first lines are funny, and he gives them rhythm and beat, and though the lyrics of his song “What Would I Do If I Could Feel?” are unbelievably feeble (“What would I do / If I could suddenly feel / And to know once again / What I feel is real?”), he sings them in Dapper Dan night-club style – like a suave carnival barker – and on a nearby carousel the painted heads of girl angels provide a backup chorus.

How I love that final, surreal “and on a nearby carousel the painted heads of girl angels provide a backup chorus.” Consider this beauty from “Pods,” a review of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

When the four principals run down Telegraph Hill, with a phalanx of pod people in pursuit, and dash to the Embarcadero, they cast long shadows, like figures in one of de Chirico’s almost deserted piazzas.

When was the last time you saw “Telegraph Hill,” “Embarcadero,” and “de Chirico” conjoined in the same sentence? And those textured six “p” words –  “principals,” “phalanx,” “pod,” “people,” “pursuit,” and “piazzas” – are also pleasing.

One more example – this one from “Boss Ladies,” a review of Michael Lindsay Hogg’s Nasty Habits:

When she speculates, “If the thimble was a symbol,” there’s a bit of the hypercivilized impishness of Bea Lillie’s “You will find the dinghy by the jetty” in On Approval – a movie that Nasty Habits, in its heraldic camp, somewhat resembles.

Only Kael, with her deep mental reservoir of movie associations, would think to connect “If the thimble was a symbol” with “You will find the dinghy by the jetty” from two movies made thirty-four years apart. Her conjunction of “hypercivilized impishness” and “heraldic camp” is brilliant.

All of the above excerpts are from reviews in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down. This is deliberate. I want to show that this book, far from being “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,” as alleged by Renata Adler, in her notorious "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in her recent After the Tall Timber under the bland title “House Critic”), contains some of Kael’s most alluring, artful writing.

September 28, 2015 Issue

I’m pleased to see James Wood in the magazine this week. He’s been absent for the last four months, and I’ve missed him. His reviews are, for me, an essential part of The New Yorker. His excellent "The Art of Witness," in this week’s issue, considers The Complete Works of Primo Levi. The piece is noteworthy for at least three reasons: (1) Wood’s recurring use of “moral”; (2) the surprisingly high value he places on “story”; (3) his ongoing preoccupation with death. I can’t recall another Wood review that uses “moral” as often as this piece does. Wood usually takes a formalist approach to criticism. It’s one of the reasons I admire his work. But in “The Art of Witness” he repeatedly invokes morality: Levi’s friend, Sandro Delmastro, is described as being “physically and morally strong”; the clarity of poet and concentration-camp survivor, Dan Pagis, is “ontological and moral”; Levi’s storytelling is “a kind of ethics, when the writer is constantly registering the moral (which is to say, in this case, the immoral) novelty of the details he encounters”; “Levi seems to join us in our incomprehension, which is both a narrative astonishment and a moral astonishment”; “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote”; “This is a classical prose, the possession of a civilized man who never expected that his humane irony would have to battle with its moral opposite”; “That emphasis on resistance makes its sequel, The Truce, not merely funny but joyous: the camps are no more, the Germans have been vanquished, and gentler life, like a moral sun, is returning”; “The philosopher Berel Lang, in one of the best recent inquiries into Levi’s work, argues that this moral optimism makes him a singular figure”; “And he does not exempt himself from this moral mottling: on the one hand, he firmly asserts his innocence, but, on the other, he feels guilty to have survived.” Has Wood exchanged formalism for moralism? No, I don’t think so. He’s describing a writing that is distinctly moral in nature. He says, “You can feel this emphasis on moral resistance in every sentence Levi wrote.” His frequent use of “moral” is a way of conveying this feeling.

Another interesting aspect of “The Art of Witness” is Wood’s praise of Levi’s storytelling. He says, “Many of these horrifying facts can be found in testimony by other witnesses. What is different about Levi’s work is bound up with his uncommon ability to tell a story. It is striking how much writing by survivors does not quite tell a story….” And later in the piece, he observes, “But If This Is a Man and The Truce are powerful because they do not disdain story. They unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” There was a time not long ago when Wood praised “antinarrative” – the “reaching for what cannot be disclosed in narrative” (see his great "Life's White Machine: Ben Lerner," included in his 2012 collection The Fun Stuff). But lately, he seems to have developed a taste for old-fashioned storytelling – stories that “unfold their material, bolt by bolt.” In his recent "All Her Children" (The New Yorker, May 25, 2015), he says of Anne Enright’s The Green Road, “This is storytelling, with the blood-pulse of lived gossip….” And in “Using Everything” (included in his The Nearest Thing to Life), he says, “The good critic has an awareness that criticism means, in part, telling a story about the story you are reading.” Wood has made a strong case for the merits of antinarrative, and he’s made a strong case for storytelling. Lately, he seems to favor the latter.

Like his hero W. G. Sebald, Wood is death-haunted. “Life is bounded by death,” he says in "Why?" (included in The Nearest Thing to Life). “Life is death-in-waiting.” “Toward becoming these old things, these old headstones in mud, we are all traveling,” he says in “Austerlitz” (The Fun Stuff). In “The Art of Witness,” he writes,

Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But, above all, they existed. Sandro, in “The Periodic Table” (“nothing of him remained”); Alberto, most beloved among the camp inmates, who died on the midwinter death march from Auschwitz (“Alberto did not return, and of him no trace remains”); Elias Lindzin, the “dwarf” (“Of his life as a free man, no one knows anything”); Mordo Nahum, “the Greek,” who helped Levi survive part of the long journey back to Italy (“We parted after a friendly conversation; and after that, since the whirlwind that had convulsed that old Europe, dragging it into a wild contra dance of separations and meetings, had come to rest, I never saw my Greek master again, or heard news of him”). And the “drowned,” those who went under—“leaving no trace in anyone’s memory.” Levi rings the bell even for himself, who in some way disappeared into his tattooed number: “At a distance of thirty years, I find it difficult to reconstruct what sort of human specimen, in November of 1944, corresponded to my name, or, rather, my number: 174517.

But, above all, they existed – I relish that elegiac note. Perhaps Wood’s profoundest contribution to literary theory is his idea that “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (“Serious Noticing,” included in The Nearest Thing to Life). As Wood makes clear, Levi is one of literature’s great rescuers.

Postscript: This week’s issue contains three terrific Talk stories: Andrew Marantz’s "Paint Job" (“He uses Rust-Oleum paint, mostly five colors – black, white, red, blue, green – that are available at Bruno’s Hardware Center, on Court Street”); Emma Allen’s "Big Silky" (“She stepped outside to call Bruce Cost, of artisanal-ginger-ale fame, for black-chicken advice”); Jonathan Blitzer’s "Drive-By" [“He taught Chris Penn how to drive stick in ‘The Funeral’ (’37 LaSalle), and he drove Chloë Sevigny around in ‘The Last Days of Disco’ (’75 Checker Cab)”].

September 21, 2015 Issue

Perusing The New Yorker Festival program, I see that for $120 I could tour The Whitney Museum with Peter Schjeldahl. That appeals to me. But it’s a lot of dough. Better to sit back, save my money, and vicariously enjoy the tours he gives in his reviews. Reading Schjeldahl is like being in the company of an inspired guide. “Notice, incidentally, how the rods meet the base,” he says of a Picasso sculpture, in his wonderful "Another Dimension," a review of MoMA’s Picasso Sculpture, in this week’s issue. He continues:

As always, when a Picasso sculpture rests on more than one point each footing conveys a specific weight and tension, like the precisely gauged step of a ballerina. It presses down or strains upward in a way that gives otherwise inexplicable animation to the forms above. Few other sculptors play so acutely with gravity.

I love it when Schjeldahl directs my attention like that. Regarding Picasso’s six casts of Glass of Absinthe, he says,

Each incorporates a differently designed spoon and is differently slathered or dappled with paint. The brushwork, especially in sprightly dot patterns, blurs the objects’ contours, rendering them approximate in ways that wittily invoke intoxication. But these are true sculptures, as judged by the essential test that they function in the round. Circle them. Each shift in viewpoint discovers a distinct formal configuration and image. Picasso here steps into the history of the art that, in order to move a viewer, requires a viewer to move.

Circle them. Schjeldahl’s voice on the page seems to be speaking directly to me. It’s a voice to which I respond with immediate understanding and pleasure.

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”).