Love in John Updike's "Couples"

David Foster Wallace, in his “Certainly The End Of Something Or Other, One Would Sort Of Have To Think” (Consider the Lobster, 2006), writes that Rabbit Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, and Henry Bech, among other John Updike protagonists, “never really love anybody – and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women.” I can’t comment on the accuracy of this remark as it relates to Angstrom, Maple, and Bech because I’m not sufficiently familiar with them. But with regard to Couples's Piet Hanema, who I feel I know reasonably well, I submit that Wallace is wrong. Wallace doesn’t say what he means by “love.” In a footnote appended to the above “satyriasis” quote, he says, “Unless, of course, you consider delivering long encomiums to a woman’s ‘sacred several-lipped gateway’ or saying things like ‘It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with religious peace’ to mean the same as loving.” No, that’s not my idea of love, and I don’t think it is Updike’s either. Updike subscribed to an intensely romantic notion of love, as represented by the legend of Tristan and Iseult, in which, as he says in his pivotal essay “More Love in the Western World” (The New Yorker, August 24, 1963; Assorted Prose, 1965), “passion-love feeds upon denial.” In this piece, he refers to Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1956) as follows:

Unlike most accretions of learning and intelligence, Love in the Western World has the unity of an idea, an idea carried through a thousand details but ultimately single and simple, an idea that, however surprising its route of arrival, strikes home. Love as we experience it is love for the Unattainable Lady, the Iseult who is “ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing, and almost hostile in a fellow-being, that which indeed incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen a prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself. She is the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted; to possess her is to lose her.”

In Couples, Piet Hanema’s Iseult is Foxy Whitman. Consider, for example, the scene in which Piet is in bed with his wife, Angela. She’s asleep, but he’s “horribly awake.” Updike writes:

Angela obliviously stirred, faintly moaned. Piet got out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of milk. Whenever he was most lovesick for Foxy, that summer, he would go to the refrigerator, the cool pale box full of illuminated food, and feed something to the void within. He leaned his cheek against the machine’s cold cheek and thought of her voice, its southern shadows, its playful dryness, its musical remembrance of his genitals. He spelled her name with the magnetized alphabet the girls played with on the tall blank door. FOXY. PIET L VES FOXY. He scrambled the letters and traveled to bed again through a house whose familiar furniture and wallpaper were runes charged with malevolent magic. Beside Angela, he thought that if he were beside Foxy he could fall asleep on broken glass. Insomnia a failure of alignment.  

That is love – romantic love straight out of Tristan and Iseult, as channeled by John Updike. And near the novel’s end, after Piet and Foxy have reunited, there’s Updike’s clinching observation: “he was not tempted to touch her in this house they had so often violated; her presence as she breezed from room to room felt ghostly, impervious; and already they had lost that prerogative of lovers which claims all places as theirs.” The Unattainable Lady has become attained, and since “passion-love feeds upon denial,” the “prerogative of lovers which claims all places as theirs” has been lost. But implicit in this is that there was passion-love to lose. David Foster Wallace’s claim that Piet Hanema doesn’t love women overlooks this vital implication.   

October 22, 2012 Issue

Pick of the Issue (POTI) this week is a contest between four pieces: Nick Paumgarten’s “Less Europe,” John Seabrook’s “Grand,” Evan Osnos’s “Boss Rail,” and Peter Schjeldahl’s “Challenging Work.” Paumgarten’s “Less Europe” is a Talk story about a “Euroskeptic” named Nigel Farage. It contains this inspired sentence: “He has a smoker’s marbly laugh and tawny skin, and, as he credibly claims, ‘relatively hollow legs,’ into which, at the reception, he poured a fair amount of gin.” Seabrook’s piece, also a Talk story, is a mini-profile of Iris Dement, “one of the brightest talents in the new alt-country genre.” It describes Dement’s recent visit to Steinway Hall (“Steinway Hall has the ponderous stillness of a funeral home, and the grand pianos are like polished caskets”). Osnos’s piece explores how a high-speed train wreck in Wenzhou, China “became what Hurricane Katrina was to Americans: the iconic failure of government performance.” It’s best part is the penultimate section, wonderfully narrated in the first-person, in which Osnos, accompanied by a tunnel builder named Li Xue, takes us inside a tunnel that Xue is constructing in “the rocky hills of Hebei Province.” Osnos writes,

Li spat into the mud and handed me a hard hat. Inside, the tunnel was cool and dark, about thirty feet high, with a smooth ceiling, faintly lit by work lights along the edges. Li had dug ten tunnels in his life, and this would be the longest – two miles end to end.

Schjeldahl’s “Challenging Work” is a review of a Ai Weiwei retrospective at the Hirshorn Museum, in Washington. Regarding photographs of Ai “dropping a millennia-old Han-dynasty urn, which smashes on the floor,” Schjeldahl says, “The act strikes me as mere vandalism.” I agree. Schjeldahl's bluntness is tonic. And the winner of this week’s POTI is Nick Paumgarten's "Less Europe" for its marvelous “He has a smoker’s marbly laugh and tawny skin, and, as he credibly claims, ‘relatively hollow legs,’ into which, at the reception, he poured a fair amount of gin.” 

Interesting Emendations: James Merrill's "Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War"

Loving a poem only for its opening lines is a bit like loving a woman only for her gorgeous eyes. The focus is narrow but very intense. This describes my relationship with James Merrill’s extraordinary “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War,” which I first encountered in the January 17, 1977 issue of The New Yorker. Its opening stanza is, for me, narcotic:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs

No more vivid word picture of a beach has ever been written, at least not in such concentrated, evocative form. The image of the beach as a “vertebrate picked clean” is inspired, and the description of the palms’ “tall seableached incurving ribs” is ravishing.

Interestingly, when Merrill included this poem in his 1985 collection Late Settings, he changed it. The opening lines read:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs

The second line has been revised - “lofty-plumed” replaces “the palms’ tall.” Is the change an improvement? I’m not certain. “Lofty-plumed” strikes me as a shade decorative. What comes to mind when I read it are hats, not palms. I like the simpler “the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs” – its plainness is consistent with the “picked clean” beach of the first line. And the rhythm of “ To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs” is smoother than “To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs.” The hyphenated “lofty-plumed” introduces a couple of extra beats that jars the line’s music – to my ear, anyway.

I’m not sure what “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-of-War” is about. Helen Vendler, in her review of Late Settings, calls it “an elegy of sorts for Merrill’s wealthy thrice-married father” (“James Merrill,” The Music of What Happens, 1988). She refers to its “anatomy of tycoons, their female hangers-on, their sexual forays, their eventual toombs.” This interpretation seems reasonable. It certainly helps make sense of words such as “razor labia of hangers-on” and “tiny hideous tycoon.” It’s not a joyful poem. Vendler says, “Hatred and pity coexist in this impersonal elegy.” But its description – particularly those concise, consummate opening lines in the New Yorker version - is exquisite.

Credit: The above photograph of James Merrill is by Rollie McKenna.

October 15, 2012 Issue

What do W. G. Sebald and Tom Wolfe have in common? Very little. Sebald’s style is flat; Wolfe’s is hyperactive. Sebald is an elegist; Wolfe is a provocateur. About the only connection between them is that they’re among the handful of writers that James Wood has reviewed more than once. Wood loves Sebald’s writing; he hates Wolfe’s. In his ““Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information” (The Irresponsible Self, 2004), he describes Wolfe’s prose as “ordinary,” “vulgar,” “gale-force,” “monstrously melodramatic,” “no capacity for simile or metaphor,” “grotesquerie,” “bumptious simplicity.”  And in “Muscle-Bound,” in the current issue of the magazine, his critique of Wolfe’s writing is even more derisive (“pumped-up,” “steroidal,” “blaring,” “irritatingly bouncy,” “a big-circus broadcast,” “spoiled music,” “revelling in its own grossly muscular power, its own cheap riches”).  However, both of Wood’s Wolfe pieces contain tiny sweet spots, momentary pauses in the onslaught of invective, when Wood veers close to actually saying something positive about Wolfe’s prose. For example, in “Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information,” Wood says, “Sometimes the reportage is so good, the rendition so faithful, and the speech so strange, that a genuine power flickers on the page.” But this compliment quickly dissolves and Wood resumes his rant. Similarly, in “Muscle-Bound,” Wood briefly halts his attack just long enough to insert this beauty: “Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and ‘Hotchkiss, Yale … six-three.’” Sound enigmatic? It is, beautifully so, especially if considered as a stand-alone sentence. But viewed in context, it makes perfect sense. And it provides entry into a wonderful gloss on Wood’s philosophy of detail, which I think may turn out to be his most lasting contribution to literary criticism (see the brilliant chapter titled “Detail” in his How Fiction Works, 2008). 

Interesting Emendations: Joseph Mitchell's "Mr. Hunter's Grave"

There are two versions of Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave.” One appeared in The New Yorker, September 22, 1956. The other is included in Mitchell’s great 1992 collection Up in the Old Hotel. The two versions are very similar. Where they differ is in the description of the weeds and wildflowers covering the graves in Sandy Ground cemetery. In the New Yorker version, Mitchell wrote:

A scattering of the newer graves were fairly clean, but most of them were thickly covered with weeds, wild flowers and ferns. There were easily a hundred kinds. Among those that I could identify were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, chickweed, joe-pye weed, wood aster, lamb’s quarters, plantain, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, chicory, butter-and-eggs, thistle, dandelion, selfheal, Mexican tea, stinging nettle, bouncing Bet, mullein, touch-me-not, partridge pea, beggar’s-lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, may apple, old-field cinquefoil, cinnamon fern, New York fern, lady fern, and maiden-hair fern. Some of the graves had rusty iron-pipe fences around them.

In the Up in the Old Hotel version, the passage is changed:

A scattering of the newer graves were fairly clean, but most of them were thickly covered with weeds and wild flowers and ferns. There were scores of kinds. The majority were the common kinds that grow in waste places and in dumps and in vacant lots and in old fields and beside roads and ditches and railroad tracks, and I could recognize them at a glance. Among these were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet, mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s-lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, rabbit tobacco, old-field cinquefoil, bracken, New York fern, cinnamon fern, and lady fern. A good many of the others were unfamiliar to me, and I broke off the heads and upper branches of a number of these and stowed them in the pockets of my jacket, to look at later under a magnifying glass. Some of the graves had rusty iron-pipe fences around them.

Notice the deletion of chickweed, joe-pye weed, wood aster, lamb’s quarters, plantain, chicory, thistle, selfheal, Mexican tea, stinging nettle, touch-me-not, may apple, and maiden-hair fern from the later version. Also note the addition of rabbit tobacco and bracken, and the addition of “A good many of the others were unfamiliar to me, and I broke off the heads and upper branches of a number of these and stowed them in the pockets of my jacket, to look at later under a magnifying glass.” 

The list of weeds, wildflowers, and ferns is one of the most beautiful passages in the piece. Why did Mitchell change it? I think he was trying to be more accurate. He wasn’t comfortable with the impression he conveyed in The New Yorker version that he was able to identify all those plants on the spot. In the Up in the Old Hotel version, he takes pains to specify only those plants that he was actually able to identify when he was at the graves. The plants that he deleted are likely the ones that he later identified when, as he says in the second version, he had the use of a magnifying glass. All of this is pure conjecture on my part. He might’ve made the deletions simply because he felt the list was too long. But that doesn’t account for the addition of the line about “many of the others were unfamiliar to me,” and so on. Some of the stories in Up in the Old Hotel are fictional; some are factual. “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is factual. Mitchell makes this clear in the “Author’s Note.” Unlike some of today’s writers of fact pieces, Mitchell believed in painstaking accuracy. His tweaking of his list of weeds, wildflowers and ferns in his masterpiece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is, I submit, an example of his conscientious effort to be as accurate as possible.  

David Denby's "Do the Movies Have a Future?"

David Denby’s “Influencing People” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010) is one of the best movie reviews I’ve ever read – where best means descriptive, analytical, artful, exhilarating. I blogged about it here, when it first appeared, in a post titled “The Social Network: Denby v. Smith v. Wood.” Now I see that Denby has included a version of it in his new book Do the Movies Have a Future? The book version is called “David Fincher and The Social Network.” Comparing it with the New Yorker piece, I note a number of interesting changes. Here, for example, is the New Yorker version’s tracing of the movie’s subtlety:

Yet, no matter how quickly the film moves, Fincher, working with the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, pauses within the fast tempo

and lets the emotional power of the moment expand. Relying on nothing more than tiny shifts of emphasis and inflection, the director, to an amazing degree, makes us care about the split between the unyielding Zuckerberg and Saverin, who’s a decent guy but unimaginative and perhaps a little timid.

Now here’s the book version:

Yet no matter how quickly the film moves, Fincher, working with the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, pauses within the fast tempo and, like a great opera conductor, lets the emotional power of the moment expand. The emotion is produced not so much by emphasis as by extreme precision – tiny shifts of inflection (a hesitation, a glance, a lowered voice); even the actors playing the lawyers add their bit of nuance to what might have been routine scenes of questioning and badgering. In the end, to an amazing degree, Fincher makes us care about the split between two college buddies, Zuckerberg and Saverin, tender friends who understood each other about as well as highly competitive young men ever do. Poor Eduardo! He’s a decent guy but unimaginative and perhaps a little timid.

Notice that the observation about the reliance “on nothing more than tiny shifts of emphasis,” in the New Yorker piece, has been reconsidered. Denby now says, “the emotion is produced not so much by emphasis as by extreme precision.” And he goes on to explain what he means by “extreme precision” – “tiny shifts of inflection (a hesitation, a glance, a lowered voice).” His commentary deepens my appreciation of the movie, as does his point about “even the actors playing the lawyers add their bit of nuance to what might have been routine scenes of questioning and badgering.”

Most of the changes that Denby has made to his great review are minor (e.g., to the line, “The truth, Fincher seems to be saying, is best approached with data, impressions, and interpretations,” he adds a semi-colon and says, “there’s no final way of knowing anything”). But there’s one passage that’s been substantially rewritten. It’s regarding the film's accuracy. Here’s the New Yorker version:

The debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun, but Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art. Accuracy is now a secondary issue.

Here’s the book version:

 A debate about the movie’s accuracy has already begun: Doesn’t the actual Zuckerberg have a girlfriend? Is it fair to portray him as arrogant and isolated? And so on. But Fincher and Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created an irresistibly entertaining work of art that’s infinitely suggestive of the way personal relations are evolving – or devolving – in the Internet Age. Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters, and that kind of accuracy can be created only by artists.

I agree with Denby’s opinion that The Social Network is a work of art. However, I question his statement, in the New Yorker piece, that “Accuracy is now a secondary issue.” Painstaking accuracy is, for me, a hallmark of great art (think Vermeer, Nabokov, Scorsese). The fact that he deletes this remark from the book version of the review indicates he’s uncomfortable with it, too. But the statement he replaces it with – “Spiritual accuracy, not literal accuracy, is what matters” – is no less problematical. I don’t want to sound moralistic about this, but it seems to me that a movie that purports to tell the life story of a real person should stick to the facts. As Pauline Kael said in her review of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, “There is no higher truth than respecting facts” (“Genius,” in her 1973 collection Deeper Into Movies). Denby’s distinction between spiritual accuracy and literal accuracy is slippery; it provides a rationale for biographical falsification.

The good news about the book version of Denby’s review of The Social Network is that it reproduces almost verbatim (there are a couple of minor tweaks) the brilliant passage in the New Yorker piece describing the movie’s visual style:

Despite the half craziness of the themes, the early Fincher movies have a visual distinction that makes them galvanic, irresistible. As critic Amy Taubin wrote, “No one comes close to Fincher’s control of movement in a frame and across a cut,” and I agree with that. Even Fincher’s patented junk and mess, first seen in “Alien 3” and then in the rubbishy, derelict rooms in “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” has a perversely attractive appeal, a glowing awfulness, as if it were lit from within. He doesn’t hide the disintegrating walls, the sordid beds; we are meant to see the ugly poetry in them. Whatever locations he uses, Fincher brings out their special character. At the beginning of “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg runs across the campus to his room at night, and Harvard, its many enclaves lit with intellectual industry, looks glamorous, like an enlivened imaginary city. The scenes of the Winklevosses in their boat, crisply cutting through the water, are ineffably beautiful; the twins are at ease in their bodies and in nature, while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in. The revolution brews amid garbage.

That “while the Zuckerberg gang slouch over their computers in the kind of trashed rooms that Fincher’s anarchists and killers live in” is superb! It’s tonic to see it preserved intact in Denby’s excellent collection.

October 8, 2012 Issue

Dan Chiasson, in his review of Brenda Shaughnessy’s new poetry collection Our Andromeda, in this week’s issue of the magazine, quotes several lines from Shaughnessy’s poem “Artless,” and says:

A rationed vocabulary, an imagination thinned by worry and obligation, a new consciousness of death (the “smoke/in the old smokehouse”), and, most of all, this strange antique music, like a dreamed stanza of Robert Herrick: these elements create the subsistence beauty of “Artless” and much of Shaughnessy’s new work.

That “subsistence beauty” is inspired! As a result of reading Chiasson’s review (titled "The Cild In Time"), I went back to "Artless" – it appears in the August 8, 2011 New Yorker – and took a close look at it. It is ingeniously structured: seventeen brief three-line stanzas, each line no more than four or five words in length, each stanza ending with a word containing “less” (e.g., “tartless,” roofless,” “bless,” “meatless”). In this intriguing poem, Shaughnessy professes artlessness (“No poetry. Plain”) as her aesthetic, but she does so in such an artful way that she undercuts her message. Her words are plain, but they’re also beautifully arranged and patterned. No poem worth the name is truly “artless.” What Shaughnessy means, I think, is a sublime of pared-down language (“less/substance, more rind”). Chiasson’s “subsistence beauty” describes it brilliantly.  

Interesting Emendations: Whitney Balliett's "New Coming"

I’m pleased to see Whitney Balliett quoted in Christopher Carroll’s excellent “The Sound of Sonny Rollins” (The New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012). The quotation, which is from an April 1, 1972 New Yorker piece, describes how Rollins blended the best elements of Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker. It reads as follows:

He extracted the muscle from Hawkins’ tone and left the velvet lopped off Hawkins’ famous vibrato, and sharpened Hawkins’ method of melodic playing by making it parodic. He learned Parker’s teeming disregard of bar lines, Parker’s way with rhythm (the oddly placed notes, the silences, the avalanches of thirty-second notes), and Parker’s trick of mixing surreal melodic passages with tumbling bursts of improvisation. And over all this he superimposed a unique and witty garrulity that made his immensely long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams.

It’s a wonderfully vivid description. Interestingly, Balliett changed it when he included the piece (titled “New Coming”) in his great Collected Works (2000). Here’s the Collected Works version:

He extracted the muscle from Hawkins’ tone, lopped off Hawkins’ famous vibrato, and sharpened Hawkins’ method of melodic playing by parodying it. He learned Parker’s teeming disregard of bar lines, Parker’s way with rhythm (the oddly placed notes, the silences, the avalanches of sixteenth notes), and Parker’s trick of mixing surreal melodic passages with bursts of improvisation. And over all this he superimposed a witty garrulity that made his immensely long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams.

Balliett deleted “and left the velvet,” changed “making it parodic” to “parodying it,” changed “thirty-second notes” to “sixteenth notes,” and deleted “tumbling” and “unique.” The Collected Works version is leaner. But I confess I miss that evocative “left the velvet lopped off” in the New Yorker article. Nevertheless, the Collected Works piece is the final version. It’s likely the one that Balliett would want quoted.  

Notes on John McPhee's "Irons in the Fire"

I went camping last week and took John McPhee’s 1997 collection Irons in the Fire with me. In between setting up the tent, rolling out the sleeping bags, walking, cycling, taking lots of pictures, and generally just hanging out here and there along Maine’s amazing coast, I read the title piece. It proved to be an excellent travel companion. It’s an account of McPhee’s journeys in Nevada with a cattle brand inspector named Chris Collis. I vaguely recall seeing it when it appeared in The New Yorker (December 20, 1993). But it didn’t make nearly the impression on me that it made last week when I read it. It’s a wonderful piece. Particularly notable aspects are:

·     The Ellie Wyeth Fox drawings of cattle brands (e.g., Reverse B Hanging P, Rocking Arrow, Lazy Spiked E) that are incorporated into the text, including the Lazy J Over Running M Combined on the book cover that Fox specially created for McPhee.

·     McPhee’s glorious use of present tense (e.g., “Now Gordon Eldridge, in Spring Valley, reaches into a shirt pocket and removes a small ledger containing the license numbers and the makes of unknown vehicles that he has seen in the valley since who knows when,” “Twenty-five miles down the valley, in the late slanting light, Chris turns in at Lonne Gubler’s Cleveland Ranch, where Cleve Creek comes out of the mountains and productively waters the basin,” “A new moon has come into the sky, a standing sliver, right off their brand,” “Soon after daybreak on a cold October morning, sprinkler fields are frozen in Steptoe Valley”).

·     His detailed, vivid descriptions of ranching procedure, e.g., roping (“The horse, turning, keeps the rope taut and drags the calf to the fire. At the fire, the horse turns again to face the calf, backing up to keep the line taut”), branding (“While Gerry keeps the rope taut and his mom continues to kneel on the calf, his dad, on foot, takes an iron from the fire and causes a puff of smoke to rise from the calf’s right hip”), earmarking (“Chris folds the right ear. Into the crease he cuts a semicircle, making a hole in the center of the ear. He moves the blade from the hole through the pink flesh to the point of the ear – a longitudinal slit – as if he were cutting fruit”), castration (“He slices off the tip of the scrotum as if he were scissoring the tip of a cigar. He squeezes into the light the pearl-gray glistening ellipsoid oysters”). The use of those scientific adjectives (“longitudinal,” “ellipsoid”) is pure McPhee. It’s what separates his work from that of other great describers such as Ian Frazier and Edward Hoagland.

·     His artful similes (e.g., “In the great treeless valleys, pickups, with their wakes of dust, stand out like speedboats,” “Out in the flats, coyotes are wailing like theft alarms”).

·     The specificity (and poetics) of naming, e.g., cattle breeds (Black Angus, Angus-Hereford, Brangus, Charolais, Simbrah), geography (Schell Creek Range, White River Valley, Wheeler Peak, Little Fish Lake Valley, Kawich Mountains, Steptoe Valley, Camel Peak, Burnt Canyon, Duck Creek Range, Diamond Range, Red Bluff Spring, Railroad Valley, Sawmill Canyon), cattle brands (Lazy E Over P, Quarter Circle Standing Quarter Circle, JY Bar Connected, Cross L Combined, Long Tailed B, Quarter Circle Flying V Bar).

·     This ravishing Rauschenberg-like verbal combine: “The buyer has a dish antenna, and sits at home watching videotaped cattle in the egret flats of Alvin, Texas, on the Red River plain of Louisiana, against the velvet greens of Jane Lew, West Virginia, and back to the pasture of Easterly, Texas, where mahogany steers against a stand of trees are up to their hocks in grass.”

I enjoyed “Irons in the Fire” immensely. There’s another piece in the collection that I haven’t read. It’s called “The Gravel Page.” I’m saving it for my next camping trip. 

October 1, 2012 Issue

In this week’s issue, three Talk story masters – Nick Paumgarten, Ian Frazier, and Alec Wilkinson - strut their stuff. Paumgarten’s intriguing “Hello, Bobby” is about record producer, Scott Litt, and his experience as recording engineer on Bob Dylan’s latest album “Tempest.” There’s a very funny line in it. It’s Litt quoting Dylan, and it goes, “He just went, ‘Heh heh heh. “Hello, Dolly.” ’ ” That’s a very improbable, surrealistic line, and I can hear Dylan saying it. It’s a tribute to Paumgarten’s ear (listening to Litt tell the story) that he’s able to capture it.

Frazier’s “Neighbors” is a rarity – a Talk story with a line break. That’s because, for a Talk story, it’s longer than usual; it’s actually two stories in one. The first part tells the story of Brooklyn folk artist Evelyn Talarico. The second section is about L. B. Brown, owner of Clinton Hill Simply Art and Framing Gallery, in Brooklyn. The two sections are linked by Talarico’s statement, “Six years ago, I went to the neighborhood gallery, and the owner, Mrs. L. B. Brown, she told me, ‘You are a folk artist, a self-taught outsider artist.’” Frazier visits Brown in her gallery. She turns out to be – like so many of Frazier’s city dwellers – an arresting, admirable individual, full of interesting talk about her “little business.” For example, she says:

“Everybody wants their cherishables framed. And to do this right I’ve got to be like a fortune-teller. I have to take time with you to get a sense of what works in your dining room or your man cave. Are you a wood person or a chrome person? Do you want to go all the way up to museum glass to conserve whatever it is you want in that frame? This is the type of question I ask.”

Mitchell, Liebling, and Singer would appreciate that quote. And so do I. I can almost see Frazier smiling inwardly as he copied it down.

Wilkinson’s “Indigenous” is a little different from Paumgarten’s and Frazier’s pieces. Except for its brilliant last line, it doesn’t contain much direct quotation. What it does have is fabulous descriptions of Mexican herbs and vegetables. “Indigenous” is a mini-profile of Gudelio García, “one of the only farmers in New York City raising crops that are native to central Mexico.” He farms an acre plot, called El Poblano Farm, on Staten Island. Paumgarten describes some of Garcia’s crops as follows:

García grows papalo; pepicha; flor de calabaza, or squash blossoms; quelites; jicama; chayote; epazote, a spicy herb that smells like gasoline; ejote; and three kinds of Mexican peppers – jalapeño, serano, and poblano. Papalo and pepicha are similar tasting herbs. They are used fresh, mainly in soups and tacos. Flor de calabaza is a yellow-orange flower used in quesadillas. Quelites are edible greens, and jicama is a root, something like turnip. Chayote is a pear-shaped squash, epazote is an herb often cooked with beans, and ejote is a string bean.

There’s poetry in that list! It reminds me of the amazing sequence of weeds and wildflowers set out in Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). And I think Paumgarten’s, Frazier’s and Wilkinson’s pieces are destined to become classics, too. They’re certainly among this year’s most enjoyable Talk stories.

Postscript: I suppose I’m going to sound like a Puritan if I ask why there seems to be such reluctance to disapprove of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s slippery practice of mixing fact and fiction. I don’t think of myself as a Puritan. But I do rigidly hold to one fundamental journalistic principle: facts are not to be messed with. The “Briefly Noted” review of Artur Domoslawski’s biography Ryszard Kapuscinski, in this week’s New Yorker, coolly and neutrally observes that Domoslawski “praises Kapuscinski’s work as ‘non-fiction which does not hold fiction in contempt.'” Praises? The use of fiction in a piece that represents itself as fact hardly warrants praise. Quite the opposite – it should be deplored! I’m surprised the “Briefly Noted” reviewer withheld comment. I’m wondering if James Wood wrote it. He appears quite comfortable with essayists who mingle fact and fiction. In his review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s great essay collection, Pulphead, he praises the contemporary essay for a “sly and knowing movement between reality and fictionality” (“Reality Effects," The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011).

Another reviewer who suspends judgment in respect of Kapuscinski’s blurred line between fact and fiction is Neal Ascherson. In his review of Domoslawski’s book on Kapuscinski, Ascherson says that Kapuscinski “habitually exaggerated, often changing details for effect” (“How It Felt To Be There,” London Review of Books, August 2, 2012). This would seem to be about as damning a charge against a journalist as there could possibly be. Yet, Ascherson appears willing to give Kapuscinski the benefit of the doubt. He admits “there’s no doubt that Kapuscinski – writing for publications and readers who had no way to check what he told them – overstepped them in the sense of selling ‘faction’ as fact.” But after rereading Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life, a chronicle of the war in Angola, Ascherson softens, concluding, “He probably did embroider and reposition details about the fighting in Angola. But, as a reporter on one of those wars, I can say that he caught ‘how it felt to be there’ as nobody else could.”

This whole business of journalists fiddling with facts came up a few months ago when John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact appeared. Reviewing that book in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jennifer B. McDonald, called D’Agata’s championing of belief over fact “hogwash” (“In the Details,” February 26, 2012). I totally agree. I say the same thing about "non-fiction which does not hold fiction in contempt.”

September 24, 2012 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Peter Schjeldahl’s excellent “Going Pop,” in this week’s issue, with some of his other Warhol reviews. He’s written at least four previous pieces: “Andy Warhol” (The 7 Days Art Columns, 1990); “Warhol and Class Content” (The Hydrogen Juke Box, 1991); “Andy’s Place” (“Critic’s Notebook,” The New Yorker, September 19, 2005); and “Warhol in Bloom” (The New Yorker, March 11, 2002; included in Let’s See, 2008). Warhol is crucial to Schjeldahl’s blissed, ‘60s way of seeing. In his early “Andy Warhol,” he calls Warhol’s 1965 Paris Flowers show a “conversion experience.” He says something similar in “Warhol in Bloom,” a review of Tate Modern’s 2002 Warhol retrospective, installed by Donna De Salvo:

Announcing that pleasure will be the show’s keynote, De Salvo begins with a group of Flowers – large silk-screen paintings from 1964 and 1967 that ring changes on a motif of flat hibiscus blossoms against a grainy ground of grass blades. (Warhol cribbed the image from a tiny black-and-white ad in a magazine.) The choice elated me, because a Flowers show in Paris, in 1965, was one of two experiences I had that year that inspired a vocational devotion to art. (The other was a Piero della Francesca fresco in Tuscany.)

In “Andy Warhol,” Schjeldahl says, “I love Warhol, with a fan’s love. It isn’t so much a warm place in my heart, an organ not notably engaged by this artist, as it is a flat spot among the folds of my brain, from where said brain got run over in the ‘60s.” Almost fifty years on, has Schjeldahl’s Warholian passion cooled? Not at all. According to his latest piece, it’s hotter than ever. In “Going Pop,” a review of the Met’s “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” he refers to Warhol’s “triumph,” "clairvoyance,” “greatness,” “command,” “genius.” He says, “The gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1967

What impresses me about Schjeldahl’s Warhol fixation is the case he repeatedly and persuasively makes for Warhol as colorist, as painter. His “Warhol and Class Content” contains a fascinating description of Warhol’s silk-screen technique that emphasizes its “painterly” aspect:

There is no sense of pastiche about Warhol’s portraits. Their form evolved from his silk-screened multiple images of the sixties, with the important addition of a technique, derived from certain dime-store fine-art reproductions, that involves printing the image on a prepared irregular surface, giving the illusion of “original” facture. Warhol transforms the technique by using it very broadly, for a variety of ends; there is no Lichtenstein-like satirical acknowledgment of its source. Still, a lot of people, Newsweek’s art critic among them, fall for the commonsense illusion that the acrylic paint is applied on rather than under – or is perhaps identical with – the silk-screen enamel. The fact is that nearly all color, including that of eyes, lips, and hair, is laid down before the screening; only occasionally and sparingly does Warhol add important touches with a brush, adjusting the balance of photo and paint in paint’s favor. The wet-in-wet handling (where it is thick; often it is flat, posterlike) dries before receiving the image, which gets its “painterly” look from being distorted by the topography. Warhol had developed the aesthetic and expressive possibilities of this technique in nonportrait paintings for years, notably in a series of large, mysterious near abstractions called Shadows. His ability to improvise with it has reached such a point of casual assurance that one can easily miss its virtuosity.

In the same piece, Schjeldahl also adverts to Warhol’s “endlessly variegated palette of aggressively ‘odd’ flavorful hues and tints.” In “Warhol in Bloom,” Schjeldahl says, “Warhol was a supreme colorist who redid the world’s palette in tart, amazing hues such as cerise, citron, burnt orange, and apple-green.” And in “Going Pop,” he describes Warhol’s two 1967 self-portraits (“One of them gravitates toward glowering reds, set off by a sudden yellow, and the other toward blackish blue, with blood orange, ochre, and aqua”) and says,

Warhol’s eye for improbable chromatic harmonies cannot be overrated. He once said that he wanted to be Matisse. He may have meant only that he wanted that kind of fame, but his potently symbolizing way with colors – which, like scents, are a royal road from the outside world to our emotions – merits comparison with Matisse, in a spectrum of hues that postdate the Frenchman’s palette.

Granted, other critics have praised Warhol's color, too [e.g., Sanford Schwartz, in his "Andy Warhol The Painter" (Artists and Writers, 1990)], says that Warhol “still seems audacious in his use of silver and turquoise, lavender, orange, and brown”). But their descriptions seem bland in comparison with Schjeldahl’s. Like his hero Warhol, Schjeldahl bedazzles. I love him, with a fan’s love.

Second Thoughts: Schwartz’s “Andy Warhol The Painter” does contain at least one inspired line: “But the actual pictures have a powdery and breathing surface; you want to get close to the canvas itself.” 

September 17, 2012 Issue

The pieces in this week’s issue I enjoyed most are:

Patricia Marx’s Talk story “Happy Hunting” (The bit about the six-year-old cupping “an oodgy-colored something” is inspired.)

The “Briefly Noted” review of Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk (Its description of Sinclair’s prose as “lacerating, off-kilter” is perfect. In my opinion, Sinclair is one of the greats. Maybe someday The New Yorker will do a longer piece on him. He merits fuller analysis.)

Anthony Gottlieb’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” [Contains several witty lines, e.g., “We are, in short, all running apps from Fred Flintstone’s not-very-smartphone,” “American college kids, whatever their charms, are a laughable proxy for Homo sapiens." But Gottlieb’s mention of Stephen Jay Gould doesn’t do justice to Gould’s view on evolutionary psychology. For example, Gould would be vehemently opposed to the “snappy slogan” (“Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”) that Gottlieb says sums up the current line of post-Darwinian thinking. In his “Natural Selection and the Brain” (The Panda’s Thumb, 1980), Gould says, “The brain is vastly overdesigned for what it accomplished in primitive society; thus, natural selection could not have built it.” However, there’s at least this to be said for Gottlieb’s piece: it’s rekindled my interest in Gould’s writing. Gould wrote one of the most powerful book reviews ever to appear in The New Yorker. I’m referring to his extraordinary “Curveball” (November 28, 1994), an evisceration of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. The piece is a fit subject for a “Retrospective Review.” Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing it.]
 

Peter Schjeldahl’s “All Stripes” (Regarding Gerhard Richter’s “STRIPS,” Schjeldahl writes, “I like and don’t like the work.” But when he says earlier in the piece, “I can’t think of any other important art that has seemed to expect so little imaginative participation from a viewer,” I’m left wondering what there is to like about it.)

Anthony Lane’s “Sail Away” (I like reviews that proceed by raising questions, and this piece poses a beauty: “Here is frustration made flesh, with fearsome results; would it be heretical or ungrateful to say that there are times, when Phoenix is in full spate, and when Hoffman is revealing similar ruptures of rage in Dodd’s more genial façade, when there is just too much acting going on, perhaps with a capital ‘A’?”)