Nadav Kander's "Yangtze - The Long River"

Nadav Kander, Chongqing VII, (Washing Bike), 2006 

In this week’s “Goings On About Town” (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012), there’s an interesting note about Nadav Kander’s photographic series “Yangtze – The Long River,” currently on show at New York’s Flowers Gallery. The note states:

The London-based Israeli photographer prints big, but at nearly six feet wide his largest pictures can only begin to suggest the grand scale of his subject: China’s Yangtze River and its environs. Kander documented the length of the river from 2006 to 2009, paying special attention to the people along its banks and the enormous bridges and highway overpasses that loom high above. His palette is restrained, and even the busiest images feel almost empty under a haze that makes everything appear dusty—soft and subdued, but far from romantic.

Reading this, I recalled the chapter in Peter Hessler’s great River Town (2001), in which he describes a boat trip that he and a friend took down the Yangtze from White Crane Ridge to Three Gorges. Hessler writes,

The sun glanced off the silver-brown water; hawks glided overhead. Men rode unsteady bamboo rafts along the river’s edge. Coal boats puttered past. Workers quarried limestone along the shore, the clink of their chisels echoing clear above the winter river.

That subtle silver-brown is exactly caught in Kander's exquisite photos, some of which are on display at www.flowersgallery.com. Is it the silver-brown of stagnation? Twice, Hessler uses the word:

… the Daning was doomed to rise nearly three hundred feet, its gorges half-filled, and these rapids would run clear no more. It would be part of the new reservoir, with the same stagnant water as the Yangtze.

But to have it simply stop – to turn the river into a lake – for some reason that bothered me more than anything else. In a selfish way, I didn’t mind so much the loss of temples, or the scenery’s lessened magnificence, or even the displaced people. The part that bothered me the most was all that stagnant water; I didn’t want to see the Daning and the Xiangxi and the Yangtze slow down. I couldn’t explain it other than that they were clearly meant to rush forward; that was their essential nature. There was power and life and exuberance in those rivers, and in a decade all of that would be lost.

Kander’s infrastructure-filled photos of the Yangtze convey that same sense of loss. The anonymous writer of the New Yorker note sensed it, too: “Soft and subdued, but far from romantic.” 

November 26, 2012 Issue

Nick Paumgarten’s “Deadhead,” in this week’s issue, is a glorious, compelling, highly original exploration of the Grateful Dead’s “transformation, over time, from living thing to library.” I think it’s likely to become a classic for its remarkable description of Deadhead obsession with the band’s vast recorded legacy. The absorbing opening section is about the recovery of a batch of old Dead tapes called Betty Boards (“tapes made by Betty Cantor-Jackson, a longtime recording engineer for the Grateful Dead”) from a barn in Petaluma, California. The second section is a series of Paumgarten’s early “Grateful Dead” memories, including a recollection of attending his first Dead concert (“In the pavilion, the tapers had set up a cityscape of microphone stands, like minarets, and through them there was the sight of Jerry Garcia, fat and hunched, virtually immobile in a haze of his own cigarette smoke”). The writing in the second section is bravura; Garcia comes alive on the page (“But he played in long, convoluted paragraphs and snappy banjo blurts. Torrents of melody poured out of his stubby, tarred hands, chiming and snarling into the night”). The piece moves from strength to strength. It consists of fourteen unnumbered sections, each one a different facet of the world of tapeheads and geeks “who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud.” Section 11, in which Paumgarten and the Dead’s current archivist, David Lemieux, are driving from Burbank to the Bay Area, is my favorite. It contains a number of inspired sentences, including this arresting beauty: “The jam finished with a piano flourish, and I gave Lemieux a look of holy smokes, which he returned with one of that’s my girl, as though the choice flattered him.” “Deadhead” is a masterpiece. Reading it is bliss! 

November 19, 2012 Issue

These days it seems that Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s great baseball writer, spends as much time thinking about double burial plots as he does contemplating double plays. This may strike some people as morbid, but not me. I enjoy nosing around old cemeteries. I enjoy reading about them, too. Angell’s “Here Below” (The New Yorker, January 16, 2006) is a wonderful cemetery piece, ranking with Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956; Up in the Old Hotel, 1992) and John Updike’s superb “Cemeteries” (Picked-Up Pieces, 1976). “Here Below” describes visits that Angell and his wife, Carol, made to Palisades Cemetery, Stockbridge cemetery, and (most memorably) Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery, where a number of his family, including his mother (Katherine S. White) and step-father (E. B. White), are buried. I like Angell’s descriptions of grave markers (e.g., “An other eloquent marker nearby was a tall and faded pinkish-brown slab – perhaps it’s brownstone – with a scalloped top and the pleasing old willow-tree-and-stone-urn drawing barely visible here, that you find in this part of the country”). Interestingly, “Here Below” contains one of the longest sentences I’ve ever seen in The New Yorker, an amazing construction that innocuously begins, “Mother smiles and sighs and picks at her roast potato,” and then takes off, running sixty-eight lines, ending with a question mark.

Angell’s “Over the Wall,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, is a touching sequel to “Here Below.” In this new piece, Angell again visits Brooklin Cemetery. This time he describes two additional grave markers – his wife’s, who died early last April – and his own (“it only lacks the final numbers”). And he mentions another grave, as well, “that of my daughter Callie, who died two years ago.” Angell doesn’t linger over his wife’s grave. He says, “My visits to Carol didn’t last long. I’d perk up the flowers in the vase we had there, and pick deadheads off a pot of yellow daisies; if there had been rain overnight, I’d pick up any pieces of the sea glass that had fallen and replace them on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone.” That “on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone” is inspired. In the oldest part of the cemetery, Angell sees headstones “worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility.” This echoes one of “Here Below”’s best lines: “Carol found one of the markers we were looking for: a silvery granite oblong, with the letters fading into invisibility.” Fading into invisibility – time’s inevitable effect. Angell’s two marvelous cemetery pieces make the vanishing process almost palpable. 

James Wood's "The Fun Stuff"

James Wood, in the Preface of his great How Fiction Works (2008), writes, “I admire Milan Kundera’s three books on the art of fiction, but Kundera is a novelist and essayist rather than a practical critic; occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text.” Occasionally we want his hands to be bit inkier with text – how fine that is! It perfectly catches the quality I most desire in a critic’s writing – deep immersion at the level of sentence and structure. Wood’s hands are always inky with text – right up to his elbows. That’s what I love about his work. He gets inside writing, analyzing the words-as-arranged-on-the-page. Helen Vendler, in her review of Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue, writes, “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act, the texture of the lines on the page” (Soul Says, 1995). That’s Wood’s art, too. His new collection, The Fun Stuff, contains twenty-five essays - seventeen of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. They are all bravura pieces of writing, knit together by three of Wood’s abiding themes: the noticing eye, a distain for convention, and a love of the long sentence.

A key element of Wood’s aesthetic is close observation of detail. “Literature teaches us to notice,” he says in How Fiction Works. Of one of his favorite writers, Saul Bellow, he says, “Bellow notices superbly” (How Fiction Works). In "Red Planet," one of his earliest New Yorker pieces (not included in The Fun Stuff), he says that Cormac McCarthy is a “wonderfully delicate noticer of nature.” In "Reality Effects" (another New Yorker piece not included in The Fun Stuff), he says that John Jeremiah Sullivan is a “fierce noticer.” In "Cabin Fever" (yet another New Yorker review missing from The Fun Stuff), he says that the protagonist of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a “steady noticer of the natural world, and that the novella’s prose follows his eye, with frequent exhalations of beauty.” In "Wounder and Wounded" (in The Fun Stuff), he calls V. S. Naipaul a “brilliant noticer.” Wood himself deserves this compliment; he’s a brilliant literary noticer. Mark O’Connell, in his terrific review of The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). I know exactly what O’Connell means; I totally agree with him. Wood has a jeweler’s eye for choice quotation and a luminous way of presenting it. For example, here’s a passage from his excellent "Beyond a Boundary: 'Netherland' as Postcolonial Novel" (in The Fun Stuff):

The eye that sees the “orange fuzz” of the streetlights is the eye that elsewhere in the novel, alights on the “molten progress of the news tickers” in Times Square, the “train-infested underpants” of Hans’s little boy, “a necklace’s gold drool,” the “roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas,” and that sees, in one lovely swipe of a sentence, a sunset like this: “The day, a pink smear above America, had all but disappeared.”

That “in one lovely swipe of a sentence” is delightful, perfectly describing O’Neill’s inspired “pink smear” line.

Wood is impatient with conventionality. In "Keeping It Real" (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010; not included in The Fun Stuff), he describes Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered as "a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and alas, utterly conventional." He scorns what he calls the “cumbersome caravans of plot” (“Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner,” in The Fun Stuff). In “Keeping It Real,” he exclaims, “All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization!” As an alternative to all this “silly machinery,” Wood points to novels such as Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Teju Coles’s Open City. Regarding Lerner’s novel, he says:

Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and “conflict,” fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life: what he calls several times in the book “life’s white machine”: “that other thing, the sound-absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance … the texture of et cetera itself.”

The Fun Stuff evinces Wood’s fondness for the long sentence. In “Beyond a Boundary,” he writes, “O’Neill writes elegant, long sentences, formal but not fussy, punctually pricked with lyrically exact metaphor.” Regarding postwar avant-garde fiction, in “‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: László Krasznahorkai” (in The Fun Stuff), he says,

A lot has already disappeared from this fictional world, and the writer concentrates on filling the sentence, using it to notate, produce, and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, intermittences, affirmations, and negations of existence. This is one reason why very long, breathing, unstopped sentences, at once literary and vocal, are almost inseparable from the progress of experimental fiction since the 1950s.

In his beautiful personal essay, "The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon," Wood describes his notion of the “ideal sentence”: “a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong."

Wood himself occasionally writes a medium-length, Krasznahorkaiesque sentence. Consider, for example, this syntactically rich, eighty-eight word assemblage from “Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner”:

At once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome, Adam is a convincing representative of twenty-first century American Homo literatus – a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political uncertainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus always more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone emptily that poetry isn’t about anything) and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and surety.

The New Yorker took one look at that line and put a period after “Homo literatus,” breaking the sentence in two (see "Reality Testing," October 31, 2012). Obviously, Wood prefers the single, long line. When he collected the piece in The Fun Stuff, he opted for his original conception.

The Fun Stuff is a brilliant collection of critical and personal pieces, one of the best in recent memory. I'm enjoying it immensely.

November 12, 2012 Issue

Call me a hedonist, peg me as hopelessly bourgeois – I don’t care. What I enjoyed most about this week’s issue is Judith Thurman’s description of Betty Halbreich’s apartment, particularly her bureau and closets:

After the cheese course, we started with the drawers in a massive bureau, where silk flowers and scarves, Bakelite “bug pins,” wooden bangles and beads, evening bags in toile sleeves, gloves from Florence and Paris, monogrammed handkerchiefs, chunky stone necklaces, silver pens and pillboxes, clip-on earrings, and her mother’s jewels all have separate compartments. Then came the clothes. Each of her closets (perhaps a dozen – I have lost count) is a deep stall with high ceilings, sturdy poles along both sides, and, above them, shelving. The larger stalls might accommodate a Lipizzaner, with its tack. Their heavy doors are fitted with custom-made wooden shoe racks that open like a steamer trunk.

I readily confess that I’m a sucker for description such as this. Like a rich, seventeenth century Dutch still life, it conveys pleasure in the representation of pleasurable things. The passage is from Thurman’s delightful “Ask Betty” – this week’s Pick Of The Issue. 

Two Paulettes: David Denby and James Wolcott

What was it like to hang out with The New Yorker’s great movie critic Pauline Kael? Two recent memoirs tell us: James Wolcott’s “Like Civilized People …” (in Lucking Out, 2011); and David Denby’s “Pauline Kael: A Great Critic and Her Circle” (in Do The Movies Have a Future?, 2012). It’s interesting to compare them.

Both pieces are deeply admiring, but avoid idolization. Wolcott says, “Much as I adored her, I didn’t want the godmother to have total jurisdiction.” Denby says,

Looking back, I’m happy that she wrote as well as she did for so many years – that was the most important thing she did for young critics who admired her and became part of her circle. I’m equally glad that she took me up in my mid-twenties when I was a nobody and that, for a while, we were friends. She may not have intended to do me a favor when she threw me out, but it was a favor nonetheless, since I might not have grown up for years if I had remained in that group.

Wolcott’s piece is juicier, more intimate, vibrant and wisecracking (more Kaelesque, you might say); Denby’s is more analytical. Wolcott is a dazzling metaphorist. Here, for example, is his description of Kael’s compositional process:

Entire paragraphs were x-ed out and new ones inserted, sentences were transposed within paragraphs that themselves were moved around like modular furniture, commas deliciously planted by The New Yorker’s notoriously comma-promiscuous copy department (resulting in sentences that resembled a higher plane of constipation, bogged down in late-period Henry James particularization) were plucked out and em dashes liberally thrown like left jabs.

That “comma-promiscuous copy department” is terrific.

Denby beautifully describes Kael’s writing style:

 As a writer, she had the natural beat of a good musician, alternating the tension and weight of a long sentence with the brutal quick jab of a short one. Her prose was so urgent and heated that a complexly argued piece seemed to burst forth in a single unbroken stream of words that combined sternly proper syntax with free-ranging, rowdy habits of phrasing. She was a master of informal rhetoric – the bullying mock question, the interjected taunt – and a great liberator of critical language, establishing the right, by means of charged rhythm and color, to speak one’s mind on the page as one might talk to one’s friends over a drink. She used slang, contractions, hype, insult, syncopated compound adjectives – anything for greater speed.

Both pieces capture Kael’s glorious profanity. “Oh, honey, you’ve never been fucked by a bear,” was one line she used, according to Denby, to snap argumentative protégés back to reality. Regarding Hollywood, Wolcott quotes her as saying, “Never underestimate how much those in power resent those with talent – talent being the one thing they can’t buy for themselves. But they never tire of fucking with it, that’s their talent.” Denby calls her “a good witch with a wicked tongue” and “as bawdy as a San Francisco madam.” He talks about her “insatiable need to win arguments.” Given her combativeness, I’ve always wondered why she didn’t rebut Renata Adler’s hatchet job, "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980). Denby refers to it as a “notoriously wrongheaded piece.” But neither critic indicates why Kael chose to remain silent in the face of Adler’s vehement attack. My guess is that she didn’t want to get into a pissing war with a skunk.

Denby and Wolcott show Kael in a fascinating variety of settings: screening rooms, her New Yorker office, talk show, taxi cab, lunch, the Algonquin, her Central Park West apartment. My favorite passage is Wolcott’s description of her at her house:

She did her writing on the second floor of her house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bent over at a drawing table facing light-flooding windows looking out on her long, descending lawn to the road below. She wrote in pencil with a rubber thimble on her thumb, her phenomenal concentration pouring from the point of her pencil across the page as she followed the line of argument wherever it led, keeping every circuit open.

Kael was cruel to Denby. She told him, “You’re too restless to be a writer.” She said, “I’ve thought about this seriously, honey. You should do something else with your energy.” Denby was devastated. Who wouldn’t be? He says, “There was a heaviness in my chest and a slight roaring in my ears, as if a wave had knocked me over and the waters were swirling around my head." He eventually recovered. To his credit, he isn’t spiteful. He calls Kael “an astonishing woman.” He wrote in her obituary, published in the September 17, 2001 New Yorker, “In both abundance and quality, her work was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American journalism.”

Credit: The above photograph of Pauline Kael is by Chris Carroll.

Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady": Lane v. Wood

It’s interesting to compare Anthony Lane’s "Out of the Frame" (The New Yorker, September 3, 2012) with James Wood’s "Perfuming the Money Issue" (London Review of Books, October 11, 2012). Both reviews give Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880) a startlingly fresh reading by exploring its sexual implications. But what I find even more interesting is the way Lane’s and Wood’s sexual views differ. Both critics see Portrait’s villain, Gilbert Osmond, as sexually creepy. Regarding James’s description of Osmond’s relationship with his daughter Pansy (“If he wished to make himself felt, there was soft and supple little Pansy, who would evidently respond to the slightest pressure”), Lane writes:

James omitted the line, and its surrounding passage, when he thoroughly revised the novel, in 1906, for the New York edition of his works (and thereby hangs another tale), yet the jolt of that earlier, unrefined image feels dreadfully suited to Osmond, for whom Humbertism, actual or threatened, would make a pleasing addition to his secret stash of sins.

Note that “pleasing.” Lane enjoys fictional evil. In his review of Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, he says, “When evil can do what it wants, the edge is taken off our fear and our sneaky sense of fun” (“Renaissance Man,” The New Yorker, February 12, 2001; included in his great Nobody’s Perfect, 2002). 

In contrast, Wood is less playful. He calls Osmond “the most frightening character in fiction.” He further says:

What makes The Portrait of a Lady such a strange book is its strongly felt attraction towards sex and its strongly felt recoil from it. Osmond’s seductive diabolism is surely, in large part erotic. The very structure of the novel is sickly and voyeuristic; a group of gazers, each with an erotic interest in her, circulates around Isabel. If you were to read the plot through the pornographic optic that it seems almost to dare, you would notice that some of them, like Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton, imagine themselves with her. Others, like Madam Merle and Henrietta, would like to watch her with someone else (Madame Merle wants to watch Osmond and Isabel, Henrietta wants to watch Caspar and Isabel).

Wood seems almost repelled by the sex he sees in Portrait through his “pornographic optic.” There’s certainly no “sneaky sense of fun” in his description of Osmond’s “seductive diabolism.”

Wood’s emphasis on Portrait’s sexual aspect appears to stem from his reading of Michael Gorra’s new study Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. In his review, he mentions “Gorra, noting the sexual charge that frequently inhabits the prose.” On the other hand, Lane’s notion of a parallel between Osmond and Humbert Humbert is his own. Fourteen years ago, in his review of Adrian Lyne’s movie of Vladimir Nabokov’s splendid Lolita, he wrote, “One of Humbert’s more insidious crimes is to make you wonder what his gentlemanly forefathers may have done to their daughters; with Isabel out of the way, for instance, what cracks might Gilbert Osmond have inflicted on the porcelain virtue of Pansy?” (“Lo and Behold,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1998; collected in Nobody’s Perfect). 

Credit: The above artwork is John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Henry James" (1913).

October 29 & November 5, 2012 Issue

There are two very different narrative methods on display in this week’s issue. Dexter Filkins’s brilliant “Atonement” uses first-person narration. George Packer’s equally brilliant “Washington Man” uses third-person narration. First-person narration strikes me as more reliable, and I generally prefer it. I am speaking here solely with respect to factual writing, not fiction. As Russell Baker observed in his essay on A. J. Liebling (“A Great Reporter at Large,” The New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004), “Liebling was almost always present in his reporting. It is a way of treating readers with respect. A glimpse of the party who is doing the reporting helps the reader judge how far he can be trusted.” Filkins’s remarkable piece is almost a form of memoir. It’s about an Iraq veteran named Lu Lobello and his quest for absolution from the Kachadoorian family, three of whom were killed by Lobello’s unit in a chaotic Baghdad firefight. Lobello contacted Nora Kachadoorian, whom he remembered from the battle, on Facebook. He also contacted Filkins who’d written about the Kachadoorians’ tragedy in the New York Times and asked him to arrange a meeting with the family. “Atonement” is Filkins’s firsthand account of that meeting. It’s a tremendously moving piece that cuts from the present (Lobello’s search for the Kachadoorians) to the past (Lobello and Filkins in Baghdad, 2003) and back to the present (Lobello and Filkins visiting Margaret and Nora Kachadoorian in La Jolla). One of its most interesting aspects is Filkins’s attempt to fathom what happened during “the firefight on Baladiyat Street.” He writes, “It is difficult to know exactly what happened on April 8, 2003. But, as I talked to the Kachadoorians and Lobello, and a half a dozen other members of Fox Company, it became clear that things were far worse than anyone had acknowledged at first.” “Atonement” contains and conveys not only Lobello’s story, but also Filkins’s pursuit of that story. As Richard Brody recently said of Jia Zhanghki’s 24 City, “it has its footnotes built into it” (“Ben Affleck’s Argo and Hollywood Nostalgia,” “The Front Row,” newyorker.com, October 12, 2012).

In contrast, George Packer’s “Washington Man” is a classic example of what Brody calls “external storytelling.” It’s written with superb authority, but the author doesn’t enter into it. Packer doesn’t use the first person pronoun even once. It’s a profile of Washington insider Jeff Connaughton. Except for the occasional “As Connaughton later wrote” and “As Connaughton recalled,” Packer rarely indicates his sources. Most of the story appears to have come directly from Connaughton. Packer’s identification with Connaughton’s point of view is extremely close. So close that Packer, at times, seems to be writing free indirect speech. For example, Packer writes,

One day in August, he was channel-flipping when Glenn Beck came on, telling an immense crowd on the Mall that change didn’t come from Washington; it came from real people in real places around the country. Beck was an asshole, but Arianna Huffington wrote the same thing in a column two days later. They were right.

Who owns these words – Packer or Connaughton? It’s Packer who’s writing them, but it sounds like Connaughton. The passage is an example of free indirect speech. It’s the first time I’ve seen it used in a New Yorker profile. I’m not sure its use should be encouraged. Packer’s words seem to have become inflected by his subject’s. Does he think Beck is an asshole? Does he think Beck and Huffington were right? Or is he simply reporting what Connaughton thinks? It’s unclear.

That said, I confess I found “Washington Man” irresistible. Even though it’s a long piece, I couldn’t stop reading until I finished it. It’s an exciting, vivid, inside story about how Washington has been captured by the “money power.” Packer’s/Connaughton’s view that “One fastball at Wall Street’s chin – a few top executives going to jail – could have had more effect than all the regulations combined” is my view. I silently cheered as I read it.

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).