Best of the Decade: #6 Ben McGrath's "The Wayfarer"

Photo by Victor Schrager, from Ben McGrath's "The Wayfarer"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #6 pick – Ben McGrath’s brilliant “The Wayfarer” (December 14, 2015).

“The Wayfarer” tells the story of a sixty-three-year-old riverine nomad named Dick Conant, who spent his days paddling his Coleman canoe (“packed as if for the apocalypse, with tarps and trash bags and Army-surplus duffels”), voyaging America’s waterways.

McGrath first met Conant on September 1, 2014, on the bank of the Hudson River, at Piedmont, New York. He interviewed him at his campsite and wrote a “Talk of the Town” story about him called "Southbound" that appeared in the September 22, 2014 New Yorker. Three months later, Conant went missing. His canoe was found upside down near the mouth of Big Flatty Creek, on Albemarle Sound, North Carolina.

McGrath describes Conant as follows:

He was sixty-three, and spoke in a mellifluous high timbre that seemed almost childlike. He wore denim bib overalls, a T-shirt, and muddy brown boots, and stood six feet one and weighed three hundred pounds. He had a rust-colored beard, with patches of white, and his face was as red as a boiled lobster shell—a riparian Santa. He laughed with great heaves of his gut. His handshake offered the firmest grip I’ve ever felt.

McGrath endeavours to reconstruct Conant’s life, including his last trip – from Plattsburg, N.Y. to Big Flatty Creek, N.C. He talks to members of Conant's family, to some of Conant’s old friends, and to people Conant encountered on his travels (Conant recorded their names in his journals). For example, he talks to state trooper Edwin Scollon, who provides a remarkable description of his brief encounter with Conant at Willsboro Point, on the shore of Lake Champlain. Here’s an excerpt:

I found Mr. Conant in a bed that he had made upon a pebbled shoreline and under a canopy of cedars. He hadn’t heard me come around the house and I took a moment to size him up. He looked quite comfortable; he had a book propped up on his midsection and all that was left of his dinner was the can that had once contained it. It was readily apparent to me, from all that he had in and about his canoe, that Mr. Conant was making a long trip. If I hadn’t had a job to do, I would have left him alone. He had made this little piece of shoreline his own for the night and even though he was outdoors, I did feel that I was about to disturb his privacy.

McGrath also talks to harbor pilot Dougy Walsh. He, too, had a vivid memory of meeting Conant: “ ‘I was blown away by this guy,’ Walsh recalled. ‘He didn’t have any nautical charts! He was using a road atlas!’ ”

McGrath talks to a resident of Trenton, N.Y., Kevin Jolley. Conant was taking a break from an arduous portage through Trenton, when Jolley encountered him and used his iPhone to video-record a conversation with him. Here’s McGrath’s superb rendering of that conversation:

Scene: Conant, sitting on a street corner, leaning back against a green duffel, boots crossed, maps in his lap, hands knotted over his midsection. He has a Camaro Z28 cap on his head, and a toothbrush and a pen poking out of his breast pockets. The canoe is off to his right, parallel to the curb. A white brick building advertising “Plumbing & Heating Materials” squats in the background. Strewn backpacks and bags, a crate, a blue bucket, a Gatorade bottle: a landlubber’s boating picnic. A man in a motorized wheelchair cruises west, not on the sidewalk but in the street, against the flow of traffic, and doesn’t so much as turn his head to acknowledge the strange voyager.

“Where you headed?” a voice offscreen asks.

“I’m headed down to Florida,” Conant says, laughing.

“What made you stop through Trenton?” another voice asks. “Just the map?”

“Well, no,” Conant says. “I want to get on the Delaware, so I can head down to—there’s a Chesapeake-Delaware Canal that I can take into Chesapeake Bay. Now, Chesapeake Bay’s a large body of water, and I’ll be exposed. But it’s not as large as the Atlantic Ocean.”

The first offscreen voice asks, “Yeah, man, what’s your whole purpose, though?”

Before Conant can finish answering, a black S.U.V. pulls up alongside the curb, looming over the canoeist, and the camera turns away. A woman leans out the window. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m looking for River View Plaza?”

You can tell from that passage – the Camaro Z28 cap, the toothbrush and pen poking out of Conant’s pockets, the canoe, the backpacks and bags, crate, blue bucket, Gatorade bottle – that McGrath relishes Conant’s details. I do, too.

“The Wayfarer” abounds with wonderfully specific, evocative, vibrant sentences. For example:

Biding his time in Austin, listening to an astronomy radio program on his headphones and scavenging from dumpsters, he thought of himself as a locust, lying in wait, hidden from civilization until his bank account began to grow again.

For a few days at a time, he might not speak to a soul, content with his Western novels and his chores. A circling beaver at dusk. A waning moon over the Green Mountains. Hooded Merganser ducklings at play. And then, suddenly feeling a social tug, he would beach in a river town and make several stops: a grocery, a church, a library, a bar.

After a mile or so, looking through a pair of binoculars I saw the flash of a yellow paddle blade, and there he was, bobbing in the ebb tide, riding so low that he appeared almost to be sitting on the water.

He arranged several sticks of driftwood crosswise, as a makeshift ramp for pulling the boat above the high-water mark. His overalls were draped across the bow, air-drying after a laundry dunking earlier in the morning. He was wearing swimming trunks and a salt- and sweat-stained T-shirt that said “New Orleans French Quarter.” His digital watch, I noticed, was set to Mountain Time. Rummaging around in his cooler, he asked me if I wanted a soda pop, and mentioned that he planned to have some ice water. He gave a few shakes to an old Gatorade bottle that he’d been re-using. “I got peaches,” he said. “You want one?”

And my favourite:

A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead. 

Reading this great piece, I thought of James Wood’s observation: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself” (The Nearest Thing to Life). That’s what McGrath does in “The Wayfarer”; he brilliantly notices this solitary, authentic, tragic wanderer and thereby saves him from oblivion. Joseph Mitchell did the same thing in his classic “Joe Gould's Secret” (The New Yorker, September 19 & 26, 1964). I think “The Wayfarer” is destined to be a classic, too. 

June 29, 2020 Issue

Combing this week’s New Yorker for arresting sentences, I found this beauty:

On a recent sunny afternoon, a masked bike messenger dropped off a pair of the flawless kardemummabullar, plus a crusty sourdough boule thickly scented with maple and fenugreek, a square of oily focaccia pocked with dollops of ricotta and pepita-parsley pesto, and a deliciously tangy Danish-style sprouted rye, whose fermented dough was so moist that it stayed good for weeks.

It’s from Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Bread to Go.” I find Goldfield’s column a dependable source of pleasurable description. Here are three more selections from her recent work:

I ate my paneer makhani with a thrillingly bitter lime pickle; with yellow shahi rice, steamed in chicken stock and turmeric; with gobi ka keema, a mix of minced cauliflower and bell peppers cooked down until it’s sweet and pastelike, punctuated by the gentle crunch of freshly ground whole spices. [“Tables For Two: Jalsa Grill & Gravy," April 20, 2020]

Leo’s version comes in a fluted glass tumbler that showcases its appealingly messy striations, as spoonable as pudding. Vanilla angel-food sheet cake is soaked in espresso and a soft spike of rum and amaro. The finished trifle is showered in delicate curls of Askinosie chocolate, and each creamy bite bears an unmistakable vein of salt. [“Tables For Two: Leo,” February 10, 2020]

I knew what to get at a seafood stall called Chili Boiled Fish, where live ones flopped around in a tank. A friendly cashier with a tattoo on her neck of a lipstick kiss carefully sealed a patterned bowl (for which I paid a five-dollar deposit) with plastic wrap to insure that it stayed hot. That proved unnecessary; it was many minutes before the dish cooled to less than scalding—which didn’t stop me from immediately plunging my flimsy spoon into the oily depths to find silky fillets of fish, tender cabbage, and chunks of cucumber, Sichuan peppercorns clinging to all, staining my rice with neon drips. [“Tables For Two: HK Food Court,” February 3, 2020]

The Startling Emotional Intensity of "Normal People"

I just finished watching episode 5 of Normal People on CBC Gem. I’m enjoying the series immensely. Looking for critical perspective on it, I found an interesting newyorker.com piece by Anna Russell titled “How Normal People Makes Us Fall in Love.”

Russell says of the show’s two leading characters, Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan,

Their similarities—they’re both bookish (they discuss “The Communist Manifesto” and “The Golden Notebook” in the novel), curious about the wider world, and intensely private—are undermined by an inability to communicate at critical moments, leading to heartbreaking misunderstandings.

That’s an illuminating point and helps explain Connell and Marianne’s on-again, off-again relationship. The word “intensely” is key here. Russell uses it again later in her piece:

They are drawn together again by an unbeatable first-love chemistry (“It’s not like this with other people,” Marianne says), replicated onscreen with startling emotional intensity. Over twelve half-hour episodes—any longer, and the viewer would surely combust—Marianne and Connell come together, and fall apart, and come together again.

That “any longer, and the viewer would surely combust” makes me smile. It’s exactly the way I feel now, and I’m only halfway through the series.

Postscript: I have a theory that might help explain Connell and Marianne’s crazy on-again, off-again relationship. It’s pretty cockeyed, but here goes. Passionate love feeds upon denial. Connell and Marianne unconsciously keep throwing obstructions in the way of their natural love for each other in order to intensify their passion. Freud put it this way: 

Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love. [“The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life” (1912)]

June 22, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Luke Mogelson’s “The Uprising,” a totally immersive account of the riots in Minneapolis protesting George Floyd’s death. It puts us squarely there at the intersection of Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue where Floyd was killed:

Barricades around the four surrounding blocks impeded traffic and law enforcement. The sidewalk outside the Cup Foods grocery store—where an employee had called the police after suspecting George Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill—was buried under bouquets, mementos, and homemade cards. Activists delivered speeches between the gas pumps at a filling station; messages in chalk—“fight back,” “stay woke”—covered the street. Volunteers passed out food and water; there was barbecue, music, tailgating. A wide ring of flowers and candles circumscribed the intersection, delineating a kind of magic circle. Later that day, within the circle, a group of indigenous women would perform the Jingle Dress Dance—a healing ritual created by members of the Ojibwe tribe during the influenza pandemic of 1918.

It puts us there on the night Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station was torched:

Smoke billowed from the ground floor, and people were roaming the hazy second floor, tossing through the windows anything not bolted down: documents, folders, phones. A nearby post office was also ablaze. In the middle of the intersection, an upside-down mail truck burned. A second mail truck suddenly appeared and crashed head-on into the flaming steel. The driver jumped out, and people cheered. Cars spun doughnuts, motorcycles popped wheelies, fireworks and gunshots punctuated the mayhem; a liquor store had been broken into, then burned down, and alcohol circulated among the crowd. People in ski masks and bandannas wielded hammers and baseball bats.

It puts us there amongst a group of marchers as police close in on them, “firing stun grenades and rubber bullets”:

As the officers converged on us, Deondre Moore, a twenty-five-year-old African-American from Houston—George Floyd’s home town—held his arms high and pleaded, “Don’t shoot! Let us leave!” A few minutes later, a rubber bullet struck Moore squarely in the chest. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain. “I thought it was a real bullet,” he later told me. The protesters were commanded to lie on their stomachs with their hands behind their backs—the same position as the silhouette painted on the pavement outside the Cup Foods. As National Guard units arrived in armored Humvees, the state troopers began zip-tying people by their wrists and leading them away. The protesters were surrounded by more than a hundred officers, troopers, deputies, and soldiers—almost all of whom were white.

Note that “converged on us” (my emphasis); Mogelson is among the protesters. That’s what I admire about his reporting. He’s a participant-observer, as he was in his brilliant “The Avengers of Mosul” (The New Yorker, February 6, 2017), one of the great reporting pieces of the last decade.

In “The Uprising,” Mogelson talks to some of the protesters, gets to know them, marches with them, shares their perspectives. One such person, Simone Hunter, figures centrally in the piece. Hunter, “a short nineteen-year-old with red-rinsed hair,” “a fixture at Thirty-eighth and Chicago since George Floyd was killed,” shows immense courage and spirit in clashes with the police. At one point, Mogelson writes,

Hunter seemed less frightened than other protesters. Producing a Sharpie pen from her bag of supplies, she started writing the phone number of a local bail fund on people’s forearms. A young police officer, crouching behind his riot shield, trained his rubber-bullet gun on her and held it there. He looked terrified.

Hunter’s outrage is palpable. Her comment, “It’s not just about George Floyd. It’s about all the unseen shit, where we don’t have the video,” radiates off the page.

“The Uprising” is an extraordinary report from the epicentre of the fight against police brutality and systemic racism – one of the year’s best pieces.    

George Steiner's Draconian Ban

James Wood (Illustration by Mark Ulriksen)

One of the most wrongheaded ideas I’ve ever read is George Steiner’s proposition that literary criticism should be banned. In his Real Presences (1989), he imagined a “counter-Platonic republic from which the reviewer and the critic have been banished; a republic for writers and readers.” He viewed criticism to be “secondary and parasitic.” In his republic,

There would be no journals of literary criticism; no academic seminars, lectures or colloquies on this or that poet, playwright, novelist; no “James Joyce quarterlies” or “Faulkner newsletters”; no interpretations of, no essays of opinion on, sensibility in Keats or robustness in Fielding.

To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

“Response” is the key here. What is the point of creating art if we aren’t allowed to express our own response to it? Adam Kirsch, in the Preface to his Rocket and Lightship (2015), says, “For criticism, too, is a kind of literature: the critic expresses his own sense of life through his responses to other minds and sensibilities.” Exactly. John Updike, in his review of Wright Morris’s On Fiction, called Morris “a responder to writing” (“Wright on Writing,” Hugging the Shore, 1983) – a wonderful description that applies to all great critics.

Here, for example, is James Wood responding to the writing in Per Petterson’s novel I Curse the River of Time:

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

How many people think like this? Probably as many as think like Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Ramsay or one of David Foster Wallace’s characters. Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague. Yet Petterson is novelistically acute about human motive and self-deception. In both passages, our needy, self-involved narrator hovers over his memories, and finally pokes his way back into the narrative with local assertions of self: “and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi”; “which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago.” [“Late and Soon,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2012]

Those two splendid paragraphs convinced me to read Petterson’s novel. Today, I count it among my favorite books. Without Wood’s piece, I doubt I would’ve found it. Is that not one of the great benefits of reviews and critical pieces? They lead us to discovery of new works. They help us see in fresh ways. They add meaning to our reading experience. They enhance our enjoyment of life.

A republic in which literary criticism is banned is not a place I'd want to live.  

Three Superb "New Yorker" Pieces on Iceland

Photo by Valdimar Thorlacius, from Elizabeth Kolbert's "Independent People"

In my post last week regarding the June 8 & 15 New Yorker, I focused on Peter Schjeldahl’s wonderful critical essay “Apart.” But there’s another excellent piece in that issue – Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Independent People.” It’s about Iceland’s response to COVID-19 – how it managed to beat the curve. But it’s also a rarity – a coronavirus travelogue. Kolbert says, “Despite the generalized gloom, it was thrilling to be going somewhere; for the previous eight weeks, the farthest I’d travelled was to the liquor store.” It was thrilling for me, too, just to be able to vicariously tag along with her as she nosed around Reykjavík,  struggling to abide by the rules of her modified quarantine. My favourite part of the piece is the last paragraph, in which Kolbert describes a Reykjavík evening:

That evening, the weather was clear and cool—by New York standards, too cool to eat outside, by Reykjavík standards balmy. The outdoor cafés were crowded. Restaurants had been asked to arrange their tables to keep groups two metres apart, but some diners, I noticed, had pushed the tables closer together. Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly. The scene was completely ordinary, which is to say now exotic—just people meeting up with friends for dinner. For a traveller these days, this might be an even better draw, I thought, than glaciers or whale-watching.

That “Everyone was talking and laughing, masklessly” is inspired!

Reading “Independent People,” I recalled two other New Yorker pieces on Iceland that I enjoyed immensely: Adam Gopnik’s “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016) and Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” (November 9, 2015).

“Cool Running” is Gopnik’s first-person account of his experience hanging out with historian Guðni Jóhannesson as he campaigned to become Iceland’s President. I like the last paragraph of this piece, too – a description of election-night at the Reykjavík Grand Hotel ballroom when it became clear that Jóhannesson won:

I have always wanted to be the first to say to someone “Congratulations, Mr. President.” And so I waited for Guðni to come to the ballroom. He arrived at last, buffeted by cameras, and made a speech, with Eliza, in a blue First Lady’s dress, by his side. He was obviously promising to be the President of all Icelanders, the last step in the choreography of candidacy. A birthday cake appeared, and then—a hallucinatory moment—another Icelandic actress sang “Happy Birthday,” in a perfect impression of Marilyn singing it to J.F.K., sexy sibilant by erotic syllable: “Happy biiirthday, Misstah Prez-uh-dent . . . ” The crowd cheered in pleasure and recognition. We live on one planet, indivisible.

Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” tells about his experience riding with a search-and-rescue team on patrol in Iceland’s southern plain. The team is part of Iceland’s renowned Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg – an extensive system of emergency-response volunteers. The piece contains one of my favourite details in all New Yorker writing – bananas hanging on a row of plastic hangers in a kitchen tent:

I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

“Admiration and wonder” pretty well sums up the viewpoint of all three of these great New Yorker pieces. I highly recommend them.

The Beauty of the Ordinary: Leslie Jamison and Sam Youkilis

Still from Sam Youkilis's "10:13 A.M., Tribeca"

One of the most captivating artworks I’ve seen this year is Sam Youkilis’s short video loop “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” included in newyorker.com’s brilliant “April 15, 2020: A Coronavirus Chronicle” (April 27, 2020). It shows a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs. Nothing dramatic happens. The florist stands at his workbench efficiently and matter-of-factly fitting a bunch of lilacs together, cutting the stems to make them even. And that’s it, the sequence starts over – fifteen seconds of seemingly mundane life. But it’s not mundane. Youkilis captures a slice of visual poetry simply by training his camera on an urban scene that most of us would walk right by. But once we’re shown it, we see the beauty.

Leslie Jamison explores this subject – the extraordinary in the ordinary – in her recent “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020), a review of the MoMA exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” She describes the show as follows:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison says,

It would be a lie to say that I was blindsided by the beauty of the ordinary at MoMA; more truthful to say I’d gone looking for it. By the time I stood in front of those home movies, I was nearly a decade into an ongoing fasciantion with the grace of ordinariness: an increasingly insistent belief in un-extraordinary lives as sites of meaning. For me it began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements, in distant cities – riveted by stories of clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal. Recovery was teaching me that every life held profoundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.

“Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!,” she says, and we must try to catch it. Certainly that’s what Sam Youkilis did in his “10:13 A.M., Tribeca” – a wonderful act of attention.

Mary Price's Excellent "The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space"

Recently, I read a book – Mary Price’s The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space (1994) – that immediately went into my personal anthology of great photography writing, joining Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, and Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

In her book, Price advances two main arguments: (1) that “language of description is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs”; and (2) that “the use of a photograph determines its meaning.”

She discusses Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugène Atget’s and August Sander’s photographs, George Santayana’s theory of photography, the nudes of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the comparison between Rembrandt’s paintings and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, the notion of the photo as a transcription of the real, the notion of the photo as mask, Proust’s use of the photograph as metaphor, Barthes’ search for the photograph of his mother that captures her “essential identity,” “the aura of reality,” “the pleasures of factuality,” and many other illuminating ideas, as well.

What I relish most about Price’s view is her emphasis on description. She says,

Describing is necessary for photographs. Call it captioning, call it titling, call it describing, the act of specifying in words what the viewer may be led both to understand and to see is as necessary to the photograph as it is to painting. Or call it criticism. It is the act of describing that enables the act of seeing.

I agree. It’s tonic to read a critic who touts description as a form of meaning-making.

June 8 & 15, 2020 Issue

Okay, here’s a question. Peter Schjeldahl has written five pieces on Edward Hopper, including his new “Apart,” in this week’s issue. Which one’s the best?

His first “Hopper,” titled “Edward Hopper,” appeared in the September 27, 1989, issue of the Manhattan magazine 7 Days, and is collected in his The 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990 (1990). In it, he calls Hopper “a towering original,” “a majestic poet in the painterly equivalent of plain prose.” He says of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, “This is a picture to look at until you are exhausted, your attention burned to a fine ash. Then look some more.” He describes this great painting beautifully:

It is a dead-on view of cheap two-story buildings, with storefronts, raked by the light of sunrise. The colors bring it off: reds, greens, and yellows laid light-over-dark to yield a glowering brightness (punctuated with black rectangles), a buttery effulgence good enough to eat. The tacky shops, for which humble would be too fulsome a compliment, are transfigured by the colors and by a play of highlights and shadows as clever as the fingering of a virtuoso guitarist. A barber pole, leaning as if the sunlight were a gale trying to flatten it, concentrates in its incongruous gaudiness – so it seemed to me the other day, looking at it – the whole doomed human will to beauty.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (1930)

Schjeldahl also refers to Hopper’s preparatory drawings:

These aren’t “studies,” in the usual sense, so much as conceptualizations that recall sketches with which certain great directors – Einstein, Hitchcock, Sirk – planned their shots. They show the elements of a painting like MoMA’s New York Movie (my own favorite Hopper) being worked out in advance with a fierce eye for exactly the right effect. Every detail in a good Hopper is specific, none is extraneous, and everything sings.

He also notes that Hopper “rarely let a painting alone until it had been packed to creaking with bleak, explosive libido.”

Schjeldahl’s first piece on Hopper is brilliant. Most critics would be content to leave it at that. But Schjeldahl is just warming up.

His next “Hopper” is titled “Hopperesque,” which originally appeared in the exhibition catalogue Edward Hopper: Light Years (1988), and is included in his 1991 collection The Hydrogen Jukebox. “Hopperesque” is loaded with memorable observations. For example:

Hopper is more a naturalist than a realist, and a symbolist above all.

Hopper’s nonrealism is clinched by the sketches and studies for his paintings. These are the work not of an observer of the visible world but of an imagination-powered metteur en scène, a stage or film director blocking in the vision of a final effect to be reached through cunning labor. Each drawing considers one or more of the decisions that will accumulate to dictate the picture.

A psychoanalyst might adduce a neurotic pattern from the unenterableness of most Hopper buildings: we rarely see a door clearly, and when we do it rarely looks operable, let alone inviting. All the life of the buildings is in their glaring windows.

Any sense of isolation in Hopper is always defiantly upbeat: not loneliness, but solitude.

 Like Hopper’s houses, his people are invariably caught in the act of seeing.

In my own favorite Hopper painting, New York Movie, an orchestration of ferociously sensual effects pivots in the reverie of the tired usherette. (She overwhelms me: sister, daughter, lover, victim, goddess all in one, caught in the movie palace that is a modern philosophical realization of Plato’s Cave.)

You attain Hopper’s wavelength when you register how the subjectivity of his places and people is subsumed to the whole picture.

A Hopper painting is a window turned inside out. You don’t look into it. It looks out at you, a cyclopean glance that rivets and penetrates.

Like “Kafkaesque,” “Hopperesque” names not a style but a particular face of reality – which we would feel even if Hopper had never lived, though more obscurely.

A supreme masterpiece like the Whitney Museum’s Early Sunday Morning, with its light-transfigured row of dumpy storefronts, may ravish us, but not in a way apt to remind us of Raphael. A poignance of imperfection unites the painting with its subject, producing a naked factuality as lethal to idealism as DDT is to gnats.

Nor is a sentimental formula like “beauty in the ordinary” called for. What Hopper does in paintings of the mundane is far more devastating: he annihilates “the ordinary” along with “the beautiful” and every other conceivable category of aesthetic experience.

Hopper plainly was comfortable with the voyeuristic impulse, which informs so much of his art directly and just about all of it indirectly – along a Platonic sliding scale from the grossest to the most transcendent knowledge, from the intrusive glance of Night Windows to the metaphysical mystery of Light in an Empty Room.

I submit that a polymorphous sexual alertness – “adhesiveness,” in Walt Whitman’s wonderful term – informed Hopper’s perception of the whole world.

He is excited by the unguarded moment, the exposed innocence, of a person, a building, a place – anything at all, though certain things and situations (generally involving windows) pique him more than others.

If one of the purposes of criticism is to suggest fresh perspectives and interesting ways of looking at a particular subject, as I believe it is, Schjeldahl’s passionate “Hopperesque” succeeds magnificently.

Schjeldahl’s third “Hopper” piece is “Ordinary People” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2007), a review of the 2007 Hopper retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In his previous two pieces Schjeldahl mentions that New York Movie is his favorite Hopper. In “Ordinary People” he describes this painting in loving detail:

Consider his second-most-powerful image, after “Nighthawks”: “New York Movie” (1939). In a corner of an ornate theatre, a pretty usherette leans back against a wall out of sight of a screen that displays an illegible fragment of black-and-white movie, watched by two solitary people. Dimmed, reddish lights oppose a russet cast to inky shadows. Parted red curtains frame a stairway to the balcony. The usherette’s reverie, if any (she may be dozing), centers our involvement. She has seen the film. Wanting to be elsewhere, she is elsewhere. Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality—those of the movie, the audience, the usherette, the theatre, and the civilization that must have theatres. I comprehend the picture’s economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that fills the space and assaults the usherette’s unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness. 

That “Where are we? I think we are in Plato’s Cave, perceiving layered dispositions of reality” is inspired. It reprises the “Plato’s Cave” reference in “Hopperesque,” but this time Schjeldahl redesigns it to maximize its punch. “Where are we? I think we’re in Plato’s Cave” makes me smile every time I read it.

Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939)

“Ordinary People” contains another memorable painting description. Schjeldahl says of Hopper’s Office at Night:

There are Hoppers that don’t work, while others, in instructive ways, work somewhat too well. I have in mind “Office at Night” (1940), in which a preposterously voluptuous secretary at a filing cabinet eyes a piece of paper on the floor as her handsome boss reads a document at his desk. The light denotes sunset. A summer wind disturbs the shade at an open window. For me, the dancing pull cord of the shade is one of the choicest details in art history, as an objective correlative, in T. S. Eliot’s sense, of “memory and desire.” Seen from an elevated point of view, the wonderfully articulated lines and contents of the space cant toward the window. I just wish the office were empty. What will happen between the characters touched by the melancholy and erotic breeze? I don’t care. They are types from central casting in an overly explicit cinematic narrative, such as Hopper commonly subsumed to his vision.

Schjeldahl’s notice (and interpretation) of that “dancing pull cord” is superb – one of my favourite details in all his writing.

Edward Hopper, Office at Night (1940)

Schjeldahl’s fourth “Hopper” is “Between the Lines,” a brief review of the Whitney’s 2013 exhibition “Hopper Drawing” that appeared in The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town.” Here it is in its entirety:

The exhibition “Hopper Drawing,” at the Whitney, lets us into the factory of hand and mind that created “Nighthawks,” “New York Movie,” “Early Sunday Morning,” “Office at Night,” and other touchstones for which “iconic” is praise too faint. Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge. Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role. The show explains the power of Edward Hopper’s compositions but leaves their spiritual pang mysterious. What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him. Also on view are masses of early work which establish Hopper’s talents, developed in Paris, as a master sketcher and an apt emulator of Post-Impressionism—gifts that he plowed under to achieve a mature style, which confronts the world not as a reflection but as a précis of soul-testing melancholy and life-saving glints of grace. 

In this short piece, Schjeldahl emphasizes a couple of points he’s made before: (1) that Hopper’s compositions evolve from preliminary sketches and drawings (“Every detail of a hand, a bed, a cornice, or a slant of light in a scene had to be auditioned and rehearsed in its role”); and (2) that Hopper isn’t a realist (“Those paintings hang here with entourages of studies that document the methods not of a realist painter but of a visual dramaturge”). For me, the outstanding line here is “What he was getting at—slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life—could yield only to paint, and only to him.” That “slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life” is marvellously fine – a perfect description of Hopper’s best pictures.

Schjeldahl’s fifth “Hopper” piece, “Apart,” appears in this week’s New Yorker. It’s both a reflection on Hopper’s relevance right now in this time of containment (“The visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance”) and on his art, using the catalogue of the Beyeler Foundation’s current show “Edward Hopper: A Fresh Look at Landscape” as a departure point. In a line that sums up a lifetime of looking at Hoppers, Schjeldahl writes, “Once you’ve seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind’s eye.”  

Schjeldahl loves Hopper. And so do I. His “Hopper” quintet is delectable. Which of the five is the best? I’m slightly partial to “Ordinary People,” mainly for its inspired noticing of that “dancing pull cord.”