Interesting Emendations: Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table"

Here are two variations of the same passage. One is from Michael Ondaatje’s short story “The Cat’s Table,” which appeared in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. The other is from his novel of the same name. Just from looking at their composition, can you tell which one is the New Yorker version?

Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

Out on the street, you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a narrow, vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

The two passages differ in three ways: (1) one has a comma after “street,” the other one doesn’t; (2) in one, the scissors are described as “vicious”; in the other, they are described as “narrow, vicious”; (3) one says “the possibility of any further hair”; the other simply says “the possibility of hair.”

Of the three differences, the most telling, in terms of identifying the New Yorker version, is the deletion of the extraneous “any further” in the second passage. The New Yorker consistently follows the principles set out in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, chief amongst which is “Omit needless words.” The second passage is from The New Yorker.

Here from the same sources are two more extracts for comparison:

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, the throat-catching smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut, and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

Note the elimination of the parenthesis in the second passage, and the insertion of “throat-catching” immediately before “smell.” The second version strikes me as more concise and, as Strunk & White would say, definite. It’s my favorite passage in the short story. I was surprised to see it altered in the novel.

The Cat’s Table contains many such differences. In almost every instance, I prefer the New Yorker version. I wonder why Ondaatje didn’t use the New Yorker edits in his novel.

Credit: The above portrait of Michael Ondaatje is by Patrick Long; it appears in The New Yorker, June 4, 2007, as an illustration for Louis Menand’s “The Aesthete.”

Interesting Emendations: A. J. Liebling's "Normandy Revisited"

I’ve just finished reading A. J. Liebling’s 1958 memoir Normandy Revisited. It’s a delicious layer cake of a book. The first layer is Liebling’s recollection of his 1926 sojourn in Lower Normandy, when he was twenty-two. The country gripped him, he says, because “it was the first foreign land I had traveled in alone.” The second layer is his memory of passing through the same region eighteen years later when, as a reporter for The New Yorker, he covered the Allied invasion. About that time, he says, Normandy had a dual character – “nasty going up front, and lovely, fat tranquil farming country a couple of miles back, undisturbed by enemy aviation or artillery.” And the third layer is his account of his 1955 return to Normandy to make sure that, as he says, the events his memories represent “were real.” These layers are so saturated in over-lapping detail that they often blend; many passages contain rich mixtures of all three.

One of my favorite scenes in Normandy Revisited occurs in the chapter titled “The Hounds with Sad Voices,” in which Liebling searches for and eventually finds a château, where he and other members of the press stayed for a week after the Allied troops broke through the German lines. I enjoy descriptions of house interiors. A detailed description of a room, it seems to me, goes a long way towards describing the life lived in it. Liebling’s description of his recollection of the baroque chateau’s interior is a beauty:

This family had enjoyed another period of prosperity in a more recent era, to judge from the vestiges of the chic of the early Third Republic that cluttered the house, like props for the production of a dramatic version of Bel-Ami. There were trophies of African spears and Arab scimitars on the walls, which were papered with an imitation of brocade, and faded green plush portieres drooped crazily from valences askew. Notably there was a stuffed leopard, its lips pulled back in a savage snarl from teeth that were no longer present. Age affects the grip even of plaster gums. The background of the leopard’s rosettes had faded to the color of bad California white wine. Most of the furniture was crank and perilous to sit upon.

As the above extract shows, Liebling had a splendid eye for detail. I love that “faded green plush portieres drooped crazily from valences askew.” Interestingly, there’s another version of this passage. Normandy Revisited is composed mostly of articles written for The New Yorker. In an exquisite piece called “Revisited Normandy: In Quest of a Gray Granite House” (The New Yorker, November 16, 1957), Liebling provides the following description:

The family owning this house, though, had enjoyed another, later period of prosperity, to judge by the vestiges of early Third Republic chic that cluttered the place, like props for a dramatic version of “Bel-Ami.” There were trophies – African spears and Arab scimitars and Tuareg shields – hanging on the walls, which were covered with a paper imitation of brocade, and faded green plush draperies drooped crazily from valences that formed St. Andrew’s crosses against the window frames. Notably, there was a stuffed leopard, its lips pulled back in a savage snarl from teeth no longer present. The field of the leopard’s rosettes had faded to the color of bad California white wine. Most of the furniture was cranky and perilous.

Compare the book’s “to judge from the vestiges of the chic of the early Third Republic” with the magazine’s slightly tighter “to judge by the vestiges of early Third Republic chic.” Compare also the book’s “like props for the production of a dramatic version of Bel-Ami” to the magazine’s more concise “like props for a dramatic version of Bel-Ami.” Notice the additional “Tuareg shields” on the walls in the New Yorker version. Notice, too, that the walls in the New Yorker version are “covered with a paper imitation of brocade,” whereas the walls in the book version are “papered with an imitation of brocade.” “Portieres” in the book is simply “draperies” in the magazine. And, instead of the book’s “drooped crazily from valences askew,” the magazine has “drooped crazily from valences that formed St. Andrew’s crosses against the window frames.” Regarding the stuffed leopard, the New Yorker version omits the observation made in the book that “Age affects the grip even of plaster gums.” Both versions are wonderful, but I think I prefer the extra detailing (“Tuareg shields,” “St. Andrew’s crosses”) of the New Yorker passage.

Almost every paragraph of “Revisited Normandy: In Quest of a Gray Granite House” differs in some way or other from the book’s version. I find the variations fascinating. Comparing them provides a glimpse of a great stylist fine-tuning his composition.

Credit: The above portrait of A. J. Liebling is by David Levine. It appears in The New York Review of Books (November 18, 2004), as an illustration for Russell Baker's "A Great Reporter at Large."

Best of 2011

Okay, here we go. I’ve got a stack of New Yorkers here – all from 2011. Flipping through them triggers countless memories of blissful reading. My project today is to sort through this rich harvest and choose what I consider to be the ten best factual pieces and the ten best critical pieces. How do I decide? It’s easy. I just look through each issue and pick out the articles containing the most starred and underlined passages. Who did the starring and underlining? Me. When I read, I mark passages that strike me as noteworthy for one reason or another. So, that’s my method. I realize it’s not very scientific, but it works for me. I know you can hardly wait to see my choices, so here they are:

TOP TEN FACT PIECES

1. Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests” (September 5, 2011).
2. Elif Batuman, “The View from the Stands (March 7, 2011)
3. Ian Frazier, “Back to the Harbor” (March 21, 2011)
4. Burkhard Bilger, “The Great Oasis” (December 19 & 26, 2011)
5. Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal” (November 21, 2011)
6. Geoff Dyer, “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011)
7. D. T. Max, “Her Way” (November 7, 2011)
8. Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero” (October 31, 2011)
9. Janet Malcolm, “Depth of Field” (September 26, 2011)
10. Mike Peed, “We Have No Bananas” (January 10, 2011)

Looking over the above list, I see a few common traits: the pieces are about travel, food, nature, or art; they appeal to the senses; they contain inspired writing.

Now for my “top ten” critical pieces. I hope this list doesn’t insult the magazine’s dance, theatre, music, and movie critics. They’re all great writers; it’s just that their fields of interest aren’t quite mine. On the other hand, I love books and art. I devour James Wood’s and Peter Schjeldahl’s every word and hunger for more. That’s why their names dominate the following list:

TOP TEN CRITICAL PIECES

1. James Wood, “The Arrival of Enigmas” (February 28, 2011)
2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Haarlem Shuffle” (August 8, 2011)
3. James Wood, “Cabin Fever” (September 5, 2011)
4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Long Faces” (March 7, 2011)
5. James Wood, “Reality Testing” (October 31, 2011)
6. Peter Schjeldahl, “Inside Story” (May 2, 2011)
7. Peter Schjeldahl, “Artists and Writers” (January 31, 2011)
8. Dan Chiasson, “Southern Discomfort” (January 3, 2011)
9. John Lahr, “Bluebird of Unhappiness” (October 31, 2011)
10. Joan Acocella, “From Bad Beginnings” (May 16, 2011)

There you have it - another great New Yorker year come and gone. I take this opportunity to thank the editors and staff for all the pleasure they’ve given me. They do an incredible job. Each issue is a distinctive, intricate, wonderful work of art.

Credit: The above artwork, by Olimpia Zagnoli and Emanuela Ligabue, appears in The New Yorker (December 19 & 26, 2011), as an illustration for "A Year's Reading."

December 19 & 26, 2011 Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It’s the last issue of the year, and it’s terrific. It contains at least a half-dozen excellent pieces. The two that I’ll comment on here are Burkhard Bilger’s “The Great Oasis” and James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” Bilger consistently produces some of the magazine’s best writing. His “Towheads” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) was one of my “Best of 2010” picks (see my December 28, 2010, post). This year, his “The Possibilian” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011) and his “True Grits” (The New Yorker, October 31, 2011) were both tremendously interesting and enjoyable. Now we have his brilliant “The Great Oasis.” It’s about reforestation in desert lands. Among its highlights are: (1) a visit to Oman where a Dutch inventor, named Pieter Hoff, is testing an experimental tree-planting device called the Waterboxx; (2) a description of the Great Green Wall, a massive project in which “eleven African nations have agreed to erect a wall of trees across the dusty shoulders of the continent” for the purpose of halting the spread of the Sahara; (3) a trip to Burkino Faso to meet Chris Reij, an agroforestry specialist, and learn about the African Re-Greening Initiative, in which farmers are reforesting vast stretches of the Sahel; and (4) a search for “one of the last baobabs in northern Oman.” The piece is beautifully structured, beginning and ending with the search for the baobab tree. And it is artfully written. Bilger gives us interesting facts in words we can picture. Here is rainfall in the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman: “When the clouds burst, as they do a few times a year, the rain skitters from the slopes like oil from a griddle, gathers into rivulets and swiftly moving sheets, and tumbles into wadies that wind between the peaks.” Here is the baobab tree that Pieter Hoff was searching for: “In the deepening dusk, it looked like an apparition out of ‘The Arabian Nights’ – a fat caliph surrounded by his fan-fluttering harem.” And here’s the sound of two men praying: “Their voices came to us as a steady murmur mixed with the rustling of the leaves.” The Sahara (“the only traces of green are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia tortilis, anchored to the bare rock”) and the Sahel (“the grasses were parched brittle and sere, the red soil baked hard beneath them”) are evoked with a specificity that puts us squarely there. Bilger’s details are wonderful (e.g., “The only signs of life were a few Senegalese fire finches, darting like sparks among the shea trees”). “The Great Oasis” is a marvelous piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

I kept thinking of Bilger’s writing as I read James Wood’s “Reality Effects.” What does Wood think of Bilger’s work? Does he even read it? To be frank, until I read “Reality Effects,” in this week’s issue, I suspected that Wood was blind to the merits of literary journalism. For example, in “Keeping It Real” (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010), Wood calls David Shields’ promotion of “reality” over fiction “highly problematic.” In reply to Shields’ preference for essays and memoirs rather than fiction, Wood advanced the example of Tolstoy, who, he says, “so often reproduced reality directly from life.” Wood calls Tolstoy “the great ‘reality-artist.’” I share Shields’ skepticism regarding fiction, even fiction as consummate as Tolstoy’s, as a representation of reality. Fiction is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. I much prefer factual writing. Now, in “Reality Effects,” an admiring review of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead, it appears Wood is starting to see the light. He says of Sullivan’s pieces:

It is obvious enough that they are by a talented storyteller, who has learned from fiction (as well as from the essayistic tradition) on how to structure and ration his narratives. He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives.

The verve of that last sentence is thrilling. It would appear that what Sullivan writes falls more into the category of “personal history” than it does “fact piece.” (Last night, I dipped into Pulphead for the first time; its “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” is excellent.) This is why Wood says Sullivan’s talent “is beautifully for the real” and why he immediately qualifies this observation with “or, rather, for the real fictions that people make of the real, and which they live by.” Bilger’s art is “beautifully for the real,” too. But it doesn’t move between reality and fictionality the way Wood says the contemporary essay often does. Bilger’s writing is factual. That’s what I like about it. “Factual” is a word Wood seldom, if ever, uses. Maybe someday he’ll see its value. I find it promising that, in “Reality Effects,” he’s at least showing appreciation for something other than fiction.

The Year In Reading: Philip Connors' "Fire Season"

One of the best books of 2011 is Philip Connors’ Fire Season. The New Yorker calls it "a compelling study of isolation, wildness, and 'a vocation in its twilight'" ("Briefly Noted," May 9, 2011). That’s an excellent description of it. But the magazine’s anonymous reviewer also says that Connors' "prose style can be portentous" and that his "personality veers from smug to misanthropic." Reading Fire Season, I didn’t detect any of those alleged attributes. Granted, there are passages in which Connors bluntly expresses aversion to what he calls “nonlookout work” and to “any task involving contact with the public in an official government capacity.” He’s quite open about his wish to be “left utterly and blissfully alone.” But he’s equally honest about the fact that his aloneness lasts only ten days at a time. After each ten-day stint on the mountain, he takes a four-day break during which he returns to Silver City. Even when he’s up on the mountain carrying out his duties as a fire lookout (or, as he calls himself, “a professional watcher of mountains”), he has occasional contact with the outside world, either by radio or in person (e.g., when hikers unexpectedly appear, or when government colleagues trek or fly in to see him). In those outside contacts, Connors doesn't come across as cold or aloof; on the contrary, he seems affable and easy to get along with. One time his wife visits with him for three days. Connors calls that time "three days of delicious domesticity." That doesn't sound like misanthropism to me. Yes, Connors has an attraction to solitude. But that doesn’t make him a misanthrope anymore than Thoreau’s solo existence at Walden made him a misanthrope. In fact, as Robert Sullivan points out in The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009), Thoreau “kept a chair by his door to encourage visitors, and took it away only when he was writing.” Note that exception – “only when he was writing.” The need for solitude and the urge to write are closely knit. Connors uses some of his time at the lookout to think and write. At one point, when he’s up in the tower, he says, “In all my seasons I’ve never seen the view so clear, so I open my notebook and begin to name and count the visible mountain ranges….” Then, in one of Fire Season’s most beautiful passages, he proceeds to recreate the list:

… the Wahoos, the Details, the Cuchillos, the San Mateos, the Magdalenas, the Fra Cristobal Range, the Oscuras, the Caballos, the San Andres Mountains, the Sacramentos, the Organs, the Franklins, the Doña Anas and the Rough and Ready Hills, the Sierra de las Uvas, the Good Sight Mountains, the Cookes Range, the Floridas and the Tres Hermanas, the Cedars, the Big and Little Hatchets, the Animas Mountains, the Pyramids, the Peloncillos and Chiricahaus, and Big Burros, the Pinaleños, the Silver City Range, the Pinos Altos Range, the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons – more than thirty in all and me in the middle of them, goggle-eyed and rapturous, alone in my aerie in the vastness.

Alone in my aerie in the vastness – aloneness is the key; if Connors hadn’t been alone at that particular “goggle-eyed and rapturous” moment, he likely wouldn’t have been moved to get out his notebook and compile his wonderful mountain list. As a consequence, we might not have the pleasure of reading it now. Connors’ self-confessed “attraction to solitude” isn’t a function of misanthropy; it flows from his being a writer. The book we hold in our hands today, Fire Season, is the result of the solitude that Connors sought and found on the Black Range. You’d think The New Yorker, the most literary of all magazines, would appreciate that. E. B. White would certainly have appreciated it. He wouldn’t allege misanthropy against a writer seeking solitude.

As for the criticism that Connors is “smug,” I find no basis for it, unless it’s in his “reference to his “peonage in newspapers,” and assertions that he doesn’t have the requisite temperament for what he calls “the hamster wheel of the eight-hour day.” I don’t find these passages smug; I find them bracing. They contain a Thoreauvian friction, a resistance to the culture at large, that I really admire.

This brings me to the most irritating aspect of the New Yorker review – the description of Connors’ prose style as “portentous.” Of the many adjectives I can think of to apply to Connors’ writing (e.g., clear, vivid, precise, detailed, honest, lyrical), “portentous” is most certainly not among them. Fire Season struck me as a remarkable piece of writing, remarkable for its clarity and concreteness, and for the present-tense immediacy of many of its descriptions. Here is birdsong (“Through the open tower windows I hear the call of the hermit thrush, one of the most gorgeous sounds in all of nature, a mellifluous warble beginning on a long clear note”), clouds (“Lenticular clouds dot the highest peaks, their elliptical shapes and striated edges bringing news of howling winds a few thousand feet above me”), air (“Come morning the air will smell sweetly of burning grass and pine duff, and my tower will cast its silhouette against a hazy salmon sunrise”), smoke (“All past folly recedes, at least momentarily, beneath the roiling smokes of June”), more smoke (“The mountains to my north are mantled in a haze of drift smoke stretching sixty miles”), trees (“On the north slope red-bark ponderosa far older than the Vitorio war throw their shaggy shadows on the needle-cast floor”), mountain peaks (“Off in the other direction, the shadow of my peak stretches in the shape of an arrowhead forty miles across the desert, the tip of it touching the Rio Grande just before sunset”), a snake (“Bit by bit the snake – a Western wandering garter – walks its jaws up the length of the salamander’s body, preparing to swallow it whole”), lightning striking his cabin (“For several minutes there’s a weird smell in the air, like an over-heated radiator, and my heart jiggles in my chest like a fox in a burlap bag”) – on and on, a multiplicity of acutely seen details that bring the page alive. At one point in Fire Season, Connors says, “I produce nothing but words.” Yes, that may be so. But what words! Fire Season is a wonderful book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Janet Malcolm's Chekhovian Ambiguity

I’m pleased to see that my favorite New York Times critic, Dwight Garner, has chosen Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills as one of his “top ten” books of the year (see “Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 11, 2011). A substantial portion of the book appeared in The New Yorker (May 3, 2010). In his piece, Garner says:

Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story.

That “eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story” is brilliant! Geoffrey O’Brien, in his illuminating review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills (“The Trial,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011), also notes Malcolm’s Chekhovian approach to her subject. He quotes a statement made by Judge Robert Hanophy during Mazoltuv Borukhova’s trial (“Somebody’s life was taken, somebody’s arrested, they’re indicted, they’re tried and they’re convicted. That’s all this is”), which Malcolm uses as an epigraph to introduce the book, and says:

In opposition to this cut-and-dried dismissal of any residual impulse to probe deeper, she juxtaposes the words of a prospective, ultimately unselected juror: “Everything is ambiguous in life except in court” – an observation of a sort in which Malcolm’s books abound, posted like warning signs to the reader to beware of the astringent clarity of each separate element as it come sinto view. We want the elements to add up to a satisfying and coherent story. But as Anton Chekhov wrote – in a letter quoted by Malcolm in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001) – responding to a reader who had complained of the writer’s having evaded a proper explanation of his protagonist’s motives: “We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.”

In support of O’Brien’s point, I would also refer to Malcolm’s description of the psychologist Igor Davidson, one of the few compassionate figures in the book:

Davidson introduced an element into the hearing that had been entirely absent from it: ambiguity. Alone among the participants, Davidson spoke as if he were in touch with life as it exists outside the courtroom, where everything isn’t always this or that, but can be both.

V. S. Pritchett, in his review of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (“A Doctor,” included in Pritchett’s 1979 essay collection The Myth Makers), quotes from a letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor, Alexei Suvorin, attacking him for the anti-Semitic articles Suvorin published at the time of the Dreyfus affair and the trial of Zola. The quotation, which could serve as another epigraph for Iphigenia in Forest Hills, is as follows: “Zola is right, because the writer’s job is not to accuse or persecute but to stand up even for the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment.”

December 12, 2011 Issue

There are a few piquant details in this week’s issue: the Beagle’s White Monkey cocktail that “somehow exactly evokes the flavor of a Granny Smith apple” (Hannah Goldfield, “Tables For Two”), the two baby teeth in Julia Taubman’s left earlobe – “one from each of her twin sons” (Nick Paumgarten, “Detroit Valentine”); a Citroën DS “the color of light manure” (Anthony Lane, “I Spy”), and Rooney Mara’s fingers “poking out of black woollen gloves as they skitter across a laptop keyboard” (David Denby, “Double Dare”). I particularly like that White Monkey. I wish I had the ingredients to mix one at home. But since I don’t, I’m going to make rum eggnog, instead. Here’s to Goldfield, Paumgarten, Lane, and Denby!

Dove v. Vendler

Is “restricted vocabulary” in the statement, “Perhaps Dove’s canvas – exhibiting mostly short poems of rather restricted vocabulary – is what needs to be displayed now to a general audience," a proxy for racial discrimination? Rita Dove thinks it is. It’s the basis of her “barely veiled racism” allegation against Helen Vendler, made in a blistering letter published in the current issue of The New York Review of Books ("Defending an Anthology," December 22, 2011). In her letter, Dove says, “This statement [by Vendler] is breathtaking on several levels: its condescension, lack of veracity, and the barely veiled racism lurking behind the expression 'restricted vocabulary.'”

You might ask, what’s this got to do with The New Yorker? Well, I’m a long-time fan of Vendler’s writing. She was the New Yorker poetry critic from 1978 to 2001. She’s written some of the most brilliant reviews ever to appear in the magazine (see my post “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011, #1: Helen Vendler’s ‘A Wounded Man Falling Towards Me,’” August 7, 2011). Although she hasn’t, to my knowledge, reviewed Dove’s work in The New Yorker, she has written four appreciative essays on Dove, including “Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove” (collected in Vendler’s The Music of What Happens, 1988), “A Dissonant Triad: Henri Cole, Rita Dove, and August Kleinzahler” (collected in Vendler’s Soul Says, 1995), “The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate” (also collected in Soul Says), and “Rita Dove: Identity Markers” (chapter 3 of Vendler’s The Given and the Made, 1995).

In “Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove,” Vendler calls Dove’s Thomas and Beulah “remarkable.” She says of Dove’s poem “The Event,” which is included in Thomas’s side (“Mandolin”) of Thomas and Beulah:

When I first read this poem and some of its companions from “Mandolin,” I experienced the best of all poetic delights – feeling that something was very beautiful and not knowing why. New forms of beauty declare themselves only gradually. It seems to me now that a rapid succession of dramatic “takes” is Dove’s perfected form; she almost always refuses editorializing, musing, and “leading” the reader. Her brilliance lies in her arrangement of content; as the elements of meaning find their one inevitable form, juxtaposition alone takes on the work of explanation.

In her introduction to Soul Says, Vendler says, “Though I’m white, I could not do without the poetry of Langston Hughes and Rita Dove.”

In “A Dissonant Triad: Henri Cole, Rita Dove, and August Kleinzahler,” Vendler describes Dove’s poem “Ozone” as “unforgettable.” She also says, in a sentence that touches the current racial issue, “I admire Dove’s persistent probes into ordinary language, including the language of the black proletariat.” Is “restricted vocabulary” another way of saying “ordinary language”? Yes, I think it is. I’ll come back to this point in a moment.

In “The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate,” Vendler says of Dove’s work, “No matter how painful her stories, no matter how sharp-edged her lines, her poems fall on the ear with solace.”

And in “Rita Dove: Identity Markers,” Vendler refers to “the ingenious process of reflective faceting” in Dove’s poem “Aircraft.”

This brings me to the piece in question, Vendler’s review of Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (“Are These the Poems to Remember?,” The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011), in which the impugned words “restricted vocabulary” occur. Consideration of these words contextually clearly shows their consistency with several other descriptions used by Vendler to convey the stylistic nature of many of the poems included by Dove in her anthology. For example, Vendler describes Dove’s five Wallace Stevens selections as “plain-voiced.” Later in the piece, she says, “Dove’s tipping of the balance obeys a populist aesthetic.” She also says, “The only canonical poets she [Dove] writes about with real enthusiasm are the ones using what she feels to be popular language.” And she says, “Most of the new poets at the end of the book are writing in her [Dove’s] preferred demotic style.” Poems written in a demotic style are often written in simplified language, i.e, a “restricted vocabulary.” “Plain-voiced,” “populist aesthetic,” “popular language,” “ordinary language,” “demotic style," and yes, “restricted vocabulary” – these are all ways of distinguishing a plain style of poetry from a more intricate one. When Vendler says, in her review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, that perhaps now what’s needed is an anthology consisting of poems “of rather restricted vocabulary,” she is referring to an anthology of plain-style poems. Therefore, while I admire the spiritedness of Dove's letter, I respectfully submit that her racial interpretation of Vendler's phrase "restricted vocabulary" is seriously mistaken.

Credit: The above portrait of Helen Vendler is by David Levine.

December 5, 2011 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Aleksandar Hemon’s "Mapping Home." At first, I thought it was going to be about Hemon’s return to Sarajevo after the war, and his account of the people and places he rediscovered, and the memories that came to mind – a sort of variation on A. J. Liebling’s great Normandy Revisited (1959), which I’m currently reading. The first part of Hemon’s piece is a form of nostalgia trip. At one point, he says:

I randomly entered building hallways and basements, just to smell them: in addition to the familiar scent of leather suitcases, old magazines, and damp coal dust, there was the odor of hard life and sewage – during the siege, people had often taken shelter from the shelling in their basements. I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

The second section of “Mapping Home” is my favorite. It shows Hemon, in his mid-twenties, before he left Sarajevo for Chicago, when he worked as a film reviewer and columnist, walking Sarajevo’s streets, seeing, looking, reflecting. He says:

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city.

That last phrase (“for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city”) is inspired! It deepens Hemon’s theme. “Mapping Home” is not just a memory piece; it’s also about using our senses to create a definition of space. Reading Hemon’s piece, I was reminded of Sallie Tisdale’s brilliant “In The Northwest” (The New Yorker, August 26, 1991), in which she talks about the word “chorophiliac,” which means “place-lover.” Hemon is a chorophiliac. His choro is Sarajevo. He says:

I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphorically, I was placed.

“Mapping Home” deepens even further when Hemon shows how Chicago eventually became his choro, too. During his early days in Chicago, he was, he says, “a tormented flâneur.” He says:

In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I did not yet know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, had not been satisfied.”

It wasn’t until Hemon settled into the Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater that he started to feel “placed.” One of the highlight passages of “Mapping Home" is Hemon’s vivid description of how he gradually started feeling like an Edgewater “local.” Here’s a brief excerpt:

In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar.

Little by little, Hemon started to feel at home in Edgewater. He says, “I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood.”

I’m attracted to pieces about place. I’m doubly attracted when they’re written at street level by a writer addicted to walking. Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” is such a piece. I enjoyed it immensely.

Objectivist Takeover?

New Yorker writers divide into two broad categories – Objectivists and Subjectivists. Objectivists write mainly in the third person; they’re loath to say “I.” Subjectivists write mainly in the first person; their pieces read almost like excerpts from their personal journals.

Throughout the magazine’s history, Subjectivism has predominated; I much prefer it. Liebling, Mitchell, Bailey, and Rouché wrote in the first person, as do McPhee, Singer, Frazier, Bilger, Friend, Kolbert, Wilkinson, Remnick, Thurman, Paumgarten, Collins, Batuman, and Mead. But lately, it seems to me, the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in the magazine has been on the rise. Jill Lepore’s “American Chronicles” pieces, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Fish Tales” (March 7, 2011), David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011), George Packer’s “A Dirty Business” (June 27, 2011), George Packer’s “Coming Apart” (September 12, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Three Trials for Murder” (November 14, 2011), and Kelefa Sannah’s “Sacred Grounds” (November 21, 2011) are all written in the third person. (Packer and Schmidle may protest the Objectivist charge on the basis of a line or two of first-person perspective buried deep in their otherwise impersonal narratives), but they can’t deny that the gist of their approach is fundamentally Objectivist.) In the magazine’s November 28th issue, all four features are essentially Objectivist: Mattathias Schwartz’s “Pre-Occupied”; Ariel Levy’s “The Renovation”; George Packer’s “No Death, No Taxes”; and Raffi Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture.” I say “essentially” because some of these pieces contain a light sprinkling of “told me” and “said to me” – feeble attempts to mitigate their over-all machined, Objectivist feel and look. The last section of Khatchadourian’s “In The Picture” suddenly turns Subjectivist (“When the video ended, JR had to rush out. He wanted to surprise Nourry by showing her a SoHo rooftop that he had discovered. Two days later, he flew to Edinburgh, and then to Paris, where I caught up with him”), but it’s too little, too late.

I prefer the Subjectivist approach because it’s closest to the most true-to-life form of writing, namely, the journal. A journal tells what happened from the point of view of the writer as he or she actually experienced it. It seems to me that journalism is most effective when it is journal-like. Here are a few examples of quintessential journal-like sentences taken from recent New Yorker articles:

One day, Cagan took me to visit the Aras station, an hour’s drive south-east of Kars, near the Armenian border. (Elif Batuman, “Natural Histories,” October 24, 2011)

Beach trials the next morning were called off owing to rain, so I took a train to Amsterdam and visited the Rijksmuseum. (Ian Frazier, “The March of the Strandbeests,” September 5, 2011)

It was after 6 P.M. when we sat down at Dean’s editing machine, a twelve-thousand-dollar 35-mm. Steenbeck, to look at some rushes. (Emily Eakin, “Celluloid Hero,” October 31, 2011)

One day in July, I watched Grimaud play the pieces on “Resonances,” her current CD, in the Stadhalle, in Bayreuth. (D. T. Max, “Her Way,” November 7, 2011)

At the end of May, when I visited Yusuke Tataki, the worker who was inside Reactor Building No. 4 at the time of the quake, he said that he had passed up offers to go back as a jumper. (Evan Osnos, “The Fallout,” October 17, 2011)

On a recent Saturday, Worsley and I and a few others attempted to whip up the dinner that King George III ate on the evening of February 6, 1789. (Lauren Collins, “The King’s Meal,” November 21, 2011)

Such sentences make pursuit of the story part of the story. They clue the reader in on what the writer is thinking and doing. Most importantly, they help authenticate what’s being described. Objectivist pieces feel and look synthetic. Yes, they’re often magnificently crafted (see, for example, Kelefa Sanneh’s “Sacred Grounds,” The New Yorker, November 21, 2011). But they feel as if they’ve been manufactured (I almost said “made-up”) rather than experienced first-hand.

Fortunately, there are still lots of Subjectivists writing for The New Yorker. But the number of Objectivist pieces appearing in it seems to be on the upswing. The November 28th issue is filled with them. Objectivism appears to be trending at the magazine. I think it should be discouraged.

Credit: The above portrait of Joseph Mitchell is by Al Hirschfeld; it appears in The New Yorker (February 22, 2004), as an illustration for Mark Singer's "Joe Mitchell's Secret."

Peter Campbell (April 16, 1937 - October 25, 2011)

This is my tribute to Peter Campbell, who died October 25, 2011. Campbell worked for the London Review of Books from its inception, in 1979, as designer, illustrator, and art reviewer. He was a brilliant contemplator of art. As Mary-Kay Wilmers says, in her tribute to Campbell (“Diary,” London Review of Books, November 17, 2011), his pieces about exhibitions “take you with him into the gallery.” His art writing was, for me, a great source of pleasure. His connection with The New Yorker is non-existent, but I often read him in conjunction with pieces I’d read in the magazine. See, for example, my posts “Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike” (February 7, 2011) and “Werner Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’: 3 Reviews” (June 9, 2011). The origin of my interest in his writing traces back to his review of a Joan Eardley exhibition that appeared in the December 13, 2007, LRB, titled “At the National Gallery of Scotland.” I have a clipping of it here in front of me as I write this. It’s filled with my underlinings. I love descriptions of art. The Eardley piece contains several beauties, including this inspired line: “de Kooning in America made pictures in which the bones of an unseen landscape seem to direct the reading of a field of abstract marks.” How fine that “bones of an unseen landscape”! The clinching review – the one that made me a devoted follower of his LRB columns – is the one he did on the Tate Modern exhibition “Rothko: The Late Series” (“At Tate Modern,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008). I have that clipping here in front of me, as well. Looking at one of Rothko’s great red-on-maroon Seagram murals, he says, “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” Campbell also had an appreciative eye for items of material culture (e.g., the “bicornual” basket from the rain forests of north-eastern Queensland, which he noted in his piece “At the British Museum,” London Review of Books, June 16, 2011, as follows: “Its sculptural curves are emphasized by the way the strands of cane from which it is made follow swelling contours. It is a wonderful, evolved design”). In 2009, At …, a rich collection of Campbell’s art writings was published. I count it among my favorite books.