Review of Timothy Garton Ash's Facts Are Subversive (Sydney Morning Herald, October 2009)

Timothy Garton Ash
Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Atlantic Books; $34.95; 441pp

C. P. Scott’s celebrated remark ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ lives on in the newspaper of which he was the editor. Or rather, one half of the remark lives on, in the form of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. The journalist Timothy Garton Ash, himself a contributor to Comment is Free, is worried about the other half, especially in the light of the enormous challenges currently facing the newspaper industry. ‘In the news business today,’ he writes sardonically in his outstanding collection Facts are Subversive, ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive.’

His title thus has a double function. First, it serves to remind the reader of the forgotten half of Scott’s dictum. Second, it seeks to persuade that reader of why the forgotten half is important. Facts are sacred because they are subversive – subversive, as Garton Ash writes in his preface, ‘of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists’. They are also, one hopes, subversive of indifference, though that firewall can be hard to breach. When, early in 2006, Garton Ash implored the readers of Comment is Free to consider Belarus, then in the middle of a sham election in which President Lukashenko held all the cards, one reader, ‘thedacs’, responded thus: ‘Nah, still don’t give a toss …’ When comments are free, they are very often cheap.

Containing pieces originally published in Prospect, the New York Review of Books and various other publications, Facts are Subversive is the substantial opus of someone who most certainly does give a toss. Garton Ash is a journalistic gumshoe of seemingly inexhaustible energies, touching down in Serbia (there to witness the fall of Milosevic), Ukraine (to witness the Orange Revolution), Burma (to witness totalitarianism’s survival into the twenty-first century) and many other political hotspots. Determined to put events into context, his journalism is almost always augmented with wide-ranging and apparently impeccable scholarship (his is, he writes, a ‘mongrel craft’). He is also a political man of letters of a kind not much in evidence these days. The book contains a number of pieces on writers who exist at what the literary critic Lionel Trilling called ‘the bloody crossroads’ – the point at which literature and politics meet.

It so happens that Trilling used that phrase in an essay on George Orwell and ‘the politics of truth’ and Garton Ash is a devotee of ‘the Saint George of English political writing’. Orwell is everywhere in Facts are Subversive. More precisely, ‘Orwellian’ is everywhere, not just as an adjective to describe the ways in which the powerful tend to manipulate the truth but also as an adjective denoting the kind of journalist that Garton Ash aspires to be. For Orwell it was who, in his own words, had ‘a power of facing unpleasant facts’ and the facts that Garton Ash must face, or ends up facing, are often unpleasant. He also has Orwell’s ear for language. Here he is at his brilliant best, in a review of Stefan Collini’s book about intellectuals, Absent Minds:

Intellectuals begin at Calais. ‘British intellectual’ is an oxymoron, like ‘military intelligence’. The river of colloquial English carries a heavy silt of mildly pejorative or satirical epithets: egghead, boffin, highbrow, bluestocking, know-all, telly don, media don, chattering classes, too clever by half. The qualifier ‘so-called’ travels with the word ‘intellectual’ like a bodyguard. The inverted commas of irony are never far away.

Is Garton Ash an intellectual? He certainly is, but he’s also a journalist – one for whom the second appellation is never in danger of being overshadowed by the first. As ‘dead tree’ journalism continues to suffer and C. P. Scott slowly turns in his grave, one writer at least holds firm to the view that reporter journalism is the first draft of history.

Review of Lawrence Weschler's Everything that Rises (The Australian, October 2009)

Lawrence Weschler, Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences
Atlantic Books; $39.95; 238pp

Creativity, wrote the South African author, poet and editor William Plomer, ‘is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected’ and many are the cultural commentators who endeavour, via a colourful juxtaposition, to prove themselves worthy of the creativity that it is their job to describe and critique. To take one recent example from my own notebook: In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the Moon. Forty years later, as images of the Moon landing flickered across our TV screens, another pioneer, Michael Jackson, died. And what was Jackson’s signature dance move? The ‘backslide’, also know as the ‘moonwalk’. Well, it may serve as an introduction to an article somewhere down the line.

For the New York writer Lawrence Weschler, this kind of connection would be more likely to form the subject of an article than its introduction. For in essays written for McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Artforum and other publications, Weschler has developed a journalistic style in thrall to ‘uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations [and] eerie rhymes’. These convergences range, as he says himself, from the silly to the transcendental, while ‘others veritably revel in their manifest unlikelihood’. Now he has brought his pieces together in Everything that Rises, ‘a convergence of convergences’ brimming with exquisitely reproduced artwork.

Weschler’s technique owes a lot to John Berger, whose 1972 book Ways of Seeing attempted to show how paintings and images relate to each other across the centuries and often contain ideological messages. Similarly, Weschler, in a number of essays, attempts to demonstrate how images in one context are often influenced by images from another. Thus, in his first piece – a dialogue with Joel Meyerowitz – he endeavours to show how the latter’s photographs of the devastation after 9/11 draw on such canonised images as Jean-François Millet’s painting The Gleaners. Elsewhere, he wonders whether Jackson Pollock may have been subliminally influenced by images of deep space in the 1950s and whether the line of the floating lips in Man Ray’s A l’Heure de l’Observatoire: les Amoureaux is a reference to the contours of the Rokeby Venus.

Weschler makes some interesting connections but his tendency to overreach is marked. In one essay, he badly misreads Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson in order to make a point about hands. (The figures in the painting are not, as he argues, looking at the surgeon’s hand at all but at a book at the foot of the operating table.) Other connections are simply daft, as when, for example, he compares a photograph of a father and son standing at Ground Zero with Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic.

At times, Weschler has a legitimate point but his featured convergence merely serves to obscure it. For example, in an essay on The Spinners, by Velázquez, he ably demonstrates how class distinctions are mirrored by the composition, with the eponymous spinners at the front of the painting and the aristocratic women dallying at the back. Imagining the actual Spanish aristocrats viewing this painting in the seventeenth century, Weschler writes that a ‘veritable ziggurat of perception opens before our eyes’. The keyword here is ‘ziggurat’, which leads him to think of ‘an open pit mine, an inverted ziggurat, like the one, in our own time, that the Chilean-American art-photographer Alfredo Jaar came upon in the summer of 1985’. He continues:

Jaar hit upon the inspired notion of slotting close-ups of the faces of the exhausted miners into elaborately ornate gold-leaf frames, replicating for a moment the same vertiginous ziggurat of perceptions first broached by Velázquez back in the middle of the seventeenth century.

The idea that there is anything ziggurat-like about Jaar’s framed photographs is without foundation. But Weschler is so trapped in his own poeticism that his visual faculties have ceased to function. And what is the poeticism doing, anyway, apart from taking attention away from the fact that Weschler’s central idea – that Jaar and Velázquez are both concerned with the relationship between rich and poor – is a pretty uncontroversial one?

These are purely aesthetic concerns and as such not especially serious. It is when the author attempts to apply his journalistic technique to politics that its limitations begin to matter. In ‘Pillsbury Doughboy Messiahs’, for example, Weschler remarks on the physical similarities between Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic. It is, to be sure, a striking resemblance: ‘the same jowly countenance, the bouffant grey mantle of hair, that identical out-thrust, righteously aggrieved little button of a chin’. But when Weschler compares the siege of Sarajevo to Gingrich’s siege of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the comparison is revealed for what it is: an idiotic bit of moral equivalence.

There are some good things in Everything that Rises. I like, for example, Weschler’s idea that Mark Rothko’s 1969 painting Untitled may have been influenced by images of the Moon landing. In the end, however, I had the sense of a journalist who can no longer tell the difference between a ‘small step’ and a ‘giant leap’ and who, while seeming to travel forwards, is actually moving very stylishly backwards.

Love and Summer, by William Trevor (review for The Australian)

William Trevor, Love and Summer
Viking; $45; 212pp

Though principally a short story writer – perhaps the greatest now writing in English since the death of V. S. Pritchett in 1997 – William Trevor is also a novelist, and indeed novellaist, of uncommon power. The attributes he brings to the longer form are in essence no different to those used in the shorter. First, there is his ear for speech, for English as it is spoken by ordinary people. Second, and carrying on from this, there is the astonishing range of his empathy, his feel for the unexalted life, for the banal and the quotidian. Above all, there is his flare for compression, for the allusive and the quietly suggestive. Unassuming and unobtrusive, Trevor reminds us that a ton of feathers weighs precisely the same as a ton of bricks.

Take, for example, the opening paragraph of his latest novel, Love and Summer:

On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.

So, a woman goes for a walk. Except she doesn’t walk, she passes. The streets glide by, apparently unheeded; no detail seems to ground them in reality. The woman spends the night in a church; or rather, her night is spent in a church: an odd thing to do and an odd way of putting it. And yet the passive voice is appropriate, for Mrs Eileen Connulty is passive. Mrs Eileen Connulty is dead.

Set in 1950s Ireland, in a fictional town where nothing much happens, except that people are born and die and fall in love with one another, Love and Summer thus begins with the death of a ‘disappointed’ woman. Eileen Connulty is survived by her children, ‘Miss Connulty’ and Joseph Paul. Miss Connulty runs a lodging house (the abovementioned Number 4 The Square) and Joseph Paul runs the family pub. The family once owned a cinema, too, but that burned down some years ago. Mr Connulty died in the fire.

It is on the way to photograph the ruins of Rathmoye’s former picture house that Florian Kilderry, from nearby Castledrummond, happens upon Mrs Connulty’s funeral. Deciding to photograph that, too, he catches the eye of some of the mourners, in particular that of Ellie Dillahan, who is married to a local farmer. Ellie’s marriage is somewhat loveless, her husband having killed his former wife in an accident seven years ago and Ellie herself having come to him by way of the nuns at an institution for ‘foundlings’ attached to a nearby convent. Florian is in the process of selling his house, which he inherited from his bohemian parents. His plan is to leave Ireland altogether, possibly for Scandinavia. The encounter with Ellie, and the affair that follows it, is thus a heartbreak waiting to happen, though for whom we will not know till the end, when the novel arrives, with a delicate shock, at its exquisite and exquisitely painful denouement.

Trevor left Ireland in the 1950s but much of his fiction remains rooted there. Some of the best stories in Cheating at Canasta, his 2007 collection of short stories, were set in modern Ireland, which, being Ireland, is never quite modern. The lilt of his prose and the subject matter are, in this novel, perfectly matched. He writes as he speaks, with a soft Irish accent, occasionally holding back the main verb in imitation of his characters. ‘A ceremony her afternoon adorning of herself had become this summer …’ Of course, this is partly the free indirect style championed by the literary critic James Wood but it is also something slightly different: a sort of authorial warmth or affection. Trevor, one feels, really loves his creations.

Nevertheless, his view of Ireland is never misty-eyed or romantic. Provincial Ireland is an environment in which the past is less a foreign country than a brooding and sometimes stultifying presence. Orpen Wren, a bewildered tramp who was once employed to catalogue the library of a local aristocratic family and who spends his days at the railway station awaiting the long-lost heir’s return, is in some ways a representative figure, mentally trapped as he is in the past. Moreover, the novel is full of ruins – not just the cinema, but Florian’s house (described as ‘eighteen dilapidated rooms’) and the estate of Orpen’s former employers. At one point, Florian himself is described as ‘the sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father’ (my emphasis).

‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?’ I thought more than once of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ when I read this novel, not because of Yeats’s depiction of Ireland as a ruined land but rather because of that magnificent description of the relationship between love and loss. What more is there to say? Not much. Only that Trevor, at the age of eighty-one, has produced another masterpiece.

Review of The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (October, 2009)

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Simon and Schuster; $25; 243pp

The history of poetic form can be usefully compared to the history of piecrust. Originally, piecrusts were protective casings: one didn’t eat them; one threw them away. It was only later that the outer shell became not only edible but also a compliment to the pie filling. Similarly, poetic form began as a way to make information memorable in illiterate societies. Poetic form, in other words, had a largely utilitarian function, though of course it very quickly acquired an ornamental and imitative one. Now, when a poem rhymes and scans one hopes that the form reinforces the content. One hopes that the piecrust compliments the filling.

I like to think that Nicholson Baker would enjoy this gastronomic analogy. For one thing, his surname would seem to suggest some culinary expertise in his ancestry. More to the point, his new novel, The Anthologist, is crammed with comparisons between food and poetry. At one point his protagonist writes, ‘What I’m doing when I’m writing poetry is I’m trying to make a little side salad.’ And later: ‘The Elizabethans really understood short words. Each one-syllable word becomes a heavy, blunt chunk of butter that is melted and baked into the pound cake of the line.’ Oh, and the narrator is called Paul Chowder.

Despite his surname, Paul is no clam. He wants to talk – about poetry. About some other things as well, but mostly about poetry. The reason for this emphasis is that he is himself a minor poet in the process of writing an introduction to his forthcoming anthology, Only Rhyme. Or rather he isn’t in the process of writing it; he is in the process of putting it off. His crisis of confidence has a lot to do with the fact that his own poetry is not going well. Paul wants to be a rhymer and a scanner, and yet the poetry he writes is just ‘slow motion prose’. He dreams of composing one great poem, good enough to take its place in some notional future anthology. He is broke and his partner Roz has left him.

‘When I look at the lives of other poets, I understand what’s wrong with me … They were so tortured, so messed up.’ It’s true that Paul, despite his crisis, comes across as obstinately twinkly, rather as Baker himself comes across in the interviews I’ve heard with him. Nor is the resemblance mere coincidence, for The Anthologist is really an essay on poetry thinly (and fetchingly) disguised as a novel. The plot is a sort of background murmur. Will Roz come back? Will she like the beads that Paul has lovingly strung for her? Will Paul improve his badminton? That’s about it for narrative tension. The rest is a brilliant riff on poetry – two hundred pages of musings about the muse.

So what does Paul Chowder think about poetry? His principal idea is that the four-beat line is ‘the soul of English poetry’ and that pentameter is not only secondary but has also caused ‘untold confusion’. (Even the three-beat line, he argues, is actually a four-beat line, because of the silent stress at the end.) He has some odd ideas about enjambment, citing Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ as an example of that practice at its ugliest: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.’ Personally, I think those lines are a knockout but Paul is so enamoured of the idea that poetry is just music by another name (he is always setting poems to music) that he misses their mimetic function, how those two magnificent monosyllables plant themselves either side of the line-break. This reveals a weakness in his argument. For while I think that Paul is right to deplore the division between poetry and verse, the division between poetry and music is necessary. A song lyric’s music is imposed from without; a poem carries its music within it.

Fascinating stuff, if you’re interested in poetry. But what if poetry isn’t your thing? Well, perhaps I was overstating it when I said that the plot was just background noise, for the themes of love and poetry do come together in some striking ways. Without Roz, Paul is merely a half-rhyme. At one point, he imagines her back in his bed: ‘I could cup her upward hip or one of her dozing boobies with my hand … That cupping is rhyme – the felt matching of two congruent shapes.’ A little later he asks himself why he needs things to rhyme so much. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s a kind of ‘avoidance’: ‘It’s like chain smoking – you light one line with the glowing ember of the last.’

The world is out of love with poetry. ‘Maybe I could do a weekly podcast … Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder’s Bowl of Poetry.’ But poetry isn’t food; it isn’t consumed. Poetry – really great poetry – consumes us. For all that I wanted to quibble with Baker, it’s clear that he understands this much. He gets it: ‘the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry’.