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An Apple that was America

Saturday, November 10th, 2012

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Recently I acquired a small still life painting by the 19th century American artist Edward Chalmers Leavitt (1842-1904):

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Still Life with Apple on a Marbletop
Oil on canvas, signed lower right and dated 1862.
6.5 x 8.75 inches

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Depictions of apples are very common in nineteenth century American art, and it’s not hard to understand why.

The apple’s renown can be traced to decades of widespread cultivation of apple trees throughout the growing nation. Successful harvests yielded not only abundant and flavorful table fruit, but an important beverage: millions of gallons of hard cider which thirsty Americans consumed with abandon.

For a young nation still in the process of defining itself, the apple was an object poised to take on symbolic importance. The natural stages of apple production — seeds, saplings, trees, new blossoms, nourishing fruit — furnished metaphors for nation-building. And when the new nation was in need of home-grown myths, they annointed Johnny Appleseed, whose legend is substantially rooted in fact.

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William Gropper, “Johnny Appleseed,” lithograph (another version, here)

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Johnny Appleseed became a hero of a quintessentially American kind, as his story blends both moral and practical lessons. Likewise the humble fruit he championed. Americans saw in the apple something they were temperamentally inclined to invest with representational authority.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the apple had achieved a status approaching that of a national symbol. Twice in his journals (in 1848 and in 1851) Ralph Waldo Emerson declared the apple to be “our national fruit,” and he later voiced that same judgment without fear of contradiction in lectures devoted to “Country Life” delivered to audiences in Boston and Worcester (1858) as well as in Brooklyn (1859):

“The apple is our national fruit. In October, the country is covered with its ornamental harvest. The American sun paints itself in these glowing balls amid the green leaves, the social fruit, in which Nature has deposited every possible flavor; whole zones and climates she has concentrated into apples.”

This background adds to our understanding of Still Life with Apple on a Marbletop and the artist who painted it.

In 1862, Edward Chalmers Leavitt, a young man eager to extend his artistic reach beyond an early talent for drawing, decided to capture an apple’s essence in oil paint on canvas. This small painting may be the earliest surviving work by him, according to my research. Indeed not much is known with certainty about Leavitt’s training and early career as an artist. His first participation in an art exhibition occurred five years after Still Life with Apple on a Marbletop, when a work labeled “Fruit Piece (painting)” appeared at an exhibition sponsored by the Rhode Island Society for Domestic Industry. In his later years Leavitt achieved local prominence as the premier still life painter in the city of Providence, churning out grandiose and meticulously detailed compositions reflecting America’s material prosperity at the end of the century. These later commercial works, designed for an upper middle class market, are a long way away from his early apple.

A single apple on a shelf: what could be simpler, more humble, more innocent?

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But look closer. Doesn’t this begin to look like more than the commonly encountered image of an apple? I think the answer is yes. Many a curious thing is to be found in Leavitt’s depiction of America’s fruit. Some things extraneous. Some things pointing beyond the literal, beyond the space the artist constructed to house his apple. Perhaps something with a personal meaning.

What I see in the painting now set before me is this:

Here, in a simple depiction of an apple on a marble shelf, the artist has encoded the state of the nation in 1862.

I interpret the painting as a representation of the country as seen through the eyes of a young man during the eventful year of 1862. Yes, I’m engaging in some speculation here. I may never find confirmation of my premise. But what I do have in hand already are two things: a tantalizing biographical fact, and the evidence of the painting itself.

Here is the interesting fact: Edward Chalmers Leavitt, born and educated in Providence, Rhode Island, decided at the age of 19, at the outbreak of the Civil War, to volunteer to serve the Union cause. Exactly when in 1862 he painted Apple on a Marble Tabletop may never be determined. But there is little doubt in my mind that throughout the months of 1862, Leavitt, like other young men of his time and place, must have followed intently every scrap of news and rumor that came his way about the campaigns and battles of the war. That second year of the Civil War saw the further terrible sundering of our nation. Blood was spilled on the battlefield; tears were spilled on the homefront.

The painting itself — its iconography — is intriguing. My reason to believe Leavitt had a higher aspiration for his painted apple, that he intended this apple as a commentary on contemporary events, is grounded in three elements of the picture. These details telegraph a message.

1.   The geography of battle

First there is the matter of how Leavitt depicts the physical setting the apple occupies. Within a very small format (just 6 1/2 by 8 3/4 inches) the artist has created a narrow and shallow display space. On reflection, however, this space broadens out to encompass a larger space. This in turn allows the apple to assume a larger meaning. What did Leavitt do to transform the space?

I find it significant that instead of attempting to replicate the look of marble as would other painters of the period, Leavitt purposely designs the stone’s signature mineral veins to achieve something other than mere verisimilitude. I’ve never before seen an American still life artist paint marble in this way. The veins, as ordered by Leavitt, are like meandering rivers that spread out across a wide territory. More broadly still, these lines suggest geographical markers or boundaries of territory. Some of these geographical cues refer to natural formations (we think of rivers) while others are man-made (notice the straight east-west line marking the meeting of the interlocked planes — creating “north” and “south” halves of the painting).

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Both the flat backdrop slab of marble and the flat shelf that projects outward toward the viewer are of equal prominence. While we perceive these as two separate surfaces, they can also be read as sections of one partially unfolded but not yet fully flattened map, thanks in part to the implied continuation of veins from one plane to the other. Indeed, on the left side of the picture we seem to be able to observe a river, formed in the north, grow as it wends its way south. The web of arteries, while mysterious, strongly suggests this decipherment. But what, in a larger sense, is the meaning of this eerie feature of Leavitt’s composition? What does it signify in the American context of 1862?

I believe the landscape-like element of this still life represents the geography of the American Civil War.

For Leavitt to use his painter’s brush to conjure up rivers, creeks and runs in the year 1862 was inevitably to awaken the names of skirmishes and battles lately entering people’s consciousness and speech: Bull Run, Wilson’s Creek, Middle Creek, Shiloh. Even if it was the convention of just one side of the conflict (the Confederacy) to name battles after the nearest river or run, those names would have been in the thoughts and on the tongues of everyone, north and south, following news of the war, reading newspaper accounts and pouring over illustrated maps. I cannot claim the lines Leavitt etched into his unfolded stone map correspond to any actual geographical boundaries or waterways met in the path of war. They don’t have to. It served Leavitt’s purpose to create a general schematic of the water-carved fields of battle. What Leavitt intended has been successfully evoked.

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Notice also what happens to us, as viewers, when we entertain the notion, even if only for a moment, that this apple is resting on a huge expanse of territory. In our mind’s eye the apple balloons in size. Our sense of scale goes kerflooey, as happens when we look at a surrealistically large apple in a painting by Magritte.

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At the very least, our sense of the meaning of the apple expands to include new possibilities.

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2.   The inflicted wound

The apple has suffered a bruise. It’s a distinctive wound.

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For centuries still life artists have used the trope of imperfections in the skin of a piece of fruit to signify the impermanence of beauty, illustrating the poet’s observation, “everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment.” Yet this is almost always conveyed through depictions of naturally occurring flaws, inherent decay rising to the surface or the natural decomposition of skin post-ripeness. Apples, for example, may be shown with lesions of apple scab disease.

In contrast, the bruise Leavitt painted has a different look and meaning. It appears its cause was an irregular action, an unnatural source, something external. A plausible reading is that the wound is one inflicted by an opposing human hand, when the violent pressure of a finger and nail left a ghostly outline on the skin.

This wound occupies the southwest quadrant of the face of the apple the artist presents to the viewer. From the vantage point of Leavitt’s New England roots and his Providence, Rhode Island, home base, to the southwest is the very direction he would point, when locating the depredations of the major Civil War engagements in the year 1862. Think of Shiloh (Tennessee); Gaine’s Mill (Virginia); 2nd Battle of Bull Run (Virginia); Battle of Richmond, Kentucky; Antietam (Maryland); and Fredericksburg (Virginia).

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3.   The blood of battle

One aspect of the apple delights the eye at first glance — or at least delights the eye of a viewer who assumes this to be an innocent representation of an apple. Two drops magically cling to the apple’s skin. These two drops belong to the tradition of trompe l’oeil still life, whose practitioners applied embellishments of this sort to impart a reality to the painted object (depicting a fly alighting on the fruit is another off-used trick). Later in his career Leavitt himself would return to the practice, in one instance dotting a cabbage leaf with drops of water, and on another occasion affixing raindrops to the yellow roses and leaves in a painting from 1885:

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But note that in these later examples the drops of moisture are of an entirely different character. We understand the drops on the cabbage leaf were applied externally (from refreshing rain or from being washed by man) as were those on the rose (again, from rain). In contrast, the drops on the apple appear to come from inside the apple. Just as a matter of gravity it’s hard to fathom how a drop of water could be placed on the shear side of the apple and retain its globular form. Instead we must imagine a puncture, a hole in the skin from which a vital essence slowly is escaping. The top drop appears to have just emerged. We imagine it will grow larger. The heavy bottom drop falls like a tear.

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It does not matter that science can explain why the drops are red, and can assure us the drops are only behaving as lenses relaying the red color of the apple skin. No: despite such knowledge we are seized by one terrible thought.  This is blood. The apple is bleeding.

This apple was America.

If you also admit the possibility of seeing Leavitt’s apple as a human torso, then what the young artist depicted is a mature and consequential image. In symbolic form he shows us the scene that follows the triggering scene drawn by Winslow Homer and published in Harper’s Weekly in 1862 (The Army of the Potomac–A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty). Homer called the actions of the sharp-shooter “near murder.”

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Notes and additional observations

1.  As I write and post this piece, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is preparing to open an exhibition, The Civil War and American Art, that will be on view from November 16, 2012, through April 28, 2013. Later the exhibition will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, May 21 through September 3, 2013. Although the accompanying scholarly catalogue, authored by Eleanor Jones Harvey, is not yet available to me (Amazon currently lists a future release date of November 27, 2012), I’ve just read an illustrated essay, apparently an excerpt from the catalog, in American Art Review, Vol. XXIV, No. 6, 2012 (November-December), pp. 80-85. In it the author reveals her thesis that the Civil War had a profound effect on the mission, content, and uses of art in America. She focuses her analysis on landscape painting and photography as well as postwar genre painting. While those are the most obvious arenas, let me suggest the investigation into signifiers should not stop there. Still life may also respond to a war’s wounds. In the hands of an engaged artist, even a mere apple can be a nation.

2.  I’ve mentioned that the web of veins in the marble platform have a mysterious aura, a mystery that activates a viewer’s desire for decipherment. In this way they remind me of the puzzling lines in the backgound of some Jasper Johns works from the 1980s and ’90s (lines whose source and meaning art scholars have scurried to uncover):

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3.  If, as I argue in this essay, Leavitt set his American apple upon a generalize map of the battlegrounds of Civil War America, it seems almost unnecessary to call attention to the shadow cast by the apple  — the shadow of death and mourning — falling across the land. The apple cannot escape from the narrow shelf; its fate awaits. Three years later, mourning the spilling of every drop of blood, ruminating on the terrible course of events, Lincoln sadly recalled: … AND THE WAR CAME.

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A Pair of Inadvertent Chuck Closes

Friday, October 19th, 2012

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The signature style of American portraitist Chuck Close is unmistakable. Its basis is a grid, usually of squares filled with colors that from a distance blend to recreate the original photograph of the subject.

Recently, when editing photos on my iPad, an apparent malfunction occurred in the crop and save function, causing a few pictures to be transformed into fuzzy, gridded structures. I see them as accidental Closes.

Below is an actual piece by Close (“Emma,” woodcut, 2002) whose tilted “grid” is made up of diamonds, rectangles and L-shapes; followed by one of my iPad-restructured photos, this one of Hillary Clinton.

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Here’s another Close (“Alex II,” oil on canvas, 1989) followed by an iPad-transformed photo of Paul Ryan from the 2012 Vice Presidential debate:

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Narcissus in the Morning

Friday, September 14th, 2012

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My dog Jesse when he awoke yesterday morning.

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I was struck by how his twisted body formed an S-curve. In aesthetics this is known as the line of beauty. This, William Hogarth thought, was the basis for all great art.

The story of Narcissus is summed up nicely here.

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One New Acquisition (and two discoveries)

Sunday, September 9th, 2012

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This spring I added a piece to my collection of mid-19th-century oil sketches by American artists. The painting, by William Hart (1823-1894), is an oil on canvas, 12 by 19 1/2 inches, titled “Rocks on the Shore.”

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Sometimes it takes time for a work of art to reveal its hidden beauty, not to mention the circumstances of its creation. This painting is a good example of a slow reveal.

So far I’ve been led to two revelations.

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The first discovery emerged when I decided to uncover the work’s original appearance. A century and a half of accumulated dirt and time-yellowed varnish had obscured its glow. As always I relied on the technical skills of Arthur Page, a veteran painting conservator. His studio removed the grime and old varnish that had veiled the artist’s original accomplishment.

This photo is from an early stage of conservation treatment (note the upper left quadrant).

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The result of the cleaning was striking. Revealed was a fresh, high-keyed painting of a bright day that attracts the viewer’s eye. The scene Hart depicts has an immediate impact. This is a sign of a fine plein air sketch — a painting completed, or at least begun, in the open air, as the artist engages in a face-to-face encounter with the natural environment, discovered here-and-now.

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Some of the details that emerged, brightly:

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Signature in the lower right corner

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Pencil outlines

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Hart’s facility in handling a colorful, paint-laden brush

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The artist’s attention to the smallest phenomenon, such as grasses rooted in the boulder’s crevices (click on photo for enlargement)

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The second discovery I made was the location Hart chose to capture in paint. As I’ll explain, the path to a final determination of that site was not smooth, because the search was first waylaid by a false identification made by an art historian.

Aside from the artist’s signature, no other inscriptions appear on the canvas, verso or recto, nor on its original stretcher. This meant finding the scene’s location and the date Hart painted it would have to depend on information external to the work itself.

The auction catalog’s description of the piece contained a bit of speculation:

“This fine example of the subject [a rocky shoreline] by Hudson River landscapist William M. Hart [sic: William Hart never used a middle initial; “WM” is how he abbreviated “William”], a Scottish emigre who settled with his family near Albany, New York, […] probably records a spot of coast in Maine, near Grand Manan where he frequently painted.”

I, too, thought Maine was a good guess. But exactly where in Maine? Surely such a dramatically-wrought promontory, whose every cut and curve, plane and shadow, was meticulously traced by Hart’s eye and hand, must be some familiar spot. It must have been known and appreciated by Hart’s fellow itinerant artists who traveled up and down the New England coast in search of scenes of picturesque and sublime content. What other artists were drawn to record this vista? Did their works survive?

Surfing online for answers, I found a few other examples of Hart’s own paintings of sites where rock terrain met the sea.

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But these paintings were of different formations, and none of the information connected to them pointed to the location of my painting.

Then, a Eureka moment — or so I thought at the time.

Paging through John Wilmerding’s “The Artist’s Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast” (1994) (currently out of print), I came to the chapter devoted to William Stanley Haseltine (1835-1900). Haseltine, like Hart, was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School, America’s first native school of landscape painting. He is best known for his precise renderings of the rocky coast of New England. Starting in the late 1850’s and continuing well into the next decade, Haseltine traveled from Rhode Island’s Point Judith to Maine’s Mount Desert Island, along the way executing drawings and oil sketches that he then used as source material for larger works he would complete in his studio. Bold rock formations were his inspiration.

On page 112 of Wilmerding’s book there is an illustration of one of Haseltine’s many beautifully-rendered drawings from 1859. It is titled, “Thunder Hole, Mount Desert Island” (pencil and grey wash on paper, 15 1/8 x 21 9/16 inches, private collection):

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If you examine the central monolith in the drawing and compare it to the William Hart painting you will discover — it is a match!

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When Haseltine recorded this view of a massive rock formation overlooking the sea, it appears he stood further back from the water than where Hart managed to climb. Haseltine also positioned himself a bit to the right. This resulted in slightly less than the entire huge craggy mass at the apex of the composition being visible, when compared to the view recorded by Hart. Regarding that dominating monolith, there’s no mistaking the fact that it revealed  the complexity of its facets to Haseltine and Hart in identically clear fashion. I’m hard-pressed to find any significant differences.

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Both artists recorded the site at about the same time of day; the sun casts shadows of similar direction and depth. Yet of the two artists, I sense Haseltine, ever the geologist, was the more faithful transcriber of the position and shape of the flanking structures on the left and right. Hart, less a literalist, seems to have taken liberties in portraying the structures to the left and right of the focal point whose beauty most intrigued him. This is also understandable when you consider Haseltine’s aesthetic approach when drawing with pencil and ink wash involved creating an interesting black, grey and white design that floats upon the white expanse of a flat sheet of paper. To the extent Haseltine wanted to reformulate the actual scene in front of him, he could accomplish that without rearranging the physical matter before him, but by modulation of tone — assigning various shades of grey to each stationary element in service to his two dimensional design. Hart proceeded differently. In creating his sketch in oil paints, he enjoyed the added resource of color. While generally respecting the fidelity-to-nature imperative of mid-19th century painting, Hart would allow his composition to stray from the actual. He felt free to rearrange matter at the behest of other, superior values.

In a later chapter in “The Artist’s Mount Desert” (pp. 129-130), Wilmerding grants only passing mention to William Hart (applying to him words of faint praise such as “competent” and “clever in a modest way”), though he does say that records exist showing Hart was painting at Mount Desert from 1857 to 1860.

With these bits of evidence falling into place (and with Wilmerding’s ostensibly reliable scholarship), I was fully prepared to re-title this William Hart painting, “Thunder Hole, Mount Desert” (ca. 1859).

And yet there was something that bothered me — a nagging question arising from a practical observation. It was this:

Why does Thunder Hole look so different today?

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Today, Thunder Hole is a tourist stop for visitors to Acadia National Park on Mount Desert:

Nothing symbolizes the power of Acadia National Park as much as Thunder Hole does. When the right size wave rolls into the naturally formed inlet, a deep thunderous sound emanates. The cause is a small cavern formed low, just beneath the surface of the water. When the wave pulls back just before lunging forward, it dips the water just below the ceiling of the cavern allowing air to enter. When the wave arrives full force, it collides with the air, forcing it out, resulting in a sound like distant thunder. Water may splash into the air as high as 40 feet with a roar!

Videos of the phenomenon are available here and here.

Thunder Hole is on the east side of the Island, south of Sand Beach and just north of Otter Cliff:

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Changes in light and moisture can alter the color of the cliffs from grey to pink, orange, even red:

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Dynamics defined the site. But still I wondered, had the erosion of wind and water so altered the structures meticulously depicted by Haseltine and Hart that, today, the distinctive central rock formation has been transformed into . . . this?

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I didn’t think so.

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Nearly two hundred miles to the southwest of Mount Desert Island, on a peninsula called Nahant on the coast of Massachusetts, a remarkable geological formation greeted the rising sun. The formation was known familiarly as Pulpit Rock, and it attracted generations of tourists until it, along with a Natural Bridge connected to nearby rocky features, were destroyed in a fierce winter storm in February, 1957.

In the nineteenth century, among the many American artists drawn to Pulpit Rock was William Stanley Haseltine. In 1865 he finished a major oil painting that depicted the scene with reverential awe, backlighting the principal rock with divine illumination (Pulpit Rock, Nahant, 1865, oil on canvas, signed and dated ‘W.S.Haseltine/1865’ (lower right), 28 by 49 3/4 inches; the basis for the title is discussed in the Overview and Lot Notes sections of an auction catalog listing, here):

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Competing with artists to memorialize the site were early photographers. Many photographic views of Nahant’s Pulpit Rock and Natural Bridge were published during the post-Civil War craze for stereoscopic views .

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Pulpit_Rock,_Nahant,_from_Robert_N._Dennis_collection_of_stereoscopic_views

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If you compare the first of the stereoscopic views of Pulpit Rock, above, with the drawing Haseltine made a decade earlier, you will discover — the location is a match.

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It’s likely Haseltine used his 1859 drawing as a reference when, six years later, he began to compose his studio painting, Pulpit Rock, Nahant, although for the latter work he chose to strip away all but the central monolith, in effect de-cluttering the site for dramatic impact.

Other American landscape and seascape artists were lured to the notorious location to record Pulpit Rock from a variety of perspectives, including Thomas Cole, whose quickly rendered sketch is available here. Later in the nineteenth century, William Trost Richards positioned himself on a vantage point similar to that of the photographer of the third and fourth stereoviews, above. The result was a small watercolor (Pulpit Rock, Nahant, signed with initials ‘W.T.R’ and dated ’76’ lower right, inscribed with title lower left, 6 x 5 inches).

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Souvenir postcards continued to spread images of Pulpit Rock and Natural Bridge into the twentieth century.

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Plainly, Wilmerding was in error when asserting that the drawing by Haseltine illustrated on p. 112 of “The Artist’s Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast” was a sketch of Thunder Hole on Mount Desert Island, Maine. What’s especially regrettable is that at pp.  118-119, in his explanatory text interpreting the drawing, Wilmerding weaves an elaborate commentary premised entirely on an erroneous identification of the site. He concludes, “this drawing achieves a particularly powerful sense of location, capturing the face and personality of Thunder Hole.”

The question also arises: Where were the book’s editor and its pre-publication readers? Were they unfamiliar with the Nahant’s Pulpit Rock and its depiction by American artists?

Is there an inscription on the Haseltine drawing that may have misdirected Wilmerding and others? If so, that adds another demerit to the situation — namely, the frustratingly incomplete information Wilmerding and the book’s editor(s) chose to provide to interested readers of “The Artist’s Mount Desert.”

Here is the full description of the Haseltine drawing found in the book’s the list of Illustrations (p. 188, ill. 110):

“110. William Stanley Haseltine, Thunder Hole, Mount Desert Island, 1859. Pencil and grey wash on paper, 15 1/8 x 21 9/16 in. Private collection.”

This description presumes to assign an accurate title — Thunder Hole, Mount Desert Island — to the work. Yet, in an ostensibly scholarly context, the reader finds no information supporting the title given to this object — none of the information that, nowadays, even commercial auction houses provide when inventorying and cataloging a drawing of this caliber. Such data include:

Whether the piece is inscribed with a title, and if so, where (in this case, no inscription is visible to the reader in the reproduction of the drawing on p. 112);

What medium was used in making the inscription (pencil, ink, other);

Whether the inscription appears to have been made contemporaneously with the drawing’s completion, or whether there is something to establish or suggest that the inscription was added years later; and

Whether the inscription is by the hand of the artist, or by another hand, and if the latter, whether that person was someone knowledgable about the artist’s work (e.g., spouse or other family member, executor, knowledgable collector or scholar).

Information of this kind is essential to provide a base for subsequent scholarship.

Attention to these fine points is not an exercise in minutiae. It is a discipline that helps to avoid factual error.

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I have retitled my William Hart painting, Pulpit Rock, Nahant, ca. 1859.

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“The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard”

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

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A Special Publication of the Library of America, this is a generous volume. It contains a three-page preface by the book’s editor Ron Padgett (a poet whose friendship with the author dates back to their high school days in Tulsa, Oklahoma); a ten-page Introduction by novelist Paul Auster; followed by over 500 pages of writings interspersed with the author’s own drawings and cartoons. Rounding out the book are pages of helpful editorial content: a Chronology; a Note on the Texts; and a Glossary of Names. The names belong to fellow artists, writers, dancers, musicians and associates mentioned by the shy-but-gregarious, serious-but-gossipy, frivolous-but-solemn, Joe Brainard.

The volume leads off with I REMEMBER, the autobiographical book Edmund White once labelled “a completely original book” and Paul Auster calls “a modest little gem.” There is an undeniable charm and relentless spell to it. Baby Boomer readers especially will be nodding their heads non-stop in recognition:

“I remember putting on sun tan oil and having the sun go away.”

“I remember catching lightning bugs and putting them in a jar with holes in the lid and then letting them out the next day”

“I remember Christmas cards coming from people my parents forgot to send Christmas cards to.”

“I remember red rubber coin purses that opened like a pair of lips, with a squeeze.”

“I remember wax paper.”

Over the years the simple template of I REMEMBER has influenced thousands of students in American creative writing classes, jump-starting imagination. Foreign writers too have followed its trail. One is Édouard Levé, whose Autoportrait is a pour of thousands of self-contained, self-referential declarative sentences — chips off the Brainard block.

And yet I REMEMBER fills only the first quarter (pages 3-134) of this Collected Writings volume. The bulk of the book falls into the category of Miscellany. To get a sense of the scope of these nearly 100 pieces, see the book’s Table of Contents on the Library of America site, here. Truth to tell, these pieces, which cover the hunt for love to the hunt for cigarettes and everything in between, include many misses among the hits. Take for example the illustrated piece on page 391 entitled “Matches.” It reads in its entirety: “If I strike say 60 matches a day (and I do) in a year’s time that would be — let me see — that would be — I hate math.” But the prevailing tone is a winning youthful energy, casual, humorous, miniaturistic. In his 1971 “Bolinas Journal” (reprinted at pages 285-333), he revealed his credo as simply “trying to be honest.”

Without doubt this book will appeal to Brainard “completists” — readers so taken by the delights of “I Remember” that from this intimately personal raconteur, from this easy sharer of confidences, they demand to hear more, more, and more.

The critic Michael Dirda recently observed that while THE COLLECTED WRITINGS “may not be a fully canonical Library of America title,” it is still “a superbly engaging bedside book.”  I agree. After the opening section devoted to the minimalist yet somehow magisterial “I Remember,” this becomes a book to be dipped into at leisure.

A note to readers who care about books as objects, especially the matter of their binding: Unlike volumes in the main Library of America series which are Smyth sewn (allowing you to open the book wide and bend back the covers without “breaking” or otherwise harming the binding), THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD is a “Special Publication” that features a different design and production. The trim size is larger (good), but notch binding is used here, a disappointment as it renders the book less elegant than regular LOA volumes.

I see I’ve used a lot of numbers in this review. A final one is 52. That is the age of this still-young author at the time of his death in 1994. The coldness of numbers masks the warm effect of THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD. In its pages you meet a big-hearted guy.

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[A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.]

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04-07-2012: This morning I came across an adoring review by Alberto Mobilio in the April/May 2012 online issue of Bookforum, here. Mobilio argues, convincingly, that “I Remember” is best read as an incantatory poem, one that epitomizes “that peculiarly American aspiration to self-mythologize in the face of an otherwise relentlessly quotidian world.”

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“Spring and All” by William Carlos Williams

Friday, November 25th, 2011

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Spring and All was first published in France in 1923 in an edition of 300 copies. Years later Wallace reflected on the book’s nonchalant, playful debut:”‘Nobody ever saw it — it had no circulation at all — but I had a bit of fun with it … Chapter headings are printed upside down on purpose, the chapters are numbered all out of order, sometimes with Roman numerals, sometimes with Arabic, anything that came in handy” (I Wanted to Write a Poem, pp. 36-37).

If you covet a one of those first edition copies, in fine condition, be prepared to shell out a thousand dollars or more.

The book’s contents have reappeared in subsequent Williams compendiums, but for those of you with a book collector’s sensibility, and for poetry readers who seek transport back to an earlier cultural era via the objects of that era (test: were you wide-eyed drinking in the set designs in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”?), this facsimile edition is the next best thing to holding the original.

In the decades since its original publication there’s been no shortage of sophisticated critical analysis of the meaning and significance of SPRING AND ALL. My amateur thoughts include a belief that the book’s once unorthodox mixture of prose and poetry sections has less power to bother readers of today. In the prose sections I grew to appreciate the gaps, the churn, the elisions, the introduction and abandonment of thoughts: we are witnessing a mind doing its work. When Williams delivers fully formed thoughts his breathing is apparent: I heard not the nervous, arhythmic and shallow breaths of today but the inhalations and exhalations of an earlier America, deep and full and sufficient to the ideas whose communication they carry.

I happen to like his use of commas.

There are stretches that have a dated feel (remember, the freshest cataclysm infecting Williams’ world view was The Great War) and some of his affections are now obscure (how many know who Dora Marsden was; or Alfred Kreymborg, whose writing Williams declares “still has value and will tomorrow have more”?). But hail the author’s ready audacity, as when he draws a broad conclusion about modern art trends by looking at a reproduction of a single painting by Juan Gris — and that reproduction not in color but in black and white! Especially in its epigrammatic statements on art and life, there is an affinity between Spring and All and Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit.

You reach page 74, Chapter XXII. You pause. It’s as if you’ve been meandering down a museum’s long corridor of displays of things interesting and things not so interesting and then you’re directed into an intimate side-room and brought face to face with a solitary object that hits you, your eye, your mind, with unexpected force: a sixteen-word poem about a red wheel barrow whose haiku economy proceeds to gestate in your presence.

To speak of the book itself, as physical object: it is sure to please. More meaty than the proverbial slim volume of poetry (it’s over 100 pages), this facsimile is finely constructed with clearly printed text on cream paper, wrapped in powder blue-gray covers that have a mysterious, sensuous, suede-like feel.

Williams writes: “The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.”

Let this better work be your pleasure.

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A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.

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“Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

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Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” is a well-wrought story of an American life. Its power will remind the reader of other durable works in the canon of American literature.

The book’s backwoods setting and the stoic philosophy of its characters have sympathetic ties to Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories set in the Michigan woods. It’s laconic protagonist, Robert Grainier, is an heir to the solitary fate of men found in Jack London’s man-against-nature tales. Grainier is an uneducated man, a day laborer, and it is the hard work of living that Johnson attends to most sensitively. His interest in this common man is reminiscent of Steinbeck’s attention to the kindred spirits populating his short novels of the Depression era. As well, Johnson’s prose — simple, direct, unmannered — employs an an oft-used American style.

Yet there is nothing derivative, nothing imitative, nothing second-hand or second-rate, in “Train Dreams.” This is a stand-alone classic.

Here is a mystery: While the novella recounts a man’s life, the narrative structure Johnson adopts owes nothing to the usual forms that typically command the allegiance of the reader of life stories. The book does not take the form of a journey or an adventurous quest. It follows no easy arc that might help to confer some apparent purpose. Spoken words are few. Gainier’s taciturnity is matched by a mind unreflective, or at best only quietly reflective. How, then, does “Train Dreams” draw us in so close to an embrace that we feel its emotional force?

That’s a question to keep in mind when, a few years from now, you again pull this slim volume from the shelf or fire-up your e-reader . . . and settle in for a second reading experience.

Notes:

1. There is a free audio excerpt of the first five pages (3 ½ minutes, as read by Will Patton) available online at the publisher’s website, here.

2. Among reviews in mainstream media outlets, James Wood’s high praise in The New Yorker (Sept. 5, 2011, pp. 80-81; online here [subscription required]) is worthwhile as it discusses how the book relates to Johnson’s other works. But be alert that Wood’s piece gives away much of the plot and broadcasts many of the book’s specific beauties which ought to be left as surprises. Wood writes not so much for the potential reader as for those interested in testing its themes after completing the book.

3. Many people are mentioning the captivating book cover illustration. It is a reproduction of a lithograph (produced in an edition of 250 impressions in 1942) by the American regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton. Two years later Benton reworked the image as a painting, reversing the direction of movement, adding color, and assigning to the new canvas the sentimental title, “Homeward Bound”:

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A hearty debate could be launched among readers as to whether the black and white image of “The Race” appropriately conveys the theme of “Train Dreams.” Does the wild horse represent the essential character of Grainier? When asked to describe the inspiration for this print, Benton said it was a “common enough scene in the days of the steam engine” to see “horses so often run with the steam trains” (but by the 1940s and the advent of diesel engines the phenomenon had ceased). I think the cover illustration fascinates us because of the horse’s devotion to a quixotic pursuit fueled by an urge to outlast the devilish machine nipping at its tail. Is it fair to say a comparable emotion and a comparable pursuit characterized Grainier’s life?

4. Some reviews mention a version of this novella appeared previously. The question arises, Did Johnson make any changes? I was able to compare the text of the just-released book to the text found in the Summer 2002 edition of The Paris Review, at pages 250-312, where the story made its first appearance. The two versions track exactly, paragraph for paragraph. The only edits I spotted are insignificant: in Chapter 2, the original measurements “one-hundred-twelve-foot” and “sixty-foot-deep” have been replaced with their numerical equivalents, “112-foot” and “60-foot-deep”; and, also in Chapter 2, an originally all-caps statement, RIGHT REVEREND RISING ROCKIES!, has been replaced with its lower case equivalent, right reverend rising rockies!

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Rilke on Rodin

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

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Here is a volume smartly conceived by its small press publisher, Archipelago Books. The book is nearly square in size to accommodate long-lined text printed on quality paper. It is sturdily bound in a partial cloth binding. This has the look and feel of a gift book, and one with the surprise of sophisticated content. If the editor’s plan was to see what happens when you assemble in one package the work of three powerful communicators — a living master essayist on matters literary, a titanic sculptor who ushered in new forms, and a poet striving to understand and explicate the invisible — that plan succeeds in sparking insights.

The book opens with an Introduction by William Gass, a long-time Rilke maven and an unsparing arbiter of things cultural. Gass stylishly fulfills his setting-the-stage duty. Using multiple perspectives (historical, aesthetic, biographical, psychological) he helps the reader understand why the young poet developed an awed appreciation for Rodin (the man and his work). We learn how Rilke absorbed the sculptor’s personal and aesthetic credo (“il faut travailler, rien de travailler”) with lasting effect on his mature poetic output.

All that Rilke learned from Rodin he expressed to the world in two significant pieces which make up the bulk of this book: an essay written at the very start of his personal association with the elder artist in 1902; and a public lecture written at the end of their relationship in 1907. Daniel Slager provides fine new translations from the German of both of these texts. Also found tucked within the pages of this book are four groups of eight glossy color photographs by Michael Eastman: a total of 32 close-up images of major pieces by Rodin that Rilke (and Gass) discuss.

The book contains 88 pages of text; this modest nominal count is misleading since in fact the material is the equivalent of about 150 pages in a standard-sized book. As a reading experience the book feels large thanks to the breadth of Professor Gass’ encyclopedic observations, paragraph after paragraph, and thanks to the seemingly unstoppable eruption of Rilke’s insights, sentence after sentence. Rilke reconnoiters the mountain of Rodin, tossing off witticisms (“Fame is no more than the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name”), evocative imagery (on The Burgher of Calais: “The figures withdraw within themselves, curling up like burning paper”), and grand judgments (“The artist’s task consists of making a world from the smallest part of a thing”). There are extended passages, describing pieces of art and art making, in which Rilke’s prose itself achieves a mountainous beauty.

True, the pieces that make up this assemblage are available elsewhere: Rilke’s essays are available in other volumes (for example, Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose); Gass’s Introduction is reprinted in his book of essays, A Temple of Texts (American Literature Series); and there are many illustrated art books devoted to Rodin’s work. But as a package, I consider this particular book to be a fine and rewarding enterprise.

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Normalizing Reading by Women

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

In modern societies today women read, yet we should not forget that in earlier periods of those same societies this was not the case. There was a time when women were not expected to read, were not taught to read, and were in effect forbidden to read. Even today there are 30 nations where the female literacy rate is less than 50%. Cultural factors are responsible for some of this shortfall.

As with all human liberation movements, the history of the rise of female literacy is a story with many heroes and heroines. It occurs to me that among those assisting the movement have been artists who created images of women engaged in the quiet and sometimes defiant act of reading. Art has the means to do good, even if those means are hidden.

While surfing online this morning I came across a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), Jeune fille assise lisant, les cheveux sur les épaules (oil on canvas, 12 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.; 32.3 x 24.7 cm):

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As depicted by Corot, the girl has settled into a pose commonly found in portraits of readers. The pose establishes a stable, triangular composition. The sitter’s torso turns slightly and her head tilts downward. An engaged viewer of this work searches first for the person’s eyes. That search leads to the sitter’s eyelids whose expressiveness communicate a fixed regard. Our gaze follows her gaze, alighting upon her gentle hands hovering over (and ultimately touching) the object of her regard.

There is something familiar about the composition. It somehow feels natural, comforting. The activity depicted — a person caught in the act of quietly contemplating something that powerfully demands attention — seems worthwhile and worthy.

Now suppose a male of pre-modern views, one who believed a woman should not be caught reading, came face to face with Corot’s composition. I believe something subtle but quietly powerful would have happened, because the painting’s formal qualities contain an antidote with the power to subvert his views.

What hidden thing in the composition exerts this counter-pressure? What, subconsciously, softens the viewer’s opposition? What might engender feelings of acceptance? The answer, I propose, is found in the body of images cherished in the viewer’s memory, such as this:

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(Giovanni Bellini, Madonna in Admiration of the Sleeping Child )

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Thus can artists leverage the power of composition to normalize new thinking.

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“The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

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In what ways do great children’s books influence the culture? In the era of Harry Potter the main route is via commodification. In an earlier era, influence might have taken an indirect path, mediated by contemporary literature.

Take the case of Virginia Lee Burton’s  “The Little House,” a children’s book published in 1942 that received immediate (and lasting) popular and critical success. Consider the effect its text and illustrations may have had on the imaginations of Anne Tyler and Arthur Miller.

Anne Tyler’s House

I came to read “The Little House” only recently, after learning it is Anne Tyler’s “life long favorite picture book.” Tyler explained her love of the tale in an essay published in The New York Times Book Review in 1986 entitled “Why I Still Treasure ‘The Little House’.” Tyler vividly remembers her mother reading the book to her at age four. When she became a mother herself, Tyler enjoyed reading it to her two daughters. She guesses she’s given away “several dozen copies” of the book as gifts to new babies. In a more recent written interview conducted in 2004, Tyler said she has long been in awe of how Virginia Lee Burton managed to say “everything possible about change and loss and the passage of time.” Plainly this is an example of  like attracting like, for in her own 18 novels Tyler has done the same.

In her essay Tyler mentions one thing that’s always eluded her:

I have pondered for years, for decades, over the final picture of the Little House. She’s on a hill again; she’s surrounded by apple trees again–but there is no longer a pond! It’s as if the story ended, “She lived happily ever after–but not quite.” Could it have been just an oversight? A failure on the part of the author-artist to recognize the importance of a pond? Or did she intend to remind us of the grim facts? “You can go back, but never all the way back,” she may have been saying. “What is done can be undone, but never completely.”

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The Little House (note the pond to the left) before an expanding city overruns it (page 9):

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The Little House after it is moved to a new perch in the country (page 39):

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I see this final picture differently. Only the house and its immediate lawn survive because there is only so much room in God’s heaven. Yes, I interpret the story as a Christian allegory.

On the first page of “The Little House” the reader meets a father who is described as “the man who built her [the house] so well.” With an air of omniscience he predicts the house will live forever. His prophesy includes a stern and very Biblical sounding admonition: the house “shall never be sold for gold or silver.” I think we are meant to understand this as a warning against betrayal.

A second voice appears on page 32. Many years have passed. The house has been swallowed up by the city and is abandoned. We sense we are coming to the fulfillment of the story. Or call it “her-story,” as Burton, who created all the illustrations, wittily indicates below the front door mat on the cover illustration. This new voice belongs to one of the father’s offspring. In a clever bit of misdirection on Burton’s part, it is not the father’s son, but a more distant (female) descendant, “the great-great-granddaughter of the man who built the Little House so well.” She is here to fulfill a destiny, however. She will bring salvation to a soul true and pure (we are told that while the house is “broken … crooked … shabby,” it is “just as good a house as ever underneath.”).

Study the pictures on pages 31 and 33:

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Whatever the condition of its soul, surely these are images of death. Executed in tones of gray and black (see how the fading pink of the first picture expires in the final shot), the pictures include a cross made of wood planks marking the door between dead-eyed windows.

The great-great-granddaughter’s mission is to be the house’s travel guide to what she calls “just the place” — an afterlife in a revived Eden that simulates the house’s original home set in nature. The journey is depicted in a two-page spread on pages 34-35. It is a scene akin to a traffic-stopping funeral procession:

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Look closely again at the after-the-move illustration further above — the “after salvation” picture (my preferred label) that has always given Tyler pause because of the omission of a nearby pond. Notice how Burton re-conceives the house’s surroundings as a protective island of contentment. The image is gently rounded and isolated in white space, appropriate to a vision or dream. There is a free-floating — and, to my eyes, heavenly — aura to the picture. That the house is no longer earth-bound is also suggested by how the image and text are positioned on the page. Of all the illustrations in the book, those found on the final three pages — 38 and 39 (which I view as a connected spread) and 40 — are the only places where the text is allowed to appear beneath the image. The effect is telling. The image is lifted up. It rises above our focus as we read, as if to say the Little House is no longer among the creatures here below.

You may scoff at this interpretation. I suspect Anne Tyler would too. But I think we should leave open the possibility that, within her own masterful explorations of “change and loss and the passage of time,” the caution that Tyler exhibits — a sentimental reticence to stir up all that lies at the dark bottom of the river of time — may be traced back to a comfortable understanding of the world (“rescue is possible; conditions can be reversed”) she constructed when, as a child, she listened to her mother read “The Little House.”

Arthur Miller’s House

Let me turn from armchair psychologizing to pure speculation. Consider next the case of Arthur Miller, on whom the influence of “The Little House” is, as far as I know, undocumented. Will you hear me out?

In the middle section of “The Little House” Virginia Lee Burton describes and provides illustrations of the menacing encroachment of a city, bent on swallowing up a pastoral setting. What I ask is this:

Is it a coincidence that just a few years after the release and popularity of “The Little House” and at a time when Miller and his wife might well have been accumulating children’s books to read to their young daughter, the playwright chose to write stage directions for “Death of a Salesman” that share not only the dread but the specific details of Virginia Lee Burton’s vision of the city?

As a prelude before the curtain rises on “Death of a Salesman,” Miller offers the audience what an evocation in music reminiscent of the bucolic setting in initial pages of “The Little House.” He specifies: “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.”

Fast forward: the horizon has disappeared. Here is Burton’s illustration of the urban reality (page 19 of “The Little House”):

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And here is how Miller sets the scene for his tragedy:

“The curtain rises. Before us is the Salesman’s house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides.  … As more light appears we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.”

Burton’s lament  (“No one wanted to live in her and take care of her any more”) is echoed by Willy Loman: “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.”

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[A review of “The Little House” is posted on Amazon, here.]

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