Tag: essays

Julia Thurman: Crafting Worlds with Words

The writers I admire most never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable —Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman.

There exist those books we scarce can put down, riveting us with suspense, prose eloquence, and resonance of human experience.

Others, we struggle with, bored or chagrined by their non-relevance or absurdities. The usual counsel is to jettison them quickly.

Had I done so with Julia Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman, a book largely focused on fashion couture, playground of wealthy indulgence, I’d have lost out immensely.

Collectively, Thurman’s adroitly articulated 39 essays, gathered mostly from fifty years of writing for The New Yorker, transcend her primary fashion genre, yielding portraitures mostly of heroic women finding autonomy in a patriarchal milieu, leading to my admiration for Thurman, awe at her salient intelligence, fine-tuned to meticulous observation and set-apart brilliance in prose mastery.

As Henry Finder, one of her editors at The New Yorker observes, “She’s not happy with a paragraph until it sings.”

Thurman’s acumen is indisputable, having achieved numerous awards that include a National Book Award for Non-fiction for her biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Writer (1983), inspiring the hit movie, Out of Africa.

Her Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999), earned a finalist National Award for Nonfiction.

She is a recipient of the Ordre des Artes et Lettres by the French government for her contributions to French literature.

A Left-Handed Woman has won PEN’s award for essay excellence .

Nothing surprises me about Thurman. Is there anything she misses in her myriad subject matter teeming with wide-ranging vignettes on not only fashion designers such as Sara Berman, Isabel Toledo, Elsa Schiaparelli , Miuccia Prada Guo Pei and Ann Lowe, but disparate entities like Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Elena Ferrante, Lee Miller, Eva Zeisel, Amelia Earhart, Isa Genzken, Greta Stern, Alison Bechdel, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder, Rachel Cusk, Yasmina Reza, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, and even Helen Gurley Brown and Cleopatra, among still others, their successes and, yes, the not infrequent intrusions of fate cascading fame and fortune to their doom.

While men do appear in her essays, they’re a distinct minority, sometimes perversely objectifying women as ancillaries of male prerogative:

Conversely, she writes of women, “I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message they were not right.”

My favorite essays come toward the book’s close, featuring Simone de Beauvoir and in a surprising thematic shift, Thurman’s memoir of cave exploration, torch in hand, accompanying renowned French anthropologists at ancient Dordogne cave painting sites, Chauvet and Niaux.

I believe Thurman is right in crediting de Beauvoir with the genesis of the modern feminist movement with her seminal The Second Sex. As for her revels exploring caves and pedaling across French landscape, it’s truly a tour de force.

One last thing: Thurman is a self-taught fluent speaker of two languages beyond her native English that include French and Italian, highly engaged as she is in French and Italian literary and artistic culture.

She also achieved reading fluency in Danish as prerequisite to her research on Isak Dinesen.

Favorite passages:

“What we bring with us—embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it—is the mystery of how we become who we are.”

“There’s a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and it’s often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion you’ve buried.”

“The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women’s lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive.”

“Most of the time, a piece of prose lies on the page bristling with cleverness, yet inert, until I hit upon the precise sequence of words—the spell, if you like—that brings it to life. At that moment, language recovers its archaic power to free a trapped spirit.”

“She could love and desire intensely, but rarely at the same moment, and she could think and feel deeply, but not often in the same sentence.”

—rjoly

E.B. White: Beauty in Complexity

I finished reading E.B. White Essays moments ago. Since the essay genre happens to be my favorite indulgence, I found White fascinating, the great master, and among the finest American essayists of the last century that includes the likes of Didion, Dillard, Wallace, Baldwin and Sontag.

White wrote several thousand essays, 1800 of them for the New Yorker. I have liked his modesty, his unaffected style, keen powers of observation, evocative musings, and love of nature.

He adored Thoreau’s Walden, my favorite American classic. Like Thoreau, White questioned some of the assumptions of his fellows, that technology assured happiness and that man could improve upon nature.

How can I not admire this good man who found beauty in life’s complexity and changing moods?

I must say a chill went up my spine when I read “Here is New York,” written in a steamy 1948 summer and, for many critics, the finest tribute ever rendered to Gotham. White was deeply troubled by the advent of the atom and hydrogen bombs, fearing their exponential future consequences. America had escaped WWII’s destruction, but danger stalked its future, with New York vulnerable as a primary target:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers….

I can’t say I’ve ever encountered anything more prescient than this foreboding passage written 52 years before 9/11.  

But this is partially witness to why White is worth your time, observant, asking the hard questions, sifting out the implications.

Unfortunately, if you google “greatest 20th century American essayists,” he gets omitted.  This is perhaps due to his three best selling children’s books, including Charlotte’s Web, resulting in his essay prowess being overshadowed.

Those of us who did English composition in our freshman year of college are more apt to associate him with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, one of the most effective writing guides ever published. White had studied at Cornell under Dr. William Strunk, Jr.  who had originally published it in 1920.  White revised it in 1959, adding to it substantially.  A no nonsense guide, it called for concise prose, accurate grammar, unified paragraphs, concrete description, and avoidance of the passive voice.

White carried out its precepts and is famed as a writer of the unembellished  style, direct, easy to follow, yet sophisticated in its declarative sentence structure and keen observations with their implications.  You’ll not find many subordinated clauses or inverted sentences.  No semicolons or dashes.  No arcane vocabulary.

Of the 31 essays in this collection, chosen by White for inclusion, my favorite is “Back to the Lake,” moving in its reminiscence as he takes his eleven year old son back to the Maine lake of his childhood, an essay critic Joseph Epstein remarks “shimmers like a perfect poem; everything in it clicks” in its theme of birth, rebirth, and death:

When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

Though critics often refer to White’s humor, there looms a stubborn apocalyptic streak in his writing as in “Here is New York.” Or take this passage:

I think when the end of the world comes the sky will be its old blue self, with white cumulus clouds drifting along. You will be looking out of a window, say, at a tree; and then after a bit the tree won’t be there any more, and the looking won’t be there any more, only the window will be there, in memory—the thing through which the looking has been done. I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing that the world is done for, reach down and pick it up and put it on His compost pile. It ought to make a fine ferment.

White struggled with general anxiety, beginning in his childhood. There were so many fears that plagued him, especially about his health. He was afraid of meeting people and of giving speeches. He didn’t show when being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He avoided parties and weddings.  

White would ultimately be honored with virtually every literary prize, including a Pulitzer, yet remained a shy, unassuming man, modest in his wants, relishing farm life in Maine.

Some readers may find White too dry or intellectual for their taste and some of his essays dated or discursive. White was never fated to win the Nobel, but he always made sense in half the space, which would have made Strunk smile. White excels when he foregoes political commentary, taking up instead depictions of everyday life:

I like the cold. I like the snow. I like the descent to the dark, cold kitchen at six in the morning, to put a fire in the wood stove…. I steal down in my wrapper carrying a pair of corduroy pants…and fill the kettle with fresh spring water…with a poker I clear the grate in the big black Home Crawford 8-20, roll up two sheets of yesterday’s Bangor Daily News, and lay them in the firebox along with a few sticks of cedar kindling and two sticks of stovewood on top of that” (“The Winter of the Great Snows”).

I have loved keeping company with White these last several days, his honesty, clarity, remonstrances, love for animals and nature uplifting. So many passages, wise and luxurious in sentiment like this one from “Letter from the East”:

With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality, with its private pools of energy (the woodpile, the black stove, the germ in the seed, the chick in the egg), and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world.

White passed from us at his beloved North Brooklin home in Maine on October 1, 1985.  He was 86.

His legacy, like that of Thoreau, will endure, for talent always makes room for itself.

—rj

 





A Poet Reminisces: Essays After Eighty

ows_141652973541643I have always liked poetry and poets, in particular, because of their sensitivity to human experience.

One poet I like a lot is Donald Hall, a giant among contemporary American poets, although he’s given up the craft, or as he puts it, since “poetry abandoned him.”

Hall is now 85.

Let me assure you, while the tropes may not come as easily as before, his acuity remains vibrant in his newest book, Essays After Eighty, a slim volume of 120 pages, yet filled with reminiscence, keen observation, and sober wisdom.

I first got introduced to Hall by way of his textbook, Writing Well, which I used for a number of years in teaching college composition. The book lived up to its title, emphasizing sentence clarity and how to achieve it, with eloquence added in.

Hall has always been a diligent stylist, whether writing poetry or prose. He confesses that he’s written some individual essay drafts for Essays After Eighty upwards of eighty times to get things said right.

I used to tell my students that the name of the game in all good writing lay in revision, pointing out that scholars have come upon nearly fifty drafts of Yeat’s famed “Second Coming” poem.

I like how Hall says it: “The greatest pleasure in writing is rewriting. My early drafts are always wretched.”

I’ve always held that a good style is etched by its economy, the right words sufficing for empty fillers drowning readers in verbosity; a pleasing rhythm like waves, in and out, upon a sea shore.

Good prose, like poetry, runs lean.

And Hall is the great master.

Let me give you a sampling of Hall’s trademark writing acumen, simple, yet keen with observation, each detail chosen well, verbs especially, accumulating into a verbal, painting, reflecting the ethos of a skilled artisan:

In spring, when the feeder is down, stowed away in the toolshed until October, I watch the fat robins come back, bluejays that harass them, warblers, red-winged blackbirds, thrushes, orioles. Mourning doves crouch in the grass, nibbling seeds. A robin returns each year to refurbish her nest after the wintry ravage. She adds new straw, twigs and lint. Soon enough she lays eggs, sets on them with short excursions for food, then tends to three or four small beaks that open for her scavenging. Before long, the infants stand, spread and clench their wings, peer at their surroundings, and fly away. I cherish them….

Reminiscence weighs heavily upon these essays, not surprising for a writer in his mid-eighties. the ghosts, as it were, looming out of the past–grandparents, Mom and Dad, aunts and uncles, friends;  wife Jane Kenyon, the love of his life and fellow poet, succumbing unexpectedly to cancer at age 47.

Even the northern New Hampshire topography has yielded to change, farms giving way to rebirth of forest as the new generation migrates to the prosperous cities of southern New Hampshire.

As I read this moving collection of personal reflections on sundry topics, I made sure to highlight a number of striking passages, and some of them I’ll share with you.

On writing:

As I work on clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little to do with import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey.

If the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

Nine-tenths of the poets who win prizes and praises, who are applauded the most, who are treated everywhere like emperors–or like statues of emperors–will go unread in thirty years.

I count it an honor that in 1975 I gave up lifetime tenure, medical expenses, and a pension in exchange for forty joyous years of freelance writing.

I expect my immortality to expire five minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game. One poet revives; another gets deader.

On aging:

When I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did.

In the past I was advised to live in the moment. Now what else can I do.?

On leisure:

Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.

On mortality:

It is sensible of me to realize that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away.

At some time in my seventies, death stopped being interesting. I no longer checked out ages in obituaries.

These days most old people die in profit-making dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don’t want to forgo the routine of their lives.

Essays After Eighty has been a wonderful read for me with its acerbic wit, cogent wisdom, delivered in a simple, yet elegant, style, proving again that the best art conceals itself.

And yet there’s a melancholy that haunts these excursions into reminiscence, a sense that the best is over and, now, there’s just the waiting. As Hall confesses, “My problem isn’t death, but old age.”

Hall, of course, is addressing physical decline with its imposed limitations and dreaded dependency; but surely his words resonate still more–the sense of ephemerality that mocks our labors and brings to an end all that we love most dearly.

For Hall, “There are no happy endings, because if things are happy, they have not ended.”

Still, this work, perhaps his last, formulates a testimony to a life lived well.

And, very rarely, do you find such honest telling.

–rj