JIM HARRISON: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Jim Harrison is up at the Guardian online, you can link to it here. It is pretty much as I wrote it (though a couple of literals have snuck in) which surprised me slightly as it was a bit longer than requested, but after trimming I didn't think I could lose any more.

I was fascinated by the whole Hemingway thing, perhaps because by some fine synchronicity, I'm reading Paul Hendrickson's wonderful Hemingway's Boat right now. I was struck by how closely Harrison echoed Gertrude Stein, but there is a further comparison that struck me this afternoon, too late to include: Hemingway had more discipline than Harrison, perhaps more restraint. I think it's telling Harrison may have, if anything, lived the more indulgent life, but remained married all his life. There's probably a good story to be written about all the shenanigans that went on around The Missouri Breaks and 92 In The Shade (Tom McGuane's novel which he directed himself).

Of course I don't believe Harrison is the writer Hemingway was. In fact one of the first comments on the Guardian's web site was someone saying they liked Harrison the man more than Harrison the writer, and I tend to agree. He is a tremendous interview--dropping in quotation of and reference to all sorts of writers and obviously completely enraptured with the art. He may have come off as raw, but he was definitely cooked. I probably should have mentioned he was, for a time, the poetry editor of The Nation; for a guy who, when asked by an interviewer for the (very New York) Paris Review if it was a problem to be a 'Michigan writer,' replied that 'the Upper East Side of New York was constitutionally the most provincial place I’d ever been,' that seemed a pretty neat trick.

I hadn't read Harrison in a while, but I pulled a copy of Letters For Yesenin out of a box and really felt the energy and despair in the poems. I suspect he wrote himself out of that.  He was a creature of his indulgence; just track his pictures in reverse. It was some life. And you can also take his food indulgence seriously: I still use his recipe for making meatballs and spaghetti sauce, and it's damn good. Needs a powerful lot of wine to go with it too. RIP Jim Harrison.

KEVIN JACKSON'S CONSTELLATION OF GENIUS

My favourite book of 2015 was Kevin Jackson's Constellation Of Genius, which was published in 2012 but being me I only caught up to it this summer. It's subtitled 1922: Modernism And All That Jazz and it is basically a diary of a year which Jackson says was the start of a new age. Or rather, Ezra Pound said it, calling it year one 'post scriptum Ulixi' or after the writing of Ulysses. Of course, Pound's new epoch soon was subsumed in his enthusiasm for Mussolini, but that's a different constellation. In his introduction Jackson acknowledges that what we think of as modernism actually arises over a period of time that begins nearly two decades earlier, but his view is predominantly literary, and predominantly Anglo-centric, and 1922 therefore makes sense, bracketed as it were by James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. 1922 was also the year William Carlos Williams published Spring And All, revolutionary in its own way, but it passes without notice here.  

But the book is not designed as an argument; it is an unfolding of a year presented as an outflowing of ideas, and as such becomes a joy to follow. It created a dilemma for me as a reader: did I keep it handy to simply dip into bit by bit, entranced by its surprises and welcoming its invitations to make connections and consider our perceptions of art, or should I just surrender to the momentum of the calendar, and read along in a flurry of excitement? How many books do you read these days that create excitement? The same sort that reading Ulysses for the first time did, or Hemingway's In Our Time, which remains to me his finest work (along with some of the other early stories).

Not that these were being read widely in 1922. Having grown up studying them, seen them as if displayed behind perspex, we forget the nature of the world they started to overturn. That is why I said Anglo-centric, even though Joyce is Irish and Eliot and Pound are American. Here's a home-grown English modernist, Virginia Woolf, as quoted by Jackson, about Ulysses: 

“and Tom [Eliot} great Tom, thinks it on a par with War And Peace! An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood”

This puts the problems of literary modernism into a nutshell. Growing up in the Sixties, in America, my perception of Eliot was coloured by his bastard offspring, the 'New Critics', and the coded interpretations of modern reference that entailed, their clinging on to the elitism of a sort of upper-middle class experimentation. I mentioned William Carlos Williams' 1922 book going unmentioned here; Williams himself noted, when he read The Waste Land it 'set me back twenty years'.

In my upbringing, the world of Elliott and Woolf was being overturned by the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets (though Charles Olson's personal mythology needed as many footnotes as Eliot's) and a new freedom of language and, yes, raw expression. Eliot seemed a Yank who had gone 'over there' and not come back, as Frost or Hemingway or Cummings had; moreover he had adapted the protective colouration of the old world, a reversal of classic American 'going native'. Yet to those whose colouration he adopted, the raw savages were 'self-taught working men'. But it was amazing to me, when I moved to Britain in the late Seventies, to discover how important Eliot was still to the older generation of artists, how liberating his work, which I considered constricted, actually had been, and still was to them, and I revisited it through a new perspective as a result.

In light of this, Ezra Pound, whose influence wound up being far greater in America, and who is in many ways the central figure in Jackson's book, gets short shift. He was the mover and shaker in the literary world of London and Paris, but more important, and what doesn't receive notice here, is the way Pound absolutely transformed The Waste Land. His editing on it was immense and made it something it would not have been otherwise, a challenge to both language and formal constraint. The line from Eliot through the Imagists to the poets I mentioned earlier, proceeds directly through Pound, and I would argue only because of him.

But as I said, this is not a book of argument, it is one of connection. And as I followed its progress through the year, I thought of the photos of the great artistic experimenters of that era, the bohemians, the surrealists, the modernists, and how they are always posed formally, in their suits and collars, or at least neckties; how this was a world whose boundaries they were knocking down while still remaining at least on the surface tied to them. I wish Jackson might have included more about actual jazz, though I'm not convinced 1922 is a crucial year. I reviewed once, for the Spectator, Philip Larkin's writings on jazz; it occurred to me that his adulation of the early twenties and Louis Armstrong, and his ultimate disdain for almost everything that followed, was a form of fetishism for the liberating sense that music brought him in his youth, a freedom from the strictures of his upbringing.

And that was what I kept coming back to, how revealing this book is about the world that was being changed or at least challenged by modernism. Again, I call on Woolf, commenting on the death of Kitty Maxse, thought of as the model for Mrs. Dalloway, who fell down a flight of stairs. 'Still it seems a pity Kitty did kill herself: but of course she was an awful snob'. Ms. Pot does not seem very modernist at all. I may have connected with Constellation Of Genius because it took me back, as much to the England which I encountered in 1977 as it did to 1922, an England that was in many ways far closer to the world 50 years earlier than it is to a world only 40 years later. The book sits by my bedside still, and I still dip into it. The best of both worlds. Again, how many books rate such a position?

Constellation Of Genius by Kevin Jackson

Windmill Books, £9.99, ISBN 9780099559023

A PAINTER OF DISTANCES, A POET OF MOVIES AND DINERS

Today I saw a post reminding us that we celebrate the birthdays of Edward Hopper and Raymond Chandler on successive days this week, and a brief essay of his which begins with a very apt comparison of Chandler's 'Red Wind' with Hopper's 'Nighthawks'. Check out Agnieszka Holland's version of the former, with Danny Glover and music by Jan Garbarek, from the Showtime series Fallen Angels, if you doubt it. Anyway, it reminded me of an essay I wrote, reviewing two books about Hopper, probably in late 1997 or early 1998, and which was published with very English indecent haste and minuscule payment, in London Magazine halfway through 1999. Which is 15 years ago, but it sprang to mind immediately when I read that post. So here it is... 

A POET OF MOVIES AND DINERS

One scene from Wim Wenders’ recent film The End Of Violence meticulously recreates Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”. Since much of Wenders’ violent vision of Los Angeles is filtered through the peeping electronic eyes of a network of surveillance cameras, this ought to evoke the Hopperesque sense of our being intruders when we enter into a painted scene. Instead, Wenders’ appropriation of “Nighthawks” rings hollow, a conceit reflecting Hollywood’s love of both Hopper and classic film-noir, but confusing and conflating the two, as if the violence and powerlessness of that film genre were somehow Hopper’s too.

 

We know that Hopper and his wife Josephine were inveterate movie-goers. We know from Deborah Lyons’ research that Hopper began “Nighthawks” the day after seeing Burt Lancaster in Robert Siodmak's film of Hemingway’s The Killers. But knowing that is not, in itself, enough to transform Hopper into Norman Rockwell’s evil twin.

 

The editors of Edward Hopper And The American Imagination have made the same false connection. These stories, poems, and essays were either written with Hopper in mind or supposedly reflect the spirit of his work. Most, ranging from a 1940 story by Norman Mailer to an excerpt from Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, deal with bums, hobos, and stiffs, and have at least an undercurrent of overt violence. Grace Paley’s Italian cop shoots his adulterous wife, his kitchen and himself. Walter Mosley’s black youngster kills his retarded playmate. This is about as close to Hopper as the kitsch poster, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, which pre-empted Wenders and this book by inserting Elvis, Marilyn, Bogart, and James Dean into “Nighthawks”.

 

It's as if Hammett or Hemingway were filtered through the grist mill of 40s movies and 50s pulp novels, melodramatic in a way Hopper simply is not. Only James Salter’s story “Dusk” comes close, in its uncomfortable, awkward intimacy between two people still alone, and its imagery of light and shadow, to a Hopper scene. No story rings as false, however, as Tess Gallagher’s “From Moss Light” an embarrassingly self-absorbed poem, inevitably recalling Raymond Carver. Lines as arch as “a woman fond of wearing hats opined, 'chic chapeau!'” hardly relate to Hopper, much less illuminate him. Hopper and the American Imagination?

John Hollander’s poem, suggesting Hopper as abstract painter, throws some light on reality, and the non-fiction is far more telling than the fiction. Gail Levin’s essay on contemporary artists influenced by Hopper makes a similar, well-drawn comparison with Richard Diebenkorn, who has learned framing from the way Hopper uses architecture, both inside and out. Leonard Michaels’ essay on “New York Movie” compares Hopper to Wallace Stevens’ “plain sense of things”. A more interesting match might be Charles Ives. Both men have 20^th century minds trapped in 19^th century souls, and Hopper often seems to play awkwardly with the shapes of the visibly modern world. Though neither Ives nor Stevens was a full time artist.

There's another difference: Ives drew inspiration from his wife, Harmony, while Ed and Jo apparently waged lifelong battle. Yet it is to Jo that we owe the ledgers which are reproduced in Edward Hopper: A Journal Of His Work. Hopper provides a proportional sketch of each painting, and lists, in his sparse handwriting, the materials used. Beneath, in her flowery, expressive hand, Jo describes each painting, and its disposition. Her descriptions belie the melodrama some read into his work. Jo may reserve some bitchy vitriol for Ed’s female figures, or the way they dress, but the paintings ARE the stories. 

One of the things that attracts us to Hopper is the way his paintings leave themselves open to our imaginations. This is inevitable, given how his art insists on each object, including people, establishing its own space. He is a painter of distances: we look into scenes from odd angles, then discover light coming from two directions at once. Light does more than create mood; Hopper manipulates it to establish the relation between all the objects he paints. The two-dimensional sketches in the Journal make this obvious. This is why he has inspired generations of movie art directors and cameramen. But compare the figures in “Nighthawks” with the faces inside the diner in The Killers and you’ll see why the “mean streets” approach to Hopper is a dead end.

 

It is also why Hopper’s people stand alone, each the start of a lonely crowd. The 1981 film Heartbeat used Hopper's vision to give Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady a backdrop for their now-iconic search for America. The essential emptiness of the wide-open highway and the loneliness of the places it leads to is more Hopperesque than anything in Edward Hopper And The American Imagination is able to suggest. Thankfully the Journal is here to remind us of that.

 

 

EDWARD HOPPER AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION

edited by Deborah Lyons and Adam Weinberg

Norton/Whitney Museum, 253pp, £18.95 (paper)

EDWARD HOPPER: A JOURNAL OF HIS WORK

edited by Deborah Lyons and Brian O’Doherty

Norton/Whitney Museum 104pp facsimile edition, £17.95