I was at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday, looking at an exhibit of fairy tale illustrations and marveling at how dots of white paint can read as glittering mail. The works I was looking at—some drawings, some prints—were all designed to live in the pages of books, but the originals had a sharp, beguiling aliveness that escaped mass reproduction. I snapped pictures—writhing serpents, inky foxes, impossibly beautiful, dead-eyed maidens against shimmering water-color skies—but they don’t capture what made the images so charismatic, the presence of the ghosts of hands. Then I went upstairs and looked at Barbara Bosworth’s photographs of stars and lightning bugs, of a woman holding a soap bubble and a man holding a flashlight, a smear of brightness, many smears of brightness.
In March, I was in Ireland. I spent a year in Dublin long ago, and when I was there, I often went to the National Gallery of Art. Mostly, I went to look at a painting by Caravaggio. Though I had seen it many times, I couldn’t recall what it looked like anymore. I just held a memory of electric feeling, of awe and wonder. As I walked through the galleries again, all this time later, I wasn’t quite sure that I’d find it. But when I saw it, I knew. It was unmistakable, so much more alive than anything else in the room.
It’s a miracle, isn’t it? All these things that people make.
There is a specific narrative move I think of as W.G. Sebald’s—a nesting of one seemingly unrelated story inside another, often with a shift of who is telling the tale, thwarting readerly expectations of where a story will go, a step off the groomed path into a wilderness that might hold anything, where the meaning is not plain but muddied and tangled, fractured by life the way tree roots break up a sidewalk. Turns out, this move is not Sebaldian—it’s Stifterian. Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was an Austrian writer well-known to Sebald, who cited him as an influence, and reading this collection of electrifyingly strange short stories, most named after a type of rock or mineral formation, full of sentences eschewing the comma, that old reliable friend, I felt dazed and dazzled and pulled back toward the days when I was very small, when every story was new, before patterns had been graven into my sense of how things must go or end. These are stories of kindnesses and cruelties, of specific landscapes and storms, of listening and listeners. I loved reading this book and will read it again.
Jean Merrill, THE PUSHCART WAR. I first made Jean Merrill’s acquaintance via
a gleefully destructive elephant who learns the hard way that actions have consequences. THE ELEPHANT WHO LIKED TO SMASH SMALL CARS became one of our favorite picture books. Having a copy around was an excellent personality test for other parents—reflexive pearl-clutchers/non-kindred spirits eschewed chaotic noisy singalongs of “The Smashing Song.” I picked up THE PUSHCART WAR not realizing that it was by the one and same Jean Merrill. I was struck by the Tony Kushner blurb:
The Pushcart War had a profound impact on me; when I was a kid I devoured it several times, and I've carried it deep inside me ever since. The book gave me a point of entrance—my first, I imagine—into the world of resistance to political and economic injustice and chicanery. It made opposition, even non-violent civil disobedience, seem fun and right and necessary and heroic, and something even someone as powerless as a kid could and should undertake.
Well now! I started reading it to Hugh, not quite sure what we were getting into, and we tumbled into glory. It is such a smart, funny, and sharp book about the world that it has made almost everything I’ve read since, from novels to newspaper articles, feel drab and clumsy. Merrill conjures up a New York City of both the future and past, where a nefarious cabal of truck company owners are angling to own the streets. This starts by eliminating the pushcarts—but the pushcart peddlers unite (fractiously, because that is the truth of community organizing) and fight back, sparking a counterculture with its own slang (“don’t be a truck!”), codes, and folk heroes (all hail Frank the Flower). Along the way, Merrill pulls in the police, the media, celebrities, and the government and their various compromised and compromising relations to the situation at hand; it’s like The Wire, but with peashooters instead of guns and a sense of humor. In the way of many children’s authors, Merrill wrote oodles of books, but I am going to get my hands on
THE TOOTHPASTE MILLIONAIRE (set in East Cleveland!) and read it next.
Eric Shipton, NANDA DEVI (1936); Maurice Herzog, ANNAPURNA (1951); Lionel Terray, CONQUISTADORS OF THE USELESS (1963); John Evans, NANDA DEVI: 1976 INDIAN-AMERICAN CLIMBING EXPEDITION JOURNAL OF JOHN EVANS (1976); Kurt Diemberger, THE ENDLESS KNOT: K2, MOUNTAIN OF DREAMS AND DESTINY (1991). When I feel a specific degree of overwhelm (presently, due to a combination of current events/big stress + making three magazines at the same time/small stress), I cope by reading books about people doing perilous things for no good reason: venturing to polar regions, sailing alone for long distances, crossing deserts, climbing mountains. The last time I dove this hard into the world of mountaineering literature, I had a baby—for me, contemplating the difficulties of climbing a mountain and getting back down with its endless permutations of murky motivations, self delusion, choice, preparation, chance, weather, skill, improvisations, and pure luck, offered more illumination about parenthood than any number of parenting books.
Some of these books are more fun to read than others—Eric Shipton’s account of reaching Nanda Devi was wonderful, notable especially for the deep respect and admiration he had for his Sherpa climbing companions—the legendary
Ang Tharkay (he reappears as the lead guide in ANNAPURNA), Pasang, and Kusang—and his aliveness to landscape. (For another extraordinary account of trekking in the Himalayas, read Jamaica Kincaid’s AMONG FLOWERS: A WALK IN THE HIMALAYA.) Herzog’s ANNAPURNA is a canonical mountaineering book about the 1950 French expedition to climb an 8,000-meter peak and absolutely wild; two-thirds of the book is about the difficulty of locating the giant mountain, and the last third is a harrowing and unnervingly cheerful account of the costs of summiting it (many, many, MANY fingers and toes). It’s littered with mildly shocking midcentury details like pills popped and trash tossed at the very summit of the mountain. Lionel Terray was a key member of the Annapurna expedition and instrumental in getting people high on the mountain down alive. His memoir, CONQUISTADORS OF THE USELESS (the best title of any adventuring memoir ever), recounts his many, many feats of climbing. Both books are an absolute hoot in that the pictures included make it plain just how much the text accounts, detailed as they are, fail to capture the actual peril of these feats. (As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about words, I find it grimly satisfying to encounter the limit of what words can do.)
The Evans and Diemberger books both deal with disasters. Evans was part of the troubled 1976 American expedition to Nanda Devi, where the climber Nanda Devi Unsoeld died (her father,
Willi Unsoeld, named her after the mountain, and was on the expedition, too). Evans’ diary is a laconic, dude-bro document of going a very long way right after his wife had a baby to do not very much; death is relegated to a postscript. The death of Julie Tullis, Deimberger’s climbing and film-making partner, haunts his book. She died in the
K2 tragedy of 1986. It’s weirdly gripping to watch him grapple on the page with an impossible task: justifying questionable choices made for questionable reasons.
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Currently reading: INTO THE SILENCE: THE GREAT WAR, MALLORY, AND THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST by Wade Davis (reread);
STUFF: INSTEAD OF A MEMOIR by Lucy Lippard.
Bookmarked: HEADSTRAP: LEGENDS AND LORE OF THE CLIMBING SHERPAS OF DARJEELING;
SHERPA: THE MEMOIR OF ANG THARKAY;
IMAGINARY PEAKS: THE REISENSTEIN HOAX AND OTHER MOUNTAIN DREAMS;
THE LIFE OF TU FU;
FIELD GUIDE TO THE PATCHY ANTHROPOCENE.
Elsewhere:
A rock collection.
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Images:
Robert Frank, "Untitled (Mary and Children with Sparklers on the Beach, Provincetown), "ca. 1958.
Cabinet card of Julia Marlowe’s hand, via Anonymous Works.
Ronni Solbert’s illustration of Frank the Flower and his peashooter, from THE PUSHCART WAR.
Mountaineers from the 1961 Indian Expedition to Nanda Devi looking at the mountain from a snow camp on Devistan I. From the Suman Dubey collection, via
Alpinist.
