Tag: takes

I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy.

Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their customary J. Crew-ish Presidential attire—thin lapels, a sleeveless dress—the charismatic couple are outfitted in clothes that look like the loose parts of one big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban shaped like the Guggenheim; she’s got a scribbled-in Afro. Her face looks cruelly joyful while his is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is being eaten by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers from a portrait on the wall. The couple bump their knuckles together, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical real-life gesture, sparked by a Fox News host who referred to it as a “terrorist fist jab.” It’s an image tightly packed with complex meanings, to say the least.

Nearly two decades later, it can be hard to remember just how flagrantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s aide Mark Penn spent a whole TV interview testing how many times he could smoosh the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama had been born outside the United States but that he’d been educated at a Muslim “madrassa.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment about not having felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had cried, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a spurious rumor that she’d been recorded using the word.

Blitt’s cover was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this latticework of horseshit. Here’s one big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying a panoply of tropes and crude imagery, he reveals just how well he knows and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us—just as fixated on and poisoned by this stuff, whether we acknowledge it or not—that someone else is weighed down by this, too.

Once I got to the office, I found out a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. One strain of the uproar had a touch of blithe condescension: there were people out there who wouldn’t get the joke, and who would take the cover as a straightforward assertion by The New Yorker—of all the joints in the world—regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another strain, somewhat more reasonable, still rang of a prudish fear of images to which I have never been able to relate: to reproduce this imagery, for any reason at all, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to augment its dark power.

I’ll admit, I laughed in the cab. I still do when I see the cover now. I regard it as important evidence of the darker edges of a promising moment, a portrait of a nation that too often sees cartoons when confronted with flesh and blood. ♦

During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.”

Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better.” Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: “If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”

Liebling took over The Wayward Press, a column in the magazine, in which he prosecuted the sins and miscues of the Fourth Estate, which he labelled “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Although he was terribly nearsighted, out of shape, and plagued by gout (his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell once observed him using a strip of bacon as a bookmark), his vigorous coverage of D Day and the liberation of Paris led the French government to award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Untidy in his personal life, he was on his third wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, when he died, at the age of fifty-nine.

Liebling’s foremost talent was bringing memorable characters roaring to life, so it’s not surprising that he fell in love with Earl Long. The New Yorker wisely allocated three issues to Liebling’s profile of Long, titled “The Great State”; the articles were later collected in a book with a superior title, “The Earl of Louisiana.”

Like other reporters who joined in the merriment, Liebling came to Louisiana to scoff at Long. “I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula,” he confessed. But, when he watched news coverage of the legislative session, he listened closely to what the ranting governor was saying to the recalcitrant legislators. Long was attacking a law, passed around the time of Reconstruction, that allowed election registrars to disqualify voters on “educational” grounds, a measure designed to push Black people off the voter rolls. “It took me a minute or two to realize that the old ‘demagogue’ was actually making a civil-rights speech,” Liebling wrote. He began to recognize Long as something more important than another Southern political buffoon. Long was a skillful progressive politician operating in a conservative, racist environment. For all the droll humor in Liebling’s coverage, that insight is what made his report a classic.

Liebling’s articles about Long caught my eye when they were published, in the spring of 1960. They influenced my decision to attend Tulane University, in New Orleans, the city that Liebling had painted so vibrantly; they also pointed me toward journalism, and they fixed in my mind The New Yorker as my ideal professional destination. For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth. Most of them, that is. Liebling displayed a New York City chauvinism by mercilessly skewering Chicago, the “second city.” In the evening, when the commuters fled, Chicago was a “vast, anonymous pulp,” he wrote, “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

I have in my office a poster on which Liebling’s portrait is accompanied by his cautionary warning: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” ♦

“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn’s account of her journey from peppy globe-trotter to sallow lotus-eater (and back again) in nineteen-thirties Shanghai. This insouciant kickoff leaves you curious why Hahn went to China, of course, and why she was so keen on becoming an opium addict. More pressingly, it makes you wonder: Who is this lady? What else will this droll, naughty adventurer get up to?

Plenty. Along with fifty-two books, Hahn wrote more than two hundred articles for The New Yorker, over eight decades, about goings on in places as unalike as Rajasthan, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Her colleague Roger Angell described her, in an obituary from 1997, as “this magazine’s roving heroine” and “a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world.” (Angell’s mother, Katharine White, was Hahn’s editor, and when he was a twelve-year-old “boy naturalist” on East Ninety-third Street Hahn gave him a macaque. “Don’t let her bite you,” she advised. “If she does, bite her right back.”)

There was never an emergency when Hahn was at the wheel. (She was beautiful, which never hurts, and came from a well-to-do family of German Jews in St. Louis.) Her writing made great use of offhandedness. She was on her way to Congo in 1935 “to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances.” In a “Letter from Brazil” from 1960, she casually mentions that her host “woke up one morning to find his pajamas spotted with blood; he had been bitten by a vampire bat.” She roamed the world, seemingly without fetter. “It had become clear to me on the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time,” she writes in “The Big Smoke.”

Initially, she wandered Shanghai, “pausing here and there to let a rickshaw or a cart trundle by,” vaguely aware of a scent “something like burning caramel,” which announced the use of opium, the way the stench of marijuana now tells of toking up in New York. Hahn became personally acquainted with the substance at the home of a man she calls Pan Heh-ven, who was later revealed to be her paramour, the married Chinese artist and poet Zau Sinmay. Time floated away as their circle of opium smokers talked and talked about art and literature and Chinese politics. (“That I knew nothing about politics didn’t put me off in the least,” Hahn recalls.)

With no sense of alarm, Hahn descends into dependence: her eyes leak, her skin turns jaundiced, and she stops going to the “night clubs, the cocktail and dinner parties beloved of foreign residents in Shanghai.” Inevitably, she finds herself reciting the addict’s creed: “I can stop any time.” But she doesn’t wish to stop, because “behind my drooping eyes, my mind seethed with exciting thoughts.”

The problem arises when opium starts interfering with Hahn’s wayfaring: it has become a mooring. “I couldn’t stay away from my opium tray, or Heh-ven’s, without beginning to feel homesick,” she writes—an unfamiliar, unwelcome feeling. She kicks the stuff with the help of a friend, who hypnotizes her and then keeps her away from her druggie boyfriend. Hahn’s description of detoxing: “I felt very guilty about everything in the world, but it was not agony. It was supportable.”

A child is another kind of anchor, and Hahn eventually had two of them, with the British officer Charles Boxer, who remained in Japanese internment in occupied Hong Kong when Hahn fled the island, in 1943. Motherhood seems not to have slowed her down much. After she returned to the United States with her two-year-old daughter—who spoke only Cantonese—Hahn discussed childhood anxiety with her pediatrician, a young doctor named Benjamin Spock. He asked if her daughter was ever happy. “When we go to Chinese restaurants,” Hahn replied, “where the waiters gather around to watch her eat with chopsticks. They talk to her, and she talks to them. Oh, she’s fine in Chinese restaurants.” Spock suggested that the girl might be reflecting the mother’s mood. Hahn dismissed him: “I’m perfectly all right. I’m just waiting for the war to finish, that’s all. Her father’s in prison camp.” ♦

As girls, we may find it difficult to picture our mothers—especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers—as anything other than the poised ladies they’re so determined to mold us into. We struggle to imagine that they were ever little girls themselves, flying kites, climbing trees, playing hopscotch and marbles with their siblings. As mothers, some of us are so fearful for our daughters that we issue long lists of instructions that we hope will shield them from a hostile and menacing world. For mothers of Black girls, warnings about promiscuity are at the top of the list, to keep them from being considered “fast” and hypersexualized.

These tensions are brilliantly captured in Jamaica Kincaid’s breathless, single-sentence short story “Girl,” first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was Kincaid’s first piece of fiction in the magazine, to which she already regularly contributed nonfiction, including many unsigned Talk of the Town pieces. In tight-knit communities like the one in Antigua where Kincaid—and, we assume, the mother and daughter in this story—grew up, reputation carries more weight than personal freedom, particularly for girls. The daughter, to whom a litany of instructions, or, rather, orders, are addressed, may yearn to sing benna, traditional Antiguan folk songs, in Sunday school, but she is likely better off, in her mother’s and the community’s perception, singing the traditional hymns of the Anglican Church. During my girlhood in Brooklyn, it was my father—who was a deacon in the Pentecostal church—who once told me that, of the four-hundred-plus members of the church we attended, there would always be at least one who was watching me. This was proved true when someone reported to my parents that I’d been seen eating sugarcane in the middle of Flatbush Avenue on a hot summer day. “Don’t eat fruits on the street,” the mother in “Girl” warns. “Flies will follow you.” Flies did not follow me, but someone’s gaze did, leading to a lengthy scolding from my mother.

“Girl,” as Kincaid acknowledged in a 2008 interview, is her most anthologized piece of writing. I first read it as a senior at Barnard College, not in this magazine but in an anthology of contemporary women writers. The story was taught both as a piece of “flash fiction” and, because of its refrain-like style, as a prose poem. I was not yet a mother then, and I read “Girl” as a daughter. I was grateful for the two moments in the story where the daughter speaks up to defend herself (“but I don’t sing benna on Sundays”), interruptions that allow her to be defiantly present in the way that daughters are in Kincaid’s later works, including her novels “Annie John,” “Lucy,” and “The Autobiography of My Mother.” In these books and others, the daughter never stops speaking, making one wonder what kinds of instructions, if any, she will pass on to her own children.

The mother, though, is not only trying to tame a shrew (“the slut you are so bent on becoming”); she is offering a template for survival. When I was fifteen, my mother sent me to take cooking and etiquette classes from a Haitian neighbor in our building. That same woman taught embroidery to twentysomethings who were working on their trousseaux—frilly tablecloths and bedsheets for their future homes with their husbands. When I first read “Girl,” I thought of it as a trousseau of words. The mother’s advice addresses everything from personal grooming to cleaning house and gardening to how to behave with friends and strangers and how to make medicine both for a cold and “to throw away a child.” The daughter indicates with her rebuttals that she will pick and choose what to keep and what to ignore. The mother’s parting words concern “how to make ends meet,” which is, after all, one of life’s defining challenges, and how to choose bread, a kind of nourishment that someone else still controls: “always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh.” “But what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” the daughter wonders. To the mother, this is a rejection of all that came before. “You mean to say,” she exclaims, “that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” ♦

I have very little interest in Elvis Presley’s music, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a Towering Figure in American Music. What I am abundantly interested in is resurrection, which means there are corners of the Elvis narrative that, when well illuminated, I find myself hovering over with fascination, or a kind of morbid pleasure. Ellen Willis’s 1969 review of an Elvis concert, the singer’s first in nine years, drew me right in.

There is no single thing that makes a writer like Willis great, but what makes her work compelling, and what most informs my own writing, is that Willis—The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic—was never afraid to be overtaken by unexpected delight, even if it came at the expense of some preëxisting skepticism. Those two traits—skepticism and the potential for pleasure—exist at the intersection of Las Vegas and Elvis, especially during the summer of 1969. Elvis was not yet the sweat-drenched singer laboring through the hotel residencies of the subsequent decade, sluggishly dragging himself along for the sake of a paycheck.

The Elvis whom Willis witnessed was, in fact, a man resurrected, not from the dead but from a long stretch of dissatisfaction with his own career path, which had led to film roles and soundtrack recordings and away, largely, from the stage. The previous year had marked a turnaround: there was the triumph of his comeback special, which was shot in June and aired in December. But to prove that he was fully back would require conquering Las Vegas, a place that was, at the time, “more like Hollywood than Hollywood,” Willis wrote.

There’s a striking moment in her piece, a sort of mini-twist, when you can sense Willis’s mode of observation shift from bewilderment to something that reads as genuine fascination, bordering on outright enjoyment. It happens after Elvis arrives onstage, when Willis takes him in for the first time. She’s amazed by his new, slimmer physique (“sexy, totally alert”), but also puzzled by his hair, dyed black and no longer slicked into the famous ducktail. Her confusion gives way to a sense of wonder when she realizes that, despite his efforts to look younger, he’s not interested in performing as he did in his youth. She marvels at his playfulness, becomes fixated on his earnestness; she writes, of his performance of “In the Ghetto,” that “for the first time, I saw it as representing a white Southern boy’s feeling for black music, with all that that implied.” Although Willis herself was only twenty-seven—the magazine had hired her the previous year—she appreciated his maturation. “He knew better than to try to be nineteen again,” she notes. “He had quite enough to offer at thirty-three.”

Willis’s Elvis column embodies one of her central gifts: her ability to walk you through an unfamiliar tunnel and lead you out the other side, into a bracing light, as surprised as she is that the destination looks the way it does. That this piece is not especially long causes the aforementioned twist to land even more forcefully. This is a writer saying, “We don’t have much time, and I’m not trying to change your mind, but I’m allowing you to witness how I was moved from one place to another.”

Reading Willis’s review of Elvis as he is shocked back to life reminded me that my interest in the singer goes beyond resurrection. Elvis was among the earliest of what I think of as the blank-slate pop stars, a lineage of performers, encompassing more recent figures such as Taylor Swift, who are so infused with meaning, for so many, that they become a stand-in for grand emotions and concepts whether they believe in them or not. What fuelled Elvis’s stardom was that he could contain all the projections at once, and even cultivate them. It takes a sharp critical eye to capture an artist like that, to write not about what he means but about what he is doing. That work isn’t about stripping away the romance of a performer’s appeal. On the contrary, I find it deeply romantic. Willis gave herself over to the spectacle of an Elvis who was not yet finished, an artist who remained as alive as he’d ever been. ♦

The shortest magazine pitch of Nick Paumgarten’s life actually took place in an elevator, which the writer was sharing with an elevator-phobic editor, and consisted of a single word: “Elevators!” The article that followed, in April, 2008, is titled “Up and Then Down.” It is the story of a man named Nicholas White—who was trapped in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill Building, in midtown Manhattan, for forty-one hours—and also a study of “elevatoring,” a delicious word for the discipline of designing vertical transportation.

A long piece about elevators might sound a little dry, even for a magazine that once published a forty-thousand-word article about oranges. (“What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down?” Paumgarten asks, coquettishly.) But, as Gerard Manley Hopkins nearly said, there lives the dearest freshness up down things. Paumgarten’s story is a parade not only of fascinating facts—there are, or were, fifty-eight thousand elevators in New York City; the super-fast elevators in the Taipei 101 Tower are pressurized to prevent ear damage; all door-close buttons in elevators built after the early nineteen-nineties are designed not to work—but also of indelible similes. In speeded-up CCTV footage of White stuck in the elevator car, he looks “like a bug in a box.” At thirty-two hundred feet, a hoist rope will snap “like a stream of spit in a stairwell.”

In one passage, Paumgarten notes that passengers “know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.” Ever since Paumgarten’s article came out, I have not shared an elevator without remembering the dots on a die and feeling a jolt of pleasure.

“The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war,” Paumgarten writes. (Pretty good, that.) When I first read those words, I was twenty-eight and living in London. Except for two copses of skyscrapers in which our financiers—and finances—go up and down, London remains a fairly horizontal city. It’s easy to spend a busy week there without riding in an elevator. To Paumgarten, elevators were ostensibly banal; to me, they seemed exotic.

His narrative structure, too, contains tensile strength. The reader is introduced to White’s entrapment, and then, just as White is contemplating his own death, diverted to learn about elevatoring before returning to his story, and so on. The subject matter goes up and down; the narrative breathes in and out (with just the right amount of anxiety). I am not the first or the last writer to have borrowed Paumgarten’s template.

Lurking behind the vertical fun is tragedy, which lends the piece an unexpected power. “Up and Then Down” mentions 9/11: we learn that some two hundred people were killed in elevators on that day. But, in a broader sense, the article is about the fear of being trapped up high. People who work in skyscrapers have always found it psychologically necessary to forget about the physicality of towers. September 11th reminded us, horrifically, of what a tall building is; in its playful way, “Up and Then Down” does, too. It’s striking that “Man on Wire,” the gorgeous and vertiginous documentary about Philippe Petit’s wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, was touring film festivals when Paumgarten’s piece was published.

When I’m in New York, I often feel like the pig in “Babe: Pig in the City.” I’m continually baffled by American tipping protocol; I get on an express when I need a local. Imagine my gratitude to Paumgarten, then, when I first visited The New Yorker’s current offices, at One World Trade Center. The elevators there are “destination dispatch,” which, per “Up and Then Down,” assigns “passengers to an elevator according to which floor they’re going to.” I’d never ridden a destination dispatch before. A fresh opportunity for humiliation awaited. But, thanks to Paumgarten’s sideways instruction manual, I knew what to do. ♦

The badge of maturity, for a literary genre, is the anxiety of influence—the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to pee upon a fire hydrant that an earlier eminence once peed upon with distinction. Rebecca West, an unjustly neglected deity of “novelistic” reportage, would have approved of the vulgarity of this metaphor. In the 1941 masterpiece “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” where she micturated upon the fire hydrant of Yugoslavia for eleven hundred gloriously digressive pages, a “lavatory of the old Turkish kind” inspires an extended rumination on its dark dung hole.

The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, one of West’s greatest heirs, would never have dwelled on such crude terrain. But many of Malcolm’s preoccupations were recognizable as attempts to overcome the debt that she owed her precursor. Legal conflicts—like the one at the heart of Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer”—make for a good example. West, who combined a psychoanalytic aversion to sentimentality with an anthropological curiosity, inspired a generation of writers to render courtroom proceedings as a civilized translation of a primordial rite. In 1946, her dispatch from Nuremberg began, “Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why.” Vengeance might have underwritten a given trial’s stakes, but cases themselves were to be taken in as stylized performances. West treated trial coverage as a variant of drama criticism.

West reserved her most operatic appreciation for tragedies of betrayal—“the dark travesty of legitimate hatred because it is felt for kindred, just as incest is the dark travesty of legitimate love.” A year before Nuremberg, West chronicled the prosecution, in London, of William Joyce, alias Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce was a second-tier Fascist who had defected to Berlin to serve as a radio broadcaster for the Nazis’ English service. He was infamous in Britain for his bloodthirsty prophecies of German triumph.

The courthouse audience’s vexed relationship with Joyce was “something new in the history of the world”—a prototype of the parasocial. Joyce’s voice “had suggested a large and flashy handsomeness,” but his appearance broke the spell. “He was short and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so,” with the look “of an eastern European peasant driven off the land by poverty into a factory town and there wearing his first suit of western clothes.” (Outdoing Malcolm in her icy dispassion, West was merciless with the poor jurors as well: “though they were drawn from different ranks of life, there is no rank of life in which middle-aged English people are other than puffy or haggard.”)

What ought to be West’s considerable legacy has been reduced to her wit, and she was hilariously unsparing in her treatment of Joyce as “flimsy yet coarse.” This, West was well aware, represented a crystallization of the attitude that inspired his original treason. Joyce’s youthful high-society aspirations had been dismissed, and the pain of this injury fed his populist resentment: “What could the little man do—since he so passionately desired to exercise authority and neither this nor any other sane state would give it to him—but use his trick of gathering together luckless fellows to overturn the state and substitute a mad one?”

Rejected by the smart establishment, Joyce ingratiated himself with a counter-élite that might dignify his bitterness as political courage. His fantasy of status and purpose destined him for Berlin, which he believed could teach England a thing or two about old-fashioned martial valor. In some ways, he prefigured the toadying courtiers of our era’s New Right, who fawn over despots with the same pick-me devotion.

West found Joyce almost beneath contempt. The bureaucratic march toward his conviction was nevertheless “more terrible than any other case I have ever seen in which a death sentence was given.” Privately, she wrote, “I am consumed with pity for Joyce because it seems to me that he lived in a true hell.” The deadpan pathos of her report painted this hell as a shared reality. The despair that both created Joyce and attended his execution was universal: “Nobody in court felt any emotion when he knew that Joyce was going to die.” ♦