Janet Malcolm — On a sentence from the essay “A Girl of the Zeitgeist”

Janet Malcolm — a sentence from the essay “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” in the book Forty-One False Starts

“I have seen men like him standing beside pickup trucks in wintry landscapes, locked in slow, obdurate, implacable argument; I have heard that voice, that aggrieved intonation of flat unyieldingness and threat, that conviction of being right, and that suspicion of being put upon; I know that closed yet oddly sly expression.”

This is Malcolm describing Richard Serra at a party, as he harps on someone else — Ingrid Sischy, the main object of the piece. I read the sentence to a friend who came over and I heard the pitch perfect sonics outloud: “I have seen…I have heard…I know”; “locked in slow, obdurate, implacable argument” — this, the grand tonguetwister. “Locked” winks at “obdurate,” with obdurate’s “a” going into “implacable” and “argument.” Then the five successive “that’s,” like Serra’s enormous torqued ellipses in the DIA Beacon, that (!) space the information and separate the sumptuous descriptors, whether adjectival or nouns: “aggreived,” “unyieldingness,” “threat,” “suspicion” — ending in the palindromish “put upon,” as the sentence finishes with a simple statement and the eye-rhyme of “oddly sly.” It’s a shimmering work of rubbing words together so they sound like a phrase from Bach or Beethoveen.

Gordon Lish had a lot to say about sentences, though he didn’t write much down. In a late-career interview he said: “Flannery O’Connor could do it: ‘She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ There are people who can do it with just one sentence, and you’ll never forget that sentence. And then there are those who can’t do it with hundreds.” This is only one sentence in a nearly 100-page piece. Yet it’s a cornerstone. We want this cornerstone because Malcolm has looked into Serra’s soul and seen something that reflects her own experience of the world — impressionism — as Cynthia Ozick said of William Gass that “the subjective style of impressionism, wherein the criticism of the text [subject] vies as a literary display with the text itself, and on a competitive level of virtuosity, even of ‘beauty.’” I should add, that each sentence is not only about sonics and syntax, though they can help — but also take away, too much salt that the reader can’t remove from his tastings. O’Connor’s line from “A Good Woman is Hard to Find” is one of dialogue — and it is more wholly dependent on the waves of the story under the able-bodied catamaran that is that sentence. Malcolm’s monument to searching out Serra’s failings adds up to a sword in the stone. How did it get there? But doesn’t it look beautiful. And doesn’t it give us Serra on a platter, but also…Malcolm. She sees through all these people, but who sees through her? Maybe she was most famous for her principles (seen in the court case against her by Masson for In the Freud Archives), her stolid control over her subjects, making no mistake (and giving nothing away) in her thieving after information, that is impression. In a way, many of her pieces are about her — an autobiography of her renegade instincts to judge, to cleave, to scallop, and to serve on the pages of The New Yorker. Her famous knives tell us that these bilious types of men, no matter being great artists are no longer apart from the animalistic “wintry” subjects in the Midwest — cooing in cold, their breath hungry for liquor, grousing about country, women, or money — no, perhaps Serra could just let the work stand for the person and recede behind his steel, nay through it and beyond with no clang or puff — simply steel, steel, steel — for this is how people experience his art at the museum or on the hill at Storm King. Otherwise, brittle words interrupt the flow: you don’t need to be right when you have constructed the torqued ellipses at the DIA Beacon — all is right in the art. Save the “aggreived intonation” to lay across the next project, the next soundless, stainless (stainful?) steel.

A la Lish, I will never forget this sentence because of all the things it says to me and how it says them — in a prompt late 20th Century syntax. A good sentence may not be so hard to find but a great sentence is. And there is the ghost of Malcolm in the distance, shooting her subjects, so they will feed the mouths of these ravenous sentences.