Review of the Moral Art of War Geoff Dyer
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE Man CONDITION
Selected Essays and Reviews 1989–2010
Past Geoff Dyer
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2011 Geoff Dyer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-579-1
Contents
Listing of Illustrations..............................................................................................xi Introduction.......................................................................................................3 Jacques Henri Lartigue and the Discovery of India..................................................................9 Robert Capa........................................................................................................12 If I Die in a Gainsay Zone..........................................................................................15 Ruth Orkin's V-Due east Day...............................................................................................twenty Richard Avedon.....................................................................................................25 Enrique Metinides..................................................................................................31 Joel Sternfeld's Utopian Visions...................................................................................36 Alec Soth: Riverrun................................................................................................40 Richard Misrach....................................................................................................44 William Gedney.....................................................................................................51 Michael Ackerman...................................................................................................67 Miroslav Tichý................................................................................................71 Saving Grace: Todd Hido............................................................................................78 Idris Khan.........................................................................................................82 Edward Burtynsky...................................................................................................87 Turner and Retention..................................................................................................91 The American Sublime...............................................................................................95 The Awakening of Stones: Rodin.....................................................................................100 Ecce Homo..........................................................................................................113 D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers....................................................................................123 F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned......................................................................129 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Nighttime...........................................................................137 Pounding Impress.....................................................................................................146 Richard Ford: Independence Twenty-four hours.....................................................................................150 James Salter: The Hunters and Light Years..........................................................................156 Denis Johnson: Tree of Fume.......................................................................................162 Ian McEwan: Atonement..............................................................................................166 Lorrie Moore: A Gate at the Stairs.................................................................................170 Don DeLillo: Point Omega...........................................................................................173 The Goncourt Journals..............................................................................................177 Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...........................................................................184 John Cheever: The Journals.........................................................................................193 Ryszard Kapuscinski's African Life.................................................................................200 W. 1000. Sebald, Bombing, and Thomas Bernhard.........................................................................205 Regarding the Achievement of Others: Susan Sontag..................................................................212 The Moral Art of War...............................................................................................215 "My Favorite Things"...............................................................................................231 Ramamani...........................................................................................................236 Def Leppard and the Anthropology of Supermodernity.................................................................239 Editions of Contemporary Me........................................................................................245 Is Jazz Expressionless?......................................................................................................252 Cherry Street......................................................................................................264 Blues for Vincent..................................................................................................269 Loving and Admiring: Camus's Algeria...............................................................................272 Oradour-sur-Glane..................................................................................................280 Parting Shots......................................................................................................286 The Incorrect Stuff....................................................................................................291 Fabulous Dress...................................................................................................300 The 2004 Olympics..................................................................................................308 Sex and Hotels.....................................................................................................315 What Will Survive of The states............................................................................................319 The Airfix Generation..............................................................................................327 Comics in a Man's Life.............................................................................................333 Violets of Pride...................................................................................................341 On Being an Only Child.............................................................................................346 Sacked.............................................................................................................356 On the Roof........................................................................................................367 Unpacking My Library...............................................................................................374 Reader's Cake.....................................................................................................378 My Life as a Gate-Crasher..........................................................................................382 Something Didn't Happen............................................................................................386 Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with particular reference to Doughnut Plant doughnuts).....................391 Of Course..........................................................................................................404 Sources and Acknowledgments........................................................................................417
Chapter One
VISUALS
Jacques Henri Lartigue and the Discovery of Republic of india
This photograph was taken by Jacques Henri Lartigue on the Cap d'Antibes in 1953. He was almost 60 by then, had been photographing for one-half a century. The picture is of a woman—I don't know who—propped up on a lilo or lounger on the terrace of some presumably luxurious hotel or villa. She'due south wearing a swimsuit and one of those fun wigs made of strips of colored paper that you can buy in political party shops. You lot tin can't see her optics, she'due south wearing a pair of big plastic sunglasses, just at that place's a hint (and this is the lovely flirty thing about the picture) that she is glancing up at the photographer—which means that she is also glancing upwardly at me, at us—rather than reading the unbelievably serious book in her easily: Nehru's The Discovery of Republic of india! It looks like information technology's virtually eight hundred pages long and weighs a ton. It wouldn't be anything like the same picture if she was reading Bridget Jones's Diary, which, apparently, hadn't been published back then—simply that's another thing about the picture show: information technology could have been taken yesterday, information technology could take been taken today (especially now that white sunglasses are in vogue again).
The volume is a touch of genius—the genius either of contrivance or of the moment—only, really, if any chemical element of the moving-picture show were removed (the wig, the spectacles, the painted nails or lipstick) it would exist thoroughly macerated. That's the affair near all peachy photos, though. Everything in them is essential—fifty-fifty the inessential $.25. It occurs to me that some other important component of a photo is the things that are not in information technology. The inclusion of sure things can not just diminish a photograph but destroy it. In this case—all the more than remarkable in a photo taken in 1953—the absence of a cigarette (and then often considered an accompaniment of glamour) or ashtray is crucial to its allure and its contemporaneity. A cigarette would "date" or age the photograph every bit surely as it ages the faces of the people who fume them. If there were any evidence of smoking I would have to look abroad. Equally it is, I can't tear my optics away. I can't cease looking at her.
So who is she?
But at that place I go, forgetting one of my own rules virtually photography, namely, that if you look hard plenty a photo will ever answer your question—even if that answer comes in the form of further questions. Well, whoever she is, she'south cute. Actually, I can't actually tell if that'southward truthful, for the simple reason that I tin can't see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful for an every bit simple reason: because I'm in love with her. Lartigue, too, I suspect. Now, plenty of men have photographed women they beloved but this picture depicts the moment when y'all fall in beloved.
That's why the proposition that she is looking up, meeting our gaze—the photographer's, mine—is then important: this is the first moment when our eyes see, the moment that each subsequent meeting of optics will subsequently contain. If this picture is of a woman Lartigue has been with for ten years information technology really proves my point: that expect, that meeting of the eyes, nonetheless contains the accuse of the beginning unphotographed wait from way back when. As for me, since I've merely merely seen the photograph, it'south a example of love at kickoff sight. And that, I think, is why Lartigue became a model for so many fashion photographers. The well-nigh effective form of subliminal seduction—the best way to sell the dresses or hats featured in photos—is to make men fall in beloved with the adult female wearing them, and photographers are all the time trying to emulate or simulate that feeling. With Lartigue, though, it's for real, and the accessories on offer are what? A daft wig, some zany sunglasses, and a hardback of The Discovery of India! That's the amuse of the movie, its magic.
As I said at the beginning, they're all crucial, these ditzy accessories. The book lends a hint, at the very to the lowest degree, of the exotic. And the wigs and glasses give the film its faint but unmistakable touch of the erotic. If you want to see her without the wig and glasses and so you are already starting to undress her. Not that there is anything explicitly sexual well-nigh this—information technology's more that you want to run across what she actually looks like. In other words, you want an respond to the question the picture insistently teases us with: to what extent is information technology posed, contrived? I'd dearest to know. It would probably be possible to find out by consulting ane of the many books about Lartigue currently available, merely I prefer a less scholarly, more straight, but—I promise—not too intrusive approach. "Excusez-moi, mademoiselle. J'espère que je ne vous dérange ..."
2005
Robert Capa
Works of art urge u.s. to reply in kind and then, looking at this photograph, my reaction expresses itself equally a vow: I volition never dearest some other photograph more.
The caption on the back of the postcard on which I outset saw it read "Italian soldier later end of fighting, Sicily 1943." The Allies invaded Italia in July of that year; Palermo, the upper-case letter, was captured on July 22, and by Baronial 17 the whole of Sicily was in Allied hands. Victory in Europe was still near two years distant, merely Robert Capa's photograph is similar a premonition of—and coda to—the end of the war in Europe.
When I adjacent saw the picture, in a book of Capa's work, information technology had a different caption. This time it read: "About Nicosia, Sicily July 28, 1943. An Italian soldier straggling behind a column of his captured comrades equally they march off to a Pow camp." This is much more than specific—but which of the two well-nigh accurately expresses the truth of the image (as opposed to the circumstances in which it was made)?
At offset information technology seems that the unabridged meaning of the flick changes co-ordinate to the caption but so one realizes that whatever the circumstances surrounding the moving-picture show frame, Capa has deliberately isolated this young couple (making both captions misleading since neither mentions the woman). As Steinbeck remarked, Capa's "pictures are non accidents." The visual truth of the photo pushes the circumstances in which it was taken beyond the edge of the frame, out of sight. Post-obit Capa's case, I besides adopt to "crop" the narrative, to concentrate on the story contained by the image, to transcribe the caption inscribed within it.
Capa's picture recalls and complements another: André Kertész's photograph "A Crimson Hussar Leaving, June 1919, Budapest." In the midst of the commotion of departure, a man and a woman wait at each other for what may turn out to be the last time. In Some other Way of Telling, John Berger has written of how the look that passes between them is an attempt to shop the memory of this moment against everything that may happen in the future. Capa's photograph shows the moment when all the unvoiced hopes in that photograph—in that look—come true. And non but the hopes of Kertész's couple, but the hopes of all lovers separated by war.
The hot Mediterranean landscape. Grit on the bicycle tires. The sun on her tanned arms. Their shadows mingling. The flutter of collywobbles above the tangled hedgerow. The crumbling wall at the field's edge is the result non of the sudden obliteration of bombs, but of the slow compunction of the seasons. It is possible to grow one-time in this mural. All the sounds—the rustle of cicadas, the noise of his boots on the route, the slow whir of the bicycle (his or hers? it has a crossbar)—offer an irenic contrast to the deafening machinery of tanks and artillery. The photo would be diminished without the bicycle; it would exist ruined without her long hair. Her hair says: this is how she was when he left, she has not inverse, she has remained true to him.
Noticing these things fills me with longing. I want to be that soldier. Since that is impossible I resolve to get on a cycling holiday in Sicily. I want, also, to know their story. When did they run into? Have they made love? How long take they been walking? Where are they heading? How long is the journeying? The photo itself urges us to enquire questions like this, simply if we wait—and mind—hard information technology will provide the answers. Listen ...
They practise not intendance how long the walk alee of them is; the greater the distance, the longer they tin can be together like this. She will ask most the things that take happened to him; he will exist hesitant at offset, but there is no hurry. She begins to remember his silence, the way it was implied by his handwriting, by the letters he sent. Eventually, he volition tell her of the friends he has lost, the terrible things he has seen. He is impatient for news of friends and relatives, back in their village or town.
She volition tell about her brother, who was also in the ground forces and who was wounded, about his parents, about the funny matter that happened to the schoolteacher and the butcher's dog. They will walk along, their shoulders bumping, noticing everything about each other over again, each a little apprehensive of disappointing the other in some pocket-sized way. At some stage, perchance when they are resting by the roadside or perhaps when they prevarication down to sleep nether the star-clogged sky, she volition turn to him and say, "Am I still as pretty as when you left?"
Knowing what his answer volition be, feeling the roughness of his manus equally he pushes the hair behind her ear, watching his mouth every bit he says, "More. Much more."
And the defeat of Italy, the finish of the war? Maybe they will talk of that likewise, but not at present, not now ...
1991
If I Dice in a Gainsay Zone
Requiem is a tribute to "the 135 photographers of different nations" who died while roofing the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Designed as a memorial—the endpapers, inscribed with the names of the dead, deliberately echo the Vietnam "wall" in Washington, D.C.—information technology is not simply a book of more than or less startling photographs held together by an editorial concept. Requiem is a great photography volume: a book, that is, with its own visual grammar and narrative coherence.
The first photos, taken past Everette Dixie Reese in the 1950s, are elegant, classical images of a serene and exotic landscape. Photographs from the war will show gainsay-haunted GIs with "the thousand-yard stare"; Reese photographs an onetime Vietnamese man with a grand-year gaze. Another irenic image shows a Buddhist monk—the Western ideal of wisdom—but at that place are hints, also, that this is a part of the world where rivers accept run routinely ruby-red. A 12th-century stone relief shows a battle between the Khmer and Cham armies in 1177. In a picture by Pierre Jahan, a French sentry's helmet gives him the look of an invading conquistador, which, in a sense, he is. An aeriform shot of the Red River Delta shows a landscape that seems nothing else and so much as camouflage patterned. War machine aircraft begin to appear in Reese's cloud-strewn skies, followed, in 1954, past French paratroopers. Then, in photo graphs by Jean Peraud, nosotros get the first of the images of combat that volition make up the bulk of the volume. A few pages afterward the death of Robert Capa in the Red River Delta is announced.
Capa's dying in Vietnam provides an essential continuity from images of the Second World War to those in this book. Many of Capa's famous photos, from the Normandy invasion to the liberation of Paris, show soldiers tramping out of the edge of the frame, trudging from one battle to the adjacent. The last photos he took, minutes before treading on a mine on May 25, 1954, evidence a cavalcade of soldiers wading through waist-high grass. They could be the aforementioned soldiers he had photographed in 1944. One of them even raises a rifle in familiar salute. And so Capa is blown to pieces. The column of soldiers marches on, invisibly, into the deepening conflict of Southeast Asia.
In keeping with this implied continuity, the war in Vietnam looks, at first, pretty much similar the 2nd World War. In the early stages of that conflict, writers tended to see it through a poetic optic derived from the 1914–eighteen war, specifically through Wilfred Owen. In the same way, photographers tended to view the war in Vietnam through a filter or lens developed to comprehend the Second World State of war. The emphasis is on the ordinary, private soldier, ordinarily in moments of slap-up danger. This is non surprising. Later all, details of vegetation, topography, and complexion bated, the feel of men at the sharp end of gainsay remains fairly constant. The uniforms are different, simply in every other respect, Dana Stone's moving-picture show of South Vietnamese troops on a devastated hilltop outpost in Ha Than in 1968 could take been taken at Passchendaele fifty years before (in common with many accounts of the Tertiary Battle of Ypres, a department of Requiem is titled "The Quagmire"). Robert J. Ellison'due south shot of an ammunition dump exploding in forepart of 3 Marines is like a total-color version of W. Eugene Smith'southward classic paradigm of four Marines cowering from an explosion on Iwo Jima. (The pictures in Requiem do non only look back in fourth dimension. Kyoichi Sawada's photo of a dead Vietcong soldier beingness dragged behind an armored vehicle anticipates Paul Watson's even grislier image of a U.S. soldier beingness hauled through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993.)
As the state of war progresses, then information technology begins to develop its own visual fashion. Capa had said that he preferred a powerful film to one that was technically perfect. In Vietnam—virtually plain in Catherine Leroy'south images published by Await in "full-bleed" (as the technical term and so accurately puts it)—this distinction becomes increasingly blurred. Larry Burrows took advisedly composed images, but for many photographers immediacy undiminished and unmediated by anaesthetic formal concerns was everything. This was not simply because of the exigencies of battle; or, rather, developments in non-gainsay photography lent themselves particularly well to the hazards of Vietnam. By the mid-1960s Robert Frank'due south apparent indifference to traditional photographic virtues had become an ordering aesthetic in its own correct. In Bystander: A History of Street Photography, Colin Westerbeck remarks that Garry Winogrand was trying "to see what is left of photography, what the essence of information technology is, after you surrender the formal French rationality that Cartier-Bresson always hangs on to." Where meliorate to explore that question than a war where any vestige of rationality could be annihilated in four hours at My Lai? The Second World War had a shape, a purpose, that became axiomatic both in the larger narrative (from Capa's pictures of D-Twenty-four hour period to George Rodger's images of the liberation of Belsen) and within each of the private, incremental pictures that make up that narrative. As the war in Vietnam progressed and then it came to be seen—quite literally—as confused, cluttered, purposeless. Three years before he went missing in action in Cambodia, Dana Stone wrote to his parents that "the risks were getting way out of proportion to the gains. I seemed to exist getting the aforementioned pictures that I had fabricated many times before and as I became more than accustomed to the war what had initially been interesting and exciting became dull and frightening."
(Continues...)
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