Chapter 159: Those We Thought We Knew

One of my favorite moments in nonfiction occurs about a third into Joseph Mitchell’s classic, Joe Gould’s Secret, composed of two New Yorker profiles of the same man, which ran in December 1942 and September 1964. Prior to the point I’m referring to, the reader will have enjoyed the shorter earlier profile, which is as flawless a piece of craft as you’ll find. It reads admirably, rolls seamlessly from anecdote to humorous insight, and has that polished roundedness that encapsulates an individual world. Then comes the second part decades later, and on its threshold, one wonders what more there is to say (the title is a sizable hint). Continuing to read feels like peeking beyond the happily ever after. It is the point where a faultless profile gets messy and, in doing so, becomes great.

The turning point is reached through the medium of another art. A much older Mitchell is making space in his office and finds his old notes on Joe Gould. He rereads a forgotten letter that evokes an old painting of Gould, a lead he had not followed. Impulsively, he calls the portraits’ author, the artist Alice Neel, twenty-two years after his first piece was filed and seven years after their mutual subject had passed away. Then, upon seeing it in Neel’s studio, the artwork makes an impression on Mitchell.

“I suddenly realized that in my mind I had replaced the real Joe Gould –or at least the Joe Gould I had known – with a cleaned-up Joe Gould, an after-death Joe Gould. By forgetting the discreditable or by slowly transforming the discreditable into the creditable, as one tends to do in thinking about the dead, I had, so to speak, respectabilized him. Now, looking at the shameless face in the portrait, I got him back into proportion…”

Neel has captured something of Gould that Mitchell had not yet put into words. It is what good art does, pleasant or unpleasant to witness, and for Mitchell, it serves as a reminder and a telling moment. Seeing the portrait allows him to complete his own portrayal.

Mitchell does the job twice when a single truthful attempt can seem like grasping at sand. People are not in a still life, and even those will wither after a time. Portraying others pitches us against our shortcomings in the face of the many moving facets of context, the individual, and the distance or proximity in time. And then there is that other distance, the doubt if we are too close or not as far removed as we should be.  

Though Mitchell was friends with Gould and had known him for years, there remained a distance from the onset. After all, he had chosen him, as he’d done with others, as part of his professional activity. It is worth thinking of the challenges that not having that distance brings. Focusing on a loved one, for instance, brings another layer of complexity to bear. We ourselves are even more in the portrait. This dilemma is at the core of Aura García-Junco’s memoir, May God Blast the Woman Who Writes About Me, where she confronts her father’s passing, torn between her adolescent admiration and the adult rejection of his brand of masculinity. Her portrayal is born of the struggle to reconcile these opposing truths on the page after not reconciling with him while he was still alive.

“As I write this book, I see myself standing before a scale. In it, the scales oscillate between my desire to speak from the inside, to describe my father with all his sharp moments, his falls, because those were him too, or, as my still furious stomach tells me, those were especially him ( …) Sometimes melancholy invites me to write my own monument, in which Dad lacks rough edges, and in the process avoids me having him being judged with the harshness with which I judged him. To make a hero. A misunderstood poet against the world. A pamphlet of love.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum is portraying a perfect stranger, not even a contemporary, twice removed by the years and the filter of other sources’ portrayals. It is the challenge that writer Pierre Michon tackles in The Life of Joseph Roulin, the story of a man hiding in plain sight, curiously both utterly unknown and seen by millions the world over: Van Gogh’s postman while he lived in Arles, who the painter portrayed multiple times; the man who delivered his famous letters, to be recreated chiefly –though imagination fills the blanks– through what this correspondence said of him in passing, and how he is depicted in famous artworks.

“He is a character of little use when writing about painting. It suits me,” Michon writes, for he aims to put a life to the famous face, to give a biography full of small wonders and miseries, to a footnote in art history. Side-by-side, paint and word form what the French call a mise-en-abîme, a mirroring effect, a portrayal within a portrayal, which in this case is no mere repetition but enriches our overall understanding. Afterward, if we wish to return to the masterpieces, we can do so knowing there’s a life beyond the frame, a better understanding of who Van Gogh portrayed and how he chose to portray him.

In choosing his subject, Michon follows in the school of thought of another crafter of small biographies, Marcel Schwob, who writes in the preface to his Imaginary Lives, “We should probably not describe in detail the greatest person of their time, or note the characteristics of the most famous in the past, but recount with the same concern the unique existences of people, whether they were divine, mediocre, or criminals”.

Schwob’s words, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, are but the start of a long conversation, too broad for this piece, about who gets to be portrayed and by whom. Portrayal, the leading role in narratives, has been, at times, the privilege of the few. However, even this practice has its challenges.

As fine a psychologist as the English writer William Somerset Maugham delves into them in The Summing Up: “The celebrated develop a technique to deal with the persons they come across. They show the world a mask, often an impressive one, but take care to conceal their real selves...I have been more concerned with the obscure than with the famous. They are more often themselves. They have had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from the world or to impress it... Kings, dictators, commercial magnates are from our point of view very unsatisfactory. To write about them is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that has attended their efforts shows that such beings are too exceptional to form a proper ground for a work of art. They cannot be made real.”

It is Maugham’s opinion, and though many great works might contradict it, one timeless portrayal of an icon enriches the conversation. There are few better profiles than Gay Talese’s Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, and yet Talese never spoke a word to the man himself, didn’t so much focus the lens on him as broaden it to include the world around him, subject to his gravity. And even then, it is a profile Talese did not want to do, the opposite of the type of people he wished to portray. 

“Harold Hayes, Esquire’s editor, gave me a one-year contract to do six pieces,” Talese recounts in an interview. “The first piece was what I wanted to do. It was about an obituary writer named Alden Whitman. It’s called Mr. Bad News. No one ever heard of the guy. It may be the most gratifying piece I ever did… ‘Well, how about Sinatra?’ said Hayes. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Life magazine just did a piece on Sinatra. What can you say about Sinatra that hasn’t already been said?’”

Talese famously wrote the piece, with the famous man refracted by a myriad of lesser-known individuals. Yet, though it might just be his most famous, his opinion doesn’t waver. “I like it, but I’d say Mr. Bad News comes closest to what I aspire to do, which is to write nonfiction about ordinary people. Sinatra was the opposite of this.”

Whether we choose the subject, it chooses us, or it is inextricably linked to our lives, some things can happen along the way that we cannot account for. There are surprises in reporting, such as the subject having a cold, preconceptions being challenged, perhaps a blurring of distances, with the observer being changed by the observed, even if it is a painting looking back onto a posthumous world. Perhaps, at some point, the portrayal should elude us, surprise us, if anyone is to be accurately reflected.

One such example arises from an old work of 19th-century fiction. Among the great characters of classic Russian literature is a young student named Yevgeny Bazarov, the central character of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. This particular portrayal mattered to Turgenev because, in Bazarov, he sought to depict the new generation he saw rising in his country and with which he’d recently fallen out.

Turgenev was of a generation that had looked to Europe and believed in incremental liberal reform to the autocratic Russian state. In his view, he was an ally to change, not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, when a new generation broke onto the cultural spaces where he had hitherto shone, he felt displaced. They were more radical and overtly revolutionary, and he was gradually undermined, with the values he cherished cast out as outdated. 

He broke with his preferred magazine, where things had gone sour, and his subsequent work was expected to be payback in prose. Hence, Bazarov, the unrelenting nihilist of the novel he then penned and who was very much based on Turgenev’s young detractors, voiced their opinions to the point of nearly quoting them. A brash, corrosive youth that often comes across as inhumane.

And yet, the reason Turgenev is a memorable writer, and Bazarov one of his claims to fame, is that in the end, he cannot, perhaps despite himself, allow his work to fall into caricature or a settling of scores.

Bazarov, partly his nemesis incarnated, is great precisely because he partially escapes his portrayer. He might be based on his detractors, inspired partly by a grudge, but he is a work full of fine balances and contradictions. In the end, what makes Turgenev a great writer is that Bazarov is not a hatchet job, or rather, the hatchet cuts both ways, and the fathers are cut as deeply as the sons that fill them with dismay.

The proof of what he had achieved is in the telling reactions to his portrayal: people on both sides of the political divide utterly disliked it. Many of the young upstarts who had antagonized him chose to see a caricature of themselves and the faults projected on them by Turgenev. More interestingly, many conservatives were appalled by the dangerous seduction of a character as fascinating as Bazarov, by the undoubted qualities he possesses. If we cannot stand him in the first chapter, he moves us deeply by the tale’s end.

There is little in common between that old New York bohemian, Joe Gould, and the young utilitarian Russian –and fictional– Bazarov. Still, to have read their portrayals is to be able to recall them, to wonder about their opinions and fate, almost to hear them before realizing what you’re doing, shaking your head, and putting the book away.

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