The dead hand of detail

David Pryce-Jones

LIFE STUDIES: PROFILES FROM THE NEW YORKER edited by David Remniek Random House Inc, £18.45, pp. 480, ISBN 0375 503 552 he New Yorker has published profiles for 75 years now, and the present editor, David Remnick, himself a graceful writer, celebrates this achievement with an anthology of them. The creme de la creme. As always with the New Yorker, you have the thrill of anticipation. Here surely is a holy of holies, enshrining the best of American writing.

Among more than a score of pieces, there are indeed three marvels. Lillian Ross's portrait in 1950 of Hemingway, 'How do you like it now, gentlemen?' has helped to immortalise Papa in old age fighting his imaginary rounds with Mr Tolstoy and Mr Stendhal, saddened and angry at the demons within. 'Time . . . Fortune . . . Life ... Luce' by Walcott Gibbs is more a parody of Time than a profile of Henry Luce, a thorough drubbing of its style and language, with the unforgettable joke, 'Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.' And who is Alva Johnston, who writes like a man, but whose name might be a woman's? Published in 1932, his or her The Education of a Prince' tells the story of one Harry Gerguson, a confidence trickster 'free from small virtues', who passed himself off in America and Europe as a Romanov prince, and before whom 'the penal systems of the world break down'. Here is a piece of the purest bravura.

Otherwise, dear reader, you will need the stomach of an ostrich to digest this huge helping of print. The procedure at the New Yorker office seems to be this. The writer comes in with a tale of some character with entertainment value, for instance a sleightof-hand artist, a tightrope-walker proposing to cross a canyon in the Far West, a lady who writes a column about household hints, a particularly foul-mouthed black comedian, a particularly foul-mouthed lady reporter, other ladies researching what the young think is cool in order to sell clothing to them. Enjoying apparently unlimited time for research, the writer then amasses more material than it is good for him or you to know. With an opening paragraph that preferably draws attention to itself through obliqueness, he sets the scene. And then proceeds to unburden himself by cataloguing every last scavenged detail of his subject.

Consider this passage about our tightrope-walker's preparations for his feat: he has

handwritten notes; drawings and photographs, engineering specifications; geological surveys: maps, weather records from Grand Canyon Village going back 15 years; information on Navajo customs. dress. music, art, history, and mythology, and technical information on cables, state-of-the-art polypropylene ropes (for the cavalletti), clamps, shackles, rock-drills, bits, pulleys, anchors, block and tackles, counterweights.

A thousand words pass before we discover that the couple researching cool clothes are women, but by then we possess the revelation that one of them

brought back the Converse One Star, which was a vulcanised, suede, low-top classic oldschool sneaker from the 1970s, and, sure enough, the One Star quickly became the signature shoe of the Seventies.

These minutiae are followed by others of a similar mail-order sort about

tight white tank-tops known as 'wife beaters,' with a bra strap showing, and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals.

Should you ever be the subject of a New Yorker profile, do be careful about your socks. These writers read a great deal into that particular article.

'Travels in Georgia' is about Carol and Sam whose work consists in picking up animals squashed by traffic on the Georgia roads and highways. 'I asked for a gorp' is its fine specimen of an opening sentence.

This soon enlarges into 'a ration of gorp — soybeans, sunflower seeds, oats, pretzels, Wheat Chex, raisins and kelp'. Carol and Sam found dead snapping-turtles, frogs, a variety of snakes, a possum, a skink, a bobcat, a long-tailed weasel, all of which they duly roasted and ate if appropriate. 'The Mountains of Pi' depicts an invalid mathematician who built in his New York apartment a super-computer in order to run through it the infinite numbers of pi, that Greek torture of the geometry class. This piece sets some ultimate fact-finding standard by resorting finally to rows of random numerals.

Reading these profiles in their original magazine form, in self-preservation your eye will skip a couple of columns only to find that the writer is still struggling up to the waist in the bog of detail. Another skip or two, and you turn to the unfailingly amusing cartoons set into the text, and then you replace the magazine on the coffee-table where it belongs as a fashion accessory. An anthology offers no such escape. You suffer that loss of spirit which comes when some stranger at a gathering holds your arm to encumber you with a story which has no apparent point or ending.

To declare a non-interest, I have never written for the New Yorker, but the telephone rang one day to introduce Debbie the Fact-checker for the magazine. Someone was writing a profile in which a friend, long out of reach because dead, was quoted as saying something clever to me 20 years earlier. It was the kind of thing this friend said habitually, but Debbie harried me over six long weeks for the authentication I could not provide exactly.

In one profile, the literary critic Anatole Broyard is taken to task for passing himself off as white when in fact he was black, hardly a sin of omission or commission. But this provides the only piece which is snippy, to use the adjective Al Gore threw at George W. Bush at the most fraught moment of their electoral joust. In the absence of political or controversial subjects of any kind, the other profiles blanket Out everything illiberal or unseemly, such as violence, divergence of opinion and unhappy endings. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Debbie the Fact-checker and her colleagues have only to complete the task of pasteurising imagination, irony, genuine quirk and poetic licence into germ-free detailing.

Celebrity profiles, of which there are three or four, vary slightly from the norm through conversion of detail into an act of worship. The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, for example,

gave them the double barrel turns, he gave them the triple pirouettes in attitude (and then he switched to the other leg and did two more). He rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the dance he leapt, surefooted, unmindful, a man in love.

Jerry Lee Lewis, Jane Austen, piston, lark? Where is the ledge of a dance? What's this presumption of love in a professional? This is the kind of good writing, as Aldous Huxley remarked in a different context, which is 'another form of bad writing'.

After a visit to Marlon Brand° on a filmset in Kyoto in 1957, Truman Capote proved unable or unwilling to shake himself free from the usual mail-order catalogue:

Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow; [do scarecrows wear socks and shoes?] And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with a stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit.

And so on ad infinitum, as though the props were the broody Brando's certification of genius. Kenneth Tynan's profile of Johnny Carson, the host of a television talk show, and nationally famous in his day, is a vat of the deepest treacle. Alas! poor Ken. I knew him, Remnick, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy except when the presence of Hollywood kings and queens for a day weakened his knees and his mind. Mrs Carson, he thought, had 'a quill-shaped Renaissance nose', which sounds painful.

The prefixes co-, reand preattached to a stem beginning with a vowel are habitually printed showing the hyphen, e.g. cooperate, re-enter, pre-eminent. In this book, those hyphens are replaced with twin dots over the vowel of the stem. Whose achievement is it to have thus standardised the umlaut in English? And on page 493 I read. 'Like General Gordon come to reinforce Khartoum, he had arrived too late.' Not all Sir Garnet there. Oh Debbie, how could you have let that through?