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Still Pen Over Shifting Ground: The Writings of Lawrence Weschler
by Sarah Fan
August 2004
Lawrence Weschler connects. Literally so—he draws the bright line from point A to point B as he takes on a rich and idiosyncratic range of topics: the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal; the director Roman Polanski; his own grandfather, the composer Ernst Toch; David Hockney's photo collages; a furniture designer afflicted with Parkinson's; and the quality of the light in Southern California, all of which are considered in his newest book, Vermeer in Bosnia, a collection of pieces from the past twenty years. For once, the book description gets a book and its writer right: Weschler is indeed “an uncanny collector and connector of wonders” and conjunctions are his business. Such connections/conjunctions/convergences can run in many different ways, from causality to resemblance to the passage of time, and Weschler works to draw them out and put them on the page.
A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker , Lawrence Weschler is perhaps best known for Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, a brief book guiding the reader through the mystifying delights of Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology that was as charming and transporting as any of the museum's carefully illuminated factual and fabricated treasures. Inasmuch as connections play into the new book as a whole, Vermeer in Bosnia seems subject to looser links than his previous compendiums. A Wanderer in the Perfect City collected some of his “passion pieces,” loving profiles of unexpected and rewarding subjects, including the musical lexicographer Nicolas Slominsky, the cartoonist Ben Katchor, and the wandering rocket scientist-turned-banker Gary Isaacs. Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas dealt with three political exiles: South African Breyten Breytenbach, Iraqi Kanan Makiya, and Czech Jan Karan. Reporting the efforts to account for torture undertaken by totalitarian regimes in Brazil and Uruguay when the torturers still lived alongside their victims led to A Miracle, a Universe .
It's a strange career he has carved out, as he has noted himself: reportage from the bleakest of places—countries struggling to reconcile horrifying histories with the necessity of shared futures—alongside long trips with artists and eccentrics in their distinct and private pursuits. Yet all his stories are always stories of people, not systems, and they describe the limited and courageous work people do in the course of living. Perhaps his shifts from one pole to the other can be read as a basic response, recourse to the great and hopeful noise culture makes against destruction, death, and war. Or tries to, at least.
It makes sense that Vermeer in Bosnia opens with a 1985 piece, “Why I Can't Write Fiction,” in which the writer claims that “the part of my sensibility which I demonstrate in nonfiction makes fiction an impossible mode for me. That's because for me the world is already filled to bursting with interconnections, interrelationships, consequences, and consequences of consequences. The world as it is is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation.” He describes his work as worrying through those knots, tracing the lines and lineages, and making the loops (yes) connect. Once given the Weschler treatment, such tangles and inarticulate coincidences often do take on fresh meaning. The strange turns of Roman Polanski's life, familiar as they may be, become newly shocking when mapped out by Weschler in a long profile; this is a story you simply could not make up, however fanciful or melodramatic your own sensibility. Any overview of a life requires scope and detail, which Weschler readily supplies, pulling focus to best effect. He is especially keen to mark totemic moments, when those big-picture concerns (scope) dovetail with small-picture events (detail).
All of Weschler's profiles use unbroken strings of paragraph-long quotations, one after the other, almost like monologues distilled and recorded, as if the author's great gift is as amanuensis. One Vermeer in Bosnia piece is largely a continuous record of the artist Robert Irwin (the subject of Weschler's first book, the passion piece Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees ) describing his adolescence as he drives through Los Angeles, but Irwin drawls his way through his richly episodic past without assigning much weight to any particular incident, however unlikely-sounding. Aside from Art Spiegelman, no one in the new book is quite as voluble and self-aware as the estimable Nicolas Slominsky or Gary Isaacs.
The Spiegelman piece was also included in A Wanderer in the Perfect City , which itself was a reconfiguration (pieces added, subtracted, or updated) of a still earlier book, Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bills and Other True-Life Tales. (The Boggs piece—about an artist who paints currency and then tries to use art as currency—was spun off and expanded into its own book, Boggs: A Comedy of Values .) Spiegelman's reappearance in Vermeer in Bosnia comes under the heading “Three Polish Survivor Stories;” the other two are Polanski's and the politician Jerzy Urban's, the latter presented as a fascinating, semi-grotesque figure of Shakespearean complication whose own slippery agenda makes the monologue, or the profile through self-presentation, inappropriate. Difficult as it is to organize pieces from twenty years of peripatetic reporting, this book may dilute its effect with the hazy connections from piece to piece. The associations slacken and the rubric stretches thin—though the most erratic section has an obvious enough theme: “Grandfathers and Daughters.” Weschler's grandfather, Ernst Toch, was an important modernist composer in Weimar Berlin before Hitler's rise forced him to flee to California. But while Toch carries a rich history, Weschler's essay doesn't jell as successfully as his other pieces, in part because there seems to be too much missing, too many pieces left out, and the full conception of a self that the details should give doesn't quite emerge. It never quite takes shape. Toch remains a half-obscured figure, perhaps because he is being re-created posthumously by a relative who remembers him as distant and cordial; the piece replicates that effect. Weschler may need his subject alive and talking.
A great part of the satisfaction in reading Weschler's books derives from his status as the perfect listener. Reading his writing becomes a way of inhabiting that ideal, making it possible to be the perfect audience, smart and attentive, contemplative and humble. Lives that, encountered apart from Weschler's mediating wisdom, would seem scary and obsessive, lived by people whose explanatory monologues might be something to escape rather than relish, take on a compelling richness that fulfills the desire for both narrative and the unexpected. In part, the success of his work lies in its ability to allow the reader to inhabit his experience of his subjects, to be as expansive and curious an interlocutor and reporter. It is not always possible to love his subjects with the absorption and attention that he shows in his writing, yet the demonstration of that care, that particularly inventive brand of interest, is itself a kind of tonic.
Weschler's self-described willing suspension of disbelief in the face of unbelievable reality also allows him to work effectively as an enthusiast. He tells people as well as he tells stories—or, he makes people into stories with sense and respect. Since he is not writing biographies, which are consigned to trot through lives in a formal chronological fashion, he can use the past when it serves to illuminate the present, to throw light and develop shadows on what can appear impossible, unlikely, or simply meaningless. Still, that can be very hard work, for sometimes history distorts and even obstructs the truth, as is the case with Bosnia.
The Bosnian essays are suitably tragic and sometimes quite funny (at least in diagnosing the ethnically specific “brain damage” that prevents Serbs from acknowledging the Srebrenica massacre for the horror it clearly is), and governed most obviously by Weschler's own hopes and expectations. Unlike Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, the writing itself does not become a tiny world like the one described. Bosnia is too big for that, its complications too great to be teased out. All pictures drawn of it tend to look blurred, their creation rushed. At one point, he writes:
"I had found myself thinking, during my few weeks last summer when I was traveling around the country, that what the people of the Balkans generally, and the Serbs in particular, really needed was a transition from the epic to the tragic, from the Homeric to the Sophoclean: Oedipus, the evidence of his own torturously tangled complicities staring him full in the face the entire time, and yet he just can't see, he can't see, he can't see, until finally, in a great purging moment of cathartic revelation, the scales fall from his eyes, and he does see. He sees, he acknowledges, and somehow he goes on. . . . That was the sort of great purging cathartic realization and self-realization that seemed so desperately called for and yet so endlessly fugitive last summer in Belgrade."
It's not a simple act, seeing, and it is amazing how much help we can require to do it, which is why we should be grateful for Weschler, who tries to see so much and then makes our own seeing possible. He is the author of a recurring series in McSweeney's called “Convergences” that points to the eerie similarity between Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic, among others. Though Gingrich-Milosevic didn't make it into Vermeer in Bosnia, his piece on Tina Barney's arresting photograph of a father and a daughter did. Both the daughter, adorned with a white tank top and half-smoked Parliament, and the gray-haired father, leaning forward with his hands on the bed, look straight on at the camera in a manner for which the word “disconcerting” may have been invented. In just a few paragraphs, Weschler spins a convincing narrative of the shift of his identification from the gazed-upon, looked-through subject of that intimidating pair to the graying, aging father, suddenly appearing so exhausted, now that the writer has his own preternaturally clever daughter. The reversal completes when he discovers that this photo is in fact the last of a series of three. Barney had taken two previous pictures of the father and daughter over a ten-year period, and Weschler's response has been transformed by these earlier images: “Ten years: God, he had aged.” In this short piece, Weschler manages something rather tricky, creating a kind of mini-autobiography by identifying within and without an object, and then letting the reader inside those roles, enacting that strange self-recognition, the seeing of self where once was other that is one of the best and most hopeful moves a culture can make. The eponymous essay “Vermeer in Bosnia” begins with the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal's trial of the Serbian Dusko Tadic, who was ultimately convicted of crimes against humanity, violations of the customs and laws of war, and breaches of the Geneva Convention. After introducing Tadic and the president of the International Court of Justice, Antonio Cassese, Weschler quickly shifts to the Mauritshuis Museum and its collection of Vermeers, particularly Head of a Young Girl , popularly known as Girl with a Pearl Earring . Weschler argues:
"it is first and foremost a painting about intersubjectivity: about the autonomy, the independent agency, dignity, and self-sufficiency of the Other, in whose eyes we in turn are likewise autonomous, self-sufficient, suffuse with individual dignity and potential agency .… his paintings all but cry out, this person is not to be seen as merely a type, a trope, an allegory. If she is standing for anything, she is standing in for the condition of being a unique individual human being, worthy of our own unique individual response."
Returning to the tribunal, the piece closes on a similar moment of being beheld, of seeing as apprehending a person as an individual, not an image or a symbol—another moment of recognition that turns upon identification. “Tadic was seated in a sort of aquarium of bulletproof glass,” writes Weschler, and he draws a connection between Tadic's defendant's box and Vermeer's camera obscura, “an empty box fronted by a lens through which the chaos of the world might be drawn in and tamed back to a kind of sublime order. And I found myself thinking of these people here with their legal chamber, the improbably calm site for a similar effort at transmutation.” As he forms the thought, the TV monitor displaying the proceedings shows a close-up of Tadic:
"There he was, not some symbol or trope or a stand-in for anybody other than himself: a quite specific individual, in all his sublime self-sufficiency; a man of whom, as it happened, terrible, terrible allegations had been made, and who was now going to have to face those allegations, stripped of any rationales except his own autonomous free agency. For a startling split second, he looked up at the camera. And then he looked away."
Like the Barney photograph, that image has the quality of an indrawn breath (a metaphor Weschler uses more than once himself, describing what the Cabalists called tsimtsum, the withheld breath of God at the moment of creation to make space for man). It seems, finally, that the simplest and most profound connection we can make is through seeing, a connection which clearly reinforces the distance between point A and point B, as the line between the eyes of the looker and the looked (however those roles may shift) is distance drawn out and made manifest. Though he cannot do away with those distances, Weschler writes along those lines to great effect.
Sarah Fan works on books in New York City.
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