Brett Warnke Review of Robert Frank’s "The Americans" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Brett Warnke

“The 50s,” that grey and cozy period of postwar life actually included most of “the 60s” as well. It is a period our contemporary society has been obsessed with since the convulsion of 1968. “It wasn’t that great!” cry the social critics and artists. Films and novels like Revolutionary Road, The Hours, School Ties, Dead Poets Society, Driving Miss Daisy, and Pleasantville are just a toe-dip into the sea of tales hoping to deconstruct “the 50s” myth. Therefore, it is not unlikely that today’s Met Museum patrons viewing Robert Frank’s The Americans will squeal with enjoyment at the off-center, peeling photography of an early mythbuster.

The Swiss-born Frank captured America from 1955-1957 through the use of a Guggenheim grant. He snapped over 28,000 images en route while later whittling his collection down to 83 eerie, pregnant, and provocative photographs. These provide the visual testimony of journeys as far north as Butte, Montana and as far south as Miami Florida.

His motifs are easy to spot: Cars, entertainment, and roads—so many roads—stretching inexorably through the coarse plate lands of the west. In these photographs American vehicles are possessions of necessity where hidden lovers neck, workers roll, and families ride. Jack Keruoac, the road poet himself, penned the jazzy introduction to the book. His phrases are peppered throughout the exhibit.

Interestingly, Frank captures quiet subcultures that seem too early and out of place for “the 50s.” Rodeos in Detroit? Black male trannies in public? A cowboy in New York City? He travels to venues of action. There are funerals, parades, crowded streets, trolley stops, and rallies. Again and again the viewer is faced with the faceless. A globular tuba stares like a Cyclops, but the player’s head is obstructed. An elderly figure ghoulishly stands beneath the stairs—again no face. On a red carpet, a platinum haired starlet is blurred out—her face a fog—while Frank artfully highlights a scoop of her adoring crowd; these are the faces to see. And perhaps most symbolically, a strained flag shows one parade goers patriotism and another’s anonymity as it flaps across a window, hiding faces.

I might even characterize his images as “Hopperesque” since Edward Hopper, too, illustrated the isolated. A friend of mine once wrote a poem observing “only statues and cynics are alone in a crowd.” But in Frank’s pictures there is a consuming emptiness in the crowd itself. Two truckers stare blankly ahead—prisoners of the road. In another, the elderly sit crowded on a bench, their rubbery noses point in independent directions like a multi-fingered road sign. You even see the birth pangs of our consumer society as bored waitresses and elevator operators roll deadened eyes at the camera. Buttressing this isolation is America’s racial reef, nicely depicted in a shot of a New Orleans trolleycar. A solitary black man gazes at the camera from his rear seat. Legally segregated, he’s not even fit to sit beside an adjacent white child.

But Frank’s most famous and enduring images capture the frenzy of American society and its worship of the shiny, the new, the young, and the corrupt. I especially enjoy the arty partiers at MoMA sipping bubbly—perhaps a disapproving jab at the lefties who will later worship his work?

De Tocqueville pointed out that “The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.” Frank removes the varnished layer, starkly positioning photos of poverty beside the vim and radiance of America’s upper class at play. There is American freedom in these photographs, but it is a freedom to conspicuously consume at others expense. In photo 24 a child crawls alone on a dusty floor while photo 25 captures a diamond-dusted diva in a hotel lobby. It is a contrast that never falters because it portrays a truth that never sticks. A blighted Nebraska farm—its only lifeline to the outside world is a narrow mail slot—is placed in juxtaposition with a busty high-roller who whirls dice in a Reno honk-y tonk. These are the contrasts that make America play on.

But where is suburbia? In the flight of “the 50s”, the suburbanization of America had begun. And also, where is religion? True, there is one image of a wanderer on a Delta pilgrimage, but it does little justice to the religious rivers of America’s interior. In our age of rising populism one image haunts me still. A 1956 photo titled “Political Rally” shows a rouser above a crowd waving his fists like he’s fighting bees. His face is a terrifying grimace, reminiscent of any snake-handling Congregationist, or more chillingly, any podium-pounding fascist. And the crowds listen.

Robert Frank’s photos are prescient because they illustrate what we now plainly see: the rusty frame of America’s gleaming Studebaker. The portrait of an absurd, bleak, and cruelly stratified America seems the warning shot in an era of good feelings. Frank’s Americans endures because the inequities and attitudes he portrays are entirely relevant today. Frank peered into the mystery of America and in Keruoac’s words, “sucked a sad poem” right out of it. Perhaps, in foolish hope, we should remember that other great European traveler who wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Brett Warnke Review of Ghost Lighthouses: New and Selected Hatteras Poems, author Chris Waters

By BRETT WARNKE

W.H. Auden once explained that if a generation gap existed, it was due to “those, old or young,/ Who will not learn their Mother Tongue.” Many writers fear for the survival or at least the strength of language—its muscularity, contours, and splendor—as well as its ability to be a vehicle for truth. Today, screens replace reams. Newspapers die. And White House hopefuls can’t name a single periodical they’ve read. In the last century, poets were increasingly pushed out of the public conversation. (Novelists seem to be next in line for the chopping block). Like Michael Ende’s fantasy novel, “The Neverending Story,” a grim Nothing seems to be growing. Ironically, it grows in a world of infinite, digitized, and instantly accessible somethings. Can the strength and beauty of language survive what Saul Bellow called “the moronic inferno” of the world today? Many of those in the scribbler’s trade express a haunted pessimism. But, extraordinarily and inspiringly, a local poet named Chris Waters is hopeful. In our interview he simply couldn’t comprehend the death of literature. “It’s not a loss that’s conceivable to me,” he said. “Then we’d be automotons, we’d be robots.”

Waters recently released a new book of poetry, “Ghost Lighthouses: New and Selected Hatteras Poems.” He does this as his former career as a professional academic has ended. Waters had many interests as a professor—Afro-French theatre, modernism, and the French writer Paul Claudel were just a few topics in his many publications during his years at (to name a few) Harvard, The University of Wales, William and Mary, and URI. While he was at the latter, he was nominated for the school’s Scholarly Excellence Award and has also earned two Pushcart Prizes nominations—one for fiction and one for poetry. In this excellent new collection of poems he writes, “The thing is though to live until/you die. Neither a peach-complexioned nor a prune-faced/zombie be.”

Waters is unsubtle about his priorities these days. His love has always been language, French and English. His license plate illustrates as much. Blazoned with “Poesie,” French for “poetry.” He is in his 80s and shows little hint of mental or physical diminution. He plays tennis, swims, collaborates with the South County Poet’s Group, writes, and spends his free moments sending his work out for publication. When Waters was teaching and researching, batches of rejected poetry used to molder for weeks in sad piles on his desk. “If you’re an honest teacher, you put your time into the classwork,” he said. But now, if rejection slips arrive, Waters will make note and send a half dozen more poems out by sunset. Waters’ wife of Dora of 31 years, his second, teaches both Italian and Spanish. He has 2 daughters and a son in New York, but rarely gets to see them. “Even New York is a distance when you’re busy writing,” he said.

“Ghost Lighthouse” often describes Waters’s retired life beside the teeming fronds and quivering beach grass in North Carolina. A humorous and personal pair of poems “Retirement (I, II)” wink at a world which expects the venerable author to slow down. He can’t. There’s too much to write about: “Golden years sounds like fuzzy brains, the point is/time to do what you haven’t done, or/doing more of it, and or better.”

But Winters isn’t solipsistic. He moves from his own world to that indifferent but galactic natural world he cannot stop noticing. In one poem, he eloquently describes an underappreciated mother, a blue shell crab: “Long before the she-crab’s final moult,/the randy jimmy starts to prance although/he has been known to court an empty carapace, or/even a sheepish brother. ….”Twelve months later, her two million larvae float/away, and she swims toward the open sea to die.”

His poetry is lush but never luxuriant and his words, selected with a jewler’s care, demand repetition. On flowers: “The roadside morning glories’ purple horns/had long since crumpled and, next on their vines, erectile, bursting, their replacements queued.” But not everything is beautiful. Some poems are misty with unease and have the effect of passing a bone peeking out from the soil: “I sat with the night wind as the oil lamp poured through the porch screen, onto the yard clutter—beach chair, handle-less rake, back-less stroller—then to the graveyard that hungered for more.” In another: “Croaking on the dry sand, croakers croak indeed/For all of that these pure fishes are less touching than a beached shark’s operatic struggle. Mouth puckered, glassily staring, convulsing. Winning, whatever its belly holds, our respect.”

Waters mentioned that a friend and fellow poet, Paul Petrie, spent last summer rewriting. Waters did no such thing. “I don’t rewrite,” he said. “I write out my work in long-hand and then push onto other subjects. I’ve never really had anything like writer’s block. There is always something new to write.” In “Beach Doings” he sums up the constant turnover of his mind in a beach scene, “People watch like cats. Things happen, don’t happen, it doesn’t matter, it does matter. Poems get done.”

Waters also taught in Africa. A previous poetry collection, a slim volume called “Senegal,” detailed the equatorial nation’s grisly history. One poem, “House of Slaves,” describes a sinister Middle Passage voyage where the dead are “fed to joyful sharks.” In “AFRICAMERICAUSTRALIA” Waters describes imperialism and its vehicle, the myth of Progress, that wiped out millions of indigenous people. But while a more didactic and less talented writer would flounder under such political topics, Winters excellently uses the voice of an unregenerate colonist describing his troubles: “We talk our language and they try it too. All to no avail./But, when they dare speak their own tongues, put them in jail. They ate stray roots and beasts. From the start, we were plowers, fencers, hoers of fields that stayed in place. This land’s ours.”

A few poems in the new volume,” like “Steam in August” have a hollow pregnancy. But these are very few. Whether Waters is memorializing his favorite cats, jeering at gulls who “winkle every crumb from their beeks,” or allowing the reader insight into the anticipation of becoming a father, “Ghost Lighthouse” glows with a brilliant light.

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Chris Waters is also looking for a publisher for two works. “Alphonso the Wise” and his collection of American-Indian poems title “King Philip’s Talking Head.” Waters can be reached by email at hwa8559u@aol.com or through mail at PO Box 233 Saunderstown, RI 02874.

97 Orchard Street: Dishing Up A Tale of the Immigrant Experience

(Published on Aug.1, 2010)

New York’s Lower East Side has been a corridor for immigrants since the mid-19th century, whether Germans fleeing the convulsions of 1848, Irish fleeing the preventable Hunger, or Jews fleeing the Okhrana. History can be disgraced by demagogues and faith can be abandoned after experience. A minority’s language can be stamped out and their seemingly solid customs can melt into air. Yet, immigrant traditions of the palate survive. Perhaps, in knowing the culinary history, forgetful middle-class Americans are less likely to forget. This is the intriguing new truth in Jane Ziegelman’s clever book, “97 Orchard.”

The book’s title is the address of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a Manhattan National Historic Site. Its Brooklyn author has no time for the stereotypical suffering immigrant and instead writes a nuanced and delicious history of the great (culinary) migration and the “hash-eaters,” “cabbage-shavers” and “rag-pickers” involved.

Specifically, Ziegelman uses four New York families (the Glockners, Gumpertz, Moores and Baldizzis) to anchor her history of immigrant cuisine. While an elephantine work like Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” details the social and political history of four decades of Jewish immigrants, Ziegelman’s nimble book instead peers into the disregarded mysteries of the immigrant stewpot.

For Ziegelman, the story of corned beef, Jewish delis, German beer halls, and sprawling Italian dinners simply illustrated a larger point — that for the 30 million European immigrants who came to America after 1820, food was “a medium to express who they were and who they wanted to become.”

The book is a bright and light introduction to America’s immigrant history, a tasty stew including savory and lesser-known recipes, Ellis Island’s menu, passages by obscure novelists, food critics, middle-class “slummers,” incisive cartoons, and the Tenement Museum’s collected family photographs, all seasoned with intriguing facts:

Did you know that Irish escaping the Great Hunger would never have seen corned beef and hash? Or that in the inferno of East Side pushcart markets one could buy anything from bear to moose snout? Or that Italian male slum dwellers, on average, ate 19 pounds of macaroni a month?

I think the author made a mistake in omitting a discussion of the mid-19th-century’s under-regulated food industry and the consequent malnutrition and infant mortality rate among the poor. But that mistake was one of very few in this delicious book.

Brett Warnke ( brettwarnke@gmail.com) is a freelance journalist who lives in Providence.

Brett Warnke's Providence Journal Review of Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II

By Brett Warnke

(Published in Providence Journal Sept. 16, 2010)

CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II,

by Madhusree Mukerjee.
Basic Books. 319 pages. $29.95.

When Prime Minsiter Clement Attlee was asked what his predecessor Winston Churchill had done to win the war, Attlee coldly said, "Talk about it."

Churchill indeed talked about it in his own version of history. But he was more than talk. He enticed an isolated America ever closer to a European war. He also relished the role of the warrior poet. The enduring image of an undaunted bulldog lording over London's urban rubble -- the eloquent old scrapper enjoying his own tryst with destiny -- caught the heart of a generation.

The best polemic to burn off this mythical fog is "The Medals of His Defeats" by Christopher Hitchens, while perhaps the most interesting book (I haven't read Richard Toye's new "Churchill's Empire") is David Reynolds "In Command of History." These along with Madhusree Mukerjee's new book, "Churchill's Secret War," give the contemporary reader an unvarnished new view of the engineer of America's "special relationship."

Mukerjee has written a book about an appalling, little known famine in Bengal, which unfolded during the final hours of the British Raj. Mukerjee's book is not a polemic but a clearly written and well-researched study. She explores the incompetence and cruelty of the Raj, especially the divide-and-rule strategy (which sliced the subcontinent in two) and the engineered degeneration of India from breadbasket into basketcase.

What the reader learns is that Churchill was not only "irrational" about India (as his closest advisers repeat in their memoirs) but that he used disturbing, racist language when pushed on the subject of Britain's empire. Churchill allowed his nostalgia for a bygone empire, a reactionary quack like his nefarious adviser Lord Cherwell, and his own ego to shape policies that led directly to the starvation of millions of Bengalis.

With precision and detail, Mukerjee takes the reader from the cold numbers -- the millions of tons of grain exported out of India -- to the food-bare villages of 1943 Bengal. What unfolds in chapters like "In the Village" seems less history and more Cormac McCarthy as peasant families, half-wild with hunger, desperately and often hopelessly struggle to survive.

Mukerjee writes with a careful hand, avoiding an easily dismissible rant and smartly allowing Churchill's closest advisors to color in the dark details. What the reader finds is a tale of deadly neglect and, Mukerjee would argue, intentional terror. She details the secret alliances, shady deals, imperial incompetence, and cynicism that led to hoarding and ultimately to catastrophe.

Brett Warnke (brettwarnke@gmail.com) is a freelance writer in Providence.

Brett Warnke Providence Journal Review of "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers"

The Party by Richard McGregor

By Brett Warnke

When my friend Jen Jen drove me past Beijing’s Tiananmen Square I was unsure where we were going. She was a college friend but also a “princeling,” one of the Party’s privileged elite. In New England, there is “old money,” and in China there is “old Party.” Her grandfather, Hua Guofeng, had been Mao’s immediate and short-lived successor (1976-1980). What couldn’t Jen Jen get away with, I thought, when her grandpa was once called “Chairman Hua”? She drove her sleek Honda into Zhongnanhai—a central and secretive Party leadership compound near the Forbidden City. The walls were high and guarded and the homes were gray but elegant. I clearly remember a sentinel with an assault weapon standing outside her home. Jen Jen dismissively told him I was a friend as she ran inside to get a scarf. He flashed a light my way, leering at me like a hungry owl. How long, I thought, would Party members in Zhongnanhai hold sway with soldiers like this and thus, control China’s monopoly of violence? Would this Central Guard, issued to all internal Party members, support the Politburo leaders until the end or would he, like the forces in the Shah’s SAVAK, the Tsar’s Okhrana, Honecker’s Stasi, disappear into the crowd upon the regime’s collapse?

The longevity and resourcefulness of the Communist Party is the subject of “The Party,” Financial Times journalist Richard McGregor’s revealing new book about China’s shadowy leadership. McGregor warns us in the prologue that the book “has no pretence to being comprehensive or definitive.” Yet, the scale and interest of McGregor’s interviews—most interestingly with progressive activists—as well as the many secrets he reveals about the Party’s self-serving maneuvers, tactics, and actions, renders this an important book.

             To MacGregor the Party is a “colossus”, a “secretive hulk”, a “grand puppeteer”, a “Board of Directors”, a “panapticon”, a “consensus,” a “sinuous, cynical and adaptive beast.” It is an unelected cabal of apparatchicks as secretive as the Vatican who operate in unmarked buildings, speak on red Party-only phones, and live along a political knife-edge. 

To outsiders the Party seems a gray, stony fixture of Chinese society. But MacGregor reveals—like David Shambaugh’s Atrophy and Adaptability—the struggles of the world’s most insecure leadership. The Party dips its toes into every sector of society and culture to maintain its relevance. “You call it interference,” an official tells McGregor, “We call it leadership.” But its Leninist leadership—corrupt, authoritarian, nepotistic, inefficient, extra-legal, and top-heavy.

The thirty years of opening markets, initiated by the wily reformer Deng Xiaoping, has sustained the Party and doubled China’s economy every eight years. But Deng also led the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen. MacGregor falls short in explaining the reasons for the brutal backlash. He doesn’t even mention Chairman Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao jailed and essentially killed during the Cultural Revolution. Mao and the history of his radicalism were a dagger pointed at reformers throats. The history of the Great Helsman’s mid-century convulsions—which MacGregor deftly details—as well as the state-socialist failure of the USSR showed how far China could devolve and how weak the Party could be. Never again, seems the unspoken Party slogan.

(Appeared in Providence Journal on Aug. 27, 2010)