Books

MITCHELL’S GET:

The Poetry of Fact: On Alec Wilkinson’s Moonshine (Padgett Powell May 16, 2024, Paris Review)

The quantity and quality of consternation caused me by the publication of Alec Wilkinson’s Moonshine in 1985 is difficult to articulate. This utterance should prove probative. If we are in a foreword, an afterword, or perhaps ideally a middleword, we will shortly be in a model of muddle at the very end of the clarity spectrum away from Moonshine itself, with its amber lucidity, as someone said of the prose of someone, sometime, maybe of Beckett, maybe of Virgil, who knows, throw it into the muddle. The consternation caused me by this book is even starker next to the delight of reading the book itself before the personal accidents of my response are figured in. I will essay to detail those accidents, but I would like to first say something about the method of the writing.

Alec Wilkinson is one of two literary grandsons of Joseph Mitchell, the grandfather of the poetry of fact. “The poetry of fact” is a phrase I momentarily fancied I coined, but the second literary grandson of Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, corrected me, and I have assented to his claim that he coined the phrase. One’s vanities are silly and dangerous. It is a vanity to think to say there are but two grandsons of Joseph Mitchell as well. There are doubtless dozens and, of course, granddaughters, too; what I mean is that Alec Wilkinson and Ian Frazier are the grandsons with whom I am most familiar, and most fond, and so it is convenient to sloppily say they are it.

What is the poetry of fact? Good question. Since I am not the coiner of the term and, at best, a dilettante in its practice, I may be excused, I hope, if my answer is wanting, but I vow to do my best. I, alas, have brought it up. When the justice of the peace who conducted my marriage, Judge Leonard Hentz of Sealy, Texas, asked if anyone objected to the imminent union, he looked up and said, of our sole witness, “Well, hell, he’s the only one here, and y’all brought him, so let’s get on with it.”

The poetry of fact is the ordering for power of empirical facts, historical facts, narrative elements, objects, dialogues, clauses, phrases, words—it is the construction of catalogues of things large or small into arrays of power. The power of the utterance is the point. The preferred mode of delivery is the declarative sentence, simple or compound, without subordination or dependent clauses—without what Mr. Frazier has called “riders.” Power in this instance—in any writing, really—is to be understood as a function of where things are placed. The end of a series or sequence or catalogue or paragraph or chapter or essay or book is the position of what we will call primary thrust. It is what will linger in the brain uppermost because it is lattermost. The beginning of an array, large or small, is the position of secondary thrust: the “first impression” that gets lost but never quite recedes. The middle of an array is the tertiary thrust—the middle gets lost in the middle, ordinarily. This is the middle’s job. Games can be played with these positions of emphasis. A sockdolager, to employ Twain, can be buried in the middle where, because it is a sockdolager, it is not exactly buried and may constitute a surprise. The emphatic middle, let us call it, installs an irony, raises an eyebrow whether anyone realizes it or not. An “unemphatic” end also installs an eyebrow. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is onto but the very tip of this iceberg with its Elementary Principles of Composition #18: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” Were it “The words at the end of a sentence are emphatic,” they’d have been closer to the nuanced complexity of the poetry of fact, but let’s move on.

THE ODYSSEY:

My Mysterious Search for J.D. Salinger: An obsessive (if strange) pilgrimage to the late author’s New Hampshire sanctuary, where, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of one man hiding. (Ron Rosenbaum, Jan 28, 2010, Esquire)

There’s a line in Mao II, Don DeLillo’s novel about a Salinger-like reclusive writer who wonders: Why are so many so obsessed with my invisibility, my hiddenness, my absence?

“When a writer doesn’t show his face,” he answers himself, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

The silence of a writer is not the same as the silence of God, but there’s something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation. The problem, the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer (indifferent to our questions, indifferent to the publicity-industrial complex so many serve), is the literary equivalent of the problem of theodicy, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problem of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.

And when a writer won’t break his silence, we think of ways to break into it. We think of knocking on his door or leaving messages in his mailbox.

S.’s two mailboxes beckoned to me as I stood at the bottom of his driveway.

UTTER TRUTHS:

Do You Know What an Odyssey Is? (Eva Brann, opening lecture for the Honors Program at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington in September, 1993)

Let me tell you what I think about Odysseus’s odyssey. Ask yourself first who its author is. Who is the poet of the odyssey? Is it Homer? Well yes, in some way. But actually it is Odysseus, it is Odysseus who takes the place of the palace-poet in Phaeacia and who tells the story of his adventures there. He is the true teller and poet of his odyssey.

Now there is something we know about this hero: he is a habitual and practiced liar. Wherever he turns up, he tells lying tales. Homer calls them that—”lying tales.” He tells various people, his honest servant Eumaius, his faithful wife Penelope and others, a lot of partial stories about his travels, stories quite different from the grand odyssey he tells those artistic folk, the Phaeacians. His very own goddess Athena encourages him in this rather peculiar tale-telling. Imagine the scene. It happens right after the crew of the magically instantaneous Phaeacian ship has left Odysseus in a deep sleep on the shore of his home Ithaca, together with a heap of loot. He awakes to find that for the first time in decades his own goddess is visibly with him. Here is Athena herself, handsome and tall, the embodiment of all the true womanly virtues, for she is warlike, cunning, and wise. She all but makes love to her protegé. She strokes his cheek and says: “A man would have to be really guileful and rascally to out do you in all sorts of trickery.” She goes on like that for a while in her pleasure with him. He really is an olympic-class liar.

Now what lies has he been telling, according to Homer? He tells all and sundry that he has been here and there, to Crete, to Syria, to Egypt, as a brigand and merchant mariner. What else would an impoverished hero, having wasted ten years of his life to sack one small citadel, do on his way home from Turkey? Of course he would circulate in the Aegean sea, stealing or trading so as not to come home empty-handed. All the Greeks did it on their return trip from Troy.

So here is my interpretation of Odysseus’s odyssey. See if you believe me—it’s pure speculation. I think Odysseus’s lying tales, the supposedly made-up stories he keeps telling, are the simple fact. Of course he went to Crete and Syria and Egypt to accumulate wealth by various peaceful and violent means. What else would he have been doing in the ten years he takes to get home? He is, I say, telling simple facts.

Then what of the wonderful and fantastic adventures that form the odyssey he tells in Phaeacia, the journey that gives its name to the poem? They are not the simple fact. They are instead the utter truth.

This very thing must have happened to you: You go to a place. Certain prosaic things occur, ordinary external factual occurrences. But your trip also has an inward significance: you learn something about yourself or about others; you see the ordinary things in a larger, perhaps in a magical perspective. This view of events, this vision, is the truth of the trip. The mere facts are a kind of correct non-truth.

Here is how it happens to Odysseus. He comes to a place, probably Egypt, where the inhabitants eat the lotus flower, which apparently contains a drug. We know from their frescoes that the Egyptians sniffed lotus flowers at parties. You may have done something like that yourself. Odysseus, a man of independent vitality and imagination, does not join his crew in indulging in this mind-altering activity, and eventually he has to extricate them by force from their spaced-out stupor. This mundane, all-too-factual episode becomes the true mythic adventure of the lotus eaters in Odysseus’ odyssey.

Another time he and his crew come to an island bordello. His men are quite ready to make pigs of themselves. Not he; in fact he masters the madam of this house. The mythic truth of this episode collides out in the adventure on Circe’s Island, where a seductive sorceress turns his crew into a herd of grunting beasts, while he retains his manhood.

In mathematics books there is often an irritating but well-meaning sentence: “The rest of the proof is left to the reader.” I am leaving the rest of this proof, the other ten adventures, to you to interpret.

If there is any sense in what I am saying, Homer will introduce into your intellects and imaginations to what may be a new notion: the distinction between brute, but somehow mendacious, fact and fantastic, but significant, truth. His poem will serve for you as the first and probably the grandest example of the poet’s function, which is to turn mere life into meaningful myth.

The second answer then to the question “Do you know what an odyssey is?” will be: It is that telling of an episode in a human life that gives its incidents magic and meaning.

PHILADELPHIA:

A Singular Dream: Huck Finn’s America Turns 250 (Cassandra Nelson, June 30, 2026, Religion & Liberty)

Violence in the novel stems from any number of motivations: institutionalized racism, aristocratic family feuds, an abusive parent’s perverse envy of their child, squabbles among thieves and outlaws over money and honor, and the kind of guilty, hangdog groupthink that makes a mob want to preemptively shoot someone “in the back, in the dark” before they can themselves be shot, since that sort of cowardly attack is “just what they would do.”

Though Huck chafes against the strictures of civilization, the starched collars and lengthy Sunday morning homilies that keep him from moving as freely as he’d like, Morrison correctly perceived that he is “running not from external control but from external chaos. Nothing in society makes sense; all is in peril.”

Our own civic moment, alas, feels similarly fraught.

When society is as likely to harm as to help, the crux of the novel becomes what—or rather who—can provide emotional security and physical safety for Huck on his journey. Nature provides some relief, but not much. More than once, thunderstorms, strong river currents, and gigantic steamboats threaten to (or actually do) destroy Huck’s raft.

Freedom and peace emerge not from the river or the rambling life per se but from the benevolent actions of good people.

Most famously, Huck finds solace and companionship in Jim, a runaway slave. Though neither man is legally in control of his own fate—Huck because he has not yet reached the age of majority and Jim because of the color of his skin—each recovers a sense of agency and worth by caring for the other. They are separated and reunited more than once on their meandering journey. Each time, their joy and relief upon reuniting is palpable: “It was Jim’s voice—nothing ever sounded so good before.”

All great stories tell of the friendship among men.

NOMAN IS [NOT] AN ISLAND(ER):

The 25-year odyssey to prove Homer’s kingdom was not an island (Emily Prescott, July 04 2026, Times uk)

So Bittlestone spent an afternoon and evening in Diggle’s college rooms laying out his theory. By midnight Diggle asked to sleep on it. “By the next morning, I was able to email him and say, ‘I slept on this and this is absolutely brilliant and we must pursue it.’”

Bittlestone had noticed that Homer’s highly detailed geographic descriptions in the Odyssey could not be reconciled with modern-day Ithaki. For instance, Homer states that Ithaca was the furthest west of three islands and the furthest out to sea. Modern Ithaki is the closest to the Greek mainland and the furthest east.

Homer describes Odysseus’s home as low-lying. Modern Ithaki is mountainous.

Bittlestone argued that the Paliki peninsula on the next-door island of Kefalonia perfectly matched Homer’s descriptions. It faces the sea, is the furthest west, and is low-lying. There was only one problem: Paliki is a peninsula, and everyone “knew” Ithaca was an island.

To solve this, Bittlestone theorised that during the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BC — the era of the Trojan War — Paliki was separated from the rest of Kefalonia by a marine channel. Because Kefalonia sits directly over two tectonic plates, Bittlestone suggested that massive earthquake-induced rockfalls had eventually filled the channel in, turning the island into a peninsula.

Next Bittlestone approached Professor John Underhill, a geoscientist. Underhill said: “Robert called me and started the conversation by saying: ‘I’m not a crank,’ and when you hear that you think: ‘Oh my word …’ He’d found my PhD based on the geology of western Greece via Google and introduced me to the project.”

SOLITUDE IS NOT A MIRACLE:

The Incredible Buddha Boy: A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? George Saunders went to find out. (George Saunders, May 7, 2006, GQ)

Austrian Airlines is big on hot rolls. Red-clad flight attendants continually tout their hot rolls in the accents of many nations, including, one feels, nations that haven’t actually been founded yet. (“Hod roolz?” “Hat rahls?” “Hoot rowls?”) The in-flight safety video is troubling: It’s animated and features a Sims-like guy with what looks like a skinless, skeletal death’s-head who keeps turning to leer at a slim Sims lady who keeps looking away, alarmed, while trying to get her long legs tucked away somewhere so Death can’t see them. Later she slides down the emergency slide, holding a Sims baby, Death still pursuing her.

Ancient Mariner-style, my seatmate, a Kosovar, tells me about a Serbian paramilitary group called the Black Hand that left a childhood friend of his on a hillside, “cut into tiny pieces.” During the occupation, he says, the Serbs often killed babies in front of their parents. He is kindly, polite, awed by the horrible things he’s seen, grateful that, as an American citizen, he no longer has to worry about murdered babies or hacked-up friends, except, it would appear, in memory, constantly.

Story told, he goes off to sleep.

But I can’t. I’m too uncomfortable. I’m mad at myself for eating two roolz during the last Round of Roolz, roolz that seem to have instantaneously made my pants tighter. I’ve already read all my books and magazines, already stood looking out the little window in the flight-attendant area, already complimented a severe blond flight attendant on Austrian Airlines’ excellent service, which elicited an oddly Austrian reaction: She immediately seemed to find me reprehensible and weak.

On the bright side, only six more hours on this plane, then two hours in the Vienna airport and an eight-hour flight to Katmandu.

I decide to close my eyes and sit motionless, to make the time pass.

Somebody slides up their window shade and, feeling the change in light on my eyelids, I am filled with sudden curiosity: Has the shade really been lifted? By someone? Gosh, who was it? What did they look like? What were they trying to accomplish by lifting the shade? I badly want to open my eyes and confirm that a shade has indeed been lifted, by someone, for some purpose. Then I notice a sore patch on the tip of my tongue and feel a strong desire to interrupt my experiment to record the interesting sore-tongue observation in my notebook. Then I begin having Restless Leg Syndrome, Restless Arm Syndrome, and even a little Restless Neck Syndrome. Gosh, am I thirsty. Boy, is my breath going to be bad when this stupid experiment is over. I imagine a waterfall of minty water flowing into my mouth, a waterfall that does not have to be requested via the stern flight attendant but just comes on automatically when I press a button on the overhead console marked MINTY WATER.

The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terrified man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure and Thus Perfect Nation—and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satisfied.

I know this. But still I’m full of desire. I want my legs to stop hurting. I want something to drink. I even kind of want another hot roll.

Seven months, I think? The kid has been sitting there seven months?

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES:

The Anti-Fascist Fabulist: Curzio Malaparte’s prose blended fact inextricably with fiction, reality with dream. (Brian Patrick Eha, Spring 2026, City Journal)

Is there a right way to witness history? Asked to name famous examples from the last century, I should think first of George Orwell shouldering a rifle alongside ill-equipped Spanish partisans, James Agee reverently cataloging the meager contents of sharecroppers’ homes, and Robert Capa clambering ashore at Normandy with his camera alongside soldiers of the Fighting First, from which ordeal only 11 blurred snapshots survived, showing those about to die already ghostlike in his lens. Percipience is a must; and above other traits, we have tended to want our witnesses to history—especially the bad side of history—to be humane. What are we to make, then, of a war correspondent, a writer of real courage, who saw more clearly and comprehensively than almost anyone else, yet who was only intermittently interested in the lives (especially the inner lives) of others? A man who cultivated a brutal dictator as his father figure; who was attracted to blood, and perhaps more fascinated than appalled by many of the horrors he bore witness to; and whose putative masterpiece contains, in its author’s own words, “nothing but soldiers, corpses, dogs, sunflowers, horses, and clouds”? A chameleon who veered from fervent Fascism in 1920s Italy to avowed anti-Fascism after the war, remaining an incorrigible fabulist all the while: Could such a figure possibly be a valuable, not to say a reliable, witness? What are we to make of the mercurial, controversial, egotistical Curzio Malaparte?