“It was a dark, stormy night”, Snoopy begins his novel, but Lucy, this precocious critic, intervenes and tells him that all good stories start with “Once upon a time”. Snoopy, as docile as he is obedient, rewrites his story: “Once upon a time there was a dark, stormy night …”, but he does not get any further.
The requirement that the beginning decide on the whole of the following story, namely whether the reader lets himself be captivated by it or not, occupies a similar fat truism as Snoopy’s first sentence. The author, Snoopys Stocken shows, is not doing any better: The first sentence can immediately throw him off the beaten track, make him crash or at least mislead him and the reader along with the reader. Educated colleagues refer to St. Franz Kafka, who with his sentence “Followed the ringing of the night bell once – it can never be repaired” evoked disaster a hundred years ago. Of course, Kafka’s sentence does not appear until the end of his story “Der Landarzt”.
She does everything that the manual of magazine journalism by Wolf Relotius and Claas Schneider recommends
One of the obituaries for the recently deceased American reporter Janet Malcolm also recalled her famous story “Forty-One False Starts”, published in 1994 in New Yorker, a portrait of the painter David Salle, which consists of 41 apparently unsuccessful attempts to draw this portrait. Malcolm tries to approach the person to be described from the outside (how else?), Describes hair and face, describes apartment, studio, neighborhood, mentions a well-known girlfriend, quotes sentences that Salle utters, so does everything that that Handbook of magazine journalism by Wolf Relotius and Claas Schneider recommends, and still doesn’t get the story round.
The American artist David Salle at a press conference in Hanover in 2009 on the occasion of his exhibition “Distance from Nowhere”.
(Photo: Jochen Lübke / picture-alliance / dpa)
She tries (1) with the setting, so on the way to Salle’s New York studio she traverses an “almost transcendent misery”, she tries (11) with biographical information that doesn’t reveal much (“Grew up in Wichita, Kansas, Jewish Family, rather poor, had art lessons as a child, attended an academy in California, came to New York and became rich and famous overnight “) and she tries (8) with art-historical and art market-appropriate classification when she asserts with lexical simplicity: “David Salle is considered the leading postmodern painter in the United States.”
That would be enough for an intertitle, if necessary also for a subline, but was no longer the case in 1994, because the subject of all 41 false starts, the subject that torments the painter extensively, is his loss of reputation, his falling market value and the fear of the younger ones are already more valid than him. Janet Malcolm, who visibly admires Salle and still wants to do him justice, has falsified her own superlative a few lines beforehand when she says in a sigh (7), “Salle’s pictures are like bad parodies of the Freudian unconscious”.
Malcolm’s report must appear like the document of a monumental failure before the artist and the work
The painter is an estimated one and a half price brackets above theirs, but relies on such poor admirers to write him up for the rich clientele. Malcolm’s report must therefore appear like the document of a monumental failure in front of the artist and the work, and yet it is an apotheosis that no artist could wish for more beautifully. It is no coincidence that the journalist discusses the subject of the report about the “loser” and the question of whether his author, Thomas Bernhard, is boring or not. In any case, it’s not your story, even though it has nearly forty typewritten pages, which is only a magazine like that new Yorker coped with, which not only made John Updike and JD Salinger famous, but also less catchy authors such as Renata Adler and Donald Barthelme.
With Janet Malcolm, Salle does not have to serve freshly brewed coffee, sit at a self-made wooden table and live in a house full of books or appear for an interview with an ecologically valuable bicycle, as the snoopy-like journalistic set pieces usually sound, but can indulge in extensive deliberations, in which the author takes a lively part.
The report has nothing that magazines could use to label an expensively purchased series of photos, the author herself is much too prominent in front of the photos for that. But there is the moment of embarrassment that characterizes great texts. Janet Malcolm brings her own collages one day (30), supposedly to have Salle explain his collage technique to her, but has to admit that she wanted to be praised by him. They both hunger for recognition.
Salle has to defend himself against the accusation (17) that he paints too quickly. Every artist, regardless of whether he writes or paints, generalized Malcolm from her experience, would defend something and defend himself: “I defend myself that I do not work fast enough.” In fact, it took her several years for the “41 false starts”, repeatedly visiting the studio, talking to David Salle about his work, listening to his complaints about disapproving critics, and rebuking herself as “left-wing, puritanical” (3) when she turns up his nose at his dearly bought furnishings.
Such a long story needs a plot (the narrative was not invented in 1994)
At one point she seems to bend to convention, it’s as if an editor-in-chief’s superego is demanding: Such a long story needs a plot (the narrative was not invented in 1994)! Malcolm bravely began this attempt (34) with the fact that Salle was slender, good-looking, and wore her long hair tied up in a braid, but now she demands action. Salle, not completely unwilling, asks what she imagines: “Something should happen. A little was already – I was in your studio, in your apartment, after the presentation of your drawings and at dinner, but I want more. “
Perhaps Malcolm is thinking of the worst VanGoghism with apprehensive ear and all, and he wasn’t that too action painting invented in a New York loft? She actually wants to watch him paint, which even with the naked eye looks like the greatest indiscretion to be expected. Luckily Salle dissuades them from the idea, instead they visit an exhibition by Lucian Freud and discuss how good this Freud is when he is bad.
“Anyone who writes about the painter David Salle sees himself pushed into a kind of parody of his melancholy art of fragments, quotations and omissions,” says the 40th attempt. The gradual creation of the portrait while avoiding a portrait has not become a parody, but the best conceivable approach to the painter. If they haven’t seen each other for a while, Malcolm fears that he might like him too much and therefore turns away from him while writing, only to fall for him again every time they meet. She compares their subsequent hardening against him with his painting technique, when he disfigures the softer figures with which he initially covers the canvas by overdrawing and robs them of what is overly pleasing.
A first sentence (the 30th false start) could also be the last: “I regularly visited the artist David Salle in his studio to learn something from him about the mystery of art.” The riddle of art unfortunately remains unsolved, but a unique report has been created about the whole riddle, but with an invisible warning: “Don’t imitate. It only happened once, it won’t work again.”