The Brooklyn Rail

This is a remarkable book. The Edge of the Table is—no better word for it—original in both its ambition and scope. I could rest content with that simple assertion, and then the imperative: “Read it.” But it’s my welcome task to write a little more about the nature of the challenge Michael Fried has set himself, and the success of his attempt to meet that challenge: a collection of prose poems.

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, when writing of the distinction between art and science as discussed in the novels of C. P. Snow, that the difference between the two disciplines is “A mere dimple of a ditch that a small frog could straddle.” Something of the same might be said of the distance between those seemingly disparate modes, poetry and prose. The “prose poem” is a form that both embodies and exemplifies Nabokov’s brave assertion: why should the terms be separate, not conjoined? The similarities of the genres are at least as consequential as the differences, as any language-lover will attest. To justify the right-hand margin is not to insist that a work must be prose; to honor line-breaks, as do poets, is not to insist that a work has no narrative through-line. And what Michael Fried does here, page after page, is to profit from both borders of that “dimple of a ditch.”

His is a much-honored form albeit rarely practiced. In our time, I think it safe to say, a number of prose writers have attempted the “short short” story—think of Charles Baxter, Stuart Dybek or Jamaica Kincaid. And poets from Charles Baudelaire to C. K. Williams have routinely deployed “long lines.” Baudelaire, indeed, might plausibly be described as the father of the genre, and Fried writes of him with “awe mixed with envy—(ratio one to one).” But this sustained endeavor, from a writer routinely described as an “art critic,” is nearly sui generis and should be treated as such.

In The Edge of the Table, Fried includes the following description of the form of “The Prose Poem”:

The medium of the prose poem is thought. In words, naturally, but words alone, no matter how carefully chosen and artfully arranged, can’t summon the magic. The reader must be made to feel, to register in mind and nerves, that motivating the sentences (the basic unit of the genre) and their succession across the page (every juncture is crucial, every point of punctuation) is an impetus of intellection that otherwise would have no proper home in the world. Alliteration and off-rhyme have roles to play. Parentheses especially are a powerful resource. Changes of direction from sentence to sentence are sanctioned. As with lyric poems, maybe more so, endings matter a lot. And overarching the whole an ideal of aesthetic perfection that, true to kind, resists further analysis. Once again, all honor to the French nineteenth century, which saw its chance and seized it.

Fried’s previous book, Promesse du Bonheur, was a sustained collaboration with the photographer James Welling. (This new collection too includes a selection of Welling’s photograms, at telling intervals.) The Edge of the Table is a sort of summing up—roughly 240 prose poems written over the past three or four years. Yet it’s part of an even larger enterprise, the tripartite publication of Fried’s selected essays and interviews alongside his poems, issued by Eris Press in the UK and Columbia University Press in the United States.

Fried writes of writers throughout (Stephen Crane, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert among them) and of philosophers and literary critics (Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Fish, for instance) but the principal engagement here is with the work of visual artists. Frank Stella and Anthony Caro are perhaps the most frequently cited of the painters and sculptors this writer called friends. The past tense—called—predominates, though some of the entries take place in the present and are, in effect, obituaries. This book is elegiac as well as life-affirming, and many of the entries deal with mortality and diminished agility in old age; the author’s feet have given out on him, and the world traveler is now a stay-at-home. Place-names abound, as do the memory of trips taken when young; in more recent years, neuropathy keeps Fried from tennis and rambling. Of “A Family Portrait by Goya,” he writes, “I ask myself why I have described this remarkable canvas in such detail, and I conclude that it is because I will never again have the chance to stand before it in silence.”

A brief entry, “Blue Ropes,” describes all this succinctly:

He turns eighty and his muscle mass, until then pretty much intact, begins to dissipate. Almost overnight he assumes the body of an old man, the veins in his hands and arms become slender blue ropes even as less blood pulses through them than ever before. An acute friend to whom he shows these sentences wonders whether he might step back and enlarge their scope. If only.

The bulk of The Edge of the Table is an effort to “enlarge their scope,” and the bulk of the entries succeed. Fried’s perceptions dazzle; as an art critic he’s both austere, enthusiastic, and blessedly free of jargon. A trio of discussions of John Constable, Nicolas Poussin, and Paul Cezanne, for instance, have the reader replicate the artist’s creative endeavor. Here’s Fried on a painting by Édouard Manet (A Bar at the Folies-Bergère [1882]) that shifts the way we see the canvas “—using reality as a springboard to call reality into question, suspending or rather transcending it before our eyes.”

These prose poems sometimes seem like mini-essays, well beyond a page in length, and, on occasion, over-stuffed. There are names not so much dropped as included, a who’s who of contemporary aesthetics, and the reader feels at times like a fly on the wall of a gathering to which he hasn’t been invited. But more often Fried’s asides are illuminating and on-point, as in his description of the formal exigencies of French verse:

It took forever for me to develop a feel for French prosody, specifically the alexandrine, the basic twelve-syllable line, with its concentration on the syllables themselves, their intrinsic weight, speed, force, luminosity, and linkage with one another (or lack of it, an equally crucial quality), rather than the stresses, the vocal emphases, as in English or American poetry. And its caesuras, sometimes obvious, other times to a foreign ear not so much. Not to mention the elision between mute “e”s and successor vowels within the line. And masculine versus feminine line-endings.

So here we have a hybrid form, a kind of journal or pensées composed in lucid prose. Or, as he writes in a piece about a conversation with Caro, which offers Fried his title and deals with the issue of size: “The solution to the problem is to run at least one element in a given piece off the edge of the table. Then the viewer couldn’t even imagine the piece on the ground.” Caro himself was wondering how best to fashion small-scale sculpture, but Fried offers a concise description of his present project itself. His long grapple with the work of words has long included poetry, of which he writes in an interview:

It’s not something I’m really in control of … I find it very easy and straightforward to write critical or art historical prose. I just sit down and I’m clear in my head about what I want to say. Poetry is much more a question of inspiration and there are times when it starts to come. The one rule I have in my life has been that when that happens, when I think I can do it, I drop everything else. I mean everything. When I was teaching and had to cut a class, I would cut a class. That was my priority.

One antecedent of Fried’s project, perhaps, is a book written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who functioned in Paris as a sort of secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, published in 1910, is Rilke’s version of a novel but organized by close focus on Rodin’s artistic process—how a viewer must study the surface of things in order to enter their depths. It advances by adjacency and a kind of indirection rather more than sequence; so does The Edge of the Table. The contemporary moment (and the author’s horrified response to contemporary savagery) comes turn by turn adjacent to a memory of youthful pleasure in a world elsewhere. Fried writes of places and people and paintings that form part of his own history as witness—an episodic narrative that’s an inward-facing meditation on the nature of the self. Often he refers to more than sixty years spent with his wife Ruth Leys; often he celebrates the great good luck of having done so.

We readers can describe ourselves in much the same way; to spend time with these prose poems is to be instructed and enlarged.