The New Yorker & Me: Pauline Kael

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Pauline Kael

This may strike some people as strange, but I still read Pauline Kael - not for her opinions, but for the sheer pleasure of her writing. In a Foreword to Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), William Shawn says, “Her opinions are forceful, convincing, often unexpected, but whether or not one agrees with them one comes away from her writings in a state of exhilaration.” As part of this blog’s ongoing narrative, I want to explore the bliss of Kael’s writing. Today, I begin with a look at a sentence I have chosen for its combinational delight. It’s from her “In Brief” review of Phantom of the Paradise (collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies): “The singer, Beef, is played by Gerrit Graham, who gives the single funniest performance; Harold Oblong, Jeffrey Comanor, and Archie Hahn turn up as three different groups – the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, and, with black-and-white expressionist faces, the Undeads.” I find the syntax of this sentence delicious. And the names it contains – Beef, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, the Undeads - are wonderfully surreal. But it’s the little tucked-in loop “with black-and-white expressionist faces” that’s pure Kael. Her style is, first and foremost, descriptive. Interestingly, if you look for this sentence in the full-length review (“Spieler,” The New Yorker, November 11, 1974), you will find only the part that comes after the semi-colon. And if you look for it in the shortened version of “Spieler” collected in Kael’s For Keeps (1994), you will not find it at all.