October 24, 2011 Issue

What to make of Nathan Heller’s Pauline Kael piece (“What She Said”) in this week’s issue? I confess I didn’t much like it. Here are eight reasons why:

1. Heller reduces Kael’s thinking to the level of “whimsical taste.” He says, “from the time she wrote her first review until the moment she retired, in 1991, her authority as a critic relied solely on her own, occasionally whimsical taste.” He says that she flaunted intuition “in the face of formalism,“ and that “She was dowsing for film classics with her nervous system.” Intuition,” “taste,” and “ dowsing with her nervous system” do not do justice to Kael’s approach. Each of her reviews is an unfolding of thought. Did she have an interpretive or ideological a priori? Yes and no. She wasn’t locked into a system the way, say, a Freudian or Marxist critic is. But there are theories implicit in her criticism. Her love of “open form,” for example, governs her aesthetic response. And her great essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (included in her 1970 collection Going Steady), develops “the simple good distinction” that she repeatedly applied in her criticism: “all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art.” Heller, in his piece, fails to mention “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

2. Heller asserts that “the fifteen-year stretch between 1964 and 1979” is “when Kael wrote almost all the reviews on which her reputation rests.” Even though he’s saying “almost,” he’s still leaving the impression that the writing Kael did between 1980 and February 11, 1991, when she wrote her last review, is of secondary importance. I disagree. In that eleven-year period, Kael produced four brilliant collections: Taking It All In (1984), State of the Art (1985), Hooked (1989), and Movie Love (1991). Also, in 1982, the first edition of her magnificent 5001 Nights at the Movies was published. It’s a collection of several thousand capsule reviews she did for The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” department. In the foreword to 5001 Nights at the Movies, William Shawn says:

A master of synopsis, Pauline Kael has contrived to tell us between the covers of one book what eight decades of film are about and who is in them and behind them, and to reflect, swiftly but astutely, on what they signify. No one else has done that; no one else could have done that.

Heller, in his piece, fails to mention 5001 Nights at the Movies.

3. Speaking of William Shawn, I was surprised to read in Heller’s article that, when Kael tried to return to The New Yorker, after spending less than a year working in Hollywood, “William Shawn balked.” Heller says, “One of her former editors prevailed on him, but the homecoming was awkward.” This is the same Shawn, who, three years later, writes in his Foreword to 5001 Nights at the Movies that “The originality of Pauline Kael’s mind and temperament, her formidable intelligence, her eloquent use of the vernacular, her extraordinary analytical powers, her insight into character, her ability to shed light wherever the real world intersects with the world on film, her enormous gift for social observation, the wit and energy and clarity of her prose all go into making her the singular critic she is.” In light of the foregoing, it’s hard to imagine Shawn passing up the opportunity to rehire Kael. Heller doesn’t disclose his source for the information that “William Shawn balked.” Perhaps it comes from Brian Kellow’s new biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. If so, he should’ve said so, rather than report it as established fact.

4. Heller says that Kael “had few qualms about blackballing young writers on her turf, and otherwise using her influence for ill.” This verges on slander, unless substantiated. Heller fails to do so. But he does indicate his source for this nasty tidbit: “In 1970, Kellow tells us, Kael conned a U.C.L.A. assistant professor, Howard Suber, out of publishing an essay on 'Citizen Kane': she promised a collaboration, vanished with Suber’s proprietary research, and ultimately used it for an extended piece of her own, 'Raising Kane' (1971).” This is absolutely the worst story I have ever heard told about Pauline Kael. I question whether it’s true. And so should Heller and The New Yorker question it. What was the nature of the promise? What proof is there of it? How “proprietary” was the research? What part, if any, did Kael use?

5. Heller uses the old, elitist High-Low structure to describe culture. At one point, he says, “The art and the criticism of the sixties were blurring the boundaries of high and low culture.” At another point, he says, “In truth, most of her early pursuits reached for higher cultural ground.” And at another, he says, “And when she started to write seriously about movies, much later, it was her passion for the high-art canon that helped set her bearings.” Kael was against High-Low distinctions. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies, she said, “Movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in movies, it is not found in a return to that official high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.” Heller is wrong. Kael didn’t have a “passion for the high-art canon.” She wanted that high-art canon overturned. Her passion was for “the subversive gesture.” That’s one of the reasons I admire her.

6. Heller claims that Kael “actively opposed” “many of the seventies’ classics.” He names three of them: The French Connection, Chinatown, and Manhattan. It’s true that she disliked The French Connection. She said, “It’s certainly exciting, but that excitement isn’t necessarily a pleasure.” But with regard to Chinatown, her opinion was mixed. She says, “It’s all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don’t care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look and a fascination.” That doesn’t sound like “active opposition” to me. Regarding Woody Allen’s Manhattan, she didn’t review it, not even in capsule form. In her review of Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, she refers to Manhattan as part of his “ongoing poem to love and New York City” (“Couples,” Hooked, 1989). Therefore, Heller is wrong with respect to two out of the three movies he says Kael “actively opposed.” And, contrary to what he says, there were many seventies’ classics that she praised, e.g., Last Tango in Paris, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, The Godfather, Part II, Nashville, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Deer Hunter.

7. Heller rarely quotes from Kael’s writing. And when he does, it’s not to celebrate her style, but to embarrass her reputation. For example, his quote from her Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid review is a bridge to a wretched anecdote in which George Roy Hill calls her a “miserable bitch” because she conveyed the impression (apparently wrong) that some of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s dialogue was taped in a studio. In his piece, Heller constantly tells us what Kael was doing, instead of showing us by adducing examples from her work: “She was constantly goading the industry to try harder, but dismissed pictures that seemed to try harder”; “She worried – and this is essentially an avant-garde worry – that audiences suckling a teat of cynicism and easy entertainment would lose their appetite for creative urgency”; “She reviewed many of these movies [late sixties’ films] with gusto”; “Kael didn’t just say, This is a bad movie because it fails to turn me on. Instead, she strung movies loosely together, as if mapping out the lines of tradition, and weather-tested them against a couple of things: authenticity of experience and the proved canon of noncimematic art.” Reading this stuff, I found myself thinking, For gods sake, Heller, shut up for a moment and let Kael speak. The same goes for his endless theorizing. “What She Said” is awash with airy theories, e.g., “Kael fell in love with writing about movies, because, unlike every other creative form at the time, they had no “tradition” from the audience’s point of view.” Really? James Agee was in the audience from 1941 to 1948, writing reviews for Time and The Nation. He and countless other moviegoers (including Kael, of course) had a very clear sense of movie tradition stretching back to Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and beyond. Kael fell in love with writing about movies because she loved writing and she loved movies. In the introduction to her wonderful For Keeps, she says, “As the seventies gave way to the eighties, the excitement I had earlier found in the movies gave way to the pleasure I found in writing.”

8. This brings me to my main complaint about Heller’s piece. He fails to see that it's Kael’s writing that accounts for her work’s endurance. He talks about how a lot of people today dream of lost opportunities, and he says, “Kael’s great achievement was to fight this way of thinking, to persuade her readers that work is always done with the machinery at hand.” Maybe that’s one of Kael’s achievements, but it’s not her greatest. Her greatest achievement was the creation of a style of writing that let you in on her thought processes as she wrote. Before she came along, no one did that. She was the first. Now, almost every critic writes that way, her way. She changed the way writers write (and think) about art. I yearn for a close, literary study of her work, one that considers her writing from the level of language, syntax, structure. Heller’s piece is just about as wide of the mark as you can get.

Postscript: Elif Batuman enriches this week’s issue with a cabinet-of-wonders piece titled “Natural Histories” that, in its combinative strangeness, its mixture of history, ecology, eco-poetry, wildlife, biology, literature, politics, travelogue, and memoir, is some sort of masterpiece. Its final two paragraphs are exquisite. Carolyn Drake's photograph is superb.

Ian Frazier: The Art of Figuration

Mark Doty, in his The Art of Description (2010), says that figurative speech is “one of the poet’s primary tools for conveying the texture of experience, and for inquiring into experience in search of meaning.” It’s one of the journalist’s primary tools, too. The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier is a consummate writer of figurative speech. Here are a dozen examples of his art:

While I was watching, only the ten semi-professional dancers danced, and on the street’s breadth, under the harsh mercury light, their weaving, unweaving, crossing, recrossing, exchanging, promenading, short-petticoat rustling, and boot-heel clicking seemed like an inexplicable organic structure on a microscope slide. (“Authentic Accounts of Massacres,” The New Yorker, March 19, 1979; included in Frazier’s 1997 collection Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody)

If you stop at night on one of the roads that mark the edge of this wilderness and listen, the accumulated silence of all that empty space will break around your ears like surf. (“Bear News,” The New Yorker, September 9, 1985; included in Frazier’s 1997 collection Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody)

Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for a while and then largely forgot about. (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

Beyond the roads were foothills, clear-cut of timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery. (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks. (“I – Great Plains,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1989; included in Frazier’s 1989 Great Plains)

As you approach, pigeons leap from the trash like flames. (“Canal Street,” The New Yorker, April 30, 1990; included in Frazier’s 2005 collection Gone To New York)

All around me, the summer landscape draped like a big hammock. (“Out Of Ohio,” The New Yorker, January 10, 2005; included in Frazier's 2005 collection Gone To New York)

Beneath the chinaberries their little purple blossoms lay on the mud like a pattern on an old dress, sometimes with hog tracks squished in between. (“Hogs Wild,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2005)

If you take I-95 North through the Bronx heading out of the city, Co-op City will be on your right. Its high-rise apartment buildings stand far enough from one another so that each appears distinct and impressive against the sky. In slow-motion seconds, they pass like the measureless underside of a starship in a science-fiction movie. (“Utopia, The Bronx,” The New Yorker, June 26, 2006)

A flock of sparrows burst from a cluster of bushes by the corner of a house with a noise like heavy rain. (“Travels in Siberia – II,” The New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2010; included in Frazier’s 2010 Travels In Siberia)

The captain sped up to avoid a huge in-bound cargo ship, which went by in our wake with its containers piled high like a waiter balancing dishes. (“Back to the Harbor,” The New Yorker, March 21, 2011)

Credit: The above photo of Ian Frazier is by Sigrid Estrada.

October 17, 2011 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is a tussle between four pieces: Evan Osnos’s report on the Fukushima meltdowns (“The Fallout”); James Wood’s review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Stranger’s Child (“Sons and Lovers”); Dan Chiasson’s review of Dorothea Tanning’s poetry collection Coming to That (“Late Harvest”); and Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts show “Degas and the Nude” (“Bare Naked Ladies”). Each is excellent in its own way. Osnos’s piece encompasses a vast amount of information, drawn from an impressive array of sources, artfully arranged in twelve sections. The message I gleaned from it is that the Fukushima disaster was anthropogenic. Osnos says:

The March tsunami was history’s most expensive natural disaster, with losses estimated at three hundred billion dollars. But the Fukushima meltdowns, the world’s worst nuclear accident in twenty-five years, were man-made, the consequences of failures that laid bare how far Japan’s political and technological rigor have drifted from their apex.

James Wood’s “Sons and Lovers” is an amusing examination of some of Hollinghurst’s stylistic tics, such as his repeated use of “levelly,” “narrowly,” and “muddle.” Wood sums up his assessment of Hollinghurst’s novel as follows:

“The Stranger’s Child” is a frustrating book, both a large and a curiously small novel – it trembles for a time on the verge of moving beyond the parochialism of its very familiar literary setting, and is finally happy to fall back into the comfy and known.

Chiasson’s “Late Harvest” contains this inspired observation: “But the poem’s tactical chitchat is Tanning’s fierce way of defying time.”

Schjeldahl, in his “Bare Naked Ladies,” composes several beautifully contoured, sparkling figurations, e.g., “Viewing his work, we breathe the dizzyingly thin air on the snowy peak of the capital ‘A’ in Art”; “The show yields an immersive sense of early modern art as a tidal wave of hot-and-bothered genius.” And it features a line – “His dancers’ perfect arabesques evoke a soundtrack of grunts” – that, in its brilliant connection between form (“perfect arabesques”) and sound (“soundtrack of grunts”), clinches my decision to make “Bare Naked Ladies” this week’s Pick Of The Issue.

October 10, 2011 Issue

It’s great to see David Long back in the magazine after a thirteen-year absence. His short story “Oubliette” is in this week’s issue. His “Attraction” (The New Yorker, December 9, 1991; included in his superb 1995 collection Blue Spruce) is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker short stories, right up there with Alice Munro’s “The Turkey Season” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980), Maile Meloy’s “Travis, B.” (The New Yorker, October 28, 2002), and Louise Erdrich’s “The Painted Drum” (The New Yorker, March 3, 2003). Long excels at writing free indirect speech. Here, for example, is a snippet from “Attraction”:

He’d talked his cousin into digging the cellar hole and setting the forms for the concrete, but Cynthia had a vision of them living down there indefinitely. “In the crypt,” she called it. Tarpaper roof, splintery planks laid across the mud, the electrical service on the little pole. No way.

That “No way” isn’t Long’s voice, although he’s the one narrating the story; it’s Marly’s, the story’s main character. Long is telling the story from her point of view. The “No way” is her internal speech.

Parts of “Oubliette,” in this week’s New Yorker, are also written in free indirect style. The story is about a girl, Nathalie Chilcott, whose mother starts behaving more and more erratically. Long so identifies with Nathalie that his authorial voice often blends with her voice to the point that they’re indistinguishable. For example, here’s a passage from one of the story’s key scenes, in which Nathalie’s mother locked Nathalie in the attic:

She made a pallet of old coats and garment bags, and lay, arms behind her head, listening to air sieving in a the eaves, the wood-on-wood sound of the roof trusses. Before long, she was picturing this episode as a short film, “Girl in Attic” – except, of course, she wasn’t the pathetic teen-ager sucker-punched by her own mother; she was the camera-wielder, preserving events for the record. Still, make no mistake, she was freaked. There was no denying that this stunt of her mothers had led them into uncharted waters.

That “Still, make no mistake, she was freaked” belongs to both Long and Nathalie. Long is reporting Nathalie’s mental state, but he’s using a phrase (“she was freaked”) that Nathalie would use.

“Oubliette” is briskly told; it presents a lot of information in concentrated form. Long calls it “flash fiction” (see his interview with New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, “The Book Bench,” newyorker.com, October 3, 2011). But it struck me as being more like an abstract of a short story, an abstract written in free indirect style. I liked it, but I didn’t get the sense of deep entry, of entry into real life, that I experienced when I read “Attraction.” I think the difference is that “Attraction” has more passion.

Malcolm X: Pinckney v. Powers v. Remnick

Malcolm X (Photo by Eve Arnold)

It’s interesting to compare three reviews of Manning Marable’s recent Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: David Remnick’s “This American Life” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011); Thomas Powers’ “Too Fast” (London Review of Books, August 25, 2011); and Darryl Pinckney’s “The Two Conversions of Malcolm X” (The New York Review of Books, September 29, 2011). Remnick, in his piece, calls Malcolm “a vivid but secondary figure in his own time.” He says, “Malcolm was an electrifying spokesman for black dignity and selfhood, a radical prod to the mainstream movement, but his role in the civil-rights movement was marginal.” This contrasts with Pinckney and Powers’ view. Pinckney says, “Most civil rights histories cast him [Malcolm] as the pivotal voice in a drama of mass transformation, the shift in general black opinion away from believing in the effectiveness of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence to conceding the justice in the militancy of the disaffected blacks in the Northern cities.” Powers writes that Malcolm “gave voice to black anger with a furious clarity rivaled in American history only by Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831.” He says that Malcolm’s face “was soon among the most famous faces in the country.” Reading Pinckney and Powers, it’s hard to accept Remnick’s “secondary figure in his own time” assessment.

Powers, in his review, praises Marable’s FBI research. He says, “It is here that Marable’s meticulous book makes its most significant contribution, quoting liberally from FBI files and the once secret files of New York City’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigation, beginning in June 1950 when Malcolm wrote a letter to Truman on the outbreak of the Korean War.” Neither Pinckney, nor Remnick, mentions this aspect of Marable’s biography. In fact, Pinckney says, “Maybe Marable hasn’t come up with as much that is really as new as he claimed, but his biography gives the satisfying feeling that he has consulted most everything out there about Malcolm X.” At one point, Remnick quotes an FBI informant, but not for the purpose of extolling Marable’s research skills.

Remnick sees Alex Haley as the key figure in Malcolm’s story. He says, “Malcolm clearly made his deepest impression on the American consciousness through his collaboration with Alex Haley.” He again emphasizes this point in the conclusion of his piece: “By choosing to entrust his story to Alex Haley, Malcolm ensured himself a lasting place in American culture.” Whereas, in Powers’ view, the Autobiography was a team effort. He says, “Rarely have two writers contributed so equally to a book. Malcolm provided the edge of social anger, unflinching and unapologetic, while Haley coaxed the personal details from him that Malcolm in his pride thought beside the point.” Pinckney has little to say about Haley. He reviews without comment Marable’s various contentions that Haley meddled with Malcolm’s conception of the book, saying only, “Yet Malcolm’s voice is undeniable and Haley deserves credit for preserving it in this form.”

Regarding Malcolm’s assassination on February 21, 1965, in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem, Powers points out that Marable “thinks the investigation of the murder was botched and that some of those who participated in the killing went free.” Pinckney is even more detailed on this point, describing what happened in the ballroom and quoting Marable’s opinion that, “Although in 1966 three NOI members were convicted of the murder, extensive evidence suggests that two of those men were completely innocent of the crime, that both the FBI and the NYPD had advance knowledge of it, and that the New York County District Attorney’s office may have cared more about protecting the identities of undercover police officers and informants than arresting the real killers.” Clearly, Marable’s conclusion on the murder investigation, based, as he says, on “extensive evidence,” is major news. Curiously, Remnick, in his review, fails to mention it. He briefly describes the murder, then cuts to Haley writing to his agent, “None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters … I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.”

The Marable contention that Remnick seizes on, and repeatedly mentions in his review, is the allegation that parts of the Autobiography are exaggerated. Remnick says:

One of his [Marable’s] goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits – “the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

In Malcolm’s alleged exaggeration and embellishment, Remnick finds a theme. He says, “The literary urge outran the knowledgeable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood.” The “crucial episode” that Remnick refers to is the gruesome death of Malcolm’s father. Remnick says,

The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

Perhaps he had been … nobody knew for sure. That would seem to be sufficient grounds for withholding allegations of exaggeration and embellishment. But not for Remnick. Pinckney, in his review, gives the Autobiography’s version of the father’s death the benefit of the doubt. Pinckney says, “In 1931, his father was killed in a gruesome accident. Black people whispered that the Legion had attacked him and laid his body across the tracks where he was nearly cut in half by a streetcar.”

Powers, in his “Too Fast,” mentions Marable’s allegation of exaggeration, but only in passing. He says,

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention adds much useful detail to the story as Haley told it, especially to Malcolm’s last years, while suggesting only a single modest revision. Perhaps, Marable offers, Haley and Malcolm exaggerated the latter’s sordid life of sin and crime to highlight, as St. Augustine did, the luminous transformation eventually worked by God, or Allah. “An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little,” Marable writes, “failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.” Perhaps this only means that Malcolm was one jump ahead of the law. In any event, beyond a few quibbles with the chronology of Malcolm’s Harlem years, Marable contradicts none of the stories in the Autobiography.

Note that last sentence: “In any event, beyond a few quibbles with the chronology of Malcolm’s Harlem years, Marable contradicts none of the stories in the Autobiography.” This contrasts sharply with Remnick’s view that “he [Marable] makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of facts.”

Remnick’s review reads like an overzealous prosecutor’s brief. It minimizes Malcolm’s historical role, sources his iconic status in the Autobiography, and then tries to knock that down by shooting holes in its credibility.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as Pinckney and Powers make clear in their excellent pieces. There’s a sentence in Pinckney’s “The Two Conversions of Malcolm X” that, in just fourteen direct, well-chosen words, captures the essence of Malcolm’s greatness: “Malcolm X embodied a blackness that could stand up to the white man’s rules.”

McPhee, Hemingway and the Sequence of Motion and Fact

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

Harry Levin, in his classic “Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway” (included in Levin’s 1980 essay collection Memories of the Moderns), says “When Nick Adams goes fishing, the temperature is very tangibly indicated: ‘It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of my neck.’” The same can be said about the way John McPhee palpably conveys temperature in “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s great Coming into the Country, 1977): “My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.”

Levin, in his essay, notes how Hemingway’s writing often “moves from the external plane into the range of a character’s senses, proceeding serially from the visual to the tactile, as it does when the “Wine of Wyoming” is sampled: ‘It was very light and clear and good and still tasted of the grapes.’” In “The Encircled River,” McPhee follows a similar progression: “The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good.”

Levin also observes that for what Hemingway “lacks in structure he makes up in sequence, carefully ordering visual impressions as he sets them down and ironically juxtaposing the various items on his lists and inventories.” It could never be said of McPhee that his writing lacks structure. He’s one of the great structuralists of all time. But, like Hemingway, he’s also expert at juxtaposing different registers. For example, in the following passage from “The Encircled River,” note the alternation of action and description: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river. His shirt is old and red. There are holes in his felt hat and strips of spare rawhide around its crown. He agitates the settled fly.”

In analyzing Hemingway’s style, Levin quotes Hemingway as saying that he always sought “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which [sic] made the emotion…” That “sequence of motion and fact” is a key aspect of McPhee’s technique, too. McPhee’s descriptions, consisting entirely of fact, are never static. Reading them, you never get the feeling you’re looking at a photo or a still life. McPhee animates his facts. People in his stories are always doing, going, working, moving. He’s a brilliant describer of action. There’s someone or something on the go in almost every one of his sentences. Consider, for example, the following sequence – one of my favorites – from “The Encircled River”:

He borrows Fedeler’s rod and sends the lure on its way. He reels. Nothing. He casts again. He reels. Nothing. Out in the river, there may be less water than salmon, but that is no guarantee that one will strike. Salmon do not feed on the spawning run. They apparently bite only by instinctive reflex if something flashes close before them. Pourchot casts again. Nothing. He casts again. The lure this time stops in the river as if it were encased in cement. Could be a boulder. Could be a submerged log. The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts. Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard. He is well over six feet. Blonde hair tumbles across his shoulders. The muscles in his arms are strong from many hundreds of miles of paddling. This salmon, nonetheless, is dragging him up the beach. The fish leaps into the air, thrashes at the river surface, and makes charging runs of such thrust that Pourchot has no choice but to follow or break the line. He follows – fifty, seventy-five yards down the river with the salmon. The fish now changes plan and goes upstream. Pourchot follows. The struggle lasts thirty minutes, and the energy drawn away is almost half Pourchot’s. He wins, though, because he is bigger. The fish is scarcely larger than his leg. When, finally, it moves out of the water and onto the gravel, it has no hook in its mouth. It has been snagged, inadvertently, in the dorsal fin. Alaska law forbids keeping any sport fish caught in that way. The salmon must take the lure in its mouth. Pourchot extracts the hook, gently lifts the big fish in his arms, and walks into the river. He will hold the salmon right side up in the water until he is certain that its shock has passed and that it has regained its faculties. Otherwise, it might turn bottom up and drown.

How wonderfully precise, rhythmic, and vivid that passage is! I particularly like the change in register from “The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts” to “Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard.”

Hemingway equated writing with making. In A Moveable Feast (1964), he says, “Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.” McPhee, too, is a maker. In his Paris Review interview (Spring 2010), he stresses the importance of structure in his writing: “If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you.” McPhee is a master craftsman. His pieces are like the handmade bark canoes he describes in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975): “Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable.”

In the Paris Review interview, when asked which writers he’s liked, McPhee answers, “I was drunk on Hemingway.” I detect traces of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River" in "The Encircled River." Both begin with vivid descriptions of fish seen from a downward looking angle through a river’s surface. In “The Encircled River,” McPhee looks down over the side of a canoe:

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

In “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” Nick looks down into the river from his position on a railway bridge:

Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them along time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

In both passages, the river is clear, the “gravel” bottom is visible, “shoot” and “shot” are used to indicate fish movement, fish break the water’s surface (“the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air,” “a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water”). McPhee writes, “noses north, into the current”; Hemingway writes, “noses into the current.”

Granted, there are major differences between the pieces, too. For one thing, “The Encircled River” is a fact piece; it’s about real people on a real river encountering a real bear. For another, three sections of it are written in a glorious, streaming present tense. “Big Two-Hearted River,” like most of Hemingway’s stories, is narrated in the past tense. Also, McPhee’s syntax is richer than Hemingway’s, and his sentences are more complex. And his verbs and adjectives are more evocative. His similes are more striking. (Note, for instance, that wonderful “Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins” in the above-quoted passage.) Maybe Hemingway has a keener ear for dialogue. But I’m not sure about that. In “The Encircled River,” John Kauffmann has a line – it consists of only two words (“Good God!”) – that cracks me up every time I read it.

Suffice it to say that “The Encircled River” and “Big Two-Hearted River” are both remarkable achievements. In order to understand how they were achieved, I suggest a good starting point is "the sequence of motion and fact.”

October 3, 2011 Issue

A sentence in Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Peace in Our Time,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, hit me with the force of a Floyd Mayweather uppercut. Near the end of her piece, which is a review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Kolbert says, “Before Pol Pot invented the killing fields, he studied in Paris, where he developed a taste not just for Marx but also for the classics of French literature.” This is a potent observation. It compels us to ask whether knowledge of the best that has been thought and said results, as Pinker’s book apparently asserts, in a decline in violence. George Steiner explored this very point in a series of haunting essays collected in his 1982 Language & Silence. For example, in “Humane Literacy,” Steiner says:

The ultimate of political barbarism grew from the core of Europe. Two centuries after Voltaire had proclaimed its end, torture again became a normal process of political action. Not only did the general dissemination of literary, cultural values prove no barrier to totalitarianism; but in notable instances the high places of humanistic learning and art actually welcomed and aided the new terror. Barbarism prevailed on the very ground of Christian humanism, of Renaissance culture and classic rationalism. We know that some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been taught to read Shakespeare or Goethe, and continued to do so.

Obviously, this is appallingly relevant to the study of literature. We have to consider the possibility that, as Steiner says in his piece, “the study and transmission of literature may be of only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique.”

I share the skepticism that Kolbert expresses in her review. Her conclusion is well said:

Hate and madness and cruelty haven’t disappeared, and they aren’t going to. Systems break down and, worse still, can be subverted. This is one of the lessons of Auschwitz, and it’s why, since 1945, most people have hesitated to argue that modernity and violence are opposed.

Louis Menand's "The Popist: Pauline Kael": A Critique

Has there ever been a more wrong-headed interpretation of Pauline Kael’s work than Louis Menand’s “The Popist: Pauline Kael” (included in Menand’s 2002 essay collection American Studies)? I don’t think so. In his piece, Menand faults Kael’s style. He says:

Her writing is all in the same key, and strictly molto con brio. There is no modulation of tone or (which would be even more welcome) of thought. She just keeps slugging away. She is almost always extraordinarily sharp, but she is almost never funny. And (as she conceded in the introduction to For Keeps), she is clearly working her way through her feelings about the movie as she writes, and this produces garrulousness and compositional dishevelment. Writing in The New Yorker gave her a huge space advantage over other reviewers; she did not always profit by it. Her reviews are highly readable, but they are not especially rereadable. James Agee, in his brief service as movie critic of the Nation, reviewed many nondescript and now long-forgotten pictures; but as soon as you finish reading one of his pieces, you want to read it again, just to see how he did it. Kael does not provoke the same impulse.

I totally disagree. I return to Kael's writings regularly, not for the benefit of her opinions, but for the great pleasure of her prose. Kael was a brilliant writer – where brilliance means rich, sensuous, textured, analytical, detailed, passionate, vivid. No less a judge than William Shawn, The New Yorker’s editor for thirty-five years, thought so. In his Foreword to Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), Shawn says:

The originality of Pauline Kael’s mind and temperament, her formidable intelligence, her eloquent use of the vernacular, her extraordinary analytical powers, her insight into character, her ability to shed light wherever the real world intersects with the world of film, her enormous gift for social observation, the wit and energy and clarity of her prose all go into making her the singular critic she is. What she is primarily is a writer; one reads her for the sheer pleasure her writing affords. Her opinions are forceful, convincing, often unexpected, but whether one agrees with them one comes away from her writing in a state of exhilaration.

Let’s take a closer look at some of Menand’s criticisms. Regarding his claim that Kael writes “all in the same key,” “strictly molto con brio,” that there’s “no modulation of tone or of thought,” that “she just keeps slugging away,” consider the following passage from her review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller (“Pipe Dream, The New Yorker, July 3, 1971):

A slightly dazed reaction to the film is, I think, an appropriate one. Right from the start, events don’t wait for the viewers’ comprehension, as they do in most movies, and it takes a while to realize that if you didn’t quite hear someone’s words it’s all right – that the exact words are often expendable, it’s the feeling tone that matters. The movie is inviting, it draws you in, but at the opening it may seem unnecessarily obscure, perhaps too “dark” (at times it suggest a dark version of Sam Peckinpah’s genial miss The Ballad of Cable Hogue), and later on it may seem insubstantial (the way Max Ophul’s The Earings of Madame de … seemed – to some – insubstantial, or Godard’s Band of Outsiders). One doesn’t quite know what to think of an American movie that doesn’t pretend to give more than a partial view of events. The gaslight, the subdued, restful color, and Mrs. Miller’s golden opium glow, Leonard Cohen’s lovely, fragile, ambiguous songs, and the drifting snow all make the movie hazy and evanescent. Everything is in motion, and yet there is a stillness about the film, as if every element in it were conspiring to tell the same incredibly sad story: that the characters are lost in their separate dreams.

I don’t get a sense from this paragraph that Kael is “slugging away.” If anything, her tone is soft, sensitive. The whole review is in this key. But there are delicate modulations in tempo. For example, the above-quoted paragraph begins in uncertainty (“A slightly dazed reaction …”; “One doesn’t quite know what to think …”) blooms into sensuous description (“The gaslight, the subdued, restful color, and Mrs. Miller’s golden opium glow, Leonard Cohen’s lovely, fragile, ambiguous songs, and the drifting snow …”) and ends in perception (“the characters are lost in their separate dreams”).

Kael wrote very close to the texture of the movie that she was reviewing. If the movie was like McCabe & Mrs. Miler and had a poetic feel, she embodied that feeling in her prose. If it felt fevered, as, say, Taxi Driver does, she enacted it on the page (“He’s so closed off he’s otherworldly; he engages in so few conversations that slang words like “moonlighting” pass right over him – the spoken language is foreign to him. His responses are sometimes so blocked that he seems wiped out; at other times he’s animal fast. This man is burning in misery, and his inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions”). Sometimes she came out slugging, e.g., when she detected artistic pretension, as she did in Badlands (“The film is a succession of art touches. Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it”). Her writing could be, as Menand says, molto con brio, but not strictly so; it could also be passionate, angry, lyrical, blissed. It all depended on her response to the movie under review.

When she’s really flying, her writing seems to cascade Niagara-like down the page. It’s like having access to her thoughts as she’s conceiving them. Menand appears not to appreciate this effect. In his “Popist” piece, he says, “she is clearly working her way through her feelings about the movie as she writes, and this produces garrulousness and compositional dishevelment.” This contrasts with William Shawn’s appraisal above, in which he talks about “the wit and energy and clarity of her prose.” I think Shawn is right. But I agree with the first part of Menand’s observation: Kael’s writing does give the impression of someone “working her way through her feelings.” That’s one of the things I like most about her writing. “Not a thought, but a mind thinking,” is how Elizabeth Bishop described Gerald Manley Hopkins’ approach to poetry writing. It’s an apt description of Kael’s style, too.

Regarding Menand’s statement that Kael is “almost always extraordinarily sharp, but she is almost never funny,” I infer that he doesn’t get Kael’s kind of wisecracking humor, the tough-minded humor of the thirties screwball comedies that Kael so admired (“It was the comedy of a country that didn’t yet hate itself,” she says in “Raising Kane”). A typical Kael quip is the one-liner she cracks near the end of her brilliant review of The Deer Hunter: “He was hotter for the deer” (“The God-Bless-America Symphony,” The New Yorker, December 18, 1978). Another line I remember is the barb she zings at Norman Mailer in her review of his Marilyn: “Surely he’s getting ready to do Norman? Why leave it to someone who may care less?” Her reviews are peppered with all kinds of provocative, subversive lines, lines aimed at puncturing ego, pretension, condescension. I love them. They’re a hallmark of her style. When she scores a direct hit, she makes me smile. Her humor is not as caustic as, say, Roseanne Barr’s, but it's similar in its aggressiveness.

Another questionable statement made by Menand, in “The Popist,” is that “Her reviews are highly readable, but they are not especially rereadable.” I find her work endlessly rereadable. Why? Because I want to revisit and understand the pleasure that her writing gives me. Who, besides Menand, would not want to reread one of the greatest prose stylists of the second half of the twentieth century? If objective proof of her rereadableness is required, see Dwight Garner’s recent short essay “A Great Guide (Apolgies to Its Author)” (The New York Times, July 14, 2011), in which he says, “rereading [Kael’s] Hooked was a treat, like someone taking me to Grand Central Oyster Bar and saying, ‘Amigo, the check’s on me.’ I can’t imagine a better beach book in 2011.”

The most objectionable statement in Menand’s piece is his comment about what he calls her “anti-aesthetic.” He says, “She hated theories. She didn’t oppose only auteur theory; she opposed all theoretical preconceptions.” I think this is wrong. Yes, she famously opposed the auteur theory. In her review of Hitchcock’s Topaz (“Americana,” The New Yorker, December 27, 1969), she refers to it as “this theory of the superior hack as hidden artist.” Her dislike of the auteur theory rested on an even greater theory, one that she fervently espoused, and even wrote a whole essay about – her greatest non-New Yorker piece of writing, in my opinion. I’m referring, of course, to “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (Harper’s, February, 1969; included in her 1970 collection Going Steady, and her 1994 collection For Keeps), in which she develops “that simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art.” “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is a beautifully, persuasively argued piece. Her rejection of the auteur theory is an aspect of the “not all entertainment is art” limb of her argument.

Even though “Trash, Art, and the Movies” contains Kael’s most explicit and nuanced statement of her artistic credo, Menand doesn’t mention it in his piece. What he does is provide a dumbed down version of her “all art is entertainment” theory, describing it snobbishly as a “middlebrow phenomenon.” A couple of sentences later, he points out that Kael “never finished college.” Menand is a very class-conscious writer. He regularly uses the elitist brow system to make his arguments. He classifies Kael’s critical approach to movies as "middlebrow" because he says it rests on “antiessentialist assumptions” the “undoing” of which “is often taken to have been the work of high critical theory, of semioticians, Derrideans, and postmodernists.” “And that undoing,” he says, “is associated with highbrow, avant-garde art and literature.” How Menand decides that semioticians, Derrideans, and postmodernists are highbrow, he doesn’t say.

Menand’s “The Popist: Pauline Kael” purports to praise Kael (it says she’s “a supremely important figure”), but it does so condescendingly. He calls her “the most brilliantly ad hoc critic of her time,” making it sound as if she didn’t have any ideas, any governing aesthetic. But he’s wrong about that, as he’s wrong about so many other aspects of Kael’s work. She laid out her critical principles in “Trash, Art, and the Movies," and everywhere you look in her writings corroborative passages leap to the eyes:

Spielberg can’t redeem it all, but he gets away with it; he’s one of those wizard directors who can make trash entertaining. (“Sugarland and Badlands,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1974)

Yet when a movie has startled people, like The Towering Inferno, or enlisted their sympathies and made them weep, like Walking Tall, or made them feel vindictive and sadistic, like the Charles Bronson film Death Wish, the hardest thing for a critic to do is convince them that it isn’t necessarily a great picture. It’s almost impossible to persuade people that a shallow, primitive work can give them a terrific kick. (Foreword to Reeling, 1976)

Now, whether the hero is life-loving or life-hating, this kind of movie is trashily sentimental or it’s nothing. But Sydney Pollack recoils from his own deals – he signs up for a Love Story and then munches on it as if he were Antonioni. (“The Sacred Oak,” The New Yorker, October 3, 1977)

Scorsese is putting his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative. He loses his lowlife entertainment values of prizefight films; he aestheticizes pulp and kills it. (“Religious Pulp, or The Incredible Hulk,” The New Yorker, December 8, 1980)

Credit: The above 1980 illustration of Pauline Kael is by David Levine.