Garner Endorses Adler's Snark

Renata Adler (Photo by Ron Galella)

Dwight Garner, in his "'After the Tall Timber,' Renata Adler's Collected Nonfiction" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 23, 2015), says of Adler’s “House Critic,” “That essay holds up in large part, and I say this as a Kael admirer.” What does that mean? In what way does it “hold up”?

“House Critic,” originally titled "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980), is Adler’s attempted evisceration of Pauline Kael’s great 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down. It’s full of false charges, e.g., “The degree of physical sadism in Mr. Kael’s work is, so far as I know, unique in expository prose,” “She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favourite words,” “She has, in principle, four things she likes.” Its basic approach is the reduction of Kael's work to caricature. To say that it “holds up” is to endorse the nasty, bullying, ridiculing smear tactics of low snark. Garner says he's a Kael admirer. Praising Adler's execrable “House Critic” is a bizarre way of showing it.

Postscript: I'm not alone in finding “House Critic” toxic. David Denby, in his “Pauline Kael: A Great Critic and Her Circle” (included in his 2012 essay collection Do The Movies Have a Future?), calls “House Critic” “a notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), calls it a “poisonous assessment.”

5th Anniversary

The New Yorker & Me is five years old today. To celebrate, I want to single out a few highlights. My first post, dated February 20, 2010, was a review of the February 8, 2010, New Yorker. That’s the one with the great Ana Juan cover – nine pampered pooches swaddled in winter garb - called “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The issue contains, among other notable items, John McPhee’s brilliant "The Patch," a personal history piece that ingeniously and movingly blends pickerel fishing with McPhee’s hospital visit with his dying father.

My most popular post – the one that’s received the most page views – is a review of the April 19, 2010, “Journeys” issue, perhaps the best New Yorker to appear in the past five years. In my post, I compare reading it to “gobbling up (say) five bowls of Haagen Dazs dulce de leche ice cream, one right after the other.” The issue features three superb pieces: Elif Batuman’s "The Memory Kitchen"; Lauren Collins’s "Angle of Vision"; and Burkhard Bilger’s "Towheads." Looking at my review, I see that I focused mainly on Batuman’s and Collins’s articles. Bilger’s “Towheads,” a “Reporter At Large” piece about the far-flung adventures of a tugboating family, deserves greater consideration. Someday I’ll get to it, maybe as part of a broader “Burkhard Bilger Retrospective.”

Speaking of Bilger, his great "The Egg Men" (The New Yorker, September 5, 2005) is the subject of an appreciation I posted on January 30, 2011 (see here). Of all my posts, I found it to be the most satisfying to write. It concludes, “Reading ‘The Egg Men,’ I experience double bliss: the subject is tremendously interesting and the writing is intensely pleasurable.”

I think my most negative post was my response to Richard Brody’s " 'Shoah' at Twenty Five" (newyorker.com, December 7, 2010), in which he came perilously close to calling Pauline Kael’s "Shoah" review anti-Semitic. Brody said, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of Shoah are so grotesque as to seem willful.” In my post, I noted that Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the piece. Borrowing a line from Craig Seligman’s defense of Kael, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), I called Brody’s charge “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.” But Brody is such a thrillingly passionate, stylish writer, I couldn’t stay cross at him for long. And he’s helped his own case by occasionally including one or more of Kael’s classic capsule reviews in his “Goings On About Town” movie column.

Kael’s writing is, for me, a touchstone. In the “Author’s Note” of her wonderful Deeper Into Movies (1973), she says that she writes “because I love trying to figure out what I think about what I feel and why.” Right there is the rationale for why I write this blog – to get at the many ways The New Yorker affords me such supreme pleasure.

And now to conclude, I’m going to pretend for a moment that I live in New York City. I’m imagining myself dropping into Nitecap for one of those Key Lime Fizzes with a candle suspended in its froth that Jiayang Fan wrote about so vividly in "Bar Tab" a few weeks ago. I want to propose a toast: Here’s to the greatest magazine in the world, a constant source of pleasure in my life – New Yorker without end, Amen!

Renata Adler's "The Perils of Pauline": Classic Low Snark

Last year, I posted an article in which I said there’d never been a more wrong-headed interpretation of Pauline Kael’s work than Louis Menand’s “The Popist: Pauline Kael.” I was wrong. That distinction belongs to Renata Adler’s vile "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in Adler's 2001 collection Canaries in the Mineshaft under the title "House Critic"). I’d forgotten about Adler’s piece. However, as a result of reading a couple of reviews of Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (2011), namely, Nathan Heller’s "What She Said" (The New Yorker, October 24, 2011) and Richard Schickel’s "Hell To Sit Next To" (Los Angeles Review of Books, November 30, 2011), which mention Adler’s article, my memory of it was quickly rekindled.

I recently reread “The Perils of Pauline.” It’s a lengthy review of Kael’s 1980 collection When The Lights Go Down. Its basic approach is a snarky attempt to reduce Kael’s work to caricature. It asserts that Kael “has, in principle, four things she likes,” that she “has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words,” that her writing consists of a “repertory of devices,” e.g., “the mock rhetorical question,” “the hack carom,” “the structure of spite,” and so on. Most of her claims have been ably rebutted by, among others, Craig Seligman, in his Sontag and Kael (2004). Seligman quotes Adler’s “four things she likes” passage and calls it “grotesque.” I agree. He says her “prissiness is embarrassing.” I agree. But when he writes, “Despite the occasional shoddiness of Adler’s tactics, I wouldn’t accuse her of the bad faith she imputes to Kael,” I demur. Adler knows exactly what she’s doing. Like an overzealous prosecutor, she twists the evidence, quotes out of context, and exaggerates the alleged crime. And what exactly, in Adler’s view, is the alleged crime? It’s that Kael is profane, raucous, lewd and loud. These are the very qualities I admire about her writing. I’m not alone in liking them. Laurie Winer, in her excellent “Taste is the Great Divider” (Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2, 2011) writes:

Adler’s slam echoed the complaints of critic John Simon, who described Kael as a Russian count might describe a clever serf: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler complained of Kael’s “vulgarity,” and she listed what she thought of as Kael’s worst phrases, among them, “tumescent filmmaking” and “plastic turds.” It’s hard not to laugh now at Adler’s discomfort, at her long lists of Kael’s crimes. It’s also hard not to see this attack as the age-old battle between the keepers of good taste and the antic comic spirit, with Adler taking the role of Margaret Dumont and Kael appearing as Groucho Marx. In the long run, of course, Groucho always wins.

Kael, in her wonderful review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (“The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977; collected in When The Lights Go Down), says, “Close Encounters is so generous in its feelings that it makes one feel maternal and protective; there’s also another side of one, which says, ‘I could use a little dirty friction.’ ” Right there is the side of Kael I love.

Credit: The above portrait of Renata Adler is by David Levine.

Pauline Kael and "Open Form"

A major strand in Pauline Kael’s governing aesthetic is the “open” approach to the movie frame. This is not an original observation. Louis Menand, in his “The Popist: Pauline Kael” (included in Menand’s essay collection American Studies, 2002), lists a number of movies that Kael cherished (e.g., Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, Shoeshine), and says:

The technical term for the quality many of these movies … share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution.

Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), notes that Kael’s “dislike of being told how to respond was a constant in her criticism, and this was her principal objection to Shoah.” In support of his point, Seligman quotes the following passage from Kael’s great essay “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20 & 27, 1971; included in Kael, Mankiewicz and Welles’ The Citizen Kane Book, 1971):

In the thirties, Jean Renoir had been using deep focus (that is, keeping the middle range and the background as clear as the foreground) in a naturalistic way. The light seemed (and often was) “natural.” You looked at a scene, and the drama that you saw going on in it was just part of that scene, and so you had the sense of discovering it for yourself, of seeing drama in the midst of life. This was a tremendous relief from the usual studio lighting, which forced your attention to the dramatic action in the frame, blurred the rest, and rarely gave you a chance to feel that the action was part of anything larger or anything continuous.

Seligman also quotes from Kael’s reviews of Harlan County, U.S.A., and Comfort and Joy. But neither Menand nor Seligman mention what I think is Kael’s clearest statement of her “open form” preference. I’m referring to the following passage in her magnificent review of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (see “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1972; collected in Kael’s Deeper Into Movies, 1973, and For Keeps, 1994):

The period details are there – a satin pillow, a modernistic apartment-house lobby, a child’s pasted-together greeting to Grandpa – but Coppola doesn’t turn the viewer into a guided tourist, told what to see. Nor does he go for a lot of closeups, which are the simplest tool for fixing a director’s attitude. Diane Keaton (who plays Michael’s girl friend) is seen casually; her attractiveness isn’t labored. The only character who is held in frame for us to see exactly as the character looking at her sees her is Apollonia (played by Simonetta Stefanelli), whom Michael falls in love with in Sicily. She is fixed by the camera as a ripe erotic image, because that is what she means to him, and Coppola, not having wasted his resources, can do it in a few frames. In general, he tries not to fix the images. In Sunday Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger showed a messy knocked-over ashtray being picked up in closeup, so that there was nothing to perceive in the shot but the significance of the messiness. Coppola, I think, would have kept the camera on the room in which the woman bent over to retrieve the ashtray, and the messiness would have been just one element among many to be observed – perhaps the curve of her body could have told us much more than the actual picking-up motion. The Godfather keeps so much in front of us all the time that we’re never bored (though the picture runs just two minutes short of three hours) – we keep taking things in. This is a heritage from Jean Renoir – this uncoercive, “open” approach to the movie frame. Like Renoir, Coppola lets the spectator roam around in the images, lets a movie breathe, and this is extremely difficult in a period film, in which every detail must be carefully planted. But the details never look planted: you’re a few minutes into the movie before you’re fully conscious that it’s set in the past.

As an approach to movie-making, I can’t see how “open form” can be improved on. Yet, even today, we see directors constantly forcing our attention to the dramatic action in the frame, always telling us what we should be feeling, seeing, and thinking.

Credit: The above portrait of Pauline Kael is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (October 20, 2003) as an illustration for David Denby’s “My Life As A Paulette.”

December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.