Rereadings: Pauline Kael's "Reeling"

This is the fifth in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Pauline Kael’s splendid Reeling (1976).

Reeling is a collection of over seventy movie reviews that Kael wrote for The New Yorker, 1972-1975. It includes some of her best work: “Tango” (on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris); “Everyday Inferno” (on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets); “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye); “Love and Coca-Cola” (on Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us); “Fathers and Sons” (on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II); “Beverly Hills as a Big Bed” (on Hal Ashby’s Shampoo); and “Coming: Nashville” (on Robert Altman’s Nashville). 

Notice that three of those pieces are on Robert Altman. Kael loved Altman’s work. If you want to know what her governing aesthetic is, read her reviews of Altman. She praised him for his “glancing touch,” his “relaxed awareness,” his “organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot.” “He’s not a pusher.” “He finds his story through the actors” and “through accidents of weather and discoveries along the way.”

There are some undervalued gems in this collection, too. I love her review of Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. She writes, “Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, the cars shimmer in the hot sunlight; in the dark, the red lights of the police cars are like eerie night-blooming flowers.”

Her dismissal of Terrance Malick’s Badlands is unforgettable: “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.” She concludes: 

And there’s a basic flaw in Malick’s method: he has perceived the movie – he’s done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor arising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there’s nothing left to respond to.

Reeling also contains two book reviews – both excellent. One is on Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book; the other is on Norman Mailer’s Marilyn. The Marilyn review contains several classic Kael zingers. Example: “Marilyn is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he’s built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he’s getting ready to do Norman? Why leave it to someone who may care less?).”

If you are new to Kael’s work and you are wondering where to start, I recommend Reeling. It covers a golden period of American movies, and shows Kael when she was really rolling, trying to get at what she responds to and why. As she says in her Foreword, “I may not have rendered justice to the best, but I’ve done my damnedest.”  

March 11, 2023 Issue

Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Boy Who Cried Art,” in this week’s issue, says of graffiti artist Keith Haring, “His chalk drawings are almost always very crude, so as not to interfere with the whooshing immediacy of the performance or the nervous allure of the performer.” That “whooshing immediacy” is brilliant. I wonder if it was inspired by Norman Mailer’s great “The Faith of Graffiti” (included in Mailer’s 1982 essay collection Pieces and Pontifications). Mailer wrote, 

Yes, the graffiti had not only the feel and all the super-powered whoosh and impact of all the bubble letters in all the mad comic strips, but the zoom, the aghr, and the ahhr of screeching rails, the fast motion of subways roaring into stations, the comic strips come to life.

Arn mentions Mailer’s essay in his piece. I think Mailer’s appreciation of graffiti was deeper than Arn’s is. Arn calls it “Business Art.” He calls Haring a “Business Artist.” What do those terms mean? Arn writes,

Even in its infancy, there was something in New York graffiti that smacked of Business Art. You can see it in Basquiat, who put a copyright symbol on his creations well before they hung in galleries. Or watch “Stations of the Elevated,” Manfred Kirchheimer’s ecstatic M.T.A. documentary. Pay attention to the way he cuts between spray-painted trains and signs for Burger King and Coppertone. When people watched the film in 1981, they may have sensed aesthetic deadlock: commercial art and street art face to face, without much of anything to say to each other. But you might also interpret these scenes as street art competing with commercial art, trying to match its bigness and brightness—and, the moment you do, Haring seems less the artist who betrayed graffiti and more the artist who made its guilty dreams come true.

"Guilty dreams"? I don’t see anything guilty about graffiti. I see it as our version of cave painting, an exuberant assertion that we exist in this time and place. 

December 26, 2022 Issue

A long time ago, I tried reading Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I didn’t make it very far. I found myself put off by the use of “fug” for “fuck.” What kind of war novelist shrinks from using the ultimate war word? "Fug" isn't real. It seems prudish. It smacks of censorship. It's a major false note marring the book's attempt to represent war as it actually is. It's not as if "fuck" had never appeared in print before. Henry Miller used it in Tropic of Cancer in 1934. That's fourteen years before Mailer's book. Now I see there's a new edition of The Naked and the Dead, published by Library of America. David Denby reviews it in this week’s issue. Is “fug” out and “fuck” in? Denby doesn’t say. He does mention that "The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked." Men in combat don't say "fug." Maybe the book has been coarsened, and Denby assumes it was always this way? Otherwise I don't understand what the hell he's talking about.

But don't get me wrong. Some of Mailer's writing I love. His boxing pieces are splendid! Recall the brilliant climax of The Fight (1975):

Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way, he started to tumble and topple and fall even as he did not wish to go down. His mind was held with magnets high as his championship and his body was seeking the ground. He went over like a six-foot sixty-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news, yes, fell over all of a long collapsing two seconds, down came the Champion in sections and Ali revolved with him in a close circle, hand primed to hit him one more time, and never the need, a wholly intimate escort to the floor.

October 25, 2021 Issue

Wow! Peter Schjeldahl is on fire! In this week’s issue, he rips MOMA PS1’s “Greater New York” for its “obeisance to supposedly unexceptional opinions.” He pens a truculent manifesto for our conformist times: 

Only doing things that one is not supposed to do and saying things that one is not supposed to say promise relief from a climate of stagnating sensibility. Being disreputable beckons. Open up. Reinstate surprise. ["Who's We?"]

Hah! I love it.

Speaking of saying things that one is not supposed to say, recall the 2017 controversy in which the artist Hannah Black requested that the Whitney remove Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Tilll’s body, Open Casket, from its Biennial show. Not only remove it; destroy it (see Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017). Black’s letter was widely condemned as an incitement to action that infringes artistic freedom. That was my own view of the matter, too. But recently I read a piece that changed my perspective. Charlotte Shane, in her review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Songs of Care and Constraint, in the current Bookforum, writes,

I, for one, found Black’s letter exhilarating, not because it filled me with vengeful glee but because it pushed against the status quo with exactitude and moral clarity. It expanded my sense of social possibility. It offered “magic—magic hard to come by elsewhere, and which can make life feel more worth living,” as Nelson writes of the art she implores us to leave alone. ["Free Fallin' "]

I don’t agree with Black’s request, but I admire her for having the ovaries to make it. Is this the kind of subversiveness that Schjeldahl has in mind? Probably not. He’s seeking “gratuitous transcendence,” “unforced pleasure.” But he is advocating “being disreputable,” and that’s what I relate to. Something Norman Mailer wrote many years ago (I’m quoting it from memory): “Better to expire a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.” 

January 16, 2017, Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Mixed Up,” a review of Philippe Desan’s Montaigne: A Life, in this week’s issue, overgeneralizes when he says that an essay “is always addressed to an intimate unknown” (Gopnik’s emphasis). Some of the best essays – Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism,” Pauline Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” to name three of my favorites – aren’t so much addressed, as launched. They’re not letters; they’re grenades aimed at specific targets. To be fair, Gopnik tempers his statement a few lines later when he writes, “The illusion of confiding in the reader alone is what essayists play on. You’re my best friend, Montaigne, like every subsequent essayist of his type, implies to his readers.” Note that “of his type.” Gopnik is talking about essayists like Montaigne, essayists who write digressive, letter-like essays with “the tone of a man talking to himself and being startled by what his self says back,” pieces “without the mucilage of extended argument.”   

I admire Montaigne for his bone-deep subjectivity. His “I” is the measure of all things. “We must espouse nothing but ourselves,” he says, in his great “Of Solitude.” Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Montaigne” (The Common Reader – 1), writes,

We can never doubt for an instant that his book was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach; he kept on saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to write himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged road, more than it seems.”

August 8 & 15, 2016 Issue

Jill Lepore’s “The War and the Roses,” in this week’s issue, is extraordinary, as extraordinary as Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” which is the only literary precedent I can think of that resembles it. Like Mailer, Lepore sees the Republican and Democratic National Conventions with her own eyes and her own words, “see it by the warp or stance of my character,” as Mailer expressed it in the Preface of his great 1976 collection of convention pieces, Some Honorable Men. What makes their convention reporting extraordinary is the writing – great gusts of description and perception – this one, for example, “The War and the Roses” ’s superb opening paragraph:

They perched on bar stools, their bodies long and lean, like eels, the women in sleeveless dresses the color of flowers or fruit (marigold, tangerine), the men in fitted suits the color of embers (charcoal, ash). Makeshift television studios lined the floor and the balcony of the convention hall: CNN, Fox, CBS, Univision, PBS. MSNBC built a pop-up studio on East Fourth Street, a square stage raised above the street, like an outdoor boxing ring. “Who won today? Who will win tomorrow?” the networks asked. The guests slumped against the ropes and sagged in their seats, or straightened their backs and slammed their fists. The hosts narrowed their eyes, the osprey to the fish: “Is America over?”

I read that and was immediately hooked, swept into the speeding prismatic current of Lepore’s heightened consciousness. But the passage that blew me away comes seventeen paragraphs later when Lepore reports the last day of the G.O.P. convention. She says, “The rule inside the Convention was: Incite fear and division in order to call for safety and union,” and then she does something totally wild and unexpected; she breaks away from the Convention, steps outside and unfurls this 258-word tour de force of description and observation:

I decided that the rule outside the Convention was: No kidding, it’s really awfully nice out here, in a beautiful city park, on a sunny day in July, where a bunch of people are arguing about politics and nothing could possibly be more interesting, and the Elect Jesus people are giving out free water, icy cold, and the police are playing Ping-Pong with the protesters, and you can take a nap in the grass if you want, and you will dream that you are on a farm because the grass smells kind of horsy, and like manure, because of all the mounted police from Texas, wearing those strangely sexy cowboy hats; and, yes, there are police from all over the country here, and if you ask for directions one of them will say to you, “Girl, I’m from Atlanta!” and you have to know that, if they weren’t here, who knows what would happen; there are horrible people shouting murderous things and tussling, that’s what they came here for, and anything can blow up in an instant; and, yes, there are civilians carrying military-style weapons, but, weirdly, they are less scary here than they are online; they look ridiculous, honestly, and this one lefty guy is a particular creep, don’t get cornered; but, also, there’s a little black girl in the fountain rolling around, getting soaked, next to some white guy who’s sitting there, just sitting there, in the water, his legs kicked out in front of him, holding a cardboard sign that reads “Tired of the Violence.”

What this passage shows, among many other amazing things, is the spectacle of a great journalist suddenly taking, with powerful sureness, a daring creative leap. She turns her back on the “grievously vexed” proceedings she’s been describing inside the Quicken Loans Arena and cuts to the Public Square where “the Elect Jesus people are giving out free water, icy cold, and the police are playing Ping-Pong with the protesters, and you can take a nap in the grass if you want, and you will dream that you are on a farm because the grass smells kind of horsy, and like manure. . . .” It’s an inspired Maileresque move, showing an alternative to the “fear and division” inside the Convention hall. Lepore is a brilliant stylist. “The War and the Roses” is her masterpiece.

Notes on James Wolcott's "Critical Mass"

James Wolcott, in his delectable essay collection Critical Mass, describes John Updike’s Hugging the Shore as being “crammed with goodies.” The same can be said of Critical Mass. One of its most enjoyable aspects is Wolcott’s Kaelesque ability to pin his subjects with arresting, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued appraisals. For example, he says Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s “conveys the champagne fizz and sparkle of fashion magazines in the fifties, the infusion of frisky new energy into old money. It’s all surface, but the surface dances.” He calls Capote’s “La Côte Basque, 1965” “a cutthroat string quartet.” He says of William Shawn, “His desk was an altar where the ideals of accuracy, clarity, and understated elegance were held sacrosanct. Every article, no matter how ephemeral, was groomed like a French poodle.” Of Norman Mailer: “The crippler is that in his writing Mailer was psychologically, creatively, empathetically tone-deaf when it came to women, his female characters a creamy mélange of angel-whores whose lipstick was ripe for smearing – a Playboy Bunny mansion of haughty bitches and breathy ditzes whose dialogue bore no resemblance to indoor speech.” On William Styron: “My own problem with Styron’s ennobled potboilers was not his subject matter, point of view, historical accuracy, pale-male effrontery, or any other heavy carbs, but the sheer awful self-conscious succulence of the prose, a fruit-orchard in every scene-painting description.”

Wolcott doesn’t analyze at the level of language the way James Wood does. His hands aren’t as inky with text (to steal a phrase from Wood) as Wood’s are. Both critics are incredible metaphoricists. Wolcott mixes his metaphors more than Wood does. His writing is fizzier, more audacious. In his piece on Marvin Mudrick, Wolcott says that Mudrick “turned litcrit into a spinoff of stand-up comedy.” The same can be said of Wolcott. Like Kael, he’s a master of the parenthetical wisecrack. His inspired “Ved, have a melon ball,” in “The Love Bug,” makes me laugh every time I read it.

Reading Wolcott, I’m sometimes reminded of Wilfrid Sheed, except he doesn’t treat criticism as a game the way Sheed did. Sheed’s reviews were all about how witty he could be. Wolcott is more attentive to his subject, more descriptive. When he’s really digging his material, he can strike some wonderfully surprising, surreal word combos. Consider this beauty from Wolcott’s superb “Manny Farber’s Termite Art” (included in Critical Mass):  

His McCabe and Mrs. Miller features a broken bar of Hershey’s chocolate, and The Films of R. W. Fassbinder so trims the fat from Fassbinder’s blobby corpus that what’s left is a pair of toilets, a telephone cord and receiver stretched across an empty bed, a giant beer bottle, and a magazine spread on Hanna Schygulla.

When was the last time you saw “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Hershey’s chocolate,” “R. W. Fassbinder,” “blobby corpus,” “toilets,” “telephone cord,” “empty bed,” “giant beer bottle,” “magazine spread,” and “Hanna Schygulla” conjoined in the same sentence? I’ll bet, never. It’s the prose equivalent of a ravishing Rauschenberg combine. I love it.

Wolcott doesn’t treat Capote and Cheever as failed saints the way (say) Daniel Mendelsohn and Colm Tóibín do. “Liar,” “failure,” “snob,” “drunk” occur so often in Mendelsohn’s “The Truman Show” (included in his How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, 2008) and Tóibín’s “My God, the Suburbs” (London Review of Books, November 5, 2009), I found myself thinking, these guys enjoy using these words. It’s tonic to read Wolcott’s Capote and Cheever pieces because he avoids Mendelsohn’s and Tóibín’s moralizing, prosecutorial approach. Wolcott relishes Capote’s and Cheevers’s complex, tormented personalities. He says of Capote:

For many, the fizzle of Answered Prayers and his personal tailspin offer a spectacle more engrossing than the arc of a distinguished life. A dignified exit may be desirable in principle, but if you can have your subject bumming around in his bathrobe in public, then you’ve got yourself a Cautionary Tale. There but for the grace of God and an empty liquor cabinet go I.

On Cheever, he writes:

Our literary life would be poorer without its theatrical touch-ups, and Cheever’s are no more to be begrudged and censured than the pile of buttermilk batter that James Dickey became or Isak Dinesen’s eye shadow.

I agree. The essence of being human is that we screw up. I applaud Wolcott’s humanism (and humor). Dan and Colm, have a melon ball. 

October 21, 2013 Issue

Louis Menand, in his “The Norman Invasion,” in this week’s issue, says of Norman Mailer, “His most interesting innovation as a journalist was the reporter as character, the practice of treating himself as a participant in the events he was covering.” Well, there were lots of journalists before Mailer who, writing in the first person, inserted themselves as participants in their stories (e.g., George Orwell, John Reed, James Agee, A. J. Liebling). The innovation that Menand must be referring to is Mailer’s odd habit of writing about himself in the third person. See, for example, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” (“His first afternoon in Miami Beach was spent by the reporter in Convention Hall. He stepped up on the speaker’s podium to see how it might feel, nosed into the jerrybuilt back room back of the podium where speakers would wait, and Press be excluded, once the convention was begun”); The Armies of the Night (“Mailer looked him over covertly to see what he could try if the Marshall went to work on him. All reports: negative. He would not stand a chance with this Marshall – there seemed no place to hit him where he’d be vulnerable; stone larynx, leather testicles, ice cubes for eyes”). In “St. George and the Godfather,” he calls himself Aquarius (“Interviewing Eagleton on the afternoon of the morning of his resignation as Vice-Presidential candidate, Aquarius finds him changed from the diffident politician who perspired before the television cameras on the night of his nomination and looked too furtive, too nervous, too quick-tongued, too bright, too unsure of himself and finally too modest to be Vice-President”).

I confess that even though I love these works, I find Mailer’s objectification of himself artificial. I wish he’d used the “I” point of view, as he did in his great “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” an account of the first Patterson-Liston fight (“Naturally I got into a debate with Cus D’Amato and a young gentleman named Jacobs, Jim Jacobs as I remember, who was built like a track man and had an expression which was very single-minded”).

Few writers have pondered the use of point of view more than Mailer. In his “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” he says, “The most powerful leverage in fiction is point of view.” Mailer was partial to the third-person perspective. Why? Because, as he points out in the Preface to Some Honorable Men (1976), a collection of his political convention pieces, there’s advantage to observing the observer: “So our best chance of improving those private charts of our own most complicated lives, our unadmitted maps of reality, our very comprehension, if you will, of the way existence works – seems to profit most if we can have some little idea, at least, of the warp of the observer who passes on the experience.”

Mailer’s innovation was his insertion of himself, not as “I,” but as “He,” “Mailer,” “Aquarius” – a third-person observer-participant – in his reportage. It’s an approach that’s ultra-objective. Mailer splits himself – there’s Mailer, the narrator, and “Mailer,” the character. I keep wondering as I read his “third-person” pieces, why not just drop the objective pose and speak naturally in the “I”? I’m aware of Janet Malcolm’s contention that “the ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention” (The Journalist and the Murderer, 1990). But I submit that it’s less an invention than Mailer’s “Mailer.”

In Praise of Journalism (Contra Dirda)

Michael Dirda, in his absorbing review of James Salter’s new novel All That Is, says, “Robert Phelps once told me that the true test of one’s devotion to a writer is a willingness to collect his or her journalism” (“‘The Glory of Certain Moments in Life,’” The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2013). I’ve never felt that way. For me, it’s the opposite: it’s a writer’s journalism that I prize; I have to force myself to read his or her fiction. The way I look at it, fiction is merely a tune-up for the creation of the really important stuff – journalism. For me, Hemingway’s 1933 Esquire piece “Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter” is one of the best things he ever wrote. The same goes for Mailer’s 1968 Harper’s article “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” Pritchett’s 1956 Holiday Magazine travelogue, “South America,” Brodsky’s 1986 New York Review of Books memoir “In a Room and a Half,” Nabokov’s 1972 Saturday Review essay, “Inspiration,” Zadie Smith’s 2008 New Yorker memoir, “Dead Man Laughing,” Seamus Heaney’s 1978 Irish Times essay, “Full Face,” Martin Amis’s 1993 New Yorker essay, “Don Juan in Hull,” Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 Art & Antiques essay, “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” John Updike’s 1972 Horizon essay, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered,” Margaret Atwood’s 2002 Globe and Mail piece, “Of Myths and Men.” I could go on and on. Far from being a “test of true devotion,” a great writer’s journalism is often the source of my deepest reading pleasure. 

Credit: The above portrait of Norman Mailer is by David Levine.

George Packer: The Breaking of Style

George Packer’s gone objective, and it’s affected his tone. It’s like he’s switched from tenor sax to clarinet. His colors aren’t as warm or rich. He’s shriller. In 2003, when he started out with the magazine, his style was literary, descriptive, and gloriously subjective. Remember his great “Gangsta War” (The New Yorker, November 3, 2003)? Its opening line is classic Packer: “From my balcony on the eighth floor of the Hotel Ivoire, I could see downtown Abidjan across the lagoon in the mist.” Remember his brilliant “The Playing Field” (The New Yorker, August 30, 2004)? Reading it was like being in the company of a lively, adventurous flâneur (e.g., “To watch the Costa Rica game, I rode the metro down to the stadium with a group of four young Iraqis”). Remember “The Moderate Martyr” (The New Yorker, September 11, 2006), which contained such inspired details as Hasan al-Turabi’s “flower-patterned polyester socks”? That was amazing! Remember his superb “The Ponzi Scheme” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009)? It’s narrated in the first person (e.g., “Recently, I drove around some of the subdivisions on State Road 54, as well as in other parts of Tampa Bay and in southwest Florida”), as is his terrific profile of the Israeli novelist David Grossman, “The Unconsoled” (The New Yorker, September 27, 2010): “When I visited, in July, the phone was constantly ringing, a cockatiel was singing in its cage, and Ruthi was practicing 'Good Vibrations' on the piano, while Michael and Jonathan came in and out of the living room.” These pieces all have a voice as well as an effect. But last year, Packer changed his style. He banished his “I” to the margins and adopted a flat, third-person perspective. “A Dirty Business” (The New Yorker, June 27, 2011), “Coming Apart” (The New Yorker, September 12, 2011), “No Death, No Taxes” (The New Yorker, November 28, 2011), and “All the Angry People” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011) are all essentially third-person reports. They’re less descriptive and more argumentative. I’m not the only one who's noticed this. Regarding “No Death, No Taxes,” a profile of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the blog “Reading the New Yorker” (readingthenewyorker.com) recently observed: “Unfortunately, writer George Packer didn’t do himself any favors by turning the last page into an anti-Thiel rant.” Of course, we can’t expect great writers to stand still stylistically. Look at how Norman Mailer deliberately roughened the prose of The Deer Park because he found the first draft “too self-consciously attractive and formal, false to the life of my characters, especially false to the life of my narrator who was the voice of my novel and so gave the story its air” (see Mailer’s extraordinary essay, “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” included in his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself). But it’s hoped that the new style will be more satisfactory than the old. It was in Mailer’s case; it’s not in Packer’s. In “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” Mailer says, “The most powerful leverage in fiction comes from point of view.” The same is true of journalism. I hope Packer gets back to first-person narration, of which he’s a master. I hope he gets back to limning cool details. I hope he gets back to describing the pattern of people’s socks.

Credit: The above artwork is by Mark Ulriksen; it appears in The New Yorker (November 3, 2003) as an illustration for George Packer's "Gangsta War."