Postscript: Alan Arkin 1934 - 2023

I see in the Times that Alan Arkin died. I remember him for his extraordinary performance as the deaf-mute in Robert Ellis Miller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I saw that film when it first came out, in 1968. I was fifteen, just embarking on my love affair with movies. It was a great time to start. Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, and In the Heat of the Night had all appeared the previous year. The acting in those films impressed me immensely. Then I saw Arkin’s performance in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. It bowled me over. For years after, when anyone asked me who my favorite actors were, I’d answer Paul Newman, Rod Steiger and Alan Arkin. Today, looking at old reviews of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, I see that Renata Adler, in The New York Times, wrote, “Alan Arkin, as Singer, is extraordinary, deep and sound.” This strikes me as exactly right.     

Michelle Dean on Pauline Kael: Not Sharp

Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018) contains at least nine questionable statements about Pauline Kael:

1. Dean describes Kael’s writing as “consistently inconsistent, tending to passionate riffs, insisting that the only principle worth defending was pleasure.” This makes Kael sound almost irrational – more expressive than logical. It underrates the “thinking” in her criticism. Kael’s thinking process often took the form of argument. She was an exhilaratingly powerful arguer. Many of her best pieces are arguments. In “Circles and Squares,” she argues against the auteur theory. In “Bonnie and Clyde,” she argues in favor of movie violence. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” she argues against “high culture.” In “Raising Kane,” she argues against the widespread view that Citizen Kane is the sole creation of Orson Welles. These pieces are as intellectual in their light as they are passionate in their heat, and they insist on a lot more than just pleasure. 

2. Dean says, “In ‘Trash, Art, and the Movies,’ Kael argues at length for erotics in the place of hermeneutics. As ever, she is interested in reaction, not aesthetics.” I’m not sure what’s being said here. Kael argued for erotics, but not in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” The movies discussed in that great essay – “Wild in the Streets,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Petulia,” “The Graduate” – aren’t especially erotic. Kael’s strongest argument for movie eroticism is her brilliant “Tango.” And in that piece, she doesn’t argue for it “in the place of hermeneutics.” If by “hermeneutics,” Dean means interpretation, she’s wrong to say that Kael argued for its replacement. Interpretation was one of her main critical tools. She was a superb interpreter: see, for example, her construal of the dark-and-light contrast in The Godfather (“The contrast is integral to the Catholic background of the characters: innocence versus knowledge – knowledge in this sense being the same as guilt”). And to say that Kael isn’t interested in aesthetics is crazy. No critic was more responsive to the look of a film – it’s light, color, texture, pattern, and design – than she was. Recall her description of the colors in Last Tango in Paris: “The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange-beige-browns and pink – the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink.” Or how about this inspired bit from her “Movieland – The Bums’ Paradise,” a review of Robert Altman’s The Long Good-Bye: “When Nina van Pallandt thrashes in the ocean at night, her pale-orange butterfly sleeves rising above the surf, the movie becomes a rhapsody on romance and death.” There you have aesthetics and hermeneutics in the same sentence. 

3. Dean says, “Sontag had written that there was a kind of pleasure in analysis, in the taking apart and putting back together of things, something that Kael could never abide.” This misrepresents Kael’s critical approach. She was a phenomenal analyst. She had a vast mental storehouse of movie associations. Her great strength was looking at a movie and noticing subtle echoes of other movies. For example, in “Bonnie and Clyde,” she wrote,

The showpiece sequence, Bonnie’s visit to her mother (which is a bit reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s confrontation with his mother, Marjorie Main, in the movie version of “Dead End”), aims for an effect of alienation, but that effect is confused by all the other things attempted in the sequence: the poetic echoes of childhood (which also echo the child sliding down the hill in “Jules and Jim”) and a general attempt to create a frieze from our past—a poetry of poverty. Penn isn’t quite up to it, though he is at least good enough to communicate what he is trying to do, and it is an attempt that one can respect. In 1939, John Ford attempted a similar poetic evocation of the legendary American past in “Young Mr. Lincoln;” this kind of evocation, by getting at how we feel about the past, moves us far more than attempts at historical re-creation. When Ford’s Western evocations fail, they become languorous; when they succeed, they are the West of our dreams, and his Lincoln, the man so humane and so smart that he can outwit the unjust and save the innocent, is the Lincoln of our dreams, as the Depression of “Bonnie and Clyde” is the Depression of our dreams—the nation in a kind of trance, as in a dim memory. In this sense, the effect of blur is justified, is “right.” Our memories have become hazy; this is what the Depression has faded into. But we are too conscious of the technical means used to achieve this blur, of the attempt at poetry. We are aware that the filtered effects already include our responses, and it’s too easy; the lines are good enough so that the stylization wouldn’t have been necessary if the scene had been played right. A simple frozen frame might have been more appropriate.

There’s more analysis packed into that one passage than most critics provide in an entire review. Its intelligence has at least three registers: it notices the poetic effect of Bonnie’s-visit-with-her-mother sequence; it compares that effect with John Ford’s similar “poetic evocation” in Young Mr. Lincoln; and it criticizes the effect for being too stylized. 

4. Dean says, “In fact, for the rest of her life she [Kael] never again wrote anything like “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” eschewing these kinds of broader essays for the most part.” I can’t let this go by without pointing out that, in addition to her weekly New Yorker reviews, Kael wrote at least eight superb essays for the magazine: “Raising Kane,” “Numbing the Audience,” “On the Future of Movies,” “Notes on Heart and Mind,” “The Man From Dream City,” “Notes on Evolving Heroes, Morals, Audiences,” “Fear of Movies,” and “Why Are Movies So Bad?” – all of which came after “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

5. Dean calls Kael’s “Raising Kane” a “career disaster.” Really? Kael’s great essay stirred controversy. In it, she argued Citizen Kane isn’t the one-man show that many people (including its director, Orson Welles) believe it to be. She was criticized for failing to provide Welles’s viewpoint, particularly on the issue of the authorship of the script, which Kael attributed solely to Herman J. Mankiewicz. But the controversy didn’t hurt her in the least. The New Yorker didn’t fire her. She kept right on writing. Her career continued to rise. Two years after “Raising Kane,” she won a National Book Award for Deeper into Movies. 

6. Dean says, “She [Kael] attributes much of the film’s [Citizen Kane’s] genius not to the much-laureled Welles, but rather to the relatively forgotten screenplay writer, Herman Mankiewicz.” This isn’t true. Kael argued that Mankiewizc was the sole author of the script and the creator of the movie’s central character, the newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane. But she was very clear on who was responsible for the film’s “magic.” She wrote, “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” And to underscore the point, she further says, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.”

7. Dean says of Kael’s “Raising Kane,” “Kael was not a reporter or researcher by trade. She didn’t have the kind of systematic mind it required. So there were holes.” This is another of Dean’s condescending remarks on Kael’s intelligence. The only “hole” in “Raising Kane” that Dean reports is Kael’s failure to consult Welles, never mind that his position on the question of who wrote Citizen Kane’s script was well known. As far as he was concerned, the script was his and Mankiewicz’s jointly. Dean uncritically adopts Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Kane Mutiny” as the correct version of the facts, notwithstanding that it’s based almost entirely on Welles’s self-serving testimony. She says, “Bogdanovich landed the attack that truly stuck it to Kael.” A few paragraphs later, she says it again: “It stuck to her.” Is this true? No, not according to Kael’s biographer, Brian Kellow: “ ‘The Kane Mutiny’ did surprisingly little damage to Pauline’s reputation” (Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, 2011). 

8. Regarding Renata Adler’s hatchet job, “The Perils of Pauline,” Dean says, “She [Adler] had clearly declared war on Kael. And she made a decent case.” Adler’s essay reviews Kael’s 1980 collection, When the Lights Go Down, calling it “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Adler’s technique of “counting the number of words and turning them back on a subject to make them look foolish” impresses Dean. She says, “Against Kael, who had so much copy available to analyze – all of it written in the structure of movie reviews – it was devastating.” But what Dean doesn’t comment on is Adler’s use of exaggeration. For example, Adler says of Kael,

She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections—and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one—they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion. It turns out, however, that Ms. Kael does think of them as critical positions, and regards it as an act of courage, of moral courage, to subscribe to them. The reason one cannot simply dismiss them as de gustibus, or even as harmless aberration, is that they have become inseparable from the repertory of devices of which Ms. Kael’s writing now, almost wall to wall, consists.

I remember my reaction when I first read that: Only four things Kael likes? Come on! Adler’s gross simplification of Kael’s movie taste is easy to refute. Think of Kael’s praise of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (“a beautiful pipe dream of a movie – a fleeting, almost diaphanous vision of what frontier life might have been”). Think of her praise of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (“You experience the elation of using your mind – of evaluating the material, and perceiving how it’s all developing, while you’re storing it up”). Think of her love of Jean Renoir’s work (“At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity – the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share”). Think of her love of thirties screwball comedy (“Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized – lovers talked back to each other, and fast”). Kael’s catalogue of movie love is endless, and completely unrelated to Adler’s nasty little list. This is typical of everything Adler’s scabrous essay alleges against Kael. It is, line by line, and without interruption, a grotesque distortion of Kael’s work. David Denby, in his Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012), calls it a “notoriously wrongheaded piece.” Dean’s treatment of it as a “decent case” is a major flaw in her book.

9. Dean says, “Adler’s words about Kael’s work would appear in every obituary when Kael died in 2001.” Well, there’s at least one obituary in which they don’t appear – David Denby’s tribute in the September 17, 2001, New Yorker. Denby says of Kael’s New Yorker writing, “In both abundance and quality, it was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American journalism.” 

Pauline Kael's Classic "Underground Man"

Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver (1976)

I’m pleased to see that newyorker.com has included Pauline Kael’s “Underground Man” (The New Yorker, February 9, 1976) in its “Nights at the Movies” series. It’s one of her best. But I want to flag an error in the newyorker.com version. The punctuation after “hallway” in the following passage should be a comma, not a period:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway. It’s an Antonioni pirouette.

The correct version (from the original review) is all one sentence:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway, it’s an Antonioni pirouette. 

“Underground Man” is included in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down, a book Renata Adler adjudged “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless” (“The Perils of Pauline,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980). To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

Kael wrote a capsule version of “Underground Man” for use in “Goings On About Town” ’s “In Brief” section, condensing the two-thousand-seventy-four-word original to a hundred and fifty-three words. It reads as follows:

Robert De Niro is in almost every frame of Martin Scorsese’s feverish, horrifyingly funny movie about a lonely New York cab-driver. De Niro’s inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He’s Travis Bickle, an outsider who can’t find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can’t sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted – whores, pimps, transients – he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness. From Paul Schrader’s script; with Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Harry Northrup, Joe Spinell, Diahnne Abbott, and Scorsese himself. [Collected in Kael’s great 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991]  

It’s interesting to see how Kael composed this “In Brief” note, picking words and phrases from the original piece and combining them to make new, more concentrated sentences. For example, the line “This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground” is sourced in three separate sentences in the original: “ferociously” in “This picture is more ferocious than Scorsese’s volatile, allusive Mean Streets”; “powerful” in “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying”; and the rest of the sentence in “Taxi Driver is a movie in heat, a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground.” 

For me, the “In Brief” note’s most quintessentially Kaelian line is “The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness,” a choice fragment of the original sentence: “Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness” (my emphasis). 

Forty-two years after it appeared in The New Yorker, “Underground Man” still thrives. Hail Kael! 

Kael's Combines

Pauline Kael (Photo by Jerry Bauer)

Charles McGrath, in his "Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic?" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 1, 2015), says, “The great critic of my life was Pauline Kael (who deserves some renewed appreciation now that Renata Adler’s famous takedown of her is back in circulation).” McGrath’s comment resonates with me. Kael was one of the great critics of my life, too. In response to McGrath’s call for “renewed appreciation” of Kael’s work, I want to focus on what I call her “combines” – delightful, surprising, collage-like constructs of description, quotation, reference, and response. For example,

There’s a pleasant matte of Manhattan with five Chrysler Buildings, and there are charming, slightly miniaturized yellow Checker cabs that suggest Red Grooms, but then when Dorothy and her companions arrive to see the Wiz at the Emerald City and it’s the World Trade Center Plaza, you think, My God, that’s where King Kong died.

That’s from Kael’s marvelous “Saint Dorothy,” a review of Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz. The unlikely combination of “matte,” “Manhattan,” “five Chrysler Buildings,” “slightly miniaturized yellow Checker cabs,” “Red Grooms,” “Dorothy,” “Wiz,” “Emerald City,” “World Trade Center Plaza,” and “King Kong” is ingenious. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Cornell box. Here’s another one, also from “Saint Dorothy”:

Nipsey Russell is a vast improvement; his first lines are funny, and he gives them rhythm and beat, and though the lyrics of his song “What Would I Do If I Could Feel?” are unbelievably feeble (“What would I do / If I could suddenly feel / And to know once again / What I feel is real?”), he sings them in Dapper Dan night-club style – like a suave carnival barker – and on a nearby carousel the painted heads of girl angels provide a backup chorus.

How I love that final, surreal “and on a nearby carousel the painted heads of girl angels provide a backup chorus.” Consider this beauty from “Pods,” a review of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

When the four principals run down Telegraph Hill, with a phalanx of pod people in pursuit, and dash to the Embarcadero, they cast long shadows, like figures in one of de Chirico’s almost deserted piazzas.

When was the last time you saw “Telegraph Hill,” “Embarcadero,” and “de Chirico” conjoined in the same sentence? And those textured six “p” words –  “principals,” “phalanx,” “pod,” “people,” “pursuit,” and “piazzas” – are also pleasing.

One more example – this one from “Boss Ladies,” a review of Michael Lindsay Hogg’s Nasty Habits:

When she speculates, “If the thimble was a symbol,” there’s a bit of the hypercivilized impishness of Bea Lillie’s “You will find the dinghy by the jetty” in On Approval – a movie that Nasty Habits, in its heraldic camp, somewhat resembles.

Only Kael, with her deep mental reservoir of movie associations, would think to connect “If the thimble was a symbol” with “You will find the dinghy by the jetty” from two movies made thirty-four years apart. Her conjunction of “hypercivilized impishness” and “heraldic camp” is brilliant.

All of the above excerpts are from reviews in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down. This is deliberate. I want to show that this book, far from being “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,” as alleged by Renata Adler, in her notorious "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980; included in her recent After the Tall Timber under the bland title “House Critic”), contains some of Kael’s most alluring, artful writing.

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.”

February 23 & March 2, 2015 Issue

“As I write this, The New Yorker is dead,” claimed Renata Adler, in her bitter Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999). Well, that was sixteen years ago, and The New Yorker is still with us, more vibrant than ever, as the current issue – the loaded and layered 90^th Anniversary Issue – vividly shows. Of its many pleasures – Mary Norris’s "Holy Writ" (“Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out”), Ian Frazier’s "The Cabaret Beat" (“Portrait photographers emphasized Ross’s hair, which grew straight up and which a famous actress said she would like to walk barefoot in”), James Wood’s "Look Again" (“It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture”) – the most piquant, for me, is Ian Parker’s brilliant "The Shape of Things to Come." It’s a profile of Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice-president of design. Its materials are vast and finely woven: people [Ive, J. J. Abrams, Robert Bruner, Michael Ive (Ive’s father), Steve Jobs, Powell Jobs, Clive Grinyer, Bob Mansfield, Tim Cook, Eugene Whang, Dan Riccio, Jeff Williams, Marc Newson, Bart André, Richard Seymour, Jeff Williams, among others]; events (a launch of new Apple products and services, a visit to Apple’s industrial design studio, a tour of Apple’s future campus); things [“a black steam-punk watch,” “three eight-foot-high computer-numerical-control (C.N.C.) milling machines,” “dozens of custom sketchbooks that had padded blue covers and silver edging,” “Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be,” “a Rams-designed Braun MPZ2 Citromatic juicer,” “an Apple Watch … in rose gold, with a band of white rubbery plastic,” “a glass-topped Apple Watch display cabinet, accessible to staff from below, via a descending, motorized flap like the ramp at the rear of a cargo plane”]. It brims with inspired sentences (e.g., “Ive’s aesthetic is not austere: one could think of the work done here as a reticent man’s idea of exuberance, with rapture expressed in the magnetic click of a power adapter”; “But others may have had the thought, or the half-thought, that the sounds made the phones more coherent – a more natural accompaniment to glass, aluminum, and Helvetica Neue”). Best of all is Parker’s liberal use of the first-person. He’s not only an observer; he’s a participant (“I spoke to Dye at a table by the lawn at Infinite Loop”; “Inside the shed, I tried on a watch, and its stainless-steel bracelet, guided by magnets, fell into place with the click of someone stacking nickels”; “The next day, I visited Ive in his studio”). “The Shape of Things to Come” is a masterpiece. I enjoyed it immensely.

Two Paulettes: David Denby and James Wolcott

What was it like to hang out with The New Yorker’s great movie critic Pauline Kael? Two recent memoirs tell us: James Wolcott’s “Like Civilized People …” (in Lucking Out, 2011); and David Denby’s “Pauline Kael: A Great Critic and Her Circle” (in Do The Movies Have a Future?, 2012). It’s interesting to compare them.

Both pieces are deeply admiring, but avoid idolization. Wolcott says, “Much as I adored her, I didn’t want the godmother to have total jurisdiction.” Denby says,

Looking back, I’m happy that she wrote as well as she did for so many years – that was the most important thing she did for young critics who admired her and became part of her circle. I’m equally glad that she took me up in my mid-twenties when I was a nobody and that, for a while, we were friends. She may not have intended to do me a favor when she threw me out, but it was a favor nonetheless, since I might not have grown up for years if I had remained in that group.

Wolcott’s piece is juicier, more intimate, vibrant and wisecracking (more Kaelesque, you might say); Denby’s is more analytical. Wolcott is a dazzling metaphorist. Here, for example, is his description of Kael’s compositional process:

Entire paragraphs were x-ed out and new ones inserted, sentences were transposed within paragraphs that themselves were moved around like modular furniture, commas deliciously planted by The New Yorker’s notoriously comma-promiscuous copy department (resulting in sentences that resembled a higher plane of constipation, bogged down in late-period Henry James particularization) were plucked out and em dashes liberally thrown like left jabs.

That “comma-promiscuous copy department” is terrific.

Denby beautifully describes Kael’s writing style:

 As a writer, she had the natural beat of a good musician, alternating the tension and weight of a long sentence with the brutal quick jab of a short one. Her prose was so urgent and heated that a complexly argued piece seemed to burst forth in a single unbroken stream of words that combined sternly proper syntax with free-ranging, rowdy habits of phrasing. She was a master of informal rhetoric – the bullying mock question, the interjected taunt – and a great liberator of critical language, establishing the right, by means of charged rhythm and color, to speak one’s mind on the page as one might talk to one’s friends over a drink. She used slang, contractions, hype, insult, syncopated compound adjectives – anything for greater speed.

Both pieces capture Kael’s glorious profanity. “Oh, honey, you’ve never been fucked by a bear,” was one line she used, according to Denby, to snap argumentative protégés back to reality. Regarding Hollywood, Wolcott quotes her as saying, “Never underestimate how much those in power resent those with talent – talent being the one thing they can’t buy for themselves. But they never tire of fucking with it, that’s their talent.” Denby calls her “a good witch with a wicked tongue” and “as bawdy as a San Francisco madam.” He talks about her “insatiable need to win arguments.” Given her combativeness, I’ve always wondered why she didn’t rebut Renata Adler’s hatchet job, "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980). Denby refers to it as a “notoriously wrongheaded piece.” But neither critic indicates why Kael chose to remain silent in the face of Adler’s vehement attack. My guess is that she didn’t want to get into a pissing war with a skunk.

Denby and Wolcott show Kael in a fascinating variety of settings: screening rooms, her New Yorker office, talk show, taxi cab, lunch, the Algonquin, her Central Park West apartment. My favorite passage is Wolcott’s description of her at her house:

She did her writing on the second floor of her house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bent over at a drawing table facing light-flooding windows looking out on her long, descending lawn to the road below. She wrote in pencil with a rubber thimble on her thumb, her phenomenal concentration pouring from the point of her pencil across the page as she followed the line of argument wherever it led, keeping every circuit open.

Kael was cruel to Denby. She told him, “You’re too restless to be a writer.” She said, “I’ve thought about this seriously, honey. You should do something else with your energy.” Denby was devastated. Who wouldn’t be? He says, “There was a heaviness in my chest and a slight roaring in my ears, as if a wave had knocked me over and the waters were swirling around my head." He eventually recovered. To his credit, he isn’t spiteful. He calls Kael “an astonishing woman.” He wrote in her obituary, published in the September 17, 2001 New Yorker, “In both abundance and quality, her work was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American journalism.”

Credit: The above photograph of Pauline Kael is by Chris Carroll.

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.