Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction? (Part II)

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo, from Alex Ross's "What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?"

A few years ago, I posted a note here asking if Susan Sontag’s “Pilgrimage” is fact, fiction, or faction. The question arose as a result of Erin Overbey including Sontag’s piece in her anthology of New Yorker personal essays called "Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections" (December 19, 2021). In my post, I noted that “Pilgrimage” originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction, and that it’s also included in Sontag’s posthumous collection Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.”

Now there’s another opinion to be considered. Alex Ross, in his recent “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?" (March 14, 2026) describes “Pilgrimage” as “semi-fictional.” According to Ross, Sontag’s meeting with Mann did take place, but not exactly the way she said it did in “Pilgrimage.” For one thing, at the actual meeting, there were two people accompanying Sontag, not one, as she says in the story. For another, the person she airbrushed from the piece, Gene Marum, was the person who cold-called Mann and requested the interview. It appears that Sontag’s “Pilgrimage" is that unreliable hybrid called faction.  

Interpretation Is All

Versions. I love to play versions of songs I like. Take one of my favorites – Billy Strayhorn’s exquisite “Day Dream.” There are as many versions of it as there are musicians who play it. Bill Charlap, Ellis Larkins, John Hicks, George Cables, Roland Hanna – all marvelous, all different. It’s fun to stack them up, listen to them back-to-back, and compare them. No two are alike – different tempos, different notes, different interpretations. 

And then I think of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.” I can only shake my head. To be fair, she’s talking about literary criticism, not jazz. She says, “Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide ... one could go on citing author after author, the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold.”  

Instead of interpretation, Sontag wants transparence: “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” Okay, I get it. She’s arguing for a fresh approach, one that scrapes away the barnacles of old interpretation and tries to see “the thing in itself.” Nothing wrong with that. Don’t reduce great artworks to standard interpretations. Seek new ones. All great art is open to new discovery. That’s what John Hicks does in his version of “Day Dream” – blows away the dreaminess and plays it hard, fast. It’s a brilliant interpretation. I love it. 

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

Postscript: Joan Acocella 1945 - 2024

Joan Acocella (Photo by Bob Sacha)

New Yorker critic Joan Acocella died January 7, 2024, age 78. She was primarily a dance critic. But she also wrote many wonderful book reviews, several of which are included in her 2007 essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. Acocella appreciated candor. She says of Susan Sontag, “She talked very straight” (“The Hunger Artist”). This applies to Acocella, too. Here, as a form of tribute, are some of my favorite lines from her work:

Butler’s chapter on Cather is not a chapter on Cather; it is an essay on politics in which Cather’s text lies bound and gagged. (“Cather and the Academy”)

Always plainspoken, she became more so. (“Feasting on Life”)

These are superb letters – long, meaty, intimate, conversational. You can practically hear her breathing. And they remind us of her faithfulness to reality, her ability to let things stay mixed and strange – to let them grow at the edges and stay loose in the center. (“Feasting on Life”)

We also needed more footnotes. But never mind. This is a priceless book: a whole life, a serious life, eighty-four years long. (“Feasting on Life”)

The grand cascading sentences ... (“Finding Augie March”)

One must love the book on artistic grounds – for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles – and also, still, for its hopefulness. (“Finding Augie March”)

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation. (“Piecework”)

Her sentences are frequently incomplete, her grammar nonstandard, her chapter titles a brazen lie. (“Piecework”)

In Bedford’s world, nobody is going to get ahead, or nobody nice, but meanwhile there is mercy, free hors d’oeuvres. (“Piecework”)

I don’t know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it. (“Piecework”)

She should stop apologizing. If Quicksands is a sort of rummage sale, what of it? (“Piecework”)

We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at Maman in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Don’t laugh – Fitzgerald believes the same thing. She combines an old-world faith with a completely modern pessimism. (“Assassination on a Small Scale”)

And the writing was marvelous – high-toned, Brahmin, but full of zest and the pleasure of performing. Her openers were always thrown down with a great flourish. (“The Hunger Artist”)

Whatever she felt was fed back into her argument, a short, violent conflagration at the end of which any idea that illness is a mark of ennoblement or of shame—something that the victim caused or, by virtue of personality, was doomed to—lies like a burnt cinder at the bottom of Sontag’s rhetorical furnace. (“The Hunger Artist”)

But the montage is not surreal – it’s real, it’s New York City – and the objects don’t fly around in that self-important, dérèglement des sens way. They stay put, and honk the way they should. Waterfalls pour from the sky, but they’re really there, on a billboard. In the city O’Hara found his own, more modest version of Surrealist hallucination. (“Perfectly Frank”)

O’Hara loved things that lived in time, things that moved – ballet, movies, Action painting, New York – and he made himself the partner of time. [“Perfectly Frank”]

But the poems were manifesto enough. With their colloquialism, with their empirical record of daily events, with the friends wandering in and out – “Jap” (Jasper Johns) waiting at the train station, “Allen” (Ginsberg, hung over) throwing up in the bathroom – and, above all, with their craft so lightly worn, the poems constituted a clear refusal, if not of the high mission of poetry, then any duty to kneel before the throne. (“Perfectly Frank”)

In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way. (“Devil’s Work”)

I have stressed the dramatis diaboli, but in most of mantel’s novels there is a regular English reality going on that might make you wish for Hell instead. (“Devil’s Work”)

Ugly families, though, are only a subspecialty. Mantel is a master of ugliness in general. (“Devil’s Work”)

Art redeems us from time: in Hadrian’s case, by shaping his life into a meaningful curve (ambition to mastery to exaltation to disaster to reconciliation); in Yourcenar’s case, by enabling her to do the shaping, and in the process to write her first great novel, save her own life. (“Becoming the Emperor”)  

December 11, 2023 Issue

What to make of Parul Sehgal’s “Turning the Page,” in this week’s issue? It’s a survey of several recent memoirs by or about critics, including Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet (on life with her father, Peter Schjeldahl), and Robert Boyers’ Maestros & Monsters (on his long association with Susan Sontag and George Steiner). I’m a fan of the work of Schjeldahl, Sontag, and Steiner. The key word here is “work.” I don’t give a damn about their personal lives. Whether they were rotten parents or fickle friends is immaterial to me. It’s their work that matters. That was Flaubert’s belief; it’s mine, too. Occasionally, a memoir appears that is itself a work of art. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, is an example that immediately comes to mind. Are Calhoun’s and Boyers’ books in that league? Sehgal doesn’t say. She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t quote. She’s flying at a ridiculously high altitude. Come down to the ground, Sehgal. Get some ink on your hands.

Postscript: As for Sehgal’s notion that the work of critics like Kael, Schjeldahl, and Sontag is a form of “unselfing” – “the ability to channel someone else” – that’s just crazy! Kael would hoot if she read that. She didn’t channel anyone but herself. Same for Schjeldahl and Sontag. That’s what made them such great stylists. To paraphrase Kael, unselfing is for sapheads. 

Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Portrait of Thomas Mann by Elliott Erwitt, from Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections”   

Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections” (newyorker.com, December 19, 2021) is a delightful collection of New Yorker personal essays. It includes one of my favorite Susan Sontag pieces – “Pilgrimage” (December 21, 1987), an account of Sontag’s visit with Thomas Mann in 1947. But I have a question. Is this piece fact, fiction, or faction? It originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction. It’s included in Sontag’s posthumous collection, Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.” Now, in Overbey’s collection, “Pilgrimage” is presented as “personal reflection.” 

Which is it? Does it matter? To me, it matters immensely. Unlike some readers (e.g., James Wood), I’m not comfortable with essays in which there’s a “sly and knowing movement between reality and fiction” (Wood’s “Reality Effects,” The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011). Did Sontag’s friend Merrill really phone Mann’s home in Pacific Palisades and receive an invitation to join him for tea? Did Sontag and Merrill actually go to Mann’s house and have tea and cake with him? Did Mann really talk to them about Wagner, Goethe, and “the value of literature” and “the necessity of protecting civilization against the forces of barbarity”? Did Mann say and do all the things that Sontag says he did? Or is the piece, in whole or in part, fabricated? For me, “Pilgrimage” gains immeasurably when it’s presented as a “personal reflection.” I hope Overbey is right.

November 22, 2021 Issue

“The best way to understand a writer is to interpret the work,” says Maggie Doherty, in her absorbing “Think Twice,” in this week’s issue. Really? Recall Susan Sontag’s famous dictum: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’ ” (“Against Interpretation,” 1964). Sontag favoured experiencing the work – “experiencing the luminousness of the thing itself, of things being what they are.” Robert B. Pippin, in his recent Philosophy by Other Means, is pro-interpretation. He writes, “But the injunction that we should ‘stop interpreting’ a work and just ‘experience’ it is like demanding that we just look at the words on a page and not say what they mean.” He has a point. Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to Sontag’s approach – one that aims for “a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.” It seems to me that if a work is closely described, its meaning will follow. Peter Schjeldahl, in the Introduction to his great Let’s See (2008), says, “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.” Boom! As usual, Schjeldahl nails it. 

But on further reflection, I realize I've overreacted. Doherty isn't arguing for interpretation as the critical approach. She's saying if you want to understand the writer, look at his or her writing. With that, I agree.  

Is Photography Dissociative?

John MacDougall, Sanirajaq, September 24, 2005

Susan Sontag, in her great On Photography (1974), writes, “The habit of photographic seeing – of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs – creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.” She goes on to say, 

Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. 

Is this true? For me, it’s the opposite; photography isn’t estrangement; it isn’t dissociative. It’s an act of awareness. And when I’m really rolling, seeing object after object that I want to photograph, it’s an act of heightened awareness. I live for those blissful camera days when I’m so deep into image-hunting I forget myself. When I’m in a perceptual groove like that, photography isn’t dissociative; it’s immersive.

One such day I was in Sanirajaq, on the west coast of Foxe Basin. I got up early and walked the beach. I saw a group of Inuit launching a boat. They pushed it over the snow down to the water and slid it in. An elder, wearing a red toque, climbed in the boat. The others passed him red jerry cans and other supplies. He shoved off and floated out into the blue mirror-like water, thick with drifting ice right to the horizon. The colors were spectacular: blue sky, sculptural white ice, blue water, white boat with two beautiful stripes of aquamarine painted horizontally along the length of its hull, the elder with his brilliant red hat, a red buoy on the bow, also brilliantly red. The Arctic sunlight was ravishing! The scene seized my eyes – so gorgeously natural and painterly, I couldn’t get enough of it. I looked and looked, taking picture after picture. The scene unfolded over thirty minutes or so, I suppose, but I wasn’t aware of time passing or anything else except the remarkable sequence of events taking place in front of me. Maybe that’s what Sontag was getting at when she said photographic seeing is a kind of dissociative seeing. But, for me, a better description is immersion – total immersion. 

Mary Price's Excellent "The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space"

Recently, I read a book – Mary Price’s The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space (1994) – that immediately went into my personal anthology of great photography writing, joining Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, and Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

In her book, Price advances two main arguments: (1) that “language of description is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs”; and (2) that “the use of a photograph determines its meaning.”

She discusses Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugène Atget’s and August Sander’s photographs, George Santayana’s theory of photography, the nudes of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the comparison between Rembrandt’s paintings and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, the notion of the photo as a transcription of the real, the notion of the photo as mask, Proust’s use of the photograph as metaphor, Barthes’ search for the photograph of his mother that captures her “essential identity,” “the aura of reality,” “the pleasures of factuality,” and many other illuminating ideas, as well.

What I relish most about Price’s view is her emphasis on description. She says,

Describing is necessary for photographs. Call it captioning, call it titling, call it describing, the act of specifying in words what the viewer may be led both to understand and to see is as necessary to the photograph as it is to painting. Or call it criticism. It is the act of describing that enables the act of seeing.

I agree. It’s tonic to read a critic who touts description as a form of meaning-making.

Eren Orbey's "A Photographer's Parents Wave Farewell"

Deanna Dikeman, "Leaving and Waving 7" (1991)

Eren Orbey’s “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” (newyorker.com, March 4, 2020) is one of my favorite newyorker.com posts of the year (so far). It’s a review of Deanna Dikeman’s portrait series “Leaving and Waving,” currently on view at deannadikeman.com. An artfully condensed version of Orbey’s piece appears in this week’s New Yorker (“Goings on About Town: Art: Deanna Dikeman”). It’s worth quoting in full:

In 1990, when this photographer’s parents were in their early seventies, they sold her childhood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, and moved to a bright-red ranch house in the same town. At the end of their daughter’s visits, they would stand outside as she drove away, arms rising together in a farewell wave. For years, Dikeman captured those departing moments; the resulting portrait series, “Leaving and Waving,” compresses nearly three decades of adieux into a deft and affecting chronology. The pair recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather. In summer, they blow kisses from the driveway. In winter, they wear scarves and stand behind snowbanks. Inevitably, they age. A few pictures, cropped to include the car’s interior, convey the parallel progress of Dikeman’s own life. Early images show the blurred face of a baby, who, in later shots, as a young man, takes the wheel while Dikeman photographs her elderly parents from the passenger seat.

That “The pair recede into the warm glow of the garage on rainy evenings and laugh under the eaves in better weather” is wonderful. The entire note is wonderful – a poignant reminder of “time’s relentless melt” (Susan Sontag). 

Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism": Wolcott v. Malcolm

Susan Sontag (Photo by Richard Avedon)

Two recent contrasting views of Susan Sontag’s powerful 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975; included in Sontag's great 1980 collection Under the Sign of Saturn):

1. James Wolcott, in his “All That Gab” (London Review of Books, October 24, 2019), a review of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life, says, 

“Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag’s dismantling of the cult, canonisation and revisionist whitewashing of Leni Riefenstahl, struck like lightning when it first appeared in the New York Review with its bravura last sentence – ‘The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone.

2. Janet Malcolm, in her “The Unholy Practice” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019), also a review of Moser’s book, refers to 

Sontag’s thrillingly good essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in The New York Review of Books in 1975 and reprinted in the book Under the Sign of Saturn, in which she justly destroyed Leni Riefenstahl’s newly restored reputation, showing her to be a Nazi sympathizer in every bone.

I agree with Malcolm. Sontag’s essay isn’t just good; it’s thrillingly good. It’s riveting. It deconstructs Riefenstahl’s book of splendid colour photographs and shows it for what it really is – not a lament for a vanishing tribe (its ostensible subject), but a continuation of Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetic.

Here’s a sample:

The introduction, which gives a detailed account of Riefenstahl’s pilgrimage to the Sudan (inspired, we are told, by reading Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa “one sleepless night in the mid-1950s”), laconically identifies the photographer as “something of a mythical figure as a film-maker before the war, half-forgotten by a nation which chose to wipe from its memory an era of its history.” Who but Riefenstahl herself could have thought up this fable about what is mistily referred to as “a nation” which for some unnamed reason “chose” to perform the deplorable act of cowardice of forgetting “an era”—tactfully left unspecified—“of its history”? Presumably, at least some readers will be startled by this coy allusion to Germany and to the Third Reich.

If you relish painstaking analysis, passionate argument, and vigorous writing, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism.” It’s one of the most memorable essays I’ve ever read.  

September 23, 2019 Issue

It’s interesting to compare Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” in this week’s issue, with Melissa Anderson’s “For Interpretation,” in the current Bookforum. Both are reviews of Benjamin Moser’s recently published Sontag: Her Life and Work. Malcolm says Moser’s feelings for Sontag are mixed – “he always seems a little awed as well as irked by her.” She writes,

Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.

Compare this with Anderson’s view: 

With Sontag, Moser intelligently brings together both public and private, onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous affective life sympathetic (if at times slightly less astute). 

Which is it – sympathetic or adversarial? I guess I’ll have to read Moser’s book to find out.

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.” 

Two Interesting New Critics

Alberto Savinio, "Self-Portrait as an Owl" (1936)

I enjoy critical writing immensely. “The Critics” is my favorite section of The New Yorker. It’s always a pleasure to discover new critics – new to me, that is. Two such discoveries I’ve made recently are Lidija Haas and Gini Alhadeff. Haas’s “The Disbelieved” (The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2018) is a brilliant review of Porochista Khakpour’s “Sick,” a chronicle of Khakpour’s experiences with Lyme disease. Haas says that Khakpour “resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way.” I like the way Haas makes a theme of this resistance. She quotes Susan Sontag’s warning in Illness as Metaphor that “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one,” then takes issue with it: “This idea implies an injunction against interpretation and against narrative shaping that’s all but impossible for a writer on the subject to obey.” She sees this longing for narrative logic and simultaneous distrust of it as a function of illness itself: “Pain and suffering are what they are – they resist meaning and the narratives that make it.” She talks about Sick’s “paranoid logic and spiralling, dizzying structure.” The more she says about this intriguing book, the more I want to read it – a sure sign of a great review.

Another sign is a review that seduces me to read about an artist I didn’t even know existed. Such a piece is Gini Alhadeff’s “Against Seriousness” (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018), a review of an exhibition of Alberto Savinio’s paintings at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York City. The piece begins magnificently:

Alberto Savinio, the hidden spring of metaphysical modernism, lives on in his Self-Portrait as an Owl (1936). His face, with its marked eyebrows, dark eyes, thin lips, and air of melancholic diffidence, sketched in swirling feathers, resembles that of his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, who did a pencil drawing of the two siblings—or Dioscuri, as they liked to call themselves, after the mythical twins Castor and Pollux—at the start of their working life in Paris, one as a musician, the other as an artist. In Self-Portrait, Savinio wears a dark suit, and his shapely hand, the thumb hooked over a waistcoat button, takes up one fifth of the image. The scarf wound around his neck partly conceals a feathered chest. 

I read that and just kept going right to the end, devouring Alhadeff’s wonderful descriptions of Savinio’s surrealism. For example:

In one of these, My Parents (1945), his mother and father have become stone armchairs, very expressive ones, with just one eye each. The mother’s chest looks pubescent above an exposed ribcage, her arms replaced by a rolled upholstery trim, her head the skull of a camel or a horse. The father is headless, an expansive chest grafted onto an armchair with one immense, powerful eye staring out of it. The shadows they cast consist of dense handwritten lines that narrate a brief story of their lives: “My mother was called Gemma, she sang with a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice.”

“Against Seriousness” brims with such descriptions. I enjoyed it enormously.

Lidija Hass and Gini Alhadeff – two critics I look forward to reading more of. 

Postscript: I see Alhadeff has a piece on William Eggleston in the June 7 New York Review of Books. It’s tempting to read it online. But I’ll wait for the print version. 

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.”

October 19, 2015 Issue

Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Bombshells," in this week’s issue, refers to one of my all-time favorite essays – Susan Sontag’s "Fascinating Fascism" (The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975; included in her great 1980 collection Under the Sign of Saturn). Pierpont writes,

In 1973, Riefenstahl launched a new career as a photographer, with a lauded book of color images of the Nuba, a majestic tribe in remote central Sudan. The subject, as far from her past as possible, supported the increasingly widespread contention that the only constant in her work was a devotion to physical beauty, without regard to race. Sontag, in an essay that seems to have made Riefenstahl angrier than anything Hitler had done, countered that the only constant in Riefenstahl’s work was its inherent Fascism, evident precisely in this devotion to physical beauty, among other things, and in its exclusion of human complexity. It’s a strong argument about intention: a refusal to separate the artist from the art. The photographs, however, remain indistinguishable in any moral or political sense from those taken of the Nuba by George Rodger, the English war photographer whose work inspired Riefenstahl, and whose perspective was anything but Fascist: Rodger, accompanying the British Army in 1945, had been among the first to photograph the corpses at Belsen.

Pierpont is right to say that Sontag’s essay is “a strong argument about intention: a refusal to separate the artist from the art.” But it’s far more than that. It’s powerfully analytical. Most people, leafing through Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba, would probably see it as one more lament for vanishing primitives. Not Sontag. She carefully examined the photographs in conjunction with Riefenstahl’s text and showed they’re “continuous with her Nazis work.” Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” is a compelling argument against Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation. It’s an important argument to keep in mind when pondering the possibility floated in Pierpont’s piece that “Riefenstahl might have been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazis.”

Postscript: Paul Farley’s “Poker,” in this week’s issue, is one of the best poems I’ve read in a long time. It’s an inspired unpacking of the possible history of three old decks of playing cards. The decks are stunningly described with a tactile specificity (“shuffled and dealt to a soft / pliancy, greased with lanolin”; “dark-edged with mammal sweat”) that enables me to feel them in my own hands. “Poker” makes me hungry for more Farley.

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part II

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (Marcella Matthaei)," 1969

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (7)," 1970-71

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She is much more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects – descendants of Goya’s gargoyles – march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s good to see them preserved between hard covers.

(This the second part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm's Forty-one False Starts.)