My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

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. 

Heer's Heresy

Jeet Heer’s “Fire in the Hole: The New Yorker’s In-House Radicals” (Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2, 2012) gives William Shawn a bum rap. In his piece, Heer refers to “the interminable torpor produced by William Shawn’s editorial dotage of the 1970s and 1980s,” and to Shawn’s “perverse late-life preference for producing a sleep-inducing publication.” To appreciate just how wrong-headed Heer’s assessment is, consider that during the ’70s and ’80s The New Yorker published, among other great pieces, Robert A. Caro’s “The Power Broker,” Pauline Kael's "Raising Kane," C. D. B. Bryan’s “Friendly Fire,” Susan Sheehan’s “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?,” Anthony Bailey's "The Edge of the Forest,” Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” Saul Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” Janet Malcolm’s “The Impossible Profession,” Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Bill Barich's "Laughing in the Hills," Joseph Brodsky's "Flight from Byzantium." And this is just scratching the surface of The New Yorker’s rich content during the Shawn era. Clearly, these pieces, no matter what else might be said of them, aren’t “sleep-inducing”; they don’t produce “interminable torpor.” Quite the opposite; they are among the seventies’ and eighties’ most exciting, stimulating, brilliant writings. They were all shepherded into print under William Shawn’s ingenious editorship. 

Credit: The above portrait of William Shawn is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (July 2, 2012) as an illustration for John McPhee's "Editors & Publisher."

July 2, 2012 Issue

This week’s issue contains a curio – John McPhee’s “Editors & Publisher." It connects McPhee’s memories of three key people in his writing life (Robert Gottlieb, William Shawn, and Roger Strauss) through the use of “fuck” or variations thereof (e.g., “fucking,” “motherfucker”). McPhee writes: “Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word – with its silent ‘c’ and its quartzite ‘k’ – more shocking than a thunderclap.” Of the various “fuck”-themed anecdotes that McPhee relates in his piece, the one I most enjoyed was Roger Strauss saying “Fuck you” to McPhee when McPhee asked him for an advance. What I like about it is the way McPhee reveals, in the aftermath of the shock of hearing what Strauss said, that he (McPhee) may have teasingly provoked it (“Truth be told, though, the book was an amalgam of fragments of other books, for which he had long since paid advances”). “Editors and Publisher” raised a question in my mind: when it came time to publish “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” in book form, why didn’t McPhee change it to reflect what Warren Elmer actually said (“You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!”)? Why did he keep the bowdlerized New Yorker version (“You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”)?

“Editors and Publisher” provides valuable insight into The New Yorker’s evolving usage of “fuck.” But there’s another word I’m even more curious about. In my opinion, no expletive packs more punch than the blunt, concussive “cunt.” According to Erin Overbey’s “Bonfire of the Profanities” (“Back Issues,” newyorker.com, June 2, 2011), it first appeared in the magazine in Philip Roth’s short story “The Ultimatum” (June 26, 1995). I notice that John Updike uses it in the version of his great short story “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer,” included in his 2003 collection The Early Stories (“The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind on her cunt”). “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer” was originally published in The New Yorker, June 14, 1976. Checking it now, I’m not surprised to see that “cunt” has been airbrushed (so to speak); the line reads, “The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind now.” 

Roueché's Rhythm

Pikonganna stood on watch at the bow in a shiny translucent raincoat made of walrus intestines. If you find simple, sturdy, gloriously specific sentences like this as delightful as I do, you’ll likely enjoy the work of long-time New Yorker writer, Berton Roueché. He was a master of plain-style writing. William Shawn described his technique as follows: “Certainly his is the art that conceals art. His words are so plain, his sentences so chaste, his rhythms so natural that one can overlook the presence of the writer and see straight through to the matter at hand” (quoted in Whitney Balliett’s obituary of Roueché, The New Yorker, May 16, 1994).

The “matter at hand” was often an intriguing medical case. As Balliett points out in his tribute, “Roueché’s medical pieces became doubly famous: lay readers found them scary and exciting while doctors, impressed by their learning and clarity, used them as medical texts.” By the time of his death in 1994, Roueché had written fifty-eight “Annals of Medicine” stories for The New Yorker. A number of them are collected in his The Medical Detectives (1980).

Roueché also wrote about a wide variety of other matters for the magazine, e.g., a towboat trip down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (“The River World,” February 26, 1972), a visit to the Whalers’ Church in Sag Harbor on Long Island (“The Steeple,” March 5, 1949), a canoe trip down the Meramec River (“Countryside,” October 27, 1975), garlic (“A Friend in Disguise,” October 28, 1974), a trip by barge from Lyon to Dijon (“Janine,” October 22, 1984), apples (“One Hundred Thousand Varieties,” August 11, 1975), Appalachian coal miners (“Forty Flights of Steps,” July 16, 1973).

Roueché loved train travel. “I have a fondness for trains,” he says in “Trans Europ Nuit” (The New Yorker, December 28, 1981). In “On the Terrace,” he writes, “A train moved through a different world. It was a world of change and surprise. It was a world of back doors, back roads, back country. It had a backstage intimacy” (The New Yorker, September 15, 1980). In addition to “Trans Europ Nuit” and “On the Terrace,” he wrote three other train pieces – all of them marvelous: “The Best Medicine on the Market” (The New Yorker, January 20, 1962), “Rapido” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980), and “En Vitesse to Rome” (The New Yorker, February 21, 1983).

My favorite Roueché piece is “First Boat to King Island” (The New Yorker, October 22, 1966), a memorable account of a Bering Sea trip he and two companions made with a group of Inuit in a heavily loaded open boat “made of walrus hide stretched over a wooden frame.” I think it may have been one of Roueché’s favorites, too; he included it in two of his collections: The River World (1978) and Sea To Shining Sea (1985).

Here’s a passage from “First Boat to King Island” that exemplifies the “rhythms so natural” that Shawn mentioned in his description of

Roueché’s style:

The boat edged into the passage. The water was thick with chips and chunks of floating ice. We moved carefully between the embankment of anchored ice and the moving floe on one throttled-down motor. Norbert kept the boat inching along just off the lip of the floe, away from the height and bulk of the ice embankment, but every time I looked, the ice seemed higher and closer. I could already feel the cold of its breath. Kunnuk reached out with an ice lance and jabbed at the edge of the floe. He jabbed again, hard, and a slab of ice came loose and slid slowly into the water. The boy at the stern with Norbert poked it safely past the boat with an oar. It was rotten ice. The whole rim of the floe was rotten ice.

Ten deft, simple, fluid lines – the equivalent of ten short brushstrokes by a master artist (Cézanne, say) – and a dynamic, vivid scene springs to life. Note the economy of his line, the use of compact, tactile words (“thick,” “chips,” “chunks,” “bulk,” “hard,” “slab”), and the brilliant use of repetition (“jabbed at the edge of the floe” / “jabbed again”; “It was rotten ice” / “The whole rim of the floe was rotten ice”). This is quintessential Roueché - plain, simple, direct, evocative. With a moderate number of words, he evokes a world. Don’t let his simplicity fool you. There’s an art to it – selection, shaping, plus that intangible “something” – call it inspiration. Roueché had it. It’s there in his sensual apprehension of the dangerous ice ("I could already feel the cold of its breath").

Credit: The above photo of Berton Roueché is by Nancy Crampton.   

October 24, 2011 Issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 5, 2011 Issue

From the moment I saw the online table of contents of this week’s issue, I’ve been anticipating the magazine’s arrival in the mail. Now it’s finally here. Of course, I want to immediately turn to Ian Frazier’s “The March of the Strandbeests” and devour it. In preparation, I’ve already viewed and re-viewed the Photo Booth slideshow of Lena Herzog’s ravishing black-and-white Strandbeest photographs. But, I decide to delay the pleasure of my reading of Frazier’s piece, and go first to Rebecca Mead’s “Better, Faster, Stronger,” a profile of “Silicon Valley’s self-help guru," Timothy Ferriss. First sentence of the third paragraph, my interest in the piece catches fire. Mead writes:

I didn’t know anyone, so I went out of my comfort zone to talk to a young man named Courtney Reum, who told me that he had left a job at Goldman Sachs to start a company that makes and sells Veev – an organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral açai liquor, bottled in recycled glass, with labels printed in soy ink.

Great sentence! The combination of all those interesting, piquant words - organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral, açai liquor, recycled glass, soy ink – is exquisite. And I like the way Mead picks up on Ferriss’s use of the self-help jargon term “comfort zone” in the previous paragraph and weaves it into the above-quoted line. Ferriss is a colorful character in a New-Age-Silicon Valley-self-help sort of way (e.g., weighing his feces, sumo wrestling, tagging tiger sharks, inducing 15-minute orgasms in female bedmates). I laughed when I read his “clenched vagina” line. Mead writes some humorous lines of her own (e.g., her reaction to Ferriss’s speaking Japanese and Mandarin: “although to see him doing so brings irresistibly to mind Mike Myers speaking Cantonese in ‘Wayne’s World’”). And do I detect a glint of a good journalist’s healthy skepticism running through the piece? I think so, and I’m pleased to see it. For example, at the end of a sentence telling us about Ferriss’s plan to offer investment advice via Facebook and Twitter, she archly says, “assuming that sufficient numbers of people will opt for the appeal of digital connectivity over the allure of recreational shark-tagging, competitive tango dancing, or any of the other activities that one might pursue in the hundred and sixty-four hours of free time in a four-hour workweek.” I enjoyed “Better, Faster, Stronger” immensely. Its prose enacts the fizzy, kinetic world it describes.

And now I turn to a completely different world where giant beasts made of plastic tubing stalk the beach near Delft. Ian Frazier’s “The March of the Strandbeests” is brilliant - where brilliant means vivid, precise, rich, poetic. It contains a number of inspired passages, e.g.:

The northeast wind skimmed the waves along the beach like pinwheel blades, the giant wind turbine above the harbor rotated, the para-surfers’ chutes twisted this way and that, the ropes on the masts of the catamaran in drydock beside the dunes snaked back and forth and banged their metal parts on the hollow aluminum with a racket that could frighten off wicked spirits. In shoreline indentations, heaps of sea foam accumulated and shivered, and clumps of foam kept blowing free and spinning across the sand, assuming corkscrew shapes and in the next instant abrading themselves away.

A terrific aspect of Frazier’s approach to writing is his inclusion of incidentals, i.e., experiences that most journalists would consider too marginal to be included in their stories. But, for Frazier (and for me, as reader), the incidental experiences are often the ones that make the story. For example, in “The March of the Strandbeests,” he mentions that Theo Jansen, the ingenious creator of the Strandbeests, had trouble finding his car in the airport parking garage. Frazier says:

At first, he couldn’t find his white Volvo in the airport parking garage, and I set down my suitcase while he listened for the dog. Theo has a small, wool-colored dog of a French Madagascar breed who goes almost everywhere with him and is named Murphy. In a minute, he picked up Murphy’s bark and we homed in on it. The dog barked more encouragingly the closer we got to the car.

“The March of the Strandbeests” abounds with such succulent details. Here’s another one:

In a vitrine, a leather-bound sketchbook of Gerard ter Borch the younger lay open to a black-chalk drawing of a tangled patch of a brush on a hillside. Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!

That “Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!” is great! It’s so typical of Frazier to notice and appreciate such a “no-count, lovely” detail.

My favorite passage of “The March of the Strandbeests” comes at the end. Frazier is describing one of the smaller Strandbeests, Animus Longer. He says, “From a distance, it looked like one of those folding pole-and-clothesline contraptions you hang laundry on.” Then he concludes the piece as follows:

This Strandbeest stood there for awhile, unnoticed. The shiny, wet sand held its reflection. Some new customers arrived and sat at one of the restaurant’s outdoor tables. A minute later, a stronger gust came up, and the apparent clothes drying rack suddenly went tiptoeing across the sand. The people at the table did a triple take and began pointing and laughing, and talking in Dutch. “Dat ding is aan het lopen!” (“That thing is walking!”) they cried.

What a delightful ending! I laughed when I read it.

Before concluding, I want to briefly comment on one more piece in this week’s issue, namely, James Wood’s “Cabin Fever,” a review of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. It’s one of the best pieces Wood has written for the magazine. I’m a fan of Wood’s writing. But I confess I’ve harbored a suspicion that he doesn’t really get (or like) American fiction. “Cabin Fever” dispels that suspicion forever. Wood says of Johnson’s writing in Train Dreams, “The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism.” “Cabin Fever” shows a deep appreciation for “the exactitude of Johnson’s language.” It’s filled with inspired quotations from Johnson’s work. The second-to-last paragraph, which begins, “The protagonist of ‘Train Dreams’ is not privy to stoned visions, but he is a steady noticer of the natural world, and the novella’s prose follows his eye with frequent exhalations of beauty,” is gorgeous.

Thank you New Yorker for these three excellent pieces. They’re a tremendous source of reading pleasure.

Postscript: Is Louis Menand changing his tune regarding the old New Yorker’s anticommercialism? He says, in “Browbeaten,” in this week’s issue, that Dwight Macdonald “believed completely in the official dogma of Ross and Shawn’s New Yorker, which was the absolute separation of the magazine’s business side (the side concerned with advertising and circulation) from the editorial side.” He says, “The New Yorker did not cater to any class of reader, in its self-accounting; it simply published what its writers and editors wanted to publish. It was blind to the marketplace.” That “official dogma” and “self-accounting” are interesting. Is Menand implying the reality was otherwise? There was a time – 1990, to be exact – when Menand believed in The New Yorker’s anticommercial nature. In “A Friend Writes: The Old New Yorker (The New Republic, February 26, 1990; included in his 2002 essay collection American Studies), he says:

In 1985, soon after the New Yorker was sold, Shawn wrote a “Notes and Comment” piece designed to defend the magazine’s editorial position against possible encroachments by the new ownership, and to reassure the magazine’s readers. “We, the editorial people,” he explained, “knew by instinct that to be able to make the New Yorker the magazine we wanted it to be we had to separate ourselves from the business side of the venture…. In this atmosphere of freedom, we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’" The analysis is entirely correct, and it explains the true commercial genius of the New Yorker.

Now, it would appear, according to Menand’s latest take, that Shawn’s view, far from being “entirely correct,” was just “official dogma,” a “self-accounting.” This is unfair to Shawn and to the magazine. I believe Menand had it right the first time around. Shawn was true to his principles. The New Yorker's separation of art from commerce was real, and not mere window dressing, as Menand now seems to suggest.