sandbox pauline kael and 70s lookback book club thread

The bio's had me fantasizing about how different her career would have been if instead of William Shawn, there was Twitter.

@realgingerrogers Your agent was right.

NO NO NO NO RT @raltman talking western with redford. RIO BRAVO!

greil's beef w/kellow is unclear. a life in the dark falls somewhere between hagiography and hatchet job IMO

doesn't your second sentence answer your first sentence

please to hear more about james redd and clemenza's reactions to lucking out.

can't decide if i want to read will hermes' book. is there a unifying narrative or thread? the NYT review made it seem kinda scattered, a hodgepodge or "random" as the kids like to say these days

Posting what Marcus said after "hatchet job," cause it seems pretty fleshed out.

I thought it went into areas where a biographer has no business going, which is to say where he was continually judging a writer’s motives and deciding for himself when a writer went too far, said things she shouldn’t have said, crossed imaginary critical boundaries, behaved unethically. If you want to write a polemic, go right ahead. But when you write a biography, where you’re supposed to tell someone else’s story, then that stuff seemed totally out of place to me. And it also seemed that the book was either totally tone-deaf or woefully ignoring all kinds of things that might have made her look better. One can sometimes sense an author getting fed-up with his subject. I imagine Brian Kellow began the book with great empathy and fascination with Pauline Kael, but the deeper he got into his research, the less he liked her or maybe the less he approved of her. That’s the feeling I got reading the book. What begins with affection or fascination turns into animus. You have these incidents where, for instance, where Andrew Sarris can write the most viscous and vile personal attack on Pauline somewhere around 1979 and it virtually goes unmentioned in the book. And so many things of critical importance in terms of her writing and career go unmentioned. And I don’t think he understands Pauline as a writer, as a prose stylist, with an incredible sense of humor and her ability to get that on the page. I don’t think he understands her or cares about her as a writer and her sense of adventure, a sense of getting something right, and to take something small and write social criticism as vivid and pointed and original as anyone was doing in the 1950s, which was so shocking reading her first book, I Lost It at the Movies, the really early pieces. You’ve got a fully formed writer who just can’t wait to get out there and start mixing it up. Who wants to say everything at once and is able to do it. There’s no sense of that in his book. So now you’re going to say, “What do you really think?”

Wolcott's portrait of Kael in his memoir is indelible, and far from condescending.

As for her books, get your hands on For Keeps if you can, followed by one of the seventies volumes and Hooked.

marcus puts limits on the practice of biography that are absurd and possibly self-serving if you consider:

where he was continually judging a writer’s motives and deciding for himself when a writer went too far, said things she shouldn’t have said, crossed imaginary critical boundaries, behaved unethically.

marcus and kael do this constantly in their criticism. so biographers can't express opinions on their subjects? i didn't think kellow's book was all that but greil is in full high dudgeon knuckle-rapping mode here

leave criticism to the real critics, son

except he said If you want to write a polemic, go right ahead. But when you write a biography, where you’re supposed to tell someone else’s story, then that stuff seemed totally out of place to me.

obv is kellow had something interesting to say, he'd be forgiven, but the guy basically just adds "unfortunately, she overrated the performance" or "but she went too far" after an excerpt.

if kellow

yeah i thought that stuff was boring too but it doesn't invalidate the work as biography

obv is kellow had something interesting to sayagreed with greil marcus, he'd be forgiven,

do you still think marcus' beef is unclear, though? whether you think it "invalidates the work as biography" or not, it certainly doesn't help a biography to have the features editor of Opera Times interrupting the story to let us know when he thinks Pauline Kael was right or not.

xpost ok didn't you just say that shit was boring?

when the focus of the biography is the written work having the editor of a piece weigh in isn't an interruption

^isn't necessarily. for the record, i thought kellow's focus on pauline-the-critic rather than pauline-the-person was the book's tragic flaw

hey, if he quoted william shawn i'd have loved it!

Two additional thoughts to last night (I'm an old guy--it takes me a while sometimes):

1) "And this is croup, if there's any doubt"--aren't you essentially saying the same thing I pointed out there, the thing you took such objection to coming from me: my opinions on Kael are well established, so take this as you wish. I don't see what else you could have meant by feeling the need to make it clear who you were.

2) "Like if you want to play semantics on the phrase 'hatchet job,' fine." Calling something a "hatchet job" is just a semantic technicality to you? A hatchet job is pretty much the worst thing a book can be. It's like saying, "If you want to play semantics on the phrase 'serial rapist,' fine."

Your Dr. Strangelove analogy is funny, and I've used the exact same line when someone (i.e., Alfred) gets angry at me for talking crass politics in the political thread. So theoretically, you're right. As a practical matter--whether such behaviour actually makes anyone feel like sticking around and hashing through a disagreement with you--you're dead wrong. (At least for me, so as not to lapse into a Kael "you" generality.)

Deli Llama: I didn't like the Wolcott book for the most basic reason of all--I don't like how he writes. I found him so annoyingly un-Kael like, in how he couches everything up in fanciful, writerly bits of business. I didn't really believe this implicit idea running through the book, either, that he was this innocent observing all these other people jostling for position on the New York food chain. Just a personal, gut reaction, but he struck me as exactly the kind of status-climber he purported to recoil from. (It's been years since I read it, but it reminded of Norman Podhoretz's Making It that way--which I recall as being more open about that sort of thing.) He doesn't condescend to Kael, no, not at all, and I did like the last couple of pages with them in a cab the night of Lennon's assassination. Elsewhere, she seemed more like a presence to me than a flesh-and-blood person...not sure if I'm saying that right; I found his portrayal of her odd.

I agree that Wolcott's metaphor-to-referent ratio gets exhausting. However almost every memoirist I've read can't resist dropping names and reveling in the company he keeps (the last Edmund White memoir is practically a who's-who of the seventies NYROB crowd). One of the exceptions is Henry Adams, obsessed with his "failure."

there are people who think wolcott derived his prose style from kael's

including, as per that atlantic interview, greil marcus. just sayin

i've always enjoyed wolcott's writing but allow that high-octane magazine prose can be hard to take over the course of a book

it's a thin line between callow status-climber and ambitious young person

there are people who think wolcott derived his prose style from kael's

Kael is accused and praised for prizing "sensation"; I'd say Wolcott more fully deserves the accusation/praise.

The one thing about Wolcott's book that mystified me--and I didn't start reading the Voice till '79, so I either never read him there, or have no recollection of doing so now--is I don't know why Kael took to his writing the way she did. If he's imitating her, I'm missing it--they seem like such polar opposites to me (she's a laser beam, he's forever losing the plot in search of clever turns of phrases). Maybe the imitation is more obvious if you go back to the Voice pieces. If his style in Lucking Out could be turned into a film, I envision some kind of whimsical concoction she'd recoil from.

Lengthy double-review of Kael--the first by one those umpteen scribes who never got over that rude thing she said to them once.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/13545504616/citizen-kael-part-i

it's a thin line between callow status-climber and ambitious young person

My favourite Persuaders song ever.

Why did Schickel discuss (at length!) Kael's hanging out with other directors -- even in the cutting room floor -- only to write "But, as I’ve said, I don’t care much about this point"? Oh, I see: so he can write: "Or maybe she just liked people who paid her court."

Man I hope my peers are still bothering to piss on my grave ten years after my death

(I myself did something similar when, in 1986, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in television production, though without the glamorous support she enjoyed.)

That was kind of fun to read in the sense that it was pure "Kael as Stalin" rather than "Kael as Marilyn Monroe meets Stalin"

Writers, politicians, and lots of people get raked over the coals long after their deaths. With someone like Kael, who didn't mince words, and whose personality on the page was as large and as sharp as could be--and whose career consisted of evaluating, criticizing, and praising the work of others--I would think pointedly unflattering reappraisals of her own body of work (and practices) would be a given; she also still has a great deal of worshipful things written about her. I'm sure she'd be quite happy that people still passionately argue about her. Stanley Kauffmann's been (I think, anyway) a great film critic for 50+ years and counting. When he dies, my guess is he'll be more or less forgotten soon after outside of a few thousand devoted readers, and that no one will ever engage in heated exchanges about his writing, his practices, or his place in history. I don't think Kael would take that trade-off (and yes, I'm just guessing and editorializing and offering an opinion for which I have no special background knowledge).

Hey, I said I hope for a similar fate!

All my life, I'll regret I wasn't around for Kael's reign of terror.

I think it's pretty clear that Kael rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Maybe she was very blunt with them about one thing or another, maybe she casually ridiculed or dismissed films and filmmakers about which they had strong personal feelings--I got into it with a writer friend once over that; to paraphrase Lester Bangs in his famous Elvis piece, showing contempt for our objects of veneration can really sting, whether you mean it to or not--or maybe (probably) there was an element of professional jealousy; she got a lot of attention in her day, and even though I think she deserved to, if you were someone who got a lot less, I'm sure that rankled. According to Kellow's book--according to Kael's daughter, I think--she was someone who meant no ill will when she was blunt or dismissive, and she seemed surprised when people took it personally. I believe that; I'm sure everyone has known someone like that in his or her life. So when people like Sarris or Shickel attack Kael, it doesn't alter my opinion of her writing at all--she will always be my favourite film critic. But neither do I have any feelings of "How dare they say that?" They were there, they have a right to air their grievances, and I just take what they write as another perspective on someone who's influenced me greatly and remains endlessly interesting to me.

Wolcott was def writing about TV in the Voice in '80-81, maybe for a couple of years after that. I believe his salient comment on Brideshead Revisited was "Oh, just go ahead and kiss him, you big lug!"

It's not "how dare they say that?" it's "why on earth would you want to be known for saying that?"

people are certainly allowed to look bitter and jealous of the dead

Andrew Sarris isn't "known" for his bitterness towards Kael, anymore than Kael will now be known for her seemingly callous treatment of the guy who did the Raising Kane research--Sarris is known for The American Cinema. Richard Schickel isn't going to be known for anything he writes about Kael or Brian Kellow's book in 2011; he's known for a long career of film criticism and television documentaries on filmmakers. Renata Adler--whose criticisms of Kael were made was Kael was still very much alive--probably is to some degree now known for her review of When the Lights Go Down, but she's also spent the last 40 years writing criticism, essays, and novels. They've had things they wanted to say about Kael. They wrote them. I'm not sure what your post before the previous one means.

"how dare they say that?" suggests that what they did was offensive, but more than that i think it's embarrassing, in part because they've accomplished enough that they don't need to air their contempt to get attention. we'll never know if Kael would have lobbed back at the slams (Well, the ones made while she was alive) if William Shawn hadn't curbed that tendency. But I think she's better off for not engaging in public flame wars once she was established.

And I don't mean to suggest that she's above criticism. But there's an ugliness to a lot of the attacks she's received that I'm not aware folks like Sarris and Schickel expend on other subjects.

and your comparison re: kane is flawed because a) kael didn't attack the researcher, she used his work without credit and b) sarris, adler and schickel are aiming their bile at a popular figure, arguably more popular than them, considering she's got a bio out.

Schickel is an inveterate spleen-venter, his negative reviews are cranky as fuck

also Kael and Sarris are totally known for their rivalry, a notoriety Sarris has done far more to keep alive (did she even acknowledge him after Circles And Squares?) and Adler's review of Kael takes a healthy chunk of her wikipedia page

x-post yeah i'll be honest, he may just be like this all the time.

his beef with Kael stems from her contempt for his boy Clint Eastwood

From what I've read Sarris never forgave Kael; he was still spitting poison when approached for obit purposes in 2001. It's a long time to nurse a grudge.

yeah i knew about the 2001 obit (classy guy), but i didn't know until the book that he was lobbing arrows all through her new yorker stint

adler and schickel are aiming their bile at a popular figure, arguably more popular than them

as somebody once said of rock critics, they're fighting turf wars over territory the size of a postage stamp

You still have Morbius

The more I get into this (knowing the end), the more "hatchet job" does seem a bit much (if Marcus threw the book down around the '70s period, I understand why he'd assume that, though). The guy obviously still has sympathy for Kael, but his decision to meld review quotes and personal life anecdotes is questionable enough without him constantly throwing in his two cents about whether or not she was right about a film.

It's just a sloppy, arguably hacky way to go about a bio, and I can't imagine an audience that could be satisfied by this book other than people obsessed with cinema enough to be familiar and informed about her work, but who have no doubt she needs to be knocked down a peg. Who else would tolerate or accept him ending a chapter with For all her excitement there was a certain lack of cohesiveness in her review of Prizzi's Honor that she had seldom shown. It seemed overlong, and not quite all of a piece, as if she were so astonished to find a film this good that she was no longer quite sure how to convey her enthusiasm after just a handful of perfectly fine mini-quotes from the review? Who else would take that kind of conjecture on faith? And if you weren't already invested in the subject matter, who would even get this far?

sorry for the rhetorical questions, renata

I guess that's as much as you're going to come around on the book--fair enough. My arguments in this thread have primarily been against two phrases: "hatchet job" and "hackwork." I think of the former as being written out of personal pique or vendetta, with the express purpose of discrediting someone. "Hackwork" to me can mean sloppily researched, poorly written, or written quickly and cavalierly, as a way to cash in on something. I don't believe any of those things even remotely apply to A Life in the Dark. Specific complaints about how much personal opinion Kellow should be allowed to interject, or your problems with the Prizzi's Honor quote (which I didn't give a second thought to when I read the book, undoubtedly because I never gave a second thought to Prizzi's Honor the film), fine. I don't agree, but clearly there seems to something of a split opinion on that element of the book.

One can put enormous care into a book and still emerge with a hack job.

Also: Kellow comes off much better in that round table posted above, better than Camille Paglia, who by the second rambling monologue should have had someone sit on her face.

Didn't mind Camille that much because that's just the way she is and every once in while she would quote something very specific that was interesting and somebody else would pick up on that. Thought Toback repeated himself a lot but I guess he such a key figure in the PK story that it was worth it to hear his eyewitness viewpoint.

You're in luck! The rest of the book is 10,000,000 Nights at the Movies.
Frank Rich review says this part starts when she gets to the New Yorker
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/roaring-at-the-screen-with-pauline-kael.html?pagewanted=all

At this triumphant juncture, a reader should turn to Kael’s full New Yorker reviews rather than Kellow’s year-after-year summaries of them. His narrative bogs down in recaps of movie plots and the juvenile jockeying that attended the annual awards balloting by the New York film critics’ organizations. Mercifully, this chronicle finally gives way to a dishy, if depressing, account of Kael’s decline. If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

One can put enormous care into a book and still emerge with a hack job.

I suppose that's true, and if I thought Kellow were a bad writer, I'd agree. I think A Life in the Dark is very well written.

I go both ways with Paglia (I've still only watched half of the panel clip). Sometimes she makes me laugh (with her, not at her), other times I want to run for cover. I saw her speak about her poetry book a few years back. Ages ago, I had a film class with a girl who Paglia reminds me of so much. I remember she got drunk at a professor's party, didn't say a word for the next few weeks of class, and when she finally rejoined the discussion, it was (to coin a phrase) like a hurricane.

As a panel member she was ideal but a Quaalude wouldn't have helped.

*would've

If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

If critics like Rich would stop conflating the decline of American movies and the decline of Kael's prose, they'd stop writing drivel like this. I only notice a decline around 1990 and '91 when the paragraphs get choppier and her theses aren't fully realized (Kellow is partly right when he cites her Goodfellas review as an example).

Surely you would agree that you're in the minority in thinking that her '80s writing is the equal of her '70s (or earlier) writing.

I don't know! Like I wrote, we all agree Hollywood film wasn't as exciting in the eighties, but I can't remember anybody arguing that Kael's prose suffered a commensurate decline.

I guess I just have a hard time completely detaching the writing from the films themselves. I mean, obviously she didn't stop being a great writer--I'm not trying to say that. But for most of the eighties, I'm not as excited by her reviews of (say) Prizzi's Honor or Enemies: A Love Story or My Beautiful Laundrette as I am by those of Godfather II or Nashville or Invasion of the Body Snatchers because the films don't mean nearly as much to me. Now and again--Casualties of War would be the best example for me--we're back in sync. This is why comments of Kellow's like the Prizzi's Honor one above didn't bother me. I didn't even notice.

Saw Chinatown yesterday at the Lightbox, introduced by Adam Nayman, a local critic. The two endings--Towne's vs. Polanski's--came up, and reference was made to Kael's review. This is one time where I think she was completely wrong: her contention that Towne's ending, where Cross gets away with it but Evelyn leaves town, would have been better. Polanski's ending to me is perfect--and I agree with Nayman that it's not Polanski's "gargoyle grin" asserting itself, but rather a very anguished expression of his guilt over Sharon Tate's murder. (Supposedly he always felt guilty for not being there the night of the murder.)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/brushing-up-on-roman-polanskis-downbeat-endings/article2271445/print/

funnily enough, I vividly remember Kael writing approvingly that Jack's dopey hitman in Prizzi's Honor played like a cross between Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.

Of course, I prefer Prizzi's Honor to the first Godfather film.

thx for reminding me that I need to see Prizzi's Honor

Huston had to explain to a flummoxed Nicholson that it's a comedy.

Something else came up yesterday that I'd never thought about, and I've probably seen Chinatown 15-20 times: Huston saying to Nicholson "Are you sleeping with my daughter" at a time when in real life he was.

Huston supposedly said of P'sH, "Jack, everything you've done is infused with intelligence, and we can't have any of that here."