The Boy

We always knew that Alfred Hitchcock was a pervert. It was simply a difference of degree, not of kind. So many of his movies are about perverts - who also happen to be murderers - that it became obvious as he got older that he identified more closely with them instead of with the James Stewart/Cary Grant/Henry Fonda heroes. Perversion was his true métier.

So the HBO movie The Girl (2012), based on the account of a witness to and a victim of old Tubby's more unseemly advances came as no surprise. It is, nonetheless, irresistible for any cinephile anxious to see Hitchcock's completely overwrought edifice chipped away: a personal account of the behind-the-scenes/behind-the-camera drooling of the Master of Suspenders over pretty Tippi Hedren, whom he made the star of two of his last highly-regarded movies.

Hitchcock prided himself on his knowledge of his audience. He was famous for calling actors "cattle," and infamous for regarding his audience as a flock of sheep. He knew exactly how to make an audience squirm, jump, bite their nails, and - crucially - grab their genitals. No other filmmaker had such a talent for making crime sexy. He knew that a suave, debonair criminal had a much greater chance of success than a creepy, uncouth one. I get the feeling that Rebecca was probably the favorite of his Hollywood movies because we aren't sure that Cary Grant isn't trying to murder Joan Fontaine until the last reel.

We never had to consult a psychologist to guess that his obesity gave Hitchcock a complex. His love of camera tricks - crane shots, impossible angles, action scenes in which people dangle from the heights of the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore - not to mention his fixation on studio shooting, leaving the location shooting to second units and using rear-screen projection almost obsessively - clearly was liberating for a man who didn't care to move about much. Rear Window, in which the hero (James Stewart) is incapacitated by a broken leg, is a fat man's fantasy. The spying into his neighbor's private lives was borderline criminal, but great fun for Hitchcock.

But for all the leering going on behind the camera, Hitchcock actually succeeded in eliciting an excellent performance from Tippi Hedren. She never acted before The Birds (1963) and went on a long hiatus after Marnie (1965). Hedren claimed it was Hitchcock's exclusive contract that sabotaged her career, but in her two movies for him, she was one of the few things worth watching.

The Girl has Toby Jones playing Hitchcock and Sienna Miller playing Hedren. At first, I found Jones to be too small for the role (Hitchcock once claimed he was 5 ft 8, but he was really a fraction shy of 5 ft 7). But Jones actually does a better job of impersonation than Anthony Hopkins did in Hitchcock. Jones got the voice especially right.

The real casting mistake was Sienna Miller, who is pretty enough, but whose prettiness is of a different sort than Tippi Hedren's. Hitchcock certainly would never have looked twice at her. She doesn't suggest depths to her femininity or her sexuality. With Miller, it is all right there on the surface, "on the plate" as Hitchcock puts it, enticing but entirely lacking in mystery.

Hitchcock's long-suffering (an educated guess) wife, Alma comes off as something of a cipher in The Girl. Played by Imelda Staunton, she isn't given the credit due her for being Hitchcock's close collaborator up until her death two years before him. Only her unexplained departure in the movie, which apparently causes Hitchcock some concern, suggests the dimensions of their relationship. Much more room is given the woman in Helen Mirren's performance in Hitchcock. But then, Mirren is a scene-stealer even in the presence of Anthony Hopkins.

The Girl shows what a god Hitchcock was in Sixties Hollywood Psycho had revitalized his sagging career, and raised the bar for bloodiness (and bloodymindedness). He never learned how to drive a car (he was terrified of policemen), so in The Girl we see Toby Jones riding in the back of a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Hitchcock was 62 when principal photography started for The Birds. I watched it again recently and found it a sometimes excruciatingly methodical stylistic exercise. Like Psycho, it spends at least half its length reeling in a whopping red herring, dawdling over plots that are jettisoned as soon - or as late - as the action commences. There is a kind of elegance to the first halves of Psycho and The Birds that turns preposterously ugly the moment when Mother and the birds enter stabbing and biting. Hedren was traumatized by a week of shooting live birds being flung at her face on a soundstage, just so Hitch could get his sadistic kicks.

Glancing at Hitchcock's filmography, it's surprising to see how many misses there were, like The Paradine Case, Rope, Under Capricorn, and Stage Fright, before arriving at the hits like Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, or the movie recently voted by a consortium of critics (who hadn't been introduced to one another) the "greatest film of  all time", Vertigo. The only ones I would like to see again are The 39 Steps and The Wrong Man. Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut notwithstanding, Hitchcock was one of the best commercial film directors. Study his movies if you must, but don't come away from them talking about art. Such talk hasn't done anyone - least of all Hitchcock - a damn bit of good.

Words To Live By

Four years ago on this blog, I collected a number of quotes from the essays of George Orwell in a post I called George Orwell's Ready Reckoner. It was the first of what I intended to be a series. But, as way led on to way, I never got around to a second installment. I hope this makes up for my negligence.

As the following quotes demonstrate, he was, aside from a superb prose stylist, a sensitive literary critic, a political thinker of genius, and a fearless observer of the world around him. As Orwell wrote of Shakespeare, "If one has once read [him] with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or other, in his unsystematic but illuminating way." Orwell could have said as much of himself.

Here is the latest batch, in no particular order.

It is difficult to think of any politician who has lived to be eighty and still been regarded as a success. What we call a 'great' statesman normally means one who dies before his policy has had time to take effect. If Cromwell had lived a few years longer he would probably have fallen from power, in which case we should now regard him as a failure. If Pétain had died in 1930, France would have venerated him as a hero and patriot. Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down in history as the greatest man who ever lived. (James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, 1946)

When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war - and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings - there is always the temptation to say: "One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral." In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942)

You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Peter Bezukhov. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine yourself talking to - Bloom, for instance, or Pécuchet, or even Wells's Mr Polly. It is because Dickens's characters have no mental life. (Charles Dickens, 1940)

There is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)

"Raffles" is a good book, and so is "The Island of Dr. Moreau," and so is "La Chartreuse de Parme,: and so is "Macbeth"; but they are "good" at very different levels. Similarly, "If Winter Comes" and "The Well-Beloved" and "An Unsocial Socialist" and "Sir Lancelot Greaves" are all bad books, but at different levels of "badness." This is the fact that the hack-reviewer has made it his special business to obscure. (In Defense of the Novel, 1936)

Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later - some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942)

Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really lived on a desert island he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. (As I Please 22, 1944)

What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others? (As I Please 63, 1946)

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. (Charles Dickens, 1940)

When we gorge ourselves this Christmas, if we do get the chance to gorge ourselves, it is worth giving a thought to the thousand million human beings, or thereabouts, who will be doing no such thing. For in the long run our Christmas dinners would be safer if we could make sure that everyone else had a Christmas dinner as well. (As I Please 66, 1946)


... the ancient boneheap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. (Inside the Whale, 1940)


The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. (Politics and the English Language, 1946)


Art and propaganda are never quite separable, and ... what are supposed to be purely aesthetic judgements are always corrupted to some extent by moral or political or religious loyalties. (Tolstoy and Shakespeare, 1941)

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. (The Freedom of the Press, 1946)


The theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. (Review of The Development of William Butler Yeats by V.K. Narayana Menon, 1943))


All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. (Why I Write, 1946)


Much of the literature that comes to us out of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and in some cases contemptibly silly. (Inside the Whale, 1940)

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who not is utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one. (Charles Dickens, 1940)

Nearly all Western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. (Review of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, 1940)

Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or play or poem or what-not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something we can only call art. (Tolstoy and Shakespeare, 1941)

Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force? (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942)


War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable. (As I Please 25, 1944)

All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. (Arthur Koestler, 1944)

The worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. (Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, 1944)




The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory. (James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, 1946)

The creative impulse seems to last for about 15 years: in a prose writer these 15 years would probably be between the ages of 30 and 45, or thereabouts ... Many writers, perhaps most, ought simply to stop writing when they reach middle age. Unfortunately our society will not let them stop. Most of them know no other way of earning a living, and writing, with all that goes with it - quarrels, rivalries, flattery, the sense of being a semi-public figure - is habit-forming. (As I Please 64, 1946)

It is obvious that any economic system would work equitably if men could be trusted to behave themselves but long experience has shown that in matters of property only a tiny minority of men will behave any better than they are compelled to do. (Review of Communism and Man by F.J. Sheed, 1939)

All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society ... Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. (Charles Dickens, 1940)

The art of writing is in fact largely the perversion of words, and I would even say that the less obvious this perversion is, the more thoroughly it has been done. For a writer who seems to twist words out of their meanings (e.g. Gerard Manley Hopkins) is really, if one looks closely, making a desperate attempt to use them straightforwardly. (New Words, 1940)


When sexual frankness ceased to be possible, picaresque literature was robbed of perhaps half of its subject matter. The eighteenth-century inn where it was almost abnormal to go into the right bedroom was a lost dominion. (Tobias Smollett: Scotland's Best Novelist, 1944)  

A Question and an Answer

In great poetry, one can always look for resemblances, echoed themes. Ideas central to life are central to poetry: where can one find meaning to the perplexities of existence? Two poets, W.H. Auden and Mary Oliver, wrote poems about journeys, lives and worlds apart. Without looking into the backgrounds of each poem, the personal circumstances that inspired them (which can contribute to, but never detract from, our appreciation of them), the first poem poses a troubling question that the second confidently answers.

W.H. Auden's cycle, "A Voyage," begins with the poem "Whither?":

A Voyage

I. WHITHER?

Where does this journey look which the watcher upon the quay,

Standing under his evil star, so bitterly envies,

As the mountains swim away with slow calm strokes

And the gulls abandon their vow? Does it promise a juster life?

Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveller find

In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave,

Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place,

Convincing as those that children find in stones and holes?

No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.

His journey is false, his unreal excitement really an illness

On a false island where the heart cannot act and will not suffer:

He condones his fever; he is weaker than he thought; his weakness is real.

But at moments, as when real dolphins with leap and panache

Cajole for recognition or, far away, a real island

Gets up to catch his eye, his trance is broken: he remembers

Times and places where he was well; he believes in joy,

That, maybe, his fever shall find a cure, the true journey an end

Where hearts meet and are really true, and crossed this ocean, that parts

Hearts which alter but is the same always, that goes

Everywhere, as truth and falsehood go, but cannot suffer.

As Auden found, the suspense of his journey, the pause between departure and arrival, held questions and answers in equipoise. As long as his journey lasts (and they lasted so much longer in the Forties), his tremulous questions can find neither affirmation nor negation. Like him, they can only wait. But, until the journey's end, there are wondrous distractions, passing scenery and the indifference of nature, but also its strange complicity, that provide him with escape from his suspense.

Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey" offers a lonely colloquy on the same subject. But she seems so much more anxious that her journey should begin, caught in that irresistible hurry that travel instills in us, that the time for reflection or regret would have to wait. Motion is the only truth now:

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save.

Oliver is as melancholy as Auden, but her loneliness is populated by voices, as Auden's were only by memories. Kafka's parable, "My Destination," makes it explicit (Kafka explicit?):

I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stables. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: "Where are you riding to, master?" "I don't know," I said, "only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination." "And so you know your destination?" he asked. "Yes," I answered, "didn't I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination." "You have no provisions with you," he said. "I need none," I said, "the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don't get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey."

Here on my Philippine island for another birthday, I know that destinations are only as certain as one's intentions at departure. Where I was going isn't always where I have arrived. The journey is the only answer.

A Snowball's Chance

Among the things my brother packed for me in my Christmas package last year was a Charlie Brown snowball. It wasn't as grand as the one that Charles Foster Kane was holding in his hand when he expired at the beginning of the movie Citizen Kane, speaking his last word, "Rosebud!" He dropped the ball and it rolled across the wood floor and shattered against a stair step.

My snowball is made of plastic. But when I found it in the box, I shook it a few times and watched the snowflakes swirl around Charlie and settle at his feet. Four companions - Lucy, Snoopy, Linus and Peppermint Patty - stood behind him, except they were two dimensional figures painted on a flat plastic semicircle, and only Charlie stood alone in three dimensions. I put the snowball on my bookcase and I look at it every day.

Helplessly, as the weeks since then have passed, I have watched as the water in the ball fell noticeably lower. Within a month, the level of the water was getting almost to the top of Charlie's brown winter cap. When I picked up the ball, I found a drop of water beneath it. I figure that the pressurization of the plane that transported the package from the U.S. to Manila had created a tiny leak. And the difference in temperatures of Denver and Manila, which was at least sixty degrees Fahrenheit in December, probably contributed to the leak.

By now, Charlie's head is above the water, and it's sunk to the chins of his friends. Only Snoopy remains underwater - but now he looks like he must be drowning. If I should shake the ball - which would only make the water leak faster - the snowflakes no longer swirl around their heads. They have no more room except to sink, bereft of life, to the ground.

What a sad spectacle to be subjected to, as the figures once suspended in a winter wonderland, now stand up to their chins in tepid, warm water, which now refracts their bodies distortedly, as if their heads are coming off. Snoopy still thumps his tail happily, oblivious of the fate that awaits him. He might as well be drowning in a half-empty pool.

In his Paris Interview, Billy Wilder said of Raymond Chandler that he knew how to write beautiful sentences, like "There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool."

I think there is nothing sadder than a half-empty snowball.

The Bella Lingua

My brother bought me The Stories of John Cheever for Christmas. I have another copy of the book, dog-eared, but I left it in Alaska with my sister. The one I have now has that exquisite smell of a newly-printed book, which is something I missed.

I read most of the stories in the Eighties, but reading them again so many years - and so much living - later is like reading them for the first time. So far I've savored "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor," "Clancy in the Tower of Babel" (both of them about an elevator operator), "The Chimera," and "The Bella Lingua". The last one is about an American expat in Rome named Streeter, who works for an agency identified only by its acronym F.R.U.P.C. His life in Rome is diverting enough, but because he spends all his time among other Americans, and because he's convinced himself that a firm grounding in the "bella lingua" is all that stands between him and the people and culture that surrounds him with its impenetrable and inexplicable emotional force, he is making a determined effort to learn Italian. Once he has accomplished this, his sense of being an outsider in a country not his own will vanish and he will understand not just what everyone is saying on the buses and in the streets, but he will "understand Italy."

As anyone who has ever lived the life of an expat must know, Streeter's conviction that all that stands between him and Italy is a language barrier is painfully romantic. When he visits a villa outside Rome with some friends, he is overwhelmed and bewildered by the beauty he finds there. Cheever outdoes himself:

"The beauty of Italy is not easy to come by any longer, if it ever was, but, driving to a villa below Anticoli for a weekend with friends, Streeter saw a country of such detail and loveliness that it could not be described."

That is Streeter's whole problem - he can't find the words to describe the world around him. In the morning, he watches a barefoot maid picking roses and singing a beautiful song:

"Streeter found his Italian still so limited that he couldn't understand the words of the song, and this brought him around to the fact that he couldn't quite understand the landscape, either. His feeling about it was very much what he might have felt about some excellent resort or summer place - a scene where, perhaps as children, we have thrown ourselves into a temporary relationship with beauty and simplicity that will be rudely broken off on Labor Day. It was the evocation of a borrowed, temporary, bittersweet happiness that he rebelled against - but the maid went on singing, and Streeter did not understand a word."

When Streeter's Italian teacher, an American widow named Kate Dresser, is confronted by her uncle from Krasbie, Iowa, demanding that she come home, and her young son Charlie tells her he's homesick, she tells him:

"'Homesickness is nothing. It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. When you're in one place and long to be in another, it isn't as simple as taking a boat. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.'"

Her uncle tries to explain to her: "'It's crazy, Katie. You come home with me and Charlie. You and Charlie can live in the other half of my house, and I'll have a nice American kitchen put in for you.'"

But Kate quickly replies, "'How in hell do you think America would have been discovered if everybody stayed home in places like Krasbie? [Nothing] will keep me from wanting to see the world and the different people who live in it'"

Her uncle takes Charlie home. Kate stays in Rome. And she compliments Streeter on the progress he is making in his Italian. His progress in making sense of Italy was left, by Cheever, undocumented.

The Cruellest Month

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

-Robert Frost, "Desert Places"

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.'

W.B. Yeats, "Adam's Curse"




It's April 30, which means that National Poetry Month is - thank God - almost over. I'll bet you never knew it was National Poetry Month. Neither did I until I read a Wall Street Journal article by Joseph Epstein, "The Poetic Justice of April 1."(1)

Because I never moved in intellectual circles (shouldn't it be intellectual "squares"?), unless you count the years (1976-1981) I spent in university, poetry has been an exclusive, private pursuit, like the music of Bartok ad Stravinsky or the films of Antonioni and Bresson. I have corresponded with creative people from time to time, authors and literary editors, but they weren't my friends. My friends have been people living very far from the arts, in fact as far from the arts as one could get - people with whom I came in contact in the military or in various revolving-door jobs I've held since. If they discovered that I could recite certain poems by Robert Graves or Elizabeth Bishop from memory, it would induce little more than a somewhat embarrassed silence in them.

So when I read articles announcing the death of poetry, I am neither saddened nor particularly surprised. Joseph Epstein was once called "perhaps the wittiest writer (working in his genre) alive, the funniest since Randall Jarrell."(2) Twenty-five years ago, Epstein wrote a lengthy essay for Commentary asking "Who Killed Poetry?" His point, then as now, is that no one really reads poetry any more, in the way that educated members of his own generation would "walk around with lines and entire passages from the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, e e cummings, and others rattling around pleasantly in [their heads]." There are still plenty of poets, of course, and plenty of them teaching creative writing courses in universities, but no one knows their work or buys their books. Poetry is kept alive artificially, like a comatose patient on life support, or like Japanese Noh drama - physically intact, but utterly isolated from the world around it.

Epstein has various theories about the absence of poetry as a vital part of our age, as it has been part of every age since prehistory: modernism, the ascendancy (since Flaubert) of beautifully written prose, rampant anti-intellectualism, capitalism, the dwindling of the average person's attention span. The fact that poetry teachers are propagating a mistaken example of poetry to their students, and a mistaken estimation of certain poet's worth, has contributed to the confusion, in the minds of the few readers of poetry, about what poetry is and, crucially, what it isn't. This explains why recent presidential inaugurations, like Bill Clinton's re-election in 1996 (oh, lost halcyon days!) and Barack Obama's last year, featured such pseudo-poets as Maya Angelou and Richard Blanco.

But I don't see what the fuss is about. I've always known poetry has always been a matter of a few, so why should I care if it's even fewer today? This trend, of the incomprehension or even hostility of the public toward poetry, has been underway for at least a century. It came about partly as a result of the deliberate effort by the leading poets of the first decades of the 20th century to render poetry as unintelligible to the uninitiated reader as possible. To understand Pound, for example, you needed to be a polyglot, or as full of bogus scholarship as Pound.

But even a generation before Vers Libre, Arnold Bennett expressed the view that, in English-speaking countries, the word "poetry" would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire hose. In 1945, George Orwell, one of the most sensitive and under-appreciated critics of poetry, wrote that "one must conclude that though the big public is hostile to poetry, it is not strongly hostile to verse. After all, if rhyme and metre were dislike for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty limericks could be popular. [Nor, for that matter, would rap music, which uses what Glyn Maxwell calls "Rapid feminine rhyming - feminine in the prosodic sense, I hasten to add."] Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have almost ceased to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the common man has come to be taken for granted in any country where everyone can read. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with unintelligibility, intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday." ("Poetry and the Microphone")

Robert Graves once told an interviewer that he only made enough from the publication of his poetry to "keep me in cigarettes." Auden, in Nones, famously lamented the loss of an audience: "The wind has dropped and we have lost our public." In his poem, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," he honestly appraised the number of people in the world who were moved by Yeats' death: "A few thousand will think of this day/As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual." So, only a "few thousand" would remember the day on which a great poet died.

In "The Obscurity of the Poet," Randall Jarrell wrote what everyone who wrote and read poetry already knew, that the poet "lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry." If this was true in the 1950s, how much have the new media of video and computers and cellphones worsened the problem for the poet?

Delmore Schwartz, in "The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World," outlined what he saw as a natural process: "As soon as the student leaves school, all the seductions of mass-culture and middlebrow culture, and in addition the whole way of life of our society, combine to make the reading of poetry a dangerous and quickly rejected luxury."

Isn't it fashionable to regard one's age as an age of decline? "It is not sufficient," wrote Philip Larkin in 1957, "to say that poetry has lost its audience, and so need no longer consider it: lots of people still read and even buy poetry. More accurately, poetry has lost its old audience, and gained a new one . . . What can be done about this? . . . If the medium is in fact to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures, I can only think that a large-scale revulsion has got to set in against present notions, and that it will have to start with poetry readers asking themselves more frequently whether they do in fact enjoy what they read, and, if not, what the point is of carrying on. And I use 'enjoy' in the commonest of senses, the sense in which we leave a radio on or off." ("The Pleasure Principle")

I am less worried about the death of poetry than by the troubling insistence of some people that it is already dead, is dying, or must die simply to fulfill their grim forecasts. But I refer you to the Washington Post article I reproduced above. When I first read it, in the Des Moines Register about a decade ago, I thought it must be a hoax, the ridiculous revenge some copy editor was having on poetry. Because it is regarded as an obligation to the past, instead of a source of continuing and eternal pleasure, poetry is hated by people who can never forget all the "required reading" they were subjected to in high school. I blame the manner in which poetry is taught for that. But there is always someone, probably bespectacled, sitting in the back of the English class, who is bullied and ridiculed for being brighter than everyone else, and quiet, and unable to conform to the norm of stupidity - a person for whom the "obscurity of the poet" comes as little surprise, and as a secret pleasure.(3)


(1) April has been National Poetry Month since 1996.
(2) William F. Buckley, "Who's He?", The New Criterion, September 2002.
(3) By the way, that bespectacled student wasn't me. I dropped out of high school (before entering university at 18) before my opinion of poetry could be pulverized by an English teacher whose first name was likely to be "Coach."

From the Golden Age to the Golden Years

In so many ways, Stanley Kauffmann is an astonishment. One of them is that he turns 97 today. Another is that he continues to comment on films for The New Republic, which he has done since 1958. The New Republic has a history of giving space to quality film criticism, going all the way back to Gilbert Seldes and Otis Ferguson. It took a little time for them to settle on Mr. Kauffmann. How do I know this? It may simply be an editorial trifle, but it is significant. You can see for yourself at the bottom of each of Kauffmann's columns. Of the articles to which I have access from 1961, there is a subtle change - a single word - that indicates TNR's official acceptance. At the bottom of every column are the words "Stanley Kauffmann is a film critic for The New Republic." One of his greatest essays, "Arrival of an Artist," from April 10, 1961, which celebrates Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura,  closes with that line. A month later, at the bottom of his essay, "A Catalogue of Deadly Sins (celebrating Fellini's La Dolce Vita), it reads "Stanley Kauffmann is the film critic for The New Republic".

Hard as it may be to believe for someone who wasn't alive at the time, but there was a genuine Golden Age of American film criticism in the Sixties. The critics who were historically associated the age were Dwight Macdonald, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, John Simon, and Stanley Kauffmann. Though sometimes mis-identified as "mainstream," none of these critics were mere movie reviewers - the ones who wrote for the dailies and who fulfilled the lowly capacity of consumer advocates, informing the mass of moviegoers of what would supply them with the biggest bang for their hard-earned buck. There were a lot of people writing about film, but these five were the major figures on the subject of film as art. They were neatly divisible into two camps, even if they may not have felt comfortable with their association. Macdonald, Simon, and Kauffmann were known, contemptuously by some, as "literary" critics, since they were first and foremost writers, who also wrote literary and/or theater criticism. It was also because they would not accept the notion that films are created in a vacuum. Andrew Sarris introduced the so-called "auteur theory" to American film criticism, which opened the door for some of the most preposterous re-evaluation of Hollywood movies in terms normally reserved for art films. Kael seemed to resist the urge to take film too seriously and attacked filmmakers (like Antonioni) when their work made too many demands of her.

Macdonald stopped writing about film in 1966 because of a chill he perceived in the climate of international film. He died in 1982. Kael retired from writing full-time in 1991, and died from complications associated with Parkinson's Disease in 2001. Sarris passed away last June.

That leaves two of the originals still around. John Simon quit his film criticism post at The National Review in 2002, but continues to write theater criticism for Bloomberg News. Since late 2010, he also writes on many subjects on his blog, Uncensored John Simon.

Stanley Kauffmann, who was sometimes enlisted by his colleagues in some film fracas or another, has always seemed the most gentlemanly of them all. The late Roger Ebert called him "The most valuable film critic in America, and the one I turn to with the thought that, if we disagree, I may very well be wrong."(1) There have been enough occasions when I disagreed with Kauffmann ( Le Samouraï , Berlin Alexanderplatz, Philadelphia, Reds, Amistad, Vanya on 42nd Street) for me to know he isn't - thank God - infallible. Not surprising to me, those films were all failures in my estimation, praised by him. Like all good critics, Kauffmann spent most of his time explaining why he didn't like a film. My only quibble is that I wish he'd done it more often.

In 2008, The New Republic celebrated his 50 years of writing for the magazine with tributes and testimonials. He doesn't go out to see films any more, but the studios send him dvds, and he continues to write about them - some of them, the ones he thinks are worth writing about. He's certainly earned the enviable right (for a film critic) to pick and choose.

Despite enjoying the luxury of living in New York, where it's possible to see every film released in the U.S., Kauffmann has always been aware of the problems of his readers, especially those living in the Sticks. A reader from the Pacific Northwest asked him in a letter if he invented some of the films he wrote about, since they were never shown in his area. "In terms of filmgoing possibilities," Kauffmann wrote, "this country is schizoid. I, in New York, confront a fairly full range of available films. Only in a few large cities is anything like that range available; and those cities are only a small slice of this country's possible audience. Most people, like that reader, have the chance to see only the major Hollywood products--not even all the American films, let alone foreign ones.

"This dismal fact ought not to make us romanticize. If Kiarostami and Tavernier and Zhang Yimou were as widely available as The Lord of the Rings, they would not attract a sliver of the same attendance, which is obviously why they don't have the same distribution. But doesn't that sliver deserve nourishment? The possible nourishment exists. Year after year films are being made for more people than have the chance to see them. And if the whole idea of film-making is as serious as some of us take it to be, this gap between film and viewers is a cultural crime.

"Why, then, do critics--at least on some magazines and newspapers--continue to review films that will probably not reach wide audiences? For myself, it is partly because, as a democrat, I believe that the rights of the minority must be respected, including the filmgoing minority. It would be an offense to that minority, whether or not they knew it, to omit reviews, positive or otherwise, of films that are part of contemporary culture and of value to their cultural conspectus ... Equally importantly, it would be an offense to the art of film to ignore those who, often through much travail, keep reaching upward. I don't think that seriously intended films will save this sorry world, but I do think that their absence, even ignorance that they exist, would make it sorrier."

Whatever else you may say about George Burns, he had balls. At the age of 87, he wrote a book called How to Live To Be 100. He made a reservation at the London Palladium for his 100th birthday party. And he made it. Kauffmann, who never planned his longevity, admitted recently that people ask him how he "did it," how he managed his longevity. His response was, "I didn’t know I was doing it."


(1) Speaking of being gentlemanly, Ebert also said, "I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look. They can't help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat." I always regarded Ebert, R.I.P., as a movie reviewer, not a film critic.