One Year Later

"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down." (H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy, 1927)


Before Donald Trump threw his hat in the ring in 2015, and the campaigns for the party nominations commenced, I didn't like him. To me, he was a mediocre blowhard, a clown with a clown's hair. Like most clowns, his schtick wasn't funny. His schtick was a blustery, pompous, self-important and utterly insupportable jerk who made and lost fortunes in real estate and hosted a reality TV show that, just like most of the other reality shows, brought out the absolute worst in its contestants. But the attention that he got from the show seemed to boost his monstrously overinflated ego. Whether or not he knew the quote by Oscar Wilde, he certainly sought to live up to it: "There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Wilde, however, who sought anonymity in his last days, learned the very hardest way that being talked about was sometimes worse than not being talked about.

Trump's motives for running for president were probably inspired by the celebrity he enjoyed from The Apprentice. He was fixated on ratings, on the size of his audience, believing it was a gauge of actual worth. He may also have been enticed by the idea of power, which was something he never had before. Having enjoyed extravagant wealth and privilege all his life, and the dubious celebrity of his TV show, he probably thought that power was the next blandishment to his ego. What he clearly didn't realize was that celebrity cuts two ways - that his image was not simply that of a phenomenally successful business tycoon, titular author of a best-selling (ghost-written) book, but it was also that of a collossal buffoon. I, like many other - probably a majority of - Americans, didn't like Donald Trump in 2015.

Then he began his bid for the Republican nomination. Choosing the Republican party was a calculated move. Since he was running against a few heavyweight contenders, like Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, I didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in the Philippines of winning. Besides, on a practically daily basis, he was managing to insult not just individual people in his off-the-cuff remarks, but entire swaths of the voting public - Hispanics, blacks, women, Muslims. And something unaccountable began to happen. Despite his offensive remarks, which I believed no decent person could possibly countenance, Trump started gaining in the polls. 

Then the primaries and caucases arrived. I even predicted on this blog that Trump would quit before or just after he lost in Iowa or New Hampshire. One by one, the lesser Republican candidates dropped out as soon as it became clear that they couldn't win anywhere near enough delegates. Trump's offensive jibes at his fellow candidates plumbed new depths of depravity with each succeeding day of the campaign.

By the time the Republican National Convention took place, the party was clearly in a treacherous position. Since victory was all that mattered, the Grand Old Party hitched its wagon to Donald Trump. At the time, I wrote on this blog that the party of Abraham Lincoln had handed its nomination to a man who would bring back slavery if he could. Many true conservatives, who were as disgusted by Trump as I was, withdrew in horror. The National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, the Knight of the Right, refused to endorse Trump.

My politics are unshakably progressive, but I'm able to acknowledge the legimacy of my political opposites - reactionaries, conservatives. Although they seem to be trying to pull America in opposite directions, the Left toward a better, improved society in the future, and the Right back to some dimly-remembered golden age in the past (Make America Great Again), we each have the happiness and prosperity of all Americans in mind. Trump is a pantomime conservative. He is using traditionally conservative issues (cutting corporate and wealth taxes, deregulation, and curtailing immigration) like dog whistles to fool voters. I watched him addressing an anti-abortion rally recently, saying things he would never have said a few years ago when he was a private citizen of New York City.

In 2016, I wrote about Trump eight times - the last time on October 25. Here are just a few of the things I posted on this blog prior to the election.

October 15, 2016: "I have always thought that he is an obscenity as a human being, let alone as a candidate for president. I knew that his disgraceful character would eventually become an issue in the campaign and that it would be his downfall."

"Donald Trump is incapable of seeing himself as virtually everyone else (except for his slavering supporters) sees him: a relatively undistinguished man who was lucky to be born rich, who has spent his life pursuing self-gratification, squandering several fortunes, marrying and disposing of attractive women (who bear him occasional children), and philandering without fear of any consequences - even if it comes in the form of a substantial divorce settlement."

September 30, 2016: "How this clownish billionaire became a populist hero of the American middle class is another of history's mysteries. Michael Reagan, son of the late president, has speculated that Trump has been listening to alot of conservative talk radio, knows what's on the minds of its listeners and has cleverly shoveled it back at them."


Just ten days before election day, my sister died suddenly, shockingly. Still reeling from the loss, I watched in stunned disbelief as Trump's victory was predicted (on CNN). Watching him get elected was the last catastrophe of 2016. The Democrats are entirely to blame. People who would normally have voted Democrat were obviously fed up with the Clintons' watered-down neo-Liberalism, the same Centrism that did nothing to solve the social problems created by globalization. I found the Democratic National Convention almost as insufferable as the RNC. And there is enough evidence to question the DNC's treatment of Bernie Sanders. Who knows but that Sanders, a bonafide American socialist, could've beaten Trump. The strange thing is Trump has been publicly vocal about Hillary Clinton's loss. He is the only president who claims that his opponent "should've won." It's as if he is saying, "Don't blame me, blame Hillary!" 

I didn't watch CNN for months. I still find it hard to watch, even if I'm convinced that they're engaged in a good fight against the worst election outcome of my lifetime (I was born during Eisenhower's 2nd term). I mentioned Trump on this blog only twice in 2017. I was reluctant, I think, to stir the shit.

He has learned a little about the disadvantages of always making headlines. The number of people who actively, passionately hate him is enormous by now, and he can't possibly believe it's only because the press have misrepresented him. I'll give him the benefit of that doubt anyway. The damage he is doing to the country, to the environment, and to the image and standing of the United States as the leader of what used to be called  the free world is not irreparable. His successor - a Democrat - will have to put back all the things he tried to throw away. The pendulum swings. Unfortunately, American politics is now about revenge. When Trump was elected, I heard some of the people who support him say, "Now it's your turn to suffer. Eight years of Obama was hell." Three more years, however, may be all the time Trump needs to do as much damage as possible.

As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, before we were plunged into this miasma, I didn't like Donald Trump. Knowing that hatred is too important an emotion to waste on someone I don't like, but that a lover of the light must also hate the dark, I can now say, a year into his term, that I hate him with what my dad would've called a purple passion. Even a tragedy has an ending. This feels more like a farce, and I'm looking forward, as H. L. Mencken promised above, to an uproarious conclusion.

The Whisperers

One of the most discomfiting poems I've ever read is Philip Larkin's "The Old Fools," which is about what will happen to all of us who are unlucky enough to live to be very old. Here is the poem's first stanza: 

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

Another of Larkin's poems, "Long Last," tells of the plight of an old woman in the same blunt, terrifying terms:

Suddenly, not long before
Her eighty-first birthday,
The younger sister died.
Next morning, the elder lay
Asking the open door
Why it was light outside,

Since nobody had put on
The kettle, or raked the ashes,
Or come to help her find
The dark way through her dress.
This went on till nearly one.
Later, she hid behind

The gas stove.  ‘Amy’s gone,
Isn’t she,’ they remember her saying,
And ‘No’ when the married niece
Told her the van was coming.
Her neck was leaf-brown.
She left cake on the mantelpiece.

This long last childhood
Nothing provides for.
What can it do each day
But hunt that imminent door
Through which all that understood
Has hidden away?


The poem reminded me of The Whisperers, a 1967 film I first saw decades ago, and that I've recently had a chance to see again.

Now that a Republican-majority government in the U.S. has turned its attention to what are known as "entitlements," with an eye to undermine them as much as their constituents will tolerate, I think it's a good time to reconsider a film about one of the people for whom such entitlements were created - an old woman abandoned by what's left of her family who is slowly losing her grip on reality and sinking into what was then (in 1967) called senility, but which is now known as dementia.

The Whisperers is graced by the presence of Edith Evans, one of the greatest British actresses of the 20th century. Based on the novel Mrs. Ross by Robert Nicolson, the film depicts the difficulties faced by a very proud old woman, Margaret Ross, living in a rented flat in a labyrinth of row houses in a northern industrial city. She tells the police, who unfortunately know all about her, that she's being spied upon inside her flat (the "whisperers"). Whenever she enters her front door or otherwise notices the water dripping incessantly from the tap, she inquires of this unseen presence "Are you there?" 

A grown son, Charlie, shows up at her flat just long enough to hide a parcel that contains stolen cash in a cabinet in the "guest room." She mentions his father, who hasn't been seen in twenty years. Charlie gives her a "couple of quid" and leaves, saying he'll be back in a week. After a confrontation with "the woman upstairs" (Nanette Newman - Bryan Forbes's wife), Margaret decides to tidy up the guest room, finds Charlie's parcel and discovers the cash. It's nothing but bundles of one pound notes, a few hundred pounds perhaps, but it's more than she's ever seen at one time in her life, despite her claims of owning property in Argentina and having "married beneath her." She thinks that the money must be from the settlement of her late father's estate, and sends a note (along with a one pound note) telling her National Assistance case worker, Mr. Conrad, that she won't be needing him any longer and that she's going to the Bahamas. Before embarking, however, she stops once more at the National Assistance Board and, while waiting in queue, boasts to another woman that her money has arrived, and opens her purse to show her. Telling her she'd like some refreshment with a real lady, the woman takes Margaret by bus to a pub, plies her with port and listens to her stories from her genteel childhood (depicted in blurry images of a little girl and a chandelier). When night falls, the woman takes her back to her own flat where, after more port, Margaret passes out. She removes the money, stashing a little for herself, until a man, presumably her husband, arrives with two teen-aged children. Plopping Margaret in a push-cart, the man takes her to within a short distance of her flat and dumps her beside the street, where she is found by her upstairs neighbor and taken to hospital. 

Charlie is arrested and confesses to stealing the money. Mr. Conrad asks the doctor, "Is she going to live?" "Oh, yes." the doctor replies. "Well - recover, shall we say?" Once she has recovered physically (from pneumonia), she is transferred to a mental hospital. There is a fantastic shot of Margaret and a therapist sitting in a large room in the hospital with a bright shaft of light shining into the room - compliments of Gerry Turpin, the film's DP. Her doctor explains to Mr. Conrad how he has to peel away all of Margaret's delusions until she's left with nothing but the truth about her life. "Yes, that must be a very rewarding moment," Mr. Conrad observes to the self-satisfied doctor, "when you tell the Mrs. Rosses that they're nobody - and nothing."

Her husband, Archie, is located. He is played by Eric Portman, who is the only other actor in the film besides Evans to present to us a nuanced, many-sided character. Though he's a "bum" and a "drunk," he's reminded of his legal responsibility for Margaret, assured of some clean clothes and transportation to her address. Living with her again, her silences irritate him, calling her a "bleeding zombie." She discovers her flat has been tidied up during her illness, and even the tap no longer drips. Archie picks up a prostitute on his first perambulation around the neighborhood, and returns to find Margaret still awake in bed. "Don't worry," he tells her bluntly, "you've got nothing I want."

When Archie takes a day job as a driver for a local syndicate boss, and a few days later as his enforcer's driver, the film goes quite a bit silly. The enforcer is attacked, Archie escapes in the car with a bag full of cash, boards a train and mutters, "You poor old bitch. You're on your own again," At that point the film - and John Barry's otherwise subtle musical score - has reached its lowest point.

As soon as Margaret knows that Archie has run off again, she goes to the National Assistance Board and tells Mr. Conrad, who, of all the people acquainted with her case, seems to be the only one who gives a damn about her. He asks her if she's sorry he's gone. "Not him," she says. "You?" Mr. Conrad asks pointedly. "Yes," she says wanly. With Archie never coming home again, Margaret falls back into her old habits - the Free Library and the church soup kitchen, picking a newspaper out of the trash can on the way home, and, once alone in her flat, her whisperers.

Bryan Forbes (1926-2013) was a British filmmaker with a background somewhat different from his contemporaries, entering films as an actor in the 1950s. Older than the generation that introduced the "kitchen sink" realism of such fine films as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life, and A Kind of Loving, he was nonetheless the beneficiary of a renewed international interest in British films and shared the same interest in working class subjects. If his films lack the raw energy of the best British films of the period, their technical polish and structural plottedness were used by Forbes to his advantage. He made three films, I think, that will last - The Whisperers, The Raging Moon (1971), and The Slipper and the Rose (1976).

In his biography of Edith Evans, Ned's Girl, Forbes wrote:

"I elected to shoot the film in the Moss Side area of Manchester; in 1966 this was in the process of becoming a planners' Hiroshima; whole areas had been flattened by the bulldozers in preparation for a petrified concrete forest of high-rise tenements. It was a waste land ... It provided me with the requisite desolation I needed for my story and I moved my film unit into the area."

Evans was 78 when she appeared in the film and she was entirely committed to whatever was required of her. Accustomed to playing dowagers, like the old countess in Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades (1949), The Whisperers was the first time she had played a working class role in a film. This was the same woman for whom George Bernard Shaw had written roles in the 1920s, the same woman who had played Juliet's nurse in four different stage productions of Romeo and Juliet. Her performance as Mrs. Ross is especially remarkable today for its intimate study of an uncomfortable subject, an old person's descent into dementia, which wasn't as well understood or documented in the '60s.

Forbes cleverly shows us how mercilessly such charitable institutions as the "Free Library" and a church soup kitchen are presided over by mean-faced men who can't let an old man sleep over his morning newspaper or allow Margaret to warm her stockinged feet on a steam pipe - or who make a roomful of hungry people sing a hymn for their supper and order them around like they're children, under that ghastly sign on the wall, GOD IS LOVE. (is He?) 

So many hoops they have to hop through for their "entitlements" - like the new Republican proposal that will require Medicaid recipients to work for their "entitlement" (an odious, offensive word, especially in the mouth of a Republican). It reminds me of how two people, a husband and wife, define "home" in Robert Frost's poem "The Death of the Hired Man":

"Warren," she said, "he has come home to die:
You needn't be afraid he'll leave you this time."

"Home," he mocked gently.

                          "Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he's nothing to us, anymore
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

                           "I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."


In his Paris Review interview, Frost pointed out about the poem, "You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. One’s a Republican, one’s a Democrat. The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat." Republicans think the poor and the old should do something to "deserve" the assistance that the government provides for them. Democrats think it is a citizen's right. The debate will go on as long as people cannot agree on what role a government is obliged to play in society, since private charitable institutions have to worry about profits before providing for our most needy citizens. It always comes down to Gandhi's remark that there is plenty to satisfy the world's need, but never enough to satisfy its greed.

The sad irony is that the National Assistance Board was terminated before The Whisperers release date, replaced by the Supplementary Benefit Act. In a sense, the film is a rather sad protest, like Kenji Mizoguchi's last film, Red Light District (Akasen Chitai-1956) - stupidly renamed Street of Shame in the U.S. - which follows several women engaged in legal prostitution in Tokyo, a film made while the Japanese government, during the American occupation of postwar Japan, was voting to ban legal prostitution. 

It's a bit difficult communicating the shattering effect this film has had on me. We have watched an episode in the life of a forgotten old woman on the extreme fringes of our world, going through the motions of what is left of her life, for how much longer Forbes couldn't bear to say.

The last moments of The Whisperers leave us with Mrs. Ross, somewhat the worse for the wear she's been put through, returning to her flat, smiling wanly (because it is, after all, home), asking - hopefully for a change - "Are you there?" The voices in her head are all she has left for company.

Who Killed the Novel?

I get the feeling that a lot of people hate literature. I get that feeling every time - which is every so many months - I see an article in the literary press announcing the death of the novel. The novel has one foot in the grave, evidently, and the other on a banana peel. The trouble is those of us for whom novels are the length and breadth of literature, the measure of the truth in writing, were not even aware that the novel was sick. 

Last week The New York Review published "The Novelist's Complicity" by Zia Haider Rahman that blames the imminent demise of the novel on an imaginary Golden Age of Television, on the death of the critic, on people who don't habitually read, and on novelists themselves.

This argument, that new media will eclipse old ones, is older than some people think. In the 1920s, radio was supposed to destroy the record industry. In the '50s, television was going to end movies. In fact,  neither medium was seriously affected. Radio actually boosted record sales. And movies changed to include technicolor (color television didn't arrive until the '60s) and letterbox screens.

Rahman argues - feebly - for the ascendancy of TV over fiction: 

"Reading now, also, has strong competition from screens. This is a new golden age of television, we’re told, and I agree. With The Wire, The Sopranos, Madmen, Breaking Bad, the reboot of Battlestar Galactica (think “Shakespeare in Space”), and many, many other shows, there has been a steady supply of riveting dramas, with rich characterization, moral depth, and tumultuous plot lines. The boxed set and the binge-watching of viewers have freed up writers from the constraints of the weekly serial, whose intervening seven days ensured that scarcely more than a cliffhanger of the plot survived in the memory. Now TV writers can craft and develop character over time, something novels do. Binge-watching offers space, also, to introduce subordinate plot lines and ideas. Just like novels.

Television today appears to be capable of delivering many of the rewards novels might offer. There’s some research suggesting that reading fiction improves our capacity to empathize with others whose lives are very different from our own. Even on this score, television can claim some success. Who would deny that The Sopranos has inculcated in viewers a strange empathy for the New Jersey mobster or that Breaking Bad has inspired warmth toward a drug-dealing chemistry teacher?"

I'm dubious of Rahman's claims for TV when she offers as "riveting dramas" shows that offer - at best - solid entertainment. And I'm tempted to credit Rahman with sarcasm in that last sentence.

She continues: "Television might offer strong competition and attention spans might be sagging, but there may be deeper cultural trends that have led to the decline of novels. In a paper published in 2014 in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly, researchers found that winning a famous literary prize seems to be followed by a steep fall in the quality ratings of a book on the online book review site Goodreads, a limb of the Amazon behemoth. This happened after Julian Barnes won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending . The researchers speculate that what might be happening is that winning a famous prize draws in a great many readers who would otherwise not consider the book, many of whom have no other reason for expecting to like the book.

"Some of these readers might not even be habitual readers of fiction. Amazon and Goodreads ratings, and numerous online book-reviewing sites, have all contributed to and reflected the democratization of the arbitration of literary taste. But such democratization is not intrinsically a good thing. The arbitration of scientific evidence is not conducted under the auspices of universal suffrage; it is scientists who adjudicate on the risks of climate change, for instance, not elected politicians, and that’s exactly how it should be. The democratization of reading tastes has gone hand in hand with the demise of the critic, and with that, the idea of reading a novel because certain people with discernibly good judgment think that the book is worth reading. A writer — I think it was the novelist Claire Messud, but don’t quote me — suggested that the literary critic should aspire to be able to be able to say of a novel that “this is a great book even though I didn’t like it.”[1] The implication is that there is much more to what makes a book great and worth reading than merely one’s visceral reaction of liking it or not. Great works allow us to gather around the campfire and discuss things of importance — not least of all, our diverse subjectivities. This idea might smack of snobbery, but it’s useful to reflect that the idea retains influence in other areas of art, such as painting and sculpture — notably, areas that don’t rely on an economics involving a large number of buyers of the same product."(2)

All of this sounds to me suspiciously like a phenomenon that Hilton Kramer called "The Revenge of the Philistines" - many people (most of them with no qualifications) are now involved in evaluating works of art merely because everything is now subject to the marketplace, where the only rule is What Sells is Good. 

Rahman leaves out of her argument, probably on purpose, the strong anti-intellectual streak in contemporary culture - the hostility towards what is perceived to be "elitist" or requiring a depth of experience or specialized learning that is beyond the average person's immediate grasp. She quotes remarks made by Philip Roth in a 2009 interview. Predicting that within 25 years the readership for novels will be negligible, he holds out a little optimism:

“I think people will always be reading them, but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range . . . To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by.”

Forty years before Roth's remarks, John Cheever, in his Paris Review interview, had a better - if considerably dated - explanation:

INTERVIEWER: What about the beginning of stories? Yours start off very quickly. It's striking.

CHEEVER: Well, if you're trying as a storyteller to establish some rapport with your reader, you don't open by telling him that you have a headache and indigestion and that you picked up a gravelly rash at Jones Beach. One of the reasons is that advertising in magazines is much more common today than it was twenty years ago. In publishing in a magazine you are competing against girdle advertisements, travel advertisements, nakedness, cartoons, even poetry. The competition almost makes it hopeless. There's a stock beginning that I've always had in mind. Someone is coming back from a year in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. His trunk is opened in customs, and instead of his clothing and souvenirs, they find the mutilated body of an Italan seaman, everything there but the head. Another opening sentence I often think of is, "The first day I robbed Tiffany's it was raining." Of course, you can open a short story that way, but that's not how one should function with fiction. One is tempted because there has been a genuine loss of serenity, not only in the reading public, but in all our lives. Patience, perhaps, or even the ability to concentrate. At one point when television first came in one was publishing an article that couldn't be read during a commercial. But fiction is durable enough to survive all of this.


I have had the pleasure over several decades to see some outstanding things on television, a few of which exploited the special qualities and limitations of the medium. But it has never seemed to me that television has ever really distinguished itself as a medium. The outstanding television programs that I have encountered in the past forty years have been documentaries like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (which was made for television but also had a theatrical release) or Ken Burns's The Civil War, multi-episode dramatizations of literary novels like the BBC's War and Peace (with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezuhov), and original productions like Dennis Potter's brilliant Pennies from Heaven. The impact of these programs derived from the fact that viewers experienced them in the privacy and intimacy of their homes.

A novel is even more of a private and intimate experience, since it uses words alone to identify characters and settings. The "interiority" of the novel comes naturally since everything the author presents to the reader takes place in his mind. 

Rahman argues that novels and television shows function differently and that novels have a great advantage when it comes to "interiority". The weakest part of her argument is blaming novelists themselves for anticipating film adaptations of their work by deliberately avoiding a first-person narrative or by striving to maintain a visual perspective to facilitate their novel's translation to the screen.

I also found Rahman's aim to be scattershot. In the middle of her essay, she switches from discussing the decline of the novel to that of the "literary" novel, which is a very different matter. If the numbers of readers for fiction is in precipitous decline (23% in the past five years), then literary novels must be in danger of total extinction. I'm always dubious of such worries, since I have known from the beginning that reading literature is a pursuit of a very few. A few years ago on this blog I addressed the claim that poetry was dead, for the same reasons that fiction is on the skids.

Literature will continue to live, I think, because what it gives the reader is something that nothing else can give him. In his 1951 essay on Anna Karenina, Lionel Trilling wrote:

"It is a subtle triumph of Tolstoi's art that it induces us to lend ourselves with enthusiasm to its representation of the way things are. We so happily give our assent to what Tolstoi shows us and so willingly call it reality because we have something to gain from its being reality. For it is the hope of every decent, reasonably honest person to be judged under the aspect of Tolstoi's representation of human nature. Perhaps, indeed, what Tolstoi has done is to constitute as reality the judgement which every decent, reasonably honest person is likely to make of himself - as someone not wholly good and not wholly bad, not heroic yet not without heroism, not splendid yet not without moments of light, not to be comprehended by any formula yet having his principke of being, and managing, somehow, and despite conventional notions, to maintain an unexpected dignity."(3)

Ironically, Rahman's essay was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4's "A Point of View." Wasn't television supposed to have killed radio ages ago?


(1) It was, in fact, George Orwell, who wrote in 1944, 'Obviously one mustn't say "X agrees with me: therefore he is a good writer," and for the last ten years honest literary criticism has largely consisted in combating this outlook.' "As I Please," Tribune, 28 January 1944. Orwell also provides us with a useful definition of the novel: "A novel ... is a story which attempts to describe credible human beings, and - to show them acting on everyday motives and not merely undergoing strings of improbable adventures." ("George Gissing," May-June 1948?, Essays, Everyman Edition, 2002, p. 1288)
(2) http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/05/the-novelists-complicity/
(3) "Anna Karenina," The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955).

Hauteur

One of the reasons why I'm convinced that Stanley Kauffmann is the best film critic of his time (1958-2013) is because he never wasted his time attacking any of his colleagues. His contemporaries, among whom were John Simon, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, were too often sidelined by their gainsaying of one another's opinions - to the extent that their fighting (critically useless) became famous in itself. As passionate in the defense of their opinions as they too often were, it is the opinions themselves that will stand or fall.

Kauffmann quietly went about his job holding every film and filmmaker up to his own standards of quality, regardless of their broader "significance" to the medium, to the culture at large, to history, or to art. He had plenty to say over a career of 55 years, but he had nothing to prove. On the rare occasions when Kauffmann found it necessary to take a stand - for example, on the subject of the "auteur theory" introduced by the French critics of Cahiers du Cinema and by Andrew Sarris in translation - it was always in the context of evaluating specific films for consideration. Reading Kauffmann's second collection of film criticism, Figures of Light,(1) which covers the crucial period 1966-1970, an era that saw often unfortunate shifts in international film production, I occasionally found him commenting directly on the claims of the auteurists, and you couldn't find a more concise and more thorough dismantling of the theory anywhere else.

He concentrates his argument in his discussion of Targets, the film debut of Peter Bogdanovich, a few of the post-Jules and Jim films of François Truffaut, and of one of the auteurists' most highly touted masterpieces, Max Ophuls' Lola Montes.

Regarding Targets:


Peter Bogdanovich is twenty-nine, the author of several brochures for the Museum of Modern Art Film Library and of numerous articles about film. He has now written, directed, and produced Targets and also plays a substantial role in it. As a film, it's minor; as a phenomenon, significant. So far as I know, Targets is the first picture made in Hollywood by an American critic of the auteur school. France has had many new auteur directors in the last decade, but Bogdanovich is the first American auteur to appear in the city that is a particular heaven for auteurs. All those Hollywood elements of commerce and popularity-groveling that seem restrictive to many of us have meant little to auteurs.

Their chief concern is with the way a director handles the material he chooses or is assigned. Many of us think of Hollywood as, in general, the home of hacks or of good men hampered. Here is an intelligent, utterly hip young man who chooses Hollywood. His action and his beliefs have nothing whatsoever to do with that other group of young filmmakers, the Underground or Free Cinema. They are anti-Hollywood. The auteurs are, in one sense, the first pop artists and cultists, but with a difference: they can see a fourth-rate melodrama and know it is fourth-rate as a melodrama at the same time that they glory in the director's use of the camera and his expertness in film mythology.

To argue for more than filmic content in films is taken by some as an argument for literary or theatrical film. But such new directors of the past decade as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, De Seta, Olmi, Jessua, de Broca, Lester, Teshigahara, and Nichols have shown that film can be truly film without being only film. Bogdanovich, however, has grown up in an esthetics that exalts manner over matter - no, it tells us fundamentally that manner is all: that Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and Preminger's The Cardinal and Hitchcock's The Birds and Hawks's Hatari! are excellent artworks because of the directors' styles, that objection to the tacky stories is misplaced because the film is not in the story but in "the relationship between the director and his material" (Gavin Millar). To me, this seems the equivalent of the theatrical legend about the great actor who could pulverize you by reading the telephone book. I have never had the luck to be thus pulverized, but the legend does not maintain that the ideal is to have great actors read telephone books. I am unconvinced that any of those directors is as good when (even because) he uses fourth-rate material as when he uses material and performers that satisfy other expectations in us as well.(2)

On Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid:

Truffaut was a leading formulator of the auteur theory; in fact, as explicit theory, it is usually said to date from an article he wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in January 1954. One tenet of that theory holds that material is less important than its cinema treatment, thus these directors have often taken stock genre material, like American thrillers, in order to prove that film art can be made out of the film's "own."

Sometimes (as in Shoot the Piano Player), the transmutation succeeds; more often, the result is only a combination of smugness and camp, accompanied in the theater by the purring of the viewer who gets the "in" references and relishes the exaltation of pop over pompous old "elitist" art. When the transmutation fails, as it does in Mississippi Mermaid and as it does in most cases, the auteur theory shivers. André Bazin, the late French critic who was early associated with the theory and who was Truffaut's mentor, wrote a corrective article in 1957 which is generally disregarded by his disciples. Bazin said: "All that [the auteur supporters] want to retain in the equation auteur plus subject = work is the auteur, while the subject is reduced to zero....Auteur, yes, but what of?" The answer, in regard to Truffaut's recent films, is: Not much.

After detailing the good and the bad things about Max Ophuls Lola Montes, Kauffmann proceeds:

Some of the Lola admirers might agree with all of this; all of them might agree with some of it. Together they reject its relevance. Why? Because they subscribe, with passionate and unquestionable conviction, to a theory of the hierarchy of film values. They believe in selecting and exalting sheerly cinematic values, like the matters I praised earlier, and in subordinating or discounting such matters as those I objected to. To them, this is exultation in the true glory of cinema.

To me, it is a derogation and patronization of cinema. To me, this hierarchy says: "This is what film can do and we mustn't really expect it to do any more, mustn't be disappointed if this is all it does." A chief motive behind the hierarchy is to avoid discussion of the strictured elements forced on filmmaking by the ever-present money men. Lola was commissioned as an expensive showcase for Martine Carol. The money men foisted Miss Carol and a cheap novel by the author of Caroline Cherie on Ophuls, so let's not criticize those elements, let's concentrate on Ophuls' marvelous decor, detail, and camera movement and, by the simple act of appropriate omission, presto, we have a masterpiece.

I disbelieve in this hierarchy. There are money men involved in every art. No one would dream of praising an architect because he designed his interiors well, if he had debased his overall form to please his client's pocketbook. Why a special leniency for film?

Why indeed in the face of the fact that film has proved it doesn't need it, has achieved thoroughly fine work? The worst aspect of this approach is that it crimps the film out of its cultural heritage - the cinematic and the literary and theatrical and psychological and social-political - and says to it, "Just go and be cinematic. If anything else is achieved, good. If not, no great matter." It is an esthetic equivalent of the Victorian ethic of "knowing your place."

This concentration on part of a work leads to inflation of the value of that part. Ophuls, who in some ways was masterly, is extolled as a master of romance. To speak only of Lola, I see him sheerly as cynic, burdened with this trumpery novel and this mammary star and deciding to give it back to the world in spades. One critic envisions Lola in the circus as a presence "redeeming all men both as a woman and as an artistic creation." This woman? This artistic creation? The last scene, in which the crowd presses forward to buy kisses of the caged Lola, gave me a vision of Ophuls himself chuckling at the Yahoos who are wonder-struck by this earlier Zsa Zsa Gabor, this "celebrity" in the word's synthetic present-day sense, a crowd scrabbling to pay for a touch of this scandal-sheet goddess. And I also had a concentric vision of Ophuls chuckling at his film audiences, as they press forward to pay for a chance to adulate his caged talent.

Let me give the last word, on this matter of exalting a medium in itself, to the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Writing about McLuhan in the latest Partisan Review, Enzensberger says:

"It is all too easy to see why the slogan "The medium is the message" has met with unbounded enthusiasm on the part of the media, since it does away, by a quick fix worthy of a card-sharp, with the question of truth. Whether the message is a lie or not has become irrelevant, since in the light of McLuhanism truth itself resides in the very existence of the medium, no matter what it may convey...."(4)

Despite Kauffmann's total rejection of auteurism, its pernicious influence persists among an older generation of film critics whose god appears to be Jean-Luc Godard, the sole survivor of the Nouvelle Vague. Kauffmann reviews quite a number of Godard's films in Figures of Light, and finds merit in some (Les Carabiniers, Weekend), but not in others (La Chinoise, Pierrot le fou). This is something the auteurists seem incapable of doing. To them, every film made by an auteur is of more or less equal value. In fact, evaluation isn't what auteurists do. They are content to catalog and classify - not to quantify.

In an extensive analysis of Godard's Weekend, Kauffmann quotes an article in support of Godard by Susan Sontag, and concludes:

I cannot summarize all of Miss Sontag's article (it should be read), but, for me, it leads to and away from this sentence: "Just as no absolute, immanent standards can be discovered for determining the composition, duration and place of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason for excluding anything from a film." This seemingly staggering statement is only the extreme extension of a thesis that any enlightened person would support: there are no absolutes in art. The Godardians take this to mean (like Ivan Karamazov) that therefore everything is permissible. Others of us take it to mean that therefore standards have to be empirically searched out and continually readjusted, to distinguish art from autism; that, just as responsive morals have to be found without a divine authority if humanity is to survive, so responsive esthetics have to be found without canonical standards if art is to survive. The last may be an open question, but it is open as long as men continue to make art.(5)

"Standards" and "responsive esthetics" are among the words most foreign to auteurists.



(1) Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Ibid, p. 96-99.
(3) Ibid, p. 255-256.
(4) Ibid, p. 160-164.
(5) Ibid, p. 132-133.