Wright’s moon is less chatty, more equivocal in its quality of mercy. But in each case the moon is contrasted with a merciless human world represented by the poet “rapt in [his] inditing.” This inditing the moon indicts. But Hardy, as Wright says of Harding in the first of his two poems, claims “the secret right / to be ashamed.” Wright, as we have seen, explicitly disclaims responsibility for the world—he didn’t start the fire.
Perhaps, however, Wright protests too much. Oren Izenberg has written that George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” resolves “upon an attitude toward looking.”52 We might say that Wright’s and Hardy’s poems resolve upon attitudes toward being looked at. In addition to its idiomatic sense of “I’m not the one responsible,” “Don’t look at me” can mean “I’m ashamed,” “I edge to shun your view.” The gaze of the other, Sartre tells us, enslaves us, places us in the other’s power. It’s the idea behind X-Ray Specs—“see through clothes!” “Do not look upon me,” says Hamlet, ashamed at his inaction, to the accusing ghost of his father.
It is strange to insist that you didn’t make the world. And it’s strange to wish you had made it. Such language records the disenchantment of poetic power. The entry for “Poet” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics begins:
The Greeks called the poet a “maker”—poiētēs or poētēs—and that word took hold in Lat. and other Eur. langs., incl. It., Fr., and Eng. But what precisely does the poet make? The obvious answer is poems, the arrangements of words that he or she composes. Yet poets have often been given credit for bolder kinds of making. According to ancient Gr. fables, Amphion built Thebes from stones his songs called into place, and Orpheus’s songs drew trees and beasts and stones to follow him. Ren. critics allegorized these stories as the harmonious beginning of civilization: poets had tamed the wilderness and softened the hearts of men. In the Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney thought that the poet delivered a golden world, “in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature.” Potentially that power of creation resembles, at one remove, the power of the Creator who first made the world.53
Poets no longer have such power of creation—far from softening the hearts of men, they know “the hearts of men are merciless,” and they can only either wash their hands of the “mess” or feel ashamed at their powerlessness. Poems are a meager response to a scurvy and disastrous world in which hardly anyone reads them. But all that edging from view and don’t look at me don’t prevent Hardy and Wright from offering up their poems. “All I am is a poet,” says Wright in the wonderfully bad “Many of Our Waters.” And it would be a betrayal of his art, and Hardy’s, to respond, “That’s almost enough.”
NO TASTE OF MY OWN
In my late teens and early twenties, my judgments of certain films were not my own, which didn’t prevent me from spouting them with a no doubt ridiculous air of authority. My judgments were principally those of Pauline Kael. She was the first tastemaker I trusted implicitly. I wince to think of the times I decided I didn’t really like a movie I liked because she’d dissed it, or corrected someone’s approbation of a film she disdained, which as often as not I hadn’t seen.
I don’t think this is an uncommon phenomenon. It’s related to the process Auden describes in The Dyer’s Hand, although he doesn’t mention criticism (he is doing it):
In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does.
The bit about olives proves Auden was English, but the rest describes my own experience. It’s a kind of indoctrination, mostly benign, into canons. Auden continues:
Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. . . . When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, “I know what I like,” he is really saying “I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu,” because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.54
Now, this account leaves out a good deal, most strikingly the dimensions of class that inform one’s accrual of cultural capital. Or, rather, it includes those dimensions precisely insofar as their omission is one of the surest signs that they are operating at the level of ideology. “Discovering who we are” makes it sound as if there is some essential, authentic self out there waiting for our embrace. (I elided Auden’s caution against being led astray by ideology at this stage, since he simply means ideology that proclaims itself as such to the clear-headed bourgeois observer.)
But in its broad strokes, Auden’s narrative will do. In middle age, I find I don’t care about Kael’s judgments. Some of her most cherished films—notably Nashville and Last Tango in Paris—strike me as callow, while I revere many of those she dismissed (Céline and Julie Go Boating, All That Heaven Allows, Monkey Business). The Library of America’s selection of her writings contains no mention of two of my favorite filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi and Douglas Sirk, and only a passing reference to a third, Jacques Tati.I She loathed Elaine May’s uneasy rhythms; John Cassavetes’s Faces was “dumb”; Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is “hollow.” She was frequently hostile toward Howard Hawks, the later Godard, and Robert Bresson.
These are familiar objections to Kael’s work, though they’re often advanced with considerable nastiness, as if they somehow invalidated her criticism.II And I suppose they do, if what you want from criticism is corroboration of your taste.
I agree more often with, for instance, Jonathan Rosenbaum. But Rosenbaum’s writing, as writing, means almost nothing to me, while Kael’s criticism is a permanent feature of my consciousness. It will last, because she was—to put it in terms she never shied from—a master of the medium. She could see into a film’s crannies in an offhand way that was also, somehow, precision-guided. Shelley Duvall in The Shining “looks more like a Modigliani than ever.” On Fast Times at Ridgemont High: “If you’re eating a bowl of Rice Krispies and some of them don’t pop, that’s O.K., because the bowlful has a nice, poppy feeling.”
Film criticism, as the youngest form of criticism, is brightly alive (at its best) to the question of what we turn to criticism for. (I’m not qualified to judge whether video games constitute a new art form, but they don’t seem yet to have evolved a criticism worthy of the name.) The first movie was made in 1888 (or 1878 or 1889 or 1893 or 1895, depending on your definition). Maxim Gorky published a (killer) review of some films by the Lumière brothers in 1896:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. . . . Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph—moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances. However, I shall try to convey its fundamentals. When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture. . . .
Imagine trying to explain what a movie is to someone with no concept of any aspect or appurtenance of the film medium or filmgoing experience. How would you begin to describe it—the dark, the hush, the clattering machine, then the miracle?
&nb
sp; Criticism is parasitic literature. Everyone knows that someone said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—a pithy but fatuous credo of anti-intellectualism. It’s remarkable that we’re driven to write about art—to explain, judge, describe, elucidate, analyze, hate, rhapsodize, tell a story. We can’t let them be—cathedrals, blockbusters, poems, pictures, statues, songs. They demand words from us.
Some aspects of film criticism, as of all criticism, go back at least to Aristotle. I imagine a goatherd sitting around a fire 2,800 years ago complaining that Homer’s catalog of ships is too long, while another goatherd tries to find words to describe how what he’s just heard has floored him.
Writing about music is like writing about architecture (except different). John Ruskin: “It is . . . no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours.” What is ours is, for instance, “to find out how far Venetian architecture reached the universal or perfect type of Gothic, and how far it either fell short of it, or assumed foreign and independent forms.”55
We eventually ask of a critic not “What should I think of this movie?” but “How can you unsettle my thinking about movies?” or “What can you teach me about what I don’t want from them?” And we return to the critics we love for reasons that, it may be, have little to do with movies (or literature or music or architecture) and everything to do with the play of wit and insight and the construction of sentences. So it’s silly of Richard Brody to write that she “was largely a first-person essayist who made use of movies to write brilliantly of the times and of herself.”56 In context, this is even more condescending than it sounds—Brody implies that Kael wasn’t really a critic at all.
But the best criticism is always personal, and it would be truer to say that Kael made use of the times and of herself to write brilliantly about movies.
What I want from criticism is that it make me think about art in new ways, or respond to things in it I hadn’t before. Kael has said all this better than I can:
The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily a bad critic if he makes errors in judgment. (Infallible taste is inconceivable; what could it be measured against?) He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.57
John Jeremiah Sullivan writes of Guns N’ Roses, a band I thought I knew as well as anyone else on the planet:
And what does she say, this Devil Woman [Sullivan’s name for one of Axl Rose’s voices]? What does she always say, for that matter? Have you ever thought about it? I hadn’t. “Sweet Child,” “Paradise City,” “November Rain,” “Patience,” they all come down to codas—Axl was a poet of the dark, unresolved coda—and to what do these codas themselves come down? “Everybody needs somebody.” “Don’t you think that you need someone?” “I need you. Oh, I need you.” “Where do we go? Where do we go now?” “I wanna go.” “Oh, won’t you please take me home?”58
No, I hadn’t ever thought about it, but now I always will.
In other words, what I want from criticism is, to put it crudely, great writing, which will always involve great noticing:
She asks him what he thinks of a reproduction she is trying on the wall, and he answers, “Not bad.” This doesn’t show that he’s sufficiently impressed and she reprimands him with, “Renoir was a very great painter.” In disgust he replies, “I said ‘Not bad.’ ” There’s no doubt which of them responds more.59
That’s Kael, on Godard’s Breathless. And how I wish she were around to respond more.
* * *
I. She praised Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and a couple of Tati’s films, but panned the latter’s wonderful Mon Oncle. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, she was bored by Tati’s masterpiece, Playtime, which taught me a new way of seeing. Sirk’s schmaltz turned her off.
II. Michael Wolff—introducing Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber (New York: New York Review Books, 2015)—calls Kael a “hysteric,” a “gasbag,” a “bully,” a “suck-up,” and a “drama queen,” concluding that “Kael is unread now.” Since this is false, the only response—as to Adler’s ridiculous claim that Kael’s When the Lights Go Down is “line by line, worthless”—is to shrug: something’s going on here, but it has zip to do with Kael’s writing.
REAL GOD, ROLL
I would begin with a word against collected editions of poetry—or at least against the current trend of issuing them in gigantic, overpriced formats that resemble the Compact OED. You should not be able to stun a moose with anyone’s Complete Poems. In recent years, we’ve had enormous, expensive editions of, inter alios, Robert Lowell, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frederick Seidel, James Merrill, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Jack Gilbert, and Denise Levertov. Even so skinny a poet as Philip Larkin, in FSG’s recent (and superfluous) Complete Poems, has bloated beyond recognition. I’m all for having these folks’ oeuvres in print (although I’d also say a word against the fantasies of totality that compel editors to include drafts, revisions, juvenilia, and the like). But what’s wrong with affordable and portable? The Library of America and Faber and Faber, for instance, manage to produce wieldy omnibuses (the former’s, admittedly, not exactly budget-friendly). Another world is possible.
This rant was inspired by the University of South Carolina Press, whose 4.2-lb. Complete Poems of James Dickey will run you $85. If you have any interest in (and are not writing a dissertation or monograph on) James Dickey’s poetry, may I suggest a used copy of The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992, published by Wesleyan, which lacks ninety-three poems published in the USC edition and contains many typos but has the virtues of arranging the poems by individual collection (editor Ward Briggs has printed the poems in order of initial publication) and of fitting in a messenger bag or backpack?
So much for The Complete Poems of James Dickey. What about the complete poems of James Dickey? Reputation is a funny thing. Dickey was once king of the cats—winner of the National Book Award (for Buckdancer’s Choice, 1966), consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (1966–68), author of the novel (1970) and screenplay (1972) Deliverance (but not of the immortal line “I bet you can squeal like a pig”). In the ’60s, Peter Davison pronounced Dickey and Lowell the only major poets of their generation (Davison appears to have backed away from this; such are the hazards of cultural prophecy). In the ’70s, after the success of Deliverance, the poet appeared on national talk shows, wrote Jimmy Carter’s inaugural poem, and commemorated the Apollo missions in the pages of Life. In 1976, The Paris Review said his name was “a household word.” A sense of the critical veneration to which Dickey was subject can be gleaned from Robert Kirschten’s introduction to The Selected Poems: “I think you will agree that one would as soon read James Dickey as live.”60 Hmm, let’s see . . . read Dickey; live . . . read Dickey; live . . .
It is possible that the relative dim of Dickey’s star since his death is simply a reversion to sanity. But it’s also, I think, an implicit recognition that his best poems, as Richard Howard implies in his brief foreword to the Briggs edition, are those collected under the title Poems 1957–1967, and particularly the ones published in the last few years of that decade. In the last thirty years of his career, Dickey too often gave full-throated vent to an oracular windiness. Consider these lines from “The Surround”:
Pray, beginning sleeper, and let your mind dissolve me as I
Straighten, upright from the overflow crouch: pray with all
Your heart-muscl
e,
The longing-muscle only, as the bird in its hunting sorrows
Bides in good falling—
Part of me wants to respond: Whose longing-muscle prays not, as the bird in its hunting sorrows bides in good falling?
But my better angel protests that the artificiality of this register is not inherently ridiculous—that its true fault lies in settling too easily for the bombastic, and it attains to a certain power even so. “Pray, beginning sleeper . . . as I / Straighten, upright from the overflow crouch” has a satisfying oddity that is undermined by the blurriness of dissolving minds and longing muscles. The trope of death as a form of sleep is shocked into life by the addition of “beginning,” with its ambitious suggestion that the newly dead are initiates into cultic mysteries, with ropes to learn. “All stark soul and overreach”: that’s James Dickey. But you could say the same of Whitman or Dickinson, Stevens or Pound.
* * *
I fell in love with the poems of Dickey’s friends James Wright and Richard Hugo at too early an age, blessedly, to hear how often they sound like the smartest drunk at the bar on any small-town afternoon. I didn’t come to Dickey until after I’d been delivered by the good news John Ashbery brings to Middle-American poets manqué in their early twenties, and by then it was too late. Reading him again in my forties, I’m amused to find my prejudices both confirmed and upended. Flipping from some of the almost priggishly static early work—
Shines, like a marsh, the sun
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