This piece led Arendt to invite Adler to tea. “If anyone was, in Lillian Ross’s phrase, sitting adoringly at her feet,” Adler wrote later, “it was I.” Adler also fell in love with Heinrich Blücher. The couple spoke German with her; they took her on as a kind of protégé, with Adler terming Arendt a “strict parent”; they were always encouraging her to go back to school and finish her doctorate, perhaps thinking about how difficult it had been for Blücher to support himself teaching without one.
She got the spot, in other words, that Susan Sontag had seemed to want. Arendt, Adler insisted, “did not care for Ms. Sontag.” Asked why, once, she said, “It’s not that Hannah Arendt hated Sontag. It’s just that she wasn’t all that interested in Sontag’s work—which I think is a tenable position.” It was, but Adler and Sontag were also perhaps in unknowing competition. She won the same Mademoiselle merit award Sontag did, three years after her younger peer. With her secure position at the New Yorker, she was more stable than Sontag. But she was not a media star, not an It Girl, certainly not in the explosive way Sontag was.
So when Adler fell upon Podhoretz in 1964, she had in her sights someone who had profoundly disagreed with Eichmann. There was a relish in her tone as Adler sliced and diced his book. Her manner of attack was precise and unrelenting. Podhoretz tended to repeat certain phrases, and the phrases he chose were those of a buffoon. This was the same technique she’d later deploy against Kael, one that allowed her to reveal tics and hypocrisies in devastating succession. As to Podhoretz’s essay against the New York Review of Books, titled “Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know,” Adler eviscerated Podhoretz with a single observation:
First, “everyone I know” occurs fourteen times (aside from its appearance in the title) and “someone I know,” “no one I know, “someone I don’t know,” and “everyone they know” make one appearance each. Although it must be admitted that repetition is a rhetorical device of which, in any case, Mr. Podhoretz has always been inordinately fond (“what really happened in the thirties” occurs nine times in another essay, and “tells us nothing about the nature of totalitarianism” several times in a row), it seems quite safe to say that “Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know” is pervaded by a sense of comradeship and solidarity; Mr. Podhoretz clearly does not consider himself a speaker in isolation.
She could do more with this than accuse him of infelicitous word repetition, too. Adler argued that the result of such pomposity was that the new reviewers were simply a small club, all talking to and complimenting and insulting each other, at the expense of intellectualism generally. They were turning themselves into celebrities without regard for the books they were analyzing. This, of course, laid Adler open to charges that she was doing the same—just as Kael was accused of careerism when she wrote “Circles and Squares.” The conservative writer Irving Kristol, writing in the New Leader during a Socialist phase before his conversion to Republicanism, remarked:
Though I may have read things by Miss Adler before, I have no recollection of them. It is her review—written faithfully according to Podhoretz’s prescription—that has made her, for me, a “literary personality.”
Kristol was certainly right that this essay was the first to crystallize the Renata Adler the world would come to know in print. The piece bears several hallmarks of the Adler style, already fully present at the outset of her career. The voice talking to us in the essay is never ingratiating, jokey, or otherwise distracted by personality. It’s pure analysis, pure reason, all business. There is often an “I” but it is never personal; it is more analytical, like Sontag’s. Adler writes like a laser beam, but she is less interested in dazzling the reader with beauty than piercing a mind with an idea. She rarely tells any kind of story, but amasses evidence for a thesis and bears down on the subject with bull terrier determination. Adler often feels more like a prosecutor than a storyteller.
The Podhoretz essay, among others, made William Shawn think Adler could do more. She, too, wanted to do what he called fact pieces: the long, ambitious articles that had become the New Yorker’s stock-in-trade in the 1960s. For the first of these Adler was sent to observe the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in Alabama of 1965. Perhaps because she was nervous on her first outing as a reporter, there is something much flatter about Adler’s prose in the piece, which offers little analysis and a lot of observation. Her sentences are shorter, sometimes even terse. She was not much susceptible, either, to the stirring rhetoric of the marches. Other than expressing doubt that the marches expressed a clear demand, she limited herself to simply reporting what she saw:
Word came that Mrs. Viola Liuzzo had been shot. Some of the marchers went back to Selma at once. Others boarded planes for home. At the Montgomery airport exit was a permanent official sign reading, “Glad You Could Come. Hurry Back.”
The effect of the whole was curiously disconnected, aloof.
She was a good deal more confident and critical writing on the subject of generational differences. She was a bright young thing in the middle of the 1960s, but her general sense of alienation from the people around her made her suspicious of their political movements, their devotion to free love, and their antipathy to the hard stuff of living. Some called her the “East Coast’s Joan Didion,” but she had a more direct, less vulnerable style. Didion tended to evoke the foibles of her hippies and drifters in dialogue and scene setting, and reported quite a bit on herself and her mood. Adler was, as always, doing something more like mounting an argument, and mostly keeping her inner self out of direct view while doing so:
At the moment, however, there is a growing fringe of waifs, vaguely committed to a moral drift that emerged for them from the confrontations on the Strip and from the general climate of events. The drift is Love; and the word, as it is now used among the teen-agers of California (and as it appears in the lyrics of their songs), embodied dreams of sexual liberation, sweetness, peace on earth, equality— and, strangely, drugs.
That “strangely, drugs” is more revealing than Adler intends, for in 1967 drugs should have been anything but strange to someone her age. (She’d only just turned thirty.) As the child of refugees, she had not had the same all-American image against which she could rebel during the 1960s. But even as such, Adler was always standing somewhat off to the side of things, not feeling them herself. This made her a powerful observer, of course. The accretion of detail in Adler’s Summer of Love–era pieces is often stunning, as is her ability to toss the strangest behavior off as a matter-of-fact statement. “He began to yodel,” she writes of one young man she meets on the Sunset Strip, as though people simply do this when instructed. But she had trouble making larger sense of what was happening around her. Nearly every reporting piece she did ended on an ambivalent note. For her essay on the Sunset Strip, she finished up at something called a Human Be-In, at which she remarked: “There were no police around at all.”
Adler would return to Mississippi to witness more civil rights demonstrations, she’d travel to Israel to cover the Six-Day War, and she’d go to Biafra. But in each case the problem was the same: ambivalence. Later, when she collected the pieces in a book, Adler would see ambivalence as a recognizable phenomenon of the time she was writing about. But even in articulating that observation, she had to hedge herself. She’d write:
I guess I am part of an age group that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America. Even now (and we are in our thirties), we have no journals we publish, no exile we share, no brawls, no anecdotes, no war, no solidarity, no mark. In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy. A center of action seemed to have broken down in us.
Again, the woman writing this analysis was barely thirty, yet already disengaged from much of the political and social current in this country. Sometimes she almost sounded conservative about the social chaos of America in the sixties. “Our values are corny ones,” she wrote without quite defining who was included in t
hat collective pronoun, “reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity, contact, the finest, broadest possible America.” Even so, the most curious thing about this analysis is that Adler so completely detached herself from the “we” she employs. Her trajectory through America had not been typical. In the 1960s, only about half of Americans even went to college; they certainly did not start writing for major national publications at twenty-two. Adler was a prodigy on the level of Dorothy Parker, writing from the beginning as she always would, her voice recognizable in those first “Talk of the Town”s on through the last pieces she published in the 1990s. But her separateness from the crowd meant she couldn’t reach out and touch the broad emotional currents of America in the 1960s. She could only watch.
Perhaps this explains why, in 1968, Adler abruptly jumped the New Yorker ship. The New York Times approached her, looking for a movie critic. It had tired of fusty old Bosley Crowther, Pauline Kael’s adversary. It is not clear if they thought of asking Kael herself to come over from the New Yorker. But Adler had been writing about film for the New Yorker occasionally, when Kael, or the alternating critic, Penelope Gilliatt, was out of commission. She was young, she had already made a mark for herself in criticism, and she was writing these fashionably alienated pieces about the 1960s. She must have seemed a perfect fit for the job.
If the New York Times was expecting an ingenue, it would not get one. Adler arrived with a sharp sense of her mission. She would not cut anyone any slack. The first review she wrote, of a German film now completely forgotten, began in the thundering register of her old books pieces, echoing her throttling of John Hersey:
Even if your idea of a good time is to watch a lot of middle-aged Germans, some of them very fat, all reddening, grimacing, perspiring, and falling over Elke Sommer, I think you ought to skip The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, because this first film of the year is so unrelievedly awful, in such a number of uninteresting ways.
This line was so funny it ramped up expectations. It signaled a young critic hungry for blood. The next film she reviewed gave her a more familiar subject in Norman Mailer’s Wild 90. Here Adler was back in the comfortable territory of writerly personalities. Audiences that liked Mailer, “among the most fond, forgiving, ultimately patronizing and destructive of our time,” were just as likely to indulge this film as they had his other works. This was not quite a compliment, though. Adler made clear that she found Mailer’s fan base a less than intellectually impressive group. For example, she could not imagine that this “permissive school, which treats Mailer as an endearing protagonist in a Peter Pan adolescent struggle to free and find himself, would ever welcome a firm, compressed and unapologetic piece of work.”
As she would later be in “The Perils of Pauline,” Adler seemed to be both uninfluenced by Kael—her prose in these early reviews is the terse stuff of her factual reporting—and completely in accordance with Kael’s bellicose spirit. The world of Adler’s movie reviews is full of accusations of pretension and sentimentality. The movies that “serious people” like, The Graduate, In Cold Blood, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, are all suspect to Adler even as they are so palatable to bourgeois audiences. Her outsider status here was a boon, keeping her from feeling the pressure to follow popular tastes. It even kept her from declaring, as most film critics of this era did, a side in the auteurist/anti-auterist wars. She simply delivered her own judgments and left the systematic arguments to others.
As had happened to Kael at McCall’s, Adler was subject in the fourteen months she was working at the Times to a number of challenges from the studios. The most famous one, from United Artists, was an ad pointing out that since Adler had hated many of certain popular films, the public should not listen to her:
Renata Adler, of The New York Times, did not like
In Cold Blood.
She had reservations about
The Graduate. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Planet
of the Apes.
We’re not quite sure how she felt about
Bonnie and Clyde.
The majority of other critics liked them.
Most of all, the public likes them.
Now she doesn’t like
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush .
What a recommendation!
While it’s often said she was a problem for Hollywood producers from the start, in fact at first the industry felt neutral about her, as Variety reported in January, two weeks after she’d started. A longer article, published in March 1968, said reactions were split:
Both her supporters and detractors agree on one verdict: she is much more literary than cinematic in her critical stance … She clearly does not share the view that the director is ultimately the creator of a film. In at least six reviews, she didn’t even mention the director’s name, let alone appraise his contribution.
The people Variety spoke to also said they found her a better essayist than reviewer, often even enjoying her Sunday efforts at elucidating the “death cult” of films, or the appropriateness of violence in them. These efforts tended to veer from the movies themselves, though, and head for Adler’s preoccupations:
One of the things democracy may be the system least equipped to deal with is revolution as an esthetic exercise. It is not really foreseen in any philosophy of history that a group of middle class young people, against whom the system has done no injustice whatsoever—whom the system was actually educating for positions of power—should want to bring the system down for fun.
Adler’s reviews were relentlessly serious, generally having no truck with trash. She could be devastating with a put-down, but she tried to give the good elements of a bad picture their proper due. She credited Barbra Streisand for elevating Funny Girl; she liked the elegantly staged ball scenes in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, even though she thought the delivery of the whole was a little too much like West Side Story. When Barbarella came along, Adler couldn’t help ranting about how movies had of late depicted women: “Maybe it is an anti-Mummy reflex, no good, decent women on the screen.” She credited Jane Fonda, nonetheless, for doing what she could.
But outsiders noticed a lot of factual errors in her reviews. Variety reported that Esquire was preparing an exposé. It also reported that Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Fox Studios, had been told by an executive that Adler had seen only half of a treacly Julie Andrews vehicle, Star!. Zanuck had fired off a complaint to the Times editor. But nothing happened until Adler quit the post at the end of February 1972. She wrote a few more pieces on the films of postrevolutionary Cuba, but after that returned to the New Yorker. In later interviews, she insisted she hadn’t been fired, and certainly the crimes with which she’d later charge Pauline Kael suggested that Adler had simply become tired of the grind. It was good, she said, to learn to write to deadline.
After Adler left the Times, she wrote a few other pieces of nonfiction. The best was a long piece, published in the Atlantic, which took the impeachment inquiry of the Church Committee to task for its shoddy investigation of Nixon’s crimes. Meticulously combing through the committee’s records, she found any number of items that should have been investigated further. She ended up believing that the impeachment inquiry had become part of some sort of Nixon cover-up.
But articles like the Nixon piece seemed no longer to be what she truly wanted to do. Renata Adler had decided that what she truly wanted to do was write fiction.
Adler spent much of the 1970s ignoring journalism and writing her two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, instead. Both are written in a fractured, epigrammatic style. Both feature protagonists who could be taken as stand-ins for Adler herself. Of the two, it is Pitch Dark that has the sound, at times, of social criticism. Adler’s style in fiction is nothing like Mary McCarthy’s, but she had a similar inability to keep her life out of her work. Lillian Hellman appears in Pitch Dark, disguised as the character Viola Teagarden, who
spoke with a kind of awe about what she called “my anger,” as though it were a l
iving, prized possession, a thoroughbred bull, for instance, to be used at stud, or as a man who has married a beautiful, unpredictably unpleasant woman, far richer and younger than himself, might say “my wife.”
Although beautifully written, these books sometimes bear the mark of the sheer difficulty Adler had in writing them. Speedboat first began to appear in excerpts in the New Yorker in 1975. When it was published in 1976, everyone raved about it; Adler was given the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award. It then took her another seven years to produce Pitch Dark, and after that she seemed to give up on fiction altogether.
She also, as befits someone who could never seem to find one subject that obsessed her wholly, took herself to Yale Law School and got a JD. Adler’s mind was almost perfectly suited to operate like a lawyer’s. She was already making a prosecutor’s argument in her piece about new reviewing, taking apart the testimony of Podhoretz, hanging him on a single word or phrase. The orderliness of legal argument ended up inflecting “The Perils of Pauline,” which also read like something of a legal brief. It was also then that her writing became combative, striving always to destroy.
Her combativeness also extended into the courts. When Vanity Fair was revived in the early 1980s as a passion project, it was initially intended to be a serious, intellectual publication more like the Partisan Review than like People. And Renata Adler had been hired to work on it by the editor Richard Locke. She retained her post at the New Yorker, but was called a “consulting editor.”
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