Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  There is a hint of explicit feminism here, of explicit dissatisfaction with the way men talk about women, even to other women. It was a theme that took quite some time to emerge in Malcolm’s work. She had come around gradually to feminism after writing that long critique in the 1970s. She also made a number of women writer friends. Malcolm even knew Sontag a little, though not well. In a short note to Sontag in 1998, when Sontag had become ill again, she wrote: “At lunch I made a mess of saying what I will have a stab at saying here, which is how distressed I am about what you have to endure, how deeply I admire you, and how grateful I am to you for writing ‘Illness As Metaphor.’”

  But like Didion, Malcolm would become friends with Nora Ephron and come to feel a deep connection with her work, particularly her essays. Feminism was one of their perennial subjects. Late in Ephron’s life, the two of them had been part of a book club, one that reread The Golden Notebook just to see what it was all about.

  And in her travels as a journalist and critic, she seemed to have noticed something about the way the world responded to smart, capable, and insightful women. In 1986, Malcolm published “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” her profile of Ingrid Sischy, completed amid the initial Masson lawsuit. One of its motifs is the way a serious-minded woman keeps trying to make her way among the naysaying of a bunch of serious-minded men. At one point, Sischy tells Malcolm about a man she once met at a lunch, a man who was not very interested in Sischy because of what she looked like. Malcolm immediately imagines herself to be just like that man:

  I had formed the idea of writing about her after seeing Artforum change from a journal of lifeless opacity into a magazine of such wild and assertive contemporaneity that one could only imagine its editor to be some sort of strikingly modern type, some astonishing new female sensibility loosed in the world. And into my house had walked a pleasant, intelligent, unassuming, responsible, ethical young woman who had not a trace of the theatrical qualities I had confidently expected and from whom, like the politician at the lunch, I had evidently turned away in disappointment.

  The expectations women have for each other, the way we all size each other up, have so many hopes for each other and so many moments, too, of disappointment: that is the nature, apparently, of being a woman who thinks, and talks about thinking, in public.

  Afterword

  In writing this book I had a great deal of time to reflect on what, exactly, people meant when they called these women sharp. Many offered the word as a compliment, but there was a slight sense of terror underlying it. Sharpness, after all, cuts. The longer I thought about it, the more convinced I became that there was a fantasy afoot when these women were called sharp or mean or Dark Ladies or whatever other vaguely ominous-sounding label people wanted to apply to them. The fantasy held that they were destructive and dangerous and mercurial, as though intellectual life were a kind of gothic novel.

  These women were nothing of the kind. They were not always right, but they were not wrong more often than they should have been, and sometimes they were very, very right. The difficulty is that people have trouble with women who aren’t “nice,” who do not genuflect, who have the courage to sometimes be wrong in public.

  These women also tended not to make themselves palatable to the one movement that might have recognized that conundrum. “I am not a feminist,” Mary McCarthy told a San Francisco crowd a couple of years before she died. But then she walked it back.

  Exceptional women in my generation certainly profited I suppose—without thinking of it that way—from the fact that women in general were rather looked down upon. So if [men] found one they didn’t look down upon, they raised her up a bit higher than she might have deserved. I’m enough of a feminist not to like the kind of praise that says, “She has the mind of a man.” I always hated that.

  It’s not considered very sisterly to believe one stands out from the pack. I thought about that often over the course of researching this book. By necessity, I ran into quite a lot of people who wanted to cut these women out of history precisely because they took advantage of their talents, and did so without turning those talents to the explicit support of feminism. It is viewed as an unforgivable lapse.

  The most famous version of that accusation came from Adrienne Rich, Sontag’s old rival. When Rich read Arendt’s The Human Condition, one of the last books Arendt completed, she was both intrigued and disappointed:

  To read such a book, by a woman of large spirit and great erudition, can be painful, because it embodies the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies. In fact, the loss is ours, because Arendt’s desire to grasp deep moral issues is the kind of concern we need … The power of male ideology to possess such a female mind, to disconnect it as it were from the female body which encloses it and which it encloses, is nowhere more striking than in Arendt’s lofty and crippled book.

  This was fair enough, insofar as Arendt was steadfastly against feminism until her dying day. She had almost nothing to say about gender, far less than all the other women in this book. She could be biting in her disdain for the feminists of her time. A professor of mine, one of her last students, tells a story of once going up with her in an elevator. My professor, Jennifer Nedelsky, was wearing a button from the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Arendt looked at her, looked at the button, and pointing at it, said in her thick German accent: “This is not serious.”

  Parker, West, Sontag, Kael, Ephron, and Malcolm were all more comfortable with the label, though they wavered. Parker wasn’t exactly a suffragette. Sontag got in that argument with Rich herself over the “simple-minded” failings of feminism. Kael tried to make a feminist argument about The Group, and the piece was killed, after which point she seems to have abandoned women’s liberation entirely. Didion would later walk back her essay against women’s liberation in an interview, claiming, “That piece was about a specific moment in time.” Malcolm too, now describes herself as a feminist, despite the critique she once wrote in the New Republic.

  All through this book I have been trying to point out that there is room, in this deep ambivalence about and even hostility toward feminism, to take away a feminist message. Feminism is, yes, supposed to be about sisterhood. But sisters argue, sometimes to the point of estrangement. It is not only commonality that defines us. If we have learned anything from the debates about intersectionality, it is that the experience we call “being a woman” is deeply inflected by race, class, and other sociological markers.

  It is also inflected by individual personality. Some of us are not naturally prone to fall in line the way a movement generally demands. Some of us are the types who stand on the outside of things, who can’t help being the person who asks, “But why must it be this way?”

  “When you are all alone it is hard to decide whether being different is a blemish or a distinction,” Arendt once wrote of Rahel Varnhagen. “When you have nothing at all to cling to, you choose in the end to cling to the thing that sets you off from others.” She argued for the notion that it was a distinction, and she was right.

  You can speak only in the voice you have been given. And that voice has a tenor and inflection given to you by all the experience you have. Some of that experience will inevitably be about being a woman. We’re all stuck with each other, stuck with the history of those who’ve preceded us. You might make your own way, but you always do it in the streams and eddies forded by others, no matter how much you may personally like or dislike them, agree or disagree with them, wish that you were able to transcend this whole situation.

  That was certainly a lesson every woman in this book had to learn.

  Note on Sources

  A great many books went into the making of this one. Direct quotations are attributed in the endnotes. But this book could not have been written without the work of prior biographers. They were integral to assembling the chronology of this book, and I stand on all their shoulders. I list the biographies and secondary sources I relied on in constructing the chronolog
y of this book in the selected bibliography, whether or not they are directly quoted in the book.

  Because I was examining these women’s personas as laid out in their writing, I worked mostly from their published texts. I did look at letter collections and on occasion did my own archival research, fumbling around for the light switches on certain issues that other biographers hadn’t fully explored.

  Although I did not set out to report anything like a thorough biography for any of these women, I was lucky enough to briefly interview Janet Malcolm in 2014, and to meet Renata Adler at a presentation I gave about my research in 2015. Certain things they said and did in those encounters are threaded into this book.

  Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources

  Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Simon and Schuster, 2004).

  Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy & Her World (Clarkson Potter, 1992).

  Richard Cohen, She Made Me Laugh: My Friend Nora Ephron (Simon & Schuster, 2016).

  Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (St. Martin’s, 2015).

  Lorna Gibb, The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West (Counterpoint, 2014).

  Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (Knopf, 1987).

  Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

  Anne Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times (New Harvest, 2015).

  Dorothy Herrmann, With Malice Toward All: The Quips, Lives and Loves of Some Celebrated 20th-Century American Wits (Putnam, 1982).

  John Keats, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. (Simon & Schuster, 1970).

  Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Penguin, 2011).

  Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (Norton, 2000).

  David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

  Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (Penguin, 1989).

  Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (Harper Perennial, 2001).

  Virginia Lynn Moylan, Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade (University Press of Florida, 2012).

  Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Life (Scribner, 1996).

  Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (Norton, 2000).

  Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag: A Biography (Northwestern University Press, 2014).

  Reuel K. Wilson, To the Life of the Silver Harbor (University Press of New England, 2008).

  Ben Yagoda, About Town: The “New Yorker” and the World It Made (Da Capo, 2001).

  Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 2004).

  Notes

  Chapter One: Parker

  All her men graduates, ever after: Frank Crowninshield, “Crowninshield in the Cubs’ Den,” Vogue, September 15, 1944.

  There was no need: “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” in Collected Stories (Penguin Classics, 2002).

  There was no money: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker,” interview with Marion Capron, Paris Review, Summer 1956.

  need of money: Ibid.

  Guess I have: Photocopies of several notes from Parker’s childhood are available in Marion Meade’s papers at Columbia University.

  Edward Bernays: See Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (Picador, 1998).

  For women we intend: “In Vanity Fair,” Vanity Fair, March 1914.

  I don’t call Mrs. Brown: “Any Porch,” Vanity Fair, September 1915.

  plain … not chic: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  brevity is the soul: From a section on Vogue patterns, October 1, 1916, 101. Captions in Vogue were never signed, but the examples used here are those that scholars believe to have been Parker’s.

  There is only one thing: “The Younger Generation,” Vogue, June 1, 1916.

  So odd a blend: Alexander Woollcott, While Rome Burns (Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), 144.

  a horde of wraps and sofa pillows: “Why I Haven’t Married,” Vanity Fair, October 1916 (as Dorothy Rothschild).

  infrequent chairs: “Interior Desecration,” Vogue, April 15, 1917 (as Dorothy Rothschild).

  a sad one for the groom: “Here Comes the Groom,” Vogue, June 15, 1917.

  So there you are: “A Succession of Musical Comedies,” Vanity Fair, April 1918.

  dog’s life: “Mortality in the Drama: The Increasing Tendency of Our New Plays to Die in Their Earliest Infancy,” Vanity Fair, July 1918.

  costume the show-girls: “The Star-Spangled Drama: Our Summer Entertainments Have Become an Orgy of Scenic Patriotism,” Vanity Fair, August 1918.

  bichloride of mercury: “The Dramas That Gloom in the Spring: The Difficulties of Being a Dramatic Critic and a Sunny Little Pollyanna at the Same Time,” Vanity Fair, June 1918.

  we behaved extremely badly: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  anti-Semitic remarks by the hotel’s proprietor: See “Inside Stuff,” Variety, April 5, 12, 1923.

  I wasn’t there very often: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  Just a bunch of loudmouths: Quoted in Dorothy Herrmann, With Malice Toward All: The Quips, Lives and Loves of Some Celebrated 20th-Century American Wits (Putnam, 1982).

  theirs was an attitude of superiority: O. O. McIntyre, “Bits of New York Life,” Atlanta Constitution, October 29, 1924.

  Miss Burke: “The Oriental Drama: Our Playwrights Are Looking to the Far-East for Inspiration and Royalties,” Vanity Fair, January 1920.

  It was the greatest act of friendship: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  a very young critic named Edmund Wilson: See Edmund Wilson, The Twenties (Douglas and McIntyre, 1984), 32–34.

  I did not find them: Ibid., 44–45.

  on an equal basis: Ibid., 47–48.

  Her girlish ways: “The Flapper,” Life, January 26, 1922.

  There are the Boy Authors: “Hymn of Hate,” Life, March 30, 1922.

  makes us feel very old: Heywood Broun, “Paradise and Princeton,” New York Herald Tribune, April 11, 1920.

  Rosalind rested: “Once More Mother Hubbard,” Life, July 7, 1921.

  If she didn’t like something: Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (Harper Perennial, 2001), 66.

  a sexual affair between Scott and Parker: See Scott Donaldson, “Scott and Dottie,” Sewanee Review, Winter 2016.

  I like girls like that: “What a ‘Flapper Novelist’ Thinks of His Wife,” Baltimore Sun, October 7, 1923.

  an armed services edition: See, e.g., Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (Little, Brown, 2014).

  Almost anyone you know: Sterling North, “More Than Enough Rope,” Poetry, December 1928.

  A kind of burlesque: Edmund Wilson, “Dorothy Parker’s Poems,” New Republic, January 19, 1927.

  Let’s face it, honey: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  edged and acrid style: Wilson, “Dorothy Parker’s Poems.”

  Razors pain you: “Résumé,” Enough Rope (Boni and Liveright, 1926).

  an incompleted dogfight: “Constant Reader,” New Yorker, October 29, 1927.

  To celebrate in borrowed cadence: Ernest Hemingway, “To a Tragic Poetess,” in Complete Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

  His is, as any reader knows: “Reading and Writing,” New Yorker, October 29, 1927.

  roughly equivalent numbers: Ben Yagoda, About Town: The “New Yorker” and the World It Made (Da Capo, 2001), 77.

  goddam women schoolteachers: James Thurber, The Years with Ross (Harper Perennial, 2000), 4–5.

  the affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith: “Constant Reader,” New Yorker, October 22, 1927.

  The Constant Reader columns: Joan Acocella, “After the Laughs,” New Yorker, August 16, 1993.

&nbs
p; literary Rotarians: “Constant Reader,” New Yorker, February 8, 1928.

  I wanted to be cute: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  sophisticated talk: La Mar Warrick, “Farewell to Sophistication,” Harper’s, October 1, 1930.

  Men like a good sport: “Big Blonde,” Bookman, February 1929.

  This is instead of telephoning you: The telegram is dated June 28, 1945, and an image of it is widely available on the Internet. See, e.g., “I can’t look you in the voice,” Letters of Note (June 17, 2011) at http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/06/i-cant-look-you-in-voice.html.

  Well, I did saunter: “NY Pickets Parade Boston Streets in Bus,” New York Herald Tribune, August 12, 1927.

  I am not a member: “Incredible, Fantastic … and True,” New Masses, November 25, 1937.

  I don’t think: New Masses, June 27, 1939.

  As for me: “The Art of Fiction No. 13: Dorothy Parker.”

  traces of the unique genius: Rebecca West, “What Books Have Done to Russia,” New York Herald Tribune, October 28, 1928.

  Chapter Two: West

  he is the Old Maid among novelists: “Marriage,” Freewoman, September 19, 1912.

  I wonder about the women: Ibid.

  Poor child: Letter to Letitia Fairfield, April 18, 1910, quoted in Selected Letters of Rebecca West, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Yale University Press, 2000).

  shabby Prospero: The Fountain Overflows (New York Review Books, 2003), 85.

  a prison stay: See Lorna Gibb, The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West (Counterpoint, 2014), 36.

  there is something definite about a dog: “I Regard Marriage with Fear and Horror,” Hearst’s International, November 1925, collected in Woman as Artist and Thinker (iUniverse, 2005).

  Christabel Pankhurst, Who Is Rich: This headline appeared in the Los Angeles Times on December 2, 1906.