Posts Tagged ‘Camille Paglia’

A polished schtick (Photo: Andrew Harrer)

Sam Leith at the Guardian revisits August Kleinzahler‘s 2004 Poetry magazine “full-frontal assault” on Garrison Keillor’s “appalling taste”.

The occasion was the publication of Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems.

Kleinzahler wrote this:

Now, had Keillor not “strayed off the reservation” and kept to his Prairie Home Companion show with its Norwegian bachelor farmers and Lutheran bake sales (a sort of Spoon River Anthology as presented by the Hallmark Hall of Fame), comfort food for the philistines, a contemporary, bittersweet equivalent to the Lawrence Welk Show of years past, I’d have left him alone. But the indefatigable and determined purveyor of homespun wisdom has wandered into the realm of fire, and for his trespass must be burned.

Full disclosure: I was asked to review Keillor’s poetry anthology some years back (was it for the San Francisco Chronicle? I can’t remember) and I gave it a pass.  I’d seen nothing in the vaunted Prairie Home Companion to convince me that Keillor’s tastes would make his anthology worthwhile reading (and I gave the same pass, for the same reasons, when Camille Paglia‘s anthology came out).  So as far as aesthetics go, I’m probably more along the Kleinzahler end of the spectrum, except for the ire.  Of Kleinzahler’s long-ago review of Keillor, “No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please,” Leith writes:

I looked it up: a dismissive review that took two and a half thousand words in the dismissing. It’s been said that criticising P.G. Wodehouse is like “taking a spade to a souffle“. This was something similar; and if you hit a souffle with a spade, you get egg on your face.

Keillor’s taste in poetry may differ from Kleinzahler’s, and his understanding of what it’s for may differ – caricaturally, he thinks it does the soul good, and that makes Kleinzahler wince with embarrassment.  … But it strikes me as odd that the response is not indifference but active rage …

Leith continued:

The divide isn’t actually between people who want to stitch rhymed verse into samplers and sell it in tourist shops, and those so high-minded they think Basil Bunting was a sellout. It’s between people happy for both views to co-exist, and people for whom it isn’t enough to play in the Premier League – you have to be energetically affronted by the existence of Sunday league.

In a calmer moment (Photo: Poem Present)

It isn’t elitist to think that Four Quartets is chewier, profounder and more artful than If or The Song of Hiawatha: it is simply common sense. Indeed, it is so obviously common sense that to be shrill in asserting it makes you look . . . well, weird. Is poetry so sickly that Geoffrey Hill catches a cold when Pam Ayres sneezes? Is the whole project of making high art threatened by the existence of low art? Nobody sensible can think so.

So the Keillors – the live-and-let-live brigade – will always look bigger than the Kleinzahlers. They are in a position to extend what you might call repressive tolerance. As it happens, to view Keillor as a dim, benevolent sweetie-pie – a manatee ripe for harpooning – is to be naive in any case: it is to mistake him for his persona. Nobody who remembers his caustic review of Bernard-Henri Lévy‘s book about America in the New York Times could make the mistake: Keillor skewered Lévy as “a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore”, and ended: “Thanks for coming. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

But for Kleinzahler, who swallows the persona in one gulp, Keillor is prepared to kill with kindness. His response, years after the attack, is one of superbly malevolent benignity: “I believe in vigorous free speech. Does no damage whatsoever that I can see. Bless his heart. I wish him well.”

I remember well Keillor’s scalding review of Bernard-Henri Lévy – “On the Road avec M. Lévy” – when I was briefly in the Frenchman’s thrall. It’s a classic.

Otherwise, however, I could never quite “get” the charm of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. Too often I, too, have swallowed the schtick in one gulp  – though I shouldn’t have needed Leith to remind me.

The only part of Keillor I ever really enjoyed was the song below:

Applause for Nunez (Photo: Marion Ettlinger)

Terry Castle took a lot of heat for what she wrote about Susan Sontag in “Desperately Seeking Susan.” (The London Review of Books carries the 2005 Sontag anti-memoir here).  Although she had she been invited to Sontag’s memorial service, she was “disinvited the day after this piece came out.” She received a nasty email from Sontag’s son, David Rieff.

So it’s curious to see the respectful reception given to novelist Sigrid Nunez‘s memoir, Sempre Susan, which is getting some good reviews. Nunez had been Rieff’s lover — a threesome in Sontag’s apartment.  The commotion is somewhat surprising, given that no bookstore in Palo Alto seems to have the book yet — not Stanford Bookstore, nor Kepler’s, nor Borders, nor anywhere else I could find — so I figure it must be carried by a handful of bookstores in New York.

One thing is clear: Sempre Susan vindicates every word Terry wrote.

Joseph Epstein, former editor of The American Scholar, uses the occasion of the publication to take Sontag down a notch or two in the the Wall Street Journal: “In her thrall to ideas she resembles the pure type of the intellectual. The difficulty, though, was in the quality of so many of her ideas, most of which cannot be too soon forgot,” he writes, before recapping her political career.

Vindication for Terry

He concludes:

Although Sigrid Nunez appreciates Susan Sontag’s curiosity, wide reading, courage in the face of bad health, and independence, her unreality, her deep and abiding unreality, is the final impression that “Sempre Susan” leaves on the reader. Sontag didn’t mind whose feelings she hurt. Her trips to give talks at universities are strewn with stories of her disregard of her audience and astonishing impudence. No one was allowed to get in the way of her desires or disrupt her sense of her own high seriousness.

At the end of Sempre Susan, Ms. Nunez presents a woman who is filled with regrets, not about her treatment of others but about her own achievement. Still confident of her “worthy contribution to culture and society,” she nonetheless wishes that she had been “more artist and less critic, more author and less activist. . . . No, she was not happy with her life’s work. . . . True greatness had eluded her.” Deluded to the end, Susan Sontag had no notion that not literature but self-promotion was her real métier.

This is far more unjust than anything Terry may have said in her wry and self-mocking piece. While Epstein quotes Camille Paglia‘s assessment of Sontag — that she “made fetishes of depressive European writers” — it’s worth noting that Sontag’s championing of world literature in America did make a dent in American consciousness, which had, at the time of her launch in the 1960s, been a pretty parochial affair.

And despite Epstein’s dismissal of it, it did indeed take courage to face boos and jeering at the 1982 rally (not to mention the nasty aftermath in the press) where she said: “Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or [t]he New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?” Is there anyone outside Nepal who would defend Communism today?

That said, it will take years to figure out Sontag’s legacy — as a writer, and as a role model for a generation of women who were born when the coupon-clipping Mamie Eisenhower was First Lady.

I wrote to Terry to ask her what she thought — of the book, and also of Epstein’s review.  It was several days before she responded — she was swept up in the first week of spring classes. But she finally dashed off a quick email:

“Yes, I devoured the Nunez book as soon as it came out, & also found it pretty good….   The epstein piece made some vivid & nasty & accurate points,  but I don’t think he had any conception of what was great about her too—esp for women of my generation…  It’s all very bittersweet!”