Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael
A Review by Dan Callahan
10/26/2004
In what is probably the most purely pleasurable book of the year, Sontag & Kael, Craig Seligman has opened a veritable Pandora's Box of teasing critical ideas, comparing and contrasting the careers of Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag. Stylistically speaking, these are two very different writers, and Seligman zeroes in on their technical idiosyncrasies (Sontag's passive verbs, Kael's jazzy slang) and their personal convergence's (they both hailed from the West, both were secular Jews and single mothers). They had their biggest impact in the mid-sixties, and they were hungry writers for a hungry time, divas that re-charged your batteries. They still awaken our deadened modern senses. And they're still dangerously seductive.
Seligman says early in the book that he doesn't want to run a contest, and he doesn't. “I revere Sontag. I love Kael,” he admits on the second page, but somehow he manages to pay equal attention to both of them, and all of his positions on Kael and Sontag are thoroughly backed up and conclusive. The first half of the book is so exhilarating because Seligman uses the fast rhetorical strategies of Kael to get at Sontag's mysterious slowness. It's a little like watching Kael sneak up on Sontag at a party and goose her. A festive, excitingly quick-witted book, Sontag & Kael does what both women did so well: it sets your mind racing.
Seligman was originally going to do a piece on Sontag for Salon, which would have co-incided with the release of a Sontag biography and her own novel In America. When the biography was released and turned out to be dreadful, Seligman lost interest in the piece, but he had done a lot of thinking about Sontag. “I had always thought that I didn't want to write a book until I had something to write a book about,” says Seligman over coffee in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “I was thinking a lot at the time about Sontag and it occurred to me that she was the opposite of Kael. And a light went off. I immediately knew there was a book there.”
Seligman was friends with Kael, and he's clearly besotted with her, but he doesn't let his adoration blur any of his critical thinking unduly. “I think there are very few people trying to write criticism who weren't influenced at least negatively by Kael,” Seligman says. “I think Kael single-handedly changed it,” he declares, then adds, “though that's obviously a bit of hyperbole.”
Seligman quotes Sontag and Kael at their best and most characteristic, and he comes out with some real zingers, too. At one point he likens Sontag at her worst to “a kind of modernist Margaret Dumont.” But he also calls her prose “as colorless, as odorless and as intoxicating as vodka.” Seligman's thorough goosing and frisking of Sontag winds up letting us see her achievement more clearly, once we have cleared away her more infuriating personal traits as a writer. In perhaps the book's most perfect section, Seligman sees how in Kael's review of The Way We Were, when she writes about the politically strident Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand), she could be writing about Sontag: “Katie, who has no common sense, cares so much about everything...that our feelings go out to her, even when her outbursts are offensive—perhaps most when they're offensive.”
Seligman defends Kael from the charge that she elevated violent, sexy trash above all else, even though he does tell an interesting story in his book about how, towards the end of her life, he showed her The Life of Oharu on tape. She wondered afterwards if it wouldn't have been better if Mizoguchi had cracked a few jokes. “I do think she became a little more set in her prejudice against high seriousness in her later years,” admits Seligman. “But she was one of the great defenders of L'Avventura, and there aren't many jokes cracked in that.” When asked about her distaste for all of Antonioni's subsequent movies, Seligman says, “She thought afterwards that he became a parody of himself. I think it's a defensible position.”
Upon the vaguely infamous legend of the Paulettes, a group of Kael's young critic friends who she helped to place at various newspapers around the country, Seligman defends Kael fiercely. “Did she have a party line for the Paulettes to follow? In my case, no,” he says. “But it was clear to me that she didn't like sycophants. The only way to have a relationship with her at all was to be yourself and argue with her. On the other hand, as with practically everybody else, if you have someone with whom you disagree about practically every movie, that person is probably not going to become a part of your circle.” This seems to tie in with Andrew Sarris' remark that you could flatter Sontag, but that you could never flatter Kael.
Seligman does admit that there was one movie that he wouldn't have argued with Kael about, even if he hadn't liked it, Brian De Palma's Casualties of War. “That struck a raw nerve with her,” says Seligman. Her review of that film, filled with pain and even a rare personal anecdote about a time she herself had witnessed a random act of cruelty, is the crowning achievement of her career.
Seligman's sympathetic treatment of his flawed heroine Sontag even extends to her problematic fiction, which he gives a careful, slightly wry reading, but he does sound a familiar note when he writes, “Sontag on Cioran or on Canetti is moving, engaging, often brilliant, Sontag on the Gang of Four, Sontag on Prince—that would have been for the ages.” He can't help shuddering at Sontag's humorless high-mindedness, her intellectual tour-guide side, not to mention her shifting political viewpoints. Yet he sees that through it all the quality of her writing has remained consistent, even if her ideas are in a constant (and sexy) state of flux.
At the end of his book, Seligman makes an extremely bold assertion. He says that Kael's body of work “wasn't merely a body of criticism but a body of literature, one of the signal literary achievements of the second half of the twentieth century.” Then, two pages later, he concludes, “Kael flourished with a consistency unmatched by any American writer since Henry James.” In a way, this might be an homage to Kael's famous comparison of the opening of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris to the first hearing of Stravinsky's “Le Sacre du Printemps,” but Seligman tries to stands by it, just as Kael would have. “Certainly one of my reasons for writing the book was to give Kael a boost, to remind people that she should be taken seriously,” Seligman says. “Not just as a critic, but as a writer. Do I think her work is on the level with the collected works of Henry James?” he asks. After a pause, Sontag-ian doubt vanquishes Kael-ian certainty. “I don't know,” he says, smiling. “I'm just too close to her.”
It's clear that the arguments about what Kael and Sontag wrote and how they wrote will live on, and Seligman gives me one final thought before we close Pauline and Susan's Box. “Good criticism invites argument,” he says. “For all her magisterial tone, Sontag intends what any good critic, including Kael, intends, which is for us to argue back. The fact that they use the strongest possible rhetorical strategies to make their point doesn't mean that you don't want to argue back.” Then, Seligman pulls another Sontag switch. “Of course, what we really want is for people to say, ‘You're right! You're absolutely right!' But that makes for dull dinner conversation.”
Sontag and Kael have obviously left their mark on Seligman, just as they have left their mark on anyone who has wrestled with these queens of criticism. In Sontag & Kael, Seligman has offered a lot of vivid reasons why they continue to have an impact. It's a bracing, tart and quietly touching book, airtight yet enormously suggestive, about the difference between reverence and love, rapidity and slowness, seriousness and fun, vulgarity and high-mindedness. It leaves more questions than answers, and that's, of course, as it should be.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 10/26/2004
