SHARP
The Women Who Made
an Art of Having an Opinion
MICHELLE DEAN
Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Dean
Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler and Daniel Rembert
Cover Illustration © Kathryn Rathke/kathrynrathke.com
“To a Tragic Poetess,” by Ernest Hemingway.
Copyright © 1926 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
Printed with permission of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
Quotes from an unpublished letter by Susan Sontag appear by permission of the Estate of Susan Sontag.
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: April 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2509-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-6571-8
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For every person who’s ever been told,
“You’re too smart for your own good”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter One: Parker
Chapter Two: West
Chapter Three: West & Hurston
Chapter Four: Arendt
Chapter Five: McCarthy
Chapter Six: Parker & Arendt
Chapter Seven: Arendt & McCarthy
Chapter Eight: Sontag
Chapter Nine: Kael
Chapter Ten: Didion
Chapter Eleven: Ephron
Chapter Twelve: Arendt & McCarthy & Hellman
Chapter Thirteen: Adler
Chapter Fourteen: Malcolm
Afterword
Note on Sources
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Back Cover
Preface
I gathered the women in this book under the sign of a compliment that every one of them received in their lives: they were called sharp.
The precise nature of their gifts varied, but they had in common the ability to write unforgettably. The world would not have been the same without Dorothy Parker’s acid reflections on the absurdities of her life. Or Rebecca West’s ability to sweep half the world’s history into a first-person account of a single trip. Or Hannah Arendt’s ideas about totalitarianism, or Mary McCarthy’s fiction that took as its subject the strange consciousness of the princess among the trolls. Or Susan Sontag’s ideas about interpretation, or Pauline Kael’s energetic swipes at filmmakers. Or Nora Ephron’s skepticism about the feminist movement, or Renata Adler’s catalog of the foibles of those in power. Or Janet Malcolm’s reflections on the perils and rewards of psychoanalysis and journalism.
That these women achieved what they did in the twentieth century only makes them more remarkable. They came up in a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything. It can be easy to forget that Dorothy Parker began publishing her caustic verse before women even had the vote. We often don’t think about the fact that the second wave of feminism kicked up after Susan Sontag had become the icon she was with her “Notes on ‘Camp’” essay. These women openly defied gendered expectations before any organized feminist movement managed to make gains for women on the whole. Through their exceptional talent, they were granted a kind of intellectual equality to men other women had no hope of.
All that personal success often put them in tension with the collective politics of “feminism.” While some of the people in this book called themselves feminists, others didn’t. Virtually none of them found themselves satisfied by working as activists; Rebecca West, who came closest, eventually found the suffragettes both admirably ferocious and unforgivably prudish. Sontag wrote a defense of feminism, then turned around and roared at Adrienne Rich about the “simple-mindedness” of the movement when challenged. Even Nora Ephron confessed to feeling uneasy about the efforts of women to organize at the 1972 Democratic convention.
The ambivalence here is often said to be repudiation of feminist politics, and occasionally it explicitly was that. These women were all oppositional spirits, and they tended not to like being grouped together. For one thing, some of them despised each other: McCarthy had no interest in Parker, Sontag said the same about McCarthy, Adler famously scorched the earth when she went after Kael. For another, they had little time for notions of “sisterhood”: I can imagine Hannah Arendt haranguing me for placing her work in the context of her womanhood at all.
And yet, these women were received as proof positive that women were every bit as qualified to weigh in on art, on ideas, and on politics as men. What progress we have ever made on that front was made because the feminine side of the equation could lay claim to Arendt and Didion and Malcolm, among the others. Whether or not they knew it, these women cleared a path for other women to follow.
I wrote this book because this history has never been as well-known as it deserves to be, at least outside certain isolated precincts of New York. Biographies had been written of all of them and devoured by me. But as biographies do, each book considered these women in isolation, a phenomenon unto herself, missing the connections I felt I could see. The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists: the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, the Roths and Bellows and Salingers. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering. Even in more academic accounts, in “intellectual histories,” it is generally assumed that men dominated the scene. Certainly, the so-called New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century are often identified as a male set. But my research showed otherwise. Men might have outnumbered women, demographically. But in the arguably more crucial matter of producing work worth remembering, the work that defined the terms of their scene, the women were right up to par—and often beyond it.
Is there, after all, a voice that carries better through the ages than Parker’s? You can practically hear the scratch of her voice in every verse. Or is there a moral and political voice whose reach exceeds Hannah Arendt’s? Where would our vision of culture be without Susan Sontag? How would we think about movies without Pauline Kael to open the door to the celebration of popular art? The longer I looked at the work of these women laid out before me, the more puzzling I found it that anyone could look at the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century and not center women in it.
I can’t help thinking the reason people haven’t is because being so bright, so exceptional, so sharp, did not always earn these women praise in their own time. More often people reacted badly to the sting. Broadway producers hated Parker an
d chased her out of a theater critic’s post. Mary McCarthy’s friends at the Partisan Review despised the parodies she wrote of them, feeling her haughty and unkind. Pauline Kael was criticized by the male cineasts of her era for being insufficiently serious. (Actually she’s still criticized for that.) The letters to the editor were scathing when Joan Didion published her famous essay on central California, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” When Janet Malcolm observed that journalists exploit the vanity of their subjects, newspaper columnists took to their pulpits to shame her for sullying the alleged honor of journalism.
Some of that criticism came from bald sexism. Some from plain stupidity. Quite a bit of it was some blend of both. But the key to these women’s power was in how they responded to it, with a kind of intelligent skepticism that was often very funny. Even Hannah Arendt could roll an eye, now and then, at the furor her Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked. Didion once fired a simple “Oh, wow” at an intemperate letter writer. Adler had a habit of quoting writers’ own words back at them, pointing out word repetition and philosophical emptiness.
Their sardonic ways sometimes became grounds to ignore these women, to deem them “not serious.” Irony, sarcasm, ridicule: these can be the tools of outsiders, a by-product of the natural skepticism toward conventional wisdom that comes when you haven’t been able to participate in its formulation. It is my view that we should take more notice of an attempt to intervene when it has that sort of edge to it. There is always intellectual value in not being like everyone else at the table, in this case not being a man, but also not being white, not being upper class, not being from the right school.
It was not so much that these women were always in the right. Nor that they are themselves a perfect demographic sample. These women came from similar backgrounds: white, and often Jewish, and middle-class. And as you will see in the following pages, they were formed by the habits, preoccupations and prejudices that entails. In a more perfect world, for example, a black writer like Zora Neale Hurston would have been more widely recognized as part of this cohort, but racism kept her writings at the margin of it.
But even so, these women were there in the fray, participating in the great arguments of the twentieth century. That is the point of this book. Their work alone is reason to acknowledge their presence.
I will cop to a secondary motive, one that shaped the kinds of questions I explored about these women. There is something valuable about knowing this history if you are a young woman of a certain kind of ambition. There is something valuable in knowing that pervasive sexism notwithstanding there are ways to cut through it.
So when I ask in the following pages what made these women who they were, such elegant arguers, both hindered and helped by men, prone to but not defined by mistakes, and above all completely unforgettable, I do it for one simple reason: because even now, even (arguably) after feminism, we still need more women like this.
1
Parker
Before she was the lodestar she later became, Dorothy Parker had to go to work at nineteen. That was not how things were supposed to go, not for someone like her. She was born well-enough-to-do in 1893 to a fur merchant. The family name was Rothschild—not those ones, as Parker reminded interviewers all her life. But still a respectable New York Jewish family, financially comfortable enough for Jersey Shore vacations and a large apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then her father died in the winter of 1913, devastated by the deaths of two wives and a brother who sank with the Titanic. His children inherited almost nothing.
There was no impending marriage available to rescue then Dorothy Rothschild. She had no education to speak of either. She had not even graduated from high school, not that women of her background were generally educated to work. Secretarial schools, which would grant a host of middle-class women the power to make their own living by the midcentury, were only starting to open when she came of age. Parker had to turn instead to the only talent she had that could quickly prove remunerative: she could play the piano, and dancing schools were beginning to crop up all around Manhattan. Sometimes, Parker liked to say, she even taught the slightly scandalous new ragtime dances to the students: the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear. She always made herself the punch line of the story. “All her men graduates, ever after, Lame-Ducked on the wrong foot,” a friend remembered her telling him.
It was a good story, granted that it was also almost certainly an exaggeration. In all the annals kept by her friends and contemporaries, no one mentions Parker so much as sitting near a piano, not to mention doing any kind of dancing. Maybe she just gave it up. Maybe, as would happen to her later with writing, having to make money with her musical talents turned the whole activity sour. But perhaps, too, she exaggerated in the service of humor, because from the beginning humor provided a good escape. Her jokes would eventually give Dorothy Rothschild a legendary status as “Mrs. Parker,” a kind of avatar of the good time. Mrs. Parker always had a cocktail in her hand and had just dropped a quip on the party like a grenade.
But just as the noise and glitter of a party often hide miseries and frustrations, the same was true of Parker’s life. The stories that enchanted other people were carvings of a kind, taken from horrible experiences and offered up as fun. Even this jovial image of a piano-playing Parker sitting at the center of a bunch of people whirling to a beat hid anger and suffering. Parker clearly didn’t mind telling people she had been left penniless, because there was a certain heroism in having built herself up from that. But she much more rarely talked about her mother, who had died by the time Parker was five, or the hated stepmother who had followed. She also tended not to mention that when she left school at fifteen, it was to stay home with her increasingly ill and disoriented father. It would be nearly five years before his death would spring her from that particular trap.
Later, in a short story she wrote about the last day of “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” Parker described the state of the (fictional) man thus:
There was no need for them to gather at the Old Gentleman’s bedside. He would not have known any of them. In fact, he had not known them for almost a year, addressing them by wrong names and asking them grave, courteous questions about the health of husbands or wives or children who belonged to other branches of the family.
Parker liked to present her father’s death as a tragedy and could sometimes sound bitter about how she’d been left to fend for herself: “There was no money, you see.” But the need for a job turned out to be a boon, the first time Parker would turn a bad experience into a good story. This was her gift: to shave complex emotions down to a witticism that hints at bitterness without wearing it on the surface.
After that experience, Parker apparently decided that all good fortune was a kind of accident. The business of writing happened by chance, she usually said. She wrote for “need of money, dear.” That wasn’t really the whole truth. Parker had composed verse from the time she was a small child, though it’s unclear exactly when she got the idea. She wasn’t a record keeper, and very few papers of hers survive. One of her biographers managed to lay hands on a few childhood notes to her father, which already had a budding writer’s voice to them. “They say when your writing goes uphill, you have a hopeful disposition,” she wrote to him once, referring to the slant of her handwriting. Then she added the sort of deflating remark that was to become her signature maneuver: “Guess I have.”
Talent can be a kind of accident sometimes. It can choose people and set them up for lives they never would have dreamed of themselves. But that was really the only kind of accident that had any hand in making Dorothy Parker a writer.
The first person who gave Parker a professional chance was a man named Frank Crowninshield. He pulled her from a pile of unsolicited submissions sometime in 1914. He may have recognized something of himself in her, perhaps her oppositional spirit. Though already in his forties by then and born a Boston Brahmin, Crowninshield was not like everyone else in the New York high society. He nev
er married—perhaps because he was gay, though there is no firm proof of it. To all interested parties, Crowninshield presented himself as merely devoted to a troubled brother who was addicted to narcotics. He was known about town chiefly for his pranks, and for his stewardship of the first iteration of Vanity Fair, a once staid and proper men’s fashion magazine he was hired by Condé Nast to reinvent.
It was then still the early days of American magazines. Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly were kicking around. But no one had yet invented the New Yorker, much less dreamed of catering to an audience more cosmopolitan than “the old lady from Dubuque.” Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud’s who is often credited with the invention of public relations, had only begun his career in the fall of 1913. Advertisers were only beginning to have some idea of their eventual power in America.
Having so few models to emulate, Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair turned out something like its editor’s personality: tart and impertinent, particularly in regard to the very rich. Something—perhaps the sufferings of his brother, perhaps the clear fact that Crowninshield’s family had always possessed more prestige than money—had made him a critic of the well-off. But he was not much for fire-and-brimstone social criticism. His method, instead, was ridicule. Even his editor’s note to the first issue of the revamped magazine was sardonic:
For women we intend to do something in a noble and missionary spirit, something which, so far as we can observe, has never before been done for them by an American magazine. We mean to make frequent appeals to their intellects. We dare to believe that they are, in their best moments, creatures of some cerebral activity; we even make bold to believe that it is they who are contributing what is more original, stimulating, and highly magnetized to the literature of our day, and we hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.
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