After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  On the way back to Owerri, the State House driver ran over a chicken, and did not stop. A small boy raised his one arm in a salute. At the airport, a Biafran crew was loading a strange cargo of sacks of cocoa beans and two old English refrigerators on the French Red Cross flight back to Libreville. The car passed a wake, with mourners singing, in Ibo, “He is dead. Got to bury him. He died in a state of courage. We shall all be there sooner or later. May his soul rest in peace.”

  The New Yorker

  October 4, 1969

  A YEAR IN THE DARK

  INTRODUCTION

  BEING film critic for The New York Times for a year (fourteen months, really) was for me a particular kind of adventure—with time, with tones of voice, with movies, with editing, with the peculiar experience it always is to write in one’s own name something that is never exactly what one would have wanted to say. The job came to me at an odd time. I had begun at The New Yorker as a book reviewer, until I no longer saw the point of reviewing other people’s books unless the books themselves were so important that one would want to make them known. There were not at that time enough books to explain a regular critic’s job, and I do not believe in professional criticism anyway, as a way of life. I turned to reporting, and it seemed to make more sense. Selma, Harlem, Mississippi, the New Left, group therapy, pop music, the Sunset Strip, Vietnam, the Six-Day War—I wanted very much to be there and accurate about these things. I particularly detested, and detest, the “new journalism,” which began, I think, as a corruption of a form which originated in The New Yorker itself. After a genuine, innovating tradition of great New Yorker reporters (A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, St. Clair McKelway, Lillian Ross, Wolcott Gibbs) who imparted to events a form and a personal touch that were truer to the events themselves than short, conventional journalism, determined by the structure of the daily news, had ever been, there sprang up almost everywhere a second growth of reporters, who took up the personal and didn’t give a damn for the events.

  There began, apparently, to be a taste for this. The facts dissolved. The writer was everything. It is hard enough to define hard fact, but we were starting to get, in what looked like quite respectable contexts, a new variant of sensational or yellow journalism—that corroding thing, the news or some distortion of the news, as entertainment. I remember particularly a reporter for the then “lively,” dying Herald Tribune who would charge up to people in Alabama with extended hand, introduce himself, and beginning “Wouldn’t you say . . .?” produce an entirely formulated paragraph of his own. Sooner or later somebody tired or agreeable would nod, and the next day’s column—with some intimate colloquialisms and absolute fabrications thrown in—would attribute its quotes and appear, as a piece of the new journalism.

  The finest reporters I met at the time were Times men in the South. While others were rushing frantically about, desperate and verbal about deadlines, dangers, reputation, the problems of safely reaching a telephone, Paul Montgomery, Gene Roberts and Roy Reed more or less sloped from place to place, getting the story with true ear and straight into the next edition of the Times. They were entirely free of self-importance or punditry, rather like great short-order cooks. The harassed ones are never any good. It seemed almost a question of making it look easy. My idealization of the Times in this respect was much later modified, in the Paris disturbances of May. (The bureau, with one exception, was always in a terrific huff. They were normally shallow and about a day behind events. And they seemed always trying to recoup, with stories headlined “Parisians Have Second Thoughts About . . .,” some particularly inadequate story of the day before. All such a headline ever meant was that the reporter himself had changed his mind.) But most Times reporters still seem to me the best I know.

  In October, 1967, when the Times suddenly, almost incidentally, offered me Bosley Crowther’s job, Mr. Crowther had been reviewing for twenty-seven years. Anything one man has done in his own way for that long becomes unoccupied in a truly vacant sense. People form strong ideas about how it should not be done; yet it is not at all clear what the job, apart from the man who has done it almost as long as it exists, might be. Like nearly everyone, I had always gone to the movies a lot and liked to go to them. It so completely blotted out the content of much of life and yet filled the days, like dreaming. (It later turned out that my favorite screening time was eight in the morning, when the change to the movie world was entirely smooth.) I had done a few movie reviews before, at The New Yorker for a month, and once for Life, but I had never read much film criticism—except by writers who interested me on other grounds. Reviewing movies seemed not at all like reviewing books, more like writing about events, about anything. And although there was wide access in the Times (a lot of people seem to read movie reviews), there was not, except in foreign films, the seriousness of making or ruining a film, as there can be with plays or books. I trusted my judgment enough to think I would know what distinction there was, and try not to harm it.

  I bought quantities of film criticism in the months before the job began, Agee, Arnheim, everybody: the angry trash claimers (writers who claim some movie they have enjoyed is utter trash, and then become fiercely possessive about it); the brave commercialism deplorers (writers forever saddened that some popular movie has failed to realize the high aesthetic possibilities they might have envisioned for it); the giddy adjectivalists, stunned, shattered or convulsed with hilarity every other day by some cinema experience; the severe traditionalists, usefully comparing any given film to one which had gone before; the cement solid positivists, whose essays were likely to begin, “The screen is a rectangle,” and, although the exposition rarely got much deeper, seemed to feel most comfortable with formulations about the Medium. The best criticism I read was still by writers who simply felt moved by film to say something about it—without reverent or consistent strategies, putting films idiosyncratically alongside things they cared about in other ways.

  In those months, I also began to go to the movies all day long, drive-ins, Spanish theaters, Chinese, Forty-second Street, museums, etc., and then I stopped. It began to produce a sensation of interior weightlessness, of my own time and experience drifting off like an astronaut’s. It was not at all the private reading binges that take place at home. It was more like travel, dislocating, among strangers, going into a public dark for dreams and controversy. On January 1st last year, the job began. Or more accurately, on Friday, December 29th, when the Sunday piece for January 7th was due. This was the first indication I had of the absolute exigencies of scheduling. From that moment, it was like catching your sleeve in a machine. The final, immutable deadline for Sunday pieces turned out to be the small hours of Tuesday morning—which created occasional disastrous coincidences, like a piece on violent suffering written just before Senator Robert Kennedy was shot and published the Sunday after he died. But the grinding calamity could be the daily pieces, whose simple mechanics were these: a screening, perhaps the day of the opening, perhaps a few days before, copy due at six in the afternoon, to appear when the paper is printed at 9:30 P.M. The pieces were typed with nine carbons, and edited in hurdles. The idea at the Times is that reviews are not edited at all, but the reality was a continual leaning on sentences, cracking rhythms, removing or explaining jokes, questioning or crazily amplifying metaphors and allusions, on pieces that were not that good in the first place. The first hurdle was the young editor of what was called the Cultural News Department, whose major contributions were to divide paragraphs in unlikely places, losing the sense (there is an ancient newspaper tradition that paragraphs more than one or two sentences long “look terrible”), and to point to as many sentences as possible and ask what I meant by them. I fell for this every time, would explain at length, and then receive that absolute nightmare of editorial replies, “Well, why don’t you come right out and say it?”

  After a few months, this transaction became untenable and I was permitted to submit pieces directly to the second hurdle, the Obituary and Culture Desk
(Obit), where all culture pieces are edited. Here, sentences were often reversed (there was rarely the conception that in doing sentences a writer chooses among options), the timing of remaining jokes undone, and meanings “clarified.” Little things could occur on Sundays: “unavailing work” one week became “unavailable work”—quite a difference, after all—and a movie’s reference to Jean-Sol Partre was helpfully explained in a parenthesis to be “a pun on the name of Jean-Paul Sartre.” But the Sunday section, under a kind, harassed, intelligent editor, Seymour Peck, was edited slightly and for good reason. In the daily, after regular, protracted and yet tentative argument (one is never, even in the face of pure inanity, that certain about editing), there would be spasms, for days on end, of drastic changes whose source was never clear. At one point, lower echelon editors were coming over the hills like the Chinese, with queries and suggestions, until it occurred to me that I could complain. That worked. It stopped. The only defense against the sourceless spasms, though, was to keep a vigil on editions of the paper until 1 A.M., call the Obit Desk and quarrel, threaten to resign (on February 11, 1968, I did resign; nobody paid much attention), or to ask for the intercession of a major editor. Arthur Gelb, Abe Rosenthal, Clifton Daniel, all the major editors of the Times, were, and are, after all writers themselves and very patient about writers’ problems, but it seemed hardly possible—the importance of other things in the world considered—to ask them often to intercede in prose and culture wars. In the end, I just stopped reading the paper, in order not to know.

  The spatial context of writing at the office was peculiar. I sat, for the first few months, at a desk among rows of desks in what is called the culture pool. Looking up from my typewriter to think, I would often be staring directly into the eyes of Hilton Kramer, who was thinking too. Phones rang incessantly on every side. When it was possible, I wrote at home. On a particularly grumpy day, several months after Bosley Crowther had left the Times for Columbia Pictures, I decided, out of pure grumpiness really, that it was time to move into his office. All first-string critics’ offices at the Times are glass enclosed, and late one night, working on a Sunday piece—with Grace Glueck, who also worked late, typing nearby—I began to scrub the words Movie News off what had been Mr. Crowther’s door. The letters had always looked unseemly to me. I tried to slide them around into Movie Snew, but that didn’t work, and I finally removed them altogether and felt fine.

  From the first, the job had sides I had not quite anticipated. For one thing, it turned out to be extremely public, more like a regular, embarrassed, impromptu performance on network television than any conception of writing I had ever had. The film reviewer writes more frequently than anybody else at the Times except Clive Barnes, who did theater and ballet, and who writes gladly, naturally. I don’t; one of the reasons for trying daily journalism was to see whether it would get any easier. The Movie News staff at the time consisted of three other reviewers, Vincent Canby, whom I liked and admired a lot, and Howard Thompson and Abe Weiler, whom I liked too. In principle, I had the choice of which movies to review, but for a while I reviewed them all, sometimes two or three in a day, trying to get the rhythm of the job. The paper thought it important that I should establish a position vis-à-vis Mr. Crowther at the start so that readers would have some context for what they were reading then. That led to the first long piece on violence, and later, to one about The Graduate. I thought it a bad idea, supposing that what shift there was from Mr. Crowther might be clear without returning to specific issues at once for differences. Near strangers were always telling me whether they agreed or disagreed with me. (This usually produced an evening of doubt, with a particular violence of tone in the review of the following day.) Conversations around me hardly ever seemed to be about anything but films any more.

  Some odd, incidental things began to happen in my life outside. On February 17th, for example, there was the awards dinner of the Directors’ Guild. Normally, I tried to stay clear of occasions of that kind, but a friend was getting an award, and he had invited his friends. For some days before the event, a lady from the Guild kept calling alarmingly, demanding to know who my escort for the evening would be. It turned out this was only for place cards—which were little gilded director’s chairs with each guest’s name engraved on them. The dinner itself, 700 people at the Americana, was not alarming in any way. We sat next to the director of “Dark Shadows,” a television soap opera about vampires, which I happened to watch from time to time, and we later moved to a table of close friends. Then, without having drunk very much or anticipated it in any way, as soon as the presentation of the awards began, I became completely hysterical with giggles, very high, hee hee, and very loud. A speaker would no sooner begin to praise a nominee, or to thank all the people who had made his award possible, than I was off again. The speeches became very brief. I couldn’t leave the room either. It would have seemed an even greater fuss. It went on for more than an hour, part mirth, part crack-up. I wondered whether I would have to be led away.

  An early surprise was the number of utterly deadly films that came out, tolerable to sit through, nearly impossible to discuss. I enjoyed reviewing the spiritedly awful ones, The Power, Dr. Faustus, Survival 1967, Broken Wings, and I kept returning compulsively to the ones I liked. But a news event of comparable insignificance to, say, The Impossible Years, would receive no coverage in the Times at all. I felt we should simply mention that such a movie had opened, and let it go at that, or perhaps, as somebody suggested, appraise in some very practical consumer way the movie’s proper price: first half hour worth fifty cents; second hour, minus four dollars; net loss in going, three-fifty plus baby sitter. Another solution was to try to broaden the context a little, move as far and as fast away from consumer service inventories as possible and, except for the plot (it is very difficult to discuss a film at all without telling what it is “about” in the narrative sense), skip performance, direction, choreography, and so on, unless they meant something—and try to go on to details or tangents that did. I tried that sometimes.

  For some reason, “the industry” was continually upset. This was puzzling. In all of 1968, Hollywood produced scarcely any movies of any value, scarcely anything that moved people, captured their fantasy lives, made them laugh, or even diverted them a little. It seemed to have lost even the knack of making artful trash. “The industry,” as compared to other characteristically American industries, was bewildered, inefficient, antiquated, also not much in touch with art. (I suspect, with all the talk of audiences under twenty-five, children are beginning to lose the movie-going habit entirely.) But I was certainly not costing them any money. People, including me, will apparently still go to movies no matter what. Although I am now convinced that the old movie factory is going to lose its audience and become a mere feeder for unindustrialized countries and television, while the movie audience fragments, becomes more particularized, and attends only the films of artists in control of their work, I did not think so then. I rather liked the industry. It was not enough. The producer of a creaky leviathan wanted not only his own millions but François Truffaut’s reviews. The third-generation, imagination-depleted moguls wanted to be treated like auteurs.

  There began to be constant rumors that I was fired or had quit, that the industry had applied pressure. The pressure rumors were silly. The Times might be besieged, unhappy at moments, conciliating, but certainly unpressurable. They seemed rather glad about controversy. They did not give a damn about the industry. I got a memo from Abe Rosenthal once, asking me to use the words “very” and “boring” less often. Arthur Gelb once or twice reminded me that readers see reviews before and not after films. Members of the bull pen, another editing hurdle, whose function I never did quite understand, often loathed what I was doing. But the major editors were unfailingly steadying. There were lots of cheery memos, and after the twelfth week, a call from Mr. Gelb to say that the trial period was over and it was all right. I guess we all knew I wasn’t going to do it for a h
undred years. As for the early quitting rumors, they probably had to do with a certain cycle of misery—particularly at low points, like a piece on Music, or the Death piece, which I never did get quite right—when the articles themselves were so bad I got desperate. At other times, there were cycles of fun.

  There was once a full-page ad in the Times not liking the reviews, and Variety used to point out as factual errors things that often were and occasionally were not factual errors I had made. Strom Thurmond once denounced the Times in Congress for my review of The Green Berets, which he read into The Congressional Record, along with Clive Barnes’s review of Hair (I was a liberal Republican, I think, when Senator Thurmond was still a Southern Democrat). But the only direct contacts I had with the industry (since the Times said I could avoid contact with public-relations people if I liked) were two, one over Star! one over Funny Girl. The Funny Girl episode was a drink, at which the producer complained—about the distinction of his film, about the execrable quality of the Times review. I made as many sympathetic noises as I could. In a while, a box arrived, containing a gilded broccoli. I had written that William Wyler’s attitude toward Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl seemed to be simultaneously patronizing and grandstanding, as if he were firing off a gilded broccoli. I was touched by the gift, although (since I had twice postponed this apparently unavoidable interview) it was a few days old and rather smelled. I laughed. Then the producer, apparently quite seriously, asked me why I had implied that Miss Streisand was a whore. Nothing had been further from my mind, and I asked him wherever he had gotten that idea. “You called her a broccoli,” he said. I said that whoredom and broccoli were truly not associated in my mind. He said they were in his and, as though there could be no doubt whatever about this, in the reader’s. It seemed to me the interview was not going well and I asked him, out of courtesy really, whether I might keep the gift. “On one condition,” he said. I asked what the condition was. He asked why I didn’t trust him. I said I did, but that it would be nice to know what the condition was. We discussed this a while. Finally, he said the condition was a kiss. It seemed unsporting to say no, and I said all right. It turned out the kiss had to be right there, at Sardi’s, in the drinking hour. I said that the Times kissing a producer at Sardi’s might be bad form. He lost all interest in the matter after that. Normally a private anecdote, except that it would have been so clearly public had it gone the other way.