The Meaning of Recognition (19 page)

Did you know that Kermode and Henry Reed once tooled around Seattle in a Ford Thunderbird and drank away the afternoon in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle? Neither did I.
From the essay on Reed, the author of ‘Lessons of the War’ and ‘Chard Whitlow’ emerges as a misfit, a talent largely wasted, and a forlorn punster. But the talent was there,
and one of the puns proves it. Puns rarely prove anything except an absence of wit, but it must have been fun to share the revolving sky-lounge with a man who could respond to the label of the next
bottle of Mumm’s Extra Dry by saying ‘Poor baby!’ Kermode is very good on poetic careers that were not fulfilled. He himself began as a poet – I think we could guess it,
even if we had not been told – but his manuscripts were lost on their way home from the war. A cruel circumstance, offset by something else we could guess: he knows that a poet with a true
vocation can’t be stopped by anything short of gunfire.

There is an affectionate essay on Roy Fuller, a recognized war poet who came home to write poetry for the rest of his life. Kermode admires the way Fuller, like Wallace Stevens, could make a
decent fist of an office job while serving his muse, to the tune of about 1,500 lyrics, give or take a hundred. Kermode can say, and make it stick, that part of Fuller’s luck was to have no
university. Kermode approves of everything about Fuller except, one suspects, the way he writes. ‘Yet for all his various skills there is often in his writing, prose and verse, a certain
ungainliness.’ This is not exactly as damning as to say ‘Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds’ but it is getting close, because we know that for Kermode the
gainliness is the
sine qua non
. Still, Hazlitt’s unstinting praise of Milton makes you want to read Milton, even if it doesn’t quite persuade you that Hazlitt wanted to read
Milton.

Essays about prose writers are just as attentive to the style that tells all. Bertrand Russell’s mountain of love-letters might have been written solely to inspire a single sentence from
Kermode: ‘He hated his women to be unhappy, because it upset
him
.’ The piece on William Golding will send me back to
Pincher Martin
, which ‘could hardly have
been written by somebody who had not been a watch-keeping officer on a warship on North Atlantic convoy duty.’ Kermode can say this with authority because he once kept the watch himself. Take
it from one who knows. Philip Roth’s
Sabbath’s Theatre
is reviewed at the level of its writing, with blazing energy, as a matter of life and death. The whispering professor can
turn the heat on when he wants to. Sometimes you wish he would do it more often. For devoting prodigious efforts of casuistry to calling Shakespeare an establishment propagandist, Professor Richard
Helgerson of Santa Barbara is gently dismantled. Demolition would have been more appropriate. Seamus Heaney is duly praised for his Beowulf, but a duff translator from the French is let off with a
slapped wrist, instead of a tanned hide. Even Jesus, if there was a temple to be cleansed, knew when to get the whip out.

But there is no point in whipping Kermode for his excess of Christian charity. It is one of the mainsprings of his receptivity, which has made him, in the long run, the opposite of a soft touch.
There was a time when he thought the theorists had something. When it became evident that what they had was a tin ear for language, he gave up on them. Talent refuses to be trivialized, even by
itself. My favourite piece in the book is a reminiscence of Australia’s most volcanic literary event, the Ern Malley hoax. About sixty years ago, the young Kermode was on the scene when the
hoax erupted. To embarrass the avant garde editor Max Harris, two young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, invented Ern Malley and his complete works: a suite of poems comprising any nonsense
that came into their heads. Harris fell for it, and for the rest of his life the laugh was on him. But Herbert Read said the right thing at the time, and Kermode repeats it now. A talented poet
can’t be entirely meaningless even when he tries. The creative spark is a hugely complex natural event which even those who possess it are only partly qualified to explore, and the less so
because their attention is on themselves. Enter the great critic, whose attention is on them all, and who proves it with his marvellous memory.

TLS
, 10 August 2001

Postscript

In 1974, when I published
The Metropolitan Critic
, the first of what are by now seven collections of pieces, it was fun to pretend that we toilers in Grub Street were
bravely embattled against the safely tenured professors of the academy. It wasn’t quite true even then – some of the best pieces in the newspapers and periodicals were written by
academics – and today it is scarcely true at all. Only the occasional prodigy among the current bunch of penny-a-line men could hope to turn anything as good, or even as lively, as the pieces
written by the professors. Fresh from victory over the arid theorists within their own ranks, they have brought their schooled humanism to a much wider forum than the quadrangle. Though very few of
the academic hats can demonstrate quite the omnivorous range of John Bayley, it is necessary to remember that Bayley did time as a professor himself. If Grub Street’s mission was to give the
academy lessons in readability, the academy’s mission was to give Grub Street lessons in scholarship. When the academics proved that they were readable too, it became obvious that an armed
truce was more desirable than a war. Professor Kermode took the lead in giving the proof; and professors Ricks and Carey, to name only the most glamorous among several, have followed his example.
After forty years, a picture that looked to the hasty eye as if it were hanging upside down is hanging the right way up. Young arrivals in Grub Street can now be told to look to the professors for
instruction not just in reading, but in writing. Some of the more slapdash tyros need quite a lot of instruction in that, but only because the educational system is failing them in quite another
way: it certainly isn’t because the university professors have made themselves unavailable.

A bit of a fast-talking dame herself, Maria DiBattista, in her valuable new book
Fast-Talking Dames
, is justifiably excited by the characteristic flip lip of her
pre-war and wartime Hollywood heroines. One guesses that in her mind she is of their number: Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Maria
DiBattista. A professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton, and published by Yale, she is heaped with Ivy League credentials but laudably determined not to be stifled by them.
Especially in its wide-ranging and sometimes over-informative notes (Charles Baudelaire? Oh,
that
Baudelaire) the book occasionally lapses into the tenure-seeking stodge of an academic
thesis, as if its governing spirit emanated from the assembled professors in
Ball of Fire
. But mostly she keeps in mind how Barbara Stanwyck, in that same movie, perched on the edge of the
desk and talked rings around the fuddy-duddies. She would rather sound like that. The bright students who attend her seminars are in luck. It must sound like lunch at the wits’ table in the
studio commissary. This is the way feminism ought to be. Maria DiBattista’s suggestion – potentially a revolutionary one – is that this is the way it once actually was. The whole
of what we have come to know and value as female equality in recent times was prefigured on the popular screen before the end of World War II. If our author had followed up on some of the
implications of this suggestion, she would have written an important book. Alas, she was talking too fast to hear herself think. Even so,
Fast-Talking Dames
could be the start of something
big.

If her judgement had not been so good on the fine detail, she might have had a better chance of applying it to the big picture. But the fine detail was too fascinating to leave alone. Those
perfect mouths with the epigrams coming out as neatly as the lipstick went on: how to step back from all that? Best not to try. The author does not do very much quoting from the scripts, perhaps
for copyright reasons. She is no better than anybody else at paraphrasing a funny exchange of dialogue: a funny exchange of dialogue is already a paraphrase, and never benefits from being retailed
at second hand. But she can tell which of the dames could really talk the talk. Myrna Loy gets high marks, and not just for the
Thin Man
movies. There are no prizes for spotting that she
was good in those. But DiBattista can see that Loy was already good in her supporting role as the narcoleptic maneater in Rouben Mamoulian’s
Love Me Tonight
in 1932. Ginger Rogers is
rightly praised for
Roxie Hart
, Carole Lombard for
Twentieth Century
, Irene Dunne for
The Awful Truth
, Rosalind Russell for
His Girl Friday
. Apart from these
recognized talents, which even a dullard can assess correctly just by agreeing with everybody else, there are unrecognized talents whose worth our author is able to weigh at a glance. With Marion
Davies a glance is all you get. Nowadays her movies are hard to find, but DiBattista has seen enough of William Randolph Hearst’s mistress working at her other job to reach the proper
conclusion: she had a disarming gift for delivering a line. Just the gift, in fact, that Marilyn Monroe didn’t have. All the blah about Monroe’s lighting up the screen is well enough
justified, but she never lit it up with her handling of dialogue. Words made her nervous and she still makes us nervous for her by the way she says them. DiBattista can tell what Monroe
couldn’t do because DiBattista can tell what Judy Holliday could do. When the movies sexed up and dumbed down in the fifties, it was a nice question which was the bigger victim: Monroe, who
had exactly what the studio bosses wanted, or Holliday, who had more. When the camera dollied in for Monroe’s butt-shot in
Niagara
, it was all over for Holliday, who also had a cute
behind – cuter than Monroe’s, as it happened – but fatally persisted with the belief that her mouth, and its closely attendant brain, should be the centre of interest. You could
say that the star of
Born Yesterday
was born before her time, but it is equally true, and much more interesting, to say that she was born after it.

The post-war transition from smart Hollywood to stupid Hollywood gets us into the area of all the socio-political implications DiBattista doesn’t deal with, or at any rate hasn’t yet
dealt with for publication. The sooner she does, the better. Film history can do without a treatise on the subject: it is fun to see a heavily accredited scholar like DiBattista getting carried
away when she talks about screen comedy, but nowadays, to make your mark as a media critic, you have to write at least as well as they do in the medium you criticize, and whoever wrote
Wag the
Dog
knows that ‘credence’ does not mean ‘credibility’, whereas DiBattista thinks it does. Feminism, however, has a missing chapter in its history, a glaring lacuna that
distorts the whole account from the fifties onwards. Within arm’s reach, our author has the material to fill the gap. Most of the sixties feminist advocates grew up when Doris Day was the
fastest-talking dame on the screen. DiBattista has a refreshing admiration for Day’s technical accomplishments, which were indeed considerable, but there is no disguising the fact that the
declension from
His Girl Friday
to
Pillow Talk
was precipitous on every scale except the financial. You can mine a whole seam of post-modernist irony in the consideration that
Cary Grant and Rock Hudson were both faced with at least as tortuous a journey towards usurping the standard masculine gender pattern as their female opposite numbers, but what matters is that for
the Doris Day character in
Pillow Talk
the ideal lay in domesticity, not in her job. She wanted to be part of a couple. In
His Girl Friday
Rosalind Russell wanted to be part of
the action. And
Pillow Talk
was meant to be the height of sophistication. A more typical female role model of the period was June Allyson, pouting loyally at home while James Stewart,
camped out in the Mojave Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope
screen. The letterbox format was less suited to June Allyson’s face, but she did her best. She not only pouted in Cinemascope, she lisped in four-track stereophonic sound, flooding the
auditorium with an audiovisual guarantee that a woman’s kiss was a susurrating highway back to the womb. It wasn’t her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading
poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation
garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and especially the American ones, took it for granted that Hollywood was designedly engaged in proselytizing for the
stereotype of the aggressively submissive home-maker, all petticoats fully starched. What DiBattista now needs to tell us is why they never pointed out that in an earlier period Hollywood had been
engaged in doing precisely the opposite.

One of the reasons might turn out to be that in the crucial postwar period the classic movies weren’t all that freely available, even on the swathe of late-night television re-runs that
the Americans call the Late Show. Some of the classic movies were in danger of extinction. Reluctant as his post-modern worshippers might be to credit it, Howard Hawks, for example, was regarded
during his busy heyday as only one step up from a Poverty Row director, like Don Siegel in the next generation. Though I hardly realized it at the time – and I was there for every showing
– the Howard Hawks retrospective season at London’s NFT in the early sixties was a feat of rediscovery as well as of organization. The Cinematheque in Paris played an important role,
but the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the key venue for the preservation of Hollywood’s greatest period of achievement. Hollywood itself never was, and Peter Bogdanovich’s
originality as a curator lay in his awareness that it never would be. (Until the prospect of sales to television saved the day, Hollywood’s instinctive homage to a great original film was not
only to remake it, but to burn its negative.) The preservation of the American film industry’s richest stretch of poetry is a copybook example of how criticism and scholarship are at their
best when they serve creativity through the power of appreciation. The whole era had to be dug up again, like Troy from beneath a sea of sand and the ruins of many lesser cities with the same name.
But if a conspiracy theory is preferred, there is always the chance that the feminist cheer-leaders, instead of being unaware of how Hollywood had once projected female equality, were aware of it
but didn’t want to emphasize it, lest they kick a hole in their own case, which depended on the supposed axiom that every man’s hand was raised against them. The pre-war, wartime and
immediate post-war films that promoted the ideal of female equality were male initiatives. Females participated, often gloriously: but the films that featured Maria DiBattista’s beloved
fast-talking dames were designed, manufactured and marketed by men.