I thought I’d write an essay for you today but naturally it’s not done because my allergies are clogging the old brain-machine. Besides you all probably want to read subjects that are not simply my inner monologue.
A couple of weeks ago the National Magazine Award nominees were announced, with few women included. The screed about that is for someone else to write; I just want to point out that when these things come up someone always loudly declares, as though it were a new argument, that maybe women “just aren’t interested” in writing “serious reported nonfiction,” because there is no female tradition of it. It’s never clear to me why simply chanting, Joan Didion, Joan Didion, Joan Didion three times at midnight is not enough to dispel the evil spirits who make this argument. But there’s more than Didion that could shed light on the silliness of presuming that women don’t report beyond the comfort of the kitchen table. Some examples:
1. No one talks about Lillian Ross much any more. She wrote a book about being the famed New Yorker editor William Shawn’s mistress, and her public profile went up in smoke afterwords. But she’s one of the best profile writers out there, and one who manages to do so without putting herself in the story. Her profile of Ernest Hemingway is regrettably not available online (these reflections on Hemingway are, though) — paging the New Yorker archivists! — but this one, about Tony Curtis, will do you just fine. Here is a sample of what would in order hands be a banal paragraph:
The unrelenting sun outside the tall picture windows subtly threatened the room, which was cool and crammed with mementos: a couple of enormous silver champagne buckets, engraved with the words “Most Popular Star—Modern Screen Awards”; a solid-gold Photoplay-magazine medallion, three inches in diameter, “Presented on behalf of the American moviegoing public to Tony Curtis—most popular actor 1958”; a painting of an orange-and-yellow lady’s boot, by Andy Warhol, entitled “The Some Like It Hot Shoe”; an elaborately tooled leather saddle, given to him by a cowboy friend; many family albums filled with photographs of attractive ex-wives, including his first, the “Psycho” star Janet Leigh (“A real class act, beautiful and brilliant,” Curtis says of her), and of handsome children, including the actress and children’s-book author Jamie Lee Curtis.
2. Rebecca West, the now long-forgotten critic, wrote Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a long-form piece of reportage about her travels in the former Yugoslavia just before the Second World War. You can actually read it in its entirety online, at the Atlantic – here’s the first bit. West was anti-Semitic and no fan of her fellow women, so some of her reportage has not aged well; but she had a delightful way of sketching out an entire personality with a few strokes of the pen:
[West’s friend] Constantine is short and fat, with a head like the best-known Satyr in the Louvre, and an air of vine leaves about the brow, though he drinks little. He is perpetually drunk on what comes out of his mouth, not what goes into it. He talks incessantly. In the morning he emerges from his bedroom in the middle of a sentence; and at night he backs into it, so that he can just finish one more sentence. Automatically he makes silencing gestures while he speaks, just in case somebody should take it into his head to interrupt.
3. Janet Flanner wrote a column for the New Yorker from Paris for almost fifty years. She wrote a very famous profile of Hitler that the New Yorker had to break into three parts to fit into the magazine. Regrettably, none of her writing seems to be available for free online, though if you have a New Yorker subscription and are inclined to dig, I recommend that you start with her subtly funny profile of Edith Wharton – a vast improvement, shall we say, over other more recent pieces of writing about the woman:
Her books are filled with smart people whose capacity, according to her, for tragedy, wit, house parties and divorce land them nowadays on the front page where vitality belongs. Their activities in her day were regarded as not as necessary symptoms of transitional psychology or even news, but as mere decay. She spent her life formally proving that the wages of social sin were social death and lived to see the grandchildren of her characters comfortably and popularly relaxing into open scandals.
This concludes your Rumpus Saturday: see you next week!
