A ‘Sharp’ take on opinionated women
In a happy case of it takes one to know one, Michelle Dean has delivered a penetrating book about penetrating American writers.
Aptly titled, "Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion" delves into a sequence of writers from Dorothy Parker through Janet Malcolm who were renowned, sometimes notorious, for the pointed nature of their criticism, essays and fiction. "They came up in a world that was not eager to hear women's opinions about anything," Dean writes in her introduction. But eventually, Dean notes, "they were received as proof positive that women were every bit as qualified to weigh in on art, on ideas, and on politics as men."
These are familiar names for book-page habitués: Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy,
Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, Joan Didion. But for some readers today, they may not be much more than half-remembered legends – and listen to Sontag, whom Dean quotes on that subject: "A legend is like a tail ... it follows you around mercilessly, awkward, useless, essentially unrelated to the self."
"I was examining these women's personas as laid out in their writing," Dean explains. Drawing on close readings of their works and other sources, Dean succinctly charts how these women broke into public discourse and how they were viewed and received. "It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule," she quotes Ephron.
But even exceptions to the rule could be stymied by gender prejudice. When Didion pitched her magazine editor about going to Saigon for a Vietnam War era story, she was told no, "some of the guys are going out."
A winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing, Dean serves one incisive sentence after another:
On Dorothy Parker: "This was her gift: to shave complex emotions down to a witticism that hints at bitterness without wearing it on the surface."
On Rebecca West: "Somehow she was always at her most charming when she was disagreeing with someone."
On movie critic Pauline Kael: "This would become a favorite technique of hers, always presenting herself as more sensible than the pretentious critics she detested, never letting an idea balloon into a paragraph when a pointed sentence would do."
At the same time, Dean respects her literary foremothers enough to examine the foibles, difficulties and weaknesses underneath those fearsome personas. She also recounts their friendships and feuds with each other, including the notorious McCarthy-Lillian Hellman lawsuit.
Describing Rebecca West's breakdown after being rejected by her lover H.G. Wells, Dean points out that "the notion that so intelligent a woman might have been undone by romantic rejection is not palatable to the feminism of our era."
Indeed, the writer's complex relationship to the feminism of her time is an important element of nearly every chapter of "Sharp." Arendt waved off questions about feminism. Didion took shots at second-wave feminists. "We have a habit, now, of assuming that people had only one kind of reaction to the women's movement: either they were all in, or they were all out," Dean writes. But that's not the case, certainly not the case among the "Sharp" writers who, like their male counterparts, wanted to be read as distinctive voices and not as mouthpieces for some orthodoxy. These chapters are not complete biographical studies. Dean does not go into Sontag's controversial response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, nor does she explore the Job-like months when Didion's husband and daughter both died unexpectedly. While the lives matter to her, Dean's primary interest is in their work, as they ascend, break through and then cope with heightened attention and inevitable backlash.
The "Sharp" writers are all white women, except for a few tantalizing pages about Zora Neale Hurston, who bore the double challenge of being an opinionated black woman. The Hurston segment brought to mind a scene in "A League of Their Own" where a black woman in street clothes fires a stray baseball back to the Rockford Peaches' white shortstop. That scene and those few pages both suggest further worlds of sharpness that await exploration.