Female writers lauded as tough
In a review of Joan Didion’s 1968 essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Christian Science Monitor writer Melvin Maddocks took stock of the field of contemporary female writers.
“Journalism by women is the price the man’s world pays for having disappointed them,” Maddocks wrote. “Here at their best are the unforgiving eye, the unforgetting ear, the concealed hat-pin style.”
Maddocks’ comments are quoted in “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion,” a sagacious, stylish survey of 10 female essayists, critics, scholars and memoirists (some, like Didion, also wrote fiction).
Although author Michelle Dean finds some of Maddocks’ remarks to be “clearly trivializing,” the book in large part confirms the critic’s generalization.
The writers profiled by Dean — ranging, in order of birth, from Rebecca West (1892-1983) to Nora Ephron (1941-2012) — each possessed fierce intelligence, potent perception and more than a little world-weariness. • “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion” (Grove, 362 pages, $26) by Michelle Dean
“These women were there in the fray,” Dean writes in her preface, “participating in the great arguments of the twentieth century.”
Although the writers are linked by gender, the book makes clear that they complement one another in deeper, more meaningful ways. For example, Dorothy Parker’s pungent poetry is echoed in Pauline Kael’s sardonic movie reviews.
The book, which is divided into chapters focusing either on a single writer or on groups of writers, opens with Parker, whose disillusioned disposition was present from the start.
In dreaming up captions to accompany illustrations in Vogue magazine, Dean writes, “Her wit had to be wielded so subtly that the editor in chief wouldn’t catch any hint of Parker’s condescension to Vogue’s readers.”
In her subsequent career at The New Yorker, Parker’s wit was welcome, as in her famous denunciation of the work of “Winnie the Pooh” author A.A. Milne, written in the poorly enunciated language of a child: “Tonstant Weader fwowed up” (translation: “Constant Reader threw up”).
Dean authoritatively charts the careers of Hannah Arendt, who committed herself to studying totalitarianism in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), and Mary McCarthy, who documented the despair of her orphaned youth in “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood” (1957).
Among the most fascinating figures featured is Susan Sontag, who grew up in an unsophisticated household but pulled herself up by her bootstraps to become a highbrow polymath.
“She had worked hard to acquire the fluency she would later have in avantgarde art,” Dean writes of the future author of the essay collection “Against Interpretation” (1966) and the powerful study of sickness, “Illness as Metaphor” (1978).
As a group, the writers included here refused to be cowed by conventional wisdom or popular opinion.
Didion was disdainful of the hippie movement and admiring of John Wayne in the essays in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — views at odds with prevailing sentiments in the 1960s.
Most striking is the case of Kael: Having lost, or quit, positions at McCall’s and The New Republic magazines because of her strong views, the movie critic found employment at The New Yorker magazine. Instead of being chastened, however, she was emboldened.
“She was busting up consensus right and left, and she tended to do so with a flair for drama,” Dean writes. “From the beginning of that gig it was clear that she would be a force to be reckoned with.”
The same could be said of each writer profiled. “Sharp” is not just a tribute to 10 remarkable women but to virtues that all writers — male and female alike — can aspire to: toughness, tenacity and clear-headed thinking.