AGAINST CLICHÉ

Renata Adler has always done more than due diligence to tear down the lazy thinking behind carelessly chosen words

Adler’s reporting is often propelled by her contempt for imprecision

After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction By Renata Adler NYRB 528 pp; $35

Renata Adler is the prophet of a very particular kind of corruption. Not the lapses in ethics of political scandal or the duplicities ubiquitous among men in power, though both come under her scrutiny, but the corruption of language — a debasement she feels thrumming beneath the higher orders of degradation like a bass line. What Adler understands, like George Orwell before her, is that the integrity of language mustn’t be taken for granted. Journalism, criticism, political debate: in every field of popular discourse Adler perceived the declension from thoughtfulness and rigour to a maelstrom of imprecision and cliché.

Cliché, for Adler, is a blight, a menace to be identified and expunged. More than an aesthetic principle, antagonizing and interrogating cliché is the foundation of her worldview. And it emerges as the central theme of After the Tall Timber, a new collection of Adler’s nonfiction. “Clichés”, Adler writes in the foreword to 1969’s Toward a Radical

Middle (reprinted here as this volume’s still-apposite introduction), “drain the language of meaning.” The toll of that is dire. “When words are used so cheaply,” she writes in a later essay, “experience becomes surreal; acts are unhinged from consequences and all sense of personal responsibility is lost.” People are led astray by vagueness and ambiguity. Movements are rendered ineffectual. Causes are lost.

Contempt for imprecision routinely becomes the animating force of Adler’s reporting: she often chooses her subjects based on what other writers have got all wrong, or didn’t care to get right. At a civilrights demonstration in Mississippi, in 1966, Adler takes issue with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s divisive “rallying cry” of “Black Power!”: “at best,” she writes, the refrain is “an expression of political naivete; at worst, it could be misconstrued as a call to violence, which would bring on retaliatory violence to oppress the blacks more heavily than ever.” The local white supremacists, meanwhile, Adler summarily dismisses as “stock characters out of the Southern bestiary,” their drawled gripes “a grotesque parody of smalltown America.” It’s typical of Adler’s perspicacity that she doesn’t bother to address the ideology of the supremacists. For her it isn’t their biliousness that makes them repugnant. It’s that they’re clichés.

In Israel, reporting on the Six-Day War, Adler observes “several international journalists” of apparently feeble character who, “having exhausted their colour stories about a proud, encircled people unafraid in the face of overwhelming odds, or the economic impossibility of maintaining a civilian army on perpetual alert, were preparing to go home” — while Alder herself, not content with this sort of received wisdom, lingers to find the real story. Wherever a journalist on the stock-response beat appears, it seems, Adler can be counted on to produce a witheringly deadpan description. She even finds one en route from Selma to Montgomery: “A Japanese reporter, who had been taking notes in his own luggage, seized one of the marchers as he crawled under a table, ‘What do you think of this?’ the reporter asked. ‘I think it’s good,’ the marcher said.” End scene.

Such chidings are the customary punishment for those lazy or careless with language, with the hard work of communication. Her vitriol is reserved for serious offenders: rhetoric-crazed ideologues, writers without scruples, organizations that have systematically denigrated the language. Here she is on the “travesty” of the National New Politics Convention of 1967:

A radical movement born out of a corruption of the vocabulary of civil rights — pre-empting the terms that belonged to a truly oppressed minority and applying them to the situation of some bored children committed to choosing what intellectual morsels they liked from the buffet of life at a middle-class educational institution in California — now luxuriated in the cool political vocabulary …

From which we can well imagine the New Politics never recovered. Now you may recall that the prevailing narrative of Adler’s career, at least as it rattles through the echo chamber of journalistic gossip, locates Adler as the author of her own demise — as the raucous troublemaker who torpedoed her legacy with one too many broadsides. Indeed, Michael Wolff, in the preface to this collection, talks knowingly of Adler’s fateful decline from “cosseted insider to what-ever-are-we-going-todo-with-her outsider,” daring, as she so audaciously did, to “cross many of the mightiest and most thin-skinned cultural institutions and arbiters.”

But what Wolff seems to only dimly apprehend are the reasons for Adler’s truculence. He points to her review of Pauline Kael’s When

the Lights Go Down (and refers to it, carelessly, as “infamous,” which Adler no doubt would have caught), but, rather than address its virtues as criticism, he simply rallies behind his charge, piling on Kael as “nasty, selfpromoting gasbag” who “was unreadable” then and “is unread now.” Wolff is right that “the Kael piece,” as Adler dubs it, offers insight into and justification of Adler’s hostile style. What he misunderstands is that the piece isn’t about Kael as a person or public figure at all. Like so much of Adler’s writing, the target is cliché — inherited feelings, uninterrogated ideas.

The Kael piece has a reputation for cruelty. But if it’s cruel, it’s cruel only toward the corruption of language that had destroyed a once-original and once-diligent critical voice. The criticisms are directed very specifically at the language: “She has an underlying vocabulary,” Adler writes, “of about nine favourite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages.” “‘Coma is like a prophylactic.’ One thinks, How, how is it like a prophylactic?” “The mock rhetorical questions are rarely saying anything. They are simply doing something.” If the barbs make you wince, it isn’t because they’re unkind to Kael. It’s because they’re clear and true about a rampant misuse of the written word.

“In criticism,” Adler writes in the introduction to A Year in the Dark, her collection of movie reviews, “I think there ought to be evidence of time taken, trouble ironed out, a kind of American Gothic zeal for suffering. It makes the doing of criticism have some risks of its own.” In Adler’s conception, you sense, suffering is a remedy for bad writing. It isn’t much work, cobbling an essay together from herd phrases and familiar constructions — that’s why it’s done so often. But taking the time to devise an original expression is precisely the risk that yields meaning. Of stagnation in the civil-rights movement Adler wrote, in 1966, that “radicals and moderate observers alike long for a breakthrough into something fresh.” So too do today’s readers.