The Last Word
In a posthumous collection, Joan Acocella pays tribute to her many and varied interests.
“ART DOESN’T START out hallowed,” the New Yorker staff writer Joan Acocella, who died in January at the age of 78, once wrote. “It starts out personal: an emergency.” And so it was for her, one of the best-read, most laconic and least pretentious cultural critics of her generation, from whom we are lucky to have this final volume of collected essays.
Her first such collection, 2007’s “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” included many essays about her primary subject: dance. In 1968, as a 23-year-old newlywed, Acocella moved to New York City and discovered that she could see as many performances at City Ballet as she liked, if she worked in the gift shop between acts. “Sometimes you hear people say that Balanchine changed their lives, and it sounds like hyperbole,” she told Ballet Review in 2016. “Balanchine did change my life. Within a few years my husband and I had separated, and I had become a dance critic.”
“The Bloodied Nightgown” is a record of Acocella’s enthusiasms beyond the dance world. But all her writing reveals what she learned from her first subject. Ballet, after all, is an intimidating training ground for the critic: Deep, deep knowledge is normal. The cost of entry is steep — hours in the dark, days in the archives, hundreds of dollars on tickets. Modern choreography is difficult to capture in sentences; on the one hand, it is abstract, both artificial and transcendent. On the other, it is bodies moving in space, as instinctively as they might move down a sidewalk.
And, as Acocella learned early, the lives of the dancers matter, too. The theater is alive with gasps at fumbled landings; at intermission, rumors of affairs float. Acocella wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the Ballets Russes but many, if not all, of her virtues as a critic arise from sitting in the dark at Lincoln Center — erudition, wit, a moral sense, straightforwardness tending to plainness, attention to an artist’s life, concern for the audience’s experience, a nose for gossip and, above all, a curiosity about an art form that changes lives.
In this book, her interests are broad, covering everything from genre fiction (“Dracula,” Agatha Christie and the Brothers Grimm) to visual art (Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon); the classics (“Gilgamesh,” “Beowulf”); English novelists (Graham Greene, the Waughs); and women writers (Elena Ferrante, Louisa May Alcott).
Acocella demonstrated in “Twenty-Eight Artists” that many creative problems could be overcome by tempering brilliance with “patience, resilience, courage.” In “The Bloodied Nightgown,” her claim is simpler: “I was schooled by teachers who believed” in T.S. Eliot’s
rule — forget personality — “but I could not do without the life.” To see a poem clearly, you must know something of its creator.
But Acocella’s attention is fixed first on the lives of her readers. She doesn’t neglect to tell us a writer’s best book and is never above saying when someone was born. She has always surveyed the literature, read the footnotes, seen the painting in real life; the reader can trust her. She is not easily taken in, calling Agatha Christie’s claim that a reader can always guess the murderer “a brazen falsehood.” Having read all 66 of Christie’s detective novels, “I have guessed exactly two of the culprits.”
While not automatically kind to even a first-time author, she understands writerly problems: Tolkien couldn’t complete his translation of “Beowulf” because then the life of his mind would be over, too. She is uncannily good on Englishness, and, perhaps relatedly, likes artists to be unflinching.
For me, she goes too far only when she describes women writers’ love of “sloshing around in their emotions” — crying is not the worst thing a writer can do. And, besides, I like glimpsing real-life Joan’s reactions in the essays — laughing, marveling, keeling over. After reading the proposal scene in Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” “you feel” — that is, she feels and we could too — “as though you have to go lie down.”
Some critics are haters, but Acocella began writing criticism because she loved — first dance, and then much of the best of Western culture. She let life bring her closer to art: She’d sat in the third row of the cinema with Susan Sontag so she knew that enthusiastic overwhelm was crucial to Sontag’s thought, and could say it in her essay on her. I can’t help feeling we didn’t appreciate Acocella enough when we had her. We thought she would always be there — and at least on our shelf she can be.