{"id":124578,"date":"2018-04-24T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T13:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124578"},"modified":"2018-04-24T14:12:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-24T18:12:27","slug":"women-intellectuals-and-the-art-of-the-withering-quip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/24\/women-intellectuals-and-the-art-of-the-withering-quip\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Intellectuals and the Art of the Withering Quip"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration from the cover of Sharp<\/em>, by Michelle Dean.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIf one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do,\u201d the British writer and journalist Rebecca West<\/a> wrote to a friend in 1952. \u201cFirst, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writing well just can\u2019t be forgiven.\u201d West, ignoring her own advice, neither died prematurely nor blunted the fineness of her writing. As a young woman, she made her name with witty, digressive book reviews that were often wonderfully cutting. (On Henry James: \u201cHe splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.\u201d) She also wrote several novels and covered world events for prestigious magazines, including the trial of the English fascist William Joyce and the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle. Her final book, an idiosyncratic history of the year 1900, was published just before her death at the age of ninety. It was the capstone to a career that spanned almost seven decades. West\u2019s true audacity was not merely \u201cto go on writing,\u201d as she put it, but to flourish in an insular, nepotistic intellectual culture that was largely hostile to women. She was ambitious, unafraid, and prodigiously gifted\u2014in a word, sharp.<\/p>\n

The literary critic Michelle Dean\u2019s new book of the same name, a cultural-history-cum-group-biography, examines the lives and careers of ten sharp women, among them Susan Sontag<\/a>, Joan Didion<\/a>, Dorothy Parker<\/a>, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, and Zora Neale Hurston. What unites this disparate group, Dean claims, is the ability \u201cto write unforgettably.\u201d If this casts something of a wide net, it does so out of necessity: the collected body of work this constellation of women produced\u2014a mixture of fiction, book and movie reviews, essays, cultural criticism, and journalism\u2014comprises a map of twentieth-century thought. \u201cThe longer I looked at the work these women laid out before me,\u201d Dean writes, \u201cthe more puzzling I found it that anyone could look at the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century and not<\/em> center women in it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dean\u2019s centering, or recentering, is both deeply researched and uncommonly engrossing. Indeed, Sharp<\/em>\u2019s pacing and wealth of anecdote compel one to consume the book like a novel. Many of the book\u2019s satisfactions arise from the depictions of the incestuous, fiercely competitive beau monde these women inhabited. There is a delicious pleasure in reading about the stars and bit players of the fabled \u201cNew York intellectuals\u201d of the forties\u2014men and women alike\u2014and their petty spats and rivalries that lasted for days or for decades.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, the jealous male critic who referred to Hannah Arendt as \u201cHannah Arrogant\u201d behind her back. (The poet Delmore Schwartz went one further, calling her \u201cthat Weimar Republic flapper.\u201d) Or the likely apocryphal story of a young intellectual it girl named Susan Sontag being approached by the novelist Mary McCarthy<\/a> at a party. \u201cI hear you\u2019re the new me,\u201d McCarthy is reported to have told her coolly. Diana Trilling, in turn, called McCarthy \u201ca thug\u201d after an unflattering portrayal of Trilling\u2019s social circle appeared in McCarthy\u2019s The Oasis<\/em>. The film critic Pauline Kael called Joan Didion<\/a>\u2019s novel Play It As It Lays <\/em>\u201cridiculously swank\u201d and \u201ca novel [she] read between bouts of giggles.\u201d And Renata Adler savaged Kael\u2019s film-review collection\u00a0When the Lights Go Down<\/em>\u00a0by deeming it \u201csimply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.\u201d It is within these gloriously caustic set pieces that one begins to understand Dean\u2019s eponymous sharpness as multivalent: capacious intellect wedded to a surgical verbal acuity.<\/p>\n

This is not to imply that their relations were solely combative. Indeed, Sharp<\/em> is particularly astute in its complex portrayal of female intellectual solidarity, friendship, and dissent. Dean traces the fine strands of a genuine, if sometimes guarded, network of appreciation. The most meaningful of these relationships was likely between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, the latter of whom delivered a poignant eulogy at Arendt\u2019s funeral: \u201cThe first time I heard her speak in public\u2014nearly thirty years ago, during a debate\u2014I was reminded of what Bernhardt must have been or Proust\u2019s Berma, a magnificent stage five, which implies a goddess. Perhaps a chthonic goddess, or a fiery one, rather than the airy kind.\u201d Such moments of warmth and mutual recognition dispel the caricature of the angry mid-century woman intellectual, slinging outrageous insults while ashing her menthol in a martini glass.<\/p>\n

Instead, Dean shows how this fiercely whetted intelligence was often mobilized against the prevailing conditions of intellectualism. These women came of age in a culture mired in sexism, and \u201cthe key to [their] power,\u201d Dean writes, \u201cwas in how they responded to it, with a kind of intelligent skepticism that was often very funny.\u201d Irony, sarcasm, and a powerfully sardonic humor\u2014what Dean calls \u201cthe tools of outsiders\u201d\u2014were weaponized in order to carve out intellectual space for themselves and each other. They punctured the swollen bladder of male self-regard with the pointed art of the rejoinder.<\/p>\n

These ripostes were disarmingly mordant, droll, and often smartly compressed. Indeed, their brevity could at times belie their concussive force. When a young man wrote in to T<\/em>he<\/em> Freewoman<\/em> to protest a Rebecca West essay, her reply, published in a 1912 letter to the editor, was simply: \u201cThis is most damping.\u201d Mary McCarthy, while reviewing what were said to be the best short stories of a then famous journalist, wrote, \u201cIt would be kinder to think that he had discovered the majority of them in an old trunk.\u201d In response to an auteur theorist in Film Culture<\/em>\u00a0who had pontificated on \u201cthe distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value,\u201d Pauline Kael asked, \u201cThe smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?\u201d Perhaps most devastating of all was Joan Didion\u2019s two-word response to a Woody Allen<\/a> acolyte who took issue with her review of Manhattan<\/em> in The<\/em> New York Review of Books<\/em>: \u201cOh, wow.\u201d<\/p>\n

These coolly scornful quips were not often well-received. Then, as now, men could give but not get. (One thinks of Margaret Atwood<\/a>: \u201cMen are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.\u201d) The style and boldness of such dismissals violated the prescriptive politeness expected of women. \u201cThe difficulty,\u201d Dean writes, \u201cis that people have trouble with women who aren\u2019t \u2018nice,\u2019 who do not genuflect, who have the courage to sometimes be wrong in public.\u201d The very quality that made these women \u201csharp\u201d\u2014their fearsomely barbed wit\u2014was sometimes used as grounds to diminish their achievements. In a 1947 piece for Vogue<\/em>, the literary critic Alfred Kazin called Mary McCarthy\u2019s novel The Company They Keep<\/em> \u201cdeeply serious\u201d before proposing the book was \u201cas maliciously female as one chorus girl\u2019s comments on another.\u201d This qualified praise was symptomatic of the era\u2019s gendered criticism. In the brittle, heatless world of high culture, being wickedly funny was tantamount to being unserious. Brilliant indecorousness, then, was another trait that bound Dean\u2019s subjects together.<\/p>\n

Which raises a question that looms over Sharp <\/em>from its first page: Would these women\u2014nonconformists, all\u2014appreciate being gathered in such a book? Dean acknowledges their ambivalence toward any suggestion of a collective \u201csisterhood.\u201d (\u201cI can imagine Hannah Arendt haranguing me for placing her work in the context of her womanhood at all,\u201d she writes in the book\u2019s preface.) Allegiance to group-based definitions was largely anathema to these women, particularly the fragmented politics of second-wave feminism. Few of the critics in Sharp<\/em> identified as feminists, at least early on in their careers, and several were openly hostile to the movement. \u201cWe have a habit, now, of assuming that people had only one kind of reaction to the women\u2019s movement: either they were all in, or they were all out,\u201d Dean writes. Not so with these iconoclasts, who might sympathize with the broad goals of feminism while recoiling from what they saw as its disappointing essentialism. \u201cLike all capital truths,\u201d Susan Sontag wrote in a 1975 The New York Review of Books <\/em>essay, \u201cfeminism is a bit simple-minded.\u201d Such internal divisiveness makes the book\u2019s organizing principle somewhat elusive. And yet that each woman would argue against her inclusion becomes, by the book\u2019s end, Sharp<\/em>\u2019s primary animating force. Dean\u2019s feat of intellectual wrangling is as impressive for what it holds together\u2014the exquisite, creaking tension of ten arch individualists\u2014as for what it deconstructs.<\/p>\n

When speaking from the periphery, the art of having an opinion\u2014\u201cto go on writing and writing well,\u201d as West had it\u2014acquires a moral dimension. The extraordinary achievements detailed in Sharp <\/em>are a necessary corrective for a culture that would admonish women\u2014these women in particular\u2014for being \u201ctoo smart for their own good.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dustin Illingworth is a writer in Southern California. His work has appeared in <\/em>The Atlantic, the <\/em>Times Literary Supplement, and the <\/em>Los Angeles Times.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cIf one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do,\u201d the British writer and journalist Rebecca West wrote to a friend in 1952. \u201cFirst, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1225,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[5023,10985,1362,6514,11183,33837,4721,6008,8391,33838,501,969,3844],"class_list":["post-124578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-dorothy-parker","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-joan-didion","tag-katherine-mansfield","tag-mary-mccarthy","tag-michelle-dean","tag-pauline-kael","tag-rebecca-west","tag-renata-adler","tag-sharp","tag-susan-sontag","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-zora-neale-hurston"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWomen Writers and the Art of the Withering Quip<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In a world of male intellectuals, women writers weaponized irony, sarcasm, and a powerfully sardonic humor\u2014\u201cthe tools of outsiders\u201d\u2014to carve out intellectual space 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