CUTTING TEETH

John Simon

In an age that consumes "genius" a lot of young talent has been killed off with praise

Spare the rod and spoil the child was not said of the artist, but it applies to him all the same. “Look at Picasso or Stravinsky,” Ingmar Bergman said to me. “Look at their faces. They are children, grown-up, old, wise children.” And artist-children can be spoiled, especially before they are grown-up and wise—when they are suddenly successful, feted, lionized, in artistic and social demand, and with honors and moneys pouring at them from cornucopias gone berserk. But before any of this happens, there is criticism. If criticism knows what it is doing, if it is not hailing a gifted first work, or an accomplished second one, as an absolute masterpiece, there is a much better chance for the artist’s talent to grow up rather than just for his head to swell.

Much has been written about our cult of the new, but the emphasis is always on what the frenzy for novelty says about and does to our society; little or nothing has been written about how the cult of novelty, which must relentlessly discover and exalt new artists, affects its hero-victims. Yet the stultification of the crowd is only a tragicomic fiasco; the real tragedy is the spoiling and ruining of potentially fertile artists by heedlessly flooding them with overindulgence. A reasonably selfreliant young artist can shake off the assaults of adverse criticism; it takes extraordinary strength to remain undizzied or unlulled by praise. It is easy to disbelieve the fellow who calls you an idiot, but how do you gainsay the rhapsode who proclaims you a genius?

The Deer Hunter was immediately recognizable as scarcely better than Heaven's Gate

This era has sometimes been called the age of criticism; it would be more proper to refer to it as the age of overpraise. There are entire publications— no, whole media—dedicated to promulgating sensational new talents round the clock; anything less than frothy-mouthed enthusiasm presumably would not sell. Likely enough, the public needs its culture heroes, what with the death of the old gods and the dearth of heroes in noncultural fields, e.g., politics. So, along with certain new diseases, there has appeared a new strain of critics for all cravings: the hunger of the media for new geniuses, the hunger of the public for new idols, the hunger of their own egos for puffing themselves up with indiscriminate puffery. Where does this leave the nascent artist?

(continued)

Continued from page 36

Consider the case of Ntozake Shange (nee Paulette Williams), who was hailed as a godsend to our theater for one dubious piece of work called for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. The title, the spelling, the punctuation should have been warning enough [sic]; failing that, the pretentious subtitle, “a choreopoem,” should have done the trick. Neither prose nor poetry, and certainly no play, this piece proved a huge critical and popular success when Joe Papp produced it Off Broadway; transferred by him to Broadway, it became a long-running hit. “The writing flies into the air like dark swallows,” raved Clive Barnes, who is equally versed in writing, drama criticism, and ornithology. Here is a sample: “she always wore her stomach out / lined with small iridescent feathers / the hairs round her navel seemed to dance / & she didnt let on / she knew / from behind her waist waz aching to be held / the pastel ivy drawn on her shoulders / to be brushed with lips & fingers / smellin of honey & jack daniels_” And so it goes—or flies—page after page (incidentally, why “aching” with a g, and “smellin” without?), and was so performed, with chanting and dancing, by several actresses. It contained one powerful monologue about a man who drops his children out of the window; the rest was sheer posturing.

Still, colored girls sold nicely as a book, too, and was done on public television. Fired on by such acclaim, Shange turned out three more theater pieces: Spell No. 7, A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, and Boogie Woogie Landscapes. Have you heard of any of them, even though Papp accorded the first two elegant productions? Of course not; they closed in short order, deservedly, and with no critical praise to keep them running. Shange next tried her hand at adaptation and did a clumsy updating and transposition into the American Civil War of Brecht’s Mother Courage, which Papp mounted lavishly. As unsound historically as dramatically, it promptly flopped, roasted by some of the same reviewers who had swooned over colored girls. Not having made it with her poetry either, Shange next turned to fiction. Her novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, had, according to Booklist, “beauty from its beguiling surface to its wideopen heart,” and Publishers Weekly predicted that “this marvelous first novel...may well take readers by storm. Possessed by poetry, motion and light,” the book was immediately swallowed by dark oblivion, poetry and all.

A reasonably selfreliant young artist can shake off the assaults of adverse criticism, it takes extraordinary strength to remain undizzied or unlulled by praise

Here is a random specimen from it: “Cypress was always smiling. She had made amends with her living, and thoroughly expected everything to happen to her, given time and the way her luck ran. She was round and sturdy, but elastic like a gathering of sunflowers in a balmy night. Cypress liked sweet wine, cocaine, and lots of men: musicians, painters, poets, sculptors... photographers, filmmakers, airplane pilots. Her house was full of folks from dusk to noon; and she was usually draped in an oriental robe glossed with coffee stains and the smell of her body.” This is bad writing. “Made amends with her living” is a subliterate way of gilding the platitude “made peace with life,” but “make amends” doesn’t mean “make peace.” Is that “gathering of sunflowers” a harvest or a party? And, in either case, why would someone “round and sturdy,” i.e., squat, be comparable to a tall, lithe sunflower? The catalogue of men is just another dull, unrevealing list, and “airplane pilots” is redundant. The zeugma “glossed with coffee stains and the smell of her body” seems to have overdosed on midnight oil, of which, among other things, it smells. As I gloss it, coffee stains darken rather than make shiny, and body odor would be a brilliant thing only to makers of smellies—a breed of filmmakers as vanished as river pilots.

When, this year, Amiri Baraka (ne LeRoi Jones, and himself no mean specimen of early critical overrating) and his wife Amina edited Confirmation, a collection of writings by black women, "Ntozake Shange... wrote that she did ‘not have anything’ for the anthology...." Whether this means that Shange no longer has confidence in her writing and admits it, or whether it means that she considers herself too good for a mere ethnic fiorilegium, it is equally disheartening. No great talent has bitten the dust, and yet this woman did once write that striking monologue about defenestration, meriting guarded encouragement. But Shange was black and a woman, which helped expedite and intensify critical salivation. There is nothing like ferreting out genius among minorities or the disadvantaged, and what critical scribbler nowadays would run the risk of being called racist or sexist? Still, even such criticasters eventually had to turn against Shange’s output, and so harmed her both coming and going.

Consider now the dispiriting career of one of America’s so-called major playwrights, Edward Albee. Having written one deserved Off Broadway hit, The Zoo Story, along with several equally deserved flops, Albee was uncritically hailed as the bright, rising star of the American theater, a promise seemingly confirmed by his big Broadway success, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the first two acts of which are indeed good theater, though the third is a falling off. What Albee should have been afraid of was not Virginia Woolf but the prematurely ejaculating reviewers. What came next? Tiny Alice, which ought to have been recognized forthwith as a manifest fraud. Instead, even respectable critics such as Harold Clurman (who remained a diehard Albee booster to the bitter, brackish end) went overboard for a play that its leading actor, Sir John Gielgud, unabashedly admitted not having a clue to. It is, of course, dangerous to assume that because some perfectly intelligent people cannot understand something, it is automatically bad. Even more dangerous, however, is the current critical and popular assumption that it is, therefore, automatically good.

(continued)

Continued from page 38

Criticism-by professionals an laymen alike— should be not just viewing or reviewing, but also re-viewing with the mind's eye

It became an ecumenical pastime to unscramble what Tiny Alice was about, in the midst of which few stopped to look at what it was. In the end, Albee believed the criticism that assured him of his gift for metaphysics, profundity, fine writing (despite poor grammar and syntax), stylization and symbolism. Perceptive critics such as Kenneth Tynan detected already in Virginia Woolf that "it leaves one’s heart unbruised and unmoved," but how can the still, small voice of reason prevail against the swelling hosannas of the yea-sayers? Off Albee floated into fancier and more stilted forms of vacuity, forsaking his one true, though admittedly limiting, gift for amusing bitchery. And when, after many flops, he tried to return to it, he had lost the knack to present even it pure and disentangled from metaphysical attitudinizing. But then, as gross a piece of transcendental claptrap as All Over was still, for Harold Clurman, "the best American play of several seasons" (as if that meant much of anything). "His is a frozen fire," Clurman extolled our extinct volcano. "No one else in our theatre writes in this particular way [who would want to?j. That makes Albee truly original." The man running in place, alone in a blind alley, may indeed be original; the question is what good is he?

And where did it all lead? A greater bundle of unmitigated flops than any allegedly major American playwright had ever produced, anticlimaxing in that sorrowful rehash of Tiny Alice, The Lady from Dubuque, and then, miraculously, managing to sink even lower with The Man Who Had Three Arms, for which only Clive Barnes, among the more conspicuous critics, could still dredge up some jesuitical praise. This sad non-play, a mixture of whines and insults, ends with the hero (a thinly undisguised Edward Albee) having a kind of nervous breakdown. "Go home, you mothers!" he shouts at the audience and critics. “I want an apology for all the years, for all the humiliations.” Then, crazedly reversing himself: “You don’t owe me nothin’. Leave me alone!” And then, in a truly abject palinode: “Don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me! Stay!" This is the preposterous hole into which absurd criticism has led Albee. Why, as recently as when his wretched adaptation of Lolita failed on the New York stage, Robert Brustein, from Cambridge, was still egging him on with illconsidered praise.

Of course, in All Over, Albee miscalculated by not bringing the dying man onstage. Some years later, in an equally worthless play, The Shadow Box, Michael Cristofer plunked down not one but several picturesquely dying persons stage center, and because he dealt—however pretentiously, hokily and ineptly—with that great, crowd-stirring topic, Death, he earned just about every conceivable award and adulation. That he has no talent became dazzlingly evident when each of his subsequent plays proved an instant failure in New York with critics and audiences alike, and I daresay that many a critical voice that trumpeted the glories of The Shadow Box would, confronted with it today, fall dead silent.

Which reminds me of a case from recent movie history. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter was declared by all but a few critics (and even those objecting mostly for historical or political reasons) a masterpiece, and went on to win Oscars and other prizes galore. When Cimino’s next film appeared, a $40 million roc’s egg called Heaven's Gate, it was greeted with possibly the loudest chorus of hoots and jeers in the annals of cinema, and failed in both a longer and a reedited shorter version in a trice. In a Sunday piece in the New York Times, Vincent Canby wondered if we shouldn’t now resee and reevaluate The Deer Hunter. Absolutely, but the critic who doesn’t want roc’s egg on his face should be able to spot arrogant incompetence the first time round: intelligently scrutinized, The Deer Hunter was immediately recognizable as scarcely better than Heaven's Gate.

That is what criticism—by professionals and laymen alike—should be: not just viewing or reviewing, but also re-viewing. Viewing the movie and re-viewing it with the mind’s eye, and, with the proper distancing, being able to perceive how it will look the morning after, the next year, in time to come. With that kind of bifocal vision we shall not be in for ghastly surprises. The potentially true artist will not be made light-headed with overpraise, and the manifestly fake artist will not be made at all.