After the Tall Timber Read online

  RENATA ADLER

  AFTER THE TALL TIMBER

  COLLECTED NONFICTION

  PREFACE BY MICHAEL WOLFF

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  OTHER BOOKS BY RENATA ADLER PUBLISHED BY NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  Speedboat

  Afterword by Guy Trebay

  Pitch Dark

  Afterword by Muriel Spark

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Selection copyright © 2015 by NYREV, Inc.

  Copyright © 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1976, 1979, 1980, 1987, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2015 by Renata Adler

  Preface copyright © 2015 by Michael Wolff

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph: Richard Avedon, Renata Adler, writer, St. Martin,French West Indies, March 8, 1978 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

  Jacket design: Katy Homans

  Adler, Renata.

  [Works. Selections]

  After the Tall Timber: Collected nonfiction / by Renata Adler ; preface by Michael Wolff.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59017-879-9 (hardback)

  I. Title.

  PS3551.D63A6 2015

  818'.54—dc23

  2014038528

  ISBN 978-1-59017-880-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  FOR

  STEPHEN

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Preface by Michael Wolff

  AFTER THE TALL TIMBER

  Toward a Radical Middle, Introduction

  The March for Non-Violence from Selma

  Fly Trans-Love Airways

  Letter from the Six-Day War

  The Black Power March in Mississippi

  Radicalism in Debacle: The Palmer House

  G. Gordon Liddy in America

  But Ohio. Well, I Guess That’s One State Where They Elect to Lock and Load: The National Guard

  Letter from Biafra

  A Year in the Dark, Introduction

  On Violence: Film Always Argues Yes

  Three Cuban Cultural Reports with Films Somewhere in Them

  House Critic

  The Justices and the Journalists

  The Extreme Nominee

  Canaries in the Mineshaft, Introduction

  Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal

  Decoding the Starr Report

  A Court of No Appeal

  Irreparable Harm

  The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing

  Biographical Notes

  PREFACE

  RENATA ADLER has become something of a cult figure for a new generation of literary-minded young women since the 2013 re-release of her novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983). Those books represent an early point, and in many ways a high point, in the portrayal of a modern sort of angst—vulnerable women adrift in both the psychological and actual world. Adler herself can often seem like an iconic figure of fragility and lostness with her long bouts of literary absence and silence.

  Here, however, in this collection of her most significant journalism, she is a diametrically opposite figure: a fierce and aggressive writer, known and feared and sometimes shunned for turning her stone-cold and contrarian judgments on her own professional class. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that her writing is some of the most brutal ever directed at journalism itself.

  Shortly before the publication of Gone, her broadside against The New Yorker and what the magazine became after it was sold in 1985 by its original owners, I was at a cocktail party on Manhattan’s West Side at the home of a New York Times cultural supremo attended by a set of publishing myrmidons of frightening standing and lockstep opinions. Following the whispered name “Renata,” I literally intruded on a clucking circle of these reproachful men planning their counterattacks against her: something must be done.

  The writer Harold Brodkey, her friend and colleague at The New Yorker, once said to me, in the 1970s when she was having her famous and glamorous moment, that in his view, Renata could not decide whether to live an “interior writer’s life” or “an exterior activist’s life.” At the time, I thought his comment was about her work in Washington in 1974 with the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry staff, where she had become a sort of history’s ghostwriter—recruited to make inarticulate politicians sound like men worthy of impeaching a president—and then her decision, at the peak of her fame, to enroll at Yale Law School. Should she seek real worldly power or continue as a mere writer on the sidelines? (It is quite extraordinary to consider that real power might have been within her grasp.)

  In fact, I think I misunderstood what Brodkey was saying. What she was wrestling with was not career suitability, but her divided nature: on the one hand, muddled fear and vulnerability, and on the other, clearheaded outrage and scorn.

  These feelings are not, of course, mutually exclusive.

  A person’s vulnerability and fears do not mean that he or she cannot also summon a particular courage. Perhaps such fear compels a person to redouble his or her efforts and boldness. Adler, who, among her friends, is well known for not being able to navigate a few blocks or keep her possessions about her, nevertheless, during a particular period of twentieth-century turmoil showed up for the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama, the genocidal conflict between Nigeria and Biafra, and the American descent into Vietnam.

  It is this contradictory nature, I believe, that has made her such a conundrum: she seems so appealing and uncertain (ever in need of protection) and then changes her clothes and goes to war. Not to mention the fact that she has often gone to war with her own colleagues, making her not just a confusing figure but an anathema as well.

  At some point, perhaps quite unaware, she crossed over from a career as a cosseted insider to a what-ever-are-we-going-to-do-with-her outsider.

  She was born in Milan in 1938 to parents fleeing Nazi Germany. She grew up in Connecticut and went to Bryn Mawr, then to graduate school at Harvard and the Sorbonne. In 1963 she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer.

  For the next twenty years or so, she was a leading light in a particular brilliant period of American writing. She was an “it” girl, complete with the iconic look and memorable pictures by Richard Avedon, provocative and fashionable. (I recall my parents, culture vultures in suburban New Jersey, discussing her with great awe.) The New Yorker then was the equivalent of something similar to HBO now—you wouldn’t have missed it, or her.

  In 1968, she became the New York Times film critic (the first woman in the job when being the first women was a miraculous transformation) at a moment when writing about film was, arguably, more influential than making films—and when The New York Times was the first and last critical word. In the early 1970s, she went to Washington where she became the Watergate committee’s writer—at the epicenter of the most momentous public event of the era. Then came Speedboat, followed by Yale Law School, then Pitch Dark; then came her book Reckless Disregard, about the big twin libel lawsuits of the early 1980s, Westmoreland suing CBS, Sharon suing Time; and then, practically speaking, nothing.

  Writer’s careers, even ones that have reached a great height, are fragile things, and they can go wrong for many reasons and as the result of many choices: money, drugs, Hollywood, among others.

  But Adler’s career goes wrong, or at least astray, or far from the light, primarily for not being able to keep her silence. Adler is a go
od demonstration of the boundaries of art, that even serious writing is harshly proscribed, that the literary life has hard rules, that politics must be carefully played, that renegades—and, no doubt, especially women renegades—who go past an undrawn line are cast out.

  She surely managed to cross many of the mightiest and most thin-skinned cultural institutions and arbiters. She offended The New York Times: first, writing excessively scathing film reviews for the paper; and then, a worse sin, quitting the Times after a year and returning to The New Yorker. Even now, with the Times having lost considerable power and clout, it is difficult to pursue a serious career in letters with its institutional disapproval shadowing you. And it has, literally for decades, pursued an odd, sour, spurned lover’s vendetta against Adler (compounded and renewed by Adler’s reflexive counterattacks on the paper), which she dissects in the introduction to Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media (2001), included here.

  There is, of course, her famous—or infamous—review of Pauline Kael’s book When the Lights Go Down. It’s hard to remember what a cultural despot Kael, then the New Yorker’s film critic, was when Adler wrote her review in 1980. Kael was bully, drama queen, suck-up, disciplinarian, hysteric, and—taking jobs and inducements from the people she promoted—a bit corrupt, too. Still, opprobrium yet attaches to Adler for her sweeping emperor’s-new-clothes leveling of Kael; and it certainly earned her no points with The New Yorker, their mutual employer. But the rightness of Adler’s view of Kael as nasty, self-promoting gasbag only become more obvious as Kael’s reputation disappeared after she lost her New Yorker post and power. She was unreadable, said Adler; and indeed, Kael is unread now.

  Adler’s cheerfully absurd recollections of the editing process at The New York Times, which serves as an introduction to the collection of movie reviews she wrote during her year, at the age of thirty, as the Times’s chief film critic, is perhaps the best exegesis of the leveling and zero-sum game that editors so often play, and another thwack on the Times’s nose.

  Then, there is her Watergate view. She is one of the few—perhaps, the only—more-or-less liberal party to the proceedings to argue, against the orthodoxy of pretty much the entirety of liberal media, that, all in all, it was a fairly weak case against Richard Nixon (and that the real reasons for his resignation were hidden from view).

  Oh yes, and you should hear her on Bob Woodward and Deep Throat. I don’t know anyone else who has pointed out that Mark Felt—identified upon his death, years later, by Woodward as Deep Throat—was widely briefing, dishing to, and confiding in almost everybody involved in the investigation. He became, in other words, the happenstance face for what every professional journalist of a certain age knows to be—though, given Woodward’s reach, few will say so—a convenient composite.

  It is extremely difficult to explain how Bob Woodward’s career could have progressed after Adler, on more than one occasion, took him apart. But then again that is the point about Woodward and Adler’s critique of him, he—quite unlike Adler herself—has always existed in a compact with the power centers that he covers.

  If there is anyone who has violated the clubbiness of the literary and journalistic world more than Adler I cannot think of whom.

  Among the reasons, I believe, that she seems so fierce, impolite, unexpected, even outré, is that she has no politics—or no official politics. In her introduction, included here, to Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism (1970), she offers perhaps one of the last defenses of centrism as a definition of reasonability and intellectual honesty. The irony of course is that it is centrism itself that has become a contrarian, radical and disturbing.

  As she presciently described long ago, television talking heads (before they were called talking heads) are spokespeople whose positions can always be predicted; Adler’s cannot because they are not based on membership in a particular club or linked to a commercial persona (or, now, a brand), unlike the myriad pundits whose worth is based on the consistency of their views. What is to be made of the usefulness or intellectual integrity of journalists and commentators whose positions are always known? They might as well never write at all—saving time for everyone. And yet, of course, the market accommodates them, whereas unanticipated views are met with hostility and confusion.

  Adler is trying to write about people’s motivations, about their inherent conflicts, about not what they say they believe in or stand for, but the largely happenstance circumstances that got them to their chance moment in the sun. All people and all events have another story. Nothing is as it represents itself to be. That is bound to be an unsettling and unpopular analysis.

  Her politics, to the extent that she has any proscribed position, has to do with language. She unpacks to startling effect what people are actually saying. She is one of the few writers who hold people accountable for the words they use. In doing so, meaning, or assumed meaning, often falls quickly away, and laziness, buffoonery, ignorance, and worlds without the most basic logic are revealed.

  Her own prose, on the other hand, is quite unlike any journalism being written today. It exists in service to itself, as its own standard, as its own force, and not in support of political or commercial positions. It is a depressing realization that writing like this is really no longer practiced, that journalism is not a writer’s game anymore, that the language of most journalism is as dead and meaningless as the language of politics and of pop culture, from where so much of it comes.

  Adler is often writing about a writer’s position in the larger world. Hers is a meditation on the power that journalists accrue, often falsely, as a product of media rather than language. A successful journalist graduates from being a writer or a reporter into being a politician or adroit entrepreneur—a fundamentally different business than pushing sentences.

  Adler herself is an example of another kind of writer, a writer’s writer, if you will. One without institutional protection, or even self-saving restraint. The ability to write with financial and emotional support—the sine qua non of being able to write—is predicated on a successful relationship with a media power, a devil’s deal almost every writer gladly makes.

  It is possible perhaps for an indomitable fighter to go it alone, to face down the cultural bishops of the moment. But Adler, except in her prose, is as indomitable as a mouse.

  Fortunately, her writing speaks for itself.

  —MICHAEL WOLFF

  AFTER THE TALL TIMBER

  TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE

  INTRODUCTION

  IN MAY, 1969, as I was watching Another World, Lee Randolph died. I had bought my television set more than two years before, after going to California to do a piece about the Sunset Strip. Buying the set had nothing to do with the piece at all, or any piece. But on assignment, in the sunny upper rooms of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, I had had a case of laryngitis so extreme that I couldn’t speak, even whisper on the telephone, and when I was not following the flower children of the Strip about, I stayed in my room watching daytime television—the soap operas, and when they were not on, the quiz programs. I became seriously preoccupied by them. The NBC peacock, with the announcement “the following program is brought to you in living color,” was frustrating, even reproachful on a hotel room’s black and white. When I got home, I bought a color set, my first TV, a Zenith Space Command with remote control, which I could operate from my bed.

  For two and a half years—until now, in fact—I watched Another World, The Doctors, Love of Life, Search for Tomorrow, Days of Our Lives, and later Hidden Faces (I have never cared for Secret Storm or Edge of Night) whenever I could, and nearly always when I thought I should be doing other things. They had their tired stretches. I missed some crucial episodes. But when Lee Randolph died, a suicide who had lingered on for weeks, I watched her face being covered by a sheet, and I was ridden by the event for weeks. I suppose the script for Lee had run out, or that the actress had found another part. But it was not at all like lo
sing a character in fiction of any other kind—not just an event in a two or ten hour imaginative experience, and then in memory. The soap operas ran along beside life five days out of seven. I saw the characters in them more often than my friends, knew their relationships, the towns. It had a continuity stronger even than the news, where stories and characters submerge and reappear—or don’t—depending on where the limelight is. I know of no more constant, undisjunct narrative than the soap operas. Perhaps they are what personal life was like, before the violent, flash discontinuities of media news and personal air travel came along.

  I had thought of my soap hours as a total waste of time, not a joke, not camp, not for a piece, not critically, a serious waste of time. But when the loss of Lee became such an important thing, I found that those two-and-a-half-year, open-ended narrative experiences define a lot of what I am and what I think, what I would like to write, what I think America, particularly a certain age and voice group, is, and what I think the American radical and intellectual communities are not. I guess I am part of an age group that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America. Even now (and we are in our thirties), we have no journals we publish, no exile we share, no brawls, no anecdotes, no war, no solidarity, no mark. In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy. A center of action seemed to have broken down in us. Lacking precisely the generational tie (through the media, mainly, kids now know about other kids) and just after the family unit began to dissolve, we knew what there was of our alienation privately, and not yet as a claim or a group experience. We now have vertical ties, loves, friendships, loyalties to people older, younger, other than ourselves. We are unnoticed even as we spread clear across what people call, without taking account of us, the generation gap.

  I think that is our special note—we cut across. Across ages, idioms, stresses, cultural values, memories. At a moment of polarization, and other clichés that drain the language of meaning, the continuity of the American story seems to rest just now in us. The first age group to experience in its youth a murderous overvalue on precocity (which leads now to an idiot generational impasse), we held back. We grew up separately, without a rhetoric, drawing our ideas from age and cultural groups already formed, as we were not. The idiom of Another World is no more foreign to us than The Green Hornet, Joseph Conrad, The New York Review of Books, bourbon no more or less our own than marijuana is. Unaware of each other until now, we are in it all. Some of us have dropped a generation back, to lead a student movement that belies everything we are. Others have taken their positions quietly, in society as it was before we came and as, in the years of its most annihilating smugness, it nearly killed us off. But most of us, I think, were formed and remain one by one—formed by books and by the media, but, through the accident of our span of history, formed alone. And now I think we are a force.