Your new favorite story about the intellectual brawl between Pauline Kael and Joan Didion.
[Some of Kael’s imbroglios help illuminate the boundaries of her taste. Her spat with Joan Didion is one example. Kael and Didion had parallel flight paths: both were Northern California kids who had close-read Henry James at Berkeley, gone East to get their bearings, and returned to California to forge their styles. Both were exceptionally sensitive to the cultural atomization of the sixties and its fractured narratives. But where Kael’s ambition was to piece together a new culture through a shared experience of the movies, Didion’s genius was in finding language to emboss this fractured landscape on the page. Kael hated what she viewed as Didion’s fashionable despair. She used the adaptation of “Play It as It Lays” (1972) as an occasion to sneer, in print, at the novel’s style. (“I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles.”) The following year, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, published an essay pointing out that Kael’s ignorance of the moviemaking process meant she sometimes praised or chastised directors for choices they didn’t make. It may have cleared the air in Malibu. A few years later, Dunne sent Kael a friendly invitation to meet. “I’m only a part-time shit,” he explained.]
Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 10/24/11
