By Craig Seligman
Counterpoint, HB$49.95 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, instantly riveting, has taken me a ridiculous amount of time to review. The first time I read it I didn’t want to make notes, to sully the experience or the physical aesthetic of this exceedingly pleasurable book. Two wonderful (albeit problematic) writers, Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, are channeled by a delightful scribe, Louisianan Craig Seligman. (Which isn’t to say it is perfect; the critic N.P. Thompson gives it an uneven, sometimes well-argued kicking, notably why Seligman is wrong to criticise Sontag for not politicising her bisexuality.)

Sontag and Kael gives you a marvelously concise embarrassment of riches to think, talk and write about. It throws up countless, sometimes contrary, debates on films, directors, theories, critics etc, that could keep laymen and film professors alike exploring and occupied for years. Which, ultimately, is what all good criticism should aspire to. I felt I had to immerse myself in the brilliant likes of Andrew Sarris – such as his seminal The American Cinema, my first Amazon purchase – who famously parried with Kael, before I could pass judgement. I still don’t feel I can; so, a few stray thoughts, a stream of consciousness of a review, if you like.

Sarris, A Clockwork Orange, Raging Bull, Clint Eastwood… Kael was wrong about these, and much more – unlike Euro sophisticate Sontag, she was too America-centric, certainly as she got older. However, she remains one of the great critics, who inspired (often directly) many of today’s leading critics, such as Seligman. This Pauletteburo of critical cognoscenti is a veritable, immortal legacy to a woman whose writing was informed, passionate, sassy, deftly cutting, electric.

“If art isn’t entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?” was one of her trademark acerbic quips. Which isn’t to say she was craven to populist slush. She was legendarily fired from McCall’s for slating The Sound of Music: “We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.” Taxi Driver’s Paul Schrader – an unworldly rural Calvinist, then distinguished critic, then fired for panning Easy Rider, then cinematic colossus – was mentored by Kael.

Seligman wears his (platonic) love and close friendship with Kael on his sleeve. He points out her first (unpaid) review, Chaplin’s Limelight, was published when she was 33; it wasn’t until she was in her fifties she started getting solid remuneration and recognition at the magnificently enlightened The New Yorker. “I used bitchery as a tool,” Kael reminisced after retiring. “In case anyone was wondering,” Seligman quips. He doesn’t mention Kael’s 1979 reviewing hiatus, five failed months as an “executive consultant”, for Paramount.

Seligman, himself gay, cogently debunks attacks of homophobia made against Kael and even Sontag. One of his strengths is his tying of politics, art, everything, into a holistic synthesis. He crushingly swipes a chic leftism both women had no truck with: “Why do deviations from orthodoxy provoke so much bitterness that the Left winds up shifting its energy…away from the true threats?”

In his post-publication obituary, Seligman lamented the loss of Sontag’s cathartic rage, so important given the current American administration. “Every word is the word, chosen with fanatical care and unvarying elegance.” Seligman pays tribute to the beauty – the almost erotic charge – of Sontag’s explosively, lusciously erudite writing. The great, warm Southern intellectual tradition of Carson McCullers continues. I wish he’d write more criticism on contemporary movies.

The last word, however, belongs to the inimitable Kael. “My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, and so many poets.”