Bookplanet: what a great critic does

Lives in the Arts
Review of TWENTY-EIGHT ARTISTS AND TWO SAINTS: Essays by Joan Acocella.
By KATHRYN HARRISON/NY Times

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few. Like all romantic conceits, it fails to acknowledge the grubby reality of mortal life, in this case the dedicated, often torturous labor a writer or dancer or sculptor invests in what he or she makes. Among the lucid and often delightful observations Joan Acocella makes in her new collection of critical essays, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” none is more important than this: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite ... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.” In fact, Acocella suggests, the remarkable and sustained career of a prodigy like George Balanchine , to name one of her subjects, proves this artist “not an example, but a freak, of ego strength.”

Which doesn’t make the creative process any less mysterious. What emerges from a reading of “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” is Acocella’s — and through hers our own — respect and in certain cases even reverence for the dogged faith on which an artistic career is built. We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos: these are the promises art makes. Fulfilling them requires something else entirely, an attribute closer to blindness than to inspiration — the refusal to give up when the odds predict defeat, again.

In these highly readable essays, most of which appeared in The New Yorker (where, as a staff writer, their author covers dance and books), Acocella addresses not single works so much as whole lives in the arts, her point of entry either the most recent novel by, or a new biography of, the writer (or dancer, or choreographer) under consideration. Many of the essays draw on interviews with her subject as well as on the work itself. Knowledgeable without being a show-off, meticulous in her research and energetically conversational, Acocella leaps immediately into the piece at hand, offering a few toothsome biographical morsels as she unpacks text or dance steps. Then, having captured her reader’s interest, she goes back to the early life and earlier work, examining those experiences she sees as having had an impact on the art. Her typical essay thus functions as a tantalizing biographical sketch, as well as a critical study, inviting us to pursue a deeper exploration.

Ultimately, there are as many different forms of criticism as there are critics, but if one were to make the broadest distinction, on one side of which lie those hypercritical critics who tend to eviscerate and disable creative efforts, often while advertising their own erudition and good taste, Acocella would fall firmly on the other side of this divide. She is a celebrant of art, not blind to the flaws of what she admires nor so inclusive in her praise that she fails to discriminate between the lesser and greater novels of, for example, Saul Bellow , but a critic whose enthusiasm is infectious. Clearly, she reviews only what she finds worth her time to review — work she loves.

Particularly, Acocella is interested in artistic careers that include break and recovery, and how the work changes in the wake of trauma, including the chronic, compounding trauma of rejection. She is a keen and sympathetic observer of the ways in which corrosive disappointment can strip away the veneer of culture and refinement that an immature artist typically acquires, revealing the more genuine sensitivity, the art, beneath.

The most engaging of the essays collected here is “The Soloist,” which follows the career of Mikhail Baryshnikov . As Russian as he is, Baryshnikov has achieved the stature of an American icon by that most reliable means — his own bootstraps. We love stories of overcoming hardship; really, the only way to improve on them is to multiply the hero’s woes, and Baryshnikov endured decades of crises and abandonments that only his obdurate investment in ballet allowed him to transcend.

Twelve years old, Baryshnikov had been dancing for three years when his mother hanged herself and he became “a child workaholic.” Drudgery paid off: at 19 he was accepted into the Kirov Ballet as a soloist, and then, Acocella writes, “his troubles really began.” In the wake of Nureyev’s 1961 defection, the Kirov became, in effect, “a mini police state” that rewarded its dancers “less on the basis of merit than according to one’s history of cooperation” with Communist witch hunts. The pinnacle of success for Russian dancers, it left them vulnerable to a “mixture of impotence and cynicism” that destroyed one brilliant career after another.

In 1970, Alexander Pushkin, celebrated teacher and surrogate father to the young dancer (whose own father never understood or supported his ambitions), died suddenly and left Baryshnikov feeling bereft of protectors. That same year, Natalia Makarova defected and the Kirov descended into panic, with the result that the K.G.B. came calling whenever Baryshnikov had so much as a meal with a visiting Western dancer. It was clear that to remain in his homeland would amount to creative suicide and so in 1974, Baryshnikov, too, defected.

Summarizing his subsequent career with the American Ballet Theater , with Balanchine, with Twyla Tharp , Acocella says of Baryshnikov: “Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself. Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us.” It’s an astute observation — the kind of simple and clearsighted remark that distinguishes Acocella’s criticism — and it applies to almost every artist, conscious or not of an alienation assuaged only by the consuming effort art demands. The sculpture of Louise Bourgeois; the wickedly funny, anguished novels of Hilary Mantel; the memoirs of Primo Levi, of M. F. K. Fisher; the choreography of Jerome Robbins : in each instance, Acocella shows us how artists live within their creations.

Three essays in particular demonstrate Acocella’s acuity as a cultural critic. There are her two meditations on female saints, Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc, both so distant and ultimately unknowable that our shifting visions of these women and their roles in the church and society reveal more about the times in which particular views emerge than about the women themselves. And there is her wonderfully insightful history of writer’s block, which “like most of today’s recognized psychological disorders,” Acocella observes dryly, “is a concept that other cultures, other times, have done fine without.”

Of Susan Sontag ’s “Against Interpretation,” Acocella observes that Sontag’s nonfiction performed the “essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, strange work, things they wouldn’t ordinarily encounter — a duty no major critic had undertaken consistently since Edmund Wilson quit regular reviewing in the late ’40s.” What’s more, “it did so in a notably unstrange manner.” This praise applies to Acocella’s criticism, as well.

“The relation between morality and imagination may be a complicated one, but it does exist,” she writes, analyzing the narrowness of Dorothy Parker ’s vision, a function, she believes, of her selfishness. “Hope, forgiveness — these are not just moral actions. They are enlargements of the mind. Without them, you remain in the tunnel of the self.” Like Sontag, like every great critic, Acocella is subjective, uncompromising. She has a distinct point of view, a refreshingly not-fashionable one — she salutes Sunday-school virtues! — and writes from her conviction that beneath its hectic, irresponsible, even intoxicated surface, art makes singularly unglamorous demands: integrity, sacrifice, discipline. Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?

(Kathryn Harrison’s most recent book is a novel, “Envy.”)