There is no one clear route as to how a person becomes a reader and a lover of great literature; which is just as well, as I came to literature relatively late and in a rather roundabout way. My route was via the cinema, and specifically the work of two film critics—Pauline Kael and David Thomson. I encountered them both when I was in my early twenties, at a crucial time in my life, and just prior to going to university. Their work ignited something in me, and fired my imagination: how to think and talk about a work of art. But more than that, their work led me to other writers, as I began to discover, sometimes inadvertently, who had influenced them. Reading became a way of connecting the dots, of tracing literary style across generations and genres. The field of my interest opened up: fiction, poetry, criticism, essays. And so did my life.
Although I read Kael before I read Thomson, and for many years would speak of Kael as my favourite critic, it is Thomson who has had the most lasting impact. Why this should be the case, I’m not so sure: I’m still trying to figure it out. Kael’s style was conversational and had great immediacy, though I would later learn that she worked hard on these aspects of her writing. Kael also benefited, especially in her early days, from writing film reviews for her own radio show; so from the start her writing had tremendous clarity and was geared to conversation. Here she is in 1963 ostensibly writing about the film Hud:
“The summer nights are very long on a western ranch. As a child I could stretch out on a hammock on the porch and read an Oz book from cover to cover while my grandparents and uncles and aunts and parents didn’t stir from their card game. The young men get tired of playing cards. They think about sex or try to do something about it. There isn’t much else to do—the life doesn’t exactly stimulate the imagination, though it does stimulate the senses.”
Like Hemingway and Raymond Carver, her style did not daunt those readers-cum-admirers hoping to emulate her—she seemed within reach. But for those very same admirers, the problem of influence arose later. For there was something about Kael’s rhythms—at once muscular and brusque and easy-going—that seeped into her protégés’ writings: not only did they ‘sound’ like her, it seemed as though they thought like her, too. Whereas Kael didn’t ‘sound’ or think like anyone except herself. (Indeed, whenever I read Kael I am reminded of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and its famous opening sentence: “I am an American, Chicago born…and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” Kael certainly did that—go at things her own way, and her record is considerable—though she was born not in Chicago but thirty miles north of San Francisco.)
But when it comes to writing—or anything creative for that matter—we’ve all got to start somewhere; I started with Kael. What I admired—and loved—about Kael’s writing was its idiomatic verve, its freedom, its lack of strain: her relaxed learning. For a long time, I didn’t read any other film critic. But I realized early on that I was susceptible to her influence: fledgling attempts at writing film reviews for the college magazine were full of Kael’s cadences. My brother must also have recognised that I had a problem. As though staging a literary intervention, he bought me Thomson’s biography of Warren Beatty, though initially I would have read it only because in those days I was more interested in movie stars than in books—which is something I later came to regret. But reading, and then re-reading, Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story, something clicked. What was it? Kent Jones, another great American film critic, says that Thomson’s is the “most seductive voice in film criticism.” So let’s just say that I was seduced, and that Thomson’s gorgeous style took hold: the warm and intimate tone; the playfulness and provocative re-imagining of film-makers and movie stars. Here is Thomson on James Cagney:
“Cagney is charged with restlessness, and yet he always contrives to discharge the agitation daintily or with conscious style…No one could move so arbitrarily from tranquillity to dementia, because Cagney was a dancer responding to a melody that he alone heard. Like a sprite or a goblin he seemed in touch with an occult source of vitality.”
But unlike Kael, Thomson has rarely held a regular film reviewing position, though he has written on and about film for numerous publications (The Guardian, Independent on Sunday, and The New Republic). Indeed, I once heard Thomson publicly declare that he is “not a film critic”, which might seem perverse given his status within film criticism circles. So what does he do, exactly? Perhaps the answer can be found in his most famous and influential book, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, and the entry on Graham Greene. Of Greene’s film criticism, Thomson writes: “The reviews are good reading still because of Greene’s range and the bite of his observations. The films were a trigger for life, or for his novelizing alchemy.” It’s that “novelising alchemy” that is at the heart of what Thomson does—that “trigger for life.” He’s said as much himself. Referring to the Dictionary’s beginnings and its continuing appeal, Thomson described it as “somewhere between a memoir and a novel disguised as a reference book. It’s meant to be read, in a way that you would read fiction.” Or as the unreliable narrator in Thomson’s 1985 novel Suspects would have it: “poetry lurks in reference-book style.”
Of course, when I first read Thomson I was unaware of all this. I simply fell under his spell. I was also in that great position of discovering a writer in mid-career, so not only could I look forward to his new books (of which there have been many), but there was a back catalogue that I could work my way through. I was able to see how he arrived at…himself. So a new influence took root in the garden that Kael cultivated. But as Thomson himself once told me, as if sensing how much his work meant to me: “I think when a writer immerses himself in some other writer’s work, you’ve got to be very careful—you’ve got to keep a towel with you to dry it off.”
—Mick McAloon
Running From The Reels 