Of the many feminist intellectuals whose stars blazed New York in the 1960s and 1970s, the critic and essayist Vivian Gornick has proved one of the most enduring. As a young reporter at the Village Voice, she dabbled in the kind of voice-driven “personal journalism” that became a hallmark. Along with Shulamith Firestone and others, she contributed to the founding in 1969 of one of the most important feminist collectives in the United States. Unlike the tragic Firestone, who later suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was found dead in 2012 of apparent starvation, Gornick has thrived, publishing a steady stream of books, teaching, and regularly contributing to outlets such as the New York Review of Books and Bookforum. Her 1977 book The Romance of American Communism, which explored the ideology’s legacy and allure through interviews with current and former adherents, was favorably reviewed by Tara Isabella Burton in the Washington Examiner when it was republished last year. Her 2001 book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, is a frequent reference for teachers and students of literary nonfiction.
Now Gornick, in her mid-80s, has released an essay collection likely intended as a career-capping retrospective. Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time, published by Verso, collects 24 pieces, all or most previously published. The pieces are arranged, unusually, in reverse chronological order: The first, larger portion of the book has recent review essays, while the final stretch selects a few of Gornick’s Village Voice-era writings.
Many of the essays take the form of biographical sketches of 20th-century intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Primo Levi, Diana Trilling, and Erich Fromm, or reconsiderations of important texts. The essays are deft, almost snack-sized, and readers already versed in the figures Gornick covers may find them less insightful than those new to the territory. But she is adept at capturing intellectual personalities on the page, and I particularly loved this precis of writer Alfred Kazin in a review of his posthumously published diaries:
For most of his eighty-odd years, Alfred Kazin was eaten alive by his own demons. Some who are being eaten alive withdraw into brooding silence; some cry aloud to the heavens. Kazin was distinctly of the second type. Explosive and confrontational, known for what he himself called his ghetto manners, he seemed a man in a perpetual state of high-level anxiety: he envied the success of others; experienced his own talent as insufficient; felt romantically shortchanged; obsessed over his Jewishness; and, until the very end, was haunted by the conviction that somewhere a marvelous party was going on to which he had not been invited.
Gornick’s critical judgments also hold some interesting surprises. Her essay on the much-maligned Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a rousing defense of a novel generally remembered in literary memory as, at best, a historically important work of propaganda. In contrast, Gornick argues, it is a mature and ingeniously formulated novel of extraordinary moral imagination. The “force and clarity” with which each character “comes alive on the page, emerging from a prose that is essentially without art, is amazing.”
Gornick is intellectually generous and mostly positive about the writers and works she considers. One exception is the late novelist James Salter, whom Gornick dismembers with unflinching precision and obvious distaste. She argues, rather persuasively, I think, that Salter, author of the cult erotic novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967), is overlauded, retrograde in his literary treatment of women, and generally incurious. “We experience” the characters in Salter’s final novel, All That Is (2013), Gornick writes, “only through an accumulation of surfaces; we’re never inside any of them. The self-knowledge required for reflection or interpretation is absent. Engagement with work or ideas or the world beyond the sensual self — elements that might prove revelatory — is nonexistent.”
She argues that Salter’s fiction is marked by a lack of artistic and psychological development and that his late work is indistinguishable from his earliest:
Certainly, it is true that most writers have only one story in them — that is, as Flannery O’Connor put it, only one they can make come alive. Then again, it is also true that it is the writer’s obligation to make the story tell more the third or fourth time around that it did the first. For this reviewer, Salter’s work fails on that score. In his eighties he tells the story almost exactly as he told [it] in his forties.
Christopher Lasch, the social critic who has lately enjoyed something of a renaissance of interest, also comes in for some rough treatment. In a review of the historian Elizabeth Lunbeck’s book The Americanization of Narcissism, which charts narcissism’s migration from a psychoanalytic term into a political and cultural diagnostic, Gornick writes that Lunbeck “seeks to rescue narcissism from the distortions she feels it has been subjected to by the critics who, instead of addressing the noisy discontent of their time with sympathetic interest, sought only to castigate it, and in the process did irreparable harm to any working definition of narcissism that was ever in analytic use.” Lasch was uninterested in genuinely reckoning with the roots of 1960s radicalism, Gornick charges, characterizing him as “a white, middle-class man without the gift of empathy who found all the social tumult depressing rather than stimulating, and who, feeling the ground beneath his own feet beginning to give way, came perilously close to idealizing a solidity of the past that never was.”
Even at her most opinionated, Gornick’s mode, tonally, is less the impassioned polemicist than the coolly detached critic. She is well regarded as a stylist, and her sentences, elegant and precise, are sometimes complex but never unnecessarily ornate. She does have an off-putting tendency to sum up her arguments with slightly trite or strenuously bow-tying final sentences: That Levi kept his mental health troubles “from closing in long enough to become one of the great tellers of those tales that warrant rewriting the Bible is nothing less than remarkable.” From Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to her lover Nelson Algren “can be intuited the woman who applied herself to the task of researching and writing a report on the condition of her own sex with so much passionate steadiness that she transformed a polemic into of the great books of the century.”
Most of the essays collected here are more like intellectual amuses-bouches than full-course meals. But they are lively, well observed, and particularly recommended to students of 20th-century intellectual history.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York Magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
