The Urbane Bookworm: Robert Gottlieb’s Essays Celebrate Literature, Film Classics and Dance
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Version 0 of 1. NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES . . .And OthersBy Robert GottliebIllustrated. 350 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. In 2016, Robert Gottlieb published “Avid Reader,” a legacy-solidifying memoir recapping his long career in the enchanted forest of hardcovers and best-seller lists as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and, later, Alfred A. Knopf — a marathon glory run during which he coaxed, cajoled, shaped, trimmed and talcum-powdered a pantheon of American and British authors, including John Cheever, John le Carré, Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, Edna O’Brien and so many other luminati. In 1987, answering destiny’s call, Gottlieb succeeded the inscrutable William Shawn as the editor and witch doctor of The New Yorker, where he was welcomed with folded arms by many of the old faithful; he retired from the magazine in 1992, turning the franchise over to Tina Brown, who rode in on Jet Skis. As industrious a writer as he was an editor (John McPhee marveled that Gottlieb once read an 80,000-word article of his overnight, with cogent suggestions for improvements), Gottlieb has published biographical treatments of Sarah Bernhardt, Charles Dickens’s children and the choreographer George Balanchine. Given that he turned 87 in April, the title of his new book, “Near-Death Experiences … and Others,” might suggest a meditation on impending mortality, a midnight reflection on the exit sign hanging at the end of the hall. Nothing of the sort. It’s a miscellaneous collection of reviews and essays that takes up where his previous collection, “Lives and Letters” (2011), left off. The title chapter is a thematic roundup of personal memoirs by near-death experiencers, who report floating out of their stricken bodies into radiant heaven or some mistier quadrant of the afterlife before returning to their earthly shells to share their special sneak preview of life eternal. While understandably skeptical of such astral flights and their pastel visions, Gottlieb is careful not to mock the credulous believers, reserving his disdain for the right-wing huckster and felon (now presidentially pardoned) Dinesh D’Souza, whose “Life After Death: The Evidence” tries to annex eschatology as another battlefield in the culture wars, where the Christian righteous smite the atheist rabble. Another omnibus review, “In the Mood for Love” (originally published in the Book Review), finds Gottlieb measuring the tumescent advances in romance fiction, where swashbuckling euphemisms and maidenly sentiments have been cast aside to make way for the raw mambo. “Bodices no longer need to be ripped — your bosom happily meets his abs halfway.” The amount of dreck Gottlieb must have read to produce a piece so abundant with equanimity beggars the mind. Geniality prevails through “Near-Death Experiences,” at least when it comes to prose merchandise. Nothing here is as barbed with asperity and exasperation as his review of Renata Adler’s “Gone” (reprinted in “Lives and Letters”), in which he corrects the factual errors and misspelled names of her “part wacky, part unpleasant” account of his tenure at The New Yorker. As with any assortment pack of articles written for different outlets on different topics, “Near-Death Experiences” rewards dipping in and out rather than chugging straight through. The best pieces — on Wilkie Collins, the demi-divinity Lady Diana Cooper and the histrionic Booth brothers Edwin and John Wilkes — are suffused with bookworm passion and urbane ease, handsomely framed and informatively filled out, rather than crackling with fresh discovery or bold assertion. As a major inside player, Gottlieb is able to identify the hollow core of Boris Kachka’s “Hothouse,” a libido-laced history of the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux: “Kachka really doesn’t grasp what things used to be like in publishing, what the relationships and struggles and personalities were — he lacks context. This is feature journalism masquerading as history.” Gottlieb never lacks context when it comes to his own pet subjects; it’s at fingertip command. His enthusiasms run to classic Hollywood (appreciations of Mary Astor and that gleaming dolphin, Esther Williams), the halcyon days of old Broadway (the lyricist Lorenz Hart, the bugle-voiced Ethel Merman), the wayward fortunes of American literary figures who once loomed so high (Dorothy Parker, Thomas Wolfe), and midcentury geysers of creative gusto (Leonard Bernstein). One of the running subthemes in the book is the many-splendored ways contemporary movies mangle literature, biography and history, casting the tall “Nicole Kidman at her frostiest” as Thomas Wolfe’s warm, plump lover and muse Aline Bernstein in “Genius”; reducing Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky in the film of the same name to a pair of rutting clotheshorses; and smothering the emotional tempests of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”: “The new film version of ‘Jane Eyre’ isn’t all bad, but it’s all wrong.” The cinematic tramplings that bother and bewilder Gottlieb the most are the ones that drag Terpsichore through the back alley. “What did ballet ever do to the world to deserve the way it’s always been represented by writers and filmmakers?” What repulses him about the movie “Black Swan” and the short-lived Starz series “Flesh and Bone” is the garbaging-up of ballet for sado-psychodrama. With its stigmata and stabbing shock-cuts, “Black Swan” is “Grand Guignol with pretensions to class,” and “Flesh and Bone” ups the ante with incest, self-mutilation, Russian mobsters and fancy-ass pole-dancing, reducing the ballerina to a tormented butterfly pinned by the Male Gaze. It’s all agony and no ecstasy, unless death spasms qualify. Filmmakers who debauch ballet know not what they doeth, but there’s no excuse for those inside the dance world to pimp the notion that ballet is a vale of martyrdom, and not just for the dancers. Heavy hangs the crown on choreographers, too, burdened by the romantic cliché of “the Anguish of the Tormented Artist,” as Gottlieb dubs it in his angry review of Boris Eifman’s biographical ballet “Musagète,” a Ken Russell-size vulgarization of the pre-eminent ballet genius of the 20th century, George Balanchine, which dishonored the stage of the New York City Ballet in 2004. Although Balanchine was among the least anguished and tormented of creative artists, “Eifman’s Balanchine suffers, suffers, suffers,” while a dancer portraying the polio-stricken ballerina Tanaquil LeClerq (Balanchine’s wife) is shown being dragged off the stage on a long piece of black cloth. “People in the audience whom I recognized as old Balanchine hands were gasping in disbelief. … I found it as painful a moment as I’ve ever spent in the theater.” This is a declaration that carries heft since Gottlieb has been parking his seat at New York City Ballet since 1948 (70 years on the beat!), watching, reviewing, kibitzing at intermission and serving for a time on the company’s board. (See “My New York Ballet” in “Lives and Letters” for the full history.) As might be deduced by now, “Near-Death Experiences” is far more dance-centric than its predecessor. Gottlieb explains in the preface: “The main difference between this book and ‘Lives and Letters’ is the inclusion in it of 20-odd of the 300 or so dance reviews I’ve published in The Observer since 1999. … My great friend Janet Malcolm has been urging me to reprint these for years, which is both flattering and unnerving — doesn’t she like the rest of my work? If you don’t appreciate their appearance here, blame Janet — it’s that girl’s fault.” I understand Gottlieb’s hedging tone. Ballet and modern dance are a minority taste, enthusiasm and devotion — and getting more minority by the minute. In my memoir “Lucking Out,” knowing how skippable many readers might find a chapter on my initiation into balletomania, I coupled it in the same chapter with a reverie on the Times Square porn scene, hoping to snare and hold the unsuspecting — a devilishly clever tactic that probably fooled nobody. Less devious than I, Gottlieb tucks his dance reviews for The New York Observer in the book’s caboose, where they occupy the last 74 pages. He is quite funny on the beefcake bombast of the visiting Bolshoi Ballet’s “Spartacus” (“Stalwart men leap and leap and leap, brandishing swords and muscles”), suitably repelled by the chic, misogynist Cruella de Ville aesthetic of Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” and stoic in the face of the New York City Ballet’s slow fade to gray under the sturdy but uninspiring leadership of Peter Martins, who retired under pressure in January, amid allegations of physical abuse and sexual harassment. (An internal inquiry by the company was unable to corroborate the allegations.) Even so, the quality of analysis and evocation in these pieces isn’t up to the level of the legendary dance writers Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce; there are no epiphany highs or extended rolls. The Observer reviews, fortified with others, might have been better reserved for a separate e-book for fellow bunheads and followers of the art rather than appended here. Then there’d be no reason for anybody to go around blaming Janet. |