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By Root 906 0

who had to meet deadlines for a living were some kind of bum. More unnerving was the gloating jubilation it ignited in the press, including a feature article in New York magazine by Philip Nobile that called it a “crucifixion,” and Andrew Sarris climbing like a rooster atop the henhouse to proclaim that Pauline was now “naked to thine enemies.” Gary Indiana, a former colleague of mine at the Voice, would later muse in Artforum, “I have a fond memory of devouring that essay with Susan Sontag, peering over each other’s shoulder, in the donut shop that used to occupy the corner of Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, both of us nearly gagging with laughter at the sly, inexorable trajectory of every sentence, the devastating conclusion of every paragraph, the utterly damning thoroughness with which Ms. Kael’s grotesquely inflated, even sacrosanct reputation had been laid out like a corpse for burial.” Sontag gagging with laughter is not a picture to linger over. It was more than simple Schadenfreude at work; it was more visceral and hooting, a vulture party, reminding me in its circling glee of the footage of Frenchwomen having their heads shaved in public after the liberation. Which is not to argue that Pauline was an innocent, defenseless victim, or that Adler’s article was unanimously endorsed. I did a jokey riff on the controversy for the Voice and for my jesting found myself vaguely threatened with a lawsuit, a prospect that seemed to excite our resident civil liberties advocate, Nat Hentoff, who always enjoyed having a First Amendment case to warm his hands over.

What made this harder for Pauline to weather than the high-powered hits she had taken before (such as Mailer’s bull run at her over Last Tango in Paris) was that Adler’s attack had the acid residue of an inside job, a takedown encouraged with a nod and a wink by those at The New Yorker who thought the Minotaur mama’s vulgarity and bullying had gone too long unchecked. A few claimed they did more than nod and wink, directly assisting in the mechanics of the piece. The high-altitude novelist Harold Brodkey, whom we met earlier, boasted that he had helped Adler with the essay, suggesting solecisms and signature mannerisms to toss in the evidence bag. Of course, Brodkey had an extravagant sense of his own diaphanous influence, placing himself as the lightning rod of every literary creation that had happened since he attained consciousness, claiming that he was the unattributed model for Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, the Devil in Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, and Leander Dworkin in Adler’s novel Pitch Dark. A fun guy, he resented the fact that the New York Mets ace Dwight Gooden made more money on the pitching mound than he did at his desk as a writer, to me a distinct sign of a madman. So his testimony always had to be filed under “Dubious” or “Iffy.” But Brodkey was also a notoriously sly malice-spreader who liked to keep busy, so it’s quite possible he did put his Iago insinuations into play here. In any case, Brodkey wanted partial credit, even if no credit was due, and he made sure Pauline was aware his fingerprints were on it. Other New Yorker colleagues let slide smiles of royal court approval over Adler’s onslaught, and it was conjectured that William Shawn himself tacitly condoned the piece, distressed over the coarse improprieties Pauline kept traipsing across the stage like a burlesque queen’s tatty boa. “Some New Yorker watchers feel that the genteel editor is in secret sympathy with Adler’s analysis and wishes that Kael, whom Brendan Gill characterizes as ‘foul mouthed’ in Here at The New Yorker, would clean up her column,” Nobile wrote in New York, citing those unnamed sources whom no journalist can be without. Granting an interview to Nobile, Shawn denied that this was so, but that the elf wizard himself felt compelled to speak on the record indicated how roiling this was intestinally for the magazine. The last paragraph of Nobile’s piece read, “Adler observed in [her nonfiction collection] Toward a Radical Middle that ‘no essay form becomes