Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Illogical Thinking in Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“Tippi [Hedren] warns a teacher that crows are massing outside the schoolhouse; their jointly worked-out response to the threat is not to put the kids into the cellar but to march them outside to walk home. To no one’s surprise but Hitchcock’s, the birds come shrieking like Stukas onto the helpless little column.” —American cultural critic and editor Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Sixty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered in New York City. The above quote is only a sample of Dwight MacDonald’s ironic takedown of this film from the “Master of Suspense.”

A post of mine from nine years ago discussed how Hitchcock radically transformed Daphne DuMaurier’s dark, short tale of isolation and terror in a British cottage into something quite different. But I thought that Macdonald’s quote was not only worthwhile in itself to read, but pointed to the sharp critical divide that quickly developed around the film.

At the time, detractors assailed the film for a variety of reasons: a weak script, awkward acting, sadism, special effects at the expense of logic or motivation. 

Movie fans paid no heed to the naysaying reviewers, making this a financially successful follow-up to Hitchcock’s Psycho from three years before.

Even so, the film continues to split opinion, only this time Hitchcock critics call the director out for using live birds for the avian attic attack on Tippi Hedren—an experience that understandably traumatized the actress. (And that was before even  worse treatment she would suffer at his hands during the making of Marnie, when the director subjected her to sexual harassment.)

The Birds, then, is certainly controversial. Yet I hardly think I am alone in regarding it as mesmerizing and chilling, all the way down to its final, ambiguous—and deeply foreboding—image of a landscape filled with the birds, silent and watching.

Quote of the Day (Dwight MacDonald, Taking Issue With Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“The only characters in the film who aren't birdbrains are the birds.”—American cultural critic and editor Dwight MacDonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Dorothy Day’s Fundraising)

“Under Miss [Dorothy] Day's guidance, the Catholic Workers have devised an inexpensive and effective technique of fund-raising: they pray to Saint Joseph, their patron saint.”—Dwight Macdonald, “The Foolish Things of the World,” The New Yorker, October 4, 1952

Readers of The New Yorker were likely to have gazed in amazement at the profile of peace and anti-poverty activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) and the Catholic Worker movement when they picked up their issue of the magazine 60 years ago today. After all, the leftist journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) made no bones about his lack of religious belief (“I didn’t go through the ‘crisis of belief’ most of my teenage contemporaries did because, not only didn’t I believe, I didn’t muster up the interest to doubt,” he said in an interview with Paul Kurtz years later).  

Yet here he was, in this first of a two-part profile, writing without condescension about a Catholic convert whom, he noted, many regarded as a saint. On one level, Day’s simple moral luminosity appealed to him, as he noted that she “has no 'presence' at all, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, she is impressive to meet or hear, communicating a moral force compounded of optimism, sincerity, earnestness, and deprecatory humor."

Yet, as a contrarian whose thinking might be best summed up in the title of his essay collection, Against the American Grain, Macdonald also found something profound in Day’s belief in nonviolence and a preferential option for the poor: “Politically,” he observed, “the Catholic Workers are hard to classify. They are for the poor and against the rich, so the capitalists call them Communists; they believe in private property and don't believe in the class struggle, so the Communists call them capitalists; and they are hostile to war and to the state, so both capitalists and Communists consider them crackpots."

Thirty years after his death, Macdonald is not read widely, but his influence during the 1950s and 1960s was considerable. The profile of Day brought the Catholic Worker movement to a larger, often secular audience previously unaware of it. His praise of James Agee’s A Death in the Family gave to that posthumously published novel enough ballast to propel it toward the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and his demolition of James Gould Cozzens probably did more than anything else to shrivel that novelist’s previously considerable critical reputation. Most important, his extended New Yorker review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America brought that work to the attention of the Kennedy Administration, which, inspired by the book, launched the War on Poverty.

(Photo of Dorothy Day from 1916 by an unknown photographer.)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Fenimore Cooper’s “Offenses Against Literary Art")

“[James Fenimore] Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”--Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895)

Mark Twain is hardly out of his corner, and already he’s delivered a staggering blow. I can report that he doesn’t let up from here, folks, as he takes after The Leatherstocking Saga (termed here “The Broken-Twig Series,” for its author’s propensity to add a plot development with a twig snapping in the forest) for its decided lack of realism and clumsy writing.

I doubt you’ll find a more delicious barbeque of a literary sacred cow anywhere. But here’s the thing: James Fenimore Cooper, who died on this date in 1851, a day short of his 62nd birthday, still manages to be read.

If you want an attack far more deadly and effective than Twain’s on Cooper, then consider the fate of James Gould Cozzens. What, you haven’t read him (let alone heard of him)? That has an awful lot to do with critic Dwight Macdonald, who laid waste to this Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who had scaled the top of the bestseller lists and even been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time Macdonald had disposed of him in a 1957 review, “By Cozzens Possessed,” the novelist’s reputation lay in ruins. Search for him now on postwar American literature reading lists in colleges--I dare you.

In contrast, Cooper has endured quite well, thank you. The strength of that position was underscored for me by a comment made over two decades ago by Alfred Kazin. At a question-and-answer period following a lecture at my local library, I asked the late eminent critic, regarding literary reputations, why James Fenimore Cooper continued to be assigned in colleges but Washington Irving wasn’t.

“When was the last time you read Irving?” he responded.

Had the asperity of the remark not caught me off guard, I might have answered, “About the same time I read Cooper.” I might then have followed it up with, “How many young readers would bother with Cooper at all if they weren’t made to read him?”

A rather less crass, more thoughtful response might have been that, for all his marvelously droll style (see my post from the other day on his A History of New York), Irving did not fashion a uniquely American style or genre. Cooper, on the other hand, created the western--or, as I like to think of it, the closing-of-the-frontier novel. It was the subject of the very first book he wrote in the Leatherstocking Saga, The Pioneers, and another title in the same series makes the point even more explicit: The Last of the Mohicans.

English professors inevitably end up tracing the development of genres rather than simply raising students’ appreciation for great literature. Consequently, Cooper gets a pass from academe for the same reason that Samuel Richardson does: i.e., he created a literary form that, for all intents and purposes in his native country, hadn’t existed before.

And then there’s Hollywood. When was it ever consumed by fidelity to works being adapted, let alone the things that mattered to Twain--verisimilitude in characterization and action?

And so, directors and producers don’t care a twig (sorry, Mr. Twain!) about plot. They’re going to change that, anyway. The important things for them are images, such as the one here, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe as the lovers in Michael Mann’s thrilling The Last of the Mohicans.

Mr. Twain would undoubtedly have wished that Hollywood had done equally well by him.

Quotes of the Day (Samuel Butler and John Erskine, on Different Types of Females)

“All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must. It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative.”—Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh (1903)

“There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.” —John Erskine, American author and educator (1879-1951).

Samuel Butler represents a dilemma for members of the “reality-based community”: How do you stereotype a writer as a religious mossback when all his life—even in the posthumously published novel that became his greatest work—he savages the clerical life at every turn? With his kind of perspective—not to mention the wit displayed in the above quote—you can’t.

After initial enthusiasm for The Origins of Species, Butler became increasingly disenchanted with Darwin’s take on it. Several of his mid-career tracts sought to reconcile will, intelligence and design to a world now under the sway of natural selection.

Judging from the sardonic passage above from The Way of All Flesh—one of many in the novel—I suspect that the novelist would have deduced Erskine’s quote as proof positive that Darwin was not infallible, in much the same way that Henry Adams pointed to the arc of American Presidents from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant as evidence of the same phenomenon.

Butler, at least, allowed for the possibility that women could be classified into three types. In contrast, Erskine’s comment implies a narrowing of the adaptive strategies of the female of the species—in a word, devolution.

In researching Erskine, I learned that he was one of the founders of the “Great Books” movement in the U.S., largely because of his advocacy of it at my alma mater, Columbia University. Contemporary Civilization and Literary Humanities—the two courses that use the mode of Socratic teaching he championed—still represent the rock of Columbia’s curriculum, 90 years later.

But I’m afraid that if Erskine had women in his classes, they might not have taken so kindly to his comment above. "Sexist pig," they might have called him (an epithet that would certainly be hurled in my time, across Broadway from Barnard), with more than a little justice. "Get over yourself," today's confident Columbia coed might have said.

In any case, the “charming woman” for whom he yearned--the type of woman that all too many males, truth be told, want--might have done so for reasons having nothing to do with his good attributes.

The critic Dwight Macdonald got to the heart of the situation in describing one woman who would unquestionably have to be classified as “very clever,” Mary McCarthy: “'When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open.''