by Sharan Shetty

Whit Stillman takes his time. A renowned documenter of the well-educated and self-absorbed, the writer-director has made only four films in 22 years. His layered depictions of the “urban haute bourgeoisie” are, though rare, singular in cinema, and unique in their dry humor and light irony.

Of those four films, perhaps the most influential is Metropolitan, his sleeper-hit debut that premiered in 1990 to critical acclaim and an Oscar nod for best original screenplay. The film portrays a “not so long ago” debutante scene in the upper-crust apartments of New York, where 20-somethings decked in tuxedoes and drinking champagne discuss Fourier, trip on mescaline, and repeatedly use the word “tiresome.”

Stillman’s script, chiseled to a subtle perfection, is a thing of beauty. Of those screenwriters who depict the lives of neurotic, privileged youth, he’s the oft-overlooked link between Woody Allen and Lena Dunham. Metropolitan’s entire narrative consists of conversations between outspoken, embittered students bound by a temporary camaraderie; the dialogues are crisp, biting, and imbued with a playful intelligence. We’re introduced to eight characters, know them for only 98 minutes, yet they each loom large in memory. I recently talked with Stillman to explore what went into writing such a finely tuned film.

A compilation of dialogues from Metropolitan.

It’s been 22 years since Metropolitan was released. It was your first film, your first script. What were your inspirations, in terms of content?

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn’t really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process. I also had a day job: I was an agent for illustrators and cartoonists.

At a certain point, the script for Metropolitan started naturally coming together; the idea was to think back to a time that had been very important for me. And I remembered this experience, after my freshman year in college [at Harvard], of coming back to New York and being invited to some of these debutante parties. A lot of stuff in the script is actually true: the escort shortage, things like that. I had a friend who was kind of from that milieu more than I was, and I think the mothers felt they could call me or him as escorts for their daughters, and they’d get both of us, a sort of 2-for-1 deal.

And once you’re invited to one, you get invited to another. It was great, because I was very discouraged and depressed in school, and didn’t know that many people in New York. It was really interesting because I fell in with this funny, friendly group of people, including girls very much like Sally and Jane, who had access to their parents’ apartments late at night. The parents would be sleeping in residential quarters, and it’d be a rather large apartment, and they would let us hang out there after the parties. And we just had a sensational time. It was one period where I wasn’t just in the dumps. So it loomed in my memory even in my mid-30s, as this kind of interesting memory of when I was around 18.

Did you set out to redeem the people involved in that debutante scene? You’ve mentioned before that that sort of educated, wealthy class is often stigmatized. Was there a thought there that, as Charlie thinks in the movie, they had been wrongly portrayed?

It was more trying to preserve something in amber. I was specifically portraying the 1969 deb season, as during that season there was very much the feeling that the debutante era was over. The whole Woodstock, post-Vietnam cultural shift was coming. Also, everyone lost their money. There were so many stories like that. I remember one family: the father was a player on Wall Street who lost all his wealth, but he’d already paid for his daughter’s deb party. So they actually went ahead with the party and then moved to Australia, broke. It really was like that. All those parties disappeared in the next several years. And yet they came back, and continue to this day.

Irritated with labels like “preppy” and “WASP,” Charlie explains the reasoning behind his term UHB, or “urban haute bourgeoisie.”

You said you had a day job. What was the process like of writing the script during that period? It seems like you almost lived a double life.

It was an odd thing. The first two years I didn’t have a child, and then I did. So I was on this nighttime writing schedule where I would write from 10 to 2 at night. I’d have dinner and split a beer with my wife, then I’d have a cup of coffee and get back to writing. I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 am, and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly I actually had better ideas.

You’re seen as having a sort of literary, intellectual voice. There’s a very subtle irony to it, especially in Metropolitan. Did you consciously develop that through drafts, or was it a natural way to illustrate these characters?

Well, I hate a lot of the stuff I first come up with, so it’s very much a process of rejection. The key thing to look for is when a character seems to have some sort of autonomy: where they’re making decisions without you needing to expend much effort in writing them. When you’re trying to force things in a script, it seems like it’s getting somewhere, but it isn’t real or interesting. All the bad material you’ve written becomes an albatross around your neck. So I really don’t like writing a lot of bad stuff, I prefer to just keep narrowing it down to stuff I think is solid. I hate doing an outline, or some sort of big treatment idea, or anything where I’m supposed to tell people what the story is before I’ve written it. I find that approach incredibly unhelpful. Sure, the general ideas about the ending and the characters are in my mind, but I find it better to develop those as I go along.

The characters and conversations are so finely sketched, which I think is what makes the film work so well. How many of these characters are composites of people you knew?

It is, to a certain extent, rooted in reality. In real life, particularly in this debutante scene group of people, each person has a function. One is inviting everyone to their house. Another is judging them all, having opinions on everything. One is sort of the decadent group leader, who is picking up interesting stuff and theories. In the case of Metropolitan, the people I spent time with during that summer were definitely inspirations for the characters. But at a certain point, the fictional character has to create their own dynamic and be their own person. With Metropolitan, I find it interesting that very often the people who it’s based on deny any similarity and the people who it’s not based on say “Oh, that’s me.”

The trailer for the film sketches out the dynamics between the group of debutante friends known as the Sally Fowler Rat Pack.

You sold your apartment to finance the film.

And I still don’t have an apartment! I’m cat-sitting this week.

So you were, like your character Tom Townsend, of “limited resources.”

(Laughing.) Yes, precisely.

What, then, convinced you so strongly it was a script that needed to be made?

Well, I was pretty desperate. I was desperate to get my career going. I had entered my 30s, I had been prospecting around the sides of the film business, but I hadn’t really gotten into what I wanted to do. And the apartment was really just a rental apartment: I sold the right to buy the apartment. Legally, I bought and resold it. But I just borrowed money to buy at the insider’s price and sell at the outsider’s price. So with that $50,000, I could make an indie film. Metropolitan cost $230,000, but we only put in $210,000. The reason it worked is because we started making sales before we finished paying our bills.

Nick reprimands Tom for condescending to the upper-class lifestyle.

It’s not a script that, on paper, would seem to communicate the tone you see on screen. Or did it? How was the script received by friends or people you showed it to?

The script generally read well. It really depended on whether the reader had screenwriter biases. There were two reactions to it that were very negative, and examples of such biases: one was a friend of mine, a wannabe screenwriter, who was very communicative about things. He was scathing about the long monologues in the script, such as Nick Smith talking about Polly Perkins and Rick Von Sloneker. He hated that. I also sent the script to a professor at the NYU Tisch School, who said she couldn’t even look at it because, of all things, the margins weren’t right. The dialogue wasn’t centered or something. And so she couldn’t help us, because it wasn’t professionally formatted.

Then I had my godfather, a professor, read it and he specifically liked the Polly Perkins story. He really loved it — and it turned out to be the best scene in the film.

Nick tells the story of Polly Perkins and the horrors of Rick Von Sloneker.

And how did the actors view the script? Was it tweaked at all during production?

The actors were all great. One of the reasons I like doing films in this age range is you get really great actors who don’t already have agents or whatever, and they’re great talents, and it’s great to discover them and put them in their first film.

Taylor Nichols, who played Charlie, was actually not that keen on the script. He had some issues with all the sociological monologues his character delivers. But what he really liked was the Charlie-Tom relationship at the end of the film. And in the editing room, he proved correct: we had to pare down those speeches. That was the real challenge, to winnow down Charlie’s sociological rants that were everywhere in the script. What I found is that when a character is telling a story, he can talk as long as he wants. You can write a 5-page monologue if it’s a story; that’s why Nick telling the Polly Perkins story works. When people are telling stories on screen, you can show the reactions of people, play it off those reactions, and it can be fun. But when it’s someone just giving an opinion on things, even if the opinion is kind of interesting, that is potentially deadly. It has to be really quick.

The beginning intertitles are often analyzed: “Manhattan, Christmas Vacation, not so long ago.” What were your reasons for setting the film in “not so long ago”?

It’s interesting you noted that, because I did it for two main reasons. One was just low-budget indie film production reality: I couldn’t afford to do a film set in 1968 or 1969. We’d need period cars, costumes, all that. So I didn’t specify. I also think that isn’t very interesting; once you specify a time, once you say “this is 1969,” you separate people from the story. So the idea was to suggest the past, but not say too much. People can come to their own conclusions about what period it is. And the reaction was great: there were some people who thought it was the 50s, others, the 60s, others who thought it was the 80s, when it was filmed. What helped the ambiguity on film is that most cars parked on Park Avenue, or on any street, are old cars. No one parks their new Jaguar out there.

There also seems to be a change in tone before and after Christmas. Before, the film is mostly intellectual conversation. After, it’s drug-taking, candor games, and fistfights. Was that a conscious decision?

Definitely. That’s supposed to represent 60s going into the 70s. The whole transition between the cultures of those respective decades.

Ah.

Yeah. Within three months of the debutante parties I went to, it was a whole different world. People had long hair, were experimenting with drugs. It’s funny, because I snuck into a deb party with my cousin in Philadelphia, back when I was quite a bit younger, in, like, 1967. And back then, the deb scene was the world that seemed strange and different, like the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald. By the time of that New York summer though, that world was falling apart and a whole new one was coming in. So the difference in events after Christmas in the movie really reflects the change I experienced of the 70s coming in.

On a more technical level, one of the things I love about the writing, and which I think is underrated, is the use of repetition. Just certain phrases: things are “surprising,” people are “tiresome.” Is this a characteristic of the urban haute bourgeoise that you’d noted? Or was it a purely comic device?

Both, really. It’s definitely a characteristic of the UHB and my personal vocabulary. And in American comedy, repetition is very important. It’s funny because when you go to Europe, they don’t really like it that much. When you’re dubbing or subtitling, in Europe they will try to vary the language, and you have to say “No, we want to repeat that exact phrase over and over.” And they say, “why?”

There’s no real clear protagonist in the film. You start thinking it’s Tom, but then you realize that maybe he is, as Charles says, a “huge phony.” Nick, on the other hand, despite his snobbery and meanness, can be endearing. Is he the real hero here? And did the hero change from your first conceptions of the story?

You’re absolutely right. I see the film now as having four identification characters, and that’s evident in the script. Those four characters are Tom, Audrey, Charlie, and Nick. I also think it’s in that order, with Tom being the most obvious, but then the viewer realizing that maybe that’s not the case.

At first, I really thought the protagonist was going to be Tom. But as I was writing the script, I thought “Wow, this guy’s kind of a jerk. He has this lovely girl [Audrey] who adores him right under his nose, and he prefers this meretricious, prude girl [Serena].” Well, I’m going to withdraw the word ‘meretricious,’ because I don’t know what that means. But then I tried to make it about Audrey, since it seemed like there was too much focus on Tom. And then during all that writing, I was simultaneously trying to get in my own observations about the social milieu at the time. All that is manifest in Charlie’s dialogue and long, ranting observations: that was me being the sociologist.

But in the end, I think there’s something comical and compelling about the intellectual gravity of Nick that really became an engine in the script. You get caught up in it, even if you don’t think you are. One of the criticisms I get of the film is that all its energy goes out once Nick Smith leaves. I can see how people react that way, because you’re getting a lot of the fun and comedy from Nick. A lot of these things, frankly, I did not catch as the writer of the script. People had to bring it to my attention.

Nick and Tom discuss the barbarism of their generation while roaming the streets of New York.

For about three-quarters of the film, it’s mostly conversations. The last fourth is a very Hollywood ending, all action. What made you move toward that type of more conventional, rom-com ending?

That ending required a lot of work. Shooting what was written at the end there, when they barge into Von Sloneker’s room, was just so bad. It was painful. Luckily, the editor found this little smile Audrey gives Tom to redeem the scene. That wasn’t even directed. Same with the beach scene — she touches or adjusts Tom’s collar, and it’s a beautiful touch that really brought to life what was written. And the very last shot, with Tom, Charlie, and Audrey just walking down the road — I’m really embarrassed by it. In the script, it actually ends with a cool sports car passing them on that road, and the audience watching them fade away in the rearview mirror. Of course, with our budget, that was basically impossible. Sometimes you just can’t do what’s in the script.

Right. I’ve heard many writers talk about how important it is to write the conclusion first. Where in the writing process did you hit upon that ending, and how did it affect the rest of the script?

Well, I wrote about a third of the script, and then I thought, oh my god, I have to see how this ends. So I wrote the end of the script, but then I had to go back and write the middle part of the movie. For me it was like the Transcontinental railroad, where you have the tracks coming out from San Francisco, which is the end of the movie, and the tracks coming out from Chicago, and I had to get the tracks to the same spot somewhere. I don’t know where in the movie is the golden spike, because the writing is both from the back and from the front.

That being said, not much is resolved in the ending. These eight kids realize that though they’ve spent winter break constantly together, they may never see each other again. We, likewise, see bits and pieces of their lives, but not enough to make an informed judgment of who they really are or will be.

One of the things I strongly felt is that if you’re writing a romantic story in this age range, you should not be saying these people are going to get married. You should not be saying that they’ve found a life solution, that Tom and Audrey are going to live happily ever after, or ever after in any way. You have to say that this guy and this girl are going to have a relationship. And it might be a nice relationship, but very possibly it’s not their definitive relationship. My feeling was that Charlie would always remain a friend of Audrey’s, and Tom might be the old boyfriend she rarely sees. Which worked, because when I was writing Last Days of Disco, Charlie and Audrey are still friends. They’re not dating each other, but they’re still going out together. I think loose ends are important. They make the script, the film, more real.

Tom realizes the temporality of his friendships with the Sally Fowler Rat Pack.

Previously: The Sound Of Requiem For A Dream

Sharan Shetty is an Awl summer reporter.

I sat behind the plate at Fenway Park in Boston a few years back and watched Tim Wakefield pitch a game with his knuckleball, and man, the way the ball dove and rose and fluttered and swerved — sometimes, clearly to a distance of feet — it was about the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The science is hard to understand. (For me at least.) It has to do with air currents and friction created by the seams of the ball and turbulence and vortices. Anyway, Awl pal Christine Schomer helped make what looks to be an excellent documentary about the subject. And here’s hoping that knuckleballer R.A. Dickey (who another Awl pal, David Roth, describes as speaking like “a character in a Charles Portis novel”) wins the National League Cy Young award this year.

The British Invasion… Again: Landing In New York

by Robert Sullivan

The British invasion began on this day in 1776. For the next couple weeks, Robert Sullivan will be considering how the trail of the Battle of Brooklyn would pass across modern-day New York.

Say the Revolutionary War had never happened back in 1776. Say the British and the American colonists had been able to keep their relationship patched together for another 236 years, puttering along like an old car. Say things were at last things coming to a boil — perhaps due to some remark made by Bob Costas during the Olympics, or due to a break in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. Say the British were at last about to invade. A good way to check in on the invading force from your apartment right now — which assuming the time-space continuum allowed it — would be to watch the MTA’s live bridge cams, specifically the ones set up on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which are spotty and always under repair (like the bridge itself) but eventually would give you some idea of how things were going, invasion-wise.

If you’d been commuting from Staten Island or Jersey yourself this morning, then you would be ahead of the game, seeing the masts of the British ships, the large rowboat landing the soldiers over in Brooklyn, perhaps firing a musket at the occasional stray jet skier. This is assuming the British still had their 18th-century fleet, and assuming, again, that the date is something like 1776/2012. Again, we’re bending time here — seeing both times at once. Gravesend is where they in fact landed on August 22, 1776, and if you consider that the season and the places are constants and you just fudge the time a little, then that’s today. (It was almost out of habit that the British landed in Gravesend it seems, as they’d landed there in 1664, also in August, when they took the town of New Amsterdam from the Dutch.)

The narrows from the water, entering the upper bay.

If you were driving across the Verrazano this morning, you would probably have seen lighter than normal automobile traffic, it being a weekday at the end of summer, but the British military traffic would be heavy and picking up, as they ferried men from the boats to the shore, along the path of the 18th-century equivalent of the Verrazano-Narrows, which was Denyse’s Ferry, a ferry that took travelers between Staten and Long islands, the natural short cut across the harbor. The modern bridge takes its name from this relatively narrow strait of water between Staten Island and Brooklyn. If you were out there this morning, in place of the fleet you would see large container ships moving slowly through the Narrows; waiting in a long line for the pilots who will board and take them into port in Newark or Elizabeth. (You can see their ghosts on the satellite view of the Narrows on Google.) If you’ve ever approached the Narrows in a boat, coming, from, say, Lower Manhattan, you know that the air changes at the Narrows, that suddenly the temperature drops a little, that at that point the smell is less of the harbor and more of the open sea. The Verrazano Narrows is a border, a microclimate threshold, a natural invasion point, it seems.

On August 24, 1776, the Constitutional Gazette would report that the “ministerial troops” had landed “between New-Utrecht and Gravesend on Long Island to the number of 7000 men.” A later report noted that there were a little over 12,000 British “on the Shore by 11 o’Clock.” As far as military logistics go, Brooklyn was a good place to invade; the farms in Brooklyn could feed an army, and the Dutch settlers in the area do not have a political dog in the fight. It was a big landing. The statistic that is invariably mentioned in post-World War II accounts of the 1776 British invasion is this: it was the largest invasion by military forces until D-Day.

For me, imagining a British invasion helps me see the modern harbor. Seeing the harbor is, I feel, a big deal, especially in a place where it is sometimes difficult to see the water. Once I was at a swanky dinner, a fundraiser, during which a number of well-known performers sang sea shanties in Brooklyn, including Gavin Friday, who I think scared a lot of people. At one point one of the singers said, “Do you realize that New York City is a harbor city?” At this, people gasped, in shock at the idea.

Seeing the harbor takes some work. It’s one thing to do it with a map, another to do it in a boat, or even on land — to see the jaws of the so-called New York and New Jersey bight, one jaw the Rockaways, the other Sandy Hook in New Jersey. It’s difficult to imagine that a ship or a fleet sailing from England would, after weeks at sea, somehow spot Sandy Hook, then home to a light house, today home to a lighthouse and the East Coast’s largest nude beach.

It’s kind of wonderful to imagine that a ship would then stop to take on fresh water, in what is today Highlands, New Jersey (“Where the Jersey Shore begins”) and then know to head into to the Lower New York Bay and maybe on a clear day even look into the distance to see the Catskills, a possibility, or so claimed Jasper Danckaerts, a sailor on Henry Hudson’s Half Moon (as noted in John Waldman’s Heartbeats in the Muck). It is, for me, a worthwhile endeavor to think that they would see the tall building at the bottom of Manhattan marking the end of their trip to Manhattan — today the not-finished World Trade Center building, then Trinity Church. This what happens in August, and all through the years, when I see the towers of the Verrazano Bridge. And it happens casually, and when I least expect it, each time I glance one or two of the Verrazano’s towers on the horizon — when I am, for instance, crossing the BQE on foot into Red Hook, or hanging out near the police department’s evidence pier on the shore of Gowanus Bay, or having a drink up high in the Standard Hotel’s harbor view bar, or riding the Staten Island Ferry. The towers are like stakes, pins in the map of time, invitations to see a bigger picture of where we live.

Robert Sullivan is the author of a several books, including Rats, How Not To Get Rich, and the Meadowlands. His newest book My American Revolution will be published out Sept. 4 and is available for preorder.

★★★ Superior cloud-watching. In the morning, thin high stripes of white and pale blue stretched north and south, against the deeper blue. A contrail cut across them at a 20 degree angle, like a stray white thread on a bolt of patterned cloth. The whole fabric of it kept moving north, or north-northeast, and the straight lines gave way to feathery whorls, likewise northbound. Outside under it, the sun came through untenderly, not to be trusted around babies. The babies were covered by cloth, by sunshade, by sideways headflap on the baby-wearing harness, by color-coordinated stroller-mounted parasol. Keep the babies in the shadows. Day’s end brought ridiculous painterliness in the west: gray-blue puffs rimmed with gold, pulling apart to show robin’s-egg blue; a progression of rose-blossom colors, from peach-colored rose through rose-colored rose on into the deep magentas, those roses people buy when a dark-red rose just isn’t red enough.

“Chitin is the principal protein in crustaceans’ shells, but its toughness and its ability to be ‘electrospun’ into fibres that can be made into mats make it an ideal sustainable and biodegradable choice for uranium harvesting.”
 — In today’s solution-to-the-world’s-energy-crisis-that-will-probably-never-work: Scientists are trying to figure out how to use the millions of tons of shrimp shells we throw away every year to help sop up the billions of tons of uranium floating around in the ocean and put it into nuclear fuel pellets. Apparently, at least judging from this 1984 Sizzler’s Steakhouse commercial, we should be able to find enough shrimp shells in the pockets of Martin Donovan’s work-out gear to power us well into the 22nd century.

Tina Brown is all, “Well played, National Review. Well played.”

by Michelle Dean

There was, you know, a time when arguing about arguing actually felt vital. Really! To wit: In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote an essay on Leni Riefenstahl for The New York Review of Books. It was not her first comment on the director of the Triumph of the Will. She had, earlier, written of Riefenstahl’s work in more admiring terms in Against Interpretation: “The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss.” But this time she’d been asked to review a book of Riefenstahl’s photography of the Nuba tribes in Sudan, and the bland indifference of the jacket copy provoked her.

It takes a certain originality to describe the Nazi era as “Germany’s blighted and momentous 1930s,” to summarize the events of 1933 as Hitler’s “having attained power,” and to assert that Riefenstahl, most of whose work was in its own decade correctly identified as Nazi propaganda, enjoyed “international fame as a film director,” ostensibly like her contemporaries Renoir, Lubitsch, and Flaherty. (Could the publishers have let LR write the jacket copy herself? One hesitates to entertain so unkind a thought, although “her first devotion was to creative dancing” is a phrase few native speakers of English would be capable of.)

Ouch. Sontag’s new attitude was an inverted reflection of the change in Riefenstahl’s fortunes. In the mid-70s the director was enjoying something of a revival. She was, as Sontag noted in her essay, about to be fêted at film festivals, and had been a marquee name on a poster for the New York Film Festival designed by, Sontag remarked darkly, a “well-known artist who is also a feminist.” Sontag felt that part of Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation owed to the simple fact of being a woman: “Feminists would feel a pang at having to sacrifice the one woman who made films that everybody acknowledges to be first-rate.”

At that, one of the Review’s regular readers bristled. Adrienne Rich was then terribly visible not just as a poet, but as a “feminist poet.” The year before, when she won the National Book Award for Diving Into the Wreck, she’d arrived at the ceremony with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walkers, and, in a joint acceptance speech, the trio declared they were accepting the award on behalf of all women. “We believe,” their statement went on, “that we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other.”

Rich may have been the kind of feminist who refers to others as “sisters,” but she was silent on whether Riefenstahl might count as one. What offended her was the suggestion that the accolades being heaped on the director had anything to do with the movement she held dear. In a letter to the NYRB — the entire exchange is here

— she pointed out that, in fact, there were women-organized picket lines outside some of the venues now celebrating Riefenstahl. And that “there is a running criticism by radical feminists of male-identified ‘successful’ women, whether they are artists, executives, psychiatrists, Marxists, politicians, or scholars.”

Rich also wanted to press the cut a little deeper. She wanted to know why Sontag was not considering, in an essay about fascist aesthetics, the relevance of gender. “One is not looking for a ‘line’ of propaganda or a ‘correct” position,’” Rich offered. “One is simply eager to see this woman’s mind working out of a deeper complexity, informed by emotional grounding; and this has not yet proven to be the case.”

Sontag was not buying. One of the many ironies of Sontag’s character was that she, herself, was quite susceptible to being hurt by critics, and that probably aggravated the resistance. Friends later told Carl Rollyson & Lisa Paddock, who wrote an unauthorized biography of Sontag, that her great respect for Rich had added to the sting. So when Sontag parried, it was to cover that she was moving in for a kill.

In her reply to the NYRB, Sontag effectively called Rich a dogmatist. She placed the poet among those who want “an unremitting rhetoric, with every argument arriving triumphantly at a militant conclusion.” The subject of her essay was fascist aesthetics; why should it address gender? (She had apparently forgotten she’d been the one to raise its relevance.) Her work, Sontag averred, rested on carefully drawn distinctions, ones that blunt minds (implied here was Rich’s) couldn’t grasp. And “it is surely not treasonable to think that there are other goals than the depolarization of the two sexes, other wounds than sexual wounds, other identities than sexual identity, other politics than sexual politics — and other ‘anti-human values’ than ‘misogynist’ ones.”

Today, I suspect, more readers would agree with Sontag than Rich. But any time two formidable minds wrestle with such difficult questions, offering up any kind of verdict seems slightly beside the point. They’re both wrong and right, and what’s more, they arrive on the field knowing they will likely leave without a clear victor. “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded,” Sontag observed in the exchange’s most-quoted line. Emphasis is often placed on the second clause of the sentence; but then, there is the first half to think about, too.

What makes this exchange so refreshing to revisit is that schoolyard words like “nice” and “mean” are wholly irrelevant to it. And, too, it’s a fierce, intelligent debate between two women, a constituency that’s been disproportionately targeted in much of the recent “concern” about the State of Criticism.

The last few weeks have given rise to something of an eighty-car pileup of criticism on criticism, so let me try to recap as briefly as possible. A few weeks ago, at Slate, Jacob Silverman proposed that we all take our gloves off when it comes to criticism. We are all, he argued, getting too “nice.” The chief exhibit for the prosecution was the novelist Emma Straub, whose well-wishing twitter feed was a presumed example of the “mutual admiration society that is today’s literary culture, particularly online.” Also mentioned was that she’d once posted a picture of herself wearing a flower crown. Beyond that the essay was pretty short on specifics. Was there some instance of a twitter-buddy of Straub’s or any other author turning in a glowing review? None given. But this didn’t prevent Dwight Garner from calling the essay “smart” in the Times, and that Esquire columnist was way into it, too, alleging that anyone wounded by a bad review was “weak.”

Yet the congratulatory mentions came to an abrupt halt when, this weekend, The New York Times Book Review doled out the gift of someone who was willing to make the subtext text: that is, with William Giraldi’s review of two books by Alix Ohlin. I guess you could say he didn’t like it, which apparently meant he was free to describe terms so condescending and vague as to transform the whole into comedy. It was not, to my knowledge, my birthday, but he even used the term “phallic shadow.” He could not stop himself from citing, among others, Cervantes, Bellow, and Pound, erecting a tower of clutching, covetous references to Great Men (and one Great Eliot). And there it was, right out in the sun: the fact was that what he objected to was having to treat this “women’s fiction.” The uncomfortable silence that followed was telling. He’d gone and let the cat out of the bag they thought was empty.

It’s curious that when examples of “too much niceness” get bandied around, it’s almost always midlist female novelists who are chosen as examples — and not, say, a writer like Chad Harbach. The arrival of Harbach’s book, The Art of Fielding, was accompanied by one of the strangest pieces of “journalism” I’ve ever read, a bizarre triumphalist narrative written by Keith Gessen (Harbach’s best friend, former roommate, and coeditor at n+1, it helpfully informs us) that appeared not on Twitter, that devil’s medium, but in the pages of Vanity Fair (it’s not online, but is an ebook now). The overall ponderousness of the thing is exemplified by one of its last lines: “Time had written the book, but Chad had had to become its conduit.”

Why start with flower crowns when you could start with Harbach, one wonders? Or, okay, I’ll be honest, one doesn’t.

You’d think that the idea of an egalitarian literary scene would be adequately disproven by those dreadful VIDA pie charts, but if you long for more evidence here’s another data point: even when women get cited by certain male critics, they’re invoked with the blind misconstruction of someone who hasn’t read them.

For example, in the Slate piece, Silverman invokes Rebecca West approvingly, writing she “could savage someone’s book in the morning and dine with him in the evening.” Indeed, in 1914, West did write an essay titled “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” but few, it seems, have bothered to read past the header. Though she’s apparently the model par excellence of cruelty, West never called for the slaughter of the semi-invisible midlist novelist. She went after the big guns, the respected minds, precisely because she was not so much interested in people or careers or “literary circles” as she was in ideas.

“Criticism matters as it never did in the past,” West wrote, “because of the present pride of great writers.” Her argument was that the late-career laziness of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells had to be fought because it threatened to overwhelm their wisdom, not because they needed to be cut out of the club. She also had Mrs. Humphry Ward in her sights, a figure fond of angel-in-the-house model of feminine ambition that was so antithetical to West. (Ward opposed female suffrage.) Yet in West’s time, Mrs. Humphry Ward had the respect of intellectual men. In short: West’s sights in that essay were set on the powerful. She was not dispatching vitriol to guard already well-defended ramparts. She wanted better discussions, point blank. She was not looking to gratuitously end careers before they’d even taken flight.

The fact is, “harshness” is a moving target. It means entirely different things to different people. And one line along which it often divides is gender. In retrospect, that a call for being “less nice” would begin with a male critic isn’t so surprising: There’s a certain male tint to the perspective that life happens on a level playing field, where reason is always triumphant and a hint of bias is a slag on a good man’s word, so why can’t we go mano-a-mano and all just have at it? Women, for better or worse, don’t have that luxury. They know that the unconscious bias is always there. Yes, it’s expressed along a spectrum: not everyone is as clueless as our poor “phallic shadow”-master in the weekend review. But even less direct disapproval can ping a radar, if you’ve been out and about in the professional world for long enough.

Nor is it always conscious, either. As Rebecca Solnit puts it in that oft-cited piece on Men Who Explain Things, the dynamic at play here is often one of “unsupported confidence.” What makes them Men Who Explain Things is their indifference to, if not outright ignorance of, the subject matter. It’s that way you come to know that their corrections are, instead, small acts of discipline — what Solnit calls the signals that “this is not [a woman’s] world.”

“I’m only voicing legitimate criticism” is a defense that any woman who’s bothered to accuse a man of “mansplaining” has heard, ad nauseam. Which is why my back gets up, a bit, when I hear “legitimate criticism” veneered on to a debate about criticism. (A side effect of the syndrome is that, presented with the concept, some men will feel it necessary to inform you, frequently at length, what it is that you don’t understand about mansplanation.) “And why do I need to be nice?” these men ask, when actually all you are asking is that they not approach you as some aspiring immigrant from another country, and one on the bad end of a trade deficit, at that. People say this is a fine line, but I don’t believe that; arrogance and intelligence are actually not that hard to distinguish from each other. One is a lot less easy to make fun of, that’s for sure.

But let’s not let that hilariousness mask that the initial resistance matters, as it’s what allows a person to imagine he is writing about “literature” or “greatness” or “culture” when what he’s really writing about is the work of other men. Sure, a lot of such critics will punctuate their work with a reference to Joan Didion here, one to Toni Morrison there, or whoever else is deemed admissible that week. But just like Sontag’s offhand reference to the unnamed “feminists” defending Riefenstahl, it comes across as more lazy than actual, serious engagement with the many, many great (and varied) books that have been written by women. Anyone offended by that suggestion need only recall Rich’s request: it’s not dogma we want, but deeper complexity.

But for those who still don’t get it, let me be the first to say, yes, don’t worry, you needn’t remind us: all your best Alice Munros are women.

Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her on Twitter.

“THE indispensable ingredient in great whiskey is time: years of aging and mellowing in casks. But in the world of craft whiskey, a growing number of distillers are unwilling to wait that long. With a range of new technologies and techniques — smaller barrels, ultrasound machines, pressure chambers — they can put on the shelf in a matter of months, if not weeks, whiskeys that they say compare to ones matured for three to five years.”
 — Listen, I am all for progress and what have you, but there are just some things man was not meant to mess with.

“The White House has been too late in reaching out to their donors and making them feel appreciated. You can’t go and ask for a million dollars from someone who can’t get a White House tour for his daughter.”

To blame the High Line for overgentrification of WChelsea is like saying the federal deficit is caused by arts funding nytimes.com/2012/08/22/opi…

— Matthew Gallaway (@matthewgallaway) August 22, 2012

Today’s Times brings one of our old favorites, Jeremiah Moss, on the radical changes in West Chelsea in the age of the High Line. The High Line, only open since summer of 2009, he writes, is overcrowded (uh, yes!) and “quickly became a tool for the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a new, upscale, corporatized stretch along the West Side.” He predicts a chain-mall future for the ground level of West Chelsea. Well, as someone warned, nine years ago now, “landlords and developers may be allowed to spend the next decade in a shock-and-awe campaign on the West Chelsea district.” (The zoning of the High Line included the ability to “install 50 times the number of current dwelling units in 14 or so blocks,” creating “a forbidding wall along 10th Avenue.”) And here we are, with too much rich goodness to digest. The pact that Friends of the High Line made with the City — even while disassociating themselves from the dirty political zoning efforts — to get the park made created an incredibly speedy transformation that’s now out of everyone’s hands. What happens next is up to demand, market rents and whoever finds the best way to service both finicky tourists and rich residents. And here: a counterpoint, sort of, which addresses the idea of affordable housing, which is completely disregarded by the Bloomberg administration, no matter what its goals actually are, in actual matters of zoning and development.