Jonathan Miller, himself an exemplary British polymath, once famously described Susan Sontag as the most intelligent woman in America. Writer, critic, filmmaker, polemicist and political activist, she epitomised the radical engagée celebrity intellectual in the 60s and 70s with an uncompromising and demanding style. Her many books and novels set her apart as a non academic critic of the first order, which also explains why she so often came in for academic criticism.
“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish intellectual at a time when that was a decidedly unhappy combination. Perhaps her best works are The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963), but she is best known for her attendance at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and her reports for the New Yorker and the resulting book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The phrase “the banality of evil” itself has gained wide currency even if few are actually familiar with the reasoning behind its coining. As a fairly sceptical observer of the Eichmann trial, she pondered the question of whether evil is a radical concept or merely the result of thoughtlessness, the tendency of ordinary individuals to go with the flow without an especially critical evaluation of what is going on around them or what the consequences of their actions or inaction might be. A reflection that is as relevant now as ever.
“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
“The common prejudice that love is as common as “romance” may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.”
From The Human Condition (1958)
Superficially less highbrow than the others in this category, Nora Ephron was in fact a journalist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, producer, director and blogger.
She achieved great success with her screenplays for the romantic comedies When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, but in her books, including Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006) and I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (2010) are only apparently lighthearted while in fact being quite radically feminist, albeit in an understated, ironic and hugely amusing way.
For some memorable quotes go here.
Camille Paglia, who describes herself as a ‘dissident feminist’, is nothing if not controversial. Self-admittedly inspired by Susan Sontag (see above) she also claimed to be the only lesbian at Yale Graduate School, picked fights with prominent feminists and ended up under the wing of Harold Bloom.
The book that made her name was Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, which, after many rejections, was finally published in 1990 by Yale University Press (and by Einaudi in Italy). It is a challenging analysis of a perceived struggle between masculine and feminine forces in literature and art, and received wildly enthusiastic and horribly hostile reviews in almost equal measure.
Other outstanding titles include Sex, Art and American Culture (1992) and Vamps & Tramps (1994)
Quotable (and sometimes debatable) quotes:
Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.
From: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.
Ibid.
The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.
Ibid.
One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture.
Ibid.
The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.
Ibid.
Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.
Ibid.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalogue of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman’s dominance.
Ibid.
Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to over-rely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.
From: Vamps & Tramps
I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.
Ibid.
Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no.
Ibid.
So, she may sometimes be a little hard to take, but she is always worth reading.
In some ways Mary Wollstonecraft can be considered the source. Her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman began from the premise that women are not ‘naturally’ inferior to men, a claim of such astonishing radicalism, even at a time of ‘Enlightenment’, that it is today difficult to imagine and impossible not to admire her singular courage.
Though obviously greatly expanded in her most famous book, the quotation I most like, for its synthesis, comes from an earlier work:
Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.
From: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
It is not too much to say the reading The Female Eunuch (1970) in the 70s changed my view of the world forever. It introduced me to a perspective I had previously been almost entirely unaware of: from the automatic assumption of gender roles to putting the loo seat down after taking a pee. Germaine Greer, an Australian by birth who has lived most of her adult life in England, is an academic, a journalist and a ferociously engaging and provocative speaker. Listen to her talking about her book Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) here.
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
From: The Female Eunuch
But she continued to think and to challenge and to be outspoken, a much more preferable approach than silence or mute hostility because at least you know what you’re up against.
Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
From: The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1991)
Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity.
From: The Whole Woman (1999)
Along with her (all male) near contemporaries from Australia, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Barry Humphries in particular, she was part of an Antipodean invasion that immeasurably enriched the intellectual life of the English-speaking world and mine along with it.
Up next MUSICIANS.
michaelsbackpocket 