Stuff I've dug up.
[Stanley] Kauffmann divined in Bullitt not only its "phoniness" but a "possible propagandistic motive": "to show (particularly to the young) that law and order are not necessarily Dullsville." The "motive" in Bullitt was to show that several million people would pay three dollars apiece to watch Steve McQueen drive fast, but Kauffmann seems to prefer his version. "People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made," Scott Fitzgerald observed in his notes on Hollywood. "But if you actually tell them anything, you find . . . they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances and vulgarities--tell them pictures have a private grammar, like politics or automobile production or society, and watch the blank look come into their faces."
--Joan Didion, The White Album
Let me tell you why I hate critics. Not for the normal reasons: that they're failed creators (they usually aren't; they may be failed critics, but that's another matter); or that they're by nature carping, jealous and vain (they usually aren't; if anything, they might better be accused of over-generosity, of upgrading the second-rate so that their own fine discriminations thereby appear the rarer). No, the reason I hate critics--well, some of the time--is that they write sentences like this:
Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes (14); on another deep black eyes (15); and on another blue eyes (16).
This precise and disheartening indictment was drawn up by the late Dr Enid Starkie, Reader Emeritus in French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Flaubert's most exhaustive British biographer. The numbers in her text refer to footnotes in which she spears the novelist with chapter and verse.
. . .
And the moral of it all, I suppose is: Never take fright at a footnote. Here are the six references Flaubert makes to Emma Bovary's eyes in the course of the book. It is clearly a subject of some importance to the novelist:
1 (Emma's first appearance) 'In so far as she was beautiful, this beauty lay in her eyes: although they were brown, they would appear black because of her lashes . . .'
2 (Described by her adoring husband early in their marriage) 'Her eyes seemed bigger to him, especially when she was just waking up and fluttered her lids several times in succession; they were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight; and they seemed to contain layer upon layer of colours, which were thicker in hue deep down, and became lighter towards the enamel-like surface.'
3 (At a candlelit ball) 'Her black eyes appeared even blacker.'
4 (On first meeting Leon) 'Fixing him with her large, wide-open black eyes'.
5 (Indoors, as she appears to Rodolphe when he first examines her) 'Her black eyes'.
6 (Emma looking in a mirror, indoors, in the evening; she has just been seduced by Rodolphe) 'Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.'
How did the critic put it? 'Flaubert does not build up characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that . . .' It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that his heroine had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by Dr Starkie in carelessly selling him short.
And one final thing, just to make absolutely sure. Our earliest substantial source of knowledge about Flaubert is Maxime du Camp's Souvenirs litteraires. . . . On page 306 of the first volume Du Camp describes in great detail the woman on whom Emma Bovary was based. . . .:
. . . her eyes, of uncertain colour, green, grey, or blue, according to the light, had a pleading expression, which never left them.
Dr Starkie appears to have been serenely unaware of this enlightening passage. All in all, it seems a magisterial negligence towards a writer who must, one way and another, have paid a lot of her gas bills. Quite simply, it makes me furious. Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage.
--Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
I rarely read critics anymore, except for those in The New York Times, who directly affect the box office (and not all that much). When I look back at the ones I've encountered over the years, however, I have the dismaying thought that if, as the saying goes, a man is best measured by the size of his enemies, I'm in a lot of trouble.
--Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat
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