Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

Oh yes, and you should hear her on Bob Woodward and Deep Throat. I don’t know anyone else who has pointed out that Mark Felt — identified upon his death, years later, by Woodward as Deep Throat — was widely briefing, dishing to, and confiding in almost everybody involved in the investigation. He became, in other words, the happenstance face for what every professional journalist of a certain age knows to be — though, given Woodward’s reach, few will say so — a convenient composite.

It is extremely difficult to explain how Bob Woodward’s career could have progressed after Adler, on more than one occasion, took him apart. But then again that is the point about Woodward and Adler’s critique of him, he — quite unlike Adler herself — has always existed in a compact with the power centers that he covers.

If there is anyone who has violated the clubbiness of the literary and journalistic world more than Adler I cannot think of whom.

Among the reasons, I believe, that she seems so fierce, impolite, unexpected, even outré, is that she has no politics — or no official politics. In her introduction, included here, to Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism (1970), she offers perhaps one of the last defenses of centrism as a definition of reasonability and intellectual honesty. The irony of course is that it is centrism itself that has become a contrarian, radical and disturbing.

As she presciently described long ago, television talking heads (before they were called talking heads) are spokespeople whose positions can always be predicted; Adler’s cannot because they are not based on membership in a particular club or linked to a commercial persona (or, now, a brand), unlike the myriad pundits whose worth is based on the consistency of their views. What is to be made of the usefulness or intellectual integrity of journalists and commentators whose positions are always known? They might as well never write at all — saving time for everyone. And yet, of course, the market accommodates them, whereas unanticipated views are met with hostility and confusion.

Adler is trying to write about people’s motivations, about their inherent conflicts, about not what they say they believe in or stand for, but the largely happenstance circumstances that got them to their chance moment in the sun. All people and all events have another story. Nothing is as it represents itself to be. That is bound to be an unsettling and unpopular analysis.

Her politics, to the extent that she has any proscribed position, has to do with language. She unpacks to startling effect what people are actually saying. She is one of the few writers who hold people accountable for the words they use. In doing so, meaning, or assumed meaning, often falls quickly away, and laziness, buffoonery, ignorance, and worlds without the most basic logic are revealed.

Her own prose, on the other hand, is quite unlike any journalism being written today. It exists in service to itself, as its own standard, as its own force, and not in support of political or commercial positions. It is a depressing realization that writing like this is really no longer practiced, that journalism is not a writer’s game anymore, that the language of most journalism is as dead and meaningless as the language of politics and of pop culture, from where so much of it comes.

Adler is often writing about a writer’s position in the larger world. Hers is a meditation on the power that journalists accrue, often falsely, as a product of media rather than language. A successful journalist graduates from being a writer or a reporter into being a politician or adroit entrepreneur — a fundamentally different business than pushing sentences.

Adler herself is an example of another kind of writer, a writer’s writer, if you will. One without institutional protection, or even self-saving restraint. The ability to write with financial and emotional support — the sine qua non of being able to write — is predicated on a successful relationship with a media power, a devil’s deal almost every writer gladly makes.

It is possible perhaps for an indomitable fighter to go it alone, to face down the cultural bishops of the moment. But Adler, except in her prose, is as indomitable as a mouse.

Fortunately, her writing speaks for itself.

— MICHAEL WOLFF

IN MAY, 1969, as I was watching Another World , Lee Randolph died. I had bought my television set more than two years before, after going to California to do a piece about the Sunset Strip. Buying the set had nothing to do with the piece at all, or any piece. But on assignment, in the sunny upper rooms of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, I had had a case of laryngitis so extreme that I couldn’t speak, even whisper on the telephone, and when I was not following the flower children of the Strip about, I stayed in my room watching daytime television — the soap operas, and when they were not on, the quiz programs. I became seriously preoccupied by them. The NBC peacock, with the announcement “the following program is brought to you in living color,” was frustrating, even reproachful on a hotel room’s black and white. When I got home, I bought a color set, my first TV, a Zenith Space Command with remote control, which I could operate from my bed.

For two and a half years — until now, in fact — I watched Another World, The Doctors, Love of Life, Search for Tomorrow, Days of Our Lives , and later Hidden Faces (I have never cared for Secret Storm or Edge of Night ) whenever I could, and nearly always when I thought I should be doing other things. They had their tired stretches. I missed some crucial episodes. But when Lee Randolph died, a suicide who had lingered on for weeks, I watched her face being covered by a sheet, and I was ridden by the event for weeks. I suppose the script for Lee had run out, or that the actress had found another part. But it was not at all like losing a character in fiction of any other kind — not just an event in a two or ten hour imaginative experience, and then in memory. The soap operas ran along beside life five days out of seven. I saw the characters in them more often than my friends, knew their relationships, the towns. It had a continuity stronger even than the news, where stories and characters submerge and reappear — or don’t — depending on where the limelight is. I know of no more constant, undisjunct narrative than the soap operas. Perhaps they are what personal life was like, before the violent, flash discontinuities of media news and personal air travel came along.

I had thought of my soap hours as a total waste of time, not a joke, not camp, not for a piece, not critically, a serious waste of time. But when the loss of Lee became such an important thing, I found that those two-and-a-half-year, open-ended narrative experiences define a lot of what I am and what I think, what I would like to write, what I think America, particularly a certain age and voice group, is, and what I think the American radical and intellectual communities are not. I guess I am part of an age group that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America. Even now (and we are in our thirties), we have no journals we publish, no exile we share, no brawls, no anecdotes, no war, no solidarity, no mark. In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy. A center of action seemed to have broken down in us. Lacking precisely the generational tie (through the media, mainly, kids now know about other kids) and just after the family unit began to dissolve, we knew what there was of our alienation privately, and not yet as a claim or a group experience. We now have vertical ties, loves, friendships, loyalties to people older, younger, other than ourselves. We are unnoticed even as we spread clear across what people call, without taking account of us, the generation gap.