Critic Going Everywhere

		Critic Going Everywhere Donald Phelps

Manny Farber’s criticism is an extension of his painting, of his talk. Extension is the theme of his work. The fretful energy which births his virtues, and sometimes faults, is an energy through which work covers ground: the terrain existing only to be covered, not occupied, not (for too long a time, at least) staked out. Thus the work, painting or movie criticism or art criticism, advances horizontally, in all possible directions, never seeming to exist for a simple progress from A to B; and getting as far away as possible from any point, any centripetal force. The criticism which Farber published to so little notice in The New Republic (1941 through 1946) and The Nation (1948 through 1952) and in The New Leader during the later ‘50s, and in Commentary on occasion – all prophesised, from the ‘40s on, the main directions and motifs and attitudes which only now are being recognised as defining contemporary art at its most important. And Farber prophesised, not through jeremiads (although a lot of his criticism can be taken as such – superficially, I feel), nor rubrics, but through a crepuscular swirl of observations, images, wisecracks, puns and remarks, frequently uncalled-for (in the sense of unauthorised; seldom in the sense of unwarranted). A style that transects all the boundaries, supposed and otherwise, between reviewing and criticism, because Farber perceives criticism as a constant review, during which the reviewer sits in no box, remains at no post, but runs his ass off to keep up.

1. In fact, Farber and Agee did collaborate, just after World War II, on an unfinished screenplay titled Furlough; materials pertaining to this project are held at the University of Tennessee’s James Agee Trust. [Editor’s note]

This last, I think, may be a foremost reason why Farber has never gained the audience which attaches (often on the basis of his poorest, most self-indulgently fancy and sentimental work) to James Agee. Agee at his best was an assessor, a summariser of art, who sensed that behind many of his subjects was that which either refuted or outstripped his attitudes. The testimonial of Agee’s worth was the cleft in his self-regard, which his perceptions occasioned: the desire to be the provincial which his limitations decreed; warring against the desire, never entirely articulated, perhaps never entirely admitted, to be considerably larger and wilder. And in the cleft, I think, he found that partnership – a partnership of accord, never of actual collaboration (1) – which carried him and Manny Farber through parallel careers on The Nation and The New Republic. Yet it must be noted that, during this time, when Agee was in the ascendant, Farber’s work was still tentative and teacherish (although the conventional language is considerably buckling to blasts of angry opinion; and during his last years on The New Republic, with the reviews of The Song of Bernadette [1943] and Rome, Open City [1945] and The Well-Digger’s Daughter [La Fille du puisatie, Marcel Pagnol, 1940] and Henry V [1944], the language and sentiments begin to jostle and wrench into the familiar voice). Only when Farber took over as movie critic on The Nation, in late 1948, after Agee’s resignation in favour of screenwriting, does the critical writing fully display the exasperated alertness, the seeming assurance (which, however, encompasses so many distractions), the combative skepticism which contribute to the most original and valuable film criticism in America today.

2. Farber’s film pieces referred to in this text are collected in Negative Space (New York: Da Capo, 1998).

It’s easy, but still a considerable mistake, to infer from this – or even from reading Farber’s criticism – that his work is essentially ‘negative’ in any of the popular modes of cynicism and opposition and darkness. What really, valuably alarms about his writing is not its negativism but its wildness, its seemingly utter lack of commitment to any ideological post or political stand. This, I recall, was what most alarmed me on first reading pieces on John Huston and Carol Reed and Stanley Kramer, in the late ‘40s. (2) Leafing through bound copies of The Nation in the stacks of Brooklyn College Library, I was most put on the defensive by the lack of centre to Farber’s attacks on these men, who then seemed to so many like magnetic poles of artistic and social virtue. Thus, Farber’s criticism, the most direct of its age or of many ages for both stating and practicing his attitudes, seemed to me an attack on centre itself; and much more disturbingly, an attack which never assumed the brasses of crusade, which couldn’t care less (it seemed) who supported it, which couldn’t have more firmly resisted proselytes, since the attitudes stated or expressed in one article would be recast or outright contradicted in two weeks.

Farber’s pulverisingly clear-sighted appraisal of Huston (when Huston was scarcely less than Lorenzo the Magnificent to so many critics, Agee included) can serve as a tract for film critics of two decades, not because he wants to destroy Huston (he points out many genuine virtues which survive in Huston’s work in these out-of-favour times), but because he wants to know what the hell Huston is all about, which is to say, what explains the contradictions of Huston’s work between a rather cold, cleanly-focused craftsmanship and a yeasty pretentiousness (mixed with a still-less-becoming opportunism and sentimentality) which has dominated in films like Moulin Rouge (1952) and We Were Strangers (1949). Nor will Farber settle for any of the slogans, paradigma, bargain-counter poetics, with which critics ever-increasingly try to settle all arguments. He wants language to do the job of explaining. And anyone who thinks this an easy request has no notion of what language has become since the ‘40s, or in whose hands it has found itself, or rather, lost itself. Nor any idea of what explaining really means.

Manny Farber’s command of journalistic rhythms and, rather too often, journalistic means, somehow never hides the truth that he is a painter who writes. He uses language as he uses paint, as a medium of unfixed exactness: precision which is repeatedly merging and changing, having to be refocused and renewed. There is no metaphor in his writing: the outright metaphors which he seems repeatedly to employ in a conventional way are generally used as ironic wisecracks, to demonstrate (a) the false extravagance, the human improbability, of what he is writing about, and (b) the distance between such confusion and the resources of any self-respecting language. His images are the self-mocking images of Western tall talk; and I do not cite them for the same reason I have not heretofore quoted from Farber, seemingly one of our most quotable writers; it is far preferable to read the articles themselves, which join and separate and rejoin the phrases in endless web, justifying them at every turn. He uses metaphor mockingly because, unlike the solemn uses of metaphor, he enjoys no confidence at all about the limits of the world. And unless a man can enjoy such confidence he must hold himself, if he be artist or critic, accountable for every inch he covers: constantly measuring and constantly leaving the measurements behind.

This is the lesson which, notably among poets and painters, has only in the last few years begun to affirm its truth. Artists have become makers of maps on which there can be no more terra incognita. Land is unknown only because one has not yet reached it. When you reach it, you know already all that you can know, which is to say, all that the present time allows. It exists, but it cannot continually exist, save through the act of moving on, thus extending it through one’s movement. Farber, I say, has long recognised this. His recognition is itself hard to recognise, at first, because, in the ‘40s issues of The Nation, he must write mainly attacks: attacks which which (I repeat) seem more devastating than they are, because Farber does not intend to devastate. He wants only to move along, and this purpose must prove anathema to the unmoving, and the unmovable; which forms so much of the most popular art and writing; most particularly in the centre-seeking ‘40s and ‘50s, but scarcely less since then!

3. Farber’s non-film pieces (among his other unreprinted writings) are forthcoming in a collection from Harvard University Press, edited by Robert Polito.

The lesson which Manny Farber brought home to me when I first read him – against all the resistance of temperament and persuasion which I could summon, against all the partisans which I then found at my side – was the bulk and crowdedness of the art world, and its inseparableness from the world all of us know. The clamorous geography of this world informs everything he writes, or paints, and – still more important – so does his sense of himself as a pedestrian witness to this world – as anything but its Cortez! The categorical arrogance of his tone is always being qualified, if not countermanded, by his humour, more robust than ironic, reminding the reader of how large and unfinished is the job which a serious critic assumes. In Farber’s writing, a single artist or artwork lets in a throng of artists who, in turn, have to make their own spaces against the audiences, or against the sheer physical data of the world. Read him on the Krolls’ furniture, or on Matisse, or the paintings of James Brooks. (3) Thus, the seeming shapelessness of his articles, in which the implication of the opening sentence might be totally bypassed by the dissection of the artist’s work (see his obituary piece on Val Lewton, as well as his later tribute to Lewton’s The Leopard Man [1943]). So, too, his ‘failure’ to ‘develop’ ideas or motifs, in the conventional journalistic sense. His genuine development of his perceptions takes the form of brocading them, augmenting them with other observations and aphorisms – not trying to persuade audiences, but testing the durability of those observations by leading them throughout the world. A painter’s mode of development.

It is startling to realise – so radical is so much of his tone and stance – that Manny Farber is deeply conservative, yet he is. And, like the best conservatives, he counterpoises the richness of the world against the modesty with which we must use it. We cannot own art – whether the work or the activity – by fiat, he seems to be saying in each of his articles. All we can do with art is produce it – an endless traffic of behaviour – and all we can own are the boundaries of ourselves. Thus, his admirations: filmmakers such as Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich, John Sturges and Anthony Mann (of whom Farber was first to evaluate for American audiences). The common denominator of these artists (or artists like Brooks, Hopper) is not their masculinity (although manliness is an essential component of their work), but their dedication to their art: not as a replica of themselves, but as an emanation of themselves, a current of that behaviour which at once links them to the world and dissolves them among the things of the world. Manny Farber has discerned and embodies this dedication.

I think that his most important weakness is an over-respect for certain journalistic values – mainly, the most secondary sort, involved with making his writing more emotionally accosting, more punchy. The greatest harm in this deference, I think, is its impingement on his genuine abilities and needs – mainly his acute appreciation of surfaces, which is of course crucial to the art I have tried to characterise. Often, when he seems most journalistically canny, Farber is simply using what is most pertinent to his best purposes – i.e., convincing his readers and spectators that the ‘depths’ of art, if that means the values of art, lie in its surfaces: that there is no floating capital in art, but only the cash on hand, the hard currency. However, the journalistic element of his writing, and his own aptitude for it, too frequently encourage us to read faster than we ought to. And it conveys on occasion a swagger, an assured glibness to Farber’s writing which belies the real content of his criticism – wherein he is constantly thinking through his observations and the terms which he gives them. He is most painterly in this, that he adds and revises on the spot: without any apparent need for retrenchment, for recapitulation, for reappraisals agonising or otherwise. Sometimes, however, the too-consummate rhythms of his writing, the too-easily appreciated wisecracks, encourage us to overlook the characteristic abrasiveness and good confusion.

Yet, these weaknesses never really put off anyone willing to meet Manny Farber as a co-participant of his world, which is the world that shows itself to us today.

First published in For Now, no. 9 (1969).

		© Donald Phelps 1969. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.