Prismatic Considerations: On Vivian Gornick's "Taking A Long Look"

Vivian Gornick | Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time | Verso | March 2020 | 305 Pages

What is there left to say about Vivian Gornick? Gornick was born into a Jewish socialist family in the Bronx: as the oft-repeated saying goes, she knew herself to be “a member of the working class” before she knew she was either female or Jewish. From childhood, Gornick developed a reputation as a whip-smart reader and observer, attuned to the absorbing pace of life in the city. In the 1960s and 70s, she wrote lacerating criticism for the Village Voice, joining her interests in psychoanalysis, literature, and the burgeoning women’s rights movement. She has channeled this knowledge, and her incisive—yet always intensely humanistic—approach to books, politics, and culture into a variety of memoirs, biographies, and works of criticism. Much of her critical and cultural writing is inflected with the personal, but in a voice that is sensitive, circumspect, rather than gratuitously revealing. 

These details have been dutifully repeated in the litany of critical essays, career retrospectives, and interviews that accompanied the publication of Gornick’s book Unfinished Business, and the reissuing of her books Approaching Eye Level, The End of the Novel of Love, and The Romance of American Communism, last year. Gornick’s penchant for the piercing aphorism—“squeezing the slave out drop by drop” is one favorite, from Chekhov—is often remarked upon, as is her stubborn independence (she has written of herself as an “odd woman” who eschews marriage and domesticity) and her dogged approach to work and revision. 

All of this to say: what can be written about Gornick’s most recent collection of essays, Taking A Long Look—which brings together pieces on literature, culture, New York City, and feminism from throughout Gornick’s career—that hasn’t already been written about her wide-ranging body of work? Some have noted that Gornick’s views make her a figure at odds with current trends: she is mostly indifferent to modern iterations of socialism, and skeptical of sweeping social movements like #MeToo. Yet part of her appeal is her anachronism. In a market oversaturated with essay collections on broad concepts like “modern life,” or peevish, hand-waving tirades against late capitalism, her interest in the specific—the complicated lives of artists and thinkers, the way fiction reveals or obscures versions of the self—can be a balm.

Gornick’s essays in Taking A Long Look still feel fresh, though not because they are particularly prescient (with the exception of one essay that mentions Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, which has become something of a touchstone for a subset of political commentators). Rather, they are rendered with a forcefulness and clarity that is absent from so much essayistic writing today. Many contemporary essays tend to fizzle or prevaricate; lacking a clear organizing principle, they loudly announce their own incoherence, or lay claim to an authority that feels unearned. By contrast, Gornick’s essays are slow burns—bristling with urgency, but careful to gather evidence before reaching for an insight. At the point of revelation, when the essays snap sharply into focus, the effect can be dazzling, almost incandescent. (They have what Virginia Woolf would call “that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius.”) 

In “The Second Sex at Fifty,” a reconsideration of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Gornick summarizes de Beauvoir’s turn to (what was later deemed) second-wave feminism, which provided an impetus for writing The Second Sex. Many of the pieces in Taking A Long Look unfold in a biographical mode, or consider aspects of biographies about various writers and intellectuals—from Herman Melville to Mary McCarthy—in whose lives Gornick finds both positive and negative examples: how, or how not, to live or write. De Beauvoir’s fundamental error, Gornick argues, was to write of women as a “they” instead of a “we”: “She knows the condition whereof she speaks intimately but make no mistake, reader, she does not share it.” What differentiates European feminists like de Beauvoir from American feminists of the same era is this astringent critical distance—ironic, Gornick explains, because de Beauvoir herself struggled with the “condition” of womanhood, whether to give herself over to men or to work. (Like Gornick, she chose the latter.) “Feminism belongs to America,” writes Gornick, because feminist pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton “wrote ‘we’ not ‘they.’” 

The revelation delivered in this essay—that The Second Sex failed as a feminist project—stings a bit, especially if you are (as I am) a staunch devotee to that book. But there are few critics better equipped to assess feminist writing—or the lack of feminism in writing—than Gornick, who witnessed the birth of the American second wave as a journalist and polemicist at the Voice, and whose deftness as a literary critic remains unmatched. The best essays in Taking A Long Look are those on feminism, reproduced from Gornick’s 1978 book of the same title. In “Why Do These Men Hate Women?”, Gornick sizes up three of American literature’s enfants terribles: Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. “Each of these writers is a man of great talent and intelligence; each of them also increasingly displays the kind of self-absorption that results in emotional stupidity,” she writes. Mailer, Roth, and Bellow write themselves, and their bitter misogyny, into their fiction; the result is not only politically churlish, but of dubious literary value, too. This is defensive, crude, and stunted writing that never attempts to transcend the self or speak to the complications of the present. 

As Gornick tells us in the following essay, “Toward a Definition of the Female Sensibility,” it is also a style into which female writers can slip. Of the novels of Joan Didion, Anne Roiphe, Lois Gould, and Margaret Drabble, she writes, “[they] seem to me works very much in the grip of the awful power of lingering defensiveness and conflict too dreadful to bear.” The pitfalls of an essay this sprawling (Didion, Roiphe, Gould, and Drabble are only some of the writers treated) are self-evident: Gornick resorts to line-by-line takedowns of each author, which can feel alternately frail or digressive. But the force of the criticism leaves little to be desired. “Ultimately,” Gornick concludes, “our art is a reflection of the progress of our desires chained to our fears.” Writing through fear—of the self, of the times, of the “other”—makes therapy out of art. Writing out of and away from fear, toward an “exultant” honesty, makes the work luminous.

Gornick’s later essays are no less sharp in their judgments. In one piece on the critic Diana Trilling, from 2017, the famously ruthless “literary lioness” gets a knifing of her own. “Not once in all her red-baiting diatribes,” Gornick notes of Trilling’s anti-Communist writing, “does an insight emanate from anything that might resemble an emotional imagination.” Trilling fails the Gornick test on all accounts: she scorned Communism and psychoanalysis, and attached herself to a flailing, infantile husband (the critic Lionel Trilling). These criticisms feel personal—the very quality Gornick scorns in Mailer, Roth, and Bellow—because they are. What Trilling suffered from was the “perfectly conventional failure to develop the single-hearted motivation required for work of the first order”: an unwieldy way to say that she didn’t invest her own work with the fierceness she employed to defend her husband. She did not, in other words, value herself, or even know herself. 

Whether or not one agrees with Gornick’s assessment—Trilling did, nonetheless, produce an impressive body of work—her positions are admirably consistent. Gornick’s philosophy of life boils down to self-knowledge: involving personal responsibility, a sturdy kind of self-reliance, and a deep, scrupulous commitment to the work of inner probing. “If one is not an active participant in the making of one’s world, one is doomed to be sacrificed to the world in which one lives,” she notes, paraphrasing the beliefs of Hannah Arendt; those beliefs could easily be attributed to Gornick. Today’s critics often fixate on systemic ills instead of individual ones, for justifiable reasons: the American cult of individualism has tended to depreciate bonds of community and distract from government incompetence. In this context, Gornick’s relentless attention to the self runs the risk of feeling insular, short-sighted. What keeps these ideas from crossing over into the territory of the reactionary (or the vaguely libertarian) is an additional layer of complication. “Self-discovery,” Gornick writes in her essay on Lasch and the cultural reception of narcissism, should be leveraged “so that free adult beings might reach out to one another in strength rather than weakness.” To Gornick, identity is not a given, but something floating and inchoate, to be captured and continually wrangled. Once a sense of self is shaped—or at least tenuously formed—the individual might contribute more meaningfully to her community. 

These opinions put Gornick in line with the tough judgments of another journalist and critic of her era, Joan Didion (whose newest book, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, also a collection of previously published essays, was released in January). Didion wasn’t an advocate for second-wave feminism—nor has she expressed anything but dispassion for socialism and Communism—but her work is characterized by similar tenets: an inviolable belief in the value of hard work and self-respect; a resistance to sentimentality and slick, convenient narratives; a taste for restrained personal writing, always tethered to broader reflection. Gornick doesn’t share Didion’s swaggering irony, nor her easy, lancing wit. (Of Didion, she writes, “One feels oneself in the presence of a writer who believed it good to be told she wrote like a man.”) On the whole, Gornick’s style is far more self-serious. If something chafes in her writing, it is her stiffness—the muscular, held posture of a constant pugilist, a writer who approaches her work as a matter of life and death. Her sentences are significant, not suggestive; the effect of all that concentrated power can be enervating. 

Still, there’s an appealing expansiveness to her thinking. Gornick’s roving, telescopic eye takes in aspects of the culture, considers them prismatically, then assimilates them into her own theory of the world. What is felt in Gornick’s essays is the joyful rhythm of a mind working out ideas on the page—skittering from observation to evaluation, then back into the archive again. This rigorous style may be out of fashion now, replaced by the kind of tentative, equivocal writing found in trendy essay collections. “Whatever conclusions I might reach about myself, my life, and my environment are just as likely to be diametrically wrong as they are to be right,” admits the essayist Jia Tolentino in the introduction to her 2019 collection Trick Mirror. It’s hard to imagine Gornick making any such confession—not because she imagines herself to be infallible, but because she writes to illuminate the culture, not to present a brittle viewpoint on it. Which makes it a pleasure, finally, to return to Gornick, even in the absence of new material. Taking A Long Look reminds us why, but more importantly, how, the essay—at its most taut and fully-formed—can be spectacular.