Sharp by Michelle Dean

Author:Michelle Dean [Dean, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780802165718
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

The palpable frustration here was the result of experience, not political conviction per se. Kael was not, like Sontag, a prodigy immediately recognized as such by everyone who read her. She was a person who had to fight for the things she had. Her belligerent spirit was not always well received by onlookers, and even when this angered her, she didn’t wish to adjust herself to meet their expectations of “caring about others” or anything else. It’s plain she was hoping the brilliance of her work would be enough, as it would be for a man in her position.

For the first half of her life, it wasn’t. Kael had the kind of intelligencence that seemed to alienate her from all but close friends, a quality she shared with Arendt. She wasn’t good at cultivating relationships and struggled to get a foothold as a writer. As it happened, she had needed the younger Sontag’s help to finally, after many years of trying, get the attention of the New York intellectuals who populated the pages of the New York Review. Sontag and Kael had met some months before The Group came out, in some forgotten place. The younger woman was evidently impressed by the elder. And so it was Sontag who brought Kael’s name up to Hardwick and Silvers when they were looking for someone for The Group. Kael must have felt very grateful, at first, when that phone call came in: reviewing Mary McCarthy on her home turf, should the piece be accepted, presented a good opportunity for Kael to finally arrive in the place where she felt she deserved to be.

Kael had made it a long way from home. She was born in 1919 on a poultry farm in Petaluma, California. Her parents were New York Jews who’d moved to the area in search of a kind of progressive agricultural commune. They already had four children to raise by the time Kael came along. She spoke of her early years on that farm as an idyll, or as much of an idyll as could be had by farmers’ children who had constant chores and parents whose marriage was troubled by financial instability and infidelity. The Kaels managed to remain in Petaluma only until 1927, when Isaac Kael lost all his money in a stock market crash and the family went to San Francisco, where he tried, and mostly failed, to come up with more steady work.

In high school, Kael’s talents began to surface. She was a good student, played violin in the school orchestra, served on the debate team. Like Sontag, she went on to study philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. But unlike Sontag, Kael did not immediately leave California. She loved California. In a review of Hud, she rhapsodized about the unself-conscious egalitarianism of her childhood home. “It was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranch hands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived,” she wrote.

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