Thank Goodness for Joan Acocella

A new piece by Joan Acocella was reason enough to cancel plans. What had she chosen to tackle this time? Balanchine? The Book of Job? Harry Potter? Arsenic? There seemed to be no subject that she couldn’t take on. A little over a year ago, I hoped to review a book on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. No dice; Joan had claimed it. Annoyance at not being able to write turned instantly to gladness at being able to read. Now I am doubly glad. Joan died last weekend, at seventy-eight, from cancer; that essay was the last she published in this magazine. She herself might not have been so deferential. “Remember: if I do not get to review it, I will throw myself out the window with a note pinned to my chest saying that this was all your fault,” she once wrote to an editor, of a history of tap dance. “Happy new year! May you be rich and happy!”

That humor was pure Joan. No writer was funnier, or more original. “Clang! Clang!” her essay on Martin Luther begins; that is the sound of the hammer nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the church. Her own sound was singular, in life as in print. If you called her, as I often did while working with her as a fact checker, a decade ago, and then as an editor’s assistant, you got used to waiting out a dozen rings and the answering-machine greeting—she screened the old-fashioned way—followed by the sudden burst of that rich, deliberate voice picking the conversation up midstream. (She might hang up just as suddenly to rush out to the movies with her partner, Noël Carroll, whom she liked to call “my boyfriend.”) Sarah Larson, who did transcription work for her back in the day, remembers Joan swanning out from her bedroom mid-afternoon-nap in nightgown and eye mask to intercept a message from Mikhail Baryshnikov. “In him there is simply more to see than in most other dancers,” she wrote in a Profile, to the point as ever.

On the page, her fabulous erudition was melded to a frankness that was so unaffected as to seem effortless. Actually—a very Joan word—simplicity is hard work, and Joan worked hard. She wrote her drafts in longhand and sent page proofs by fax. She liked her diction blunt, earthy, threaded with startling touches of beauty. I laugh when I read her description of the puppeteer Basil Twist’s abstract “Symphonie Fantastique,” with “blue disks that bump into each other, like who the hell are you” and “something whirling in a circle, like an enraged doughnut.” She put David Remnick in mind of both Virginia Woolf and the hardboiled sportswriter Heywood Broun. Naturally, Joan described her own style best. “I like a little sand in my oyster,” she said—a motto to live by.

Joan was born in San Francisco, grew up in Oakland, and planned to be an academic. She got her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers, then became a critic, writing for the many instead of the few. There is an idea that criticism is about the passing of judgment. Joan told Leo Carey, her last editor at the magazine, that though she sometimes felt unsure of her writing, or her ability to keep doing it, she always knew that her take was the right one. She certainly didn’t pull her punches. “I thought that if she didn’t stop grinning at me, as if to say, ‘Ain’t we got fun,’ I would run up onstage and strangle her,” she wrote of a dancer who displeased her.

But a good critic must be much more than a judge. She must be an alchemist, transforming art and the experience of it into words. That power was pure Joan. It is what made her such a wonderful writer about new and classic literature alike, reviving the obscure and reconsidering the legendary. And it is what made her such a great writer on dance, her big love, and on ballet in particular, an art that can seem forbiddingly inaccessible to the nonspecialist. Here she is, at the end of that same Baryshnikov Profile, watching in astonishment and letting the reader watch along with her:

He rose like a piston; he landed like a lark. He took off like Jerry
Lee Lewis; he finished like Jane Austen. From ledge to ledge of the
dance he leapt, surefooted, unmindful, a man in love. The audience
knew what they were seeing. The air in the theatre thickened almost
visibly. . . . By that time, we actually wanted him to stop, so that we
could figure out what had happened to us.

The figuring-out was her challenge; watching her do it was our reward. A good piece of criticism “should be shapely. It should be deep as well as personal,” Joan said. “If we achieve it, our work will be no more in need of defending than a poem or a novel.” Joan achieved it. No defense needed—only gratitude, our thanks. ♦