Stanley Kauffmann, Moviegoer

Stanley Kauffmann is dead at 97.  In his reviews, it seemed that had been alive – and living generously and well – for as long as there have been movies.  

He was solidly octogenarian when I had lunch with him (and his wife; with her he was companion and chevalier at once) fifteen years ago.

He was – for fifty-five years – the film critic for the New Republic:

He knew that the educated and creative eye is never impressed by size or locality. It saw aspects of the human spirit whether delivered by Nicholas Ray or Satyajit Ray, by Ingmar Bergman or Ingrid Bergman.

The remembrances on the magazine’s website – the passage above is from one by David Thomson, himself a critic of legend – leave little to say.

Except to say that Kauffmann the moviegoer was also the person who helped Walker Percy find his way to The Moviegoer.  Kauffmann didn’t just discover The Moviegoer while working as an editor with Knopf, as the obituary of record has it.  He shaped the novel and guided its author, and his attention is the likely reason the novel is so unlike Percy’s other novels.

The Moviegoer is the first work of what is called contemporary American fiction, made so by its affectless protagonist, its present-tense narration, and its hopscotching movement from one point of interest to the next.  These effects owed a great deal to Kauffmann. He made Percy rewrite the novel twice.  Then he was fired.  Then The Moviegoer won the National Book Award for 1961.

A Kauffmann suggestion led Percy to sharpen the novel’s Catholic aspect.  The story is told in my book The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

It was only in the rewrites that Percy prefaced the novel with a snippet from Kierkegaard and dedicated it to his dead uncle. It was in the rewrites that the title – which had been Carnival in Gentilly: Confessions of a Moviegoer, a double-barreled combination suggested by Shelby Foote – was made The Moviegoer, which echoed The Stranger nicely and put the emphasis on the emblematic main character, not the story. And it was in a rewrite that Percy added an epilogue, which, though opaque, does the most to suggest a religious dimension to the novel.

Kauffmann asked Percy to add some material about the protagonist Binx Bolling’s father, and Percy did so, developing a chance encounter with Bolling’s mother and her new family of six, Louisiana Catholics through and through.

Percy wrote a scene about the hereafter that echoed a scene about the hereafter in The Brothers Karamazov.  Echoed, but only just:

The Moviegoer is not The Brothers Karamazov; the hour is late, the ancient faith attenuated; and the epilogue of the novel, one might say, is an epilogue to the long story of that old-time religion, ethnically rooted, catechetically certain, which was vanishing in 1961, as the book was published and the Catholic bishops prepared for the Second Vatican Council. The churchgoer was giving way to the moviegoer, Percy seemed to say, and in the years to come the churchgoer and the moviegoer, although related, would be strangers to each other.

Pauline Kael lost it at the movies.  Stanley Kauffmann found it there, and he shared it with us.    

• 10 October 2013
• #stanley kauffmann#media commentary
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