One thing that Naipaul and Sontag share, besides a certain haughty austerity, is that they both came from humble beginnings to conquer their respective fields.  Perhaps when you must go against the grain and against tradition, you can’t afford the luxury of the slightest sympathy for the also-ran, lest you allow yourself to become one.  Certainly Sontag would believe so, that one must will oneself to greatness and anything that weakens one’s willpower, any acceptance of softness or mediocrity within oneself, dooms one to obscurity as a minor artist.

In criticism, Seligman claims that provocation and exaggeration are more important than truth and honesty, which goes some way to explaining how he misapprehends Sontag, who might sometimes practice the former but only in service to the latter.  He also writes that critics must narrow their vision to the art about which they write, but the magic of criticism is that reading the criticism may be as heady and rewarding an experience as seeing the art it describes.  Perhaps he is right, although he is too unthoughtful (or considers it a waste of his time) to explain how that might happen, how criticism can aspire to that level of greatness.  Instead, he merely asserts that Kael was a superior stylist, whose skill “deepen[ed]” with age but whose early work was even more rewarding and “human” in its “strain[ing],” to Sontag, whose writing is “narrow” and “constrained” if still “masterful.”

Again, we see that Seligman stacks his deck in order to raise up Kael, even for her shortcomings, while he pushes down Sontag, despite her virtures.  His entire conception of criticism and how it might transcend its subject matter serves to elevate Kael from the station of a reviewer of movies through a film critic to a great writer and critic.  He wants her to be great so he defines greatness in a way that flatters her.  He doesn’t dare argue against Sontag’s greatness, instead he spends his time denigrating her fiction, arguing that in her fiction she is not great.  Only in her criticism can she lay claim to greatness.

When the object of your love is a film critic rather than a film, however, that danger is real, and that is the danger that Craig Seligman faces but never confesses in his book Sontag & Kael.  Seligman is a great lover of Pauline Kael, the once-formidable film critic for the New Yorker who retired in 1991 and died a decade later, but while Kael and her criticism will always be important to those who knew her, as Seligman did, and those who read it as part of their introduction to film as a form, her influence will continue to wane as the years pass and those who knew her and can extol her pass into history.   Kael may have been the most influential movie critic that ever lived but that is a relatively minor accolade since movie critics just aren’t that influential.

What galls Seligman is how much more respect Susan Sontag gets than Kael.  Sontag, almost everyone agrees, will be read for some time and remain one of the great critical voices of this age.  She will be read and admired, if seldom loved, for generations.  While this assessment could turn out to be wrong, Seligman simply can’t understand or abide the disparity between Sontag’s stature and Kael’s.  This book is his attempt to rectify this disparity, and he tries to accomplish it as much by tearing Sontag down as he does by raising Kael up.

The book is organized into four lengthy sections, two of which primarily focus on Sontag and two primarily on Kael, with each section making forays into the opposite character for effect and comparison.  How he chooses to compare them makes his project clear:  he compares Sontag to Kael when he wants to show how strident, joyless, or lacking in sympathy Sontag is, but he compares Kael to Sontag when he he wants to show how Kael is every bit as engaged or accomplished as Sontag.  He uses Kael to make Sontag look bad, but uses Sontag to illuminate and elevate Kael.

At the books midpoint, just before he turns his primary focus away from Sontag and toward Kael, he quotes one of his early readers in an attempt to shut off and prevent this line of criticism.  He friend asked, “Why are you devoting half your book to a writer you hate?” and it’s a good question because it gets at the hidden, probably unconscious, agenda of the book.  Seligman protests that he doesn’t hate Sontag, and I believe him, but he never asks himself why he would write about her so unsympathetically.  He thinks she’s just exasperating so that’s enough.

Sontag is universally admired and respected if never loved (and seldom even liked), while Kael is much beloved by all who know her if often dismissed as mere reviewer by the wider culture.  The question raised by his first reader, and that likely will occur to all readers, can be answered simply by noting this fact and appreciating how devastating it is for Seligman, who so loves his Pauline.