And, as Acocella learned early, the lives of the dancers matter, too. The theater is alive with gasps at fumbled landings; at intermission, rumors of affairs float. Acocella wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the Ballets Russes but many, if not all, of her virtues as a critic arise from sitting in the dark at Lincoln Center — erudition, wit, a moral sense, straightforwardness tending to plainness, attention to an artist’s life, concern for the audience’s experience, a nose for gossip and, above all, a curiosity about an art form that changes lives.
In this book, her interests are broad, covering everything from genre fiction (“Dracula,” Agatha Christie and the Brothers Grimm) to visual art (Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon); the classics (“Gilgamesh,” “Beowulf”); English novelists (Graham Greene, the Waughs); and women writers (Elena Ferrante, Louisa May Alcott).
Acocella demonstrated in “Twenty-Eight Artists” that many creative problems could be overcome by tempering brilliance with “patience, resilience, courage.” In “The Bloodied Nightgown,” her claim is simpler: “I was schooled by teachers who believed” in T.S. Eliot’s
rule — forget personality — “but I could not do without the life.” To see a poem clearly, you must know something of its creator.
But Acocella’s attention is fixed first on the lives of her readers. She doesn’t neglect to tell us a writer’s best book and is never above saying when someone was born. She has always surveyed the literature, read the footnotes, seen the painting in real life; the reader can trust her. She is not easily taken in, calling Agatha Christie’s claim that a reader can always guess the murderer “a brazen falsehood.” Having read all 66 of Christie’s detective novels, “I have guessed exactly two of the culprits.”
While not automatically kind to even a first-time author, she understands writerly problems: Tolkien couldn’t complete his translation of “Beowulf” because then the life of his mind would be over, too. She is uncannily good on Englishness, and, perhaps relatedly, likes artists to be unflinching.
