No, I wanted to bolt because my pseudo-boyfriend had suddenly become incarnate, and I preferred him in disembodied form: as a voice 3,000 miles away.

He’d first contacted me through a dating site, of course. When he wrote to say my smile was killer, I was flattered enough to check out his profile. Except, uh-oh: His face was pretty much hidden in his picture—a sure sign, I figured, that he was ugly, disfigured or, who knows, toothless. I was about to click away when I noticed he was in the film biz. Hmm, inter-resting. So I cavalierly broke online dating rules No. 1 and 2—Thou shalt not engage with long-distance suitors, and Thou shalt not e-mail anyone who doesn’t post a decent pic—and told Rose he could phone me, why not.

He was funny, inquisitive and sweet … so when Rose kept ringing, I broke rule No. 3—Thou shalt not engage in more than one meaningful call before meeting face to face, lest thou get invested in someone thou hast no chemistry with. And before I knew it, we’d fallen into a strange intimacy: He was calling me nightly to ask how my day had been and to talk writerly shop.

Then, suddenly, Rose was planning a trip east. Ostensibly, that was because he needed a break from La-La-Land and all the phonies there—but, as he himself said, “If we don’t at least pretend that’s the reason, we’ll put too much pressure on ourselves.”

“While we’re at it, can we say we’ll meet as friends instead of potential make-out partners?” I asked. “Even less pressure. You know.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “We’re just transcontinental pen pals finally getting together for a friendly meal.”

A couple weeks later, the fateful evening arrived. While putting on lipstick in the mirror, it occurred to me that I wasn’t feeling any butterflies—not even caterpillars—and I was forced to admit I’d never be attracted to Rose: Though I’d become attached to him because he was the only person who called daily to check on me, I’d never felt the all-important emotional spark. I’d never said to myself: This might be the person who understands me like no one else ever has, and isn’t scared or baffled or disgusted by who I really am. Rose and I had never discussed stuff that made my heart and head (and maybe one other body part) surge with excitement. With the guys I’ve fallen for in the past, on the other hand, there was always talk of our childhoods, our dreams, our heartbreaks; discussions of literature, philosophies—the biggest topics we could come up with. With those other guys, it was always the conversations that got me more than how they looked or even how they touched me.

And the reason those kinds of supernova dialogues have been so important to me is because they’ve always seemed like the most potent evidence that maybe I’m not ultimately alone in the world.

But while Rose knew plenty about my career and my daily errands, he didn’t know much about the things that really define me—not about my mother’s death when I was a kid, about my formative experiences and escapades, about how I hope I’ll write a novel that people will fall in love with.

By the same token, I’d never heard about the person who’d had the biggest impact on him, his first love or, I dunno, what’s dysfunctional about his family. We’d never read each other our favorite lines from, say, Rilke and Roethke; never talked about Susan Sontag and Edmund Wilson; and—even though he was Mr. Movie—never compared and contrasted Fellini and Fassbinder. (What the hell had we talked about, anyway?)

So … should I even bother with the date? Why put either of us through the hassle? Problem was, I wanted to hold on to the friendship because, as much as I crave those big moments of emotional connection and think that they’re all I really need or want, I’d gotten hooked on something: the mundane comfort that came from our quotidian how-was-your-day chit-chats.

So I packed myself off to the W, hoping I’d figure out a way to handle it, realizing it could be a bad scene.

After I pushed through the revolving door and greeted him, Rose kissed me on the cheek. “Wow!” he said. “You’re even better in person. Those dark eyes. And that hair!”

Freaking a little, I pointed at my head. “I told you I’m totally prematurely gray underneath, right? One-hundred-percent dye job, baby.”

I only felt more awkward when he handed me the dreaded flower. “Mind if I pull off the stem and put the head in my bag?” I asked. Without waiting for an answer, I went ahead with, uh, castrating it. He was cool about my lack of graciousness, which made me realize I should try acting like a grown-up for dinner.

But it’s never easy to be relaxed and friendly while sending the message that nothing sexual is going down. So I told an inappropriate story about a drunken hook-up. I also sent coded hints: I stopped drinking after two Sancerres; offered to split the check; said I wasn’t up for dessert or a nightcap. But then, before I told him I was ready to head home—alone—he swooped in for a kiss. “I just can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not into it.”

Awkwardly, civilly, he put me in a taxi. Before it pulled away, I said out the window, “I’d really like it if we could stay friends.”

The days passed without a word from him. A week later, though, when he called, I picked up. “I met someone else,” he said, “and we have our first date tonight. Maybe she’ll help me get over you.” He went on: “Question, though: Do I bring her a rose?”

I laughed. “Just bring yourself. And be yourself, because—” But I stopped before launching into any platitudinous bullshit. Because I hadn’t exactly been honest with him or myself during our cellular courtship, had I? No, I’d fooled us both into believing I was romantically interested in him because he’d been such a good palliative for my loneliness.

So I continued: “You know, this poet I like, Rilke, he says life isn’t any less painful for lovers, only they keep using each other to hide their own fates.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We all die in the end, I guess.”

“Oh. How lovely.”

“I think what I meant to say was … well, have fun tonight. I hope it works out. Call to tell me how it goes, will you?”

We’re friends again now, Rose and I, and both as lonely as ever.

Which is why I want to begin my Neil Young polemic from the heights of Mount Wilson.

The Two Scrooges

Back in 1940, in one of the most influential literary polemics of the last century, Edmund Wilson argued in his “Two Scrooges” essay (the opening piece in The Wound and the Bow, originally published in The Atlantic) that the reigning condescending literary consensus on a superb popular artist—in this case, Charles Dickens—was all wrong. Indeed that it reflected an obtuse, snobbish philistinism. One that was able to see only the superficial, cheerful caricaturist in Dickens, and occluded the dark, complex resonances of the sensibility that surfaced in the later work.

“The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky’s master, Dickens,” Wilson memorably sneered, with good reason.

The Two Scrooges, the Two Dickens—and now, ladies and gentlemen, consider a similar cultural divide over the conception of another misapprehended popular artist: the Two Neil Youngs.

There’s the bland, insipid, complacent, syrupy, self-satisfied, family-values, country-pie, pious, rural-virtues Neil Young that Jonathan Demme’s just-released film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, gives us. No doubt a true snapshot of a recent Neil Young moment, but a snapshot that doesn’t merely sugarcoat but virtually erases—denies—the existence of the Other Neil Young.

The occlusion of the artist’s complex identity is comparable to constructing an image of the work of T.S. Eliot based entirely on a film version of Cats. “Waste Land,” what “Waste Land”? Look at the big furry kitties!

Mr. Demme’s film omits the dark, electrifying, deeply disruptive, sometimes bleak, sometimes exhilarating and subversive Neil Young. Not the “country-rock” musician that Mr. Demme’s reliably adoring film-critic acolytes describe him as, but rather the hard-core, killer rock ’n’ roll genius whose electrifying, volcanic sound and deeply resonant and compressed lyrics left an imprint not just on music, but on popular culture itself. Neil Young is not just a transformative rock god—but as the spiritual godfather to Kurt Cobain, he was also a powerfully influential transformer of American popular culture, the progenitor of the wickedly acute, wised-up post-punk cultural sensibility.

Don’t get me wrong: Mr. Demme’s film is in many ways both beautiful and respectful. But by exalting rural virtues—in effect, by equating “rural” with “virtue”—and by making a hymn of praise for the prairie wisdom of the Great White North, Neil’s Canadian prairie roots, he verges on rural supremacism. By that I mean the ingrained American nativist, puritanical distrust of (and distaste for) the urban, the cosmopolitan, the seductive sins of sophistication, irony and complexity. Instead, simple is always best. Or less dangerous.

And so, in his extremely well-meaning way, Mr. Demme—well known as an admirably socially engaged director—has made perhaps the most reactionary film of the past year.

Reactionary in the sense that it implicitly gives the impression that family values of a certain kind—the Great White North, Great White Nashville kind—are the only true values. If you stay close to the land and practice rural virtues, you’ll go to heaven, (as long as you’re a rich rock—sorry, “country-rock”—star). Conventionality rules, dude!

‘The Idiocy of Rural Life’

Reactionary? I know I reacted to it by questioning the assumption that not all who live close to the earth are superior to those who don’t. Although I’m not a Marxist, I savored once again the bracing contempt for the cult of peasant wisdom that Marx and/or Engels expressed in The Communist Manifesto: The peasants need to be rescued, they say, from “the idiocy of rural life.”

Some have claimed that this is a mistranslation, that what was meant was not the “idiocy” but the stultifying isolation—but that’s absent too in the virgin-soil iconography of this prairie apotheosis, complete with primitivist dioramas of Neil’s life-giving Great White North wheat fields.

Yes, the film suggests, all this can be a reward for virtue; this is what virtue looks like—a contribution to the demonization of urbanity whose celebration was the best thing about Mr. Demme’s other films.

I don’t think I’d feel the same way were it not for the peculiar erasure of any trace of the Other in this film, the Other Neil Young. The one whose soul-shattering chords and trance-like lyric meditations suggested that there might be Other Values, realms beyond the rural to find fulfillment or (dare I say it?) excitement, the wild surmise at a glimpse of something not found in the Prairie Home Companion.

The Other Neil Young can be glimpsed—if you want a side-by-side comparison with Mr. Demme’s laundered version—in Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 down-and-dirty Neil Young documentary, Year of the Horse. A film and a sensibility almost entirely ignored—whitewashed—in the critical adulation accorded Mr. Demme’s film. Due to Mr. Demme’s critical cachet, his film will undoubtedly overshadow not just Mr. Jarmusch’s work (shamefully not even referred to in most reviews) but, even worse, will serve to eclipse entirely in the minds of most—in the collective consciousness of the culture—the very memory of the Other Neil Young.

Now I’m not proposing the equivalent of a W.W.E. steel-cage match between Mr. Demme and Mr. Jarmusch (although, come to think of it … ). Look, they each made their own movie of their own Neil Young. But the Jarmusch documentary at least does justice to the reason why Neil Young is an important figure in the culture. Not for his contribution to “country rock,” the misleading pigeonhole that the tunnel-vision reviews of the Demme film have consigned him to. Yes, he contributed to “country rock” (and I’m second to no one in my love of “country rock”—I probably play more Gram Parsons repeatedly than anyone you know), but the point is that he, Neil, is at the very heart of hardcore rock ’n’ roll, something the Bloomsbury types of our time seem to disdain appreciating or just don’t get.

He’s at the heart of rock ’n’ roll, on a plane with Dylan and Van Morrison, because of the way he harnesses the torrential energy of “Like a Hurricane,” because of the spooky, apocalyptic dreaminess of “After the Gold Rush,” the mordant forever-haunting, guilt-ridden death wish that is “Tonight’s the Night.” The incantatory, almost sinister romantic ecstasy of “Cowgirl in the Sand” (which can’t help conjuring up, for some of us at least, the bleak desolation of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”). And the brilliant, truly insidious but somehow tragically joyful nihilism of “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” with its thunderous opening chords that sound like someone’s pounding on the Gates of Hell. Just to name a few.

I’m not saying there’s anything technically inaccurate about Mr. Demme’s film. Indeed, there’s much to admire about its dramatic structure and genesis. It’s basically a concert film of Neil Young doing songs from his new down-home, back-to-roots tribute to his Canadian prairie origin, the acoustic, rural virtues of his Prairie Wind album, with a few older “country-rock” throw-ins like “Heart of Gold.”

What lends it the drama that the songs (for the most part) lack are medical rather than musical factors. Neil wrote the songs shortly after learning he’d need to undergo surgery for a brain aneurysm. The concerts for Mr. Demme’s film were recorded at Nashville’s original Grand Ole Opry House, the Ryman Auditorium, with some of Neil’s remarkably gifted old-boy Nashville studio musicians (and none of Neil’s Crazy Horse compadres, the ones he made rock ’n’ roll history with, who are—like that history—nowhere to be seen, not even referred to, unpersons: part of the unpast in this snapshot).

I have to say I’m in awe of Mr. Young for having the courage, the level of spiritual evolution required to pull off with such calm panache a concert that so effortlessly weaves together such a remarkable array of musical elements—guitars, keyboards, backup singers, choruses. There is much beauty and bravery to admire in it. And the shadow of mortality endows the occasionally wistful but mainly self-satisfied music we’re given with an extra dimensionality that Mr. Demme modestly and unobtrusively records. Well-done, tasteful, somber, reflective and—did I mention?—self-satisfied.

Three Neil Youngs?

And yet … Neil Young being happy and self-satisfied, surrounded by friends and fellow music lovers: more power to him, and mad props for doing it so well. But hey, forgive me: I totally concede I couldn’t face brain-aneurysm surgery so admirably and stoically, no question—but still, this is a guy who used to give brain aneurysms with his music (metaphorically, anyway). This is a guy who could leave you shaken to the core with his chords, with a single incantatory phrase whose compressed, elliptical wisdom could haunt you for weeks, months, a lifetime ever after.

Mr. Demme’s movie, this Canadian Prairie Home Companion, is so nostalgically goody-goody and reverent about the Great White North that Neil came from, it becomes like a propaganda film. Sure, there are some songs on Prairie Wind that are haunting and wistful and plaintive—it’s Neil Young, after all—and you can’t help loving the weathered faces and battered fingers of the Nashville session wizards. It’s all admirable, really—I get that.

But art isn’t always about admirability, is it? All happy families are alike, alas, which is why there are few great novels about happy families. Indeed, Edmund Wilson was, if crude, at least closer to the heart of the matter when he said that art grows out of a wound, one that can’t be covered up with plastic surgery or sugary sentiment. (The Jim Jarmusch film gives you both the wound and the bow, so to speak.)

It’s not like I’m being anti-acoustic here. But as my friend Natalie—a major Neil Young fan who plays electric bass guitar in a cult-fave, punk-pop, all-girl (except the drummer) band called Ruffian—pointed out, it’s not just a split between Electric Neil and Acoustic Neil à la Dylan here.

She likes Early Acoustic Neil—the eerie trippiness of “After the Gold Rush,” for instance, or the deep mystification of “Helpless” (“Blue, blue windows behind the stars”—huh? Check out the Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Helpless” sometime and you’ll see what we’re talking about.)

But she feels that Late Acoustic Neil is another story—the Neil of the terminally insipid “Harvest Moon” and the songs on Prairie Wind, simple to the point where it reminds you that while simplicity can be an artistic virtue, there’s a difference between simplicity and simple-mindedness.

So maybe, Natalie suggested in response to my Two-Neil typology, there are actually Three Neil Youngs—Early Acoustic, Electric and Late Acoustic—although she agreed that Early Acoustic and Electric are just on a higher plane than Late Acoustic. (I hope you’re following this.)

Meanwhile, there’s the Neil Young of the Jim Jarmusch movie, which is really a portrait of him and his decades-long companion band, Crazy Horse (the one he formed after leaving Buffalo Springfield). I have to give Mr. Jarmusch—whose films have not been faves of mine before—credit here for his instinct for greatness: for giving us footage of some amazing, extended versions of the insanely appealing, thunderous, incantatory Crazy Horse sound, interspersed with tales of OD’s, bad behavior, the rock ’n’ roll life.

Yeah, it’s Behind the Music stuff we’ve heard before, but it cumulatively convinces you that there’s some special Crazy Horse chemistry in the wail of sound—Neil on lead, Billy Talbot doing those thunderous bass riffs and Frank (Pancho) Sampedro ripping it all to intelligible shreds on rhythm guitar. Especially when you see the three of them locked into a riff they can’t escape from (nor do you necessarily want them to)—it’s so mesmerizing to watch them as they bob and weave in a semi-synchronized ecstasy that looks like Orthodox Jews davening before God. Indeed, on several songs—most notably “Like a Hurricane” and “Tonight’s the Night”—Mr. Jarmusch is content to let us watch and listen to something kind of breathtaking.

‘The Long Friends’

What exactly is it that’s unique about Neil Young? For one thing, his work still provokes interesting arguments; people who are smart about music and culture still care about figuring him out.

At a party recently, I found myself getting into a long argument with a smart dude who was knowledgeable about both film and music and had this theory of “the spook” in regard to Neil Young’s best work.

I seem to recall we started off arguing about “Cowgirl in the Sand,” which is my admitted Neil Young weakness, due to having been introduced to it under, um, special circumstances one night at some lodge on the Rocky Mountain slopes of Colorado. It was one of his longer songs, 10 minutes or so in the original, but this one seemed to go on forever (and yet one never wanted it to end).

Since then, in live performance, Neil has played longer and longer versions of this eerie ode, each accompanied by what I’d call an electric-guitar exegesis that—like the illuminations of a monk on an old manuscript—doesn’t necessarily spell out its meaning but somehow speaks to it and elaborates upon it.

I was talking about a relatively rare Neil CD, Road Rock, which has a full 18-minute version of “Cowgirl in the Sand,” a version I’m still learning from. I always feel that when an artist is obsessed with returning to one of his early works, it’s worth our while to take the proper time to understand why.

Nonetheless, I got no respect from this guy, who called the 18-minute version “noodling, Grateful Dead style” (killer put-down, and even if I think he’s wrong, you can see the subject brings the sharp knives out of the drawer).

Anyway, we went on to discuss other songs we both liked, and he offered the theory that what they had in common was something he called “the spook,” which sounded like an old blues term for something eerie, uncanny, in touch with ghostly forces. Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil—like that.

He said that some Neil Young songs definitely had “the spook” and others did not. As I recall, we agreed on “Helpless,” I think, but disagreed on “Powderfinger” (him yes, me no). And although I don’t know if I’d use the same phrase, I think there’s something true about it. Half the time, that quavering falsetto in Mr. Young’s voice makes it sound like he’s seen a ghost or like he’s walking past the graveyard, in touch with spirits whose provenance he’s not so sure about. His spooky muses. I think of the chillingly spooky phrase from Robert Stone’s Children of Light, the name that his half-mad heroine gives to the unwelcome visitors/creatures she begins to see when she’s losing her mind: the “Long Friends.” I have a feeling that Mr. Young has seen the Long Friends.

Girls Know

So there’s that—that spooky, moody, minor-chord Neil Young thing. But for me, it’s also about the songwriting, the lyrics: Neil Young as master of epigrammatic Compressed Elliptical Wisdom (C.E.W.). And, by the way, this is not just guy stuff—one interesting thing you learn is that many intelligent women are into Neil. There’s Natalie, the bass player, and her theory of the Three Neils. And my friend Naomi (who dates bass players), with whom I developed the theory of Neil’s C.E.W.

It’s what’s most distinctive about his songwriting. Dylan has it but tosses it off casually, almost too profusely—there’s so much to pay attention to that you don’t give any one element its due. Neil makes you focus on an elliptical phrase by repeating it over and over until all (or most) of its resonances rise and emerge. When Neil gets hold of a phrase, he doesn’t try to explain it, but rather exalts it through an almost trance-like incantation.

“Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” for instance: Has any phrase ever captured the transition from life to death with more take-you-by-surprise compression than “out of the blue and into the black”? (Kurt Cobain quoted from this song in his suicide note.)

Just about every line in that song has that quality. My favorite? “You pay for this, but they give you that.” Let’s just say it’s not about a retail transaction; it’s about another kind of price altogether. You could even call it a distillation of tragic wisdom that summarizes all of Sophocles. (O.K., that’s a hyperbole, but you know me—I like the friction that comes from mixing high and low references.)

Naomi’s favorite was another line from that same song: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.” The way Neil turns an absolutely deadpan recitation of a cliché that’s been worn down to the point of meaninglessness, through his plaintive incantation, into a kind of transcendental affirmation of beautiful and frightening realms beyond our ken.

It’s what distinguishes great songwriting: the ability to take a familiar phrase out of the vernacular and, just by giving it the attention, the attentiveness we often neglect, defamiliarize it and raise it to another level.

That’s what this guy does, what he’s done. Not just affirm old-time family values and radiate complacency, as he does for Mr. Demme. Listen to Decade, listen to Live Rust, rent Year of the Horse.

Watch the Demme film if you want. It’s a beautiful snapshot for a family-values album. But believe me: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.”

But maybe I should give Edmund Wilson the last word. A word about art and danger. At the close of “The Two Scrooges,” Wilson is talking about Dickens’ struggle to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a struggle interrupted by a fatal stroke. A death that left unresolved Dickens’ own internal struggle with the character of John Jasper, Drood’s mesmerizingly villainous, opium-smoking choirmaster, whom Wilson believes Dickens saw as an embodiment of his own divided self:

“Mr. Jasper is, like Dickens, an artist …. Like Dickens, leads a life of the imagination apart from that of common men. Like Dickens, he is a skilful magician whose power over his fellows may be dangerous …. ”

And so, Wilson suggests, “All that sentiment, all those edifying high spirits, which Dickens has been dispensing so long … has all this now grown as false as those hymns to the glory of the Christian God which are performed by the worshiper of Kali?”

Which is why I want to begin my Neil Young polemic from the heights of Mount Wilson.

The Two Scrooges

Back in 1940, in one of the most influential literary polemics of the last century, Edmund Wilson argued in his “Two Scrooges” essay (the opening piece in The Wound and the Bow, originally published in The Atlantic) that the reigning condescending literary consensus on a superb popular artist—in this case, Charles Dickens—was all wrong. Indeed that it reflected an obtuse, snobbish philistinism. One that was able to see only the superficial, cheerful caricaturist in Dickens, and occluded the dark, complex resonances of the sensibility that surfaced in the later work.

“The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky’s master, Dickens,” Wilson memorably sneered, with good reason.

The Two Scrooges, the Two Dickens—and now, ladies and gentlemen, consider a similar cultural divide over the conception of another misapprehended popular artist: the Two Neil Youngs.

There’s the bland, insipid, complacent, syrupy, self-satisfied, family-values, country-pie, pious, rural-virtues Neil Young that Jonathan Demme’s just-released film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, gives us. No doubt a true snapshot of a recent Neil Young moment, but a snapshot that doesn’t merely sugarcoat but virtually erases—denies—the existence of the Other Neil Young.

The occlusion of the artist’s complex identity is comparable to constructing an image of the work of T.S. Eliot based entirely on a film version of Cats. “Waste Land,” what “Waste Land”? Look at the big furry kitties!

Mr. Demme’s film omits the dark, electrifying, deeply disruptive, sometimes bleak, sometimes exhilarating and subversive Neil Young. Not the “country-rock” musician that Mr. Demme’s reliably adoring film-critic acolytes describe him as, but rather the hard-core, killer rock ’n’ roll genius whose electrifying, volcanic sound and deeply resonant and compressed lyrics left an imprint not just on music, but on popular culture itself. Neil Young is not just a transformative rock god—but as the spiritual godfather to Kurt Cobain, he was also a powerfully influential transformer of American popular culture, the progenitor of the wickedly acute, wised-up post-punk cultural sensibility.

Don’t get me wrong: Mr. Demme’s film is in many ways both beautiful and respectful. But by exalting rural virtues—in effect, by equating “rural” with “virtue”—and by making a hymn of praise for the prairie wisdom of the Great White North, Neil’s Canadian prairie roots, he verges on rural supremacism. By that I mean the ingrained American nativist, puritanical distrust of (and distaste for) the urban, the cosmopolitan, the seductive sins of sophistication, irony and complexity. Instead, simple is always best. Or less dangerous.

And so, in his extremely well-meaning way, Mr. Demme—well known as an admirably socially engaged director—has made perhaps the most reactionary film of the past year.

Reactionary in the sense that it implicitly gives the impression that family values of a certain kind—the Great White North, Great White Nashville kind—are the only true values. If you stay close to the land and practice rural virtues, you’ll go to heaven, (as long as you’re a rich rock—sorry, “country-rock”—star). Conventionality rules, dude!

‘The Idiocy of Rural Life’

Reactionary? I know I reacted to it by questioning the assumption that not all who live close to the earth are superior to those who don’t. Although I’m not a Marxist, I savored once again the bracing contempt for the cult of peasant wisdom that Marx and/or Engels expressed in The Communist Manifesto: The peasants need to be rescued, they say, from “the idiocy of rural life.”

Some have claimed that this is a mistranslation, that what was meant was not the “idiocy” but the stultifying isolation—but that’s absent too in the virgin-soil iconography of this prairie apotheosis, complete with primitivist dioramas of Neil’s life-giving Great White North wheat fields.

Yes, the film suggests, all this can be a reward for virtue; this is what virtue looks like—a contribution to the demonization of urbanity whose celebration was the best thing about Mr. Demme’s other films.

I don’t think I’d feel the same way were it not for the peculiar erasure of any trace of the Other in this film, the Other Neil Young. The one whose soul-shattering chords and trance-like lyric meditations suggested that there might be Other Values, realms beyond the rural to find fulfillment or (dare I say it?) excitement, the wild surmise at a glimpse of something not found in the Prairie Home Companion.

The Other Neil Young can be glimpsed—if you want a side-by-side comparison with Mr. Demme’s laundered version—in Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 down-and-dirty Neil Young documentary, Year of the Horse. A film and a sensibility almost entirely ignored—whitewashed—in the critical adulation accorded Mr. Demme’s film. Due to Mr. Demme’s critical cachet, his film will undoubtedly overshadow not just Mr. Jarmusch’s work (shamefully not even referred to in most reviews) but, even worse, will serve to eclipse entirely in the minds of most—in the collective consciousness of the culture—the very memory of the Other Neil Young.

Now I’m not proposing the equivalent of a W.W.E. steel-cage match between Mr. Demme and Mr. Jarmusch (although, come to think of it … ). Look, they each made their own movie of their own Neil Young. But the Jarmusch documentary at least does justice to the reason why Neil Young is an important figure in the culture. Not for his contribution to “country rock,” the misleading pigeonhole that the tunnel-vision reviews of the Demme film have consigned him to. Yes, he contributed to “country rock” (and I’m second to no one in my love of “country rock”—I probably play more Gram Parsons repeatedly than anyone you know), but the point is that he, Neil, is at the very heart of hardcore rock ’n’ roll, something the Bloomsbury types of our time seem to disdain appreciating or just don’t get.

He’s at the heart of rock ’n’ roll, on a plane with Dylan and Van Morrison, because of the way he harnesses the torrential energy of “Like a Hurricane,” because of the spooky, apocalyptic dreaminess of “After the Gold Rush,” the mordant forever-haunting, guilt-ridden death wish that is “Tonight’s the Night.” The incantatory, almost sinister romantic ecstasy of “Cowgirl in the Sand” (which can’t help conjuring up, for some of us at least, the bleak desolation of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”). And the brilliant, truly insidious but somehow tragically joyful nihilism of “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” with its thunderous opening chords that sound like someone’s pounding on the Gates of Hell. Just to name a few.

I’m not saying there’s anything technically inaccurate about Mr. Demme’s film. Indeed, there’s much to admire about its dramatic structure and genesis. It’s basically a concert film of Neil Young doing songs from his new down-home, back-to-roots tribute to his Canadian prairie origin, the acoustic, rural virtues of his Prairie Wind album, with a few older “country-rock” throw-ins like “Heart of Gold.”

What lends it the drama that the songs (for the most part) lack are medical rather than musical factors. Neil wrote the songs shortly after learning he’d need to undergo surgery for a brain aneurysm. The concerts for Mr. Demme’s film were recorded at Nashville’s original Grand Ole Opry House, the Ryman Auditorium, with some of Neil’s remarkably gifted old-boy Nashville studio musicians (and none of Neil’s Crazy Horse compadres, the ones he made rock ’n’ roll history with, who are—like that history—nowhere to be seen, not even referred to, unpersons: part of the unpast in this snapshot).

I have to say I’m in awe of Mr. Young for having the courage, the level of spiritual evolution required to pull off with such calm panache a concert that so effortlessly weaves together such a remarkable array of musical elements—guitars, keyboards, backup singers, choruses. There is much beauty and bravery to admire in it. And the shadow of mortality endows the occasionally wistful but mainly self-satisfied music we’re given with an extra dimensionality that Mr. Demme modestly and unobtrusively records. Well-done, tasteful, somber, reflective and—did I mention?—self-satisfied.

Three Neil Youngs?

And yet … Neil Young being happy and self-satisfied, surrounded by friends and fellow music lovers: more power to him, and mad props for doing it so well. But hey, forgive me: I totally concede I couldn’t face brain-aneurysm surgery so admirably and stoically, no question—but still, this is a guy who used to give brain aneurysms with his music (metaphorically, anyway). This is a guy who could leave you shaken to the core with his chords, with a single incantatory phrase whose compressed, elliptical wisdom could haunt you for weeks, months, a lifetime ever after.

Mr. Demme’s movie, this Canadian Prairie Home Companion, is so nostalgically goody-goody and reverent about the Great White North that Neil came from, it becomes like a propaganda film. Sure, there are some songs on Prairie Wind that are haunting and wistful and plaintive—it’s Neil Young, after all—and you can’t help loving the weathered faces and battered fingers of the Nashville session wizards. It’s all admirable, really—I get that.

But art isn’t always about admirability, is it? All happy families are alike, alas, which is why there are few great novels about happy families. Indeed, Edmund Wilson was, if crude, at least closer to the heart of the matter when he said that art grows out of a wound, one that can’t be covered up with plastic surgery or sugary sentiment. (The Jim Jarmusch film gives you both the wound and the bow, so to speak.)

It’s not like I’m being anti-acoustic here. But as my friend Natalie—a major Neil Young fan who plays electric bass guitar in a cult-fave, punk-pop, all-girl (except the drummer) band called Ruffian—pointed out, it’s not just a split between Electric Neil and Acoustic Neil à la Dylan here.

She likes Early Acoustic Neil—the eerie trippiness of “After the Gold Rush,” for instance, or the deep mystification of “Helpless” (“Blue, blue windows behind the stars”—huh? Check out the Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Helpless” sometime and you’ll see what we’re talking about.)

But she feels that Late Acoustic Neil is another story—the Neil of the terminally insipid “Harvest Moon” and the songs on Prairie Wind, simple to the point where it reminds you that while simplicity can be an artistic virtue, there’s a difference between simplicity and simple-mindedness.

So maybe, Natalie suggested in response to my Two-Neil typology, there are actually Three Neil Youngs—Early Acoustic, Electric and Late Acoustic—although she agreed that Early Acoustic and Electric are just on a higher plane than Late Acoustic. (I hope you’re following this.)

Meanwhile, there’s the Neil Young of the Jim Jarmusch movie, which is really a portrait of him and his decades-long companion band, Crazy Horse (the one he formed after leaving Buffalo Springfield). I have to give Mr. Jarmusch—whose films have not been faves of mine before—credit here for his instinct for greatness: for giving us footage of some amazing, extended versions of the insanely appealing, thunderous, incantatory Crazy Horse sound, interspersed with tales of OD’s, bad behavior, the rock ’n’ roll life.

Yeah, it’s Behind the Music stuff we’ve heard before, but it cumulatively convinces you that there’s some special Crazy Horse chemistry in the wail of sound—Neil on lead, Billy Talbot doing those thunderous bass riffs and Frank (Pancho) Sampedro ripping it all to intelligible shreds on rhythm guitar. Especially when you see the three of them locked into a riff they can’t escape from (nor do you necessarily want them to)—it’s so mesmerizing to watch them as they bob and weave in a semi-synchronized ecstasy that looks like Orthodox Jews davening before God. Indeed, on several songs—most notably “Like a Hurricane” and “Tonight’s the Night”—Mr. Jarmusch is content to let us watch and listen to something kind of breathtaking.

‘The Long Friends’

What exactly is it that’s unique about Neil Young? For one thing, his work still provokes interesting arguments; people who are smart about music and culture still care about figuring him out.

At a party recently, I found myself getting into a long argument with a smart dude who was knowledgeable about both film and music and had this theory of “the spook” in regard to Neil Young’s best work.

I seem to recall we started off arguing about “Cowgirl in the Sand,” which is my admitted Neil Young weakness, due to having been introduced to it under, um, special circumstances one night at some lodge on the Rocky Mountain slopes of Colorado. It was one of his longer songs, 10 minutes or so in the original, but this one seemed to go on forever (and yet one never wanted it to end).

Since then, in live performance, Neil has played longer and longer versions of this eerie ode, each accompanied by what I’d call an electric-guitar exegesis that—like the illuminations of a monk on an old manuscript—doesn’t necessarily spell out its meaning but somehow speaks to it and elaborates upon it.

I was talking about a relatively rare Neil CD, Road Rock, which has a full 18-minute version of “Cowgirl in the Sand,” a version I’m still learning from. I always feel that when an artist is obsessed with returning to one of his early works, it’s worth our while to take the proper time to understand why.

Nonetheless, I got no respect from this guy, who called the 18-minute version “noodling, Grateful Dead style” (killer put-down, and even if I think he’s wrong, you can see the subject brings the sharp knives out of the drawer).

Anyway, we went on to discuss other songs we both liked, and he offered the theory that what they had in common was something he called “the spook,” which sounded like an old blues term for something eerie, uncanny, in touch with ghostly forces. Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil—like that.

He said that some Neil Young songs definitely had “the spook” and others did not. As I recall, we agreed on “Helpless,” I think, but disagreed on “Powderfinger” (him yes, me no). And although I don’t know if I’d use the same phrase, I think there’s something true about it. Half the time, that quavering falsetto in Mr. Young’s voice makes it sound like he’s seen a ghost or like he’s walking past the graveyard, in touch with spirits whose provenance he’s not so sure about. His spooky muses. I think of the chillingly spooky phrase from Robert Stone’s Children of Light, the name that his half-mad heroine gives to the unwelcome visitors/creatures she begins to see when she’s losing her mind: the “Long Friends.” I have a feeling that Mr. Young has seen the Long Friends.

Girls Know

So there’s that—that spooky, moody, minor-chord Neil Young thing. But for me, it’s also about the songwriting, the lyrics: Neil Young as master of epigrammatic Compressed Elliptical Wisdom (C.E.W.). And, by the way, this is not just guy stuff—one interesting thing you learn is that many intelligent women are into Neil. There’s Natalie, the bass player, and her theory of the Three Neils. And my friend Naomi (who dates bass players), with whom I developed the theory of Neil’s C.E.W.

It’s what’s most distinctive about his songwriting. Dylan has it but tosses it off casually, almost too profusely—there’s so much to pay attention to that you don’t give any one element its due. Neil makes you focus on an elliptical phrase by repeating it over and over until all (or most) of its resonances rise and emerge. When Neil gets hold of a phrase, he doesn’t try to explain it, but rather exalts it through an almost trance-like incantation.

“Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” for instance: Has any phrase ever captured the transition from life to death with more take-you-by-surprise compression than “out of the blue and into the black”? (Kurt Cobain quoted from this song in his suicide note.)

Just about every line in that song has that quality. My favorite? “You pay for this, but they give you that.” Let’s just say it’s not about a retail transaction; it’s about another kind of price altogether. You could even call it a distillation of tragic wisdom that summarizes all of Sophocles. (O.K., that’s a hyperbole, but you know me—I like the friction that comes from mixing high and low references.)

Naomi’s favorite was another line from that same song: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.” The way Neil turns an absolutely deadpan recitation of a cliché that’s been worn down to the point of meaninglessness, through his plaintive incantation, into a kind of transcendental affirmation of beautiful and frightening realms beyond our ken.

It’s what distinguishes great songwriting: the ability to take a familiar phrase out of the vernacular and, just by giving it the attention, the attentiveness we often neglect, defamiliarize it and raise it to another level.

That’s what this guy does, what he’s done. Not just affirm old-time family values and radiate complacency, as he does for Mr. Demme. Listen to Decade, listen to Live Rust, rent Year of the Horse.

Watch the Demme film if you want. It’s a beautiful snapshot for a family-values album. But believe me: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.”

But maybe I should give Edmund Wilson the last word. A word about art and danger. At the close of “The Two Scrooges,” Wilson is talking about Dickens’ struggle to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a struggle interrupted by a fatal stroke. A death that left unresolved Dickens’ own internal struggle with the character of John Jasper, Drood’s mesmerizingly villainous, opium-smoking choirmaster, whom Wilson believes Dickens saw as an embodiment of his own divided self:

“Mr. Jasper is, like Dickens, an artist …. Like Dickens, leads a life of the imagination apart from that of common men. Like Dickens, he is a skilful magician whose power over his fellows may be dangerous …. ”

And so, Wilson suggests, “All that sentiment, all those edifying high spirits, which Dickens has been dispensing so long … has all this now grown as false as those hymns to the glory of the Christian God which are performed by the worshiper of Kali?”

That is all well and good. Roger was a great publisher. Farrar, Straus & Giroux was a noble holdout. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Derek Wolcott. Etc. But to know Roger, and love him, wasn't really about Literature and Culture. I'm trying to remember if I ever saw him wield a pen. Roger loved pleasure and fun and mischief, Roger fled bores like the plague and then told you about them. Roger never had a pious sober or correct thought in the three years that I hung around him. Why is it that the people who do anything interesting seem to take themselves so unseriously? Roger W. Straus Jr. was an elegant rascal; Roger was bad.

I met Roger in 1994. I was desperate for a father figure that I could adore, not some stuffy mentor, and Roger was desperate for what he was always desperate for- amusement, interest, the latest jellybean, as his old friend Edmund Wilson called young writers. "I'm just a truffle hunter; I like to find truffles," Roger said, slathering his bread with butter, fixing another gob of butter to the roll with the side of his thumb. His voice in that rich dark throaty lion's purr. Masculine, silver, vain, sexy.

Then he invited me to be a Farrar, Straus author and pulled the velvet bell rope on the whole world of fancy literature. In Paris, my publisher would be Gallimard. "In England, I am thinking, Faber & Faber." None of that happened (my book was good, but it wasn't all that good), and meantime Roger flirted on the phone with my wife and took me to lunch at his corner table at the Union Square Cafe, had us to candlelit dinners at his place in the East 70's or to lunch at his Westchester dacha.

The parties were always a few writers, underpaid and serious, in dark suits cobbled together, lovingly sucking the Cubans amid this shockingly aristocratic spread. Roger in his ascots and white shoes, servants-they were white, too-greenhouses, caviar, blinis, champagne, cigars, old cognac and so forth. Roger was insensitive in the way that all men of action are. He had no problems pouring money down over himself while the writers were poor as church mice. In his golden age, Roger used to send a limo in to pick up Edmund Wilson, the dean of American literature, and bring him out to the country, and meanwhile Wilson would be itching for $2,000 here, $3,000 there to keep the furnace going.

Philip Roth wanted more than that. "That is when Philip and I got a divorce," Roger said, pronouncing it divawce , with his Anglo catarrh. Divorcing Philip Roth! I had the impression that Roger had gotten divorces with lots of folks. He enjoyed divorces and feuds.

He squirmed when writers wanted real money, but he loved to tip them grandly, like waiters: He preferred the $2,000 or $3,000 coin-toss to the giant advance. "Don't you need some walking-around money?" he said when I was going out West on a story. My wife shook Roger down for $2,000 for a book party, although Roger then instructed her carefully on how to throw it.

"Invite everybody and don't get too big a room. I like a party where everyone had to breathe at the same time. Don't spend anything on the wine. Have you ever been to a cocktail party where someone said, 'Oh boy, this wine is good!'" Laughing his velvet laugh. "Now that is a bad party."

The other thing he did was send us books. He was always sending over new and old volumes-Edmund Wilson, Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Wolcott-like bottles of wine. He seemed to see it as his role to cultivate me and my wife like fig trees in his greenhouse, to instruct us in the best way to

live. These are some of the true joys of life, he was saying, good books.

Did Roger read? I think in the way people who know wine drink wine. He picked around in there, found what interested him. "The punch takes longer to hit the jaw," was his pronouncement on my latest rewrite of my first novel, and in its way that was enough; he was right. Someone in The Times wrote that Roger had excellent taste. That's wrong. Roger wasn't about taste; he had a deeper vision than that. It was about soul and energy.

Taste is twisted up with fashion and glamour and appropriateness, the haute bourgeoisie. Roger wasn't interested by taste. Roger liked to grow carnations. Who grows carnations? No one in any gardening magazine. But carnations pleased Roger, so he grew them. Maybe they reminded him of his boutonnieres ….

The best example is when I asked him about the writer Deborah Eisenberg, what did she look like?

"She's not pretty," he said. "She's like your wife. She's better than pretty." Then I felt the error of my own taste. Better than pretty. That was true discernment.

Gossiping about women is what made Roger run. "That one's a ball-crusher," he'd pronounce in a sly whisper. This new restaurant looks just like a bordello, he told Edmund Wilson, making him laugh. The only line-editing Roger ever did that I can think of was when, in some lone motion of discretion, he cut a description of the writer Penelope Gilliat's red bush from Wilson's last published diaries, The Sixties . Though of course Roger loved to tell the story: "It was very exciting-she had a flaming red bush." There is a funny story in The Sixties where Roger tells Wilson about going out to lunch with a new Italian writer who brought her two children. The 6-year-old boy's fly was open, and the little girl kept putting her hand in and playing with him.

"No dear, not here," the mother said.

Naughty talk kept Roger alive. "Don't worry, I'll talk dirty to her," he said, assuring me he would smooth a deal out with my agent. He used to parade around town with his mistress-that was an open secret-and he took a lively interest when I told him about an editor friend's affair.

"So," he said with shrewd interest. "It's begun now in your generation, has it?"

The newspapers found Roger's quotes outrageous, and I think that both surprised him and encouraged him. He liked taking the stuffing out of anyone. When he introduced me to the vaunted editor Elisabeth Sifton, he assured me not to worry about the fact that she was the daughter of the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr. "Oh yes, and her father was-that Thing," he said, grabbing that simple word from the air.

He took the air out of himself too: "I moved around in college. I finished up at the University of Missouri, in the West. At that time, the hand of man had not set foot in that part of the world."

The Times obit informs me that when the war came, able-bodied Roger spent it with a playboy buddy doing publicity for the Navy-in New York, of course. Not the sort of service they talk about on Memorial Day. Which is to say that others probably paid a price for all the fun Roger had. The grim burnt air that assaulted the nostrils in the rickety Farrar, Straus offices over Union Square may have had to do with the fact that so many people were doing so much work on very little pay while Roger danced out in his white shoes to have caviar, and called the interns "darling" and "babe." My view of Roger's domestic scene was a sparse but sprawling Roman ruin, pillars tilted and broken, a few distant figures in togas. Roger's one son was all but out of the picture; he'd left Farrar, Straus a long time ago for a more obscure publishing arc. If you had daddy issues as big as my daddy issues, it was inevitable that you would paint yourself into that scene of broken pillars-and sure enough, I did. I wrote an article about the dacha in this newspaper some years ago. Probably a big mistake.

But Roger could adore a scoundrel, and so could I.

"A fart in the wind, my dear, just a fart in the wind," Roger said at first, dismissing it.

But others didn't take it lightly. Soon I was being accused by a family member of writing anonymous letters about Roger's mistress. Egad, things got byzantine and Iris Murdoch in a big hurry. So I had to go. So long to Gallimard and Faber and the sunny valley of Literature.

Roger regretfully announced our divorce to me at the Union Square Cafe, at his corner table. Is this because you don't like my new book? I said. No, no, the book is fine, it's not about the book, he said. (Although the book never did find a publisher.) I stared down at the crab cocktail I hadn't eaten, and after that at the beautiful swordfish that also arrived, untouched, and thought of bolting then and there. I don't have to sit still for this.

I sat still for it. Roger was my father figure, and even if he was a rascal, he was as liver-spotted as a lobster and deference was owed. He spoke lovingly to me. He said that he would always look out for me, that I should call him when I needed advice. But I should go out and find a young editor.

Someone who could grow up with me, could bring me along. He was old; he wasn't going to be around forever. I'd never heard him speak so seriously, with a gravelly solemnity and sincerity, and everything he said was true, though I couldn't see it then, as I couldn't see the dark blotches under his beautiful cuffs from an IV, or some other medical procedure. No, my world went black, the curtain came down on the sun, the way it does when you lose your true love. (And for years to come, I'd command my wife not to buy Farrar, Straus books, till we had no choice-for who else was doing such interesting stuff?)

At last I couldn't take it any more and, with a formal gesture, I stood up. We both said we'd stay in touch, but it was the last time we'd ever see one another, the last time we spoke. Oh, Roger! Then I did what you should do with a great spirit that brings you to life. I kissed him.

(Thanks to Rachel Donadio for her reporting on the funeral.)

This is one reason why the exhibition called Ear's Eye for James Joyce , which brings together a selection of paintings, drawings, collages and constructions by the American painter Susan Weil, all based on Joyce's writings, is something of an event. Another reason is that the exhibition itself is a sheer delight, so teeming with wit, invention and pictorial virtuosity that it's bound to be engaging even for viewers who've never read a line of Joyce. And as each work in the exhibition is accompanied by an excerpt from the text on which it's based, the show may also serve as a salutary introduction. For anyone even slightly acquainted with Joyce's oeuvre the show is a must.

Don't be surprised if you've never heard of either the the artist or her work. Although Susan Weil has devoted nearly two decades to the Joyce project and has meanwhile produced a number of limited-edition art books on the subject, the show at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery is the first American survey of her Joyce paintings. Her work is actually better known in Sweden than in the United States, where she was a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. In 1997, the National Museum in Stockholm organized an exhibition of her work that was accompanied by a catalog in English and Swedish. But as far as I know, no American museum has taken any notice of her work.

Don't expect to see anything resembling conventional literary illustration in this exhibition. Just as Joyce's writing evolved into a synthesis of realism and symbolism and a language rich in puns and other varieties of wordplay, at once earthy, elegant and often very comical, so the forms as well as the content of Ms. Weil's pictures and constructions mix portraiture, abstraction and disjunctive images in an attempt to create the visual equivalent of the rhythms of Joyce's prose. Attentive to the lilting musicality of his sentences, Ms. Weil's imagery traces a syncopated rhythm of its own that owes something to Cubism, something to Futurism and a lot to the freewheeling inventions of Dada. Yet the result resembles nothing we've seen in those earlier styles, for hers remains sharply focused on the Joycean scenarios she has taken as her guide.

Thus James Joyce II (2003), the work that dominates the exhibition, is divided into a dozen or so separate "portraits" of the writer-his face, his hands, even the soles of his shoes-that all but dance a kind of cinematic jig. In the big rectangular picture called Irish Stew (1995), on the other hand, Joyce's face is almost the last thing we notice in the lower left-hand corner of a composition crowded with more animated symbols. Joyce made a specialty of combining accounts of the most commonplace, even vulgar experiences with allusions to mythic archetypes, and Ms. Weil succeeds in evoking similar incongruities in the very format of her collage-constructions.

Almost as impressive as the pictorial invention Ms. Weil has brought to the Joyce paintings and constructions is her mastery of Joyce's often difficult writings. Even as great an admirer of Joyce as Edmund Wilson once wrote, "I do not deny that [Joyce] is tedious at times: I am bored by the relentless longueurs of some of the middle chapters of Finnegans Wake just as I am bored by those in the latter part of Ulysses ." I myself have never found it possible to read Finnegans Wake through to the end and, like Edmund Wilson, "I have found it puts me straight to sleep to try to follow" some of the academic explications of Joyce's later writings. Yet Ms. Weil appears to have taken such difficulties in stride, and has paid Joyce the great compliment of devoting some 18 years to the study of and visual interpretation of his literary achievement. I repeat: Ear's Eye for James Joyce is an event.

The exhibition remains on view at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 137 Greene Street, through Sept. 28.

Even a quick study of the cerebral crew known as the New York intellectuals reveals that the female of the species never received the attention she deserves. For the most part, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Jean Stafford, Diana Trilling and Elizabeth Hardwick wrote as much as-and, in the case of Arendt, more and better than-their male counterparts, and yet the women were usually banished to the back room of the Partisan Review clubhouse. Histories of the group have done little to rectify this oversight; while women's names are sprinkled liberally on the dust jackets and in the indexes, even the finest accounts-such as Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals (1987) and Alexander Bloom's appropriately titled Prodigal Sons (1986)-are mostly devoted to the "boys": Daniel Bell, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Dwight Macdonald.

The bias is particularly odd because-as David Laskin points out in Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals -the women's achievements may be the notable feature in this period of American intellectual history. "As a generation, these women had unprecedented opportunities-to write, to publish and edit, to stand up as public figures, to marry multiple times and have love affairs as they desired," he writes. Indeed, among the many reasons the New York intellectuals capture our imagination is that their literary accomplishments didn't preclude equally robust social lives. The "P.R. girls," as their nemesis Diana Trilling called them, "were lucky enough to encounter a generation of men who were interested in their minds as well as their bodies and as eager for their work as their love," Mr. Laskin writes.

Work versus love, writing versus "wifely duties"-herein lies the tension, both for the women and for Mr. Laskin. Any successful intellectual biography strikes a delicate balance between the work and the life. Focus too tightly on the former and you have a dissertation; stick too closely to the latter and you get a cocktail of salacious anecdotes. In order to reconcile these approaches, Mr. Laskin pairs off his subjects much as he did in A Common Life (1994), his book about literary friendship and influence. "As wives and husbands they were most fully and unconsciously themselves," he writes in Partisans . "Marriage was their mode, their stage, their fallback position, their default option."

The concept of marriage has an almost talismanic hold over Mr. Laskin, who argues that the group's serial devotion to matrimony reveals something essential about them as intellectuals. Marriage is crucial to his enterprise not because the New Yorkers married frequently, but because they married badly-a "theme" that gives him an excuse to fill his book with truckloads of gossip.

Think of Partisans as a pointy-head bio-pic, a docudrama about intellectuals that does its best to avoid their ideas. The skittish, clichéd segues with which Mr. Laskin lurches from textuality to sexuality are the stuff of parody. "But it wasn't all high-minded analysis and embattled idealism down at the seedy little P.R. office near Union Square," he reassures the reader after a meager one-paragraph history of Partisan Review . "There was also plenty of gossip, intrigue, and back stabbing, as well as off-hours boozing and competitive sex." Page after page, Mr. Laskin dissects these flamboyantly disastrous marriages-in particular McCarthy's to Wilson, and Lowell's to Stafford and, later, to Hardwick-with the fastidiousness of a Talmudic scholar poring over Scripture. "The evidence is highly suggestive that Wilson did in fact beat [McCarthy] up in June 1938 and that the beating was traumatic enough, whether physically or mentally, to bring on a psychological collapse," he concludes soberly.

Simon & Schuster files this book under "women's studies"; given the author's fascination with marital violence, why not "Comp-Hit"? Not content to describe every lurid episode in detail, he constructs a carefully calibrated hierarchy of wretched behavior. "Certainly there is a stronger case against Lowell for spousal abuse than against Edmund Wilson," he reasons after a particularly spicy passage. It seems that McCarthy got off relatively easy compared to Stafford, who was permanently disfigured in a car crash she believed was Lowell's attempt at murder-suicide. Remarkably, she agreed to marry him after their high-speed "courtship." ("He said he was in love with me and wd. I marry him and to avoid argument I said sure, honey, drink your beer and get me another one," she writes to a friend.) One reads in horror as Ms. Stafford announces their marriage; in the same letter she describes Lowell-accurately, it turns out-as "an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet." Ah, love.

It's not entirely fair to say that Partisans is pure gossip. Because Hannah Arendt's marriage to Heinrich Blücher was relatively peaceful, Mr. Laskin is forced to discuss her work, which he does quite well. The connections he draws between the New Yorkers and the Southern Agrarian writers are also intriguing, although one suspects he includes literary critic Allen Tate and his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, out of prurient interest in their long, tortured marriage. When Tate accepted a job at Princeton in 1939, he summarily quit both his and his wife's positions. "It was years before it occurred to me," said Ms. Gordon, "that Allen had resigned my full professorship-always a hard thing for a woman to come by-without consulting me." Mr. Laskin affords her only slightly more respect; though he notes that she published nine novels and two story collections, which makes her one of the most prolific writers in the book, he tells us virtually nothing about them.

The stated goal of Partisans is to praise these honorable women ("our teachers and mentors," he gushes, "they were the writers whose words taught us what we were thinking"), and so there's something odd about the author's fixation on the most demeaning details of their tempestuous couplings. Odd, that is, until one understands the book's implicit argument: Rather than celebrate the emerging feminist movement of the late 50's and early 60's, these women chose to define themselves through their patriarchal, exploitative marriages. If Mr. Laskin is disappointed that they were professionally, but not emotionally, "liberated," he is positively outraged that they refused to rise up and embrace their victimhood.

When Ms. Hardwick dares to offer a modest humanistic credo ("I'm a feminist, of course, but it's not my interest to look at things from the woman's point of view. You write as who you are"), Mr. Laskin fairly seethes with contempt. "Hardwick had been one of the boys since the old P.R. days back in the 1940's, and she never really renounced her membership in the club. She'd always gotten too much out of it," he writes. Incredibly, he concludes that it was their antifeminism-not their intellectual accomplishments-which ultimately bound the diverse group together. "They refused to see that they were exceptions. And because they were successful, at least by their own lights, they refused to see the point of feminism. Gender had been no impediment in their own careers, every one of them insisted at various times in her life. So why make such a fuss about it?"

In the midst of his ax-grinding and gossipmongering, Mr. Laskin manages, inadvertently, to pose a genuinely interesting question: Why did the New York intellectuals-male and female alike-lose their relevance and authority in the 60's? The answer surely has something to do with their parochial brand of Cold War liberalism, as well as their inability to appreciate various aspects of the counterculture, of which feminism is one. But to hang so much on their failure to understand the importance of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) is absurd. Mr. Laskin's suggestion that a writer squanders her chance in the great literary sweepstakes if she rejects feminism betrays a naïve, overly politicized notion of how literary canons are formed: "Had Stafford not ridiculed 'women's lib' in the 1960's and 70's," he writes, her novel, The Mountain Lion , "might have found a place on feminist reading lists instead of assuming the shabby-genteel status of a neglected classic."

Though Mr. Laskin makes good on his promise to shine a spotlight on these extraordinary women, his pathographic group portrait is so unflattering that one would prefer the discreet shadows of their erstwhile obscurity. "Neglected classics" never looked so good.