Camille Paglia: Intellectual Firebrand

Camille Paglia, that University of the Arts intellectual firebrand, has been too long absent from the SALON website. What a pleasure to read her today once again. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on John Fiske fifty years ago, it was to discover how difficult it was for a humanist without private means or a university job to earn a living as a professional historian. I took my epigraph from New England preacher Theodore Parker, who contended that the intellectual in our new egalitarian democracy had to “think with the saint and sage, but speak with Common Men.” There have been damn few such creatures in our cultural history—William James, John Dewey, Dr. Albert Barnes, W.E.B. Dubois—and in our generation, surely Camille Paglia.

I hadn’t realized until recently how hard it had been for her (born in upstate New York to two Italian immigrants in 1947) to get the academic status she was entitled to. Indeed, she has been a quirky, tactical troublemaker from the beginning, I just picked up on her with her first major work, “Sexual Personae: From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” (Yale, 1990). It had been her Yale dissertation (1974) and she offered it to seven publishers and five agents before she finally talked Ellen Graham at Yale to take a chance on a controversial thesis. One can imagine that she was always a feminist, long before she found intellectual reasons for her beliefs, this “feminist who feminists love to hate”. Her father was teaching romance languages at LeMoyne College when a Belgian colleague did Camille the favor of a gift of Simone Beauvoir’s “Second Sex”.

She had been working for three years on a biography of Amelia Earhart until the French feminist broadened her horizons. Her “peers” mocked her as a feminist bisexual egomaniac. Even though her Yale mentor Harold Bloom helped her to get a job at Bennington, that free wheeling free thinking college up in the country, she quit in disgust in 1979 over intellectual disagreements. She became one of those itinerant scholars that are such a disgrace to our new system of $100,000 star professors surrounded by proles without health insurance or pension rights. She even taught nights at Sikorsky Helicopters, and scraped by freelancing for that New Haven alternative paper, “The Advocate”, with topics like the oldest pizzeria in town, or about a house that had been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Basically, her wrangle with the feminist establishment was that they taught young women to hate men yet were themselves intellectually deficient in art history, science, and political history. It was a blessing for her to find a spot in 1984 as a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts, that shrewdly blended the College of Performing Arts with the Philadelphia College of Art in 1987. Ever since reading “Personae” I’ve been mesmerized by her capacity to relate the most demotic aspects of our Pop Culture with very esoteric High Culture. She hangs out intellectually with the likes of Bill Maher and Matt Drudge as well as her Yalies.

In the this interview in SALON, for example, this activist Democrat worries about Condi Rice’s current agenda, and sees that as part of her predicament, a Ph.D. under Madeline Albright’s father at the University of Denver prepared her to deal with the Cold War that is no longer here.

Consider her last visit to Baghdad—where her plane had to circle the field to avoid surface to air rockets, hop a helicopter to the Green Zone because of too many IED’s on the highway, and meet the Prime Minister in the dark because the electricity failed. The Bushies chose Rice and Powell to wean the African Americans away from the Dems, but that didn’t make it easier for Condi and the General. She worries about Bush’s mental state, inferring from his intonations and pace that he is living on the edge.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Camille talks boldly about being a practicing atheist—at the same time she urges that college students study the history of religions, as necessary to maintain ethical balance in our confused civilization.

What a talk show host she could be. NPR has probably become too timid to give her a slot. She worries about the conservative ranting that’s going over our air waves. Such blather is antipathetic to the kind of humanism she professes. Will we ever grow up enough in Philly or the United States to listen to Ms. Paglia. Long shot, but not impossible.