Contemporary Authors

• L'Exposition, Prix Lavinal Printemps des lecteurs 2009 P.O.L (Paris, France), 2008
• Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden P.O.L (Paris, France), 2012

• Suite for Barbara Loden - 2016 Dorothy, a publishing project, St. Louis, MO

• Wikipedia -

  Nathalie Léger
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Nathalie Léger (born in 1960) is the Executive Director of the IMEC.[1]

  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Work
  3 References
  4 External links

  Biography

  Nathalie Léger was curator of several exhibitions, notably Le Jeu et la Raison, dedicated to Antoine Vitez (Festival d'Avignon 1994), L'Auteur et son éditeur (IMEC, 1998) and the exhibition Roland Barthes, which was held at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in 2002, and in 2007, the exhibition Samuel Beckett, in the same place. She directed the five-volume edition of the Écrits sur le théâtre by Antoine Vitez (Éditions P.O.L (fr) 1994–98) and established, annotated and presented that of the last two courses of Roland Barthes at the Collège de France La Préparation du roman (Seuil-IMEC, 2002).

  She is the author of a very personal essay entitled Les Vies silencieuses de Samuel Beckett (Éditions Allia (fr), 2006). She also published a novel about the Countess of Castiglione, L'Exposition, Prix Lavinal Printemps des lecteurs 2009 (P.O.L., 2008).

  In 2012, she published Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden (fr), a novel devoted to the American actress and director Barbara Loden.[2] Since its publication, the book has been a very critical success[3] and was awarded the Prix du Livre Inter on 4 June 2012.[4]
  Work

  2006: Les Vies silencieuses de Samuel Beckett, Allia
  2008: L'Exposition, Prix Lavinal Printemps des lecteurs 2009, P.O.L
  2012 Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden, Paris, P.O.L

Suite for Barbara Loden
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Suite for Barbara Loden

Nathalie Leger, trans. from the French by Natasha Lehrerand Cecile Menon. Dorothy, a Publishing Project (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-9973666-0-0

In Legers associative, meditative novel, what we can know of one another is whatever we can imagine. Asked to write a short encyclopedia entry about the American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden, Leger's narrator becomes "carried away," unable to stick to the basic, established facts of Loden's life, or even to what appears "imperfect, individual, accidental" about her subject. Accordingly, Leger eschews the brief encyclopedia assignment, instead structuring the text like a musical composition in which certain notes sound again and again. Unable to access Loden's journals, the narrator writes scene-by-scene descriptions of Loden's single film, 1970's Wanda, interspersing these with scenes from her own investigation, which brings her to New York, Connecticut, and "soot-stained" Pennsylvania coal country, where Wanda was shot. A novel by Loden's husband, the director Elia Kazan, seems to be full of "things Barbara used to talk about," and an actress friend quotes Flaubert, suggesting that "everything we invent is the truth." But Barbara herself remains elusive: "A woman ... pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another ... playing not herself but a projection." Loden said she made her film "as a way of confirming my own existence"; brief appearances by the narrator's mother, another woman who, like Wanda's heroine, once found herself adrift, will suggest to readers that the search for another is also our common, constant labor: the creation of a self. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Suite for Barbara Loden." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285661&it=r&asid=32d4f5be1a430ba1314815c2b97dfaaa. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285661

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2015/06/suite-for-barbara-loden-by-nathalie-leger/
  Word count: 2137

  Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger

  Reviewed By Amanda DeMarco

  June 2nd, 2015

  A Sunday Daily News article from March 27th, 1960 reports that Alma Malone was sentenced to twenty years in prison for her involvement in a botched bank robbery. She was supposed to drive behind her partner “Mr. Ansley” to the bank, wait for him while he completed the robbery, and then act as the getaway driver. But Malone took a wrong turn, and by the time she arrived at the bank, the robbery had gone wrong. Ansley was dead. After she was sentenced, Malone thanked the judge.

  In 1970 the film Wanda won the Pasinetti Award for Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival. It tells the story of Wanda, an apathetic, docile woman who leaves her impoverished husband and children and casts herself adrift in the world. She asks a neighbor for money, begs for a job, gets picked up by a man in a bar and then abandoned by him at an ice-cream stand the next day. She’s frequently humiliated. She doesn’t have much to say. When she finds Dennis, she doesn’t realize he’s just robbed a bar. He calls her stupid. He yells at her for forgetting he doesn’t want onions on his burger. He has an idea for robbing a bank and he decides that she’s going to drive the getaway car. You know how the story goes from there.

  Barbara Loden was born the same year as Alma Malone. Like Malone and like Wanda, she was born into Appalachian poverty. At age sixteen she left home to work as a showgirl in New York. She became a pin-up model, then an actress. She married the famed director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden) and, at the age of thirty-eight, she wrote, directed, and starred in Wanda. “It’s like showing myself in a way that I was,” she said in a 1971 interview in Madison Women’s Media Collective.

  Nathalie Léger was asked to write a brief entry about Wanda for a film encyclopedia. Léger is an impressive French person whose publications include a book-length personal essay entitled Les vies silencieuses de Samuel Beckett. “Convinced that in order to keep it short you need to know a great deal,” she embarked on a course of in-depth research for the encyclopedia entry, and the result was the book Suite for Barbara Loden, or at least that’s how Léger tells it in Suite for Barbara Loden, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon. It’s a book about Loden, but also about Wanda and Kazan, and a little about Malone, but definitely about Léger herself and her mother.

  When I set out to review Suite for Barbara Loden, I realized I didn’t have much to say, exactly, beyond what Léger says. I wanted to show how she shows how one woman’s experience is filtered through another, collapses into another. And I wanted to show how we (women) connect with Wanda—even extraordinary, glamorous, intellectual women like Léger or Loden, and even women generations younger than Wanda, like myself—how the book sucks in every woman who approaches it.

  Léger quoting Barbara Loden: On 21st February 1971, Barbara told the Sunday News: “I was nothing. I had no friends. No talent. I was like a shadow. I didn’t learn a thing in school. I still can’t count. I hated movies as a child, people on the screen were perfect and it made me feel inferior.” Later, in the Post: “I used to hide behind doors. I spent my childhood hiding behind my grandmother’s stove. I was very lonely.” Later still, in Positif: “I’ve gone through my whole life like I’m autistic, convinced I was worth nothing. I didn’t know who I was, I was all over the place, I had no pride.”
  Nathalie Léger

  Nathalie Léger

  In one of the book’s more bizarre episodes, Léger, who is in America doing research for her dictionary entry/book, meets up with Micky Mantle at the Harry Houdini museum in Scranton, New Jersey. Mantle knew Barbara Loden when she was a dancer at the Copacabana: “‘Do spirits return? Will the spirit of Barbara Loden return?’ Mickey Mantle asks me, blinking. He is old. Once upon a time he had red hair. He used to be a serial womaniser.” Mickey Mantle also tells Nathalie Léger about trying to write a memoir: “I wanted to describe the trajectory of a baseball, the air, the rustling air, the space.” The account shimmers with fiction; such a perfect Micky Mantle could only be produced by sleight of hand.

  While conjuring up figures from Loden’s past, Léger also traces Wanda’s route through the brawny but bruised mid-century Pennsylvania landscape. She sees it as a foreigner would: afresh and disorienting. Karina Longworth in described the film in a 2012 piece for L.A. Weekly: “Wanda’s somnambulent, nomadic journey plays out like a hazy dream rendered in 24 vintage Polaroids a second.” And in fact, Léger begins her book with a scene from the movie, of Wanda wandering the grounds of an open-pit coal mine: “At times the dust absorbs and dissolves the figure as it doggedly moves on; lit up for a moment, now just a vague, blurry smudge, now almost transparent, like a backlit hole in the picture, a blind spot on the decimated landscape. Yes, it is a woman.” Despite Léger’s relentless focus on Loden, on Wanda, both often seem to be difficult to see, in danger of disappearing.

  Léger: “[Loden] died at forty-eight of generalised cancer. Wanda was her first and her last film. What else? How to describe her, how to dare describe a person one doesn’t know?”

  Barbara Loden’s son did not grant Léger access to his mother’s papers for her research. A little piece of Loden’s reality, made present by its disappearance from the book.

  Wanda spends much of the film with men in hotel rooms. After they’ve had sex with her, it’s clear that these men simply wish she would cease to exist. Their irritation at her existence is excruciating. She giggles, falls silent, tries to be flirtatious, looks at her hands.

  “The typical 1970s woman is a woman who’s wondering what she’s actually going to be able to do with the freedom everyone keeps telling her about; a woman who wonders what new lie she’ll have to make up now, how she’s going to pretend to be cool, so that all these men will finally leave her the hell alone,” Léger has met a friend for dinner and she (the friend) is talking about Barbara Loden. Wanda isn’t a feminist movie per se; Wanda is an anti-hero. What if all I do with my freedom is attempt to fulfill other people’s desires? What if I am miserable and contemptible?

  Loden

  Léger: “When Wanda came out in 1970, feminists hated it. Barbara Loden came in for a great deal of severe criticism. Many clearly reviled her. What is this? A passive woman, submissive to male desire, who seems to take pleasure in enslavement… no self-awareness, no pioneering mythology of the free woman. Nothing.”

  Léger quoting Loden in Madison Women’s Media Collective, 1973: “The film has nothing to do with women’s liberation.”

  Léger quoting Loden in FILM, 1971: “That’s why I made Wanda. As a way of confirming my own existence.”

  Longworth in L.A. Weekly: “In an interview after Loden’s death, [Kazan] took credit for writing Wanda‘s script, calling it ‘a favor I was doing for her, to give her something to do.’”

  Longworth: “Kazan later would identify Wanda as part of ‘a class of women known as floaters. … [They] float, like debris.’ In a profile of Loden, Rex Reed described the character, with his trademark finesse, as ‘an ignorant slut.’ In the same story, Loden called her ‘an ordinary person.’”

  If men see Wanda as a particularly worthless specimen, Loden and Léger’s stroke of genius is in identifying her as not particular at all. Wanda is not the thing we fear we could be; she is the pitch-perfect embodiment of what we know we sometimes are. What some of us are or were all the time. And no one had ever been able to or interested in depicting that before. When you see Wanda, it’s like putting on a new pair of glasses with the proper prescription: oh yes, this is what this looks like, this is what we look like.

  “Once upon a time the man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men,” confesses Léger. “How could he not understand the sometimes overwhelming necessity of yielding to the other’s desire to give yourself a better chance of escaping it?”

  I’ve slept with men who obviously wished I’d cease to exist after having sex with me. In fact, if I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a relationship with a man who did not, at some point or another after having sex with me make it clear that it would be less irritating for him if I did not exist. It’s not a completely unique experience for me; I work as a translator, a profession in which people often prefer to forget that you exist. I’ve translated one book by a man, and I’m in the middle of another. And in the next year I’ll work on two more. I’ve never translated a book by a woman, nor do I have a contract to do one. It’s work that I’m grateful for and that I enjoy, I must make that clear. But all in all, I’m spending most of my time telling men’s stories. That’s part of why I found Suite for Barbara Loden so magnetic. It isn’t just that Léger tells a story in which I see myself and everyone I know reflected; it’s that I’m jealous she gets to tell a story in which I could possibly see myself. (Or perhaps I’m most jealous of Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon, who have translated the book so beautifully; they’re most clearly my would-be doubles, and two more women whose voices you’ll hear when you read this book, voices within voices.) And I guess that’s why I wanted to write this review; because I wanted, in a small way, to get to tell that story too.

  Early in the book, Léger quotes Georges Perec to explain her approach to telling Loden’s story: “To start with, all one can do is try to name things, one by one, flatly, enumerate them, count them, in the most straightforward way possible, in the most precise way possible, trying not to leave anything out.” It’s a self-generating story, things enter it because of the fact of their existence. To populate it, Léger has to search for them, to notice that they exist.

  Léger writes Suite for Barbara Loden with the assuredness of someone whose topic has its own self-replicating logic. Someone whose task is channeling, not producing, her book. Indeed, it seems like the book must already have existed, containing the story of its own origins as well as its own critique. Already containing me and my longings and this review.

  Micky Mantle continues to tell Léger, “but I still couldn’t describe the trajectory of a baseball, no more than I could describe Barbara Loden, I wouldn’t be able to make her spirit come back. Besides, I didn’t know her, her spirit I mean—maybe I glimpsed it through her body, or maybe I’m confusing it with someone else’s; air, the rustling air, the warped shape, the disappearing and reappearing of some sensation against a dark backdrop, that’s what I was looking for.”

  Amanda DeMarco is the publisher of Readux Books and translation editor at The Offing. The recipient of a 2015 PEN-Heim grant, her criticism has recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The L.A. Review of Books. More from this author →

• Minneapolis Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/reviews-suite-for-barbara-loden-by-nathalie-leger-and-himself-by-jess-kidd/415912614/
  Word count: 238

  Suite for Barbara Loden
  By Nathalie Leger. (Dorothy, 128 pages, $16.)

  “Suite for Barbara Loden” is difficult to describe. This award-winning, slim book has chunks of biography, art film history and feminist self-revelation — sort of Doris Lessing lite. Its premise: Author Nathalie Leger must write a short description of the 1970 art film “Wanda” for a movie guide and becomes obsessed with the life of actress Barbara Loden.

  Loden more or less wrote the screenplay for the film, then directed and starred in it, basing it on a news article about a woman who thanked a judge for a 20-year sentence after a botched bank robbery. The film’s main character is a coal miner’s wife who has left her husband and children. Bad choices ensue.

  “Suite” tracks Leger’s research into Loden’s life and death, superimposing aspects of Loden’s life on the character of Wanda. (Loden grew up in poverty and died at 48 of cancer.) The comparison didn’t entirely work for me, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.

  Themes that run through the book and film are the struggle to develop identity and how women allow themselves to be used. Although never considered a popular movie, “Wanda” was a hit with the avant-garde crowd. Go to YouTube to see Loden on “The Mike Douglas Show” with Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

  BECKY WELTER

• New Yorker
  http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/barbara-loden-a-woman-telling-her-own-story-through-that-of-another-woman
  Word count: 2381

  Barbara Loden: “A Woman Telling Her Own Story Through That of Another Woman”
  By Richard Brody November 1, 2016

  A newly translated book about the feminist filmmaker Barbara Loden, shown here in 1970, recognizes that for a biography to be worthwhile it must also be personal.
  A newly translated book about the feminist filmmaker Barbara Loden, shown here in 1970, recognizes that for a biography to be worthwhile it must also be personal.Photograph by Foundation For Filmakers / REX

  Every biography (as I discovered in the course of writing one) can be two books: one about its subject; the other about the adventures arising from the research. I wrote only the former, the one about the subject, and I kept my adventures out of it; even so, they’re relevant in their absence, because, for a biography to be worthwhile, it must also be personal. All good biographies of artists are also books of criticism, reflections of the writer’s judgments, preferences, and passions regarding the work of the artist in question; those guiding tastes and emphases provide the hidden but decisive structure for the information that the book delivers. Even if a biography appears to stick close to the subject’s life, its constellation of information subtly reflects not just the course of research but also the course of the author’s life long before writing a biography was ever in sight.

  Here, now, is a remarkable new book that does everything—biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once, all out in front. The book is “Suite for Barbara Loden,” by the French author Nathalie Léger, which was originally published in 2012 and is recently out in English translation from the small press Dorothy. It’s all the more remarkable for doing so much in a mere hundred and twenty-three pages (in the translation by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon). Barbara Loden directed one feature film, “Wanda,” from 1970, in which she also starred. She was already an actress, including in “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass,” both directed by Elia Kazan, whom she married in 1968. She won a Tony Award for her stage role in Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,” from 1964. But Loden’s place in artistic history is assured by “Wanda,” one of the best American independent films ever made. She had other projects in mind (including an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s novel “The Awakening”) but was unable to find financing for them. She died of cancer in 1980, at the age of forty-eight.

  It’s apt that “Suite for Barbara Loden” (whose original French title was “Supplément à la Vie de Barbara Loden”—“Supplement to the Life of . . .”) is the work of a French writer. The most significant critical appreciation of “Wanda” is by Marguerite Duras, who, shortly after Loden’s death, interviewed Kazan for Cahiers du Cinéma and discussed the film with him, expressing her desire to distribute the film herself and asserting that “there’s a miracle in ‘Wanda.’ ” Loden was a hero of Europe—her film won a prize at the Venice Film Festival and was screened at Cannes—yet, in its limited release here, in 1971, the film found scant and grudging acceptance. (Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, said that there’s “much to praise” in it, but felt that “its truths . . . are too minor and muted for a feature film” and called it “an unresourceful and monotonous movie visually.”)

  In her combination of the conversational and the incantatory, the fragmentary and the infinite, Léger captures something of Duras’s own tones and moods, yet her approach to Loden and her appreciation of “Wanda” are entirely her own. Léger’s mode of criticism is original and difficult, and she pulls it off with a quiet literary flair: interspersed throughout the book are her descriptions of the movie, scene by scene, with perceptions and emphases that bring the sequences vividly to the imagination while also subtly imbuing them with her own perspectives.

  Léger begins with a line that could be the start of a novel—“Seen from a distance, a woman, etched against the darkness”—but that she soon identifies as a moment from early in the film. “Wanda” is the story of Wanda Goronski, a poor resident of a Pennsylvania coal town who withdraws from her family life and accepts a divorce from her husband. Without work, abandoned on a roadside, she wanders into a bar that, unbeknownst to her, is being robbed (the bartender is tied up and out of sight), then gets a ride from a man who turns out to be the robber; she becomes his unintended but then willing accomplice in his next criminal scheme, as well as his lover. Her relationship with this man, whom she calls Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins), is based on his crude aggression and domineering rigidity and her readiness to submit to his orders, big or small. His schemes culminate in a carefully planned and brutally plotted bank robbery. Structured like a criminal-lovers-on-the-run film noir, filmed with rough-textured documentary-style images that are nonetheless sharply composed with a high-relief, sculptural density, “Wanda” is an existential adventure in which the existence in question is that of Wanda herself—her furious effort at self-recognition and self-creation in a world that controlled her self-image and even effaced it from her own mind.

  The book began, Léger writes, as a commissioned encyclopedia entry about Loden, which she approached in a spirit of overkill that matched what she considered to be the magnitude of the subject: “I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her own story through that of another woman.” For Léger, the vastness of her small book is in the greatness of “Wanda”—and of Loden, for making it. She decided not to fulfill the commission and, instead, to write a biography of Loden, but slammed up against an insurmountable set of obstacles:

  One person never answered the phone, another wanted money before they would grant me access to anything, another refused to show me the photographs that she had taken of her in the last year of her life. Cultural organizations had better things to do; there were legal complications that meant that I couldn’t get permission to see any files on her. The librarian responsible for the Elia Kazan archives told me she was sorry, but there was nothing in his papers about his second wife. As for those who had worked with her on the film, they were either dead or didn’t want to talk about it.

  The shadow subject of the book is the impossibility of writing a comprehensive biography of Loden that would be worthy of her. Léger went ahead with the project anyway, turning it into a surrogate biography that replaces the archival material and the interview answers that she can’t get with the work of implication and imagination, replaces the novelistic solidity of an extended biography with the lacunary lyricism of an array of resonant fragments.

  Still, Léger pursued a prodigious course of research, including travel to the sites of the shoot and archival trawling that yielded, among other treasures, the original news article, from 1960, that inspired Loden’s film: the story of a woman named Alma Malone, who had taken part in a bank robbery (involving, like Wanda’s, a kidnapping as well) with a man whom she always called Mr. Ansley. The detail that intrigued Loden: at Malone’s sentencing, after her conviction, she thanked the judge, expressing relief at her impending imprisonment. (The anecdote reminds Léger of a line spoken by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” released in 1960; Léger also cites Loden’s own enthusiasm for that film.) Movingly, Léger traces Malone’s own story and discovers that she was released from prison in April, 1970: “She never knew that at that very time her story was being told by Barbara playing the role of Wanda.”

  Léger’s multifaceted approach to Loden’s life and work is itself organized around a powerful magnetic field of her own ideas and passions—her recognition of “Wanda” as an essentially feminist masterwork. In the process, the book is, locally, a refutation of feminist critics who, at the time of the film’s release, repudiated it on the grounds of the protagonist’s apparent passivity in the face of masculine authority. Globally, it’s a recalibration of what constitutes, today, a progressively feminist work of art; Léger undercuts the current-day cliché of evaluating films on the basis of their female characters’ degree of “agency” and constructive purpose.

  In her biographical consideration of Loden’s film, Léger quotes Duras’s judgment that “there is an immediate and definitive coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.” She tracks down Loden’s own remarks on the subject, such as “Wanda’s character is based on my own life and character. . . . Everything comes from my own experience,” and a remark, from 1971, to a women’s-film journal, that the film is “like showing myself in a way that I was.” Léger’s sharp aperçu that “Barbara Loden was born in 1932, six years after Marilyn Monroe, two years after my mother, the same year as Elizabeth Taylor, Delphine Seyrig, and Sylvia Plath,” turns out to be no idle list of names. Taylor doesn’t play a role in the book, but Léger’s mother turns up throughout, as a quizzical and practical interlocutor who, when they watched “Wanda” together, told her about her divorce from Léger’s father, about “the violence that had been inflicted on her” in their marriage. (An anecdote about her mother’s blank-eyed amble in a French shopping mall after the divorce runs through the book in correspondence with a similar scene in the film, of the solitary Wanda killing time in a mall.)

  Loden’s prize-winning performance in Miller’s play, a pièce à clef about his marriage to Monroe, prompts Léger to riff on the congruences between the two women, with quotes from Kazan and Loden herself (as well as a sharp insight from the director Joseph L. Mankiewicz) to back it up. As for Plath, Léger quotes from her journal regarding her “submerging” herself in a man’s existence and being “supremely happy with my newfound selfless self.” Seyrig is the actress who starred in the title role of Chantal Akerman’s work of grandly intimate fury, “Jeanne Dielman,” as well as in Duras’s “India Song”; Loden both refers to Jeanne’s silence in the film and quotes Seyrig to great effect regarding the essential condition of women: “Actresses do what all women are expected to do. We just throw ourselves into it more.” The book presents Loden’s singularity as nonetheless exemplary of the artistic and personal struggles of women of her generation—and, for that matter, of modern women over all, including Léger herself.

  As Léger conducts her research, she reports not merely the informative results but the first-person experience from which her discoveries arise. The book’s research involved travel to the towns in Pennsylvania and Connecticut where the movie was shot, and Léger describes those trips with an epigrammatic precision that reflects “Wanda” and Loden in their polished facets. In a Pennsylvania mining town, Léger talks with an older waitress from a mining family who describes the process in great detail and with sardonic good humor. A superb set piece finds Léger in the company of a graduate student in Waterbury who gives her a tour of the real-life scrappily handmade Christian theme park where, in the film, Mr. Dennis has an odd and brief reunion with his father. Léger describes motels and bars and roads, towns and radio broadcasts, industrial sites and also telephone calls with Loden’s son and Loden’s former collaborator, turning her own experience into latter-day projections of Loden’s own inner world.

  There’s even what I took to be a fictionalized episode of Léger’s interview of Mickey Mantle, who, the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman told her, “knew Barbara Loden when she was a dancer at the Copacabana.” Mantle didn’t have anything to say to Léger about Loden, but he talked of his work on his autobiography, of his desire to speak precisely about the inner experience of playing baseball—and of his studies of Melville, Hemingway, and Proust in an effort to learn how to do so. Léger’s expression of her own incredulity—“Mickey Mantle is talking to me about Proust”—doesn’t render the incident any more credible to a reader; rather, it comes off as an unfortunate bookish prejudice that equates verbal expression with high culture. (That prejudice is certainly not shared by Loden, whose dialogue for the unsophisticated characters of “Wanda” has a scarred and jagged poetry.) But it’s the book’s single gross misstep, and one that hardly diminishes its insight, power, or pathos.

  “Suite for Barbara Loden” rises to a crescendo along with Léger’s account of the film’s ending, in which she cites Duras’s recognition that Loden “has found a way of making holy the very thing that she has tried to show as a kind of degradation.” Wanda’s utterly guileless indifference has the feeling of an adamant integrity; her total acceptance is rather a total defiance of the norms of society that exclude her from it. The mereness of the world may buffet Wanda as it will, but she isn’t of it. In its exaltation of an absolute purity of heart that resembles an absolute innocence, Loden’s one feature film resembles, above all, the films of Robert Bresson—presenting a vision of uneasy, unwanted heroism, and of a world condemned to need such a heroine. Here, too, Loden’s identity fuses with that of her protagonist.