Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  So when Silvers telephoned to assign the piece in August 1963, she immediately accepted. He wanted only fifteen hundred words, and he wanted it fast, but Kael felt she could do it. The only problem was that she did not particularly like The Group. The intelligence that had so attracted her to The Company She Keeps was entirely gone. As she put it in her draft:

  As a group, the girls are as cold and calculating, and as irrational and defenseless and inept, as if drawn by an anti-feminist male writer. Those who want to believe that the use of the mind is really bad for a woman, unfits her for “life,” miscellanies her, or makes her turn sour or nasty or bitter (as in the past, Mary McCarthy was so often said to be) can now find confirmation of their view in Mary McCarthy’s own writing.

  Kael knew something, by then, about what “the use of the mind” might do for a woman. She was often accused of being “sour or nasty or bitter.” In fact, just at New Year’s in 1963, she’d read a listener complaint on her radio show on KPFA, a Berkeley radio station. “Miss Kael,” it began, “I assume you aren’t married. One loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Kael reads this passage with the relish of a predator in perfect attack position. She unleashes a torrential reply:

  I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notion that the woman is semi-masculine.

  The palpable frustration here was the result of experience, not political conviction per se. Kael was not, like Sontag, a prodigy immediately recognized as such by everyone who read her. She was a person who had to fight for the things she had. Her belligerent spirit was not always well received by onlookers, and even when this angered her, she didn’t wish to adjust herself to meet their expectations of “caring about others” or anything else. It’s plain she was hoping the brilliance of her work would be enough, as it would be for a man in her position.

  For the first half of her life, it wasn’t. Kael had the kind of intelligencence that seemed to alienate her from all but close friends, a quality she shared with Arendt. She wasn’t good at cultivating relationships and struggled to get a foothold as a writer. As it happened, she had needed the younger Sontag’s help to finally, after many years of trying, get the attention of the New York intellectuals who populated the pages of the New York Review. Sontag and Kael had met some months before The Group came out, in some forgotten place. The younger woman was evidently impressed by the elder. And so it was Sontag who brought Kael’s name up to Hardwick and Silvers when they were looking for someone for The Group. Kael must have felt very grateful, at first, when that phone call came in: reviewing Mary McCarthy on her home turf, should the piece be accepted, presented a good opportunity for Kael to finally arrive in the place where she felt she deserved to be.

  Kael had made it a long way from home. She was born in 1919 on a poultry farm in Petaluma, California. Her parents were New York Jews who’d moved to the area in search of a kind of progressive agricultural commune. They already had four children to raise by the time Kael came along. She spoke of her early years on that farm as an idyll, or as much of an idyll as could be had by farmers’ children who had constant chores and parents whose marriage was troubled by financial instability and infidelity. The Kaels managed to remain in Petaluma only until 1927, when Isaac Kael lost all his money in a stock market crash and the family went to San Francisco, where he tried, and mostly failed, to come up with more steady work.

  In high school, Kael’s talents began to surface. She was a good student, played violin in the school orchestra, served on the debate team. Like Sontag, she went on to study philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. But unlike Sontag, Kael did not immediately leave California. She loved California. In a review of Hud, she rhapsodized about the unself-conscious egalitarianism of her childhood home. “It was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican and Indian ranch hands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived,” she wrote. And San Francisco was cosmopolitan enough to satisfy her artistic leanings; it had so many movie theaters, so many artists, so many jazz clubs. After college, she kicked around the bohemian ends of the city, dreaming and working with a friend, the poet Robert Horan, on various projects. Horan was gay and Kael knew this, and even though the two were onetime lovers, according to her biographer Brian Kellow, she simply wasn’t bothered by his attraction to men.

  In November 1941, Horan and Kael moved to New York together in the time-honored manner of aspiring artists: penniless hitchhikers hoping they would figure out some way to support themselves on arrival. Instead, they starved, sheltering themselves at Grand Central Terminal. Horan went looking for work and was promptly taken in by a gay couple he charmed on the street. Kael was not part of the arrangement, and was suddenly left to fend for herself, Horan quickly turning all his attention to his new benefactors. Perhaps it was no surprise after that that Kael had trouble believing New York would ever accept her.

  In those first years, she had to work as a governess and a clerk in a publishing house because her efforts to publish her own work were all stymied. She watched the New York intellectuals at close range, and held in particularly high esteem a journal started by Dwight Macdonald, that friend of McCarthy’s and Arendt’s, called Politics. But she could not break through. She blamed New York; she blamed the scene. “The place is cluttered up with ‘promising’ young poets who are now thirty-five or forty writing just as they did fifteen years ago or much worse,” she wrote to a friend. By 1945 she gave it up and returned to San Francisco.

  Back among the bohemian oddities of her hometown, Kael met a poet/experimental filmmaker names James Broughton. A man who spent his life, as he often explained, getting over an overbearing mother, he was prone to short love affairs rather than long commitments. He made tiny experimental films, like Mother’s Day (1948), which saw a naked blond child wandering around as a woman’s voice alternately praises and scolds him. Kael moved in with Broughton for a short time. When she became pregnant, he kicked her out and disavowed the child. Gina James was born in September 1948. Kael didn’t put Broughton’s name on the birth certificate.

  The child changed things for her, as children always do. It meant Kael desperately needed a steady living, but she was soon forced into freelance work because if she were to leave home there wouldn’t be anyone else to care for the child. She reviewed books. She tried her hand at playwriting. She wrote a treatment for a screenplay but it was rejected. The only thing that ended up working for her was meeting a man in a café who wanted a review of Limelight for his new little cinema magazine called City Lights. (This man, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, would go on to found City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.) Released in October 1952, the film was a vehicle for an aged and doubled Charlie Chaplin, whose work Kael had never particularly cared for.

  She wrote the review anyway, having something to say about the man himself. “The Chaplin of Limelight is no irreverent little clown; his reverence for his own ideas would be astonishing even if the ideas were worth consideration,” she wrote. “They are not—and the context of the film exposes them at every turn.” She called Chaplin a “Sunday thinker” who fit neatly into one of Socrates’s observations about artists: “Upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest men in other things in which they were not wise.”

  This, the first movie review Pauline Kael ever published, appearing in the Winter 1953 issue of City Lights, revealed several things about her. One was that she looked at a film in something larger t
han an aesthetic sense. Despite becoming known later in her life as a defender of popular taste in movies, a defender of visceral reactions, she had larger questions about them: about the quality of the ideas they represented, about the way they fitted into the larger puzzle of both cultural and intellectual life in America. Another was the exuberant energy that would eventually become the Kael trademark. She was not a critic who wrote too much in the first person. A tidbit here and there of her “I” comes through. But mostly her personality is in the vigor with which she analyzes something, turning it over, looking for clues. Another was that, interested in the mass audience as she was, she would never be afraid of kicking a popular phenomenon in the teeth. Chaplin may have been at the tail end of his career, wizened and grizzled, but he was still Charlie Chaplin, America’s Little Tramp. But Kael’s role as a critic, she believed, was to run roughshod over the politics of reputation. This did not make her popular.

  On her first trip to New York, she was initially impressed by the way people dressed and their serious demeanor. “When I was a kid I thought there were a lot of brilliant people who wrote dull stuff because they were corrupt,” she told an interviewer. “And it took me a long time to realize that most of them just couldn’t write that much better.” But after the Limelight review appeared, the doors in New York that had always been closed to Kael opened, just a crack. Suddenly she was getting enthusiastic responses from Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv, though he still felt some of her pieces were too long. And in Berkeley, she inherited the movie critic post at KPFA from a friend, the poet Weldon Kees, who first invited her on as a guest. “Pauline, let’s start positively,” he would sometimes say as they began the broadcast. But in 1955, he committed suicide, and the radio station offered Kael the spot. It paid nothing. But she took it and developed a following. She was always contrarian and always systemic. She, like West and McCarthy before her, sometimes liked to take direct aim at the preoccupations of other critics:

  I would like to talk about the collapse of film criticism in this country, so that there are no intelligent guides, either for audiences or filmmakers, and about why our young filmmakers make spitballs instead of movies.

  One of her listeners was a man named Edward Landberg, who ran a small movie house in Berkeley called Cinema Guild. A slightly eccentric man with a healthy dose of self-esteem and a stubborn devotion to his own tastes, he had built a small audience for his repertory house in a storefront on Telegraph Avenue, which played only films he personally liked. He called to say he liked the show. They began to date, and they married soon after, in December 1955. It is unclear how much it was a love match. What it was, clearly, was an alliance of two people deeply devoted to movies.

  Even before they wed, Kael was basically running the Cinema Guild alongside Landberg. She became closely involved in the programming, but her big innovation was to add criticism to the circular flyers the theater would hand out on the street, hoping to attract patrons. Despite those flyers being marketing material, she was never afraid of taking shots at the big shots there, either. “Welles not only teases the film medium with a let’s-try-everything-once over lightly, he teases his subject matter once over heavily” is how she’d describe Citizen Kane. This punchy style of summarizing films worked to sell them even as it mocked them. Through Kael’s efforts, the Cinema Guild became popular enough that it could open a second screen.

  But the union wasn’t destined to last. Landberg resented his wife’s stubbornness. No doubt she felt the same way about him. What put them on the path to divorce, Landberg told a documentarian, was that she had put a copyright in her own name on the circulars. By October 1960, he had fired her from the only successful job she’d ever had. Kael responded in rough kind. First, she took seven thousand names from the Cinema Guild’s regular mailing list from the circular and put a resignation letter in her edition:

  For 5½ years I have written these programs, made up the displays and talked with thousands of you over the telephone. I think the Cinema Guild and Studio has been the only theatre in the country for which the taste and judgment of one person—the writer—has been the major determinant of selecting films. It is with deep regret that I must announce that irreconcilable differences with the owners have made my position untenable: this is the last program I will prepare.

  When he sent out the full edition of the circular, Landberg blacked out this resignation letter. Kael then sued Landberg for fifty-nine thousand dollars in back wages and profits. She did not win the lawsuit, and Landberg retained ownership of the Cinema Guild, leaving Kael without an income yet again.

  But by then she was at least beginning to have an easier time publishing her criticism. After her marriage to Landberg, Kael drafted the first of her great pieces, an essay called “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience,” for Sight and Sound. It was the first articulation of what would come to be Kael’s deepest insight as a critic. In brief, she believed that those who insisted on watching foreign films, who believed themselves to thus be watching a higher and better sort of art when they eschewed the popular movie houses, were full of it. And she was not afraid of attacking their darlings, among them Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film Susan Sontag had much admired.

  Much of Kael’s objection had to do with the script, by Marguerite Duras, which she found repetitive and finally too much about the female character’s feelings:

  It began to seem like True Confession at the higher levels of spiritual and sexual communion; and I decided the great lesson for us all was to shut up. This woman (beautifully as Emmanuelle Riva interpreted her) was exposing one of the worst faults of intelligent modern woman: she was talking all her emotions out—as if bed were the place to demonstrate sensibility. It’s unfortunate that what people believe to be the most important things about themselves, their innermost truths and secrets—the real you or me—that we dish up when somebody looks sympathetic, is very likely to be the driveling nonsense that we generally have enough brains to forget about. The real you or me that we conceal because we think people won’t accept it is slop—and why should anybody want it?

  This is an unintentionally revealing argument. The exposure of feelings in art was and is a point much debated, because just as Kael points out here, the question tends to be gendered. Among women writers this is a familiar sort of war. There have always been those who insist that full-on confession of every flaw and feeling is the only honest way to write, and then those, like Kael, who would argue that it reinforced terrible stereotypes about women and gave voice to their worst qualities as intelligent human beings. But the savagery of the last line—the insistence that the inner self was slop that nobody sensible could possibly want to know about—could not simply be Kael talking about art or Hiroshima or Marguerite Duras. It had to be the statement of someone who believed this about herself.

  The thrust of all her criticism makes it clear that Kael did not consider herself to be particularly sentimental. She would not have liked being posthumously sweetened by armchair psychoanalysis. She hated pathos. And yet, the odd sense of self-savagery is sometimes there in her frustration with opponents. She wants them to be linear thinkers, to be clear and direct; people who didn’t think this way drove her crazy. She seemed to seek out writers who needed a healthy dose of common sense.

  In what might have seemed like a paradox Kael also despised grand-scale theorists, people who provided not so much clear-sighted lines of analysis as myopic ones. In the 1962 piece “Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?” in Sight and Sound, for example, she dismantled Siegfried Kracauer, a German theorist who had written a long, turgid treatise on the nature of film. This she could not abide, nor the respect for it that seemed to her to contaminate movie writing in general:

  There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one’s own preferences into a monomaniac theory; in film criticism, the more confused and single-minded and dedicated (to untenable propositions) the theorist is, the more likely he is to be regarded as serious and important and “deep”—i
n contrast to relaxed men of good sense whose pluralistic approaches can be disregarded as not fundamental enough.

  She likened Kracauer to boring suitors, the kind whose love doesn’t appeal to their beloveds. If Kracauer was right about “cinema,” she wrote, she was going to dump him. And this was just a warm-up to the blow she would deliver to a newish critic named Andrew Sarris, who had published an article in the Winter 1962–1963 issue of Film Culture called “Notes on the Auteur Theory.” Kael found the thing so preposterous she promptly wrote the blistering reply “Circles and Squares.”

  One of the ironies of this famous exchange is that Sarris didn’t invent the idea behind his modest essay. The auteurist theory came from the French, who had more or less invented film criticism. In brief, it holds that a film director has a detectable style that can be identified and analyzed even in the context of a commercial Hollywood production. In its simplest form, this idea is so unobjectionable that even Kael did not completely disagree with it. She, too, was prone to talk about a director as having a very high degree of control over the film eventually produced, a presumption she attached to the work of everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Brian De Palma. But what she found silly and pompous was the way Sarris had built it into a system for evaluating art, a kind of plodding, overly determined approach that she abhorred.

  Sarris had largely opened the door for her by trying to identify clear premises of auteur analysis, which stated abstractly did sound rather dim: “The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.” Kael pounced on the obvious weakness with a no-nonsense attitude: “The smell of a skunk is more distinguishable than the perfume of a rose; does that make it better?” This would become a favorite technique of hers, always presenting herself as more sensible than the pretentious critics she detested, never letting an idea balloon into a paragraph when a pointed sentence would do.