Kael was also not afraid to turn the latent sexism of writers against them. Sarris’s essay had mumbled something in passing about an “essentially feminine narrative device,” apropos of very little. “Circles and Squares” ends with a rhetorical bang turning the idea of “feminine” and “masculine” techniques back on him:
The auteur critics are so enthralled with their narcissistic male fantasies … that they seem unable to relinquish their schoolboy notions of human experience. (If there are any female practitioners of auteur criticism, I have not yet discovered them.) Can we conclude that, in England and the United States, the auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence—that period when masculinity looked so great and important but art was something talked about by poseurs and phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also their way of making a comment on our civilization by the suggestion that trash is the true film art? I ask; I do not know.
Sarris reacted like a scolded child: he complained of the injustice of these comments for the rest of his life. “Pauline acted as if I were a great menace of American criticism,” he told her biographer, but his own feeling at the time was that he was little read, and even less remunerated, and he had been attacked out of all proportion to his actual influence. (His critic’s post at the Village Voice would not come until a little later.) What further confused him was that for all “Circles and Squares” had laid waste to Sarris’s ideas, Kael was not personally angry with him. In later years, she’d often remark that she found some of his other writings insightful. In fact, when Kael arrived in New York the year after “Circles and Squares” was published, she called Sarris and asked him out to dinner.
Sarris would tell a few different versions of this story—which he wrote about more than once—but suffice it to say he was surprised to get the call. He complained that Kael presumed he was gay (Sarris would go on to marry Molly Haskell). At first, living in the farther reaches of Queens, he hemmed and hawed about going into Manhattan. She said, “What’s the matter? Won’t your lover let you go?” He also made it clear he found her abrasive and aggressive, and that she talked too much about sex for his taste. They never seem to have repeated the encounter.
The funny thing about this small feud is that while it is now reputed to have held the attention of the film world for months after, in fact there wasn’t much of a kerfuffle at the time. Certainly the mainstream press did not pick up the argument, and even the chatter in film journals does not seem to have been particularly wide-ranging. Other men had clearly felt targeted by that last paragraph—mostly the editors of the British film magazine Movie, whom Kael had ridiculed for being devotees of bad films. They complained that she had implicitly tarred them as homosexuals in her last punch of a paragraph: “Were we to infer (with almost as little justification) from Miss Kael’s fanatical feminism that she is a lesbian, that would be equally irrelevant to her capacity as a critic,” they sniffed. But according to these editors, gender was relevant to one’s capacity as a critic. “When Miss Kael says that there are no female auteur critics, she is right,” the Movie editors wrote. “She could have gone further: there are, alas, no female critics.”
This was a bad tactical move. Kael went in for the kill in her reply. She named a number of female critics, and asked, “And why that offensive, hypocritical, ‘alas’—as if the editors of Movie regretted that women were not intellectually strong enough to support the rigors of their kind of criticism.”
Heated letter exchanges in the pages of small journals would never have been enough to make this debate the eternal standoff it became. What kept it alive was Sarris, who over the years reheated the argument, dutifully panning each of Kael’s later books, mentioning repeatedly his feud with her, which culminated in a ripping piece in 1980. She never responded. In 1991, she told an interviewer: “I’ve always been a little surprised he took it so personally.” Brian Kellow, Kael’s sole biographer to date, charges her with careerism for writing “Circles and Squares,” a complaint that seems baffling in light of Sarris’s profession of his own obscurity at the time. She couldn’t have been trying to leapfrog Sarris, because by his own account he had no status as a film critic worth leaping over.
But it is true that the publication of “Circles and Squares” occurred on the cusp of a career change for Kael. The same year it appeared, 1963, she got a Guggenheim fellowship. She’d been recommended for it by, among others, Dwight Macdonald, who noted wryly in response to the request: “Despite your implacable harassment of me in print, I have, as a good Christian atheist, turned the other cheek and written a fulsome recommendation of your project to the Guggenheim people.” This project was the compilation of the book I Lost It at the Movies, assembled from Kael’s various essays for Film Quarterly, the Atlantic, and Sight and Sound.
But 1963 was also the year Bob Silvers commissioned the review of The Group, the piece that was supposed to mark her proper acceptance into the New York intellectual set. Kael finished a draft very quickly and submitted it. She hoped it would be an entry into the intellectual milieu she had wanted to belong to since her twenties. But Hardwick rejected Kael’s piece by letter, simply saying she thought it irrelevant to criticize McCarthy about her treatment of women. Perhaps it was simply that Mailer had, by then, agreed to write a review for the book himself. But perhaps Hardwick was being sincere.
Kael was injured. She got word of the rejection back to Sontag—who did not keep her side of this correspondence—and sent her a copy of the draft review. Sontag wrote back that she had hated Mailer’s take on McCarthy. “Too hard on her personally, and too easy, in a perverse way, on the book.” But she thought there was room for improvement in Kael’s piece, too, she said. She didn’t think the arguments about feminism were the best attack on the book. “To me, what you say about the novel and the way character is developed, and the relation between fact and fiction is more interesting, and original, than your indignation—though I share it entirely—at McCarthy’s slander on women,” Sontag added.
Perhaps owing to this tidbit of encouragement, Kael saved the draft of the review. But it is also at this point that Kael stopped commenting on the relations between the sexes in her work. It just stops coming up the way it had in her previous criticism. People began to say and believe that Kael had no relationship to feminism because of that silence. One feminist critic who met Kael in the 1970s told her biographer: “I thought Pauline was deaf to feminism. Not hostile. It just wasn’t something she could hear.” This was probably true, as far as it referred to the formal second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s. But it’s just as possible that having been told by someone she respected that these comments on gender were unserious, Kael simply accepted the premise and decided to go about the rest of her critical life with less of an eye to defending women as women. She could not let go of her desire to be taken seriously.
She did not quite let go of The Group, though. When she heard there was a film to be made of the novel, she promptly got herself an assignment from Life magazine to cover it. She incorporated her observations about McCarthy’s book—chiefly the bit that accused the book of slandering women of intelligence—into her questions to both the film’s director and its producer, Sidney Lumet and Sidney Buchman. She wrote that they didn’t care much for the themes of the novel, though, and became alarmed when Buchman gave her his summary of its themes: “Higher education does not fit women for life.”
Not being used to the role of an observer (I never did get used to it), I shot back, “What does? Does higher education fit men for life?”
It would be some time before the producer got back to Kael with a straight answer. Evidently he felt education corrupted everyone, but added, “You know, Pauline, I don’t know what the damn thing’s about.” She remained courteous about what she saw as the director’s shortcomings, apparently, until a party held after the movie wrapped. According to the director, Sidney Lume
t, in the midst of a heated discussion about the role of a critic, Kael burst out with: “My job is to show him [Lumet] which way to go.” The piece displayed the frustrations its writer felt while writing it. It was so long and opinionated that Life refused to print it, and Kael had to put it in one of her books, instead.
When Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies was eventually published in 1965, no one expected a collection of movie criticism to be a hit. But somehow it became a bestseller. The Atlantic published the introduction to the book, under the title “Are the Movies Going to Pieces?”in December 1964. In it Kael was a town crier, complaining that the vitality was going out of movies. In part she blamed studio executives. And as usual she blamed critics who had become so abstruse and against meaning that they were defending films that made a fetish of technique without carrying any meaning. Kael singled out one writer for criticism:
In the Nation of April 13, 1964, Susan Sontag published an extraordinary essay on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures called “A Feast for Open Eyes” in which she enunciates a new critical principle: “Thus Smith’s crude technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility embodied in Flaming Creatures —a sensibility based on indiscriminateness, without ideas, beyond negation.” I think in treating indiscriminateness as a value, she had become a real swinger.
By then, the two women knew each other, so this was all very curious. To be fair, Sontag was not Kael’s kind of critic. She did not write colloquially. And while not exactly a proponent of grand theories, Sontag was from every other available angle Kael’s idea of a snob: interested chiefly in “cinema,” in foreign films, in form and style over content. (It’s worth keeping in mind that Sontag had not yet published “Notes on ‘Camp’”—in which she betrayed at least some affection for popular culture.) And here, in print, more than a year after the strange transaction with the New York Review of Books, Kael kept shaking Sontag like a dog with a bone: “Miss Sontag is on to something and if she stays and rides it like Slim Pickens, it’s the end of criticism, at the very least.” As the critic Craig Seligman later noticed, Kael may have gotten to Sontag with that: The version of Sontag’s essay that appears in Against Interpretation has a change in wording. Instead of praising “indiscriminateness,” it praises a sensibility that “disclaims ideas.” The slight tweak does move Sontag’s argument out from under Kael’s knife.
At any rate, Kael’s argument caught the attention of the newspapers and when the full book appeared, the critics loved it. In the New York Times, a movie magazine editor raved that it proved “she is the sanest, saltiest, most resourceful and least attitudinizing movie critic currently in practice in the United States.” He admired especially the way she summed up her approach in “Circles and Squares”:
I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form … if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgements, if we are eclectic. Eclecticism is not the same as lack of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the best standards and principles from various systems. It requires more care, more orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory.
This was more or less how Pauline Kael would continue to write for the rest of her life, consistently inconsistent, tending to passionate riffs, insisting that the only principle worth defending was pleasure. Some people, naturally, found this “exasperating,” as did a critic in her old haunt Sight and Sound, who complained about “the destructive emotionality of her polemical pieces.” Nonetheless, the book was by any measure a success. Kael moved back to New York on the money it made.
For the first time in her life, at forty-six, she could make her living by writing. Her daughter came with her; the two lived on the Upper East Side. Kael threw herself into work, apparently sure the only thing that followed success was more of it. She had nabbed what looked to be a regular gig: a position at McCall’s (where Dorothy Parker had written some forty years earlier), reviewing films for a circulation of 15 million subscribers. The editor hired her because he knew the audience of the magazine was changing, and he was hoping Kael’s vivaciousness might attract a younger demographic. He signed her up for a six-month contract.
This man had perhaps not read enough of Kael’s work previously to understand her project. Perhaps he expected that because she had once defended trash, she’d find some redemption in every trashy film. In any event, he would report himself horrified later, when he saw she had criticized one of Lana Turner’s lesser films— Madame X—for casting the fifty-year-old Turner in a role she was far too young for. She would recommend something like Godard’s Masculin Féminin, and then pan Doctor Zhivago. The final straw, widely reported in the media, was a review, ostensibly of The Singing Nun, which Kael took as an opportunity to trash The Sound of Music. She mentioned that most in the business now referred to this sort of musical as The Sound of Money, then continued:
Whom could it offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how self-indulgent and cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. And we may become even more aware of the way we have been used and turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming those sickly, good-goody songs.
This piece, coming at the three-month mark of the contract, was enough for the editor. When he fired her, the press leaped on it and claimed she’d been dismissed because of pressure from the studios. This would mark the first time, though not the last, that she would appear under the headline “The Perils of Pauline.” Her editor made a kind of apology tour to the trade newspapers, primly telling Variety that “Miss Kael became more and more critical about the motives of the people who were making films, rather than sticking to the films themselves.”
Kael recovered quickly, landing at the New Republic as a replacement for the rather more gentlemanly film critic Stanley Kauffmann, who had been hired away by the New York Times as a drama critic. At first it seemed a better match as the New Republic catered to an audience with a higher tolerance for intellectual disagreement than McCall’s. But it paid far less, and within one or two pieces she was back having disagreements with her editors, who often cut at will from her work. The break came when a long essay she’d written on a new film called Bonnie and Clyde was rejected entirely by the magazine. She resigned and for just a moment it seemed she would be back to freelancing, making income piecemeal, all while she was nearing fifty. But then she was put in touch with William Shawn at the New Yorker.
By the 1960s, the New Yorker was no longer the simple humor magazine it had been under Harold Ross. When William Shawn took over as editor in 1952, the tone changed considerably. Shawn was a retiring man with idiosyncratic tastes, but when he really liked a writer, he really liked a writer. He would give such writers a spot at the magazine and simply let them have at it. Many would hold on to their New Yorker jobs for life, defining themselves against the regular run of magazine journalists. Writers that “Mr. Shawn” liked had a sort of tenure, a spot they could always come home to.
Kael had already caught Shawn’s eye. A few months earlier she’d published her first piece at the New Yorker, called “Movies and Television,” a long articulation of her complaint that television’s flat style was infecting the movies. Shawn had liked it, and now, receiving the seven-thousand-word essay on Bonnie and Clyde, he liked that too. He published it in October 1967, even though the film was by then old news, having come out in August. While it had done respectably at the box office, as a matter of prestige it was a sinking ship, with reviewers taking it to task for glamorizing violence. Kael hauled it ashore. “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” she wrote. The negative reaction had only proved to her that most people were hostile to art. “Audiences at Bonnie and Clyde are not given a simple, secure basis for identification,” she argued. “They are made to feel but not told how to feel.” People might not have liked that Bonnie and Clyde made violence fun, but that didn’t make the picture bad. It was a judgmen
t on the audience, not the art. Kael still thought morality had a role to play, though. The film’s “whole point,” Kael said, was “to rub our nose in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing.”
By now Kael had mastered her idiosyncratic form of film criticism. She kept one eye on what other critics had written, on the flaws and pieties of their logic; one eye on the audience and its reaction to what was being presented onscreen, because Kael believed that the experience of going to the movies was as important as the movie itself; and finally, a third eye was on the fun of it all. Fun might be a subjective quality, but Kael was sure it was the movies’ highest value in a way the more high-minded critics—Sontag among them—were not. It subjected her all her life to accusations of crassness, of lack of caring, and of simplemindedness. But in her avowedly “eclectic” style, fun was the one thing Kael was consistently devoted to. She made it a credo.
Shawn, not normally remembered as a man inclined to fun, nonetheless liked her style in the Bonnie and Clyde review so much he asked her to become one of two regular movie reviewers for the New Yorker, a post she would occupy until her retirement. Having blundered her way out of several contracts recently, Kael asked for a condition on her employment: she wanted an agreement that her copy would not be substantially changed without her permission. Shawn gave it, but once Kael arrived at the New Yorker, he went back on his word and did what he did with every other writer at the magazine, going over her drafts with a fine-tooth comb. Kael fought with him about it. Among other things, her stubbornness prevented her from being very popular at the New Yorker offices. Shawn had set a tone of bourgeois propriety, and her fondness for swearing and “deliberately crude” prose—her characterization—was a perennial subject for discussion between them. They seemed to find a kind of truce in argument, as between the two of them. But others did not share it:
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