Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  And always, there were movies. During her student years at Berkeley, Pauline first came under the spell of the films of Jean Renoir. She was entranced by La grande illusion, the director’s brilliant 1937 World War I drama—an attempt to make a pacifist statement as Hitler was on the brink of annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia. She was full of admiration for Renoir’s evenhanded treatment of the story’s aristocrats and plebeians, and wrote in 1961, “Renoir isn’t a sociologist or a historian who might show that there were heroes and swine in both groups.” She also responded to the fact that Renoir was an instinctive filmmaker who never stuck too slavishly to the script. She found La grande illusion “a triumph of clarity and lucidity; every detail fits simply, easily, and intelligibly. There is no unnecessary camera virtuosity: the compositions seem to emerge from the material. It’s as if beauty just happens (is it necessary to state that this unobtrusive artistry is perhaps the most difficult to achieve?).” She was also mesmerized by Renoir’s 1939 La règle du jeu, which she would one day call “perhaps the most influential of all French films, and one of the most richly entertaining.” This comedy about a country-house party run amok appealed to her on its own terms, but she also was drawn to its underdog status. It had been mutilated prior to its 1939 release, slashed again after its opening, then stifled completely by the Vichy government, as well as by the Nazis, before being restored in 1959. Pauline grew to love Renoir’s best films beyond measure; he was, perhaps, the most kindred spirit of any director she would encounter until she came upon the 1970s masterworks of Robert Altman.

  Despite her natural competitive bent and a strong need to dominate, she had no trouble finding friends among the Berkeley student body. She had become part of a circle that included Ida Bear, a writer, and Virginia Holton Admiral, an Oregon-born painter and poet (and later the mother of the actor Robert De Niro). There was also Violet Rosenberg, her closest woman friend. Like Pauline, Violet was passionately interested in art and politics and did not suffer fools, and the two become inseparable companions. Violet was deeply proud of Pauline’s intellect and her fearlessness in expressing her opinions, and in the years to come she would prove a loyal friend. “There was always a circle of people around Pauline,” Violet later recalled. “People came to her. They were magnetized.”

  Pauline also became attached to two men who were to count among the most important relationships of her life. Robert Duncan, a young poet who shared many of Pauline’s left-leaning political interests, would become one of her most cherished friends. Duncan was a renegade almost from the beginning of his life—one of the most unorthodox lives that could possibly have been found in 1930s and ’40s America. He was born in Oakland just six months before Pauline. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, Edward Howard Duncan, put him up for adoption soon thereafter. His foster parents were an architect named Edwin Joseph Symmes and his wife, Minnehaha Harris, who were devoted to spiritualism and the occult. At their home in Bakersfield, the Symmes family hosted séances the way some couples hosted canasta games, and they informed their son that he was descended from a line of people who had perished in the lost city of Atlantis. The Symmeses were hostile toward modern science, which they believed would cause the New World to be engulfed in flames during their son’s lifetime, just as Atlantis had been decimated by flood and earthquake. Small wonder that young Robert made his way through his early school years as a misfit—a cross-eyed, conspicuously effeminate though fiercely quick-witted boy who acquired the unfortunate nickname “Sissie Symmes.” Like Pauline’s, Duncan’s family suffered serious reversals in the wake of the Wall Street crash, and like Pauline, he came through it with a strong sense of himself intact. In 1936 Duncan entered Berkeley as a scholarship student, and soon he was immersed in writing poetry and exploring radical politics, significantly as editor of the American Student Union’s Campus Review, which the university effectively disowned. Duncan, during his years at Berkeley still known as Robert Symmes, was an English major who was also taking introductory philosophy courses, and it was there that he met Pauline.

  She responded immediately to his strong and commanding personality. “He was attracted to strong-mother-archetype women he could talk to on an equal basis,” recalled Duncan’s friend Jack Foley. “He wanted real, substantive discussions.” Duncan had a great sense of his own sexual power, and he could be enormously flirtatious and seductive. He was an equally charismatic presence on the public podium, and when he read from his own poetry, the effect could be spellbinding. He was a rather handsome man, but his crossed eyes made people slightly uneasy; they never quite knew whether he was looking at them.

  Midway through his time at Berkeley, Duncan left the American Student Union behind for the Young People’s Socialist League; Pauline and Virginia Admiral often joined him at the organization’s meetings. Duncan would leave Berkeley in 1938 for an abortive fling as a student at North Carolina’s progressive Black Mountain College, then move on to Philadelphia, where he began his first serious relationship with a man, an older instructor he had known at Berkeley. But he and Pauline were to maintain a frequent correspondence for the next decade, sometimes writing to each other several times a week.

  For years the rumor persisted that the two had been secretly married for a time. They weren’t, but Pauline felt a powerful attraction to Duncan, as a surviving fragment of a letter she wrote to him indicates. He had indicated to her that he felt a certain pressure from their circle of friends for them to become romantically involved—hardly an unusual situation for a gay man to come up against in those conformist times. “Don’t be foolish—you don’t love me—you will never love me,” Pauline responded to him with remarkable clearheadedness. Duncan had been flirting with the idea of psychoanalysis, and Pauline was encouraging: “For Christ’s sake be analyzed!” she wrote. “Be analyzed if only because you need the self-knowledge for your work, your art.”

  In her review of the 1973 Barbra Streisand–Robert Redford romantic drama The Way We Were, Pauline seems to have tipped her hand a bit with respect to her Berkeley years. Watching the scenes set at Columbia University during the 1930s, with the driven, obsessive Katie trying to rally student support for Stalin, trying—and failing—to perfect a short story for her fiction-writing class, Pauline may have felt a bit as if she were seeing the ghost of her seventeen-and eighteen-year-old self. Like Katie, Pauline did dabble in left-wing radical politics during her college years—she was more intrigued by Trotskyism than anything—but with the passage of time, as her review of The Way We Were revealed, she took a much cooler attitude toward leftist politics: “[T]here appears to be nothing between Communist involvement and smug indifference. . . . Implicitly, the movie accepts the line the Communist Party took—that it was the only group doing anything, so if you cared about peace or social injustice you had to join up.” She was fairly quick to step away from her own flirtation with the Communist Party, largely because of her natural suspicion of anything that smacked of dogma.

  The person at Berkeley with whom Pauline was destined to be most intimately involved was, like Robert Duncan, a poet: Robert Horan, with whom she also shared classes. Horan was attractive, with a keen, alert mind, and discussion—often angry—immediately formed the foundation of their friendship. Kael found Horan stimulating company because, like her, he was obsessed with just about anything concerning the arts. It became routine for the two of them to stay up all night arguing about poetry, fiction, movies, music, painting.

  In a number of ways Horan exerted greater influence over her than Duncan did. For one, their shared enthusiasm for the arts got her to rethink the academic path she had been on since her freshman year. Pauline’s principal instructors felt that a good grounding in philosophy, public speaking, and English literature would prepare her beautifully for law school. But her involvement with Horan made her see herself increasingly as a writer. She wasn’t quite sure which form appealed to her most, but she instinctively began moving toward playwriting, and Horan encour
aged her every step of the way.

  He also became her lover. Sex may never have been the engine in their mercurial friendship, but at the time it was not surprising that a young man and woman who shared such intensity, along with so many common interests and ideas, should match up. She loved Horan, but she also understood and, on some level, accepted his attraction to men. Certainly there is no evidence, in her many letters from this period, that she considered those men any real threat to her relationship with him. Her own attitude toward gay men was quite open and sympathetic, and later, when Horan showed an interest in settling into a permanent relationship with a woman, she did her best not to be judgmental. She was happy to be involved with a man as attractive and stimulating as Horan, but she had no great designs on marrying him, and she sat back to see which direction it all would take.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By her senior year Pauline had compiled a solid, if far from outstanding, academic record. She might well have gone on to do graduate work in English, or, given her oratory skills, to success as a law student. But during her final year at Berkeley, her grades fell apart. Her first semester in 1939 was a disaster: She completed only a single course in political science and failed to pass Philosophy 12, Philosophy 199, and Economics 199a. The university gave her a chance to make up the courses before placing her on any official form of academic probation. She petitioned to have the failing grade removed, but her request was denied. Later, in 1940, she made up Philosophy 199 with a B, but she never completed the other two classes, and she finished her time at Berkeley a few credits short of a degree. Decades later, when interviewers occasionally asked her why she hadn’t managed to graduate, Pauline was quick to say that she had had around six credits left when she ran out of money.

  In the future she would offer other accounts of her final academic year. To some she said that she had been a teaching assistant for several courses. When she had caught the flu during her senior year, she had realized that she could either grade the final papers in all the courses or study for her own finals, but she didn’t have the strength to do both—therefore, she had opted to help the other students graduate. To her friend Daryl Chin, she once said that she had taken the money put aside for her final semester and gone to New York, where she treated herself to a theatergoing binge that included Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, starring Tallulah Bankhead.

  In fact, the events of her senior year suggest that she was tired of student life, and that the thought of returning for one more semester was anathema to her. She longed to be rid of the restrictive, unreal atmosphere of campus life and to go out in the world, finding her way as a writer. By summer she was desperate for money, and decided to join her sister Anne in a sublet apartment, where she began determining in what direction she would set out as a writer.

  At Berkeley she and Bob Horan had discovered the literary criticism of R. P. Blackmur, whose ability to illuminate the social context of great literature resonated deeply with both of them. Pauline loved the passionate tone of Blackmur’s writing, and later she would always be flattered when her criticism was compared with his. Reading his comments on Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, one can easily see how his intensely personal voice had a profound influence on her:

  When I was first told, in 1921, to read something of Henry James—just as when I had been told to read something of Thomas Hardy and something of Joseph Conrad—I went to the Cambridge Public Library looking, I think, for The Portrait of a Lady. It was out. The day was hot and muggy, so that from the card catalogue I selected as the most cooling title The Wings of the Dove, and on the following morning, a Sunday, even hotter and muggier, I began, and by the stifling midnight had finished my first reading of that novel. Long before the end I knew a master had laid hands on me. The beauty of the book bore me up; I was both cool and waking; excited and effortless; nothing was any longer worth while and everything had become necessary. A little later, there came outside the patter and the cooling of a shower of rain and I was able to go to sleep, both confident and desperate in the force of art.

  The immediate question, though, was exactly how she was going to survive. Fortunately, during her student years, she had figured out how to live reasonably well on very little, and despite her horror at the thought of becoming a housewife, she mastered a number of solid, practical skills. She was adept at sewing and was a good cook, able to fix herself inexpensive meals by shopping at San Francisco’s markets, where the freshest produce was available for very little.

  Still, she needed something to live on, and she was lucky to be able to count on friends and relatives. Anne, by now teaching at Polytechnic High School near Commerce Street, was always a soft touch, and there was Robert Duncan, who had split from his lover in Philadelphia and by 1940 was living in Woodstock, New York, as part of a commune organized by James Cooney, editor of The Phoenix, a countercultural publication with a pacifist point of view. Duncan was working on the magazine and contributing pieces to it, and during this period he became friendly with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, both of whom had recently returned to America after years of living in Europe. Both were impressed with Duncan’s talent and encouraged him to continue writing poetry. Duncan had a bit of money to send to Pauline, and did so on a few occasions, always with her assurance that she would pay him back when she could.

  In addition to working at her writing, Pauline took in everything on the local arts scene that piqued her interest. She had become addicted to reading The Partisan Review, a literary quarterly with a heavy accent on politics that had been published since the mid-’30s. On the musical front she had discovered Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations, in which the composer explored more abstract musical ideas than usual. She constantly attended art openings throughout the Bay Area and kept up with all the new movies, writing to Violet Rosenberg, who now lived in Santa Paula, her impressions of them. She enthused over John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, which she considered “a wonderful movie . . . really the most exciting photography—at least the most sustained in quality, I’ve seen in the movies yet.” It’s an interesting reaction, given her later antipathy toward Ford’s large-scale, elegiac Westerns and her dislike of the director’s The Grapes of Wrath (also released in 1940). Also, the use of the superlative in singling out an aspect of a film—“the most sustained in quality”—was to become one of the defining characteristics of Pauline’s style as a movie critic; in time, it would draw her both an army of admirers and a loud chorus of detractors.

  By March 1941 Robert Horan was working on the staff of The San Francisco News. Happy enough with his job, he was also consumed by writing poetry, and Pauline had plenty of opportunity to monitor his progress and offer her criticism, since they were by now living together in an apartment at 930 Post Street. Horan worked at the paper from 4:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., which suited Pauline, an inveterate night person, perfectly. She would sit up reading voraciously until it was time for Horan to leave for work, then she would join him for a predawn breakfast at one of the neighborhood diners. Their romance, which had always been of an on-again, off-again nature, was going through a cooling period—enough so that in mid-March 1941, Pauline wrote to Vi of a new affair that had presented itself:

  I’m fairly sure that in the long run it would turn out disastrously. But he remains the only exciting new mind I’ve met in the last year or so—remarkably brilliant—but it’s all just too much trouble for now and I prefer to let things drift. Besides, it would be so damned much trouble to “hook” him properly. (About thirty-five, wife dead, has small daughter, is a musician of quality, studied music and philosophy, and has fun around town with a lady prof from Mills . . . get the idea?

  She continued with her round of moviegoing, regaling Vi with her sharp and often somewhat eccentric reviews of what she’d seen. Indeed, the comments about movies in her letters of this period form a kind of intriguing preview of what would become her critical voice. Predictably, she found the Margaret Sullavan–Charles Boyer weeper Back St
reet “fairly dull” and Preston Sturges’s brilliant The Lady Eve (Barbara Stanwyck, again) “awfully vulgar-funny—really quite something.” She considered Meet John Doe “not too poor” for a film directed by Frank Capra, whose relentless glorification of American individualism was already grating on her. More unexpectedly she recommended that Violet Rosenberg take in So Ends Our Night, John Cromwell’s 1941 drama about Nazi Germany—not for its social and political content, but for “the most beautiful shot of Frances Dee, standing in a European marketplace.”

  In her social life she was feeling misunderstood, a fairly common condition for her. She beseeched Vi to come back to San Francisco to live, because there were so few people who really seemed to grasp her ideas about the arts and the world scene, and she desperately missed the conversations they used to have. “Communication (orally) with people around seems even more difficult than it used to be,” she wrote. “I’m getting more tired than ever of having to get basic ideas accepted before you can go on to talk about the things you’re interested in talking about.”

  By May, she was feeling better about herself, buoyed up by the intense work that she and Bob Horan were doing together. They had teamed up for what she described as “a rather complex essay” on three formidable literary critics, R. D. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Lionel Trilling. They hoped to sell the piece to one of the top national magazines as the first step toward launching their reputation as serious critics. “We’ve been working together just about every waking moment we could find,” she wrote to Vi, “and he’s just been swell and wonderful to work with . . . By now we know the workings of each other’s mind too well for disparities from sentence to sentence.”