Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  While Horan and Pauline often disagreed violently about the art exhibits they took in together, they were more in accord when it came to modern poetry. In particular they shared a great love of Dylan Thomas’s early works, relishing the raw power of poems such as “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” “It was tremendous fun,” Pauline remembered. “We were both young and a little bit crazy, in the sense that practical things didn’t matter the way matters of the mind did—matters of mind and emotion.”

  Ultimately Pauline and Horan were beginning to feel stifled by living in San Francisco, and they began spending hours plotting a move to New York. Horan was desperate to be in the vortex of cultural activity in America, but given Pauline’s strong connection to the West Coast, she had mixed feelings about the enterprise. Much as she loved the Bay Area, however, she had to admit that San Francisco was really the biggest small town in America, and later observed that it was like Ireland: If you really wanted to do something important, you needed to get out.

  In November 1941 Pauline and Horan finally made the break and left for the East Coast. They hitchhiked across the country, dropping into a number of burlesque houses along the way. They arrived in Manhattan to find they were flat broke, and camped out for several nights at Grand Central Station, homeless in the city they had dreamed of for so long. Several nights later Horan was wandering the streets, trying to lay his hands on some money so they could eat. He was standing in front of Saks Fifth Avenue when he attracted the attention of two men who were returning home from a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. Horan was weaving back and forth, pale and exhausted, and fearing that he might be seriously ill, the two men stopped and began to talk to him.

  It turned out to be a lucky break for Horan, since the pair were both well-known composers—Samuel Barber and his lover, Gian Carlo Menotti. They had met a decade earlier when they were students at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; by now, both had several major successes behind them. Barber, at age thirty-two, had enjoyed his greatest triumphs in the concert hall, with his lushly romantic Violin Concerto and his elegiac Adagio for Strings. Menotti, one year younger than Barber, had shown that his gifts lay on the opera stage: two short works, Amelia Goes to the Ball and The Old Maid and the Thief, had done well, and his third stage work, The Island God, had recently had an unsuccessful world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.

  The composers were immediately taken with Horan and invited him to come to their apartment on East Ninety-fifth Street, where they gave him food and liquor, and invited him to spend the night. Horan protested that he couldn’t take them up on their offer because Pauline was waiting for him at Grand Central. But they persisted, and Horan quickly arranged for Pauline to stay with a friend on Fifth Avenue, while he moved in with Barber and Menotti—not just for a night but for the long term. The two composers gave him the affectionate nickname “Kinch.”

  Pauline, left to make her own way in New York, would continue to have conflicted feelings about the degree to which Barber and Menotti had suddenly dominated Horan’s life. Finding herself feeling antagonistic toward them, she recorded some of her feelings in a series of notes that appear to have been preparation for a play script she wanted to write. The “trouble with Bob is he feels guilty. First, feels as tho [sic] he’s whoring,” she wrote. “All right—maybe these homos have fine rich mature relationships—what good is that going to do me? I can’t be a homo no matter how hard I try, or how commercial I get.” (The latter remark underscored her feelings that it was easier to break into New York’s artistic circles if you happened to be a gay man.) She accepted Horan’s attraction to men; what was more difficult for her to accept was the deepening influence that his new mentors had over him.

  Horan’s defection left her feeling excluded, which marked the real beginning of her career-long antipathy toward New York and the East Coast artistic establishment. Her upbringing in rural California contrasted wildly with the backgrounds of so many writers and artists she was to meet during her early years in New York, many of whom had come up through the more traditional routes—a cosmopolitan childhood, tony prep schools, Ivy League universities—where they began to make the connections that would serve them later in their careers. By nature Pauline loved painting herself as a rebel, and she found that her Petaluma background was a great help in doing so.

  What Pauline needed immediately, in order to survive in New York, was a job. She quickly found one—little to her liking—as governess for a wealthy East Side family. While it gave her access to literary teas and performances at the Metropolitan Opera, she loathed the work itself and resented the fact that she had to dress in proper sports clothes. “I haven’t invested a sou in pleasure clothes,” she wrote to Vi. “So anything you could send would be most gratefully snatched at—but for heaven’s sake, don’t send the taffeta if you can still look terrific in it.”

  She was appalled by the cost of housing in New York City but managed to earn enough at her job to afford an apartment in the upper reaches of Park Avenue, just north of the street’s most elegant apartment houses, where the neighborhood began to melt into East Harlem. By late May she no longer had the governess’s post and was frantically looking for work. She spent a good deal of her spare time taking in art shows—and disliking much of what she saw, including an exhibition of Max Ernst’s paintings and the opening of a Henri Rousseau exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Most of the paintings she encountered only intensified her love of Picasso and Miró and Klee. The Nindorf Gallery boasted a generous selection of Klees, and Pauline found that every few weeks she returned there to “look at them all over and feel delighted.”

  Sentimental 1940s movies mostly left her cold, although she enjoyed Bette Davis’s 1942 hit, Now, Voyager, which she later dubbed “a schlock classic,” and Casablanca, which had a “special, appealingly schlocky romanticism.” But she was repulsed by Mrs. Miniver, which she and Samuel Barber saw at Radio City Music Hall; Pauline found it a mawkish tribute to the British gentry, and she was horrified when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1942. She detested the general run of war movies—remembering their characters as being “patriotic and shiny-faced. Wiped clean of any personality”—and was appalled by the racist manner in which all German and Japanese were portrayed. Propaganda, whether it glorified Americans or demonized the enemy, was inescapable in Hollywood’s war pictures, and Pauline longed for the screen to depict American life with some degree of authenticity.

  Her letters from this period consistently indicate her low opinion of most of the people she encountered in New York artistic circles. She had come east hoping to be challenged and invigorated, but after only a few months, she was disappointed. (There is also a suggestion of frustration that people she regarded as mediocrities were ahead of her on the career path—more adept than she at playing the New York game.) She thought that New York’s arts world was blighted by “a heavy confusion of young men and not so young men living together and shopping around, or being married to fierce young ladies who have other fierce young ladies. And all of them making infantile efforts for a chic wit, for a maximum of attention.... 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.”

  For some time Isaac Kael had been in failing health. He had suffered from hypertension in his later years; eventually he had a stroke, after which he was confined to a wheelchair. On November 11, 1942, Isaac died in Alameda, California. His death was reported by Rose, the child who had looked after him most. Pauline’s grief was of an unusually private nature. She never said much to friends about her reaction to his death, and her surviving letters make no mention of it; she had never been an introspective person, and her father’s passing did nothing to change that fact. If anything, it only intensified her feelings of restlessness: Isaac had died without seeing her achieve anything of significance, and she became ever more mindful of how quickly time passes when one is trying to establ
ish a career.

  She had landed a job at a publishing house—her letters to Vi do not indicate which one—but the salary was abysmal, and the constant struggle for cash was leaving her feeling depleted. During the first part of 1943, she switched apartments, finding a fairly spacious flat at 135 East Twenty-eighth Street, complete with fireplace, skylight, and built-in bookshelves—but no furniture, which meant that she spent her weekends scrounging in junk and antiques shops for used tables and chairs.

  She remained hard at work on her short stories and playwriting, constantly reworking them to try to get them in salable shape. She also kept Vi informed of the gossip about their old school friends. The big news was that, in a startling about-face, Robert Duncan was planning an April wedding to an acquaintance of Pauline’s named Marjorie McKee. “Pleasing news for a change,” noted Pauline, “altho [sic] I can’t dare to imagine how it may work out.”

  Pauline continued, however, to be a fairly stubborn transplant to New York, and her letters reveal very little sense of optimism about the future. She was flailing about, constantly battling anxieties about money and increasingly filled with doubt and ambivalence about her current situation. It was also harder than she had guessed to establish a relationship with a man—the kind of relationship she thought she wanted. There were plenty of opportunities for casual sex; servicemen regularly propositioned her on the street and in bars, and when she turned them down, as she often did, they would try to make her feel guilty by telling her that the girls at home were the ones for whom they were fighting.

  She kept in close touch with Bob Horan, who by now was spending much of his time at Capricorn, Barber and Menotti’s country retreat in Mount Kisco, New York, north of the city. Horan had always had a serious interest in music, and he was in his element, discussing music theory with two celebrated composers. He was also turning out to be a potent influence on both men, encouraging them to explore abstract painting and modern dance. Eventually Barber wrote the Capricorn Concerto, a modern take on the Baroque concerto grosso, featuring solo instrumental writing for flute, oboe, and trumpet—which Barber claimed represented himself, Menotti, and Horan, respectively.

  Pauline enjoyed the stimulating environment at Capricorn, and Horan saw to it that she was a frequent weekend guest. Designed by the architect William Lescaze, Capricorn was later described by Horan as “a modern but not moderne chalet set into the side of the mountain and overlooking Croton Lake and the hills.” The house was spacious and spare, with a terrace in back that was ideal for summertime lunches. “One would have to be an imbecile, not to succumb to the beauty and the quiet. I feel miserable when I have to catch a train back to the city,” Pauline wrote to Vi.

  Horan frequently stayed with Pauline when he was in New York, and she seemed relieved that their relationship had become less complicated. “Bob is terribly sweet to me these days when he comes to stay,” she told Vi, “but there’s a kind of bony structure missing there that I think I should always be too well aware of—despite his obvious talents and mind, and the very good understanding we have.... I’ve never felt so good about living alone.”

  Her low opinion of much of the mainstream fare being offered in New York continued unabated. She was shocked by the quality of most of the plays of the 1943 fall season and was especially dismayed by Dream Girl, Elmer Rice’s female version of the Walter Mitty fantasy, and baffled by the acclaim for the performance of Mrs. Rice, Betty Field. But by early 1944, there were more personal concerns nagging at her—one of which was the prospect of her sister Rose’s visit in late February. By now Rose had married Myron Makower and embarked on a teaching career, but her proper, settled status seemed only to inflame the animosity between the two sisters.

  Pauline was also becoming extremely possessive about her spare time, trying to protect as much of it as she could in order to work at her writing. But with too many friends and acquaintances dropping by the Twenty-eighth Street apartment in the evenings or on weekends, she was beginning to feel as if she had never left Berkeley. In the meantime, Horan’s own writing flourished: Some of his poems had been accepted by The Kenyon Review, and he was providing the text for The Unicorn, a dance work that Menotti was composing for Martha Graham. Pauline, stalled in her tracks, was not entirely enthusiastic about her friend’s full-speed-ahead career progress. She told Vi that she found Horan’s recent work “hurried and a little too chic. Success doesn’t come that easily if you’re really serious—and I just don’t think he is at the moment.” Deep down, she feared that Horan might never turn out anything of real substance.

  She was far more impressed with the progress of Robert Duncan. In 1944, the distinguished editor Dwight Macdonald had launched an exciting new magazine of contemporary thought called Politics. Pauline considered it the finest publication of political commentary she had come across; it reflected Macdonald’s strong, anarchist point of view, and it never cheated the issues. For some time she had admired Macdonald’s work as editor of The Partisan Review, and she was excited when she learned he was starting up a rival magazine. In late 1943 she had written him a kind of fan letter: “I am looking forward to a magazine which will stand for the principles and position you represented on Partisan Review; if there are to be policy-forming discussions, I should be very interested in attending them.”

  In August 1944 Politics published a groundbreaking essay by Duncan called “The Homosexual in Society,” a gutsy and powerful piece of work in which Duncan spoke up for a group “who have suffered in modern society persecution, excommunication, and whose intellectuals, whose most articulate members, have been willing to desert that primary struggle, to beg, to gain at the price if need be of any sort of prostitution, privilege for themselves, however ephemeral.” The essay provoked widespread comment and gave a substantial boost to Duncan’s literary reputation.

  Pauline soldiered on in New York, thanks to periodic loans from Vi, but in the fall of 1944 her money worries worsened when she impulsively quit her job at the publishing house. Not only was she bored with the stodgy, good-old-boy atmosphere of the place, but she had become incensed when an anticipated raise to $175 monthly showed up as only $106.

  At home she was absorbed in recordings of Beethoven, Purcell, Mozart, and Stravinsky. In the fall of 1944, she accompanied Samuel Barber to a New York Philharmonic concert that featured Stravinsky conducting a program that included some of his own works. After the concert, Barber launched a lengthy denunciation of Stravinsky, both as composer and conductor. Pauline defended him point by point until Barber sighed that Stravinsky was just a fad with her. Pauline replied, “At least I don’t have a fad for your music.” Barber responded with a frozen silence that lasted for weeks. “He has pride and vanity at a maximum,” Pauline wrote to Vi. “Nobody is ever rude to him—and I’m afraid the poor dear will take some time recovering.”

  She limped through the following year with a string of odd jobs. Her greatest literary discoveries of 1945 were the works of Marcel Proust, which she made her way through in four weeks of concentrated reading. “I almost feel as if it had become a layer of my sensibility by now,” she told Vi. “When you get to know a book that well it seems to get into you.”

  She was fascinated by the news that her old Berkeley classmate Virginia Admiral had left Robert De Niro, Sr., and gone off to live with Manny Farber, the film critic of The New Republic. This was bound to pique her interest, since for some time she had followed Farber’s reviews with great enthusiasm. Born in Arizona, Farber had certain things in common with Pauline—a Berkeley education, an interest in other forms of art (he went on to distinction as an abstract painter), and an intense dislike of overly formal, schematic “masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago,” which, he felt, “has come to dominate the over-populated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant are (1) to frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a
frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” He much preferred what he called “termite art,” which he characterized as something that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art.” He believed that the movie critic’s objective was to dig into the truth of a film and get it across to his readers. He once said, “I can’t see any difference between writing about a porno movie and an Academy Award movie—both are difficult objects.” His writing was at once jazzy and direct and intellectually rigorous. Pauline admired many things about him, including his iconoclastic wit and his fondness for lively B movies, and his theory about white elephant art vs. termite art would be an important influence on her own development as a critic.

  There were other movie critics that Pauline had admired over the years, and each of them cast some degree of influence over her as she began thinking more seriously about the art of the film. One was Graham Greene, who began reviewing films for The Oxford Outlook while still a student, and from 1935 to 1940 he reviewed by the week, mostly for the London Spectator. Greene was never afraid to rail about the blindness of the British Board of Censors, or to berate his British readers for not taking cinema seriously enough. Pauline agreed with his observation that “an excited audience is never depressed; if you excite your audience first, you can put over what you will of horror, suffering truth.” It was a point of view that led him in some surprising directions, such as his feeling that Alfred Hitchcock “amuses but he doesn’t excite.... He hasn’t enough imagination to excite; he doesn’t convince.” He felt that Hitchcock concentrated on his big moments at the expense of everything else that was going on in the movie: opinions that served as a blueprint for the critical position that Pauline would later hold on Hitchcock.