Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  It was decided that Pauline would leave town to have her baby. She moved down to Santa Barbara, renting a place at 1108 Bath Street. At Santa Barbara’s Cottage Hospital on September 21, 1948, she gave birth to a five-pound, fifteen-ounce daughter whom she named Gina James. The birth certificate stated that the mother’s name was “Mrs. Pauline James” and the father’s, “Lionel James,” a writer. She adored having a child and received help both from friends and her sister Anne. “The pictures of Gina are a delight,” Robert Horan wrote to her in the summer of 1949. “I have one set up on my desk, and it stares at me with those deep and curious eyes, as if to say ‘What in heaven are you doing?’” By June 1950, Gina had begun her toilet training. She was also quite talkative, and she often spoke in the first person: “I’m Gina!” “I’m a baby!”

  The first year of Gina’s life was difficult for Pauline. While some writers have strained to portray her as an early feminist, nothing could be further from the truth. To Pauline, leading a life on her own was not really a virtuous act. While she was sorry that Broughton had exited her life, she regretted not having a husband only in the sense that having one would have made it easier to get along financially.

  Pauline eventually wrote of her relationship with Broughton in a one-act play called Orpheus in Sausalito. Subtitled “a farce for people who read and write,” it dealt with the breakup of the freethinking Beth Thomas and Richard Trowbridge, a poet with a mother complex and conflicted feelings about success. “The world doesn’t find you,” Richard says. “You have to go knock on doors, hat in hand, if you want your art to be accepted.” Orpheus in Sausalito wasn’t much of a play and is really interesting only as a biographical reference point. Its dialogue is self-consciously smart and the characterizations don’t naturally spring to life.

  Eventually, the personal chaos that Orpheus attempted to portray would make its way into her writing life in a more significant way. Both as an early audience member and, later, as a critic, Pauline always objected to patness, an avoidance of examining emotional complexity onscreen. In her film reviews she would repeatedly champion pictures that did not back away from portraying outwardly puzzling, seemingly contradictory situations that nevertheless had a potent truth all their own. When she described a film that portrayed a “messy” situation, she usually meant it as a compliment.

  Because of the demands of motherhood, Pauline’s employment opportunities were limited; it made the most sense for her to pursue freelance writing assignments that she could do at home. While still living in Santa Barbara, she was able to pick up occasional book-reviewing assignments with The Santa Barbara Star, covering recent releases such as Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted and Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness. In her review of May Sarton’s May-December love story Shadow of a Man, in November 1950, she hit on what would become one of her most frequently revisited topics—technical control and manipulation at the expense of emotional involvement:

  There is not an unintelligent line in The [sic] Shadow of a Man. From her first sentence, May Sarton shows distinction of mind: her intentions are of the highest, her integrity cannot be challenged, her craftsmanship is remarkably sustained.... Craftsmanship, this surface poise and control, this careful maturity, isn’t enough. The writers one cares about are controlled on a different level: the controlling mind and vision allow for a surface variety and spontaneity—even allow for mistakes.

  After her stint in Santa Barbara, she moved back to San Francisco and into a small apartment at 2490 Geary Street. She also wrote an original story for the screen and submitted it, with high hopes, to the Columbia Pictures story department. Called “The Brash Young Man,” it was rooted in Pauline’s frustrating experience in New York and her fear of losing her renegade outsider status. It centered on a character named Benjamin Burl, “brash, confident, pugnacious,” who for years has been struggling to achieve literary success. Although he has talent, not one of his several novels has sold well, and his publisher has all but given up on him. Benjamin is very much a back number when he makes one more attempt at a novel. To his astonishment it catches on with the public and becomes a big seller. Benjamin becomes a belated literary “discovery,” but success ruins his life:

  He became modest and shy. All the fun had gone out of things: there was no one to quarrel with and shout at; he didn’t have to convince people of his genius—they all agreed with him.

  Benjamin becomes morbidly depressed. He longs for the days when someone would say something derogatory about his books. He gets what he’s looking for in Amanda Magill, a glamorous, sharp-tongued reviewer who sums up his life by writing: “Mr. Benjamin Burl’s infatuation with himself has become a national romance.” Amanda has a genius for pointing out to Benjamin that he is a fraud whose talent consists of indulging in literary tricks. The story synopsis ends with Amanda standing over Benjamin as he begins a new novel, smiling, shaking her head and pronouncing, “no”—much to Benjamin’s delight.

  All in all, “The Brash Young Man” consisted of a seventeen-page synopsis, but it took one of Columbia’s readers only a little more than three pages to dismiss it: “about the substance and quality of a slick-paper magazine story.” The reader offered a plot rewrite that would conform more closely to the commercial formula for a big-screen romantic comedy but ended with the observation that “its first best chance would be with the magazines.” “The Brash Young Man” went nowhere, but it is quite revealing about Pauline’s own defensiveness where her career was concerned, her frustration at having her talents consistently overlooked, and her fears of what commercial success might bring.

  The next several years were to be among the leanest and most stressful of Pauline’s life. They were marked by a maze of unfortunate jobs, taken only out of the desperate need to provide for her daughter. In 1951 a doctor examining Gina detected a heart murmur, and it was eventually discovered that she had been born with a congenital defect: a sizable hole that would require delicate and complicated surgery. Pauline, devastated, had already faced times when she couldn’t scrape together enough money to stay ahead of the rent and keep herself and her daughter properly fed; now she was facing a potentially crippling mountain of medical bills. The consensus was that it might be better to wait to perform the necessary surgery until Gina was a little older and stronger. Anxiety over Gina’s health became a constant in Pauline’s life.

  It also signaled the real beginning of what was to be a deep, lifelong, mutually dependent bond between mother and daughter. Many of Pauline’s friends, sometimes teasingly, sometimes seriously, often told her that she was a classic Jewish mother. What they appeared to mean was that she was a nervous mother, worrying over her daughter’s condition. But as Gina grew older, friends and family members sensed another characteristic of classic Jewish motherhood: the conviction that her child was destined to be some kind of creative genius.

  While she was determined to see to it that the health issues that threatened Gina were vanquished, having a fragile daughter fulfilled her needs in some way that she could never quite bring herself to admit to anyone. All her life she had wanted to be at the center of someone’s universe—but on her own strict terms. The spell that Gian Carlo Menotti noted that she cast over Bob Horan had faded; by now Horan’s relationship with Menotti and Barber had run aground, and he was no longer a member of the household at Capricorn, all of which had triggered a nervous collapse. Robert Duncan, too, had pulled away from her and gone his own way. In the early 1950s Pauline might have been unsure of most aspects of her future, but she was certain of one thing: Gina needed her more than anyone else ever had.

  On November 21, 1952, Judith Kael died at the age of sixty-seven, after a long battle with cancer. Both Philip and Louis were living in Los Angeles by this time, so responsibility for looking after their mother had fallen to Rose, Anne, and Pauline. Most of the caring for Judith seems to have been absorbed by Rose, which served only to heighten the animosity between her and Pauline.

  Paulin
e stumbled along in her writing life. She was accumulating a pile of play scripts, comedies mostly, but she seemed to realize that they weren’t as good as they needed to be. She kept scribbling away in what spare time she could find in the middle of the constant chaos of trying to make ends meet. She coached students in a wide range of subjects. She ran a laundry and tailoring business, Kent Cleaners, just off Market Street in San Francisco, which entailed an inconvenient streetcar ride from her apartment. She took on ghostwriting assignments from time to time.

  Still, she prided herself on being able to make do with little. Her struggles didn’t make her hell-bent on success; in some ways, they seemed to deepen her natural distrust of people with money. Decades later, Pauline was chatting with her son-in-law, Warner Friedman, about the whole nature of struggle and hard times.

  “I was never hungry in my life,” said Warner.

  Pauline went silent and stared at him for a long moment.

  “You never were?” she finally asked, stunned and a little angry.

  Even when things were at their worst, Pauline had one constant source of pleasure—going to the movies. The end of World War II had signaled the beginning of a new era in American moviegoing. During the war, most of the major Hollywood studios had lost tremendous ground abroad because the European markets were all but closed during hostilities, leaving Holly wood’s export efforts concentrated on the United Kingdom and Latin America. European filmmaking was by necessity cut back dramatically while the war was on, but there were some remarkable examples of filmmaking under duress—notably Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis, made during the occupation of Paris, and Roberto Rossellini’s stunning Rome, Open City, filmed while the Allied and Axis forces were shooting it out in the streets of Rome. With the end of the war there was suddenly a generous supply of foreign films pouring into the United States. American audiences were now finding their way to movies like Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, whose unvarnished honesty was a welcome change to the surfeit of overglamorized, manipulative Hollywood products, full of crashing Max Steiner scores, gauzy photography, and implausible happy endings. Pauline had fallen under the spell of de Sica and the other Italian neorealists while she was still involved with James Broughton. De Sica’s Shoeshine had actually been one of her indelible movie-going experiences:

  When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, “Well, I don’t see what was so special about that movie.” I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel? . . . Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine, did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.

  But it was a movie Pauline disliked that was to provide the unexpected turning point in this difficult phase of her life. In the fall of 1952, as she and a friend were sitting in a Berkeley coffeehouse arguing about a film they had both seen recently, sitting nearby was Peter D. Martin, who recently had launched a magazine, City Lights, devoted to film commentary. Martin was intrigued by the stream of articulate, independent opinion he heard Pauline expressing, and he asked her if she would like to review the new Chaplin picture, Limelight, for City Lights.

  Limelight was a heavy-handed, strangely charmless tale of a down-at-the-heels English comic, Calvero (played by Chaplin), written off by his peers and public, who gets one last chance to show what he can do. The press treated it respectfully, but Pauline found it embarrassingly sentimental and, with its irritating references to Chaplin’s own neglect in Hollywood, nothing more than a testament to himself.

  Her review reveals that her critical voice was still in the process of assembling itself, but all the intimations of what she would become are there. She wrote that Chaplin, at this point in his career, was playing to a “somewhat segmented art-film audience,” and no longer the mass audience that had thrilled to his performances as the Little Tramp. “When the mass audience becomes convinced that the clown who had made them laugh was really an artist, they felt betrayed,” she observed. She thought that Chaplin had become too serious, so that his view of his character, Calvero, was fatally high-minded: “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. They are not—and the context of the film exposes them at every turn.”

  She thought the stage benefit that provides the climax of the film, in which Calvero proves that his comedic gifts have not deserted him after all and dies in the wings, was “surely the richest hunk of self-gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.” Chaplin, she felt, was trying to even the score with those who had attacked him for his morals or his politics, or those who had simply forgotten him. To her, the central conceit, the lie of the movie, was driven home in the scene in which Calvero praises the young ballerina (Claire Bloom) he has rescued: “My dear, you are a true artist, a true artist.” “The camera emphasis on Chaplin’s eyes,” wrote Pauline, “the emotion in his voice, are intended to give depth to his words. This ghastly mistake in judgment and taste—this false humility which proclaims his own artistry in the act of asserting another’s—is not a simple mistake. It is integral to the creative mind which produces a Limelight.”

  Pauline had managed her first piece of writing about the medium that meant more to her than any other. While she continued to work on her stories and play scripts, deep down she had the feeling that, at the age of thirty-three, she might have found herself as a writer at last.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pauline’s official debut as a movie critic was well timed, for she was beginning what would become her life’s work in an atmosphere of amazing creative ferment. By the mid-1950s Berkeley was known as the Athens of the West. The poets who had read at Madeline Gleason’s festival at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in 1947 had grown in numbers and influence. In addition to Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, there were Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, who together formed one of the most vital and progressive communities of poets in U.S. history. The most important event of this period took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, when Rexroth organized a reading at San Francisco’s Six Gallery that would soon become legendary. The poets that night included Snyder, Whalen, and Ginsburg, who gave an unforgettable reading of his explosive poem “Howl,” a cri de coeur against the complacency of the Eisenhower years (and, by extension, against the effect that it had on artists). Nothing like it had ever been experienced, and it was clear that American poetry had discovered a thrilling new voice.

  This eruption of new poetry was only one part of the San Francisco renaissance. Jazz clubs, avant-garde performance spaces, and small, experimental presses were plentiful. In 1953, Peter D. Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights bookstore, devoted exclusively to selling paperbound books. (Previously, paperbacks had been available mostly on racks in drugstores and groceries; City Lights gave them a new respectability and became a magnet for local artists in the process.) Ferlinghetti went on to launch City Lights Publishers, which brought out “Howl” in 1956.

  Across the bay, Berkeley was enjoying a renaissance of its own. The leading bookstores included U.C. Corners, where all the international newspapers and film magazines could be found; Cody’s; the Circle, where the literary quarterly Circle magazine was published in the back; and Moe’s, a magnet for secondhand-book hounds. Telegraph Avenue and Channing Way were dotted with first-rate classical record stores staffed by well-informed clerks. What had been a relatively bucolic tow
n with all the conventional trappings of university life was in the process of transforming itself into a lively arts and intellectual center.

  Pauline was about to become a significant player in this world. Her review of Limelight in City Lights had attracted some positive attention from literary figures of note, among them Mary McCarthy. With her first real encouragement, she worked on several pieces on spec through 1954, one of which, “Morality Plays Right and Left,” was a lengthy discursive essay. (She had already come to recognize that her love of jazz was revealing itself in her own writing: She was fond of riffs, as she came to think of them—the extended, brilliant, sidetracking discussions that veered off from the main crux of her argument but always reconnected to it in the end.) Ostensibly her topic was Twentieth Century–Fox’s 1954 Cold War thriller Night People, starring Gregory Peck, about the effort to rescue a U.S. soldier who has been kidnapped in Berlin. Pauline found the film to be a reflection of the U.S. government’s love affair with its own image and disapproved of its oversimplification of complex issues. Her wide-ranging discussion probed the dangers of pandering to the public, something studios were aggressively doing with the popular wide-screen technology, designed to help people forget about television and get back into the theaters:

  The new wide screen surrounds us and sounds converge upon us. Just one thing is lost: the essence of film “magic” which lay in our imaginative absorption, our entering into the film (as we might enter into the world of a Dostoyevsky novel or Middlemarch). Now the film can come to us—one more consummation of the efforts to diminish the labor (and the joy) of imaginative participation.