Pauline Kael (6 page)

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:

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 Street
“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.”

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 establish 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.