Pauline Kael (7 page)

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.

Another critic Pauline admired enormously was Otis Ferguson, who wrote for
The New Republic
beginning in 1930. Ferguson possessed a keen appreciation of the director’s contribution, but he also understood that movies were mostly the product of a factory system. “Movies are such common and lowly stuff,” he once wrote, “that in intellectual circles we often find ourselves leaping, like trout for flies, after something in a new offering that promises to set it off from the average run, something of special interest or fame, in short any branch of art certified to have nothing to do with that of making pictures.” Ferguson was anything but predictable. He could easily overlook the studied and self-conscious artiness of John Ford’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, which he considered a masterpiece, yet he raised loud objections to the knowing machinations of
The Wizard of Oz
, in which he found Frank Morgan, as the Wizard, “the only unaffected trouper in the bunch; the rest either try too hard or are Judy Garland. It isn’t that this little slip of a miss spoils the fantasy so much as that her thumping, overgrown gambols are characteristic of its treatment here: when she is merry the house shakes, and everybody gets wet when she is lorn.”

But the reviewer whose work Pauline admired most was James Agee, who was on the staff of
Time
from 1941 to 1948; during most of this period he also reviewed for
The Nation
. Agee was a superb prose stylist, and although he could be sharp, he was never strident and seemed to speak with the voice of reason. He was capable of dismissing a big sentimental hit in a few sentences, as in his evaluation of Leo McCarey’s Academy Award–winning story of two priests,
Going My Way
: “It would have a little more stature as a ‘religious’ film if it dared suggest that evil is anything worse than a bad cold and that lack of self-knowledge can be not merely cute and inconvenient but also dangerous to oneself and to others.” He could accomplish more in a limited space than any other movie critic, and his adeptness at seeing right through an actor’s performance was unparalleled. He was stunningly prescient about the turn that Bette Davis’s career was in the process of taking by the mid-1940s. In his essay on her 1945 release,
The Corn Is Green
, in which she played a dedicated schoolteacher in a Welsh coal-mining town, Agee saw all too clearly that the spontaneity and raw grasp of realism that had made many of Davis’s earlier performances so magical had begun to elude her as her importance within the movie industry grew:

This appreciation of the decline of early gifts—gifts that come so much more easily before actors and directors become officially sanctioned stars—was a theme that Pauline would return to often once she began her own reviewing career.

But perhaps Agee’s greatest gift as a critic was an ability to wrestle with his feelings about a movie in a way that involved the reader. Covering Preston Sturges’s 1944 farce
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
, he admitted that he found the movie “funnier, more adventurous, more intelligent, and more encouraging than anything that has been made in Hollywood in years.” But he went on to say:

It was this ability to dig deep beneath the surface of the movie, to take into account the audience’s role in the picture, and to examine what the director’s particular style might mean in the context of what was happening in contemporary life, that Pauline most loved about Agee’s criticism. There were points, however, at which she parted company with him. She took issue with his fondness for plain, bare-bones, unadorned drama without a trace of vulgarity or over-the-top flair. He wanted movies to be “cleansed” of excess, but Pauline couldn’t help but feel that this “virtue may have been his worst critical vice.”