Pauline Kael by Brian Kellow Read Free Book Online

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 encouraged 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
    B y 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,