Pauline Kael by Brian Kellow Read Free Book Online Page B

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:
    I’m fairly sure that in the long run it would turn out disastrously. But he remains the only exciting new mind I’ve met in the last year or so—remarkably brilliant—but it’s all just too much trouble for now and I prefer to let things drift. Besides, it would be so damned much trouble to “hook” him properly. (About thirty-five, wife dead, has small daughter, is a musician of quality, studied music and philosophy, and has fun around town with a lady prof from Mills . . . get the idea?
    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