What was it like to hang out with The New Yorker’s great movie critic Pauline Kael? Two recent
memoirs tell us: James Wolcott’s “Like Civilized People …” (in Lucking
Out, 2011); and David Denby’s “Pauline
Kael: A Great Critic and Her Circle” (in Do The Movies Have a Future?, 2012). It’s interesting to compare them.
Both pieces are deeply admiring, but avoid idolization.
Wolcott says, “Much as I adored her, I didn’t want the godmother to have total
jurisdiction.” Denby says,
Looking back, I’m happy that she wrote as well as she did
for so many years – that was the most important thing she did for young critics
who admired her and became part of her circle. I’m equally glad that she took
me up in my mid-twenties when I was a nobody and that, for a while, we were
friends. She may not have intended to do me a favor when she threw me out, but
it was a favor nonetheless, since I might not have grown up for years if I had
remained in that group.
Wolcott’s piece is juicier, more intimate, vibrant and
wisecracking (more Kaelesque, you might say); Denby’s is more analytical.
Wolcott is a dazzling metaphorist. Here, for example, is his description of
Kael’s compositional process:
Entire paragraphs were x-ed out and new ones inserted,
sentences were transposed within paragraphs that themselves were moved around
like modular furniture, commas deliciously planted by The New Yorker’s notoriously comma-promiscuous copy department
(resulting in sentences that resembled a higher plane of constipation, bogged
down in late-period Henry James particularization) were plucked out and em
dashes liberally thrown like left jabs.
That “comma-promiscuous copy department” is terrific.
Denby beautifully describes Kael’s writing style:
As a writer,
she had the natural beat of a good musician, alternating the tension and weight
of a long sentence with the brutal quick jab of a short one. Her prose was so
urgent and heated that a complexly argued piece seemed to burst forth in a
single unbroken stream of words that combined sternly proper syntax with
free-ranging, rowdy habits of phrasing. She was a master of informal rhetoric –
the bullying mock question, the interjected taunt – and a great liberator of
critical language, establishing the right, by means of charged rhythm and
color, to speak one’s mind on the page as one might talk to one’s friends over
a drink. She used slang, contractions, hype, insult, syncopated compound
adjectives – anything for greater speed.
Both pieces capture Kael’s glorious profanity. “Oh, honey,
you’ve never been fucked by a bear,” was one line she used, according to Denby,
to snap argumentative protégés back to reality. Regarding Hollywood, Wolcott
quotes her as saying, “Never underestimate how much those in power resent those
with talent – talent being the one thing they can’t buy for themselves. But they never tire of fucking with it, that’s their talent.” Denby calls her “a good witch with a wicked
tongue” and “as bawdy as a San Francisco madam.” He talks about her “insatiable
need to win arguments.” Given her combativeness, I’ve always wondered why she
didn’t rebut Renata Adler’s hatchet job, "The Perils of Pauline" (The New York
Review of Books, August 14, 1980). Denby refers to it as a “notoriously wrongheaded
piece.” But neither critic indicates why Kael chose to remain silent in the
face of Adler’s vehement attack. My guess is that she didn’t want to get into a
pissing war with a skunk.
Denby and Wolcott show Kael in a fascinating variety of
settings: screening rooms, her New Yorker
office, talk show, taxi cab, lunch, the Algonquin, her Central Park West
apartment. My favorite passage is Wolcott’s description of her at her house:
She did her writing on the second floor of her house in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, bent over at a drawing table facing
light-flooding windows looking out on her long, descending lawn to the road
below. She wrote in pencil with a rubber thimble on her thumb, her phenomenal
concentration pouring from the point of her pencil across the page as she
followed the line of argument wherever it led, keeping every circuit open.
Kael was cruel to Denby. She told him, “You’re too restless
to be a writer.” She said, “I’ve thought about this seriously, honey. You
should do something else with your energy.” Denby was devastated. Who wouldn’t
be? He says, “There was a heaviness in my chest and a slight roaring in my
ears, as if a wave had knocked me over and the waters were swirling around my
head." He eventually recovered. To his credit, he
isn’t spiteful. He calls Kael “an astonishing woman.” He wrote in her obituary,
published in the September 17, 2001 New Yorker, “In both abundance and quality,
her work was a performance very likely without equal in the history of American
journalism.”
Credit: The above photograph of Pauline Kael is by Chris Carroll.
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