Lucking Out - James Wolcott [36]
As I enter Pauline’s office, she clears a place for me on the couch if there’s no spot to perch, moving aside scripts she’s been sent, stacks of newly delivered books and galleys, unsolicited manuscripts, manila folders with news clippings, and whatever else has come through the pipeline. On her desk lay the latest set of New Yorker galleys, undergoing extensive surgery. Although Pauline wrote fast and was accused of being more impressionistic and free-associative than rational-analytical (an accusation laced with a sexism with which she was wearily familiar, the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that a woman critic was more at the mercy of her hormones, mood fluctuations, and monthly cycles than a marble bust of judicious decorum such as the New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann or a sprightly carnation such as Vincent Canby of the New York Times), she was meticulous with her copy, as fanatical a tinkerer as any fussbudget from the E. B. White elf academy. It was the aim and direction of her perfectionism that were different. She didn’t pursue evenly smoothed embalmed non-reflective-surface perfection. She sanded down the jagged edges of her reviews to piercing effect. She was slangy the way New Yorker writers were slangy in the thirties, before excess propriety and hallowed obeisance to the fine-toned points of craft outfitted writers with clerical collars. Rather than camp behind the fine-mesh scrim of mandarin prose or adopt the chummy manner of New Yorker critics past (such as Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, and her predecessors on the film beat, among them John McCarten, John Mosher, and Brendan Gill), she filed battlefield reports from the front line of the back row, writing for the ear as much as the eye, one of the few critics (to borrow a locution from Seymour Krim) whose words were capable of matching the speed of our minds. In his book, Seligman quotes one of Pauline’s editors at The New Yorker, John Bennet, describing the complexity of her creative-destructive grid work. “Balzac, madly revising at his most caffeinated, Proust at his most hypodermically caffeinated, had nothing on Pauline when it came to crossing out, writing all over the margins, taping extra sheets of paper to the margins to make even more revisions—revisions of revisions, inserts inside inserts.” Entire paragraphs were x-ed out and new ones inserted, sentences were transposed within paragraphs that themselves were moved around like modular furniture, commas delicately 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. Even without the benefit of literacy, strictly as an eye exam, her pieces looked more alive on the page than those of anyone else (save for Donald Barthelme and his typographical Monty Python circus). Nearly every cut and addition she made was to foster idiomatic verve, direct contact, and acceleration, the hum of a live broadcast.
Having made her name as a film reviewer for a Berkeley radio station, Pauline was an advocate of reading work aloud to make sure that it “played.” She would sometimes read me reviews or partial reviews over the phone, not to toot her own horn (though she loved it whenever a line got a laugh), but to have a sounding board, a preview audience. It was a way of pinpointing false notes and dead spots, lopping the branches off of sentences that went on so long that her voice ran out of wind before the finish line. On rare occasions she’d call because she was “stuck” (she would read up to the point the piece hit a blank wall, trying to figure out how to push