Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [12]
During her freshman year Pauline immersed herself in English and philosophy courses. For both semesters she scored a solid B in philosophy, earning an A in English. She also excelled in public speaking, but did less well in French, earning a B during the first semester and a C in the second. She took no further language courses for the rest of her time at Berkeley, and the pattern of her freshman year was to be repeated over her sophomore and junior years: excellent grades in her philosophy and literature courses, lower ones in the classes she took simply to fill a requirement, such as economics.
In high school Pauline had been frustrated by her teachers’ persistent attempts to force-feed their students material that was good for them: history that reeked of academic correctness, literature with carefully worked out, socially and morally responsible themes. It was learning deemed socially constructive rather than learning that opened up the mind, training it to think in daring, critical ways. At Berkeley she encountered a whole new set of frustrations. For one thing, she wasn’t allowed to write her papers in colloquial English. Pauline responded to literature, music, and art with a kind of no-holds-barred intensity, but she found that her professors criticized her for injecting her personal voice into her essays. Humor was seldom welcome at all. The conversational style that she naturally favored was frowned upon; she was asked to remove “I” from her essays and use “one” instead. It was a kind of chilly formality, “term-paper pomposity,” as she would come to label it, that went against her natural writing instincts.
But she was a serious student, with a fierce competitive streak, and mindful of the importance of succeeding at Berkeley. So she set to work, trying her best to turn out essays in her own individual voice, in ways that wouldn’t alienate the professor and result in a poor grade. She was a great lover of the works of contemporary English novelists such as Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Rosamond Lehmann, and in one essay, written midway through her time at Berkeley, she compared the leading British authors with their American counterparts:
The English are the inheritors of civilization and style, and the current writers know how to use them. They write with grace and assurance; the words mean what they intend them to mean; the rhythms fall where they should. They use the English language with authority. The American writer, caught in his clumsy despair, can scarcely withstand envy and resentment.
But the English, for their part, have more to resent in us than our dollars! The freshness . . . of American writing, the qualities that have made American novels an influence abroad, are as little accessible to them as their authority is to us.
This argument took hold of her early on, and once she became a film critic, it would figure very strongly into the way she wrote about American and European movies.
Pauline’s years at Berkeley were a time of great discovery, as she lost herself in the novels of Dostoyevsky, Melville, Hawthorne, James, and Woolf. She loved to make her way through an author’s entire oeuvre, becoming, as she put it, “immersed in a sensibility.” Henry James’s novels would prove an exception to Pauline’s habit of binge reading, as it took ten years for her to familiarize herself with the author’s work, with breaks in between. Early on she was most deeply drawn to The Bostonians, James’s 1886 account of the conflict between the hard-bitten suffragette