Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [120]
There was an unceasing flow of fan mail, which she was diligent about answering. A brief, casual note of appreciation about something she had written in The New Yorker usually got a polite reply written on a postcard, but the more in-depth and thoughtful letters she took more time with; sometimes she even surprised her devoted readers by telephoning to thank them for their words, even if they were uncomplimentary. Sometimes lasting friendships were born out of her correspondence with readers.
One person who wrote to her in the early 1970s was a professor of English literature at the Oregon College of Education, Erhard Dortmund, with whom Pauline would maintain a steady and lively correspondence for thirty years. As with many who came into her orbit, she took an interest in Dortmund’s career and encouraged him to submit articles to The Atlantic Monthly. Dortmund recalled their friendship as an “improbable one. She was so smart and intuitive and loved all of life’s juices . . . she worshipped people with vitality and people with guts and zaniness. She loved zany things. I’m just the opposite. I’m inhibited and not bold, but luckily full of curiosity. At some level, we found common ground. We had similar vibes about many things.”
As Gina often pointed out, Pauline liked to be surrounded by people whose feelings about the arts and politics were close to her own. She often told friends that she found it difficult to form a close bond with someone who disagreed with her about more than three movies. More to the point, she relished the company of people who had zest and intensity and appetite for movies, art, music, literature, current events. She had no need to dominate the conversation in a group of people—she found such behavior boorish. Her social self was very much like her moviegoing self: She loved being a spectator. The writer James Wolcott, who became friends with her in the mid-1970s, observed, “She would throw a little dart in, but it was only when someone was going way overboard about something. She never dressed anybody down. She liked being around people who were entertaining.”
Pauline was already developing a circle of movie-loving friends, many of them younger critics in whose careers she took an interest. They would meet at screenings and then go out for drinks or dinner afterward, constituting their own floating version of the Algonquin Round Table. But there was a crucial difference: The Algonquin Round Table had been made up of a group of peers; Pauline’s group resembled a Renaissance court, where people tended to seek her approval by agreeing with her about the film they’d just seen, or trying to move to the head-of-class position by outdoing each other with sharp, barbed comments.
It was not strictly true that the way to Pauline’s heart was through slavish agreement. She could be patient with her acolytes’ worship of her, but if it crossed the line into sycophancy, she could distance herself very quickly. Sometimes those who had considered themselves to be rising through the ranks of her inner circle were stunned to find themselves suddenly frozen out. Joe Morgenstern, for one, found the competitiveness and backbiting of Pauline’s acolytes repellent: “Sometimes I would just sit there silent as a stone, listening to everybody dish everybody. It was not part of my knowledge, my world, or my inclination. And I thought it was really unseemly. I had a sense that she needed the idolatry, and that kind of nastiness on the part of the courtiers was just an inevitable part of it.”
On her return to The New Yorker