Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [13]
To Pauline, The Bostonians made a fascinating contrast with the immaculately wrought, complex subtleties of James’s later works, such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors. She regarded it as “the liveliest of his novels, maybe because it has sex right there at the center, and so it’s crazier—riskier, less controlled, less gentlemanly—than his other books.” The Bostonians possessed “a more earthly kind of greatness.” It became one of the seminal books of her early life, and her reaction to it provides a key to her developing literary sensibilities. Years later, reviewing the 1984 James Ivory film of The Bostonians, she would put forth the theory that James’s original was “the best novel in English about what at that time was called ‘the woman question,’ and it must certainly be the best novel in the language about the cold anger that the issue of equal rights for women can stir in a man.”
For extra money Pauline worked as a teaching assistant, reading papers for a number of courses. Later she had a job as assistant to a chemist who created makeup for performers. One of his clients was the skating star Sonja Henie, then at the height of her movie fame. Taking note of Pauline’s fair complexion, the chemist asked her to be the “test girl” for Henie’s makeup. “She would come in and inspect the cream on my arms,” Pauline later told Sam Staggs. “I don’t believe she ever spoke a word to me; she would talk to the chemist while fingering the patches on my arms.”
Pauline managed to keep up her generally good grades while pursuing an intense social life. The Bay Area in the 1930s was a good place to be for anyone who loved jazz as much as she did, and she later claimed that she went out dancing every single night in the many top jazz clubs that had sprung up around the city. One of her favorite performers was Turk Murphy, a trombonist who earned a big Bay Area following playing in the dance bands of Will Osborne and Mal Hallet. She delighted in Murphy’s Dixieland jazz; she also loved dancing to the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, and others who frequently played at San Francisco’s best hotels. For Pauline, music, like movies, didn’t have to be immaculately polished to give intense pleasure. Sometimes it was much better if it wasn’t polished at all. She developed a passion for the singing of the trombonist Jack Teagarden; she recalled thinking, Oh, that’s how to do it. You don’t need a voice; you just sing.
And always, there were movies. During her student years at Berkeley, Pauline first came under the spell of the films of Jean Renoir. She was entranced by La grande illusion, the director’s brilliant 1937 World War I drama—an attempt to make a pacifist statement as Hitler was on the brink of annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia. She was full of admiration for Renoir’s evenhanded treatment of the story’s aristocrats and plebeians, and wrote in 1961, “Renoir isn’t a sociologist or a historian who might show that there were heroes and swine in both groups.” She also responded to the fact that Renoir was an instinctive filmmaker who never stuck too slavishly to the script. She found La grande illusion “a triumph of clarity and lucidity; every detail fits simply, easily, and intelligibly. There is no unnecessary camera virtuosity: the compositions seem to emerge from the material. It’s as if beauty just happens (is it necessary to state that this unobtrusive artistry is perhaps the