Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [14]
Despite her natural competitive bent and a strong need to dominate, she had no trouble finding friends among the Berkeley student body. She had become part of a circle that included Ida Bear, a writer, and Virginia Holton Admiral, an Oregon-born painter and poet (and later the mother of the actor Robert De Niro). There was also Violet Rosenberg, her closest woman friend. Like Pauline, Violet was passionately interested in art and politics and did not suffer fools, and the two become inseparable companions. Violet was deeply proud of Pauline’s intellect and her fearlessness in expressing her opinions, and in the years to come she would prove a loyal friend. “There was always a circle of people around Pauline,” Violet later recalled. “People came to her. They were magnetized.”
Pauline also became attached to two men who were to count among the most important relationships of her life. Robert Duncan, a young poet who shared many of Pauline’s left-leaning political interests, would become one of her most cherished friends. Duncan was a renegade almost from the beginning of his life—one of the most unorthodox lives that could possibly have been found in 1930s and ’40s America. He was born in Oakland just six months before Pauline. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, Edward Howard Duncan, put him up for adoption soon thereafter. His foster parents were an architect named Edwin Joseph Symmes and his wife, Minnehaha Harris, who were devoted to spiritualism and the occult. At their home in Bakersfield, the Symmes family hosted séances the way some couples hosted canasta games, and they informed their son that he was descended from a line of people who had perished in the lost city of Atlantis. The Symmeses were hostile toward modern science, which they believed would cause the New World to be engulfed in flames during their son’s lifetime, just as Atlantis had been decimated by flood and earthquake. Small wonder that young Robert made his way through his early school years as a misfit—a cross-eyed, conspicuously effeminate though fiercely quick-witted boy who acquired the unfortunate nickname “Sissie Symmes.” Like Pauline’s, Duncan’s family suffered serious reversals in the wake of the Wall Street crash, and like Pauline, he came through it with a strong sense of himself intact. In 1936 Duncan entered Berkeley as a scholarship student, and soon he was immersed in writing poetry and exploring radical politics, significantly as editor of the American Student Union’s Campus Review, which the university effectively disowned. Duncan, during his years at Berkeley still known as Robert Symmes, was an English major who was also taking introductory philosophy courses, and it was there that he met Pauline.
She responded immediately to his strong and commanding personality. “He was attracted to strong-mother-archetype women he could talk to on an equal basis,” recalled Duncan’s friend Jack Foley. “He wanted real, substantive discussions.” Duncan had a great sense of his own sexual power, and he could be enormously flirtatious and seductive. He was an equally charismatic presence on the public podium, and when he read from his own poetry, the effect could be spellbinding. He was a rather handsome man, but his crossed eyes made people slightly uneasy; they never quite knew whether he was looking at them.
Midway through his