Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [15]
For years the rumor persisted that the two had been secretly married for a time. They weren’t, but Pauline felt a powerful attraction to Duncan, as a surviving fragment of a letter she wrote to him indicates. He had indicated to her that he felt a certain pressure from their circle of friends for them to become romantically involved—hardly an unusual situation for a gay man to come up against in those conformist times. “Don’t be foolish—you don’t love me—you will never love me,” Pauline responded to him with remarkable clearheadedness. Duncan had been flirting with the idea of psychoanalysis, and Pauline was encouraging: “For Christ’s sake be analyzed!” she wrote. “Be analyzed if only because you need the self-knowledge for your work, your art.”
In her review of the 1973 Barbra Streisand–Robert Redford romantic drama The Way We Were, Pauline seems to have tipped her hand a bit with respect to her Berkeley years. Watching the scenes set at Columbia University during the 1930s, with the driven, obsessive Katie trying to rally student support for Stalin, trying—and failing—to perfect a short story for her fiction-writing class, Pauline may have felt a bit as if she were seeing the ghost of her seventeen-and eighteen-year-old self. Like Katie, Pauline did dabble in left-wing radical politics during her college years—she was more intrigued by Trotskyism than anything—but with the passage of time, as her review of The Way We Were revealed, she took a much cooler attitude toward leftist politics: “[T]here appears to be nothing between Communist involvement and smug indifference. . . . Implicitly, the movie accepts the line the Communist Party took—that it was the only group doing anything, so if you cared about peace or social injustice you had to join up.” She was fairly quick to step away from her own flirtation with the Communist Party, largely because of her natural suspicion of anything that smacked of dogma.
The person at Berkeley with whom Pauline was destined to be most intimately involved was, like Robert Duncan, a poet: Robert Horan, with whom she also shared classes. Horan was attractive, with a keen, alert mind, and discussion—often angry—immediately formed the foundation of their friendship. Kael found Horan stimulating company because, like her, he was obsessed with just about anything concerning the arts. It became routine for the two of them to stay up all night arguing about poetry, fiction, movies, music, painting.
In a number of ways Horan exerted greater influence over her than Duncan did. For one, their shared enthusiasm for the arts got her to rethink the academic path she had been on since her freshman year. Pauline’s principal instructors felt that a good grounding in philosophy, public speaking, and English literature would prepare her beautifully for law school. But her involvement with Horan made her see herself increasingly as a writer. She wasn’t quite sure which form appealed to her most, but she instinctively began moving toward playwriting, and Horan encouraged her every step of the way.
He also became her lover. Sex may never have been the engine in their mercurial friendship, but at the time it was not surprising that a young man and woman who shared such intensity, along with so many common interests and ideas, should match up. She loved Horan, but she also understood and, on some level, accepted his attraction to men. Certainly there is no evidence, in her many letters from this period, that she considered those men any