Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [16]
CHAPTER THREE
By her senior year Pauline had compiled a solid, if far from outstanding, academic record. She might well have gone on to do graduate work in English, or, given her oratory skills, to success as a law student. But during her final year at Berkeley, her grades fell apart. Her first semester in 1939 was a disaster: She completed only a single course in political science and failed to pass Philosophy 12, Philosophy 199, and Economics 199a. The university gave her a chance to make up the courses before placing her on any official form of academic probation. She petitioned to have the failing grade removed, but her request was denied. Later, in 1940, she made up Philosophy 199 with a B, but she never completed the other two classes, and she finished her time at Berkeley a few credits short of a degree. Decades later, when interviewers occasionally asked her why she hadn’t managed to graduate, Pauline was quick to say that she had had around six credits left when she ran out of money.
In the future she would offer other accounts of her final academic year. To some she said that she had been a teaching assistant for several courses. When she had caught the flu during her senior year, she had realized that she could either grade the final papers in all the courses or study for her own finals, but she didn’t have the strength to do both—therefore, she had opted to help the other students graduate. To her friend Daryl Chin, she once said that she had taken the money put aside for her final semester and gone to New York, where she treated herself to a theatergoing binge that included Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, starring Tallulah Bankhead.
In fact, the events of her senior year suggest that she was tired of student life, and that the thought of returning for one more semester was anathema to her. She longed to be rid of the restrictive, unreal atmosphere of campus life and to go out in the world, finding her way as a writer. By summer she was desperate for money, and decided to join her sister Anne in a sublet apartment, where she began determining in what direction she would set out as a writer.
At Berkeley she and Bob Horan had discovered the literary criticism of R. P. Blackmur, whose ability to illuminate the social context of great literature resonated deeply with both of them. Pauline loved the passionate tone of Blackmur’s writing, and later she would always be flattered when her criticism was compared with his. Reading his comments on Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, one can easily see how his intensely personal voice had a profound influence on her:
When I was first told, in 1921, to read something of Henry James—just as when I had been told to read something of Thomas Hardy and something of Joseph Conrad—I went to the Cambridge Public Library looking, I think, for The Portrait of a Lady. It was out. The day was hot and muggy, so that from the card catalogue I selected as the most cooling title The Wings of the Dove, and on the following morning, a Sunday, even hotter and muggier, I began, and by the stifling midnight had finished my first reading of that novel. Long before the end I knew a master had laid hands on me. The beauty of the book bore me up; I was both cool and waking; excited and effortless; nothing was any longer worth while and everything had become necessary. A little later, there came outside the patter and the cooling of a shower of rain and I was able to go to sleep, both confident and desperate in the force of art.
The immediate question, though, was exactly how she was going to survive. Fortunately, during her student years, she had figured out how