Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [17]
Still, she needed something to live on, and she was lucky to be able to count on friends and relatives. Anne, by now teaching at Polytechnic High School near Commerce Street, was always a soft touch, and there was Robert Duncan, who had split from his lover in Philadelphia and by 1940 was living in Woodstock, New York, as part of a commune organized by James Cooney, editor of The Phoenix, a countercultural publication with a pacifist point of view. Duncan was working on the magazine and contributing pieces to it, and during this period he became friendly with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, both of whom had recently returned to America after years of living in Europe. Both were impressed with Duncan’s talent and encouraged him to continue writing poetry. Duncan had a bit of money to send to Pauline, and did so on a few occasions, always with her assurance that she would pay him back when she could.
In addition to working at her writing, Pauline took in everything on the local arts scene that piqued her interest. She had become addicted to reading The Partisan Review, a literary quarterly with a heavy accent on politics that had been published since the mid-’30s. On the musical front she had discovered Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations, in which the composer explored more abstract musical ideas than usual. She constantly attended art openings throughout the Bay Area and kept up with all the new movies, writing to Violet Rosenberg, who now lived in Santa Paula, her impressions of them. She enthused over John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, which she considered “a wonderful movie . . . really the most exciting photography—at least the most sustained in quality, I’ve seen in the movies yet.” It’s an interesting reaction, given her later antipathy toward Ford’s large-scale, elegiac Westerns and her dislike of the director’s The Grapes of Wrath (also released in 1940). Also, the use of the superlative in singling out an aspect of a film—“the most sustained in quality”—was to become one of the defining characteristics of Pauline’s style as a movie critic; in time, it would draw her both an army of admirers and a loud chorus of detractors.
By March 1941 Robert Horan was working on the staff of The San Francisco News. Happy enough with his job, he was also consumed by writing poetry, and Pauline had plenty of opportunity to monitor his progress and offer her criticism, since they were by now living together in an apartment at 930 Post Street. Horan worked at the paper from 4:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., which suited Pauline, an inveterate night person, perfectly. She would sit up reading voraciously until it was time for Horan to leave for work, then she would join him for a predawn breakfast at one of the neighborhood diners. Their romance, which had always been of an on-again, off-again nature, was going through a cooling period—enough so that in mid-March 1941, Pauline wrote to Vi of a new affair that had presented itself:
I’m fairly sure that in the long run it would turn out disastrously. But he remains the only exciting new mind I’ve met in the last year or so—remarkably brilliant—but it’s all just too much trouble for now and I prefer to let things drift. Besides, it would be so damned much trouble to “hook” him properly. (About thirty-five, wife dead, has small daughter, is a musician of quality, studied music and philosophy, and has fun around town with a lady prof from Mills . . . get the idea?
She continued with her round of moviegoing, regaling Vi with her sharp and often somewhat eccentric reviews of what she’d seen. Indeed, the comments about movies in her letters of this period form a kind of intriguing preview of what would become her critical voice. Predictably, she found the Margaret Sullavan