Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [18]
In her social life she was feeling misunderstood, a fairly common condition for her. She beseeched Vi to come back to San Francisco to live, because there were so few people who really seemed to grasp her ideas about the arts and the world scene, and she desperately missed the conversations they used to have. “Communication (orally) with people around seems even more difficult than it used to be,” she wrote. “I’m getting more tired than ever of having to get basic ideas accepted before you can go on to talk about the things you’re interested in talking about.”
By May, she was feeling better about herself, buoyed up by the intense work that she and Bob Horan were doing together. They had teamed up for what she described as “a rather complex essay” on three formidable literary critics, R. D. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Lionel Trilling. They hoped to sell the piece to one of the top national magazines as the first step toward launching their reputation as serious critics. “We’ve been working together just about every waking moment we could find,” she wrote to Vi, “and he’s just been swell and wonderful to work with . . . By now we know the workings of each other’s mind too well for disparities from sentence to sentence.”
While Horan and Pauline often disagreed violently about the art exhibits they took in together, they were more in accord when it came to modern poetry. In particular they shared a great love of Dylan Thomas’s early works, relishing the raw power of poems such as “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” “It was tremendous fun,” Pauline remembered. “We were both young and a little bit crazy, in the sense that practical things didn’t matter the way matters of the mind did—matters of mind and emotion.”
Ultimately Pauline and Horan were beginning to feel stifled by living in San Francisco, and they began spending hours plotting a move to New York. Horan was desperate to be in the vortex of cultural activity in America, but given Pauline’s strong connection to the West Coast, she had mixed feelings about the enterprise. Much as she loved the Bay Area, however, she had to admit that San Francisco was really the biggest small town in America, and later observed that it was like Ireland: If you really wanted to do something important, you needed to get out.
In November 1941 Pauline and Horan finally made the break and left for the East Coast. They hitchhiked across the country, dropping into a number of burlesque houses along the way. They arrived in Manhattan to find they were flat broke, and camped out for several nights at Grand Central Station, homeless in the city they had dreamed of for so long. Several nights later Horan was wandering the streets, trying to lay his hands on some money so they could eat. He was standing in front of Saks Fifth Avenue when he attracted the attention of two men who were returning home from a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. Horan was weaving back and forth, pale and exhausted, and fearing that he might be seriously ill, the two men stopped and began to talk to him.
It turned out to be a lucky break for Horan, since the pair were both well-known composers—Samuel Barber and his lover, Gian Carlo Menotti. They had met a decade earlier when they were students at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; by now, both had several major successes behind them. Barber, at age thirty-two, had enjoyed his greatest triumphs in the concert hall, with his lushly romantic Violin Concerto and his elegiac Adagio