Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [184]
In 1976, when Reeling was published, John Simon had, while expressing his admiration for Pauline as a stylist, objected to her coarseness of spirit and taste, in terms of both language and her championing of certain movies he considered lowbrow: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler echoed this theme in her review, complaining that Pauline had “lost any notion of the legitimate borders of polemic. Mistaking lack of civility for vitality, she now substitutes for argument a protracted, obsessional invective—what amounts to a staff cinema critics’ branch of est.” Adler—not coincidentally, perhaps, an ardent admirer of William Shawn’s editing style—lamented Pauline’s use of images of “sexual conduct, deviance, impotence, masturbation; also of indigestion, elimination, excrement. I do not mean to imply that these images are frequent, or that one has to look for them. They are relentless, inexorable.” Among the words and phrases that bothered her: “just a belch from the Nixon era”; “you can’t cut through the crap in her”; “plastic turds”; and “tumescent filmmaking.”
Adler also attacked Pauline for her repeated use of “the mock rhetorical question,” such as “Were these 435 prints processed in a sewer?” “Where was the director?” and “How can you have any feelings for a man who doesn’t enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?” These questions, she felt, were “rarely saying anything; they are simply doing something. Bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning, rallying.”
There was more: Adler took issue with Pauline’s use of “you” to indicate what the audience was feeling, when she would have more civilly, in Adler’s view, said “I.” Like Robert Brustein, Andrew Sarris, and even Pauline’s friend Greil Marcus, she found fault with the surfeit of hyperbole, and she objected, seemingly on moral grounds, to comments such as the one Pauline wrote about Paul Schrader, in Hardcore—not knowing how to turn a trick—which Adler felt represented “a new breakthrough in vulgarity and unfairness.” She also theorized that Pauline had taken advantage of The New Yorker’s famously genteel editing process, in which writers are “free to write what, and at what length, they choose.” While disagreements with writers of feature articles could be dealt with simply by postponing the running of the piece, movie reviews demanded constant currency; Pauline’s work had to be run, week in and week out, essentially forcing The New Yorker either to fire her or “to accommodate her work. The conditions of unique courtesy, literacy, and civility, of course, were what Ms. Kael was most inclined by temperament to test. Her excesses got worse.” Reading Pauline in book form was a very different experience from reading her from week to week, Adler wrote, because “It is difficult, with these reviews, to account for, or even look at, what is right there on the page.”
“The Perils of Pauline” quickly became an incendiary topic of conversation in New York literary circles. It was hard to remember when any established writer had launched such a damning dismissal of one of her own kind. Time and New York ran full-scale feature articles on the scandal. In The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris gave his seal of approval to Adler’s broadside, but the publication also ran a scathing article by Pauline’s friend James Wolcott, who mercilessly limned Adler as “Princess Renata,” a writer who “when not dusting off her diplomas . . . writes about journalistic chores—book reviewing, movie reviewing, investigative reporting—with the pained, annoyed tone of a royal bride stranded in one of the empire’s scruffier provinces.” Letters to the editor poured into The New York Review of Books. “Renata Adler should see a psychiatrist,” her young critic friend at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Michael Sragow, wrote to Pauline. “Hope you’re bearing this latest injustice with your usual fortitude and good humor, which is what you’ve