Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [20]
Her letters from this period consistently indicate her low opinion of most of the people she encountered in New York artistic circles. She had come east hoping to be challenged and invigorated, but after only a few months, she was disappointed. (There is also a suggestion of frustration that people she regarded as mediocrities were ahead of her on the career path—more adept than she at playing the New York game.) She thought that New York’s arts world was blighted by “a heavy confusion of young men and not so young men living together and shopping around, or being married to fierce young ladies who have other fierce young ladies. And all of them making infantile efforts for a chic wit, for a maximum of attention.... The place is cluttered up with ‘promising’ young poets who are now thirty-five or forty writing just as they did fifteen years ago or much worse.”
For some time Isaac Kael had been in failing health. He had suffered from hypertension in his later years; eventually he had a stroke, after which he was confined to a wheelchair. On November 11, 1942, Isaac died in Alameda, California. His death was reported by Rose, the child who had looked after him most. Pauline’s grief was of an unusually private nature. She never said much to friends about her reaction to his death, and her surviving letters make no mention of it; she had never been an introspective person, and her father’s passing did nothing to change that fact. If anything, it only intensified her feelings of restlessness: Isaac had died without seeing her achieve anything of significance, and she became ever more mindful of how quickly time passes when one is trying to establish a career.
She had landed a job at a publishing house—her letters to Vi do not indicate which one—but the salary was abysmal, and the constant struggle for cash was leaving her feeling depleted. During the first part of 1943, she switched apartments, finding a fairly spacious flat at 135 East Twenty-eighth Street, complete with fireplace, skylight, and built-in bookshelves—but no furniture, which meant that she spent her weekends scrounging in junk and antiques shops for used tables and chairs.
She remained hard at work on her short stories and playwriting, constantly reworking them to try to get them in salable shape. She also kept Vi informed of the gossip about their old school friends. The big news was that, in a startling about-face, Robert Duncan was planning an April wedding to an acquaintance of Pauline’s named Marjorie McKee. “Pleasing news for a change,” noted Pauline, “altho [sic] I can’t dare to imagine how it may work out.”
Pauline continued, however, to be a fairly stubborn transplant to New York, and her letters reveal very little sense of optimism about the future. She was flailing about, constantly battling anxieties about money and increasingly filled with doubt and ambivalence about her current situation. It was also harder than she had guessed to establish a relationship with a man—the kind of relationship she thought she wanted. There were plenty of opportunities for casual sex; servicemen regularly propositioned her on the street and in bars, and when she turned them down, as she often did, they would try to make her feel guilty by telling her that the girls at home were the ones for whom they were fighting.
She kept in close touch with Bob Horan, who by now was spending much of his time at Capricorn, Barber and Menotti’s country retreat in Mount