Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [230]
As a mother, Pauline was exactly what you would expect from reading her or knowing her. Taste, judgment, being right were crucial. Her inflexibility pleased her. She was right—and that was it. My mother had tremendous empathy and compassion, though how to comfort, soothe, or console was a mystery that eluded her. Pauline tried to make me aware of people’s needs and she taught me to be considerate of other people’s feelings. But when Pauline spoke to someone about their work as if it had been produced by a third party, it had repercussions. There was fallout. In my youth, I watched what she left, unaware, in her wake: flickering glimpses of crushed illusions, mounting insecurities, desolation. Those she was not dismissive of, those who valued her perception, judgment, integrity, and extreme forthrightness, did feel her sting, but also felt she was totally real and that she affirmed and valued them as human beings. She could see the possibilities. Pauline’s greatest weakness, her failure as a person, became her great strength, her liberation as a writer and critic. She truly believed that what she did was for everyone else’s good, and that because she meant well, she had no negative effects. She refused any consideration of that possibility and she denied any motivations or personal needs.... This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint, or hesitation gave Pauline supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice. She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.
Gina was followed by Craig Seligman, who spoke of the good fortune he’d had, not only in becoming friends with his literary idol, but in finding her such fun to be around. “She was funny and lethal right up to the end,” said Seligman. “One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ‘It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can’t write.’ And she said, very weakly, ‘Yes—they say things like ‘It never ceases to amaze me.’”
Robert Altman gave a rambling speech about Pauline’s championing of his work—it was easy to imagine her mentally editing his remarks—while Arlene Croce shared affectionate reminiscences of being with Pauline and Gina the day that they found the Great Barrington house, and of crossing Fifth Avenue with Pauline to avoid running into Otto Preminger. John Bennet, one of her later editors at The New Yorker, recalled her constant fussing over revisions. (“It’s a piece of crap, but maybe I can do something with it.”) Jonathan Demme, Marcia Nasatir, and an obviously shaken David Edelstein all took their turns at the podium. Malko read a brief note from Anne Wallach, who was unable to attend the service. And Roy Blount, Jr., read the poem he’d composed for Pauline’s birthday, concocting different voices for Pauline and the Almighty.
It had been decided that the last voice should be Pauline’s. The lights went down. A series of recordings with Pauline reading from her reviews and talking about the movies were played. The audience sat transfixed, listening to that soft, sensual voice with its rising and falling cadences, its easy western rhythm and accent.
Malko took the stage again. “Pauline really believed all her life that she was lucky to be able to do what she wanted to do,” he said. “But we were the lucky ones. Thank you, Pauline.”
Then the audience quietly filed out of the theater, as quiet as if they were critics leaving a screening, accompanied by the Baroque music that Pauline loved.
It is always tempting—too tempting—to try to draw great lessons from the lives of those writers whom we have spent a lifetime admiring. As Polly Frost observed, their pull is too powerful: We insist on trying to determine what kind of legacy the person has left, now that she is no longer there to explain the world to us. “Upon sober reflection,