Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [25]
By the fall Pauline had to acknowledge that New York was not working out for her. Deeply disappointed, she packed her things and moved back to San Francisco. Her years in New York seemed to her to represent one stinging defeat after another, and she felt no closer to success than she had been when she left Berkeley.
CHAPTER FOUR
On her return to the West Coast Pauline moved in temporarily with her mother, who was living on her own and in declining health. Their time together was apparently pleasant, for when Pauline found an apartment of her own at 355 Fulton Street, she felt guilty about leaving Judith. She cast around for a newspaper job, trying (unsuccessfully) to master typing. She worked for a time as a clerk at Brentano’s, where her total income for 1946 was $156.65, and then found a position at Houghton Mifflin. She was grateful for the money, but she complained to Vi, “I don’t think properly on the typewriter and I have been composing hundreds of business letters so that my poor mind is a cesspool of business English.”
Her timing in coming back to San Francisco, however, was excellent, as she was about to witness one of the most explosive flowerings of the arts in the city’s history. One of the crucial figures of the period—in many ways, the woman who triggered the beginning of it—was the poet and translator Madeline Gleason, who launched the first Festival of Modern Poetry at San Francisco’s Lucien Labaudt Gallery in April of 1947. This landmark event unfolded over the course of two evenings. Among the poets featured were the activist Muriel Rukeyser; the anarchist Kenneth Rexroth, who had for some years been cultivating a growing presence in San Francisco; and Robert Duncan, who had returned to the Bay Area following the collapse of his marriage to Marjorie McKee and had enrolled at Berkeley as a student in medieval and Renaissance literature. The event was the catalyst for what came to be known as the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s, which in turn would feed into the later San Francisco Renaissance. The local audience for poetry readings began to grow. Both Duncan and Jack Spicer had a following from their classes at Berkeley; they began to have discussion groups in their homes in which young poets would read from their works, and soon more and more people were crowding into their salon evenings. While the city had long been home to major individual writers such as Frank Norris, Bret Harte, and Jack London, the poetic activity of the 1940s and ’50s would make it a genuine bohemian literary center.
Pauline was, by nature, distrustful of such movements. She admired the highly personal tone that many of the Berkeley poets employed, but she was not one who easily succumbed to the romance of underground causes; she suspected that those involved in them were guilty of self-consciousness at best, self-promotion at worst. Much as she revered artistic achievement, she also had a pragmatist’s love of mainstream success and failed to see why a group of obscure poets should congratulate themselves for being known only to a tiny sector of the reading public. Her own connection to the postwar flowering of avant-garde activity was a more personal one: She had become a friend and lover of the poet James Broughton.
Born in Modesto, California, in 1913, Broughton claimed that the defining experience