Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [31]
Her review reveals that her critical voice was still in the process of assembling itself, but all the intimations of what she would become are there. She wrote that Chaplin, at this point in his career, was playing to a “somewhat segmented art-film audience,” and no longer the mass audience that had thrilled to his performances as the Little Tramp. “When the mass audience becomes convinced that the clown who had made them laugh was really an artist, they felt betrayed,” she observed. She thought that Chaplin had become too serious, so that his view of his character, Calvero, was fatally high-minded: “The Chaplin of Limelight is no irreverent little clown; his reverence for his own ideas would be astonishing even if the ideas were worth consideration. They are not—and the context of the film exposes them at every turn.”
She thought the stage benefit that provides the climax of the film, in which Calvero proves that his comedic gifts have not deserted him after all and dies in the wings, was “surely the richest hunk of self-gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.” Chaplin, she felt, was trying to even the score with those who had attacked him for his morals or his politics, or those who had simply forgotten him. To her, the central conceit, the lie of the movie, was driven home in the scene in which Calvero praises the young ballerina (Claire Bloom) he has rescued: “My dear, you are a true artist, a true artist.” “The camera emphasis on Chaplin’s eyes,” wrote Pauline, “the emotion in his voice, are intended to give depth to his words. This ghastly mistake in judgment and taste—this false humility which proclaims his own artistry in the act of asserting another’s—is not a simple mistake. It is integral to the creative mind which produces a Limelight.”
Pauline had managed her first piece of writing about the medium that meant more to her than any other. While she continued to work on her stories and play scripts, deep down she had the feeling that, at the age of thirty-three, she might have found herself as a writer at last.
CHAPTER FIVE
Pauline’s official debut as a movie critic was well timed, for she was beginning what would become her life’s work in an atmosphere of amazing creative ferment. By the mid-1950s Berkeley was known as the Athens of the West. The poets who had read at Madeline Gleason’s festival at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in 1947 had grown in numbers and influence. In addition to Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, there were Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, who together formed one of the most vital and progressive communities of poets in U.S. history. The most important event of this period took place on Friday, October 7, 1955, when Rexroth organized a reading at San Francisco’s Six Gallery that would soon become legendary. The poets that night included Snyder, Whalen, and Ginsburg, who gave an unforgettable reading of his explosive poem “Howl,” a cri de coeur against the complacency of the Eisenhower years (and, by extension, against the effect that it had on artists). Nothing like it had ever been experienced, and it was clear that American poetry had discovered a thrilling new voice.
This eruption of new poetry was only one part of the San Francisco renaissance. Jazz clubs, avant-garde performance spaces, and small, experimental presses were plentiful. In 1953, Peter D. Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights bookstore, devoted exclusively to selling paperbound books. (Previously, paperbacks had been available mostly on racks in drugstores and groceries; City Lights gave them a new respectability and became a magnet for local artists in the process.) Ferlinghetti went on to launch City Lights Publishers, which brought out “Howl” in 1956.
Across the bay,