Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [79]
Inner order and outer chaos: it was a theme she would return to again and again in future reviews, and one that her critics, many of them guilty of misreading her, would take up as ammunition against her.
At The New Yorker, Pauline had many of the luxuries that most writers can only dream of—a generous-minded editor who, despite his attempts at interference, permitted her to write in her own true voice; no crippling space restrictions; an enthusiastic and informed readership.
Her main problem was money. Initially the magazine paid her $600 per column. Over a six-month period that meant an annual income in the neighborhood of $14,000—which, after taxes and set off against New York’s high cost of living, she found very difficult to live on. She told friends that she wanted Shawn to fire Penelope Gilliatt and give her the reviewing job year-round, so at least she could make a more respectable living. “She was sore because she was only paid half a salary, and salaries in those days were so awful,” recalled Jane Kramer. “But it was a very benevolent place, on the other hand. A paternalistic benevolence.” Pauline had a limited appetite for paternalism: It galled her that she was rushing to meet weekly deadlines when many of the magazine’s old-guard writers, cronies of Shawn’s from the war years and after, were getting money on their monthly “drawing accounts” when they hadn’t turned in a word of copy for years.
Her limited income made it all the more crucial for her to book as many speaking engagements as she could during her six months off from the magazine. (Since the success of her two books, Robert Mills’s office was flooded with offers.) She also had an arrangement with The New Yorker to take on outside writing assignments during her time off. In mid-1968 she accepted a major assignment from Willie Morris, the enterprising young editor of Harper’s , who had successfully lured an impressive array of new writers to his magazine, and the long essay she published in the magazine’s February 1969 issue, “Trash, Art and the Movies,” was perhaps her boldest statement yet of her own moviegoing personality.
“There is so much talk now about the art of the film,” Pauline wrote, “that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.” Again, she encouraged audiences to respond to what they genuinely enjoyed—not to second-guess themselves as they might have been taught to do in school. And if what they enjoyed was a cheap youth exploitation picture like Wild in the Streets, that was fine, “because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t.” Movies like Planet of the Apes and The Thomas Crown Affair couldn’t possibly be defended as works of art, she wrote.
But they are almost the maximum of what we’re now getting from American movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as “art”—and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.
It’s preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it