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By Root 2335 0

escape—a spacious, turreted Victorian house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small, attractive town right on Route 7, in the heart of the Berkshires. It was a lovely, graceful, unspoiled area, near the Housatonic and Green rivers. Two Berkshire Heights Road stood on a four-and-a-half-acre lot and was in a state of decay, but the asking price—$37,000—was attractive, and she and Gina decided to go to work on it. The down payment and costly repairs virtually depleted Pauline’s savings, but she considered it a sound investment. She looked forward to the day when she and Gina would be able to move there full-time. As she told a reporter years later, “I never adapted to New York. I feel better in the country.”

On May 26, 1970, Pauline received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It was presented to her “for her film criticism, written fast, out of a desire to respond to new movies before they have settled into history. Her exacting standards and her enthusiastic recognitions of excellence have been a stimulus to the quality of film-making and film-viewing.” The $3,000 she was given was as welcome as the honor itself.

She occupied herself in the summer of 1970 with reading, and clipping articles from The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications that might be useful reference points when she resumed her New Yorker duties in September. She also paid close attention to Penelope Gilliatt’s columns in “The Current Cinema,” and remained frequently baffled by Gilliatt’s cloudy style. A brilliant, well-read woman, Gilliatt possessed a formidable intellect that Pauline respected. Her reviews were much shorter than Pauline’s, but they were often vaporous, their central points difficult to identify. It is possible that Shawn prized this very quality in Gilliatt’s writing, simply because it provided such a startling contrast with Pauline’s own style, but for those who loved the latter, the six months that Gilliatt was on reviewing duty were an opportunity to pass over the pages of “The Current Cinema” as quickly as possible. In the spring of 1971, one disgruntled reader vented his frustration to Shawn in the form of a poem:

Gimme a P,

Gimme a G,

But don’t send Gilliatt back by sea.

Give ’er the fare, give ’er the fare

To get to England

Quick!

By air.

Gilliatt was a sweet-natured woman who was generally well liked by her colleagues at The New Yorker. She did, however, have a serious drinking problem. Patrick Crow, an editor at the magazine, remembered sitting in O’Lunney’s Bar near The New Yorker offices and seeing Gilliatt saunter in in mid-afternoon and toss down four Scotch and sodas. When the bartender asked her if she wanted a fifth, she replied that she had to go to the office and read proof. She was constantly plagued by money worries, and while she needed her post at The New Yorker to maintain any reasonable kind of lifestyle, she seemed unable to perform her critic’s duties without the aid of a drink. Her friend Jane Kramer recalled that Gilliatt “could focus under the most intense sedation—alcohol, God knows what pills she was taking. Most people would be conked out. But with Penelope . . . it focused her mind. She wrote some of her best fiction that way.”

Pauline was convinced that Shawn was effectively holding her back by not giving her the chance to write “The Current Cinema” year-round. She had clearly demonstrated her connection to the younger readers that the magazine’s advertising department coveted, and while Gilliatt may have possessed a keener sensitivity to certain European films, she was not tuned in to the tenor of the times in the way that Pauline was. Pauline’s resentment of Gilliatt’s presence at the magazine grew by the day. She was not uncivil to her, but she spent plenty of time complaining about Gilliatt to friends and colleagues. “My sense was that they stayed out of each other’s way almost intentionally,” said Jane Kramer. “Penelope, during a lot of that time, would have been happy to see Pauline.