The death of Pauline Kael (1919-2001) was announced on a
local television-news program late on Labor Day night, as I was preparing for
my first film class of the semester the next morning at Columbia.
I can’t say I was as saddened as I had been a few days earlier by the death of
Jane Greer (1924-2001). Still, do not send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls
for thee, and all that. Pauline was 82, and I am 72, and who knows when the
Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman’s The
Seventh Seal will come for me?
Long ago, Pauline and I were once a virtual figure of
speech, like Cain and Abel, as our critical feuding began back in 1963 and
never really ended-if not between the two of us personally, then between the
people who supported her and those who supported me. Yet truth to tell, we never
much liked each other, though we managed to co-exist in the embarrassingly
voyeuristic world of movie-reviewing.
Anyway, the next morning I was certain that no one from the
media would call to get my thoughts on her life and career. But I was wrong. The
phone rang just as I was about to leave for school. It was CBS Radio, and they
asked me to say some words about Pauline Kael. At one time, it would have
seemed like asking Mary McCarthy what she thought of Lillian Hellman. But maybe
38 years is a long time to carry-or even remember-a grudge. I trotted out
Northrop Frye’s old insight that after
The Iliad , we in the West have treated the death of an enemy as a tragic
rather than a comic event, though I hastened to add that it was a bit
melodramatic to speak of Pauline as an enemy. I praised her criticism in as perfunctory a manner as I could muster, and credited her
with being a brilliant journalist. I toyed with the idea of saying that she
wrote with her heart, like Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard , but I thought better of it. I kept insisting, however,
that there were other people more inclined than I to do full justice to her
long, productive and much-honored career.
When I finally got to my class, I asked how many students
had ever heard of Pauline Kael, and only a few raised their hands. Even fewer
raised their hands when I asked how many had read Pauline Kael’s reviews from The New Yorker . Out the window went all
my personal anecdotes about Pauline and me.
One other bizarre note
was struck at Columbia, when I sorted through the mail that had
accumulated during my absence all summer. There was a release with no date on
it from the National Arts Journalism Program. The text read in part: “Film
critic Pauline Kael will become the first NAJP-Columbia University
Distinguished Lecturer in Criticism at the National Arts Journalism Program
(NAJP), the program announced today. The Distinguished Lectureship in Criticism
was established by the advisory Board of the NAJP to acknowledge the lifetime
achievement and support the current activity of America’s most distinguished art critics.”
All well and good, but
what puzzled me was how the NAJP expected Pauline to give lectures in the fall
when she was reportedly too ill from Parkinson’s disease to leave her home in
Great Barrington, Mass. Possibly she had accepted the appointment as an honor,
knowing that she would be unable to fulfill the lecturing duties. Still, it was
strange, me coming upon the release on the morning Lawrence Van Gelder’s
thoughtful and conscientious obituary appeared in The New York Times .
I didn’t actually read
the obituary until after I’d come home from school. My name and affiliation
with The Village Voice was coupled
with Bosley Crowther of The New York
Times as early targets of Kael’s invective. I noted also a long quote in
the obituary from Louis Menand’s rapturous tribute to Kael in The New York Review of Books of March
1995, even as he demeaned her alleged imitators as inferior-a fittingly Kaelian
touch. It was in this same piece that Mr. Menand expressed the regret that he
couldn’t refer to me as the late Andrew Sarris. I responded at the time with
all the pent-up rage of my Peloponnesian roots and my red-hot Greek peasant
blood by canceling my subscription to The
New York Review of Books . Mr. Menand’s is the kind of biliousness that
Pauline seemed to evoke from her champions.
Returning to the more distant past, I first read Pauline’s
prose in 1961 in Film Culture , a year
or two before I had any idea what she looked like. To put a point to it, she
wrote like a Berkeley babe who was
bringing personalized and impressionistic sex to film criticism, and throwing
out all the polite and formal evasions in our hedonistic profession. This, I
think, is her major contribution to the craft.
How we first met in person is a story I have published
before, and it has caused me to be scolded by Pauline’s admirers for being
ungallant. Nonetheless, I was surprised that she looked (and was) older and
completely unlike the fantasy female I had constructed from her writings. In a
way, she seemed more dangerous and invulnerable an adversary as she was than if
she ‘d looked more like how she wrote.
To go back a bit, one night in 1963 I received a phone call
from a woman identifying herself as Pauline Kael. Mind you, this was after she
had published her “Circles and Squares” essay that blasted my “Notes on the
Auteur Theory in 1962” essay to smithereens, with a few homophobic innuendoes
thrown in for good measure. And here she was, calling me to come meet her at a Manhattan
hotel. Since it was late at night, and I was living in Kew
Gardens with my mother and would
have to walk up a long hill to take a subway to the city, I hemmed and hawed a
bit. “What’s the matter,” Pauline snapped challengingly, “won’t your lover let
you leave?” Back then, “lover” had an exclusively gay connotation. So here I
was, an ineffectual heterosexual minding my own business in Queens,
and my manhood was being questioned again.
Of course, I went out of sheer curiosity and a pathetic
search for adventure. Well, I finally saw Pauline in the company of her
sweet-tempered daughter, Gina, whom I’ve liked ever since, and one of Pauline’s
gentleman friends, who I later learned was a gay analyst. So go figure. Why did
she want to meet me? I suppose to neutralize or intimidate me. I gathered that
she imagined I would be grateful to her for being shown the error of my ways.
She was on a visit to the city and seemed to feel like an outsider in the
critics’ community.
From the beginning,
Pauline scored points with the non- cinéaste
cultural establishment by her apparent debunking of all film scholarship, her
unceasing ridicule of film scholars, and her apparent denigration of movies as
unworthy subjects of serious academic study. As long as she was on the attack,
she was hailed as a Joan of Arc halting the movie-buff barbarians at the gates
of academe-hence all her honorary degrees from institutions resenting the
incursions of cinéastes into the
liberal-arts curriculum.
But once Pauline began
revealing her own enthusiasms for movies with the mantras of “fun” and
“trash”-not to mention her own pet auteurs (Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Brian
De Palma), whom she would defend to the death-some of her support from the non- cinéaste and anti-movie intelligentsia
began to fade away. Pauline never lost it at the movies, as the title of one of
her books states. Like the rest of us, she found consolation on the silver
screen for all of life’s disappointments, and they were many. She was a late
starter, as I was-writing her first review at 35 and getting her job at The New Yorker at almost 50. But whereas
I was grateful to have started at all (at age 27), she seemed bitter that her
great opportunity came when time had robbed her of much of her energy-or so she
once confided to me, when we were still talking.
My wife, Molly Haskell, has reminded me that though Pauline
and I battled like cats and dogs, perhaps our destinies were linked in some
mysterious way. Perhaps it was as Molly reported me telling a doctor during my
grave illness in 1984. “What,” they asked, concerned about my intermittent
hallucinations, “do a cat and dog have in common?” The proper answer, I suppose
now, was that both were household pets. But back then, I remembered enough
structuralist theory to reply: “What cats and dogs have in common is that they
define each other by their differences.”
Before Pauline attacked me in print, I felt I was obscure to
the point of anonymity. After Pauline attacked me with such passion as some
auteurist monster, I realized that I had moved from obscurity to notoriety
without passing go. In berths and hard cash, she profited much more than I
did-in addition to its prestige, The New
Yorker paid better than The Village
Voice , and Pauline did stints as a consultant in Hollywood.
But she deserved it for her relentless self-promotion and her artful suggestion
that she was the ultimate authority on all movies because the opinions of
colleagues were worthless.
For years, I disbelieved her statement that she never saw
any movie more than once. How could that be possible, I thought, except in the
service of some Gestalt theory of her own? Then, one
day, I realized why this statement made sense in her case. By eliminating the
possibility of a revised opinion, she could endow all her reviews with papal
infallibility. She never had to say that she had been wrong or that she was
sorry. That was for us ordinary mortals. Her word was final and eternal. There
are many people who believe this, and they are entitled to their opinion. For
me, it is unthinkable that I should deprive myself of the pleasure of seeing my
favorite movies again and again, or hearing my favorite operas and pieces of
music again and again.
Jean-Luc Godard once noted that he and his colleagues on Cahiers du Cinema had missed the boat on
Max Ophuls and John Ford. I would add Frank Borzage to that list. I happened to
miss the boat the first time around on Billy Wilder, Sergio Leone and Debra
Winger. We all change as we get older, and our perceptions of films change with
us-all of us, that is, except Pauline. Her first impressions are engraved in
stone forever and ever, because that is all movies deserve.
Pauline once called me a
“list queen” to my face, but by then I had become accustomed to her reflex
insults. But it started me thinking. To my knowledge, Pauline was the only
critic never to compile a 10-best list. Her admirers might say that Pauline was
above such trivial journalistic diversions. But with a 10-best list, a critic
puts his or her tastes on the line, and makes an easier target than one would
get, for example, by plowing through Pauline’s steam-of-consciousness prose.
I am always being asked to appear on panels bemoaning the
state of contemporary film criticism when compared with the supposed golden age
of the nouvelle vague and the
Kael-Sarris contretemps. I always pour cold
asserting, as I do now, that film criticism today is far superior to what it
was back in the supposed golden age of the Kael-Sarris cat-and-dog fight, when
two comparatively provincial and unsophisticated careerists-one in San
Francisco and the other in New York-collided in a maze of misunderstandings
that concealed the fact that they were both consumed by movies with much the
same emotional intensity.
So which of us was proven right in the long run? In the long
run, as John Maynard Keynes or someone once said, we are all dead.
