The Classical #14

By Nick Pinkerton

In common with many folks, the release of two new books—Brian Kellow’s biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and Library of America’s The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael—has had me re-reading the work of the Petaluma shit-kicker in bulk for the first time in years, and thinking about it anew.

Firstly: I don’t know why one would give a biography of a figure that one presumably admires a title like A Life in the Dark, which is like handing out brickbats to reviewers with scores to settle, of which I’d imagine there are still a few (e.g. “Indeed, Kael was ‘in the Dark’—about the cultural climate of her time!”) But nevermind.

The great disappointment of A Life in the Dark is how juiceless an affair it is. Kael rose to her prominent position writing The New Yorker’s “The Current Cinema” pages at age forty-eight and, given that she presented herself in print as something of a Texas Guinan-type, a wisecracking salt-of-the-earth bawd crashing the Eastern literary establishment, it’s been generally presumed that she’d sown acres of wild oats back West. In fact, David Thomson wrote with some confidence in a review of the 2004 Sontag and Kael that “there was clearly a time in her life when she was as much a hound for men as her chatty prose was later attuned to the erotics of that skin substitute known as movie.”

This may well be the case—but all that comes to us through Kellow are a few melancholy and intrinsically lopsided affairs with “bisexual” artists whose later lives suggest they scored rather high on the Kinsey scale. Taking A Life in the Dark as authoritative, we must assume that most of that “dark” was nothing more risqué than the screening room gloom. Only at one point does someone recall a Kael who is anything like the sassy screwball heroine of her personal legend, delivering the immortal come-on “What have you got to
lose?” to Berkeley Cinema Guild owner (and soon, briefly, her husband) Ed Landberg* when he faux-innocently brushed her breast during a quiet moment together. (As far as dishy stuff goes, one does put down A Life in the Dark wanting to know more about Penelope Gilliatt, the English novelist and screenwriter whom Kael unhappily shared “The Current Cinema” until 1980, later the companion of Worst Film Critic Ever Vincent Canby—Gilliatt is depicted herein as an absolutely hopeless lush, at one point blocking the exit to a press screening after passing out in front of the door.)

Some writer might yet make something interesting of Kael’s life. In re-reading the barnstorming bits of The Age of Movies, one sees clearly how Kael set herself up in the crusading public intellectual role, befitting a former Partisan Review reader. In declaring open warfare on American prudery/hypocrisy/aesthetically-conservative “well-wrought” craftsmanship/Walt Disney/ Happy Endings, she seems more interested in being a peer to Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal than to her old stepping-stone Andrew Sarris. One wishes, in vain, that Kellow had provided a better elucidation of the period and explanation of her role therein.

It is curious, at any rate, that a film critic has attracted the attention of a biographer, although there are a number of existent autobiographical works by some of my more prominent peers. Former Kael acolyte David Denby’s American Sucker hit shelves in 2004. The Onion reviewer Nathan Rabin’s The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture was published last year, in time for the author’s thirty-third birthday. Not to be outdone, the abovementioned Thomson has returned to postwar London to Try to Tell the Story, while Roger Ebert has recently expelled Life Itself: A Memoir.

I have not read any of the above, and doubt I would’ve read Kellow’s Kael bio were it not for the fact that I was paid to do so. I am entirely uncertain where this antipathy stems from, for I am convinced that criticism is a noble and necessary calling.

And yet, here is the curious thing—I can endlessly thrill to the journals of America’s first man-of-letters, Edmund Wilson, documenting the adventures of his “large pink prong”… and is there any better fireside reading than The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, documenting the private life of the dynamo Oxford dandy-cum-theatre critic, loaded to bursting as they are with such morsels as:

“November 25, 1976: Thanksgiving dinner chez Billy and Audrey Wilder, guests include Sue Mengers**. Sue is sourpussed again for unexplained reasons; just as inexplicably, I start to grope her during diner. Sliding my hand down the back of her backless dress to squeeze her enormous bum. Have no idea why I did this; she responds with happy moans and intimate work with her knees. Her daunting size would of course be a deterrent if it came to the crunch; but on the other hand there would be a lot of sheer buttock to whip.”

So, sorry film journos, you’re going to have to try just a wee bit harder to get your hands on my hard-earned shekels. I need dirt! And if you’ll excuse me, a well-thumbed copy of Joe Eszterhas’s Hollywood Animal is calling my name…

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*- Blurry acid-casualty Landberg comes across much more vividly in Phillip Lopate’s “The Passion of Pauline Kael,” written for New York Woman (?) and reprinted in his collection Truly, Tragically, Tenderly: “Well, it’s obvious I can’t be Jesus. But if I’m anybody, it’s Elijah. And if I’m right that I’m the Final Prophet, then they’ll have to hand over the Covenant to me. And then the world will be saved.”

**- Mengers, who died in September of this year, was the German-born super-agent who represented many of New Hollywood’s biggest names, and a prominent interviewee in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.