Ten Years in the Tub (121 page)

Doggett's grasp of the legal complexities is entirely admirable, and rather intimidating; ditto historian John Guy's elegant presentation of the philosophical conviction that led to Sir Thomas More's execution by Henry VIII in
A Daughter's Love
, a book I read for professional purposes too nebulous to go into here. In fact, this month, one of the lessons I have learned from my reading is that I am unlikely to try my hand at biography. I loved every page of Brian Kellow's
Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark
, but the very first chapter, in which Kellow describes Kael's early life in a tiny rural town in California, contains the following half sentence (I did read the rest of it, eventually, but I became distracted):

            
To Kenneth Kann, author of
Comrades and Chicken Ranchers
, an oral history of farm life in Petaluma, the town was “a community of idealists, people who were not so…”

Hold on a moment, you find yourself thinking. In order to write a biography of the
New Yorker
's film critic—a pretty nifty way, it turns out, of writing about postwar cinema—Brian Kellow has to read oral chicken-ranch histories? Of course he does, because he's a thorough and serious biographer. But…
damn
. There's another job I can't do when I grow up.

Pauline Kael was one of the people who made me want to write in the first place. I had never read the
New Yorker
before I came across a collection of her reviews on one of my very first visits to the U.S., when I was still in my teens. And I can't remember now what made me pick the book up, other than that it was on the remainder pile in Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York. But I loved her energy, her enthusiasm, her informality and her colloquialisms, her distrust of phoniness, even before I realized that these were qualities I wanted to steal from her. The art-house audience, she wrote in 1964, “accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity' and as style.” (She'd be amazed, I think, to find that she could write the same sentence nearly fifty years later, on just about any page of any reviews section.) Stuff like that made me want to read her standing up.

What's much harder to stomach is her frequent line-crossing: Kael, it seems,
wanted to pal up with the important filmmakers of the day, while reserving her absolute right to excoriate them in print. “If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away,” she wrote in a review of
Stardust Memories
, “this picture should help him stop worrying.” “After that, her friendship with Allen froze solid,” says Kellow. You don't say. Meanwhile, Kael was frequently mystified and hurt by attacks that fellow critics and, occasionally, directors made on her. One of the most substantial came from Peter Bogdanovich, who forensically demolished her essay on
Citizen Kane
(an essay that relied heavily on the research of another, uncredited writer). It was Woody Allen who advised Kael on how she should respond: “Don't answer.” Maybe Kael would have seen no contradiction in any of this. She wanted to hang out with people who made good movies, and when they stopped making good movies, she wanted to be able to tell them so, in print, and at length. Perhaps this is what good critics do, but that doesn't mean you have to like them.

May 2012

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Stumbling on Happiness
—Daniel Gilbert

     
  
Prunella: The Authorized Biography of Prunella Scales
—Teresa Ransom

     
  
The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens
—Jenny Hartley, ed.

     
  
Joan's Book
—Joan Littlewood

     
  
The Submission
—Amy Waldman

     
  
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T' Be: The Lionel Bart Story
—David and Caroline Stafford

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Imagine: How Creativity Works
—Jonah Lehrer