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current writers know how to use them. They write with grace and assurance; the words mean what they intend them to mean; the rhythms fall where they should. They use the English language with authority. The American writer, caught in his clumsy despair, can scarcely withstand envy and resentment.
    But the English, for their part, have more to resent in us than our dollars! The freshness . . . of American writing, the qualities that have made American novels an influence abroad, are as little accessible to them as their authority is to us.
    This argument took hold of her early on, and once she became a film critic, it would figure very strongly into the way she wrote about American and European movies.
    Pauline’s years at Berkeley were a time of great discovery, as she lost herself in the novels of Dostoyevsky, Melville, Hawthorne, James, and Woolf. She loved to make her way through an author’s entire oeuvre, becoming, as she put it, “immersed in a sensibility.” Henry James’s novels would prove an exception to Pauline’s habit of binge reading, as it took ten years for her to familiarize herself with the author’s work, with breaks in between. Early on she was most deeply drawn to The Bostonians , James’s 1886 account of the conflict between the hard-bitten suffragette Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom, a staunch conservative from the old South, as they both fight to control the future of Verena Tarrant, a charismatic rising star on the public lecture circuit. James hints strongly that Olive is a repressed lesbian whose designs on Verena are motivated by sex, as well as by her commitment to the movement, but Pauline was less intrigued by this than she was by Olive’s audacious, monomaniacal character—by her pure determination to get what she wants. Already, Pauline was getting a sense of how hard most women had to fight to hold on to their ambitions and ideals, to hold fast against the threat of compromise.
    To Pauline, The Bostonians made a fascinating contrast with the immaculately wrought, complex subtleties of James’s later works, such as The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors . She regarded it as “the liveliest of his novels, maybe because it has sex right there at the center, and so it’s crazier—riskier, less controlled, less gentlemanly—than his other books.” The Bostonians possessed “a more earthly kind of greatness.” It became one of the seminal books of her early life, and her reaction to it provides a key to her developing literary sensibilities. Years later, reviewing the 1984 James Ivory film of The Bostonians , she would put forth the theory that James’s original was “the best novel in English about what at that time was called ‘the woman question,’ and it must certainly be the best novel in the language about the cold anger that the issue of equal rights for women can stir in a man.”
    For extra money Pauline worked as a teaching assistant, reading papers for a number of courses. Later she had a job as assistant to a chemist who created makeup for performers. One of his clients was the skating star Sonja Henie, then at the height of her movie fame. Taking note of Pauline’s fair complexion, the chemist asked her to be the “test girl” for Henie’s makeup. “She would come in and inspect the cream on my arms,” Pauline later told Sam Staggs. “I don’t believe she ever spoke a word to me; she would talk to the chemist while fingering the patches on my arms.”
    Pauline managed to keep up her generally good grades while pursuing an intense social life. The Bay Area in the 1930s was a good place to be for anyone who loved jazz as much as she did, and she later claimed that she went out dancing every single night in the many top jazz clubs that had sprung up around the city. One of her favorite performers was Turk Murphy, a trombonist who earned a big Bay Area following playing in the dance bands of Will Osborne and Mal Hallet. She delighted in Murphy’s Dixieland