Read Pauline Kael for Free Online Page A

jazz; she also loved dancing to the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, and others who frequently played at San Francisco’s best hotels. For Pauline, music, like movies, didn’t have to be immaculately polished to give intense pleasure. Sometimes it was much better if it wasn’t polished at all. She developed a passion for the singing of the trombonist Jack Teagarden; she recalled thinking, Oh, that’s how to do it. You don’t need a voice; you just sing .
    And always, there were movies. During her student years at Berkeley, Pauline first came under the spell of the films of Jean Renoir. She was entranced by La grande illusion , the director’s brilliant 1937 World War I drama—an attempt to make a pacifist statement as Hitler was on the brink of annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia. She was full of admiration for Renoir’s evenhanded treatment of the story’s aristocrats and plebeians, and wrote in 1961, “Renoir isn’t a sociologist or a historian who might show that there were heroes and swine in both groups.” She also responded to the fact that Renoir was an instinctive filmmaker who never stuck too slavishly to the script. She found La grande illusion “a triumph of clarity and lucidity; every detail fits simply, easily, and intelligibly. There is no unnecessary camera virtuosity: the compositions seem to emerge from the material. It’s as if beauty just happens (is it necessary to state that this unobtrusive artistry is perhaps the most difficult to achieve?).” She was also mesmerized by Renoir’s 1939 La règle du jeu , which she would one day call “perhaps the most influential of all French films, and one of the most richly entertaining.” This comedy about a country-house party run amok appealed to her on its own terms, but she also was drawn to its underdog status. It had been mutilated prior to its 1939 release, slashed again after its opening, then stifled completely by the Vichy government, as well as by the Nazis, before being restored in 1959. Pauline grew to love Renoir’s best films beyond measure; he was, perhaps, the most kindred spirit of any director she would encounter until she came upon the 1970s masterworks of Robert Altman.
    Despite her natural competitive bent and a strong need to dominate, she had no trouble finding friends among the Berkeley student body. She had become part of a circle that included Ida Bear, a writer, and Virginia Holton Admiral, an Oregon-born painter and poet (and later the mother of the actor Robert De Niro). There was also Violet Rosenberg, her closest woman friend. Like Pauline, Violet was passionately interested in art and politics and did not suffer fools, and the two become inseparable companions. Violet was deeply proud of Pauline’s intellect and her fearlessness in expressing her opinions, and in the years to come she would prove a loyal friend. “There was always a circle of people around Pauline,” Violet later recalled. “People came to her. They were magnetized.”
    Pauline also became attached to two men who were to count among the most important relationships of her life. Robert Duncan, a young poet who shared many of Pauline’s left-leaning political interests, would become one of her most cherished friends. Duncan was a renegade almost from the beginning of his life—one of the most unorthodox lives that could possibly have been found in 1930s and ’40s America. He was born in Oakland just six months before Pauline. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, Edward Howard Duncan, put him up for adoption soon thereafter. His foster parents were an architect named Edwin Joseph Symmes and his wife, Minnehaha Harris, who were devoted to spiritualism and the occult. At their home in Bakersfield, the Symmes family hosted séances the way some couples hosted canasta games, and they informed their son that he was descended from a line of people who had perished in the lost city of Atlantis. The Symmeses were hostile toward