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modern science, which they believed would cause the New World to be engulfed in flames during their son’s lifetime, just as Atlantis had been decimated by flood and earthquake. Small wonder that young Robert made his way through his early school years as a misfit—a cross-eyed, conspicuously effeminate though fiercely quick-witted boy who acquired the unfortunate nickname “Sissie Symmes.” Like Pauline’s, Duncan’s family suffered serious reversals in the wake of the Wall Street crash, and like Pauline, he came through it with a strong sense of himself intact. In 1936 Duncan entered Berkeley as a scholarship student, and soon he was immersed in writing poetry and exploring radical politics, significantly as editor of the American Student Union’s Campus Review , which the university effectively disowned. Duncan, during his years at Berkeley still known as Robert Symmes, was an English major who was also taking introductory philosophy courses, and it was there that he met Pauline.
    She responded immediately to his strong and commanding personality. “He was attracted to strong-mother-archetype women he could talk to on an equal basis,” recalled Duncan’s friend Jack Foley. “He wanted real, substantive discussions.” Duncan had a great sense of his own sexual power, and he could be enormously flirtatious and seductive. He was an equally charismatic presence on the public podium, and when he read from his own poetry, the effect could be spellbinding. He was a rather handsome man, but his crossed eyes made people slightly uneasy; they never quite knew whether he was looking at them.
    Midway through his time at Berkeley, Duncan left the American Student Union behind for the Young People’s Socialist League; Pauline and Virginia Admiral often joined him at the organization’s meetings. Duncan would leave Berkeley in 1938 for an abortive fling as a student at North Carolina’s progressive Black Mountain College, then move on to Philadelphia, where he began his first serious relationship with a man, an older instructor he had known at Berkeley. But he and Pauline were to maintain a frequent correspondence for the next decade, sometimes writing to each other several times a week.
    For years the rumor persisted that the two had been secretly married for a time. They weren’t, but Pauline felt a powerful attraction to Duncan, as a surviving fragment of a letter she wrote to him indicates. He had indicated to her that he felt a certain pressure from their circle of friends for them to become romantically involved—hardly an unusual situation for a gay man to come up against in those conformist times. “Don’t be foolish—you don’t love me—you will never love me,” Pauline responded to him with remarkable clearheadedness. Duncan had been flirting with the idea of psychoanalysis, and Pauline was encouraging: “For Christ’s sake be analyzed!” she wrote. “Be analyzed if only because you need the self-knowledge for your work, your art.”
    In her review of the 1973 Barbra Streisand–Robert Redford romantic drama The Way We Were , Pauline seems to have tipped her hand a bit with respect to her Berkeley years. Watching the scenes set at Columbia University during the 1930s, with the driven, obsessive Katie trying to rally student support for Stalin, trying—and failing—to perfect a short story for her fiction-writing class, Pauline may have felt a bit as if she were seeing the ghost of her seventeen-and eighteen-year-old self. Like Katie, Pauline did dabble in left-wing radical politics during her college years—she was more intrigued by Trotskyism than anything—but with the passage of time, as her review of The Way We Were revealed, she took a much cooler attitude toward leftist politics: “[T]here appears to be nothing between Communist involvement and smug indifference. . . . Implicitly, the movie accepts the line the Communist Party took—that it was the only group doing anything, so if you cared