I’ve already used more dashes than usual. That’s her doing, too.
Her fellow critic David Thomson once theorized that she would have given up everything to play one great scene in a movie. But what casting director would have taken the chance? She was diminutive, unglamorous, quick to argue. An unorthodox Jewish childhood (some of it spent on a chicken ranch in Petaluma, Calif.) led to philosophy studies at the University of California at Berkeley and then a long period of struggle that only in retrospect looks like apprenticeship: dead-end jobs, a daughter born out of wedlock, a bad marriage, doomed attachments to gay men.
And yet there was something celluloidal about Kael’s first break. She was 33, holding forth at a Berkeley coffeehouse, when a magazine editor sitting nearby asked her if she wanted to review the latest Chaplin picture, “Limelight.” Kael loathed it and told the world, and a career was born.
She reviewed for a local radio station; she organized and annotated film revivals; she gained a toehold in journals such as Film Quarterly and the Partisan Review. But it wasn’t until 1967 that Kael won her catbird seat: a permanent reviewing slot with the New Yorker. The money wasn’t great, and she had to wage bloody war with her editor, William Shawn, to preserve her earthy, idiomatic voice. But she had the platform she craved, and she made full use of it, challenging musty Europhiliac aesthetics, championing the redemptive powers of trash and pushing for a cinema of vibrancy, sensation and disorder.
“She wanted,” recalls one admirer, “to open the windows and let in some air.” And, just as urgently, to let out some air. With no space restrictions to stop her, she drew readers through Melvillean digressions that her biographer, Brian Kellow, usefully compares to jazz riffs, veering off from the main theme but always reconnecting in the end. The result was a kind of criticism that no one had seen before: raucous, personal, scornful of theory and received opinion — and focused above all, as Kellow writes, on “the confluence of what happened onscreen and what happened in life.”
Part of me, I admit, wonders what would have happened if a writer of comparable talent had been asked to evaluate Kael’s career. And then I remember it’s been tried. Renata Adler’s infamous scorched-earth attack on Kael in the New York Review of Books had all of Kael’s aggression and none of her wit. So let us be grateful that Kellow’s admiring but even-handed approach in “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” so neatly captures the unruly emotions his subject provoked.
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