Pauline Kael is my favorite writer.
If I'm ever asked who my favorite writer is, which I never am, but if I ever were, I might give any number of random answers. Thomas Pynchon or Neal Stephenson would be possibilities. At one time, I might have picked Jack Kerouac. I fell so in love with Catcher in the Rye for a while that I might have picked J. D. Salinger on the strength of that one book. I've read more of John Updike than just about any other author, but I can't say have a great affection for his works.
But when I have the time to stare at my bookshelf and make a mental tally of the books I've read and loved, the books I've read and hated, the books I've read and forgotten about, I have to admit that Pauline Kael is the one writer whose writing I would keep coming back to because she has such a gift for words - for being intelligent and engaging and persuasive and maddingly disruptive to your sense of what you thought was true. She was a film critic who made her name in the late 60s into the 70s working for The New Yorker. I first found out about her through reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews, which often referenced Kael. I fell in love with her work when I read the piece Replying to Listeners, which originated as a radio broadcast on KPFA. It begins thusly:
I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don’t want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, “Miss Kael, I assume you aren’t married—one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more “mature,” they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.
I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notions that the woman is semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs; now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis—which any man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the shadows.
The end of the piece is something that inspired me to take up, very briefly, a career as a movie critic. And by career, I mean, a 10-minute weekly radio spot on the Rice University student radio station, KTRU, that lasted for one semester. But let's call it a career. Here's what inspired me, the end of Kael's article:
I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.
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