Below, Greil Marcus offers a lovingly accurate evocation of the perils of the late Pauline Kael’s deadly-shot frankness. Pauline was incapable of euphemism or subterfuge, even with her dearest friends, when it came to movies, writing, or any other realm of art or shop talk that came under her raptorial critical scrutiny. Marcus, who is promoting his new collection, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010, was interviewed by PopMatters and asked what his ideal dinner date would be:
I’d go to Chez Panisse in Berkeley with Pauline Kael. She’d be cranky and funny and outrageously cutting. The food would be simple, gorgeous, so full of flavor it would stop the conversation. We’d argue about movies, books, she’d tell stories of Berkeley in the ‘40s and ‘50s, we’d argue about our own writing—“I was reading your book, every word seemed to lead to every other, and then there was this thud—what happened? What is that terrible sentence about ‘the catacombs of visible culture’ doing there? “But that was the sentence I was aiming toward all along—” “Your aim was off. Take it out. Believe me, you can live without it.”
As one of her best movie friends told me, “He sounds just like her.”
Pauline’s books (I can’t bear the cool professionalism of referring to her as “Kael”), the early collections (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and the compendiums of her movie writing for The New Yorker from 1967 to 1991, have largely disappeared from bookstores since her death in 2001, although older editions are available at Amazon. Her work is long overdue for a serious revival (I’m looking at you, Library of America).
If you have a hankering to hear Pauline’s actual voice, you can’t do better than this paint-blistering, zero-bullshit talk at the University of California, Berkeley on April 26, 1968. It’s just thrilling to think that this badass dynamo in her late 40’s, mowing down sacred cows right and left, had just been hired by The New Yorker — “the first place I’ve ever written for in which I’m totally free and in which I can also make a living.”
(If you’re a New Yorker subscriber, you can read “Kael Talks,” my 1994 interview with Pauline, in the magazine’s archive. It was also included in Conversations with Pauline Kael, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1996.)
