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Pauline Kael on the fun of writing disrespectfully

Thu, 16 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I had barely got started at the New Yorker when an eminent literary critic wrote a blast at me so thorough it was published in two parts. A friend of mine had invited this fellow and me to Thanksgiving dinner a few months before, and I said to my friend that though I had sat across the table from this eminence I had no idea he hated me so much. My friend said, "You didn't see his face when you said you loved writing. Don't you know it's torture for him?" I hadn't known. I'm temperamentally incapable of getting into the mind-set of those who agonize over sentences. And to be a book critic and agonize over those serious-minded literary novelists who have themselves agonized over every word must be hell. I don't mean to suggest that I haven't worked hard. I have, but it was almost always the most exhilarating part of the day.

Writing about movies, you don't have to treat them all respectfully. Your job is to sort out the rare great from the adequate and the frequent appalling. In the process you can pep up what you're doing by letting go with a little savagery. You can treat bum work as a hanging offense. You can even crack a joke about it now and then. Even mediocre pop art is a lot more fun than failed high art, and it's more fun to write about.

In the shadow of the screen

Mon, 17 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler (1959)

It's like a Dickens story told by Philip Roth. Duddy is the teenage runt from the Montreal ghetto who will become a movie mogul. When the unscrupulous kid asks his austere, educated uncle, "Why didn't you ever have time for me?" the uncle answers truthfully, "Because you're a pusherke. A little Jew-boy on the make. Guys like you make me sick and ashamed." This exuberant, richly satiric novel might be better known here if it hadn't come out of Canada (reputed to be the land of the earnest). It's vulgar in the best sense of the word.

Margaret in Hollywood by Darcy O'Brien (1991)

The late Darcy O'Brien, well known for such books as "Murder in Little Egypt" and "A Dark and Bloody Ground," was the son of two early movie stars: the muscular George O'Brien and the cool, beautiful Marguerite Churchill. Renaming Marguerite Margaret and making her his narrator, he tells the lightly fictionalized story of his independent-minded mother -- who instinctively, from the age of 5, takes pleasure in performing. He tells it in a succinct, levelheaded way. He may be the least fussy of all the writers who have tackled sensational material; he's not inspired, but he's blessed with good sense.