their visions up there on the screen in new and exciting ways. Best of all, the audiences were with them. The dialogue between screen and audience that Pauline had always envisioned was rising to glorious heights. Later she would compare this period of filmmaking with the great flowering of American writing in the nineteenth century, with the best of the current crop of directors and screenwriters reinvigorating their art form just as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman had theirs.
“Inexplicably,” she wrote in that season-ending column in March 1972, “despite everything—the suicidal practices of the film industry, the defeat of many people of talent, the financial squeeze here and abroad—this has been a legendary period in movies.... A reviewer could hardly ask for more from any art, high or popular.”
The luckiest people who work in the arts are those who find themselves in just the right place during the perfect confluence of creative activity and an eager, inquisitive public. Pauline was in the vortex. She had reached the apex of her moviegoing life, and she wanted it to go on forever.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After winding up her reviewing at The New Yorker in March 1972, Pauline once again plunged into a hectic schedule on the lecture circuit. She always had mixed feelings about this part of the year. Lecture appearances provided her with much-needed income, and she relished the chance to speak with young people about what they responded to in the movies; many of the conversations she had with college students on the road provided her with important material for her New Yorker pieces. But she disliked having to associate with faculty members and attending the English Department party that inevitably followed her lecture appearances. She considered most of the English and film studies professors she encountered to be dull, pompous, jealous of her position in the world, or all three. Still, if academia remained generally unattractive to her, she was quite attractive to academia and regularly received offers to become a visiting or regents professor—one example of many being the unsuccessful attempts of the Berkeley professor David Littlejohn to persuade her to join the School of Journalism faculty. She did, however, agree to serve as a member of the Educational Advisory Board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a post that allowed her to use her influence to help artists she considered deserving and underfunded.
When she wasn’t on the road, she was occupied with the ongoing process of fixing up the house in Great Barrington. She told friends that she dreamed of one day living there full-time, though she could not yet see how such a thing would be feasible in practical terms, given the intensity of her schedule at The New Yorker and the necessity of spending so much time in Manhattan. She delighted in telling people what a wonderful job Gina was doing in getting the house into shape—from overseeing repair work to choosing a beautiful selection of soft colors for the walls. One of the things Pauline loved most about the house was its spacious kitchen—a luxury after the cramped quarters in New York. It was a classic country kitchen, with old 1950s appliances and a big, generous sink, and Pauline loved spending time in it, cooking for her friends.
There was an unceasing flow of fan mail, which she was diligent about answering. A brief, casual note of appreciation about something she had written in The New Yorker usually got a polite reply written on a postcard, but the more in-depth and thoughtful letters she took more time with; sometimes she even surprised her devoted readers by telephoning to thank them for their words, even if they were uncomplimentary. Sometimes lasting friendships were born out of her correspondence with readers.
One person who wrote to her in the early 1970s was a professor of English literature at the Oregon College of Education, Erhard Dortmund, with whom Pauline would maintain a steady and lively correspondence for thirty years. As with many who came into her orbit, she took an interest in Dortmund’s career and encouraged him to submit articles to The Atlantic Monthly. Dortmund recalled their friendship as an “improbable one. She was so smart and intuitive and loved all of life’s juices . . . she worshipped people with vitality and people with guts and zaniness. She loved zany things. I’m just the opposite. I’m inhibited and not bold, but luckily full of curiosity. At some level, we found common ground. We had similar vibes about many things.”