of money to send to Pauline, and did so on a few occasions, always with her assurance that she would pay him back when she could.
In addition to working at her writing, Pauline took in everything on the local arts scene that piqued her interest. She had become addicted to reading The Partisan Review, a literary quarterly with a heavy accent on politics that had been published since the mid-’30s. On the musical front she had discovered Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations, in which the composer explored more abstract musical ideas than usual. She constantly attended art openings throughout the Bay Area and kept up with all the new movies, writing to Violet Rosenberg, who now lived in Santa Paula, her impressions of them. She enthused over John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, which she considered “a wonderful movie . . . really the most exciting photography—at least the most sustained in quality, I’ve seen in the movies yet.” It’s an interesting reaction, given her later antipathy toward Ford’s large-scale, elegiac Westerns and her dislike of the director’s The Grapes of Wrath (also released in 1940). Also, the use of the superlative in singling out an aspect of a film—“the most sustained in quality”—was to become one of the defining characteristics of Pauline’s style as a movie critic; in time, it would draw her both an army of admirers and a loud chorus of detractors.
By March 1941 Robert Horan was working on the staff of The San Francisco News. Happy enough with his job, he was also consumed by writing poetry, and Pauline had plenty of opportunity to monitor his progress and offer her criticism, since they were by now living together in an apartment at 930 Post Street. Horan worked at the paper from 4:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., which suited Pauline, an inveterate night person, perfectly. She would sit up reading voraciously until it was time for Horan to leave for work, then she would join him for a predawn breakfast at one of the neighborhood diners. Their romance, which had always been of an on-again, off-again nature, was going through a cooling period—enough so that in mid-March 1941, Pauline wrote to Vi of a new affair that had presented itself:I’m fairly sure that in the long run it would turn out disastrously. But he remains the only exciting new mind I’ve met in the last year or so—remarkably brilliant—but it’s all just too much trouble for now and I prefer to let things drift. Besides, it would be so damned much trouble to “hook” him properly. (About thirty-five, wife dead, has small daughter, is a musician of quality, studied music and philosophy, and has fun around town with a lady prof from Mills . . . get the idea?
She continued with her round of moviegoing, regaling Vi with her sharp and often somewhat eccentric reviews of what she’d seen. Indeed, the comments about movies in her letters of this period form a kind of intriguing preview of what would become her critical voice. Predictably, she found the Margaret Sullavan–Charles Boyer weeper Back Street “fairly dull” and Preston Sturges’s brilliant The Lady Eve (Barbara Stanwyck, again) “awfully vulgar-funny—really quite something.” She considered Meet John Doe “not too poor” for a film directed by Frank Capra, whose relentless glorification of American individualism was already grating on her. More unexpectedly she recommended that Violet Rosenberg take in So Ends Our Night, John Cromwell’s 1941 drama about Nazi Germany—not for its social and political content, but for “the most beautiful shot of Frances Dee, standing in a European marketplace.”
In her social life she was feeling misunderstood, a fairly common condition for her. She beseeched Vi to come back to San Francisco to live, because there were so few people who really seemed to grasp her ideas about the arts and the world scene, and she desperately missed the conversations they used to have. “Communication (orally) with people around seems even more difficult than it used to be,” she wrote. “I’m getting more tired than ever of having to get basic ideas accepted before you can go on to talk about the things you’re interested in talking about.”
By May, she was feeling better about herself, buoyed up by the intense work that she and Bob Horan were doing together. They had teamed up for what she described as “a rather complex essay” on three formidable literary critics, R. D. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Lionel Trilling. They hoped to sell the piece to one