or on weekends, she was beginning to feel as if she had never left Berkeley. In the meantime, Horan’s own writing flourished: Some of his poems had been accepted by The Kenyon Review, and he was providing the text for The Unicorn, a dance work that Menotti was composing for Martha Graham. Pauline, stalled in her tracks, was not entirely enthusiastic about her friend’s full-speed-ahead career progress. She told Vi that she found Horan’s recent work “hurried and a little too chic. Success doesn’t come that easily if you’re really serious—and I just don’t think he is at the moment.” Deep down, she feared that Horan might never turn out anything of real substance.
She was far more impressed with the progress of Robert Duncan. In 1944, the distinguished editor Dwight Macdonald had launched an exciting new magazine of contemporary thought called Politics. Pauline considered it the finest publication of political commentary she had come across; it reflected Macdonald’s strong, anarchist point of view, and it never cheated the issues. For some time she had admired Macdonald’s work as editor of The Partisan Review, and she was excited when she learned he was starting up a rival magazine. In late 1943 she had written him a kind of fan letter: “I am looking forward to a magazine which will stand for the principles and position you represented on Partisan Review; if there are to be policy-forming discussions, I should be very interested in attending them.”
In August 1944 Politics published a groundbreaking essay by Duncan called “The Homosexual in Society,” a gutsy and powerful piece of work in which Duncan spoke up for a group “who have suffered in modern society persecution, excommunication, and whose intellectuals, whose most articulate members, have been willing to desert that primary struggle, to beg, to gain at the price if need be of any sort of prostitution, privilege for themselves, however ephemeral.” The essay provoked widespread comment and gave a substantial boost to Duncan’s literary reputation.
Pauline soldiered on in New York, thanks to periodic loans from Vi, but in the fall of 1944 her money worries worsened when she impulsively quit her job at the publishing house. Not only was she bored with the stodgy, good-old-boy atmosphere of the place, but she had become incensed when an anticipated raise to $175 monthly showed up as only $106.
At home she was absorbed in recordings of Beethoven, Purcell, Mozart, and Stravinsky. In the fall of 1944, she accompanied Samuel Barber to a New York Philharmonic concert that featured Stravinsky conducting a program that included some of his own works. After the concert, Barber launched a lengthy denunciation of Stravinsky, both as composer and conductor. Pauline defended him point by point until Barber sighed that Stravinsky was just a fad with her. Pauline replied, “At least I don’t have a fad for your music.” Barber responded with a frozen silence that lasted for weeks. “He has pride and vanity at a maximum,” Pauline wrote to Vi. “Nobody is ever rude to him—and I’m afraid the poor dear will take some time recovering.”
She limped through the following year with a string of odd jobs. Her greatest literary discoveries of 1945 were the works of Marcel Proust, which she made her way through in four weeks of concentrated reading. “I almost feel as if it had become a layer of my sensibility by now,” she told Vi. “When you get to know a book that well it seems to get into you.”
She was fascinated by the news that her old Berkeley classmate Virginia Admiral had left Robert De Niro, Sr., and gone off to live with Manny Farber, the film critic of The New Republic. This was bound to pique her interest, since for some time she had followed Farber’s reviews with great enthusiasm. Born in Arizona, Farber had certain things in common with Pauline—a Berkeley education, an interest in other forms of art (he went on to distinction as an abstract painter), and an intense dislike of overly formal, schematic “masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago,” which, he felt, “has come to dominate the over-populated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant are (1) to frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” He much preferred