“I’m Gina!” “I’m a baby!”
The first year of Gina’s life was difficult for Pauline. While some writers have strained to portray her as an early feminist, nothing could be further from the truth. To Pauline, leading a life on her own was not really a virtuous act. While she was sorry that Broughton had exited her life, she regretted not having a husband only in the sense that having one would have made it easier to get along financially.
Pauline eventually wrote of her relationship with Broughton in a one-act play called Orpheus in Sausalito. Subtitled “a farce for people who read and write,” it dealt with the breakup of the freethinking Beth Thomas and Richard Trowbridge, a poet with a mother complex and conflicted feelings about success. “The world doesn’t find you,” Richard says. “You have to go knock on doors, hat in hand, if you want your art to be accepted.” Orpheus in Sausalito wasn’t much of a play and is really interesting only as a biographical reference point. Its dialogue is self-consciously smart and the characterizations don’t naturally spring to life.
Eventually, the personal chaos that Orpheus attempted to portray would make its way into her writing life in a more significant way. Both as an early audience member and, later, as a critic, Pauline always objected to patness, an avoidance of examining emotional complexity onscreen. In her film reviews she would repeatedly champion pictures that did not back away from portraying outwardly puzzling, seemingly contradictory situations that nevertheless had a potent truth all their own. When she described a film that portrayed a “messy” situation, she usually meant it as a compliment.
Because of the demands of motherhood, Pauline’s employment opportunities were limited; it made the most sense for her to pursue freelance writing assignments that she could do at home. While still living in Santa Barbara, she was able to pick up occasional book-reviewing assignments with The Santa Barbara Star, covering recent releases such as Budd Schulberg’s The Disenchanted and Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness. In her review of May Sarton’s May-December love story Shadow of a Man, in November 1950, she hit on what would become one of her most frequently revisited topics—technical control and manipulation at the expense of emotional involvement:There is not an unintelligent line in The [sic] Shadow of a Man. From her first sentence, May Sarton shows distinction of mind: her intentions are of the highest, her integrity cannot be challenged, her craftsmanship is remarkably sustained.... Craftsmanship, this surface poise and control, this careful maturity, isn’t enough. The writers one cares about are controlled on a different level: the controlling mind and vision allow for a surface variety and spontaneity—even allow for mistakes.
After her stint in Santa Barbara, she moved back to San Francisco and into a small apartment at 2490 Geary Street. She also wrote an original story for the screen and submitted it, with high hopes, to the Columbia Pictures story department. Called “The Brash Young Man,” it was rooted in Pauline’s frustrating experience in New York and her fear of losing her renegade outsider status. It centered on a character named Benjamin Burl, “brash, confident, pugnacious,” who for years has been struggling to achieve literary success. Although he has talent, not one of his several novels has sold well, and his publisher has all but given up on him. Benjamin is very much a back number when he makes one more attempt at a novel. To his astonishment it catches on with the public and becomes a big seller. Benjamin becomes a belated literary “discovery,” but success ruins his life:He became modest and shy. All the fun had gone out of things: there was no one to quarrel with and shout at; he didn’t have to convince people of his genius—they all agreed with him.
Benjamin becomes morbidly depressed. He longs for the days when someone would say something derogatory about his books. He gets what he’s looking for in Amanda Magill, a glamorous, sharp-tongued reviewer who sums up his life by writing: “Mr. Benjamin Burl’s infatuation with himself has become a national romance.” Amanda has a genius for pointing out to Benjamin that he is a fraud whose talent consists of indulging in literary tricks. The story synopsis ends with Amanda standing over Benjamin as he begins a new novel, smiling, shaking her head and pronouncing, “no”—much to Benjamin’s delight.
All in all, “The Brash Young Man” consisted of a seventeen-page synopsis, but it took one of Columbia’s readers only