her youth, “and it’s not too tough to do.”) She was uncomfortable with the sort of unwritten contract Bergman had with his audience, in effect asking to take them by the hand and explore the spiritual crises that were plaguing his own life, over and over, in film after film.
Pauline believed Shame, however—a study of the ravaging effects of war on a married couple (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) living on an island—to be a significant artistic step forward for Bergman. Shame succeeded, in her view, because he had reversed direction and made “a direct and lucid movie . . . Bergman has pulled himself together and objectified his material. There are no demons, no delusions. Everybody is exactly who he appears to be, so we can observe the depth and complexity of what he is. There is no character who may or may not represent Bergman; he is not lost in the work but is in control of it, and is thus more fully present than before.” She thought that Shame had an “almost magical lack of surprise; it has the inevitability of a common dream.” There is a strong indication that she was comparing Bergman with Godard when she offered this observation:In film, concentrating on a few elements gives those elements such importance that the material can easily become inflated, and the method is generally attempted by people who overvalue their few ideas and have little sense of the abundance of ideas that must go into a good movie. Bergman was not in such straitened intellectual circumstances, but he was given to inflation of “dark” and messy ideas. The order he imposed on his chamber dramas was a false order. The films looked formal and disciplined, but (as often happens in movies) that “abstract” look concealed conceptual chaos. If a movie director cannot control both his thematic material and the flux of visual material, it is far better to have inner order and outer chaos, because then there is at least a lot to look at—different people and things and places to distract one—even if it is disorganized, while if the movie looks formally strict but the ideas and emotions are disturbed, the viewer may feel that the fault is in himself for not understanding the work, or, worse, feel that this kind of artistic-looking, disturbing ambiguity is what art is.
Inner order and outer chaos: it was a theme she would return to again and again in future reviews, and one that her critics, many of them guilty of misreading her, would take up as ammunition against her.
At The New Yorker, Pauline had many of the luxuries that most writers can only dream of—a generous-minded editor who, despite his attempts at interference, permitted her to write in her own true voice; no crippling space restrictions; an enthusiastic and informed readership.
Her main problem was money. Initially the magazine paid her $600 per column. Over a six-month period that meant an annual income in the neighborhood of $14,000—which, after taxes and set off against New York’s high cost of living, she found very difficult to live on. She told friends that she wanted Shawn to fire Penelope Gilliatt and give her the reviewing job year-round, so at least she could make a more respectable living. “She was sore because she was only paid half a salary, and salaries in those days were so awful,” recalled Jane Kramer. “But it was a very benevolent place, on the other hand. A paternalistic benevolence.” Pauline had a limited appetite for paternalism: It galled her that she was rushing to meet weekly deadlines when many of the magazine’s old-guard writers, cronies of Shawn’s from the war years and after, were getting money on their monthly “drawing accounts” when they hadn’t turned in a word of copy for years.
Her limited income made it all the more crucial for her to book as many speaking engagements as she could during her six months off from the magazine. (Since the success of her two books, Robert Mills’s office was flooded with offers.) She also had an arrangement with The New Yorker to take on outside writing assignments during her time off. In mid-1968 she accepted a major assignment from Willie Morris, the enterprising young editor of Harper’s , who had successfully lured an impressive array of new writers to his magazine, and the long essay she published in the magazine’s February 1969 issue, “Trash, Art and the Movies,” was perhaps her boldest statement yet of her