By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
The parcels of Pauline: opening Kael's books
The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney reports on the 3,000 books that belonged to Pauline Kael, now in the stacks at Hampshire College: “Kael’s marginalia are very much in the classic Pauline mode. Penciled in a quick, tight cursive, her comments favor the expressively expostulatory: ”gawd,” ”oh my,” ”huh?,” ”poo,” ”bull,” ”good,” ”Jesus!,” ”he’s right,” ”ugh,” ”yup,” ”oh come on,” ”??,” and ”!” …One can almost hear ”her sharp pencil rasping away,” as David Thomson once described the auditory experience of sitting next to Kael at a screening…. After Kael’s death, her papers went to Indiana University’s Lilly Library: 126 cartons’ worth of letters, manuscripts, and files… Kael’s personal library, 70 boxes’ worth, was sold off by [a] dealer in rare and used books. Kael, who lived in Great Barrington, had contacted him before her death. [He] also was charged with the task of finding a home for the film-book library…. The sale was made with the understanding that Kael’s books would form ”a working special collection… rather than one just salted away.” … What students get are titles one might see on any film devotee’s shelves, only more so: two editions of Lillian Ross’s ”Picture,” … John Gregory Dunne’s ”The Studio,” Kevin Brownlow’s ”The Parade’s Gone By,” four Stanley Kauffmann collections, Manny Farber’s ”Negative Space” (inscribed ‘for one favor after another)… both volumes of the paperback edition of ”Agee on Film,” three Andrew Sarris collections… Her first edition of [Sarris’] ”The American Cinema” has just two markings in it, ”nonsense” (next to Sarris’s assertion that the western resists parody and satire) and an extremely large exclamation mark next to Sarris’s stating that his directorial chronology ”represents a weighted critical valuation.”… William Goldman’s ”Adventures in the Screen Trade” abounds in marginalia. Where Goldman notes that ”The Godfather: Part II” got more Oscar nominations than its predecessor, a clearly exasperated Kael scrawled, ”Did you notice its quality? Goldman sees everything in terms of formula.”