"I thought it went into areas where a biographer has no business going, which is to say where he was continually judging a writer’s motives and deciding for himself when a writer went too far, said things she shouldn’t have said, crossed imaginary critical boundaries, behaved unethically. If you want to write a polemic, go right ahead. But when you write a biography, where you’re supposed to tell someone else’s story, then that stuff seemed totally out of place to me."
— Greil Marcus on the new Pauline Kael bio by Brian Kellow. I’m still appreciating the biographical data (there is some!), but I knew the road was getting rougher when I got to this, re: The Way We Were, which I have not seen: “In the end, Pauline seriously overestimated Streisand’s acting ability…all in all, [Streisand’s] Katie seemed slightly self-conscious the work of an actress gunning to be taken seriously.” If the Features Editor of Opera News really can’t just let his biographical subject’s opinion on a film go unchecked, maybe he should quote someone closer to her stature.
