Kenneth Tynan Letters
Tynan, Kathleen
BOOKS IN REVIEW It's Not So Easy to Criticize Kenneth Tynan Letters Edited by Kathleen Tynan Random House / 665 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY John Simon K enneth Tynan was a splendid critic and a...
...With assistance from Garry O'Connor, she has winnowed out nearly as many letters as she published, with, alas, some cuts "mainly because of excessive length and hardly ever to censor...
...If a purple suit and a purple private life can be excused in actors, why boggle at them in a critic...
...In this context, Oh...
...For [Charles] Marowitz, theatre ceases to be art as soon as people like it...
...A letter to his Birmingham chum Julian Holland in London is full of sensible quotations from and references to Flaubert, Baudelaire, Pierre Logs, Massinger, Boswell, Pater, Lord Chesterfield, Henry James, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, James Agate, and Ivor Brown...
...The rub is that Miss Lesser does not set much stock by dramatic criticism...
...As Kathleen explained to me, he could not write without cigarettes, and writing was his life, or dearer than life...
...There were, of course, those who held it against him...
...Tynan's ten-year activity as dramaturg of Britain's National Theatre under Laurence Olivier was extremely imaginative and productive...
...Kathleen Tynan was right to include a number of memos Tynan dashed off to authors and directors as dramaturg of the National Theatre...
...B ut to get down to Kenneth Tynan Letters...
...Calcutta!, the erotic revue he engineered, as well as other more or less shocking ventures testifying to an interest in pornography, have been steadily held against him Charge One is totally irrelevant...
...almost invariably, he proposes marriage...
...The answer here is that never in my life have I spent so long or taken such pains over wooing anyone...
...Working with Polanski on the movie Macbeth, he reminds the director that the play is "Not a tragedy written by a philosopher...
...When even his libido temporarily failed, he remarked, "Bankruptcy, emphysema, paralysis of the will —and now this...
...If all else fails I may loan it out to Twiggy as a chastity belt...
...I lost weight and now resemble a bronzed but bloodless vampire...
...Still, is there anything much finer than what Ken wrote Kathleen in one of his first letters: "With you I have that rarest feeling—a sort of passionate peace....You think I'll tire of you...
...Yet there are also more elaborate insights here: about drama and dramatic criticism...
...Let's start with some of those bonbons, sallies that are not merely tickles aimed at our ribs, but also darts relentlessly targeting the truth...
...I feel that God is making his point with rather vulgar overstatement...
...John Locke's style is "fine and direct: prose as tight and pedestrian as good prose should be...
...When the Christians steal his daughter, he begins to realise what it means to be Jewish, and by the end of the trial he knows it through and through—so indelibly that no one in the theatre will ever forget it...
...Now I am certain...
...Miss Lesser must know that wit is generally an offensive weapon, a subtle and persuasive means of aggression...
...You are air and water, I am earth and fire...
...That's how you create the universe...
...Possibly because they—Kathleen more than Ken — mas44 'The trouble with our successors is that nothing seems at stake for them.' tered what Tennessee Williams wrote about Ken and Elaine to Maria St...
...And Rebecca West: "How can a woman contrive to be a non-smoker and yet look all the time as if she were chewing a cheroot...
...And he spoke for us as we could never speak for ourselves, with a depth of knowledge and facility of language that made even his insults beautiful...
...The review ends with a hefty paragraph, too long to quote here —an encomium of Olivier's Titus...
...Unlike his first marriage, to Elaine Dundy, this one lasted...
...Kathleen Tynan has supplied copious, almost overgenerous, footnotes and helpful bridging commentaries...
...Years later, Tynan writes, "I do not believe that anyone, having had the reward of you, could be so vainglorious as to suppose he deserved any other reward of life...
...He is cheerful and optimistic to the end...
...So we find him advising Olivier about his production of The Three Sisters...
...about women, sex, and love...
...know it intimately, unafraid, like Tynan, of associating with admired artists...
...You show us Shy-lock turning into a Jew before our eyes...
...Top that," he writes shortly before his death), snobbish (though he eloquently denied it), obsessed with pornography (but that helped topple the Lord Chamberlain's censorship), and scattered in too many directions (which yielded, among other things, a good book on bullfighting), and flirtatious to the last (the crush on Louise Brooks producing a remarkable profile...
...But he was a master critic: "I've never in my critical career written a line that was consciously motivated by personal animus," he wrote Terence Rattigan: a noble aim, whether achieved or not...
...There is no such thing as full objectivity in us subjective human beings, and taste is not to be confused with mathematics...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW It's Not So Easy to Criticize Kenneth Tynan Letters Edited by Kathleen Tynan Random House / 665 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY John Simon K enneth Tynan was a splendid critic and a perhaps even better writer...
...Tynan was, and happily always remained, an enfant terrible...
...In either direction, Tynan was a champion because, for him, something big was always at stake...
...The misunderstanding was cleared up, but the delay it caused may have been crucial...
...Then comes a bit of good-humored ribbing of the play: "with acknowledgments to Lady Bracknell, to lose one son may be accounted a misfortune, to lose twenty four, as Titus does, looks like carelessness...
...Old drama criticism is chiefly for people interested in theater, for whom the goings-on at Shakespeare's Globe, the Comedie Francaise, or the Berliner Ensemble are of timeless interest...
...This is irony as good as anything in Dickens or Evelyn Waugh, and can be enjoyed by all readers, even those who have not seen Miss Leigh's performances...
...To Jack Benny, who sent him a gold44 These well over 600 pages can be relished in small daily doses like bonbons...
...Wendy Lesser herself writes self-contradictingly that "a brilliantly unforgiving theater critic is a defender as well as an44 Kenneth Tynan was, and happily always remained, an enfant terrible...
...his reading and theater- and moviegoing were extensive and eclectic from his earliest years...
...Around mid-review, Miss Lesser writes, "Wit is the sharpest tool a critic can deploy, and Tynan exercised his with the speed and precision of an emergency-room surgeon...
...Though Tynan declares "I would rather write amusingly and inaccurately than correctly and tediously," astonishingly often he manages to be both amusing and accurate...
...Miss Lesser's champagne metaphor fails even worse than her surgical one...
...The American Spectator • August 1998 67...
...Yes, the food defeated me...
...Similarly, I honour Cary Grant for never having played Macbeth...
...Just: "They must just learn to live with the primary fact of life, which is not a monogamous thing on the animal level...
...First, that his mode of dress and modus vivendi were too ostentatious and a proof of insufficient basic seriousness...
...when on a long solo car trip he has a blowout, he writes, "Spare tyre contains about as much air as my left lung...
...Note how aptly Tynan praises this immature and much-maligned work of the young Shakespeare: "Like Goya's 'Disasters of War,' this is tragedy naked, godless, and unredeemed, a carnival of carnage in which pity is the first man down...
...It was an important part of his persona: a theater critic, like other theater figures, benefits from a colorful one...
...Here is his account of a stay in Puerto Vallarta, where the weather is favorable, "but the drinking water is otter-coloured and it's hard to type in the toilet all day...
...Still, one wonders how many of those not infrequent ellipses were brought about by Britain's draconian libel laws...
...It is worth attending to this intelligent and well-written critique: refuting it is as good a way as any to rescue Tynan's reputation...
...Having lauded the performances of Anthony Quayle and Maxine Audley, Tynan continues: "As Lavinia, Vivien Leigh receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband's corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber...
...11 money clip with his engraved image: "I am tremendously grateful for the exquisite gold money clip you sent me with the wonderful cartoon of Bela Lugosi on the back...
...About Olivier's Shylock, he exults: "One of the most astonishing things you have ever done...so shatteringly and obviously right that one wonders why nobody has thought of it before...
...attacker....Tynan spoke for the audience, defending it from the inane, the shopworn, the sentimental, the dishonest...
...After all, the point is that others come and go...
...Second, that his writing, though clever, was too nasty, even bitchy, militating against critical objectivity...
...Into the relatively short time allotted him, Tynan packed more living and loving, more fun and more furiously perfect work than many another into a greatly longer span...
...The third charge is the gravest...
...Well, not entirely...
...But that is not what criticism is or can be...
...Tynan's notes and comments, constitute a Bildungsroman: the evolution of a Casanova into a casanier (as the French call a contented homebody) in his second marriage...
...What a pity that the man who so long loved, admired, and worked with Olivier could not accomplish this undertaking, hampered for a while by the subject himself...
...How wonderful to find the 16-year-old Birmingham schoolboy write: "To assert that the critic needs the discipline of creative writing is just balls, because at present criticism is the only remaining form of creative writing which demands any discipline at all...
...When criticism no longer affects living persons, it becomes what it irreducibly is —a form of literature for, at its best, the ages...
...Wit, to be sure, is resented by those it stings...
...in fact, like good wine, it improves with age...
...And if a notice is unfair, other critics and time itself will defuse its effect...
...not unrelated, are ultimately separate entities: the austere recluse, the social butterfly, and the impudent gadfly can display equal literary merit...
...Here is someone far from the cold person many take him for...
...The man at the beginning...is a businessman first...only secondarily a Jew...
...We have since learned how to sweeten tragedy, to make it ennobling, but we would do well to remember that Titus is the raw material, 'the thing itself,' the piling of agony on to a human head until it splits...
...In Donald Wolfit's Prince of Denmark, "All of Hamlet was there, but not a whole Hamlet...
...Humor, which Tynan also had, is something else again...
...Consider that at least nine-tenths of what a critic gets to review is trash or nearly: a "killer review" is the most effective antidote, especially if, like Tynan, you are also an adept at praise...
...He may have been self-serving, starstruck ("Last year I met Cary Grant...
...Believing a gossip columnist's canard, Olivier threw a spanner into Tynan's work...
...Most revealingly, she writes, "Reading old theater reviews, however good they are, is a bit like drinking the dregs from last night's Champagne [sic] glasses, after the fizz has disappeared...
...This must be read in conjunction with an earlier passage, claiming that Tynan, having peaked circa 21, "abandoned one ambition after another — acting, stage directing, filmmaking, playwriting, dramaturgy, book writing—until all that remained was his reputation as a killer critic, the writer of some fine New Yorker profiles and the brains behind a wildly successful pornographic show...
...rather, an enthusiast who sincerely believes that the latest beloved is the love of his life...
...Elsewhere, he congratulates Olivier and the rest of the cast: "'Long Day's Journey,' as all four of you are playing it, emerges as a masterpiece of so many kinds that I stopped counting...
...Women flock to me and hang their coats on me...
...Unlike fiction, it may not attract the masses: like poetry, however, it continues to enrich the concerned elite...
...Next, the famous "killer" wit...
...Peter Hall, his successor, had felt Tynan's sting from time to time, and did not want Ken around...
...But more and more in the late letters we read about lungs and smoking and difficulties with breathing...
...Also recitals of his sexual exploits to third parties...
...The life and the work, though JOHN SIMON is theater critic of New York and film critic of National Review...
...About the ending, he writes: "I realise you want the girls drifting off like ghosts at the end to echo their entrance, but I think it's a bit dangerous...
...What more can anyone ask for...
...More important yet is what he wrote Harold Hobson, his longtime friendly rival, a month or so before dying: "I certainly miss our duelling days—The trouble with our successors is that nothing seems at stake for them...
...A melodrama written by a 66 August 1998 • The American Spectator great poet...
...Calcutta!, almost singlehandedly, achieved in several countries), and, yes, "killer theater critic...
...In what remains, though, pleasures abound...
...indeed, all the New Yorker profiles Lesser praises ended up in books, and the one on Olivier Tynan worked on at his death was meant to become also a full-length biography...
...Life moves on: they don't...
...Less than six months later, always trusting in the future, Tynan was dead...
...Her bottom has gone to pot and her pot has gone to bottom...
...in both, Ken himself is often aptly quoted...
...And if you've never seen the plays being discussed, it's like drinking the dregs from other people's Champagne glasses...
...In Letters, Tynan demolishes part of this argument: "Was it unadventurous for Astaire to stick to tap-dancing instead of venturing into ballet...
...Or: "Odd how Victorian literature is sealed off at each end with an anal scandal—Wilde up Bosie's bum, Byron up Annabella's...
...Already at ten, Master Tynan gets Film Weekly to publish his letter beginning, "If it is actually true that Warner Brothers intend to put Humphrey Bogart in a series of 13' pictures, they will be making the greatest mistake of their lives...
...About a fling he refused to have, he writes afterward, "Non-berserk people do not exchange coral lagoons in the sunshine for tin baths in the back kitchen...
...we mix...
...By 19, he tells us of "trying desperately to model my style on a blend between Jane [Auster]'s masculine directness and Gibbon's effeminate fastidiousness...
...So he describes Stephen Spender as "the Compleat Masculine Effeminate," and Dylan Thomas as "a surly little pug but a master of pastiche and invective...
...Kathleen is blossoming (working on a film script...
...An earlier letter considers Frederick Rolfe, Wilhelm Stekel, Manet, Cezanne, Walt Disney, and Orson Welles along with Olivier (a lifelong favorite...
...To stand up except when commanded is an act of insurrection...
...Illness, however, was taking its toll...
...but they, surely, are even less objective than the critic, besides constituting a tiny minority vis-a-vis the readers, present and future...
...it is reprinted in his collection Curtains...
...Thinks himself the biggest and best phoney of all time, and may be right...
...We find it again in Wendy Lesser's review of Kenneth Tynan Letters in the New York Times Book Review of May io...
...Still Tynan's humor did not forsake him...
...they stay...
...Only so will a review be read all the way...
...Tynan was 64 August 1998 • The American Spectator never seriously committed to filmmaking, where his most notable contribution was Macbeth, on which he collaborated with two highly gifted others, Roman Polanski and Shakespeare...
...We fit...
...Again: "I had drinks yesterday with Marilyn Monroe...
...about art and politics and the good life...
...These well over 600 pages can be relished in small daily doses like bonbons, or read continuously as the autobiography Tynan sometimes contemplated writing (with a title borrowed from Byron, The SumThe American Spectator • August 1998 65 mer of a Dormouse, a metaphor for transience), but never wrote...
...Nobody disputes that we can and must learn from history...
...and write well: graphically, poetically, penetratingly, and wittily, i.e., entertainingly...
...Not for young Kenneth the "gilding pen" of George Jean Nathan that "runs into ecstasies on the least provocation...
...why should theatrical history be, in its way, any less instructive...
...Just as the critic is not really a surgeon saving or snuffing out lives, he is not merely a dispenser of consumer guidance...
...It ended partly because, in his outspoken disagreements with the NT's governing board—notably its chairman, Lord Chandos —Tynan alienated the administration...
...never have I trod so carefully, never worried so exquisitely over every step of the way...
...it would be a shame if theatrical and literary history forgot him...
...For what applies to old plays and players, to successful or failed productions, applies equally, mutatis mutandis, to present andfuture ones...
...He has a "theory that there is too much genius around and too little talent...
...About Polanski: "Roman's women must either sit down or lie down...
...And still later on, "The aim is always and only to make you love me...
...Or, more likely, because much of the intensity endured...
...About London, from Tunisia: "And how are things in your prison of battleship-gray skies, with its bars of rain...
...B ut Kenneth Tynan Letters is also valuable as a sex and love story...
...I have...baited it with old writs and as soon as it catches any money I will let you know...
...Tynan's language captures what "the greatest actor alive" does in offering "an unforgettable concerto of grief" as nearly as words can...
...The other part falls to factual incorrectness...
...By age sixteen, he already writes about world drama and literature with a breadth and perspicacity to do a doctoral student proud...
...In his autobiography, the director John Dexter recalls Olivier's justification for making Tynan the National Theatre's dramaturg: "Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in...
...These adventures and misadventures, as supplemented with Mrs...
...my stomach is still in the intensive care ward of a goat-infested clinic 'south of the border.'...Also it's not conducive to work where everyone else is water-skiing, playing backgammon and vomiting...
...His gangster in Dead End, the 'D.A.' in Marked Women and the producer in Stand-In were great pieces of acting...
...And third, that he frittered away his talent, accomplishing fewer and more trivial things than he should have...
...Tynan's critical prowess is as prodigious as it was precocious...
...If that danger seems minimal, we must be thankful not only to him, but also to his second wife, Kathleen, who earlier produced a capital biography of her husband, followed by this collection, Kenneth Tynan Letters, whose fruits her own, likewise premature, death prevented her from duly savoring...
...Take an example from Tynan's criticism, his review of Peter Brook's internationally acclaimed 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, when Tynan, at 28, was already seven years past his alleged apogee...
...In the end, both spouses had outside affairs, but as Ken's health declined from the emphysema that was to kill the killer critic, Kathleen was there to look after him, and life in Los Angeles with side trips to Mexico for climatic reasons verged on the idyllic: "The children are tops—Matthew enchanting, Roxana a beautiful mind in a beautiful body...
...Or, indeed, about himself: "Stop it, Tynan, get wise, be the golden boy, get back to the well-known surface where you belong, you tourist in the domains of philosophy...
...He concluded with a demand for full recognition of Bogart as a character actor, placing little Ken well ahead of the professional film critics of 1938...
...At various moments it looks like (a) the best American play, (b) the best Irish play, (c) the best Greek play, (d) the best family play, (e) the best Freudian play and (f) the best Marxist play ever written....What an irony that that poor, devastated man spent 3o years writing grandiose pseudo-tragic plays when all the time the great play he had it in him to write was about how his family made him precisely the sort of poor, devastated man who would spend 3o years writing grandiose pseudo-tragic plays...
...Isn't it enough to have been a consummate profile writer, censorship abolisher (which Oh...
...And we smuggled two kittens in from Mexico...
...These two pages demand to be read, as do almost all of Tynan's reviews...
...On the contrary: it was brave, and it was what made him (and will keep him forever) a classic...
...The best a drama critic can do is love theater well (which also means being able to hate it well...
...and partly because Olivier gave up his artistic directorship...
...Scattered throughout are love letters to many girls and women Tynan fell for, won or lost, or both won and lost...
...Charge Two is based on a lingering and apparently ineradicable misunderstanding of the nature and function of criticism to be utterly objective —as scientific as a litmus test, as trustworthy as a consumer guide about refrigerators or vacuum cleaners...
...Tynan's sadomasochist pursuits were not, I infer, shared by Kathleen, and he had to seek gratification elsewhere...
...They are static: we can see the future, but they can't...
...She goes on to emphasize the importance of immediacy in a theater review, but that is to underestimate what criticism does...
...we blend...
...Three charges continue to be leveled at Tynan, who died in 1980 aged 53...
...To Tynan's credit, he was plucky about it...
...Unfortunately for those on the receiving end, his goal was as often to kill the patient as to save him...
...It was, as Dexter said about himself, "fury for perfection...
...She seems to me to be Kensington's reply to Colonel Blimp: and yet the best journalist of our time...
...Book writing, on the other hand, became more and more Tynan's aim...
...Miss Lesser concludes with Tynan's alleged tragic flaw, "his addiction to immediate reward, his fear of failure, or whatever you want to call the thing that made him unable to deliver on his prodigious (and prodigally wasted) talents...
...The problem was that Ken struggled to give up smoking, but, despite his worsening illness, couldn't...
...True, champagne goes flat, but good writing is ageless...
...And again, sagely: "The purpose of a true avant-garde is not to be an end in itself but a beachhead from which to conquer the majority...
...strive to be as objective as humanly possible...
Vol. 31 • August 1998 • No. 8
