Highbrow at the Theater
THACHER, MOLLY DAY
Highbrow at the Theater Sights and Spectacles. By Mary McCarthy. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. 183 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Molly Day Thacher I WOULD THINK that these reviews and observations on the...
...What irritates me is the tone of cocksure, condescending cleverness," she writes, looking back at the earliest of these reviews...
...They are made by and for that subspecies of New York intellectual who cannot take the theater and yet cannot leave it alone...
...When she digs into her subject, as she does in her essay on Ibsen, she comes up with some cogent observations...
...She insists on regarding it as literature under a handicap...
...The unsuccessful may sometimes be patted on their misshapen little heads...
...Miss McCarthy has a very high brow indeed...
...But rarely does she pay her material this respect...
...The theater is by nature middlebrow...
...But she has never abjured the cocksureness or the the condescension or the premium on cleverness for its own sake...
...When a highbrow girl approaches it, she dare not come too close...
...Reviewed by Molly Day Thacher I WOULD THINK that these reviews and observations on the theater had already reached the appropriate readers through the Partisan Review, in which most of them first peared...
...She must honor the playhouses at random, observing without relish now a relatively important play, now one almost without meaning of any kind...
...And from this whimsical sampling she must draw psycho-sociological conclusions...
...But Miss McCarthy will not accept theater as theater...
...There was, is, always will be plenty wrong with any living theater, but if Reviewed by Molly Day Thacher d one is to propound a pathology one: has at least to start with an undera standing of the subject in a state of i health...
...To "cover" it would be to sink into it, to enjoy it unthinkable...
...The claim on the book jacket that she has laid bare "the pathology of the New York theater" is nonsense...
...The successful ones must be destroyed in an original manner...
...As William Faulkner remarked in a recent interview, "The critic, too, is trying if to say 'Kilroy was here...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 27
