On Stage

...If I were to ask the mirror on my wall who is the greatest elitist of all, it would, if it is an honest mirror, have to answer "Time," or else "Oblivion," which is time's pen name when meting out unfavorable criticism...

...There is good in that...

...Well, yes—one tries to teach the untutored...

...Whether or not the grounds are compassion, and whether or not there is a great deal to hold back there, Barnes, like other reviewers, certainly holds back...

...Yet, on closer inspection, even the epic has not become extinct, merely transformed into the novel...

...I wonder sometimes whether my having grown up in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia as well as Yugoslavia, made me first into "a Serb" and then, by homonymy, acerb or acerbic...

...The ideal critic, therefore, would be the one who could prefigure the judgment of time, anticipate the voice of posterity...

...In any case, that is not worth discussing, beyond pointing out how unfastidious most journalism is...

...I disagree...

...THIS IS NOT the occasion for raising the thorny question of what the theater of the future might be like, even assuming I had the answer...

...Nevertheless, the critic who tries to accord with the judgment of the future must ipso facto speak to people who have a sense of perspective in his own time...

...yet if they become tutored merely by adopting the critic's opinions and insights rather than by finding in his views a confirmation and refinement of their own, they will, at the utmost, be sedulous apes...

...That I believe them to matter goes without saying, else I would not bother to write criticism for such publications...

...A critic who glories in being of his day may lose his usefulness in days to come—except for a limited interest to scholars...

...Winnowed out by time and buried in a porter's field by oblivion...

...In an interview with a Rochester newspaper, Clive Barnes, the drama critic of the New York Times, was holding forth on what he considers the general overestimation of the critic's power and importance...

...Whom else, after all, can a critic subscribe to...

...We tend to remember only one of Procrustes' nasty habits, that of lopping off those parts of his guests that protruded beyond his bed...

...The task ahead?involving, as it surely does, also the establishment of a National Theater—is tremendous but not impossible...

...Pauline Kael once chided me for being so Olympianly concerned with speaking to and for the future rather than for and to my contemporaries, as she feels a critic should...

...In his own domain, your critic is simply a rugged individualist...

...And some of these denizens of unmarked graves were once critics' darlings...

...Still, the critic does teach...

...so, perhaps, it would be most accurate to say that he teaches potential, budding elitists to become consummate and mature ones...

...The latter, if it is not a crowd pleaser and gold mine, need nonetheless not go begging for its supportive audience of enthusiasts...

...To be choosy, to be stern, is to be elitist...

...I have in mind an aristocracy of the spirit, which has nothing to do with birth or social standing or wealth or academic background...

...Whether they can afford to have such high standards is another question, and here the answer must be more circumspect...

...Asked by the interviewer whether he thought that "the acerbic John Simon subscribed to that philosophy," Barnes replied, among other things, that "John Simon subscribes to John Simon," and went on to describe his own position as "I say what I think...

...Where will the even more thousands of today's celebrities be tomorrow...

...But it is the nucleus of theater in America, around which the rest, rightly or wrongly, revolves, either in emulation or in revulsion and, in both cases, in envy...

...And, really, how is one not to appear an elitist among today's critics...

...Why can't I sometimes be the barbed, acidulous, peppery, tart, or sardonic John Simon...

...to pronounce, in a democratic society, on what is superior and what inferior, and know, even while doing this, that masses of people will not comprehend such discrimination, feel threatened by it, and resent it bitterly...

...On Stage ON BEING AN ELITIST CRITIC BY JOHN SIMON LET ME confess, as I take over the theater column, that I am an "elitist" critic—an epithet that has been hurled at me only a trifle less frequently than "acerbic...

...Broadway, of course, is not the American theater, still less the theater, tout court...

...I think sometimes I hold back on grounds of compassion...

...The amount of attention I devote to it is in itself an index of my concern...

...It may have to give up competing with film in the grandioseness of its mise en scene, with television in its undemanding frivolity, with rock music and lyrics in their simple-minded accessibility...

...When I regain consciousness, I am always quite out of breath...

...Amicus Plato, sed magis arnica Veritas: I cannot serve the cause of friendliness when I am trying to serve the cause of theater by serving the cause of truth as best I can...

...It is incontestable that if Broadway were to disappear, the shape of American theater would undergo a radical change, probably for the better, although just possibly for the worse...

...Otherwise it could surely come up with an occasional synonym...

...But, obviously, none of us can quite do that, since to a greater or lesser extent we are all time-bound creatures...

...The only kind of critic not considered an elitist at all is one who likes most things, but he is not a critic at all...

...Elitist, however, is worth consideration...

...To whom else is it really worth talking...

...The best reader is one who is already about as discriminating as the critic —in other words, as much of an elitist...

...And that may be precisely the sort of transmutation the theater may have to endure, transmutatis trans-mutandis...

...Only let us make sure that we know what we mean by elitism...

...Rather, it has to do with whether, for whatever reason, one prefers high art to the other kinds, and whether one has the power of discrimination to tell them apart, for it is very easy to have the preference without the discrimination...

...But, one might well ask, do the prevailing standards of newspaper and magazine criticism matter all that much...

...what makes him an elitist would, in almost any other field of endeavor, make him a good American...

...So, contrary to what some of the Great White Way's stalwarts have said, I am far from being the sworn enemy of Broadway—using the term so as to include such related phenomena as, say, the Lincoln and Kennedy Centers...

...There will have to be less costly production values, considerable governmental and private subsidies and, above all, some way of persuading the various theatrical unions that their present demands are ultimately suicidal...

...But it seems to me not at all unlikely that under the never-before-experienced triple onslaught of film, television and rock concerts (undoubtedly the most cherished medium of today's youth), theater may have to restructure itself into an elitist art form...

...If the critic, by being not so much severe as simply scrupulously honest (which, in juxtaposition with present critical practice, may come to the same thing), should accelerate this rebirth into a more selective, aristocratic, minority-oriented—in short, elitist—theater, so much the better...

...Substitute the word "criticism" for "writing,'' and you have, pretty much, the current state of affairs...

...And, even if it makes me info an elitist, I do subscribe only to myself...

...Yet he had another, no less unsavory custom, that of stretching travelers shorter than his bed until they exactly matched its length...

...It is highly presumptuous to sit in judgment on other people's work and talent...

...Even paranoics have enemies, Delmore Schwarz quipped, and even a fabulous invalid, as Broadway has come to be known, may eventually have to die...

...Said Karl Kraus: "An intellectual elevator service ought to be instituted to spare one the unheard-of exhaustion stemming from the descent to the level of today's writing...

...Acerbic, by the way, has everywhere been attached to my name as if the two of them were Siamese twins...

...Where are thousands upon thousands of yesterday's celebrities today...

...Moreover, if they do, can they afford to be as aristocratically fussy as I would have them be...

...Of course, as things stand, theater is so much more expensive than chamber music concerts that it requires far greater box-office returns...

...In short, theater may have to become a minority art, rather like chamber music...

...Not so I. It seems to me that a critic needs a great many other tools far more than he does compassion, and that the person dealing in compassion has a choice of numerous charitable vocations of which criticism does not happen to be one...

...Criticism is, by definition, one of the most elitist activities extant...

...For that last, I suppose, I would have had to be born in Sardinia...

...After all, a strong nucleus is of paramount importance for an institution, even if for genuine imagination and innovation one may have to look nearer the periphery...

...No critic is harsher or more exclusive than time...

...yet what is discrimination and toughmindedness except strong conviction based on intense comparative evaluation...

...I can say "not impossible" because no major art form that has been with us for centuries, indeed millennia, has ever died out, with the single exception of the epic...

...We must not try to rack an uninterested public into filling up the obsolete gigantism of our theatrical edifices...

...Yet if I am not eager to see it go, or exultant in its putative proximate demise, I cannot help feeling that it may have outlived its usefulness as the cornerstone, cement or lodestar of our theater...

...The theater today is in fairly desperate shape...