LOVE
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do miss the essential target. For instance, not long ago, a lively young
critic fired a familiar blast: no ideas in our theater, too many sensational
productions
epater Ie box office,
too many writers revealing sexual ob–
sessions of depressing singularity . . . all the usual changes were rung
but then the critic titled his piece "The Theater Is Losing Its Minds,"
and confused everything. I don't know how far back his memory both
actual and learned goes, but if there were ever any minds operative
in the American theater it is news to me. Before Eugene O'Neill (whose
mastery of ideas was second to none, unless it be his fellow Nobelist
Miss Pearl Buck), there was a wasteland of Owen Davises, Avery Hop–
woods and Eugene Walters, stretching back to the egregious Royall Tyler
who started the American theater on its mindless way. Two centuries
of junk.
If
anything there are rather more signs of intelligence stirring
now than in the bad old days.
Then, a few months later, our critic was back again. This time he
wondered why the better novelists did not bring "mind" to the theater?
Or at least why hadn't the theater produced playwrights as good as the
novelists on Today's List, and he gave the list, betraying himself, I'm
afraid, as an incipient Love lover. Every year there is a short list of
the O.K. writers. Today's List consists of two Jews, two Negroes and
a safe floating
goy
of the old American Establishment (often Mr. Wright
Morris) just to show there is no prejudice in our loving world; only the
poor old homosexualists are out. It is a list dictated not by any esthetic
but by Good Citizenship. That the writers on it happen to be admir–
able is irrelevant: Togetherness put them there and we all feel better
seeing them belaureled. Now my young critic is not responsible for
Today's List but he showed a certain absence of mind in trying to beat
the playwrights with it, because not one of the writers named could
be thought of as an intellectual in the sense I assumed he meant (Gide,
Camus, even the dervish Genet). They are all good, if fairly standard,
writers, more or less in the naturalistic tradition and, at least in their
novels, betray no more mind than do the plays of Mr. Arthur Miller.
I find this sort of mistake (taking good writers of one sort and
saying they are good writers of quite another sort on the grounds that to
be good is good enough) singularly depressing and yet another sign _
of the general corruption of esthetic and intellectual values in this soft
age_ The language of criticism now tends to be as inexact as the prose
of the works criticized. No one seems to know who or what anyone or
anything is. Prevalent is a lazy permissiveness. Our literature as well as
our theater seems at times like a terrible kindergarten. Jack is a great
novelist because he
feels
he's a great novelist. Anything goes. I am some–
tim~
charmed by the minor talent of Mr.
J.
D. Salinger but when he
