LOVE
619
as much or as little as he pleases, his goal being the interpretation of
Shakespeare's lago,
not
the revelation of his own inner state as he grap–
ples with lago. Our actors may not be able to say a line of verse in–
telligibly or begin to understand what lago is all about but you can bet
they will bring floods of irrelevant feeling to the part. It
is
not acting
but group therapy. And the sad thing is that though this kind of acting
is usually disagreeable to watch it is delightful to do. They won't change
without a struggle, and since they feel rather than think they tend to
be fanatics about a method whose queen, of course, is the genuinely
gifted Miss Kim Stanley. Yet the whole sad mistaken thing is all there
in her large bland face, the small eyes turned inward though they seem
to be looking out, the whiney voice rising and falling according to the
beat of some inner metronome of "truth," her whole being suffused in
a nimbus of self-love. The final effect is onanistic.
For some years I would not read Miss Mary McCarthy's theater
criticism after her majestically wrong-headed estimate of "A Streetcar
Named Desire." She not only missed the point of the play but, worse,
got carried away by irrelevancies: Williams was really a slob, devoted
to success, pretending to be a real artist while swinging with the Broad–
way set and, worst of all, he was guilty of "ambition." She uses this
word several times in her collected pieces to tick off those writers who
try, sneakily, to get above their talents. Art-climbers are very like social
climbers, and Miss McCarthy is a good one to put them down. Now I
grant that there is something odd in Tennessee Williams's work which
not only enrages quite sane critics but drives them to impute motives
to
'him
which, I would suggest, are more the business of post-mortem
biography than of criticism. I think again of the young critic who wrote
recently in
Encounter
that Williams's real theme was incest. Well, his
real theme is
not
incest no matter how one chooses to read the plays.
One does not dare speculate on what sort of grape-vine gossip led to
this conclusion; thought certainly had nothing to do with it, though
feeling might. But aside from Miss McCarthy's forty whacks at Williams,
when I finally came to read her collected criticism, I was struck by
her remarkable good sense. She is far and away the best American
writer to have looked at the American theater in our generation. Un–
corrupted by compassion, her rather governessy severity, even cruelty,
derives from the useful knowledge that the road to Kitsch is paved
with good "ambitions," and that one must not give the "A" for ambition
without also giving simultaneously the "E" for the poor thing accom–
plished. The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing
more debasing than the work of those who do well what
is
not worth
doing at all.
