142
MARY McCARTHY
Fergusson, who is neither a journalist nor a wit-it is like comparing
pears to green. The worst I can say of Tynan is that I thought better
of him when
I
began this book than when
I
finished it. There is too
much common coin here or protective coloration; you cannot tell the
butterfly from the log. The profiles of and interviews with stars
and
celebrities-Bea Lillie, Gordon Craig, Tennessee Williams, Cagney, W.
C.
Fields-are like
New Yarker
profiles or Sunday feature stories: "cute"
personality pieces, biography and physical impressions factory-woven
with anecdotes. Taken at random from the Bea Lillie piece: "Offstage
she leads a fairly intense social life and has arguably slept through more
hours of daylight than of dark." The "fairly" and "arguably" are un–
arguable
New Yarker
profile. We learn in the same paragraph that her
"last Christmas present to Noel Coward was a baby alligator." Cute?
Such journalism can be produced by automation, with the reader's
chuckles built
in.
On the opposite
fa~ade
of Tynan is a somewhat adenoidal spokes–
man-for-those-under-thirty-didactic and moralizing. His general ideas
comprehend a preference for prose theatre over verse theatre, a prefer–
ence, until recently, for foreign writers over English writers, a belief
that the drama should show "respect for ordinary people," and a defini–
tion of drama (it shows human beings reduced by ineluctable process
to a state of desperation). But these reiterated thoughts (and
I
cannot
find any others except for the insistence that the theatre is a public place)
are not so much ideas as crochets, like the crochets of an old person. His
wit and humor, moreover, have the middle-aged quality of long-suffer–
ing-the classic henpecked humor of the drama reviewer wedded to a
seat on the aisle. The drama reviewer in fact is an archetype of the
human being reduced by ineluctable process to a state of desperation:
a
state well defined by Tynan in his remark about
Requiem far a Nun,
which he was seeing for the fourth time.
"I
begin to understand how
Francis Thompson felt when the Hound of Heaven picked up his spoor."
Very good.
Mary McCarthy
