The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan
edited by John Lahr
Bloomsbury £25, pp352
In a courteous, much-quoted letter to Harold Hobson, written less than three months before his death at the age of 53 from emphysema in Santa Monica in July 1980, Kenneth Tynan recalled the special exhilaration of the days a generation earlier when he, as an atheist socialist convert and drama critic of The Observer, used to take issue, almost every week, with almost everything that was written by his opposite number, a mystically inclined Christian monarchist on the Sunday Times. 'I certainly miss our duelling days,' wrote Tynan. 'The trouble with our successors is that nothing seems at stake for them.'
Those of us who now make our lives in the British theatre look back with astonishment to a time when young men and women set out in the postwar world inspired to practise drama criticism by Kenneth Tynan and, therefore, ready to believe that this profession alone could give them a suitable platform from which to express their deepest convictions not just about art, but about life itself.
If you are forced, as we are today, either to seek enlightenment in the saloon-bar chippiness of a trap-shut mind like 'Charlie' Spencer's or to be patronised by the piss-elegant fatuities of a crashing narcoleptic like John Gross, then you know all too well what has been lost. You find yourself regularly reaching up to a familiar shelf to get down your ragged blue Pelicans, and once more be refreshed by the words of someone who wrote with the urgent conviction that plays mattered, and that what you said about them might somehow matter just as much.
It is hard to believe that the century's most celebrated theatre critic worked his craft for a mere 13 years, between 1950 and 1963, before being lured away by Laurence Olivier ('God, anything to get you off that Observer') to join him in his mission to found a British National Theatre from some Portakabins off the Waterloo Road. But by the time Tynan accepted the two-edged invitation to stop writing and help determine the new company's repertory, he had already decided that, in spite of the massive jolt of energy given him by the revelation of Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, he was unlikely ever to want to resume his old job. It was not, he felt, something he would want to go back to.
His enforced demob from the National in 1973 left him not just neurotically calculating the exact percentage of his input into the theatre's successes ('The Front Page, a gigantic hit, following my earlier choices, Long Day's Journey and Jumpers to make a Tynan grand slam'), but also, more importantly, coming to address the question that looms large over these diaries and to which no good answer was ever suggested: what does a great ex-drama critic do with the rest of his life?
It is pointless to pretend to any newcomer to the Tynan legend that they will find in this solipsistic record of the years 1971-1980 (held back from publication at his widow Kathleen's wish, and now released by his eldest daughter, Tracy) anything but fitful flashes of the edge and brilliance that mark his critical work. Much more, the diaries achieve power as a kind of protracted, agonising note before death, sometimes almost too painful to read, the record of a man who is, like a Russian hero, losing faith at an inexplicably early age in the ability of the world to sustain his interest.
Although he notes in response to Joan Littlewood's intention to kill herself on the first anniversary of the death of her much-loved partner, Gerry Raffles, that he 'must write to her and insist she change her mind; she must learn to be less presumptuous and to go on suffering like the rest of us', you nevertheless feel that, in his heart, Tynan feels himself powerless to do anything but be pulled on downwards. 'Were I to commit suicide I would merely be killing someone who had already, to many intents and most purposes, ceased to exist... I am learning how not to feel strongly about anything. I shall die writhing in apathy.' Whether you choose to read this volume or not will partly depend on how depressed you wish to feel for some days afterwards.
Searching for the reasons underlying Tynan's terrible decline, you cannot fail to be impressed by the strength of his resolve not to end up, like so many of his contemporaries, as yet another literary gentleman who has lost passion. He would die rather than give in to the English embrace. 'There is a Bloomsbury of the social and political, as well as the artistic world; its grail is good taste, its watchword sensitive restraint, its armoury the civilised sneer.'
Domestic moralists, no doubt, will find in Tynan's sexuality, and especially in the detailed account given here of a sado-masochistic relationship with his girlfriend Nicole, evidence of a waste of spirit which they like to claim leads to unhappiness. (The relationship certainly does little for his once-famous style. The only reply a reader can offer to the proposition 'The full rectal presentation with the dear Scot's bum outstretched to bursting as the pink piston of prick slides up and down is something I shall never forget' is a heartfelt 'No, indeedy.')
But this is deliberately to miss the point. The real hurt and damage of Tynan's life was done when he abandoned his cover as Olivier's lieutenant and dared to launch forth with projects of his own. Nothing in the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! was ever as naked as the anguish it caused Ken.
As you read the entries occasioned by the response to its even grimmer sequel Carte Blanche, you wonder what strange, quixotic quality it was in Tynan which made him imagine that he could transfer the intimacy of his own private desires into the Jeyes-fluid-smelling playhouses of the West End. No wonder he records a young man coming up to him in the street and thanking him for what he is doing, then pausing before asking: 'Er, what, er, what are you doing?'
It is in the circumstances understandable that Tynan came to believe that we are not creatures who inhabit bodies. We are our bodies. And contemplating the sustained hopelessness of these diaries, as their author heads towards extinction 'snarling, retching and wanking', we should be careful to remember that a man who is admitted into a California hospital with the highest level of carbon dioxide in his blood ever recorded, and the lowest oxygen, is suffering from something rather more serious than good old Noël Coward-style world-weariness. All the more admirable therefore, and providing some of the best passages in the book, is the remains of Tynan's critical impulse to praise: an urge he directs, inevitably, mostly at those who entered showbusiness some years before he did himself.
It is when he writes of the American comedian Phil Silvers whom he finds trying to disguise the effects of a stroke in a touring company in Bournemouth ('this matchless, whiplash clown') or of Ethel Merman at the Palladium ('audiences now expect sweat and strain; Merman's golden flow astounds them'), of Fred Astaire ('the poet of late capitalism') and of Shirley MacLaine ('a credit to the species') that he recovers something of the idolising spirit which his enemies found ridiculous - all part, they said, of being a name-dropper - but which his readers trusted and valued as an ability to convey in words the real smell and redemption of performance.
At the end, the theatre is the most peculiar of all the arts because it seems always either to be way ahead of all the other forms, or way behind them. People who work any length of time in the collaborative media hardly need telling that most careers in theatre and cinema end in despair.
Samuel Beckett's late work will never be a patch on his early, nor does Tennessee Williams, say, ever recover the gorgeous poetry of his youth. Even the greatest falter, not, as some pruriently long to believe, because of problems of excess - fame, drink or sex. These things are symptoms, not causes. Nearly all artists fail for the same reason and for that one reason only: because the thing they are trying to do is so clearly so difficult. Only those who have written well know what it is like to stop writing well. 'One reason I cannot write nowadays is because I no longer have a stance, an attitude, what Eliot called "the core of it, the tone".'
Kenneth Tynan was for a while the best and liveliest critic around, the only one besides Pauline Kael to whom actors and playwrights turned regularly with a sense of anticipation. He thereby did a job almost as hard as making art. It was his gift and fortune to be the herald for a historic period of vitality in the British theatre. Let that be his obituary.
