Great critics are scarcer than great artists. In the case of theatre, the disproportion is disproportionately high. A poem, a picture, even a piece of music can be held steady before the critic's pondering gaze, but evanescence is the very nature of a stage performance. An odd form of magic occurs in that mote-filled space between the lighted stage and the darkened auditorium, and magic is always devilishly hard to describe. One can count no more than a handful of scribes capable of writing intelligently about the drama. There is Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, and Shaw, of course; closer to our own time, James Agate had a large reputation when he was alive and working, but does anyone read him now?
It was upon the likes of Agate that Kenneth Tynan sharpened his critical blade. He derided Agate's style, John Lahr reminds us, for its "breathless punch-drunk downrightness", and invented for himself what Lahr - biographer of Joe Orton, among others, senior drama critic of The New Yorker, and no slouch himself when it comes to polished prose - characterises with inspired accuracy as "an artful, pungent, sly tone, which might be described as 'lowfalutin' ". As a critic, Lahr writes, "Tynan emerged on the English scene virtually fully formed. He was poised; he was knowledgeable; he was fun. He was also - and always - spoiling for a fight." He was determined to sweep aside the dreary good- mannerliness of post-war drama criticism and replace it with something that would be exciting, passionate and pugnacious. His critical motto was: "Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds." His writings on drama and film contain some of the most shapely, elegant prose of the 20th century, and it is shocking and saddening that collections of his work, including the incomparable Curtains, are out of print on both sides of the Atlantic.
Kenneth Tynan, Lahr drily observes, "was his own greatest invention, and he loved his Maker". He was born in 1927 in Birmingham, "the ugliest city in the world, that cemetery without walls". His father, Sir Peter Peacock, was a self-made businessman who kept a second, secret family, and never married Tynan's mother. The young man styled himself, rather aptly, Kenneth Peacock Tynan, until he was 17, when his father died, and he dropped the pavonian part of his name. His mother, Rose, was a former laundress, of whom Kenneth the peacock was ashamed, and who in 1958 was found by the police wandering the streets with a suitcase on which was written: "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going to those who love me." She was not. Tynan rejected her, and eventually she died in a mental institution, something for which her son felt lacerating guilt for the rest of his life. "I could have postponed her death at the expense of my own absorption in self-advancement," he wrote. "I chose not to."
If he was self-made, Oxford lent a hand in the making. He landed there like a meteor in 1945. His tutor was C.S. Lewis, and ever afterwards Tynan kept a regard for that scholar, children's writer and Christian apologist which verged on reverence. "By his own calculation," Lahr writes, " [Tynan's] experience at Oxford amounted to 72 weeks, 300 parties, and one 6,000-word essay a week, or the equivalent of five full-length books." In 1950, at the age of 23, he published his first book, with the characteristic title, He That Plays the King, in which he launched some precocious, and ferocious, broadsides against the English critical establishment. "The fixed quizzical grin, the bar-fly impressionism, the epicene tartness, which most critics affect, is no substitute for awe, hate, or rapture," he wrote. After Oxford he went into theatre direction in the provinces, and did some acting; it quickly became clear that his place was not behind the footlights but in front of them. He went into journalism, and in 1954 was appointed drama critic of the Observer, a remarkable achievement for a man of 27. In 1951 he married Elaine Dundy, a troubled match which ended in divorce in 1964. His second wife, Kathleen, remained with him to the end, and after his premature death in 1980 wrote his biography.
From the first, Tynan sought notoriety, and frequently found it. The insight, acuity, and razor-sharp wit of his reviews made him feared in the theatrical world and loved outside it. He brightened the drab stage landscape of the 1950s and the early 1960s, as anyone old enough to have read him then will remember. Lahr quotes some of his more famous barbs - or infamous, if you happened to be the victim of them - for instance, his description of the doughty Margaret Rutherford's performance as Lady Wishfort in Congreve's Way of the World: "Miss Rutherford is filled with a monstrous vitality. The soul of Cleopatra has somehow got trapped in the corporate shape of an entire lacrosse team." He could stoop to broad, though brilliant, punning, too; of the musical, Flower Drum Song, he wrote: "Perhaps as a riposte to Joshua Logan's The World of Suzy Wong, Rodgers and Hammerstein have given us what, if I had any self-control at all, I would refrain from describing as a world of woozy song." He was sometimes cruelly devastating; one Broadway actress never fully recovered from his description of her confronting the audience and "shaking her voice at us like a tiny fist".
As a critic, Tynan peaked too early. In 1963 he first attacked Laurence Olivier, the head of the National Theatre, and in the next breath wrote asking to be hired as the theatre's literary manager. Olivier swallowed his indignation and gave him the job, adding with a groan: "God - anything to get you off the Observer." Tynan should have heeded the premonitory echo of ruin in those words. He stayed with the National until 1973, when his bΩte noir, Peter Hall, took over from Olivier and ousted Tynan as well. By now Tynan had some money, earned from the erotic review, Oh! Calcutta!, which he had devised and staged. The 1970s, however, were to prove a decade of drift, and it was downward most of the way. He developed emphysema, but refused to give up his 40-a-day habit. In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles, where he and Kathleen tried to make it in the mad, bad world of the movies. Kathleen had some success - she wrote the screenplay for Agatha, with Dustin Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave - but not Tynan, who both loathed and was fascinated by Hollywood, and whose love of the cinema would not translate into action. He was saved from penury by The New Yorker, where William Shawn commissioned him to write a series of profiles of contemporary figures for a fee of $44,000, big money in those days. The profiles, of Tom Stoppard, Noδl Coward, Johnnie Carson and others, were to be his swansong. He died in 1980.
Given the facts of his rackety and too-short life, one might expect his diaries, which run from 1971 to 1980, to make for gloomy reading. On the contrary, they are joyous, rambunctiously obscene, and wholly life-affirming. Tynan, a socialist and unashamed sybarite, knew how to live. The record here of his loves, his travels, the meals he consumed and fine wines he quaffed, makes the doings of the rest of us seem meagre and culpably dull. He knew everyone, and, of the females, slept with a great number of them. There is a lot of sex in these pages. Bums loom large. Tynan was a sado-masochist, whose chief predilection, about which he was entirely open, was for spanking women on the bottom, and being spanked in return. This pastime he pursued with dedication and vigour. He saw the comedy of it, but never pretended that it was not one of the things in life he took most seriously.
Cheerfulness, however, keeps breaking in. There are superb stories and anecdotes on every other page, all recounted in that cut-glass prose style which survives even in the lowest moments; few sick men have described their own symptoms with such grim hilarity. And the gossip is vintage. Who could resist an entry that opens thus: "13 May. While I think of it: the story of Britt Ekland's knickers." Every reader will have a favourite joke, but here is one that is hard to beat:
Arthur Askey, reminiscing about music-hall days, names Robb Wilton as the funniest ad-libber he ever knew. Wilton (he says) once went to a funeral and found himself at the graveside standing next to an aged fellow-vaudevillian named Charlie Edwards. After the ceremony Wilton turned to his friend and said: 'Er - how old are you, then, Charlie?' 'Ninety-four,' said Charlie.
Wilton looked at him for a moment and then said: 'Hardly worth your while going home, is it?'
Tynan saw these diaries as a kind of last testament to a life lived to the hilt. As death approached, he summoned his eldest daughter, Tracy - named for the Katharine Hepburn character, Tracy Lord, in The Philadelphia Story - to his sickbed and informed her that he had decided to bequeath his diaries to her, because he was afraid his wife might try to suppress them. After Tynan's death, legal complications deprived Tracy of her inheritance. However, when her mother died in 1995, Tynan's two younger children, Roxana and Matthew, returned the diaries to Tracy. Tynan, as usual, got his way in the end.
John Lahr has done an immaculate editing job - the footnotes are footnotes, not annoyingly consigned to the back of the book - and has written a fond, fair and polished introduction.
Of this book one could do no better than echo Cocteau's wonderful tribute, quoted by Tynan, who after seeing Proust's corpse lying beside the manuscript of └ la Recherche remarked: "That pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers."
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times