Kenneth Tynan’s actual career — theatre critic of The Observer, literary manager of the National Theatre and profile writer for The New Yorker — was distinguished but unremarkable. He was, on the face of it, no more than an accessory to the theatrically gifted and great, an attendant lord but never Hamlet. And yet, 24 years after his death at the age of 53, it seems we cannot leave him alone. His life is repeatedly and variously chronicled.
The story was told by his first wife, Elaine Dundy, in her autobiography, Life Itself!; again in a biography by his second wife, Kathleen Tynan; in his letters, edited by Kathleen; in two other biographies; in numerous histories; and, most notoriously, in his diaries, edited by John Lahr.
In addition, he is evoked in drama. Not long ago we had Smoking with Lulu, a play about his encounter with the silent-screen star Louise Brooks; and now we have Tynan, an RSC one-man show by Richard Nelson. Corin Redgrave plays the man himself. The play, but for a few words, is extracted entirely from his diaries, written from 1971 until his death in 1980. Nelson was asked to create the piece by Tracy Tynan, the daughter Kenneth had with Dundy.
He was, at first, reluctant to take the commission. “I wasn’t sure it was a good idea,” he says. “I sort of thought I knew the diaries. Then I read them again, and I realised something else was going on here. Gore Vidal said after Tynan died that he was one of the greatest writers in the English language who had no subject other than the performances of others. The diaries reflect a very conscious effort to find a different subject — himself and his own performance. I think they show he was a truly great writer.” Tracy Tynan agrees, saying the diaries “are possibly his crowning achievement”.
There is an odd parallel here with Dominic Shellard’s motive for writing Kenneth Tynan: A Life. Shellard argued that it was the Observer reviews that established him as a great writer. That body of 800-word notices, he said, “more than matches Hazlitt’s output or Shaw’s obsessions”. He was a great writer because of the diaries, says Nelson; he was a great writer because of the reviews, says Shellard. Both feel the need to point out his literary greatness.
Perhaps this is a reaction to the more orthodox view of Tynan as a hugely important cultural figure, rather than a creator in his own right. He was, it is said, the midwife to the birth of the new, tough and usually politically engaged theatre that overthrew the claustrophobic, suburban drawing-room style of the post-war London stage. Later he became the supreme 1960s dandy subversive, shocking the nation by being the first man to use the f-word on television and producing the erotic review Oh! Calcutta!. His CV may not have been much on paper, but the lived life had greatness written all over it. “No one, they say, ever erected a statue to a critic,” wrote fellow critic Michael Billington in his obituary. “But Kenneth Tynan has bequeathed something even larger to posterity: a legendary life.”
So, he was great, then. Or was he? Dissident voices have lately been heard. Acknowledging his greatness as a theatre critic, Peter Conrad bemoans his later decline, first at the National and then at The New Yorker: “It is a sad cautionary tale about false values, professional ethics and the degeneration of journalism in recent decades.” Tynan, for Conrad, may have been the midwife of new theatre, but his New Yorker profiles also ushered the Rosemary’s Baby of vacuous celebrity puffery into the world. Even his gifts as a writer are now being questioned. Here is Oliver Herford in the TLS: “Tynan’s writing is now irredeemably dated, too arch and egotistical to have outlived its weekly occasions.”
So, which is it to be? Tynan the arch, the dated, the groveller to celebrities; or Tynan the great writer and/or brilliant cultural magus? The first point to get out of the way is that, whatever else he was, Tynan was always a fantastic story. Born the illegitimate son of a former mayor of Warrington, Sir Peter Peacock, a man who had led a double life for 20 years, he was a brilliant poseur and provocateur at university, and, as a theatre critic, he managed to both flatter and abuse — frequently the same people — with such suave and irresponsible brio that his opinions became more of an event than most of the plays he reviewed.
“Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy,” was his motto, and, usually, he was all four.
His passion for the theatre was unarguable and highly personal. With one line — “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger” — he launched John Osborne, announced the arrival of a new direction in theatre and celebrated his own sensibility as the one true guide to dramatic virtue.
At the National, he both trashed and sucked up to Laurence Olivier before himself getting caught in the crossfire when Peter Hall took over. He hadn’t quite worked out that Olivier had only hired him to shut him up. Meanwhile, the diaries reveal a later life of flamboyant perversity. His devotion to the spanking of women was unwavering, as was his unerring ability to land himself, usually because of the spanking, in situations of slapstick absurdity. The damage sustained to his penis as a result of a session with a favoured spankee is one among many funny and painful bodily deteriorations he documents with morbid objectivity.
The theatrical anecdotes, meanwhile, are the best. He once reviewed the singer Frank Ifield “under the insane misapprehension that he was blind”. “I often wonder,” he muses in the diaries, “what he thought when he read the review in which I congratulated him on the gallantry with which he had overcome his handicap.”
The life was unquestionably funny and most of it was lived among the very famous. That alone could be enough to justify the constant retelling of his story. Nelson’s well-chosen diary extracts are, apart from anything else, hilarious. But is there more to be said? Well, first, the Tynan-as- cultural-midwife view has to be severely modified. He may have spotted Osborne, but he missed Pinter by a mile, condemning him as a “cool, apolitical stylist”, a judgment that, in retrospect, seems downright bizarre. Furthermore, his politics were purely cosmetic. He vaguely claimed to be a Marxist, but no such ideology is consistently detectable in his writing, his actions or his manner. And, frankly, claiming to be a Marxist is as bad as claiming to be a Nazi.
