Tynan the vulgarian should be a lesson to us all (original) (raw)

I've always admired Ken Tynan as a critic - his infectious idolatry, and the verbal zest and zeal that communicated his enthusiasm for performers like Olivier and Gielgud, Dietrich or Garbo. So I was puzzled last week to find myself so dismayed by the extracts from his Diaries, with their tawdry anecdotes about Britt Ekland's knickers or a vodka-bloated Liz Taylor and their prosecution of a fuming vendetta against roundheads like Peter Hall who despised Tynan's cavalier flashiness. Had I over-estimated him or did something go wrong with a career that began with such precocious audacity?

Tynan loved the theatre and never surrendered to the dozy habituation that overtakes most reviewers. But perhaps he loved the theatre too much. Managing to be both a Brechtian socialist and an Aquarian liberationist, he believed that plays could transform society. Unfortunately, the show he produced to test this faith was the shoddy erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!

Otherwise his contribution to the revolution consisted of saying 'fuck' for the first time on BBC television. (Oh, he also educated Princess Margaret by projecting an anthology of porn films on to a bed sheet for her benefit.) To Tynan's dismay, his young, angry contemporaries like Kingsley Amis and John Osborne aged into paranoid, intolerant blimps. His own development - or lack of it - was no less depressing; he resolved to remain youthful, which turned him into a mere trend-hound.

He made two fatal mistakes. First, he wriggled into an unwise intimacy with performers he admired, imagining they would accept him as a friend, not a fan. Orson Welles was importuned to write a preface for Tynan's teenage book about heroic acting. Tynan repaid him by trashing his performance as Othello in London in 1951, nicknaming the production Citizen Coon, and was then bemused when Welles ejected him from his dressing-room. He was flattered when Olivier made him the National Theatre's literary manager and once again reacted with naive surprise when Olivier, eased out in favour of Peter Hall, abandoned him. Blissfully obtuse, he couldn't understand why Olivier refused to subsidise him in retirement by authorising him to write a lucrative biography.

His second error was to accept that job at the National, which Olivier offered so as to neutralise him as a critic. Tynan thought his position was a guarantee of power, ensconcing him as an institutional conscience like the Brechtian figure of the Dramaturg. (Pauline Kael, equally deluded, allowed a Hollywood studio to hire her as a producer.) But his campaign to persuade Olivier to stage Rolf Hochhuth's Soldiers, which accused Churchill of war crimes, was a humiliating failure.

In his last years, he wrote showbiz profiles for the New Yorker, which enabled him to pursue his unrequited love affair with celebrity. He paid court to the sickly, bed-ridden vamp Louise Brooks (Lulu in Pabst's silent film of Wedekind's play), and valiantly maintained that the talk-show host Johnny Carson was an existential improviser, walking a tightrope every night on live television with no safety net. He seemed not to have noticed that in writing such puffery he had surrendered his critical integrity and become no more than an eagerly sycophantic publicist.

It's a sad, cautionary tale about false values, professional ethics and the degeneration of journalism in recent decades. Tynan was a great critic during his time at The Observer, and his reviews invaluably preserve the excitement of performances that would have perished if he hadn't described them. After he left, the culture decided that it had no further use for the adversary activity of criticism, expecting critics to reinvent themselves as manufacturers of glossy advertising copy. Even more ignominiously, they could supply shaming gossip about celebs they schmoozed with: Britt's scanties, Liz's tipples. Alas, Tynan now posthumously obliges.

In his book about bullfighting, he said: 'Anyone who arrives at self-knowledge through desperation is the raw material for a great play.' Succumbing to emphysema in Los Angeles, he did belatedly reach that stricken self-recognition. But by then he was living the play, not writing it or even writing about it.

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan are published on 22 October by Bloomsbury, £25