THE WORLD OF GEORGE JEAN NATHAN (389 pp.)—Edited by Charles Angoff—Knopf ($5).
Critic George Jean Nathan was once told that an angry theatrical producer had called him a pinhead. "That is on the face of it absurd," retorted Nathan. " Tin-head' is a two-syllable word." The dean of U.S. drama critics has been nipping his lip at the American theater and the people in it for 46 seasons. He has outlasted the combined Broadway runs of Abie's Irish Rose, Tobacco Road and Oklahoma!—and in continuous performance. Plays have to ring down the curtain around 11 p.m.; Nathan never does.
Nobody knows exactly how much effect Nathan has had on the American theater, but no critic has had more. He found the theater swamped in hokum and sentimentality. Today even Nathan, a hard man to please, admits that it is a much better show. Nathan has backed his bid for high dramatic standards with wit, passion, and the integrity of a porcupine. Like Shaw, he has tickled his reader's funny bone while slipping him a cultural hotfoot.
Stanley Meets Livingstone. Nathan made his debut in the sticks; he was born in Fort Wayne, Ind. in 1882. At eleven, he was already scribbling playlets for the neighborhood children to act out in the Nathan barn. In his late teens, he went east to Cornell, where he edited the school daily, won a gold medal for fencing, received his B.A. in 1904. He topped off his education with a year at the University of Bologna. His uncle, Frederic Nirdlinger. a well-known critic and playwright, got him his first job of cub reporter and third-string drama critic for the New York Herald. Three years later, in 1908, Nathan was introduced to H. L. Mencken. Stanley had met Livingstone in what both men felt to be darkest America.
In the years that followed, the magazines they co-edited (Smart Set and the American Mercury) introduced or helped to foster such notables as James Joyce, Aldous Huxley. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill. They also became trademarks of the "lost generation" along with hot jazz, bobbed hair and the hip flask. Mencken lashed out at the "booboisie" with a bull whip; the debonair Nathan was content to use a swizzle stick. In the eyes of the proper-minded, the two iconoclasts were unholy terrors. A couplet of those days went:
Mencken and Nathan and God Yes, probably, possibly, God.
With Malice Toward Some. An old
Mercury associate, Charles Angoff, has reached back over 34 years, dusted off Nathan's personal Five-Foot Shelf of writings (some 39 books) and pieced together a Nathan sampler. Sipped, The World of George Jean Nathan is a delight; swallowed, it leaves a faintly rusty taste on the palate, like water too long in the taps. With malice toward some, Nathan has his say on every subject under his sun. Examples:
¶Actors—"A ham is, simply, any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts." ¶ Critics and criticism—"Impersonal criticism . . . is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful." "Show me a critic without prejudices, and I'll show you an arrested cretin."
¶Alcohol—"I drink to make other people interesting."
¶Sex—"To the Latin, sex is an hors d'oeuvre; to the Anglo-Saxon, it is a barbecue."