The Prejudiced Palate

To nearly two generations of Broadway producers at more than 10,000 first nights, no onstage exits were as important as the abrupt, deadpan departures of Critic George Jean Nathan from his aisle seat. If that departure came (as it did all too often) at the end of the second act, financial disaster loomed ahead. For his abrasive wit in demolishing flimflam and fraud, his impish pride in prejudice, and not least for his ability to hone a sharper line than most of the playwrights he panned, slight (5 ft. 7 in., 130 1bs.), white-thatched First Nighter Nathan was one of Broadway's most feared and lonely figures. In a rain of newspaper columns, magazine articles and books, he aimed his dyspeptic darts at every sobersided target from Hollywood to Herbert Hoover. Yet when Critic Nathan made his final exit last week at 76, the U.S. theater mourned the death (of arteriosclerosis) of its doughtiest champion.

Other U.S. critics may have made as high demands on the theater, but none has ever matched the bright, Nathanic blend of impudence and intellect, rapture and irreverence. "Art," he held, "is a beautiful, swollen lie; criticism, a cold compress." While he derided "soapbox philosophers" and "commercial uplifters," Critic Nathan preached, cajoled and bullied to carve out a niche for Eugene O'Neill, the first U.S. dramatist to achieve worldwide renown. He worked as hard to popularize such famed European playwrights as Sean O'Casey, Ferenc Molnar, and Luigi Pirandello. Says the New York Times's Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson: "Nathan had as profound an influence on the American theater as George Bernard Shaw on English theater."

Up from Mushklatsch. In 1932, when a headline-hunting congressional committee warned Nathan that "dramatic criticism has destroyed the legitimate spoken drama of our country," Nathan's retort killed the projected investigation as cold as any Broadway turkey. Said he: "Dramatic criticism has made over the American drama from mushklatsch. It is necessary for dramatic criticism to show no mercy toward what still persists of the ignorant older order and to butcher it to death as quickly as possible."

Journalist Nathan's most effective weapon was not a butcher's knife but a stylist's stiletto. With malice toward some, he dubbed Noel Coward's Design for Living "a pansy paraphrase of Candida"; dismissed T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party as "bosh, sprinkled with mystic cologne." Maxwell Anderson, jeered Nathan, "enjoys all the attributes of a profound thinker save profundity." Nor did Nathan spare his fellow critics: Said he: "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."

The Amorous Electric Chair. Though he wore his cynicism on his sleeve, Critic Nathan was nonetheless a deep-dyed romantic. Said he: "Life, as I see it, is for the fortunate few--life with all its Chinese lanterns, lovely tunes and gay sadness." He doted on good food, elegant restaurants and fine cigars, and was so faithful a connoisseur of burlesque that he followed it from Manhattan into wistful exile in New Jersey's flea-bitten strip operas. In his seedy, cluttered hotel apartment near Times Square, Bon Vivant Nathan stored a three-year cache of champagne "in case of siege." In and out of print he loved nothing better than a pretty girl--and feared nothing worse than being married to one. In 1955, after a 17-year courtship, he married Actress Julie Haydon and with stoic good cheer settled back for three happy years in what he had called "the amorous electric chair."

Son of a French lawyer who settled in Indiana, George Jean Nathan chose Cornell as the U.S. college "most like a European university," got his first job on the old New York Herald. In 1908, over double drinks in a Manhattan bar, he struck up a partnership with Henry Louis Mencken* that was to last through two decades and make Nathan's byline famed on Main Street as well as on Broadway. Together they became the scorpion-tossing twins of Jazz Age journalism. On Nathan's Smart Set (1914-23), Mencken's old American Mercury (1924-33), and the short-lived American Spectator (1932-35), the slim, elegant Nathan and hulking, tousled Mencken battered at boneheads and "dingdoodles" (Nathan's pet epithet for self-satisfied know-nothings). When Mencken died two years ago, his meat ax seemed as anachronistic as a halberd. But Critic Nathan--though the day had passed when he could kill a play with a quip--remained an acute and acidulous observer of the theater whose only visible sign of mellowing was his decision last year to enter the Roman Catholic Church.

Nathan had always written his reviews --and 40 books--in longhand; when arteriosclerosis cramped his right hand in 1956, he quit his longtime (13 years) job as drama columnist for Hearst's King Features Syndicate. He dictated his memoirs for Esquire, and last month, in a piece prepared for Theatre Arts magazine's June issue, had his last, impish say on the state of the American theater. "It seems," wrote he, "that we still have with us the volunteer embalmers who are yapping that the theater is dead. The theater will live as long as there is one pretty girl left on its stages." For Critic Nathan, the Chinese lanterns were still blazing.

*Though a contemporary dittyist added a third member:

Mencken and Nathan and God,

Yes, probably, possibly, God.

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