The Fabulous Imp

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:

P:Actors--"A ham is, simply, any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts." P: 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."

P:Alcohol--"I drink to make other people interesting."

P:Sex--"To the Latin, sex is an hors d'oeuvre; to the Anglo-Saxon, it is a barbecue."

P:| Work--"I believe about work as I believe about drink: it should be used in moderation." P: Most modern playwrights--"[They] read and act like pulp writers crossed with

telegraph key-men."

P: Noel Coward--"[He] has nothing to

sell but his own vast personal boredom."

CJ Clifford Odets--"He uses his characters

as cuspidors at which they in turn spit

out their lines."

P:T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party--"Bosh sprinkled with mystic cologne."

To Nathan, dedicated bachelor, man & woman do not add up to two sexes but only about one and a half. "The best woman is the inferior of the second-best man." "To enjoy women at all one must manufacture an illusion and envelop them with it; otherwise they would not be endurable." As for marriage: "[It] is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery." Nonetheless Nathan remains an incurable romantic who has sought in women what he sees in art, "a reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty and the imprisoning of it in a tangible dream." Dreamiest of his many dream girls: Actresses Lillian Gish and Julie Haydon.

Tea at "21." All the world's a revolving stage for Nathan, except for Manhattan's Royalton Hotel, where-he has spent 46 years, 28 of them in the same apartment. Dimly lit as if for some perpetual cocktail hour, cascading with books which spill along the floor, Nathan's quarters look like the perfect setting for an aging matinee idol. But Nathan does not really need soft lighting. Still debonair at 70, he has only a flirting acquaintance with age.

On a typical day he is up at 8. He riffles through the morning papers but skips the political news ("terrible waste of time"), opens and answers mail, takes a walk if the weather is nice. The afternoon up to 4:30 is devoted to writing (in pencil). But, Nathan insists, "I'm not one of these frantic authors who feels a day is lost if he doesn't write his 3,000 words. It's like saying you have to run three miles a day--maybe some days you have a pain in your leg." Nathan moves on for a cup of tea or a highball at "21," then to dinner and his seat on the aisle as drama watchdog for Theatre Arts and Hearst's King Features Syndicate.

10,000 First Nights. Punctual himself, he has been known to trip late first-nighters. After some 10,000 first nights, he feels he can spot a turkey in ten minutes, rarely stays to double-check ("I couldn't punish myself that way"). With the "worst season since 1932" barely behind him, Nathan has his doubts about continuing the annual theater book roundup he began in 1943, may do a general book on the theater instead.

Biggest and slowest project he has taken on is his autobiography. "It's very hard to know what will offend people. Then there are the letters, hundreds of them, from Shaw, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy, Huneker, Dreiser, Yeats, Cabell, O'Neill. Trouble is, if a man is dead, you have to struggle with the estate. Those widows--they think every letter a man ever wrote is worth $8,000,000."

What's good about the theater today? "Its honesty," says Nathan between chain-smoking puffs. "In the earlier days, the playwrights couldn't tell the whole truth about people and characters." What's bad about it? "For one thing, the new producers. In the last few years young men have come on the scene who want to be producers. They know nothing so they put on trash. The cry is 'young blood.' Bosh, young blood has corrupted more fine things in this world. It needs to get just a bit stale." About as stale, perhaps, as George Jean Nathan, the Fabulous Invalid's fabulous imp.

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