Dear Time-Reader

"One trouble with criticism in this age," says TIME Drama Critic Louis Kronenberger, "is that there's so much concern about 'the function of the critic.' The minute a critic decides what his duty is, he is apt to stop living up to it. Criticism after all is a way of exercising the mind."

Critic Kronenberger has been enjoying such exercise for the past 14 years. His interest in the theater goes back much farther--to his teen-age days in Cincinnati. The theaters there hired high-school students as ushers, paid them by letting them see the show. By working once a week, Usher Kronenberger got to see all the plays that came to Cincinnati. A few years later he arrived in New York City and began seeing every show he could.

Kronenberger had never reviewed a play before he became TIME's critic in 1938. But he had written many book reviews, and decided there wasn't much difference between one type of critic and another. He says: "All criticism is pretty much alike in this: you go in and say what you think. A good critic, to use Max Beerbohm's definition, is simply a cultivated man with brains and a temperament. Temperament includes both tastes and prejudices; a critic who didn't have them would be just a machine."

Kronenberger rarely takes notes during a performance, but occasionally jots down some lines he may want to use in his review. Writing in the dark, he finds, has its pitfalls, such as writing one line on top of another. Kronenberger always writes his first draft of a review in longhand, explains: "Writing in longhand works out better for the succinctness of the review. The typewriter either goes too fast or writes too much."

The chief difference between writing criticism for TIME and for other publications, he believes, springs from the anonymity of the writer. "In a signed review," he says, "the personal intrusions soften the tone. Everything in TIME is sharper and more emphatic." Even so, he says, every critic is human, and brings to the theater his own preferences and dislikes. Some don't like mystery stories, for instance. Kronenberger does. But he dislikes "what is sometimes called 'theater'--the spectacle with no meat on its bones. Generally speaking, the important thing in a play is what you hear, not what you see. It has to be written before it can be produced. I'm interested in production, but I don't think that the tail should wag the dog."

Kronenberger deplores the use of "big adjectives on small things," says: "When Olivier's Oedipus comes along, you're glad you can use a big adjective, or a series of big adjectives. And you're thankful that you didn't use up all the big ones three weeks before on a little suburban drama."

The seasonal nature of a theater critic's work fits in well with Kronenberger's design for living, because it gives him time to write his own books during the summer months. He has written and sold three plays, although none has yet been produced. His books include a number of anthologies (mostly on his favorite century, the 18th), a social and cultural history, Kings & Desperate Men (TIME, April 13, 1942), and two novels, The Grand Manner and Grand Right and Left (TIME, Feb. 25). The last was a whimsical comedy about "the richest man in the world," who was consumed by a passion for collecting rare art objects and expensive bric-a-brac (examples: an inland sea, a buffer state, marble staircases), wound up collecting the rarest prizes of all--a gallery of living men and women. Kronenberger says that he got the staircase idea at a party where he met a lady who had just been to an auction with a friend. The friend had bought several items, including a marble ceiling from an Italian villa. Asked what she would do with it, the friend replied: "Oh, one can always use an extra ceiling."

This week Alfred A. Knopf is publishing Kronenberger's newest book, The Thread of Laughter, a study of leading English writers of comedy for the stage, from Ben Jonson to Somerset Maugham. It is based on lectures Kronenberger gave at Columbia and Brandeis. And he is currently working against a spring deadline on another new book, which will deal with "the domestic manners of the American--looking at life around you in a reasonably serious way."

Cordially yours,

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