The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan Book

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan reveals afresh the sparkling, undimmed loquacity of the man who turned theatre criticism into an art form in its own right. It is also a desperate, harrowing tale of a tormenting talent on a tragic trajectory, described by Tynan's second wife Kathleen, in her superb biography The Life of Kenneth Tynan as "electrically charged, but not earthed". Magnificently edited by John Lahr, himself a cherishable talent whose own authoritative New Yorker profiles are collected in Show and Tell, the journals cover the decade he spent in England and, latterly, California from 1971 to 1980, when he was buoyed up by commercial success of his sex revue, Oh! Calcutta, yet could not secure funding for a proposed movie project. A self-styled ergophobe, in writing with a stammerer's eloquence of his blockage, he still failed to budge it, and so occupied himself with starry socialising, political rumination, and the well-turned sentence. He describes his complicated relationship with Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, where he worked as dramaturg; he recounts inadvertently watching explicit pornography in the presence of Princess Margaret, the moment saved only by Peter Cook's ad-libbed funny-voice commentary; and he relishes the discovery that his career as a national critic had been initiated entirely due to a mistaken identity. Most affecting, though, are his appreciation of performers, always preferred by Tynan to the words themselves. Phil Silvers performing after a stroke, the vaudevillian genius of Max Wall, and the charm of Jacques Tati are all fulsomely described, and with commensurate flair.And then there's the sex. As Tynan's health deteriorated (hereditary emphysema, exacerbated by heavy smoking), his anally-fixated sado-masochistic sexual demands, already related in his first wife Elaine Dundy's autobiography, Life Itself!, increased, as did his preoccupation with death. In truth, the diaries were his Green Room, a rehearsal space for the aphoristic nuggets with which he studded his public writing. Too intellectually uptight, perhaps, to be an artist, Tynan's tragedy was to realise this, and these gilded, chastening diaries allow us a voyeuristic, thrilling glimpse at the ever-absorptive reflection of this grand, inconsolable narcissist. --David VincentRead More