Lynch the Critics!

A Severe Overhauling of the Play-Reviewing Profession With Some Rules for Critics Yet Unborn

JOHN DOS PASSOS

§1

A NEW Playwright's Dream:—There is a sound of revelry by night and Belgium's fairest... It is the one night in the year when there's not a single new show opening on Broadway, and at the Round Table the sauerkraut juice flows freely (too freely, alas). The drama critics of New York are assembled for their well-known annual outing. The orgy is at its height. Every man has his stenographer on his knee, and in the heady drink they toast the great successes they have made and celebrated in the last season: In Old Kentucky, Lights of London, The Lady of Lyons, The Fatal Wedding, all milestones in the advance of the modern theatre to bigger, better and brighter things. At the end of the room the wilder spirits are singing their national anthem: The Anvil Chorus.

But whist! In the street outside hooded figures skulk and lurk. When the cop passes and repasses on the beat, singing happily to himself to keep from crying, the desperadoes hide in the dark doorways and abandoned basements along Forty-fifth Street. When he has gone they gather again and cluster round the door. They wear black masks and false whiskers and are desperate men, no sound comes from them but the occasional grind of tooth on tooth, the clenching of a fist, an oath gargled between the tonsils . . . What are they waiting for? Too soon alas we shall know. A critic, seeking in the cool air a moment's surcease from the madding feast takes a step out from the swinging doors of the Algonquin. Beware—devoted man! 'Tis too late. Before his lips can form the wo^rds "Jack Robinson", a cloak has been thrown over his head; gagged, bound, trussed and spitted like a filet mignon he has been laid in a bootlegger's truck that stands idly by. Suffice it to say that when Jocund Dawn comes tiptoeing across the Williamsburg Bridge there is not a critic alive in all Manhattan except Percy Hammond who had fallen asleep in his chair.

AT dawn David Belasco rode up Fifth Avenue on a white horse calling out the members of the Dramatists' Guild, who met at noon in the College Room at Roxy's, were served Beechnut Coffee (advt.) and discussed the emergency. What no critics! cried Augustus Thomas jumping on a table and tossing back his mane of snow-white hair. How can you have openings without critics? And without openings how will they be able to tell the new plays from the old ones? At last the proposition was put to the vote in the form of: If not critics, what? The Ayes had it by 432 3/4 to 17 7/8. And then the Young Man Who-Had-Come-to New-York-in-Search-of-Fame-with-a-MS-in-HisGladstone and whose little opus, put on after six years of delays, advances, sale and resale to this manager and that, collaborations, playdoctorings, rehearsals begun and discontinued, backers found and lost, angels brought to the water but never quite made to drink, whose play the critics had panned in concert, and with raspberries, the day before, woke up and lo! it was a dream.

§2

If Not Critics—What?:—This past winter not only the Young-Man-Whobut many of those riper in the theatre racket and even the venerable George M. Cohan himself have been complaining of the critics. The general impression is that they've been getting too canary. The critics are too damn critical, managers complain. They toss the new shows round with too much levity, forgetful of the very respectable investment that there is in a new show; if they saw the investment in cash in a glass case they'd treat it more respectfully. The authors involved point out wistfully that these new shows are their flesh and blood, and that if the critics could write plays they wouldn't be critics. The actors complain as usual that any girl with It can put it all over them. In fact, managers, authors and actors are tending to join in a movement to suppress and eradicate criticism at all cost, even if a constitutional amendment has to be passed to prohibit it. Why couldn't the newspapers give just a summary of the new plays, is the cry, just a rosy summary, and let the public judge for itself.

New York is famous for its lack of interest in ideas.

BUT in this rosy Zion of milk and honey where critics did not corrupt nor knockers break in and cry "Flop", the theatre would pine away and die of interest. Ideas, their discussion and ructions, is what the theatre lives on, even in this day of Clean Entertainment that any father would take his daughter to see. And to have a good free-for-all discussion there's got to be somebody to fling the first stone. The professional critic is the man who flings the first stone; he's a necessary evil like plumbing or the police, and without him the theatre would languish and die, and besides where would the publicity men get their blurbs?

New York may not be interested in ideas but blurbs are its meat and drink.

Q. E. D. We must have critics and critical critics.

§3

The Seven Lamps of Criticism:—All right, all you lovers of definitions, what do you mean by critic? Well, a critic would be a man with a standard to measure things by, or else a man with an exceptionally fine palate like a coffee-taster or a man with an historical sense or a man with a nose for news in his particular line or a man with a chip on his shoulder, if the chip were hefty enough to be worth while, or a man who had a philosophical axe to grind, or a man who was just naturally fond of and curious about the theatre. For any of these it would have to be somebody to whom the theatre means more than a way of inveigling the time between eight-thirty and eleven in the evening.

Maybe some of the complaints about the present run of theatre critics is that they are all people to whom the theatre means just that—light entertainment between dinner and a late party; naturally when they go every night the light entertainment ceases to be entertaining and they get embittered.

The first requirements of the 1929 supercritic will be a strong stomach and a strong constitution, because the sheer physical task of going to and coughing up ideas and a column of print at all the openings in a New York season is enough to tax an infant Hercules. Then, instead of the vague hanker to see a "good" play, he'll have to have an inkling of self-knowledge so as to be able to explain clearly what he is really after. Because, after all, if you pay money to go to a show, and sit there, it must be for some other reason than merely to pass the time. The time'd pass eventually if you stayed home, and you wouldn't have the effort and expense. The 1929 model super-critic will have to write about plays as seriously and unashamedly as the sports writers write about sports or "financial experts" make their reports on the rallies and relapses of the market.

THE most curious thing about the life of the arts and intellectual pursuits generally in America is the spasmodic, discontinuous quality everything has. The American public has a monkeylike inability to keep its attention fixed on any one thing. Movements and individuals flare up fitfully, and give great promise and are acclaimed by the watchers on the housetops with tremendous ballyhooing, and then suddenly, just as they are about to settle down to business, they fade out without anybody to inquire why or whither. The function of a critic would be to remember what goes on in the theatre from season to season, and to try to piece it all together into some sort of historical sequence, not forgetting that the life of a people is all one piece, and that a people's entertainments are linked with their work and how they make their money and the intensity of their position in the social conflicts of the time and with the general economic and emotional currents of history. You'll say this is too difficult, that the social currents of our time are too complicated for one mind to grasp. The great organizers of industry like Ford are able to do just that in their own particular lines. What I am asking is that some first-rate man take up the game of dramatic criticism. Perhaps it is too much to ask.

§4

Inferiority Complex:—There's one way in which it might be possible to get criticism without going to the trouble and expense of creating the super-critic at all. That would be to cultivate and improve the present run of critics, to cure them of their inferiority complex by feeding them liver or having them psychoanalysed, and send them back to their fourth row seats after a stiff course in Freud or perhaps a half year with Baker. The thing is that in these United States the intellectual worker has such a hard time explaining himself to the folks back home. It's bad enough for "creative" writers. The only excuse is that sometimes there's money in the great American play or the great American novel. So that a writer at present almost occupies the same social position as a bond-salesman or a real-estate agent. There's always a chance that he may win the Pulitzer prize or strike oil in some other way. But imagine writing home and saying that you were studying to be a critic and getting the monthly remittance in return. It's obvious to the folks at home and everybody else that there can't be much money in it ever. Criticism is one of those jobs like schoolteaching, that you do while you're waiting for your ship to come home. Unfortunately, even under Coolidge prosperity, the great majority of ships never sight Ambrose Light. So, embittered, the might-have-beens remain critics, never forgetting down underneath that they are botched writers of the Great American Play or the Great American Novel. Hence the critical inferiority complex.

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How can it be cured? By creating such a public demand for sound violent conscious criticism that when a young man writes home to the folks that he's decided to be a critic, they can tell the neighbors about it without shame.

§5

The Nigger in the Woodpile:— Throw away your hammer and buy a horn, was the cry of the unfortunately much defeated Big Bill the Builder in Chicago. And then he would go on to analyse the sinister un-American motives behind all knocking. He's not far wrong; when you reach for your typewriter and start phrasing an indictment of something, there's usually a nigger in the woodpile somewhere. Abstract truth is a rare, unloved bird. In asking for new, bigger, better and brighter critics I suppose I'm only asking for critics that will feed sugar to my own personal hobby-horse. But it needs sugar, damn it. There ought to be critics for every tendency in current thought. A critic ought to be a spokesman and a propagandist. The current batch are not even propagandists for their own ideas; outside of a vague social exclusiveness, somehow connected with the forties and fifties, they have no direction at all. Stark Young and George Jean Nathan are the only exceptions I can think of. Then there's H. T. P. in Boston. Stark Young has a coffee-taster's palate and Nathan has a philosophy, to me very objectionable, but it's at least something you can talk back at. And H. T. P. has an old-fashioned liking for the stage. According to the creaky economics of the nineteenth century, a demand was supposed to create a supply. The New York stage has needed a critic ever since the last old fogy who remembered Booth curled up in the Players Club and died.

Well, here's the nigger in my woodpile: the critic I'd like to see would have a taste for the theatre and a taste for the fantastic machine age we live in, he'd know more about America than about the speakeasies in the forties and fifties that are the centre of New York provincialism, he would look at the social pyramid from its base rather than from its cornices, his politics and passions would be those of the under dog instead of those of the doorman of Park Avenue apartments, he'd feel that his daily drudgery was helping to build something that was important to him. Even if he did not like plays like The International and Him he'd be able to cope with them without peevishness. And . . . and he'd be fired by every paper in New York after his first review.