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Before reading Thomas Connolly's book I knew of George Jean Nathan as a theatre critic who had championed Eugene O'Neill and for whom a drama critics award is named. Having read the book I see that the little I knew was sadly sufficient. Once an arbiter of taste for the entire nation, Nathan left little in the way of a lasting artistic legacy.
Connolly calls Nathan (1882-1958), "the first modern American drama critic" (13), who rescued the profession from the "two sorts of drama critics: anonymous puffsters and scholarly genteel types" (47) writing at the time he began his career in 1905. Through his half century career, reviewing first for the New York Herald, and then, with H. L. Mencken, as co-editor of The Smart Set (1914-24), and most famously with Mencken at the American Mercury (1923-32), which they cofounded, and later still at The American Spectator, Newsweek, and Esquire, Nathan became the most widely read theatre critic in the nation. In addition to his magazine and newspaper work he penned 34 books of theatre criticism and theory.
In contrast to the previous generation's gentility and its emphasis on the actors as stars, Nathan cultivated "destructive criticism" and concentrated on the playwrights and their scripts. And he became as much a public personality as any of the theatre people he wrote about. Connolly describes him as "elegantly dressed, escorting a fetching ingenue toward two-on-the aisle, row E seats; midnight suppers at the Stork Club" (13). His cigarette holder stuck at a jaunty angle, his walking stick in hand, Nathan visited "21" daily and bedded chorus girls and actresses like Lillian Gish and Julie Haydon. So well known was this cultivated persona that Nathan-inspired characters of the acerbic wit about town appeared on film: as Addison De Witt in "All About Eve" and J.J. Hunsecker in "Sweet Smell of Success". By 1924 Nathan was the best known and highest paid drama critic in the world.
Remembered today for championing the early and struggling careers of playwrights O'Neill, Sean O'Casey, and William Saroyan, Connolly is correct to write that Nathan's "legacy is not as important as his contemporary success." (17). This is true because Nathan lacked any aesthetic creed or vision of the theatre. Nathan knew what he liked and he could write intelligently and entertainingly from a wide store of theatre knowledge but, as Connolly admits: "Nathan's critical method is difficult to describe because it is essentially amorphous" (99).
Nathan's prejudices at times outran his critical faculties. He wrote "to argue that [the actor] is an artist is to corrupt the concept of the word artist with half-meanings"( 94). He showed no sympathy for the Group Theater or the Federal Theatre Project, dismissed committed left-wing playwrights like John Howard Lawson and Clifford Odets as "little red writing hoods" (14 ), opposed the work of Bertolt Brecht, and called Beckett's Waiting for Godot: "the little play that wasn't there" 137).
Nathan, the man, hardly comes across as sympathetic today either. An egoist in most things, he was so ashamed of his Jewish origins that he hid the truth from his friends and biographer. His defining personal motto "Be indifferent" translated as moral monstrosity in the foreword he write to his book, The World in False Face: "If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after it would not matter to me in the least" (96).
Simultaneously, Nathan undermined the vocation he claimed to cherish by using his power in self-serving and unethical ways. Overstepping his bounds as critic, Nathan read unproduced plays, suggested, and sometimes insisted upon, revisions to their authors and then passed these on to producers with his personal endorsement. He lobbied directors to cast certain actresses, with whom he might be keeping company, for plum roles. Connolly cites specifically the case of the actress Julie Haydon, whom Nathan married after a fourteen year affair. Nathan convinced William Saroyan to choose Haydon rather than Lillian Gish, who had broken off an earlier and long running affair with him, as Kitty Duval in the original cast of The Time of Your Life. He repeated this maneuver with Tennessee Williams, who had written the role of Laura in The Glass Menagerie with Gish in mind. Haydon got the part.
Walter Lippmann's judgment upon Nathan, written for Vanity Fair in 1928, stands the test of time: " ....he has created a character called George Jean Nathan that is as interesting as any I have ever seen...a sort of gourmet with dyspepsia.... He is not a man of the world, but at least a man of his own world. " (97).
Connolly succeeds in bringing alive this conflicted man and his interesting times. The book, however, may be faulted on two counts. By quoting widely from Nathan's books but very little from his magazine and newspaper reviews of particular productions, Connolly makes it difficult for us to make up our own minds as to his subject's skills and insight. Also, by hewing closely to the outline of his original dissertation, Connolly has produced chapters that both repeat information contained earlier and jump back and forth both thematically and chronologically.
