WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

Kenneth Tynan Is Keen Observer

A few weeks ago on the BBC, no less, an unmentionable word was mentioned by, no less, the literary manager of England's National Theatre; and, once again, Mr. Kenneth Tynan was in the news.

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He has been newsworthy for a good many years in dramatic circles because he is if not a firstrate critic (he is impeded from being that by his world-view, which is materialist and egoistic), at least a very, very good one, in that he is a shrewd observer and expert verbalizer who disposes of a pyrotechnical vocabulary and abundant wit, and is therefore fun to read whatever one thinks of him, drama, or, indeed, the universe itself.

WILLIAM F. SUCKLEY, JR.

He is extremely interesting to theaterfolk because of his exemplary technical skills as a critic; but it is, alas, not these but other exhibitions which have caused him to become an international figure, recognized as such by the New York Times Sunday magazine which has devoted an admir⚫ing spread to him triggered-oh sweetest of ironies-precisely by the commotion that resulted from his violation of a tabu for the maintenance of which the New York Times would go to the electric chair.

MR. TYNAN IS INTERESTING to us ordinary folks, we learn, because of his freewheeling iconoclasm and because he is, thereby, a part of that wave of the future which good gray editors dutifully cover on the grounds that in due course it must inundate us all, and we may as well be good sports about it when the time comes.

The philosophy of Kenneth Tynan is not by any means original, although he depicts it refreshingly in his quite ungovernable effluvia, most of them published in this coun-

try in the cleavages of Playboy magazine. It is the usual kind of business. Man is born to enjoy himself. The acutest pleasures in life are cultural and sexual, or maybe sexual and cultural, From the time he was a schoolboy, Tynan was on to the instant scandalvalue of manifestoes in favor of sexual permissiveness, and it is recorded that he resigned as an independent candidate for a school election when the headmaster denied him permission to make his stand in favor of free homosexuality. Unlike some of his friends and admirers, he is not himself a practitioner of the freedom he advocates, but he finds it a constant source of amusement to toy with the subject.

A FEW YEARS AGO he wrote a piece for the highbrow English periodical, Encounter, in which he took great delight, a delight he apparently believed was communicable to his reader's, in recounting an episode with a tailor whom he visited to hire a costume for the annual affair given by the lord mayor of London, and before whom he declined to undress on the grounds that he (Tynan) was a homosexual. That, believe it or not, was the punch line of his long essay, which suggests that as a critic he has his own second act problems.

In the United States he made great publicity for himself a few years ago by signing the Fair Play for Cuba Committee's manifesto to the effect that we were being beastly towards Fidel Castro, and then writing a whimpering piece of self-pity when Sen. Dodd of the Internal Security Subcommittee had the nerve to question him as to his knowledge of where the funds were collected to pay for the publication of the manifesto.

IN ENGLAND he lives contentedly among the literati, available to all interesting people, save only for his reservation, that he "couldn't be friendly with a convinced Tory... all the people I know and like are liberal or Socialist."