John Lair: The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Given that the history of literature is littered with scraps and ashes of paper from diaries and letters shredded or burned by too zealous keepers of the literary reputation, you cannot, in all conscience, wish that Kenneth Tynan's diaries had met the same fate.

You might wish, though, that they had been stored safely in a place accessible to future biographers, and not published to serve, as they surely will for many, as an introduction to a once-brilliant theatre critic here turned silly and sniping and who will go down in history for his abiding interest in bums and spanking.

Tynan was the Observer's theatre critic between 1950 and 1963. But he was much more than that stark statement implies (he seemed, too, to throw a longer shadow of influence over British theatre than 13 years in the role might merit).

They don't make theatre critics like Tynan any more. Perhaps they never did.

Because Tynan invented Tynan - and nobody played him as well. He understood performance, and the role of the critic in it, in a way that few have managed since.

For Tynan, writes John Lahr in his introduction, "writing was a hedge against loss, a way of keeping the consoling dramatic pleasures alive inside himself by making them live for others".

That generosity of spirit, seldom acknowledged by practitioners of the theatre, is what makes a good critic flash, so that a performance may be seen again - through the critic's eyes, in print - as though it is the reflection of light caught in mirrors.

He writes of Richard Burton's Henry IV, "In battle, Burton's voice cuts urgent and keen - always likeable, always inaccessible."

Of Katharine Hepburn that she is "wide open yet without breaches in her armour. It is the paradox which makes stars."

Not that you will find much of Tynan the critic in these pages. He left the Observer to become in-house critic and to help plan the seasons at Sir Laurence Olivier's newly founded National Theatre. "God," wrote Olivier, who Tynan had slammed in 1962 for his Chichester Festival Theatre season, "anything to get you off that Observer."

He was at the National until 1973; the diaries cover the years (and the tiffs at the National) from 1971 to January 1980. Tynan died at the age of 53 in July of that year.

He died of emphysema; it is a rare photograph that shows the foppish Tynan without a fag in his hand. The years after the National were the years in the wilderness. He wrote the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! (Or, "Oh! How Couldya?"), and accepted a series of profile-writing commissions from the New Yorker.

But really the diaries are the writings of a man who could no longer write: towards the end he could no longer smoke and he could not write without smoking.

It is that - and the banal ditties - that make the diaries such a depressing read. The spanking, which he could not persuade his wife to partake in, is merely dreary. I doubt even Tynan writing at the height of his powers could write anything really thrilling about a bum hole.

In 1975 he writes, of a David Hare play Fanshen, that the theatre was only half full. "If I were a critic today, I would guarantee to have it packed." It is a sad line in a series of bad lines: Tynan knew what power he had wielded as a critic; he was also too good a critic of himself to know that there was to be no revival.

Two months later he records that "the critic's job is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad. Antonioni [Tynan is here writing about the Italian film director's The Passenger] is at present blocking the street. He almost makes me wish I were back at work bulldozing." He writes of a young fan approaching him in the street to thank him for what he's doing. There is an awkward pause before the question: "Er, what, er what are you doing?"

What he was doing was dying. Railing against dying, to be sure, but dying nevertheless. His health was gone, he had no money, and no idea what to do with himself. He writes: "I used to have a sign by my desk: 'Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy.' But I am no longer any of these things, except melancholy."

The diaries are, except in sadly meagre portions of that flashing wit, seldom any of these things, except melancholy.

"A sham necklace of bitter brevities or false, hollow eulogy will not do for criticism," Tynan once wrote.

Nor will these diaries and all their bitter brevities do as anything other than hollow eulogy for Tynan.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features journalist.

* Bloomsbury $79.95