Word: nathanisms
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...nearly two generations of Broadway producers at more than 10,000 first nights, no onstage exits were as important as the abrupt, deadpan departures of Critic George Jean Nathan from his aisle seat. If that departure came (as it did all too often) at the end of the second act, financial disaster loomed ahead. For his abrasive wit in demolishing flimflam and fraud, his impish pride in prejudice, and not least for his ability to hone a sharper line than most of the playwrights he panned, slight (5 ft. 7 in., 130 1bs.), white-thatched First Nighter Nathan...
Other U.S. critics may have made as high demands on the theater, but none has ever matched the bright, Nathanic blend of impudence and intellect, rapture and irreverence. "Art," he held, "is a beautiful, swollen lie; criticism, a cold compress." While he derided "soapbox philosophers" and "commercial uplifters," Critic Nathan preached, cajoled and bullied to carve out a niche for Eugene O'Neill, the first U.S. dramatist to achieve worldwide renown. He worked as hard to popularize such famed European playwrights as Sean O'Casey, Ferenc Molnar, and Luigi Pirandello. Says the New York Times's Drama...
...from Mushklatsch. In 1932, when a headline-hunting congressional committee warned Nathan that "dramatic criticism has destroyed the legitimate spoken drama of our country," Nathan's retort killed the projected investigation as cold as any Broadway turkey. Said he: "Dramatic criticism has made over the American drama from mushklatsch. It is necessary for dramatic criticism to show no mercy toward what still persists of the ignorant older order and to butcher it to death as quickly as possible...
Journalist Nathan's most effective weapon was not a butcher's knife but a stylist's stiletto. With malice toward some, he dubbed Noel Coward's Design for Living "a pansy paraphrase of Candida"; dismissed T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party as "bosh, sprinkled with mystic cologne." Maxwell Anderson, jeered Nathan, "enjoys all the attributes of a profound thinker save profundity." Nor did Nathan spare his fellow critics: Said he: "Impersonal criticism is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful. Show me a critic without prejudices...
...Amorous Electric Chair. Though he wore his cynicism on his sleeve, Critic Nathan was nonetheless a deep-dyed romantic. Said he: "Life, as I see it, is for the fortunate few-life with all its Chinese lanterns, lovely tunes and gay sadness." He doted on good food, elegant restaurants and fine cigars, and was so faithful a connoisseur of burlesque that he followed it from Manhattan into wistful exile in New Jersey's flea-bitten strip operas. In his seedy, cluttered hotel apartment near Times Square, Bon Vivant Nathan stored a three-year cache of champagne "in case...