Critic's Notebook; Clurman on the Theater, With Sweep and Passion: Biography

Naturally, [Harold Clurman] had blind spots. Although he had a fondness for vaudeville and in particular for the Marx Brothers ("absolute idiocy" as a "deliberate style"), his reviews of Broadway musicals were at least several beats less enthusiastic than those of other critics, as was the case with his response to "Brigadoon," "Kiss Me Kate," "West Side Story" and "Fiddler on the Roof." About "Carousel," he said, "I am certainly not its best audience since songs that go 'This was a real nice clam bake' fail to melt me." As a critic in the contemporary theater, Clurman was always forward looking, even when a playwright's philosophy was different from his, as was the case with Samuel Beckett. He was an early champion of Edward Albee and an artful analyzer of Bertolt Brecht, whom he called a "kind of Gothic primitive, in whom a rude simplicity is coupled with a shrewd mentality." He could be instructive to other critics, as in his suggestion that they might "mistake a play's materials for its meaning." This was, he said, "as if an art critic were to say that Cezanne's painting is about apples." An enemy of the snap judgment, he resolutely took a longer view. He was extremely reluctant to use the word great, reserving it for masterpieces like "King Lear." "The Collected Works" intentionally omits excerpts from several of his books, including "The Fervent Years" (his definitive history of the Group Theater), while finding room for discoveries: the diary of his trip to the Soviet Union in 1935, an account of a revealing visit to Charles Chaplin in Switzerland and a dialogue with Louis Sheaffer. In that wide-ranging conversation, he recalls that at 19 he cut a class at Columbia University to go to the first performance of Eugene O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon." As the "first successful attempt to write an American tragedy," it was, he said, "the most important moment in the American theater."