Volume 27, Number 3 · March 6, 1980
Lightly Toasted
By James Wolcott
Show People: Profiles in Entertainment
by Kenneth Tynan
Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., $11.95
Laughter, soft light, the rustle of napkins: Kenneth Tynan's collection of New Yorker profile-essays is a posh affair, a cork-popping evening spent in the company of the famous and the famously forgotten. In a perplexing foreword, Tynan says that in recent years 'essay' has become an odious world. in certain corners of the lit-crit world. 'Many critics maintain that the essay is an inferior form; and many publishers believe that modern readers care only for long-distance, marathon writing….' If these experts are correct, Tynan muses, then Montaigne must be given the heave-ho. 'To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written.'
Review, 2408 words
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