Critic who provoked lovers of Broadway dead at 103
Eric Bentley, an author, playwright and theater critic who was an early champion of modern European drama in the 1940s and an unsparing antagonist of Broadway, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 103.
His son Philip confirmed the death. Bentley was among that select breed of scholar who moves easily between academic and public spheres. His criticism found its way into classroom syllabuses and general-interest magazines.
And more than dissecting others’ plays, he also wrote his own and had some success as a director. He adapted work by many of the European playwrights he prized, especially Bertolt Brecht, whom he first met in Los Angeles in 1942.
The English-born Bentley variously walked the corridors of Oxford, Harvard and Columbia, where he taught for many years with faculty colleagues like Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, literary lions in their own right.
At Columbia he became engaged in leftist campus politics during the volatile 1960s and surprised everyone when he quit — in part, he said, having divorced his second wife, to experience life as a gay man.
But it was as a critic that he made his first and most enduring impression.
The critic Ronald Bryden, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, said that Bentley’s 1946 essay collection, “The Playwright as Thinker,” “did for modern drama what Edmund Wilson in ‘Axel’s Castle’ had done for modern poetry; it established the map of a territory previously obscured by opinion and rumor.”
Bentley published one admired collection of criticism after another, among them “In Search of Theater” (1953) “What Is Theater?” (1956) and “The Life of the Drama” (1964) — “the best general book on theater I have read bar none,” the novelist Clancy Sigal wrote in The New Republic.
Bentley’s book “Bernard Shaw” (1947) prompted Shaw himself to say that he considered it the best book written about him.
As he concentrated more on his playwriting, he found his subjects in those who had rebelled against established society. He took up the causes of the left in “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958,” first produced in 1972; the astronomer Galileo in “The Recantation of Galileo Galilei: Scenes From History Perhaps” (1973); Oscar Wilde in “Lord Alfred’s Lover” (1979); the sexually inconstant in “Concord” (1982), one of a series of three plays in “The Kleist Variations”; and homosexuality in “Round Two” (1990), a variation on Schnitzler’s play “La Ronde.”
He discussed his own sexual orientation in 1987, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I generally avoid the word bisexual,” he said. “People who call themselves bisexual are being evasive. They don’t want to be regarded as homosexual — or they want to be regarded as supermen, who like to sleep with everything and everybody. Nevertheless, if one can avoid these connotations, the word would be applicable to me, because I have been married twice, and neither of the marriages was fake; neither of them was a cover for something else; they were both a genuine relationship to a woman.”
Those marriages were to Maja Tschernjakow and to Joanne Davis, a psychotherapist. His first marriage ended in divorce, his second in separation (they never divorced). In addition to Davis and his son Philip, he is survived by another son, Eric Jr., and four grandchildren.