The New York Times - USA (2020-08-07)

A24 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESFRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020

Eric Bentley, an influential the-
ater critic — as well as a scholar,
author and playwright — who was
an early champion of modern Eu-
ropean drama and an unsparing
antagonist of Broadway, died on
Wednesday at his home in Man-
hattan. He was 103.
His son Philip confirmed the
death.
Mr. Bentley was among that se-
lect breed of scholar who moves
easily between academic and pub-
lic spheres. His criticism found its
way into classroom syllabuses
and general-interest magazines.
And more than dissecting oth-
ers’ plays, he also wrote his own
and had some success as a direc-
tor. 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 Mr. 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, liter-
ary lions in their own right.
At Columbia he became en-
gaged in leftist campus politics
during the volatile 1960s and sur-
prised everyone when he quit — in
part, he said, to experience life as
a gay man, having divorced his
second wife.
But it was as a critic that he
made his first and most enduring
impression.
The critic Ronald Bryden, writ-
ing in The New York Times Book
Review in 1987, said that Mr. Bent-
ley’s 1946 essay collection, “The
Playwright as Thinker,” “did for
modern drama what Edmund Wil-
son in ‘Axel’s Castle’ had done for
modern poetry; it established the
map of a territory previously ob-
scured by opinion and rumor.”
Mr. Bentley published one ad-
mired collection of criticism after
another, among them “In Search
of Theater” (1953) “What Is The-
ater?” (1956) and “The Life of the
Drama” (1964) — “the best gen-
eral book on theater I have read
bar none,” the novelist Clancy Si-
gal wrote in The New Republic.
Mr. Bentley’s book “Bernard
Shaw” (1947) prompted Shaw
himself to say that he considered
it the best book written about him.
Mr. Bentley argued that the
great serious drama of the mod-
ern era had been written in Eu-
rope. He pointed to the operas of
Wagner and the plays of Ibsen,
Strindberg, Chekhov, García
Lorca, Synge and Pirandello as
well as Shaw. And great drama
was still being written, he said in
the 1940s, referring to Brecht,
Jean-Paul Sartre and Sean
O’Casey.
“Experimentalism in the arts
always reflects historical condi-
tions, always indicates profound
dissatisfaction with established
modes, always is a groping toward
a new age,” he wrote in “The Play-
wright as Thinker.”
Mr. Bentley discerned a new
naturalism in the modern voice.
“What is it we notice if we pick up
a modern play after reading
Shakespeare or the Greeks? Nine
times out of ten it is the dryness,”
he wrote, distinguishing that from
dullness — “the sheer modesty of
the language, the sheer lack of
winged words, even of eloquence.”
Mr. Bentley was less enthusias-
tic about American playwrights —

even, at first, Eugene O’Neill. “Where Wedekind seems silly and turns out on further inspection to be profound,” Mr. Bentley wrote of the German playwright Frank Wedekind in the notes to “The Playwright as Thinker,” “O’Neill seems profound and turns out on further inspection to be silly.” As for commercialized Broad- way, he judged it to be anathema to artistic theater, a view many readers regarded as tantamount to an attack on American culture. “Condescending and misan- thropic,” Cue magazine said. The drama critic Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Herald

Tribune Book Review, said that “Mr. Bentley does not believe in a popular theater” and feels that “the audience is incapable of valid judgment in aesthetic matters.” Broadway’s defenders re- minded Mr. Bentley that Sopho- cles, Shakespeare and Shaw had, above all, been popular. To which Mr. Bentley rejoined, “To be popular in an aristocratic culture, like ancient Greece or Elizabethan England, is quite a different mat- ter from being popular in a middle-class culture.” He eventually became more fa- vorably inclined toward American dramatists, but he never let up in his goading of American theater- goers to pay more attention to Eu- ropeans like Brecht. For a time he even wore his hair in bangs like Brecht. While at Columbia Mr. Bentley turned out a twin series of anthol- ogies, “The Classic Theatre” and “From the Modern Repertoire,” which became standard reading in drama curriculums. In the turmoil of the 1960s, he was a founder of the DMZ, a caba- ret devoted to political and social satire whose subjects included the war in Vietnam, and he criticized Columbia’s handling of student political demonstrations on campus. In 1969 he quit his teaching post, shocking his friends and colleagues. Many thought he had done so in protest, but he later said that he had simply realized that he wanted to be a playwright. “I always dreamed myself the author when I translated,” he said. There were also personal rea- sons for resigning. He had decided to leave his second wife and live openly as a gay man, he said, and he thought his Columbia colleagues would not have tolerated that. Around the time he began mov- ing away from academia, the theater reporter Pat O’Haire of The Daily News depicted him in his 12- room Riverside Drive apartment, its walls and shelves dense with theater memorabilia: “Away from campus, or the con- fines of teaching, Bentley can only be described as a sort of combina- tion establishment-guerrilla,” she wrote. “He goes barefoot and wears jeans, but his shirt, though colorful, is a traditional Brooks Brothers button-down. His hair is long and flecked with gray; he wears a beard that is neatly trimmed in a Captain Ahab style, with the upper lip shaved. It seems as if he is straddling two worlds.”

Eric Russell Bentley was born Sept. 14, 1916, in Bolton, a northern industrial town in Lancashire, England, to Fred and Laura Bent- ley. His father was a respected lo- cal businessman. His mother had wanted Eric to become a Baptist missionary. Mr. Bentley was a scholarship student at the prestigious Bolton School, where he studied the pi- ano. He then went to Oxford on a history scholarship; C.S. Lewis was one of his teachers. Yet as a merchant-class student sur- rounded by upper-class swells, he felt out of place. Shaw became an early hero, Mr. Bentley told The Times in 2006, because he seemed to be a fellow outsider. “ ‘Pygmalion’ is a great classic in my book because it’s an Irishman’s recognition of the ba- sics of class-ridden Britain,” he said. He emigrated to the United States after receiving his bache- lor’s degree from Oxford in 1938 (he was naturalized in 1948) and received a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale in 1941. On the strength of his early books, Mr. Bentley was appointed in 1952 to succeed Harold Clur- man as drama critic for The New Republic, a position he held until

He also wrote for The Na-
tion, Theatre Arts, The Times Lit-
erary Supplement in London and
The New York Times.
When he wasn’t writing in the
1940s, he taught and directed at
the University of California, Los
Angeles; at Black Mountain Col-
lege in North Carolina; and at the
University of Minnesota. From
1948 through 1951 he traveled in
Europe on a Guggenheim fellow-

ship, directing plays. In 1950 he helped Brecht with his production of “Mother Courage and Her Chil- dren” in Munich. He also directed the German-language premiere of O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Com- eth.” By then his regard for O’Neill and other American playwrights had risen. His earlier criteria for artistic merit, he conceded, had been “puritanic” and even too “Brechtian.” His celebrated book “The Playwright as Thinker,” he conceded, “reflects more my academic side — a certain degree of excessive authority, even arro- gance, you could say.” In 1952, after his return to the United States, Mr. Bentley took over Joseph Wood Krutch’s course in modern drama at Co-

lumbia. The next year he was appointed the Brander Matthews professor of dramatic literature at Columbia, where he stayed until his resignation in 1969, with time off in between as the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Har- vard in 1960-61 and as a Ford Foundation artist in residence in Berlin in 1964-65. He was later the Cornell professor of theater at the State Univer- sity of New York, Buffalo, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Mary- land. Mr. Bentley was known to per- form songs from the theater in nightclubs, accompanying himself on the harmonium. 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 In- vestigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Com- mittee, 1947-1958,” first produced in 1972; the astronomer Galileo in “The Recantation of Galileo Gali- lei: Scenes From History Per- haps” (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.” Mr. Bentley discussed his sexu- al orientation in 1987, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “I generally avoid the word bisex-

ual,” 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,” he went on, “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 relation- ship to a woman.” Those marriages were to Maja Tschernjakow and to Joanne Da- vis, a psychotherapist. His first marriage ended in divorce, his second in separation (they never divorced). In addition to Ms. Da- vis and his son Philip, he is sur- vived by another son, Eric Jr., and four grandchildren. For all his laurels as a critic, Mr. Bentley carried a nagging regret: that his plays were not appreciat- ed as much as his criticism. “Brecht once told me that he left unpublished a lot of his poetry,” Mr. Bentley said in the 2006 Times interview, “because, he said: ‘If they regard me as a poet, they’ll say I’m not a playwright, I’m a poet. So I don’t publish the poems, so they’ll say I’m a playwright.’ “I feel at times that I should not have written my criticism,” Mr. Bentley continued, “because when I write a play, they say, ‘The critic has written a play.’ ”

Eric Bentley, Critic Who Preferred

Brecht to Broadway, Is Dead at 103

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

The critic, author and playwright Eric Bentley in 1976. His criticism found its way into classrooms and mainstream magazines. At left, Mr. Bentley at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1943.

TYRONE DUKES/THE NEW YORK TIMES

VIA PHILIP BENTLEY

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a
former senior book critic for The
Times, died in 2018. Julia Carmel
contributed reporting.

He adapted work by

many of the European

playwrights he prized.

In 2013, Kim Zarins was looking
for authors to teach a workshop on
writing fantasy for children and
teenagers, part of a California
State University summer arts
program she was organizing. “I
had two qualifications,” Ms.
Zarins, a professor of English at
Cal State, Sacramento, recalled in
a phone interview. “You had to be
an excellent writer and a gener-
ous teacher.”
Kathleen Duey, a prolific chil-
dren’s book author, was a clear
choice, Ms. Zarins said.
Ms. Duey wrote more than 75
books for children, middle-grade
and young adult readers. “Spirit:
Stallion of the Cimarron,” a novel-
ization of the DreamWorks film of
the same title, made the New York
Times best-seller list in 2002.
Another of her books, “Skin
Hunger: A Resurrection of
Magic,” a fantasy novel and the
first in a planned trilogy, was a fi-
nalist for a National Book Award
in the young people’s literature
category in 2007.
And as a teacher, she made a
lasting impression. “One student
said for the longest time that she
had one of Kathleen’s words of
wisdom on her desktop: ‘Every
artist of every kind takes a leap,’ ”
Ms. Zarins said. “That’s what she
did for my students. She showed
them how to leap.”

Ms. Duey died of cardiac arrest on June 26 at her home in Fall- brook, Calif. She was 69. She had struggled with dementia in recent years, said Karen A. Bale, a novelist who was Ms. Duey’s close friend and collaborator. A member of the Society of Chil- dren’s Book Writers and Illustra- tors, Ms. Duey, with her long red hair and gift of gab, was a beloved presence at the group’s confer- ences. A gardener, she would bring her editor, Ellen Krieger, av- ocados from her backyard. Ms. Duey gained a reputation within the organization as some- one who lent her time and talent to aspiring writers, said Bruce Cov- ille, a fellow author of children’s literature. He got to know Ms. Duey in the 1980s, when she was the one starting out and in need of a confidence boost. “She didn’t yet understand how incredibly talented she was,” he said. Ms. Krieger, who was Ms. Duey’s editor at Avon books in the early 1990s, said in an interview that Ms. Duey had taken her work “incredibly seriously,” even when publishing paperback originals like “Double Yuck Magic” and “Mr. Stumpguss Is a Third Grader,” a chapter book about an adult visitor to an elementary school classroom who turns out to be illiterate.

“It was not ephemera,” Ms. Krieger said. “Her writing meant everything to her.” Kathleen Elaine Peery was born on Oct. 8, 1950, in Sayre, Okla., to William Ralph Peery, a geologist, and Mary Eileen (Fin- lay) Peery, a homemaker. The

family relocated to Fort Collins, Colo., where Ms. Duey graduated from Fort Collins High School. She attended the University of Col- orado for a year but dropped out, Ms. Bale said. The two women met in 1985 at a book reading Ms. Bale gave in

Fallbrook, an agricultural com- munity north of San Diego. By then, Ms. Duey and her husband, Steven Duey, had settled there, and Ms. Duey was beginning her career in earnest. “She said: ‘Hey, I’m a writer, too. Would you mind calling me?’ ” Ms. Bale recalled. “We talked al- most every day on the phone for three years before we met in per- son. Because she didn’t drive.” Ms. Bale asked Ms. Duey to edit her novels, and starting in the late 1990s the women collaborated on a middle-grade series, “Survival.” Each book was set amid a historical catastrophe, like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. “She was very passionate that children have access to books and reading materials,” Ms. Bale said. “She just wanted everyone to en- joy reading.” Ms. Duey poured her creative energy into the “Resurrection of Magic” trilogy for years. It is a complex story set in two worlds: In one, magic has been banned; in the other, in the future, magic is controlled by the wealthy. Like the Harry Potter series (though Ms. Duey had conceived the idea years before the world knew of Hogwarts), the story features a magic academy and a lead charac- ter with extrasensory powers, though the tone is darker. In praising the first of the se-

ries, “Skin Hunger,” Kirkus Re- views wrote, “This double-narra- tive fantasy begins slowly but deepens into a potent and affect- ing story of struggle.” Ms. Krieger edited that book and its follow-up, “Sacred Scars,” while working again with Ms.

Duey, this time at Simon & Schus- ter, which published the books. “It’s a tragedy that she never completed the third book,” Ms. Krieger said. Ms. Duey had completed a first draft, she said, but her cognitive decline had pre- vented her from submitting a fin- ished manuscript. Ms. Duey’s marriage ended in divorce. Her survivors include her partner of 30 years, Richard Cu- sick, and a son, Garrett Duey. An- other son, Seth Duey, died in 2002. Speaking of Ms. Duey’s legacy, Mr. Coville said: “There’s her writing, which grew and grew and is very fine. But there is also the long-term impact of her teaching and mentoring.”

Kathleen Duey, 69, Children’s Book Author Who Helped Budding Writers Bloom

By STEVEN KURUTZ

Kathleen Duey at the 2007 National Book Awards, where her novel “Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic” was a finalist.

PATRICK MCMULLAN/PATRICK MCMULLAN, VIA GETTY IMAGES

‘Spirit: Stallion of the

Cimarron’ was among

the 75 books she wrote.

The New York Times - USA (2020-08-07)

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