INSULTS AND IMAGES
SIR,—I love the cheerfulness with which Kenneth Tynan tries to throw my insults back in my face with- out any rhyme and precious little reason.
Like him I have now re-read his original article with some care, but, unlike him, with little pleasure. The fact is that the two of us could argue with amiable abusiveness until the cows come home, and never get nearer any conclusion. Mr. Tynan, for example, thinks ballet is a 'minor art,' whereas I don't know what a 'minor' art is. tWhat is this judging committee that runs round looking at every art form saying: 'That's major, that's minor and that's mid- dling"?)
Why I raised Mr. Tynan's point in the first place was that the programme I was reviewing seemed so perfectly planned to infuriate (and expose) his hope- lessly wrong-headed view of classical ballet. Certainly in his piece the only comment he had on the ballet he was criticising, Giselle, Was that the story was fatuous. From this, as well as from his writing about plays, I deduced that his interest in art was primarily concerned with its narrative and intellectual argu- ment. This never stopped him from being a most stimulating dramatic critic, but it makes his opinion of ballet ludicrous,
Mr, Tynan's remark on 'classical ballet being essen- tially a court entertainment which the nineteenth- century bourgeoisie adopted in order to raise them- selves to the level of kings' is the purest fantasy, while his assertion that Martha Graham's 'supreme achievement is to have invented a language of move- ment that contradicts classical ballet at almost every point' is mere foolishness. As Miss Graham herself points out on every appropriate occasion: 'There are only two kinds of dancing, good and had.' The more Mr. Tynan writes about ballet the more his arrogant ignorance of the subject stands revealed.
CLINK BARNES
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