Books in Brief: George Kaufman

George Kaufman, by Malcolm Goldstein (Oxford, 503 pp., $20). George S. Kaufman’s reputation as playwright, director, and wit is by now firmly established. Goldstein’s biography is the third to be written during the last decade and confirms that the co-author of such Broadway hits as You Can’t Take It with You, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Solid Gold Cadillac, and the Marx Brothers’ classic A Night at the Opera knew the art of comic stagecraft as few have known it before or since. A man of sharp and sometimes wounding humor, he was habitually withdrawn and isolated, yet somehow he managed to earn a reputation as a great ladies’ man (he figured prominently in the Mary Astor divorce case of the 1930s). The emphasis here, however, is on Kaufman’s work. Goldstein chronicles the making of each of Kaufman’s plays in detail— too much detail, in fact. Few people will care who replaced whom in the cast of the New Haven tryouts of a Kaufman disaster that expired after a dozen Broadway performances, yet Goldstein dotes on such minutiae. For a biography of a celebrated wit this is an oddly humorless book. Both Howard Teichmann’s and Scott Meredith’s earlier works had a greater sense of life about them, although Goldstein provides the best treatment of Kaufman’s artistic decline in the 1940s. This is a magnificently researched book, but it is one that is likely to be more consulted than read.

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David A. Pietrusza

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George Kaufman, by Malcolm Goldstein (Oxford, 503 pp., $20). George S. Kaufman’s reputation as playwright, director, and wit is by now firmly established. Goldstein’s biography is the third to be written during the last decade and confirms that the co-author of such Broadway hits as You Can’t Take It with You, The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Solid Gold Cadillac, and the Marx Brothers’ classic A Night at the Opera knew the art of comic stagecraft as few have known it before or since. A man of sharp and sometimes wounding humor, he was habitually withdrawn and isolated, yet somehow he managed to earn a reputation as a great ladies’ man (he figured prominently in the Mary Astor divorce case of the 1930s). The emphasis here, however, is on Kaufman’s work. Goldstein chronicles the making of each of Kaufman’s plays in detail— too much detail, in fact. Few people will care who replaced whom in the cast of the New Haven tryouts of a Kaufman disaster that expired after a dozen Broadway performances, yet Goldstein dotes on such minutiae. For a biography of a celebrated wit this is an oddly humorless book. Both Howard Teichmann’s and Scott Meredith’s earlier works had a greater sense of life about them, although Goldstein provides the best treatment of Kaufman’s artistic decline in the 1940s. This is a magnificently researched book, but it is one that is likely to be more consulted than read.