The Orton Diaries ed. by John Lahr (review)

442 Book Reviews especially in view of the need she apparently felt for thorough research when dealing with the unfamiliar (for example, reading and making digests of twenty-five books on recent German history and politics, resulting in notebooks of more than a hundred thousand words, before writing Rhine, and then, as she says, using all that research in only two speeches), In later interviews, Hellman's opinions of other playwrights are interesting, for example, in 1951. "Now that Mr. Shaw is dead, nobody is next to O'Casey for my money." In a 1962 interview, she said that the American theatre had had a group of "most remarkable ... extraordinarily talented" playwrights in the Twenties: O'Neill, Kel1y, Howard, Kaufman, Rice. In the same interview she said that she considered Beckett the only important dramatist to appear in the previous ten or twelve years. She thought highly of Tennessee Williams and perhaps a bit less so (her opinion varies) of Arthur Miller; considered Albee "promising"; and placed Brecht "in the big league," apparently above all three. Later, in 1968, she said that there had been "probably not more than ten really serious writers in the American theatre," and then finds that, after a good deal of fumbling, she can name only nine: O'Neill, Kelly, Odets, Miller (the last two "with some reservations"), Williams, Kaufman , Albee, Rice, an~ Howard. It is perhaps revelatory that it did not occur to her to make herself the tenth. Hellman was a fascinating woman, and one could go on and on about her opinions, of herself, her friends, her enemies, the whole wide world. One sees in her the intelligence, determination, and humor of a Regina Giddens (whom she srud in one interview that she had never thought of as bad), the dedication and integrity of a Kurt Muller, the independence combined with devotion of a Fanny Farrelly. The interviews, obviously, are a pleasure to read. JACOB H. ADLER, PURDUE UNIVERSITY JOHN LAHR, ed. The Orton Diaries. London: Methuen 1986. pp. 304, illustrated.£12·50. The facts concerning Joe Orton's bizarre death are well known: in the early hours of 9 August 1967 Kenneth Halliwell, his lover offifteen years, bludgeoned him to death with a hammer and committed suicide by swa1lowing twenty-two nembutal pills in the cramped one-room flat they had shared since 1959. The reasons behind Halliwell's descent into a depression verging on madness seem obvious. The older, better educated Halliwell had created Orton, the anarchist-darling of the theater critics, in a tradition-defying new age of sexual license bordering on perversity. In the eyes of Halliwell, a dilettante with aspirations he could not fulfill, Onon, the feted playwright, grew into a monster ungrateful for his lover's nurturing of a talent long unperceived by others and so had to be destroyed. The immediate events precipitating the horror may never by known. When the bodies were discovered, the police found a note on the desk: "If you read his diary all will be Book Reviews 443 expIained. K.H. P.S. Especially the latter part." Unfortunately, the diaries, which Orton kept religiously on a daY-Io-day basis once he had begun them on 20 December 1966, eight months before his death, are incomplete. As the last entry, an unfinished one, is dated J August 1967, the day that Orton began a brief visit to his family in Leicester (he died eight days later. after returning to London a few days earlier), John Lahr, the editor of the diaries, can only assume that sometime between the diaries' discovery by the police and the time that Margaret Ramsay, Orton's agent, took possession of them, the last pages had been removed. Were the diaries intact its readers would be forced to conclude from "the latter part" that Halliwell had committed the murder-suicide out of sheer boredom following the ill-fated couple's stultifying weekend visit (27 July - 3] July) to the respectable middle-class Jewish home in Brighton of producer Oscar Lewenstein - a motivation worthy of a Joe Orton character but too mad even for the playwright's unstable killer. Halliwell seems an ever-present yet curiously shadowy...