Images in a Vast World: Homage to Stark Young (1881–1963)

Over fifty years ago, on the publication of the final collection of Stark Young’s dramatic criticism, Immortal Shadows (1948), Eric Bentley feared that Young’s work was then already on its way to being forgotten. In the years that have passed since that last collection and Young’s death in 1963, Bentley’s fears have been borne out, and Stark Young’s immense contribution to the rise of a serious dramatic criticism in America has been passed by as if it had never existed—this fate for the man John Gassner called “pre-eminently the artist-critic of our formative modern theater in America.”

In a real sense the essays by Stark Young that began appearing regularly in the New Republic in 1921 signaled the beginning of a new era for the American theater and its criticism: here was a critic who thought the art of the theater worth taking seriously, and who, as luck would have it, appeared on the scene just as drama in America became worthy of being taken seriously. The rise of the Provincetown Players in New York after World War i and the theatrical experiments they initiated were to set off the first native explosion of modern theater in America. It was Young’s great gift to appreciate this new movement at the outset for what it was—and to see in it what the American stage might become. In his preface to Immortal Shadows Young observes that “not only was the period remarkable, but those of us in it at the time knew that it was remarkable.”

Young himself was as remarkable as the era. He had just turned forty when he arrived at his position as drama critic of the New Republic by the most improbable route imaginable. He had been born into a fine old tradition-minded Mississippi Delta family little more than a decade after the Civil War, and for the first twenty years of his life Young had been exposed to what then passed for the education of a gentleman in the public schools of Como and Oxford, Mississippi, and at the University of Mississippi. In his autobiography, The Pavilion (1951), Young acknowledges the intellectual inadequacy of his background while conjuring up its great human richness: “I had in a way a distinct kind of education. It consisted not so much in what is usually called education and informed studies as it did in personalities and the general principles that were accepted by them out of life, as it was, and that were to be lived by. Partly by inheritance and partly by the way we live, our people came into an interest in human beings that was not so much psychological or analytical as it was personal, secret, open, and bright.”

The sensibility forged by this experience of a post–Civil War southern upbringing was never to be attuned to abstract theories of drama, to schools of psychology, nor to what Young calls “tags of the scientific that was to come into vogue later on.” Instead Stark Young brought to his criticism an intelligence that was acutely sensual, eyes and ears open in an unprecedented way to the nuance and texture of the theatrical moment, and an ability to record what he saw in a manner at once poetic and concrete.

Young wrote dramatic criticism like no one before or after him, for he had a unique way of seeing and listening that must have derived from his childhood. Southerners then and now have a singular way of communicating with one another that goes far beyond the literal into a kind of poetry that Young himself has described as well as anyone: “Things are said that might seem to be nothing at all very much, but that we know without analyzing are the light or serious outpouring from intense or profound or daily and humble sources—a preference for a flower, say, is not just that but also a comment on some quality in life, some soft sweetness or cold or graceful formality, or some old romantic memory or happy or...