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Born in 1927, Tynan thought himself the only child of Rose and Peter Tynan, a draper. The elder Tynan led a double life - the half of the week hidden from Kenneth he was "Sir Peter Peacock, Justice of the Peace, successful entrepreneur, six times mayor of Warrington, and with a Lady Peacock and many small Peacocks in train." The deception only came to light when Sir Peter died in 1948 at the end of Kenneth's Oxford career, and his angry legitimate family claimed the body and barred Tynan's tearful mother from the funeral. (Intellectuals) Kenneth masturbated from age eleven onwards. Towards the end of his life he described himself as a dying species, Tynanosaurus homo masturbans. As a boy he collected pornography, no easy task in wartime Britain. Leading drama critic James Agate lent the teenager the key to his extensive porn collection. Tynan slept with many girls at Oxford, and usually asked them to give him a pair of their panties to hang alongside the whip which graced his walls. Kenneth liked voluptuous Jewish girls, particularly those with strict fathers and used to corporal punishment. He told one that the word 'chastise' had "a good Victorian ring of retribution... The word spank is potent and has the potential to correct schoolgirlishness... Sex means spank and beautiful means bottom and always will." Kenneth Tynan was the original Buttman. During his second marriage, he formed a lasting liason with an unemployed actress with whom he acted out elaborate sado-masochistic fantasies. He dressed up as a woman, she as a man, and sometimes they used prostitutes as extras. Tynan told his wife that he had to do this twice a week, "although all common sense and reason and kindness and even camraderie are against it... It is my choice, my thing, my need... It is fairly comic and slightly nasty. But it is shaking me like an infection and I cannot do anything but be shaken until the fit has passed." During the 1960s Kenneth had more influence on world theatre than anyone else, and as Paul Johnson argues in his book Intellectuals, the theatre has more effect on behavior than any other art. Tynan warred on censorship. His motto was: 'Write heresy, pure heresy." He pinned to his desk the slogan: "Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds." In 1960 he got a four-letter word into the leading British newspaper of the time, the Observer. The next year he demonstrated for Castro in Hyde Park with the help of scores of pretty girls. On November 13, 1965, in his masterpiece of self-publicity, he said the word 'f---' on the BBC. For several months it made him the most notorious man in the country. In 1969 Kenneth organized nudity on the general stage with his review Oh! Calcutta which performed all over the world, grossing $360 million. During the 1960s, Tynan increasingly pushed aside a serious career to become a pornographer. Wearing purple jackets and leopard spot trousers, he formed a relationship with Playboy. In the early 1970s he tried to enlist leading writers in compiling an anthology of masturbation fantasies but was humiliatingly turned down by such persons as Nabokov, Graham Greene, Beckett and Norman Mailer. Kenneth spent much of the 1970s unsuccessfully trying to raise money to make a pornographic film. He wrote to his second wife from Provence: "What am I doing here churning out pornography? It is very shaming." One night he dreamed of a naked girl, covered with dust and crap, her hair shaved off, with dozens of drawing pins nailed into her head. "I woke up with horror," Kenneth recorded. "And at once dogs in the hotel grounds began to bark pointlessly, as they are said to do when the King of Evil, invisible to man, passes by." Kenneth accurately understood himself as "a watcher, an observer, a reflector," not "an instigator." "When the stage was his only world," writes the 12-7-87 issue of Time, "Kenneth Tynan dominated it as no drama critic since George Bernard Shaw had. When, sometime in the 1960s, the wide world was turned into a stage for celebrity posturings, the critic recast himself as a potential star, offering himself as an international social critic and sexual reformer. And became just another face in a crowd grotesquely clamoring for attention. The life his second wife, Kathleen, recounts in her uncompromising and ultimately harrowing biography-memoir becomes record of a befuddled search for the fulfillment of youth's inordinate promise, and for the graceful exit Tynan never found." In 1987, Kathleen Tynan published the 597-page Doing Turns on a High Wire: The Life of Kenneth Tynan. Tynan's death in 1980 came from emphysema, the product of habital smoking on a weak chest he inherited from his father. Pornography has never had a more eloquent defender than Tynan who spent the last months of his short life in a wheelchair, sucking oxygen through a tank while looking at fetish magazines. He writes "In Praise of Hardcore." "It's always pleasant to see prudery knocked, and whenever I read articles by fellow intellectuals in defense of pornography, I do my best to summon up a cheer. Lately, however, the heart has gone out of my hurrahs. The old adrenaline glow has waned. And now that I've analyzed a number of recent anti-censorship tracts, I think I know why. The writers are cheating. A whiff of evasiveness, even of outright hypocrisy, clings to their prose: too much is left unspoken, or unadmitted. Their arguments, when you look at them closely, shift on the quicksands of timidity. On the surface, a fearless libertarian has come forth to do battle with the forces of reaction. But between the lines he is usually saying something like this: "(a) I hate censorship in all its forms, but that doesn't mean that I actually like pornography. "(b) In fact, I don't even approve of it, except when I can call it 'erotic writing' and pass it off as literature. "(c) I wouldn't go into a witness box to defend it unless it had educational, artistic or psychiatric value to make it respectable. "(d) I read it only in the line of duty, and feel nothing but pity for those who read it for pleasure. "(e) Needless to say, I never masturbate. "Such - once you've stripped off the rhetoric - is the accepted liberal viewpoint, and safer than that you can hardly play. At best, it adds up to a vaguely progressive gesture that could never endanger the author's moral standing or give his wife a moment of worry. From first to last he remains socially stainless and - to me, anyway - utterly unreal. He is like a man who loathes whorehouses in practice but doesn't mind defending them in principle, provided that they are designed by Mies van der Rohe and staffed by social workers in Balencian dresses. "...Hardcore pornography is orgasmic in intent and untouched by the ulterior motives of traditional art. For men it has a simple and localized purpose: to induce an erection. "Pornography is expressly designed for those who are not lucky. If your taste is for earrings or high heels or spanking or any of the other minority appetites, you may have trouble finding a like-minded bedfellow. You will be 'one of their own', and that can create a strangulating sense of guilt. Pornography loosens the stranglehold and assuages the solitude. "Worse by far is the plight of those who are villainously ugly and unable to pay for the services of call girls. To be poor and physically unappetizing is to be sexually condemned to solitary confinement, from which pornography offers the illusion of release. "It's difficult to be an enemy of pornography without also disapproving of masturbation. To condemn the cause, it is logically necessary to deplore the effect. "The debating society at my school was discussing the motion 'That the present generation has lost the ability to entertain itself.' Rising to make my maiden speech, I said with shaky aplomb, 'Mr. Chairman - as long as masturbation exists, no one can seriously maintain that we have lost the ability to entertain ourselves.' The teacher in charge immediately closed the meeting. "In a letter to the Sunday Times, a respected liberal clergyman wrote: 'To be sexually hungry is the fate of thousands, both young and old. There is nothing evil in this hunger, but it is hard to bear. To have it stimulated when it cannot be honorably satisfied is to make control more difficult.' "Here, in three short sentences, all the puritan assumptions are on parade - that sexual deprivation is the normal state of affairs, that it is morally desirable to grin and bear it, and that masturbation is a dishonorable alternative. "Because hard core performs an obvious physical function, literary critics have traditionally refused to consider it a form of art. [But] As Lionel Trilling said: 'I see no reason in morality (or in aesthetic theory) why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions, of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no ground for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc..' "But I mustn't lurch into the trap of suggesting that pornography is defensible only when it qualifies as art.... A reviewer in the International Times declared: 'In the brave new world of sexuality, perhaps we can forget about art, and read Henry Miller as he was meant to be read: as the writer whose craft describes intercourse better than anybody else's. If we have learned nothing else from Genet, we can be sure of this: his result may have been art, but that's not as important as his intention, which was pornography.' "[One frequently raised argument against porn is that it does our imagining for us.] It sounds like a fearful affront, a chilling premonition of 1984; but it is exactly what all good writers have done since the birth of literature. The measure of their talent has immemorially been their ability to make us see the world through their eyes. If they can heighten our perceptions, we should thank them, not resent them. "One inalienable right binds all mankind together - the right of self-abuse. That - and not the abuse of others - is what distinguishes the true lover of pornography. We should encourage him to seek his...pleasure as and where finds it. To deny him that privilege is to invade the deepest privacy of all." (The Sound of Two Hands Clapping by Kenneth Tynan. New York, 1975.)
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