Ten years after his death, the man who single-handedly shaped Canadian criticism still evokes feelings of deep hostility or a sense of tragic loss.

Anthony Newley finishes his week's engagement at
the O'Keefe Centre, bows to the applause, and then
lashes out against Nathan Cohen. "The SOB" has a number of "illegitimate sons" around, sneers Newley, referring to Toronto's theatre critics. The audience applauds and laughs.

Newley had neither forgotten nor forgiven Cohen's column of many years before, in which he wrote that the British singer "abuses" his voice "by reaching for high notes that produce a frequent quaver together with a constant nasality and an exaggerated Cockney sound."

The year is 1976. Nathan Cohen has been dead for five years.

By the time of his death on March 26, 1971, Nathan Cohen was one of the most admired and hated men in Canada. On the day he died, The National led off with four words: "Nathan Cohen is dead." In no other country in the world had one man so personified theatre, so represented the world of criticism, so influenced the cultural taste of his times. Would Walter Cronkite begin a broadcast with the words "Clive Barnes is dead"? Did the BBC headline the passing of Kenneth Tynan? In a country renowned for either ignoring its heroes or driving them away, Nathan Cohen was a phenomenon.

For many in the arts, even a decade after his death, Cohen still evokes feelings of hostility and hurt; for tens of thousands of theatre-goers, Cohen has left a vacuum of first-rate criticism; for his fellow critics and journalists, Cohen's death removed a touchstone of guidance. Robert Fulford recalls that while writing an article in the mid-1970s, he found himself thinking, "What will Nathan think about this?" When he realized that Cohen was no longer around, he felt a tremendous sense of loss.

Autumn, 1946. On her first date with the young man, Gloria Brontman requests that she be taken to the New Play Society's production of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! at the Royal Ontario Museum Theatre. Her companion is 23 and a writer for a Communist newspaper for Jews, the Vochenblatt (The Canadian Jewish Weekly). Used to writing book reviews and political articles for the predominantly Yiddish weekly (he later wrote a regular column, "Turning Pages"), young Nathan Cohen is urged by his date to write a review of the play. And so he does:

"It was the best-acted, best-directed amateur production we have ever seen in Toronto," the critic writes, lavishing praise that a few years hence would seem un-Cohenlike. But suddenly, a diatribe is unleashed that appears daring, even a third of a century later:
"It is a pity, though, that a group of such obvious talents as the New Play Society should waste them on a play as weak as Oh, Wilderness! is. O'Neill is a playwright whose contempt for humanity, sombre hatred for the modern world and craving for the past
has endeared him to pessimists the world over."

Attack O'Neill? The Pulitzer-Prizewinning playwright? The Nobel-Prizewinning playwright? The most honored man of American drama of the first half of the 20th century? At the age of 23, Nathan Cohen had found his calling.

The birth of Samuel Nathan Cohen had taken place two decades earlier, and 1,300
miles east: in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on April 16, 1923. In most ways, his was a classic immigrant-Jewish family: a name change (his father, David Kaplansky, had his name shortened but hardly made less Jewish by an immigration official when he arrived in Halifax shortly before World War I); a family briefly separated (Cohen's mother, Fanny, was left back in Timkovich, Poland, with their two daughters, while her husband went off to the New World to find employment and enough money to bring them over); and a hard-working, deeply religious and scholarly framework.

Nathan, the family's first child born in Canada, and his younger brother Louis were raised with their sisters above the family grocery store in Whitney Pier, a desolate coal-mining and steel area on the outskirts of Sydney. Yiddish was spoken in the home and, more often than not, it was screamed. Nathan and his father, both strong-willed, were always quarrelling. His brother remembers the time when young Nathan stood up in Hebrew school and cried out, "Why is God?" The rabbi threw the child out of class, and an uproar followed. Furthermore, Nathan made it clear that he was not about to go into his father's business, as he'd been ordered to do. The values and the strictness of his father were being rebelled against, from the earliest years. When he was about to be married, more than a decade later, his fiancee was stunned to discover that he had not spoken to his father in years.

In her attempt to ease the friction between her husband and son, Fanny, a loving, generous and kind woman, followed the classically ethnic pattern: she overfed and pampered the child. When Nathan entered school at the age of 4, he was the size of a 10-year-old.

As a child in Whitney Pier, Nathan read continuously. Taking no interest in athletics, refusing to go on boy scout hikes, he would sit in the back of his father's grocery store, plowing through comic books, Liberty magazines, love stories, novels, plays. A similar catholicity in taste would inform his entire life; in spite of his demanding theatre criticism,
he always saw himself as staunchly middlebrow.

Theatre-going? Not between the wars in Sydney. But there were three movie houses,
with an admission fee of but a nickel or a dime, and they changed films three times a week. Nathan was there for every new one, concentrating, focussing, memorizing, absorbing.
"In a small town like that, there's nothing: no ballet, music, theatre -- only a cinema," Cohen said years later. "That's why I know about movies." Journalist David Cobb insists that Cohen saw every movie made after 1930 and remembered every one of them. Fulford believes Cohen was a better movie than theatre critic. Certainly, the development of his dramatic taste had begun.

There was always this passionate, eager, almost driven desire to know. "You must know everything!" screams a grandmother to young Isaac Babel, in the great Russian-Jewish author's short story which took that admonition as its title. It could well serve as Nathan Cohen's credo.

As a mature critic, Cohen recalled a teen-age experience at Sydney Academy. He heard a high school teacher, Willie Mould, recite ("badly, I suspect now") a scene from Henry V.
"I got terribly excited. I went after class and asked him to tell me more about Henry V and to tell me more about Shakespeare. You can imagine the excitement of the teacher, being suddenly presented with a student who was actually interested in what he was talking about."

The desire to know everything continued on in college, which Cohen entered at the age of 16 -- but looking 30. Along with that desire was now growing an egotism and self-confidence that would serve him well in the foreign soil of postwar Toronto. According to Beryl Chernin, a childhood friend, the heavy-set teenager marched up to the English professor at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, on the first day of class and announced, "I am Nathan Cohen!"

He was always his own best promoter. "Bud" Trueman (the father of Global TV's Peter), who was later the chairman of the National Film Board and the first director of the Canada Council, was struck by Cohen's obsession with words and literature:

"He was without doubt the best-read student I have ever had. And he was as arrogant then as he proved to be later on, but never negatively. Nathan was conspicuous in class by his knowledge and his desire to shoot ideas out."

Nathan Cohen was not the typical student "brain"; he rarely went to lectures, and spent almost all his time in the library. And there was always a sense of controversy, amidst the acting in school plays, the directing, the editing of the school publication, The Argosy (every two weeks), the running of the school year-book. Mount Allison was closely affiliated with the United Church. Yet here was Cohen -- a Jew -- attacking incompetent professors on campus; questioning conscription; challenging the very war that was then raging in Europe. He never received his Honours Bachelor of Arts, degree, but only a "pass BA," and it was a quarter-century later, when the university bestowed an honorary Doctor of Laws upon him, that Cohen was told why: "You were too much a rabble-rouser."

In any case, fate forced Cohen out of any possible academic career. Fire broke out at the men's dorm at Mount Allison (arson was suspected but never proven), and several students died. Nathan, who jumped naked from the third floor into a snowbank, suffered third-degree burns. Hair was never to grow on the backs of his hands or on his legs. He lay in a hospital for six months in Sackville, his MA thesis (on Romantic poets in Canada) destroyed.

Cohen's father then sent Nathan, only 19, to Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. Soon after he was found wandering the streets of the city, apparently suffering from amnesia. He was feigning illness, to get out of a hated profession, his friends say. It was an early symptom of the onset of diabetes, says his wife. Either way, Cohen returned to the east to edit "the only labor-owned daily newspaper" in Canada, The Glace Bay Gazette. It was financially backed by the United Mine Workers, who soon witnessed the creation of Nathan Cohen, Journalist. Still not 20, Cohen did everything on the eight-page, flat-bed paper. He would arrive at the office each morning at 5 a.m., lay out the front page, read the teletype, call the undertaker, fire and police departments for local news. Twenty-hour days, seven-day weeks, $100 a month.

It was most likely while working on the Gazette that Cohen became a Communist. There had been an ugly strike, and the young editor was offended by the pressures put on him and the men at the paper. Still, it is uncertain whether Cohen was ever a "card-carrying member," or whether his feelings toward communism were ever more than a passionate distaste for injustice. As Joe Gershman, the editor of the Vochenblatt, later stated, "During the years he was a member, he was a rebel against certain postulates held by the party. He was not in favor of democratic centralism, particularly in the matter of art. He felt a writer should be given a chance to explore and write freely what he thinks and sees, rather than follow the party line. Nathan was, in nature, a rebel, even. when he was in the Communist Party."

Kenneth Bagnell, who worked in a bookstore near the newspaper and is now the editor of Imperial Oil's The Review, remembers that Cohen "was writing some of the most negative editorials [about mine conditions] that appeared anywhere in Canada." When Cohen quit after two years ("it was the greatest training in the world"), he could look back with pride on being denounced in the Nova Scotia Legislature by the minister of mines for his personal campaign to have a national conference on mines called. Years later, Cohen would be proudest, not of his criticism, but of interviewing Marilyn Monroe's personal secretary immediately following the actress's suicide, and of grabbing Yugoslavian writer Milovan Djilas, a Tito critic, for an exclusive interview following his release from prison. He would always feel first and foremost a newspaperman, a reporter. But in 1944, Cohen had had enough of small towns.

(In 1968, on a trip to see a theatrical production at the Charlottetown Festival, his wife looked for a small farm on Prince Edward Island as a retirement possibility. "Live in a small town again?" asked Nathan. "Over my dead body.")

Nineteen-hundred and forty-five. Political articles for the Canadian Tribune, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of Canada. Nineteen-hundred and forty-six. Book reviews for the Vochenblatt, and his first play review. Nineteen-hundred and forty-seven. Marriage, and a need to make a living. Cohen's father-inlaw now echoed the request of his own father, made a half-dozen years earlier: Become a lawyer.

Nathan Cohen had enjoyed acting in university, but this time he was miscast. Osgoode Hall Law School exams at Christmas, failed. Torts and property, exams at Easter, failed. Two supplementary exams the following summer, also failed. He attended no classes and wrote no exams.

Enter, stage right, Cohen's rescuer: Mavor Moore. A prominent radio actor and writer and, along with his mother Dora Mavor Moore, one of the founders of the New Play Society, Moore recommended the 23-year-old-on the basis of his steadily more
substantial play reviews in the Vochenblatt -- for a new CBC Radio program to
review plays, Across the Footlights. It was his big break.

When Cohen moved from his first-generation Canadian, primarily Yiddish-speaking readers to an Anglo-Saxon listening audience of tens of thousands, he would create a revolution in Canadian criticism, which more than 30 years later is still being felt. To
discuss the state of theatre criticism in this country in the 1940s is just about impossible.
It was worse than incompetent: It was dangerous, in its effusive praise and utter lack of critical standards.

Middle-aged Torontonians might recall the juvenile gibberish of Roly Young, who wrote for The Globe and Mail in the 1930s and 1940s. The title of his column, "Rambling With Roly Young," captures the quality of his prose in Canada's "national newspaper":

"The Drama Committee is putting the art before the horse," rambled Roly, in a review
of three one-act Canadian plays performed in 1943. "The cast included her woodcarver husband (done in New France Paul Muni), an Indian servant (from the Kiwanis tribe, I think), and her lover (who was good despite the wig)."

Things were no better over at the Toronto Daily Star, where Augustus Bridle held court from the 1930s until he was run down by a cab in 1952, at the age of 83. Theatre was identified with church basements and fund raising, with no differentiation between what was amateur and what was professional. Theatre reviews (since one dare not call them "criticisms") were dumped on page two, or in the women's section, or on the society page, when they appeared at all.

Augustus Bridle in 1948, Cohen's first year as a radio drama critic: "It was theatre night, and a packed house for the Women's Board of Toronto Western Hospital...A gala night; many full-dressed figures; boxes full..."

Nor did things change drastically at the Globe in 1949, when Herbert Whittaker began the job he did for almost three decades. That Whittaker was, and is, a decent, good fellow is denied by no one; but his close friendships with the theatrical community, and his distaste for negative criticism of any kind, were not seen as a weakness on his part, but as a strength.

Whittaker himself has declared, "I developed an ambiguous style; I developed it deliberately; quite deliberately. Two readers could respond in two completely different ways. I gave guidance, but I didn't get between the reader and the play. I gave my views by implication, by degree, by shading, by admitting the good points. The harsh review paralyzes some..."

But that is precisely the idea! screamed the youthful Nathan Cohen, as he burst upon the Toronto literary community with all the subtlety (and welcome) of Steve Biko parachuting into an Afrikaners' convention. For 10 years as a regular drama critic on local and national CBC Radio, this "bright, fascinating, self educated Jewish intellectual from a small town in eastern Canada" (Robert Weaver's words) was to challenge everything theatre stood for - and did not stand for -- in Canada.

"Isabella Valancy Crawford...can best, and most charitably, be described as incompetent." Across the Footlights, January, 1949.

"The trouble is that the Canadian theatre is basically an amateur institution ...with.a placid tradition of mediocrity and self-praise..." CBC Radio drama item, November, 1948.

Former CBC-TV producer Ralph Thomas recalls that Cohen was soon considered "the most vicious man alive -- a holy terror." "His line was to condemn those things beneath his standards," argues Herbert Whittaker. "This was careless."

Careless? More like subversive. "Toronto was a predominantly WASP city," states Fulford. "Cohen was ethnically a stranger, culturally a stranger. He was more European than Toronto. This town was Anglophile, an outpost of the Empire."

If Toronto was Anglophile, Cohen must have seemed Anglophobic -- and in many ways, he was. He simply could not see how new groups putting on production after production of Noel Coward, Christopher Fry and J.B. Priestley could create a Canadian theatre. No fan of Tennessee Williams, Cohen still urged that his plays be performed -- and Arthur Miller's as well.

We are closer, physically and spiritually, to the United States than to England, Cohen kept reminding his growing radio audience, and they wanted to kill the messenger.

The Nathan Cohen legend was growing. The 15-minute local show Across the Footlights grew into The Theatre Week, heard nationally across Canada on the CBC, which led to frequent drama criticism for Critically Speaking, a national radio magazine of the arts, and then to his domination of CJBC Views the Shows, at a weekly pay of $35. When actor Lloyd Bochner let Cohen know that he had put the critic down for a charitable donation
of $50, he was shaken to hear that it was more than Cohen made in a week -- and there were now two young daughters to support.

William Krehm, the music critic on CJBC Views the Shows, reminisces: "Cohen was a phenomenon with no precedent. Here was a man drunk with allegiance to culture. He approached the subject of art not as a polite pastime for Sunday afternoon pleasure. He was bound to cause trouble and he did. He was working in a setting hostile toward him. which questioned the need of forthright criticism. Here was the perfect Biblical role. And Nathan had the form and vitality of an Old Testament prophet."

Doris Mosdell, the movie critic on the same important radio program, put it more simply: "Most actors and directors were extremely anti-Cohen, and from their point of view, with good reason. He never said, 'They're doing their best; theatre needs a boost. I'd better alter my standards.' The less you knew about the arts, the more you hated him. But it was fun to hear someone who was not wishy-washy."

Nathan Cohen was made for radio, and it is almost a shame that he is better remembered today for his newspaper columns, with their purple prose and mannered, turgid, clumsy style. ("No one's more aware of what's wrong with my style than I am," he insisted years later. "Sometimes, when I read one of my long, convoluted sentences, I'm out of breath at the end." But, he told friend Robert Weaver, "My dear Robert, I never claimed to be a stylist.")

Cohen was a superb broadcaster: He was flowery, wordy, hyperbolic, exuding self-confidence like a cross between I.F. Stone and FDR. Like Stone, he would publish his own magazine, The Critic, out of his own basement, off and on, over four years in the early 1950s, with articles by Gerald Pratley, George Robertson, Robert Weaver and wife Gloria ("Personal journalism at its best" - Fulford); like Roosevelt, his health failed drastically and slashed away at his strength. He was 28 years old, but looked 50.

The legend continued to grow. An actor takes a swing at Cohen in a restaurant, over a negative review. Filthy and threatening phone calls are made in the middle of the night, to the point where his wife has to get an unlisted number. (Cohen's father-in-law, with whom they live, urges him, "Tone down your criticism.") Cohen becomes the editor of the CBC's Ford Radio Theatre, adapting plays and freelancing more and more, to make ends meet.

And then, Mavor Moore, Cohen's personal deus ex machina, once again intervenes. He thinks up the idea for Fighting Words, and Harvey Hart, later film director of Fortune and Men's Eyes (on Cohen's suggestion), creates the concept for the show, and also produces it. The Man Toronto Had Learned to Hate now becomes The Entertainer to the Nation.

The 30-minute, two-camera, live show --
CBC-TV's first successful discussion program --
was to run for almost a decade on the national network. Panelists had to guess the author of a discussion-producing producing quotation, mailed in by the home audience. "A program of guesswork and give and take!" smiled Cohen, pushing back his thick, horned-rimmed, black glasses, and clasping his hands together.

You can close your eyes and still hear that hoarse, sweet, high-pitched voice: "Nooooooo, I don't know about that, Mr. Callaghan!" "That's a verry sweeping statement, Mr. Trudeau!" "Oh, those are fighting words, Mr. McLuhan!"

Cohen scratches his ear, throws his body to the side, his oversized belly shaking, his teeth flashing, as he laughs. "Awww, Ir-ving come onnnnnnn! Come onnnnnnn! Mr. Layton, you're being out-raaaaaaaaaageous!! !"

Eric Koch, a program organizer for Fighting Words and later regional director of CBC's English-language network in Quebec, feels that the show, more than anything else in his career, made Cohen a national figure in Canada. Patrick Scott put it this way, in his Star TV column, years later: "In the history of Canadian broadcasting, the program Fighting Words occupies a very special and perhaps even unique niche... [It] was synonymous with Nathan Cohen, and vice versa. He dominated the show by the very force of his personality, which made him one of Canadian television's most colorful performers.
He was not only the show's catalyst, as he was meant to be, but its star."

The spontaneity of live TV could have its drawbacks. Only a few years into Fighting Words' long run, Gordon Sinclair attacked the Canadian flag. The episode was mentioned in Parliament, and RCMP officers began to ask Cohen's neighbors about his political affiliations. But he had left the party long before, probably as early as 1947. He had noticed that in the lists of "traitors" and "enemies of the state" who were being tried and executed in Russia, only Jews were singled out by religion -- and with the word "Zhid," meaning "kike," rather than the acceptable Russian term "Ivrei," for Jew. Cohen did not wait until the so-called Doctor's Plot, or Khrushchev's destalinization at the Twentieth Congress in 1956, like millions of others around the world. He was always ahead of his time.

The critic laughed off the mini-McCarthyism of Canada, but he laughed too soon. Fighting Words was taken off the air, and he was quickly relieved of his reviewing duties on CBC Radio, too. Unable to find employment, he went off to England in late 1954, sharing an apartment with Toronto actor Lou Jacobi. The only memorable incident was when he was somehow invited to have dinner at the home of Lord David Astor. When the butler held out a giant bowl with a long fork buried in it, Cohen scooped out the vegetables and forgot to return the serving fork. Long minutes passed as Cohen (now 31, but ever the Bluenose) wondered why everyone was staring at him.

A letter-writing campaign to have Cohen reinstated led the CBC, always strong in its convictions, to invite him to return to his role as the moderator of Fighting Words.

Cohen's blacklisting was not his only trauma in the 1950s, aside from his everprecarious health. In early 1953, Toronto's short-lived Jupiter Theatre produced a play of Cohen's, Blue Is for Mourning. It was, as he later described John Gielgud's production of Hamlet with Richard Burton, "an unmitigated disaster." The endless tale of a coal-mining family in Glace Bay received a poor mounting, and it left Cohen, as a scathing critic of other playwrights' works, open to savage reprisal. The stone thrower had built a glass house.

Lister Sinclair was gleeful, as he filled in for Cohen on CJBC that week, still licking his wounds from a critical beating from Cohen a few short weeks before. "In the program we're told that Blue Is for Mourning is to be the first part of a trilogy. I can only hope that Mr. Cohen will not harden his heart and carry through his dread resolve."

"I don't deserve it, George," Cohen moaned to George Robertson about the poor production. "The play is not that good!" Cohen meant that a better play could have survived such a weak presentation, and he may have been right. But he quickly learned his lesson. As he told Fulford years later, "I can't write plays, but I can remind us all of what theatre could be."

And how theatre could become good, too. Like a Falstaff who could inspire wit in others, Cohen remained faithful to his new self-awareness. When he became the script editor of General Motors Presents on CBC-TV in 1957, Cohen proved an inspiration to many fledgling Canadian writers. He immediately recognized the commercial brilliance of Arthur Hailey's Flight into Danger and recommended it for production. Charles Templeton was impressed by his treatment at the hands of the infamous theatre critic:

"Cohen was an astute judge of play writing: Every single page was marked up. `Why?"This doesn't make sense in terms of page 4.' `Much too purple."This character wouldn't say that at a tense moment.' His comments were valuable beyond description. He read a manuscript as well as anyone."

By 1958, Nathan Cohen was seemingly at the peak of his career: He had returned to the print media, writing an often brilliant weekly column ("The Things Cohen Says!") for the Toronto Telegram since 1957; performing ad-lib radio reviews of local theatre on CBC's Audio; interviewing such cultural figures as Joyce Cary, Evelyn Waugh, V.S. Pritchett, Peter Ustinov, Harold Hobson, Iris Murdoch, Arthur Miller and John Gielgud for the CBC Radio program Anthology; plus his script editing on General Motors Presents and his hosting Fighting Words on both radio and TV. He was making more than $25,000 a year, a goodly sum for a freelance in Canada in the late '50s, and he was only 35 years of age.

Enter Pierre Berton, stage left, in his role associate editor of the Star. Hire that man from the tely, Berton urged Beland Honderich, who acted on the suggestion. And on January 4, 1959, Nathan Cohen began his dozen-year association with Canada's largest newspaper, which he would turn into a nation-wide forum on theatre and ballet in Canada. It would
end only in his death. The new job involved a salary cut of more than $10,000.

With the Star, and his becoming its entertainment editor in late 1959, the persona of Nathan Cohen took on mythic proportions. Those canes, for instance. His wife recalls going to a Ward-Price auction in 1956 or 1957, and putting in a silent bid for about a dozen canes, at $1.50 each, which was accepted. Over the years, she continued to buy more. Cohen loved the canes and carried one to almost every theatrical opening, relishing the public image of professional curmudgeon. ("The cane? It's only an affectation," he would happily admit.) Berton remembers Arthur Hailey sending Cohen a sword-cane from New Orleans. When the critic discovered, during a performance, that he was actually wielding a concealed weapon, he soon after had it welded together to make the sword unattainable. His words were weapons enough.

And the capes! The number is legion.of those who swear on their grandmothers' graves that they had seen Nathan Cohen in a cape. Never, says his wife. "He wore a cape," insists Berton. "I suggested the cape," confesses Templeton. "He rented one, one evening from Malabar, and swept down the aisle, about five minutes before a performance began."

"People have claimed I wear capes," Cohen once confided to Gary Lautens, the humorist at the Star. "And I don't. I've never worn, owned, or borrowed a cape. [Pause] However, it isn't a bad i-deaaaaaaaaaa."

The stories of Cohen at the Star, whether apocryphal or not, tumble out of acquaintances, friends and fellow workers alike, like avalanches.

The way Cohen would sit and hold court in his fifth-floor office in the old Star building on King Street West, chainsmoking four packs of cigarettes a day, guzzling double-black coffee from a giant double-mug, spilling it all over his desk at least once a week.

The day Lautens received a letter referring to a column of his in which he confessed to his habit of reading newspapers from back to front. "You must be Jewish," the reader wrote. "I always suspected you were one of us." Lautens showed the letter to Cohen, who dashed off a few sentences, dismissing the notion that Lautens was Jewish, "pooh-poohing the idea completely." Lautens eagerly signed the note on the bottom. Cohen had written it in Yiddish.

The times that Cohen would review a city, as well as its theatre ("Winnipeg is desolate"), and make front-page headlines.

The morning that Cohen was waiting for a bus on north Bathurst Street, near his home, when a driver picked him up. (Composer John Beckwith recalls Cohen telling him the story.) "You're Nathan Cohen, aren't you?" the kindly man asked. "Yes, I am," replied Cohen. "GET OUT."

The afternoon at the Star, engraved in the memory of Ralph Thomas, when Cohen was discussing "famous movie teams" with film critic Martin Knelman. Knelman recalled four, and Cohen quickly rattled off 30 pairs and added softly, "And that was only male teams."

The time Cohen was burned in effigy, because of his negative review, by the cast of Brendan Behan's The Hostage when they performed at the Royal Alex.

The immortalization of Cohen by Mordecai Richler, in his satiric novel The Incomparable Atuk. Seymour Bone "had to plan, connive, claw, insult, lust and rage for years before he was recognized, Dominion-wide." Bone was "the rebellious, ambitious, acne-ridden son of a successful Presbyterian salesman," who "overate so much before attending his first play for the Standard that, though he was enjoying himself immensely, he simply had to flee before the end of the first act. BONE STOMPS OUT, one newspaper headline boomed over a four-column photograph of the critic seated in the second row, his face a map of suffering and distaste ... Bone, now a national figure, six feet tall and 275 pounds, was immediately offered a CBC television panel show, Crossed Swords."

And what about the revealing interview on TV, during which Cohen, rumpled and hulking, six feet tall and 275 pounds, was asked by a moderator, "You don't seem to care very much for lyrical drama, such as Romeo and Juliet. Why is that, Mr. Cohen?"

And the critic replied (recalls actress Fran Hyland), "Look at me."

It was impossible not to look at Nathan Coen, and respond to Nathan Cohen, and be enraged by Nathan Cohen, and be threatened by Nathan Cohen.

Lest we forget, artists do not like critics. That is a given; a donnée, as Henry James would put it. No, it's more than dislike: disdain, have contempt for, despise, detest. One need reach for a thesaurus to even begin to capture the loathing. Writers, particularly, love to put their hatred for critics into print, often with witty, if obvious, results:

"A critic is a legless man who teaches running." Channing Pollock.

"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: They know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." Brendan Behan.

But the average person does not like critics, either. Who do they think they are, anyway? Did that idiot see the same show I did? (One of the most famous anecdotes about Nathan Cohen, repeated in the obituaries, recalls the time a theatre manager strode up to him and stormed, "Do you really think the hundreds of thousands of people who loved Brigadoon are wrong, and you're right?" "Yes," replied Nathan Cohen.)

No, it's more than resentment. It runs deeper, when you really think about it. One response to critics (when they disagree with us, of course; agreement is usually acknowledged with a nod) is almost sexual in its unconscious depths of fear and resentment: We are all experts, we earnestly feel, with an egalitarianism that harks back to the American and French revolutions.

Philistinism? Of course, shown most clearly in the deathless judgments: "I might not know art, but I know what I like," followed closely by,"My five-yearold can draw better than that." But that makes the feelings no less deeply felt. "I'll be damned if l m going to shell out $6 ($10, $20, $28.50, $45) for two tickets, and have that bastard tell me that it was a lousy production!"

Need one add, when the tickets include a tedious four-hour, round-trip journey to Stratford, Ontario, along with an overpriced, underspiced dinner, the rage against the nay-saying critic can reach gargantuan proportions.

Cohen was well aware of the anger, and it both charmed and hurt him. He often referred to it, with, self-deprecating wit, in a series of columns entitled "Things a Critic Hears," which he published in the Star on various occasions in the 1960s:

"How soon after you failed as a playwright, did you decide to become a critic?"

"Parasite! Vulture! Cannibal!"

"If you're so good, what are you doing in Canada?"

"In 50 years of play-going, I have never seen anything as contemptible as your attack on Noel Coward. B.K. Sandwell would never have done anything like that, or Roly Young or Augustus Bridle. But they were gentlemen."

"Your trouble is that you have a love-hate attitude toward Canadian theatre. You want it to be good, and you can't forgive the people in it for not meeting your expectations."

"How much does Mavor Moore pay you for all those plugs you give him?"

"When are you going to stop persecuting Mavor Moore?"

It was not only Mavor Moore whom Cohen persecuted (and plugged). The Stratford Festival is also a good case in point.

When Stratford opened, in 1953, Cohen was close to ecstasy, like most of the other theatre critics: It's "a cultural event of the greatest magnitude for Canadians," he enthused over CJBC Views the Shows. "It gives our serious movements, and all our theatre arts, a dignity, a prestige they've never had before."

But within a few years, while the raves of others continued, Cohen began what was to be an ongoing antagonism toward the festival. The superb New Play Society had fallen apart with the coming of Stratford, its energies and most of its performers absorbed into the festival machinery. And the Crest Theatre became more concerned with scenery,
costumes and props than in the enunciation and meaning of words, just like Stratford!
The critic was angry; he felt betrayed. And.he said as much, in a number of scathing articles on the Festival. Here is Cohen in The Tamarack Review in 1959:

"Were the Festival part of an energetic, entrenched, diversified theatre scene in Canada, its consequences would have been beneficial, or at any rate not as harmful as they have turned out to be. As it is, the Festival inflamed two chronic, understandable but thoroughly dangerous Canadian yearnings: the itch to win international glory by excelling, in some branch of the arts, the two big brothers -- Britain and the United States -- in whose shadow we must always stand; and the passion to bypass the apprentice stage of culture and metamorphose overnight, from an instant, quick-frozen state, as it were, into a full-fledged maturity."

And in the Star, in 1962: "For all its success and prestige, [the Stratford Festival] has never achieved an honestly binding audience relationship. Most people go there to make their seasonal bow to the arts, to demonstrate that they appreciate culture and do, too, like Shakespeare."

In the late 1960s, when John Hirsch was associate artistic director of Stratford, he was invited to have dinner with Nathan Cohen. The two had not spoken in years. "Nothing I
did at Stratford was any good to Cohen," Hirsch brooded. "He could not forgive me for leaving the Manitoba Theatre Centre and making a career of my own. I could have done the Second Coming on the Stratford stage, and Cohen would have panned me."

At dinner, Cohen leaned across the table and whispered to Hirsch, "I will not rest until I get you out of Stratford." "But why, Nathan?" "Because it's so goyishe."

Goyishe. Gentile. WASPy. Dry. Sterile. "Forever sucking the hind teat of British culture," as Mavor Moore has said. Goyishe was everything that Stratford -- and most Canadian theatre pre-Cohen - had stood for. And everything that Nathan Cohen was against.

"Nathan knew that classical theatre has to justify its existence through a reinterpretation of the classics through a Canadian sensibility. And he felt that North American actors, with their vitality and their own individuality, were squeezed into British repertory molds," Hirsch declared. "And Nathan was right. Although I did not feel it at the time."

Cohen was usually right, if any critic can be described as being "right." Although he refused to socialize with theatre people (beyond his frequent interview lunches, which he single-handedly pioneered in Toronto journalism), that did not prevent him from becoming involved behind the scenes.

Cohen had been shaken by the power and richness of John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, and sent the young playwright a note: "I hope you understand that there's not a chance in the world of this getting a professional production in Canada. I've taken the liberty of sending it to a producer of my acquaintance in
New York and, of course, promise nothing." It was produced off-Broadway, and has since been performed in more than 100 countries. Since 1967, Fortune and Men's Eyes has always been on a stage somewhere in the world.

Cohen, in spite of a lifelong passion and preference for old-fashioned realistic drama, begged former CBC producer Stan Jacobson to obtain the rights to Jack Gelber's avant-garde play, The Connection, for a Toronto presentation. (Al Waxman remembers his thoughts, sitting on the curtainless stage of the House of Hamburg, behind the old Ward-Price building on College, when Cohen swept in, waving his cane: "Uh-oh. There he is. There's Cohen.")

Cohen urged Joe Shocter of the Citadel Theatre to hire Sean Mulcahy as his new artistic director. He pleaded with actor Paul Kligman to take on the title role in Othello:

"My God. Do it."

"Are you ' talking logic or instinct, Nathan?"

"Instinct. Do it. I may hate you in it, but I promise you, I'll see it."

See it he did, at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. And he saw other plays at the Vancouver Playhouse. And the Manitoba Theatre Centre. And the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. And the Charlottetown Festival ("When no one else was going there, Cohen was the first to take it seriously," applauds Star columnist Sid Adilman). And Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal. And the Neptune Theatre in Halifax.

Cohen flew everywhere across Canada, becoming the country's first, and only, national theatre critic. "Always first class, of course," says Gary Lautens. "This was Cohen's status. Even the publisher of the Star flew coach, but not Cohen. 'I've arrived now,' he was saying. 'I'm not travelling steerage any more.'"

Cohen's drive for indigenous Canadian theatre moved him to be a free publicist for a number of theatres, most especially George Luscombe's Toronto Workshop Productions. Calling TWP "the only organization in English Canada with demonstrable style," he would plug away for them continually, at the bottom of his columns. In 1963, for instance, in partial italics: "Don't forget there's a performance tonight of George Luscombe's production of Woyzeck at 47 Fraser Ave. (telephone LE 5-4412), a theatrical tour de force, by far the finest local production of the season."

Yet, as always, Cohen could never forgive a fall from grace. When Luscombe's troupe seemed to have "no idea where it was going" (1970), Cohen bitterly accused the director of "defaulting the leadership of the theatre."

This quality of taking art seriously, personally, giving a damn, not wanting to see patrons cheated, informed his response to Mavor Moore's move in 1970. When the man who gave Cohen his start at the CBC, in both radio and television, abruptly quit his position as the first general director of the new St. Lawrence Centre, Cohen was livid and took it as a personal affront. He pounded his desk, recalls Adilman, and cried, "No one has ever angered me so much! He's let me down!" Moore had no right to walk out on a fledgling Canadian theatre like that, and looking back at the record of the St. Lawrence over the past decade, Cohen seems to have been right again.

Along with his infamy came recognition, as well: John Bassett tracked down Cohen at his hotel in New York, offering him a new house, in addition to the same $21,000 salary he was getting from the Star, if he would move over to his Telegram. The New York Times placed him on a "short list" of final competitors to replace Brooks Atkinson as drama critic. (But it could never have been; Cohen's brief Communist links in the 1940s had frequently kept him from reviewing shows in the States, and would most certainly have been dug up again.) David Merrick, the theatrical producer, offered Cohen the position of dramaturge for his new productions. Posthumously, the Young People's Theatre chose to call its loft The Nathan Cohen Studio, after the critic who steadily supported children's drama during his career. The most recent recognition is Rick Salutin's Nathan Cohen: A Review at Theatre Passe Muraille.

All the adulation (always tempered by the hatred) never let Cohen forget his humble roots - or lose his interest in others. The office boys at the Star were used to being treated like dirt by all but Cohen; he knew every one by name. He often fought for women's right to hold better positions, raging against the CBC for its ingrained sexism. He even wrote a lengthy brief for the government on the growing role of women in the arts in Canada. The secretaries at the Star loved him -- his politeness and his tradition of never forgetting to bring back little gifts from his many European trips. When he went to the Academy Awards, he always took along his young niece, who lived in Los Angeles. And when he took his two daughters to the theatre, little corsages were sure to be delivered to the door, just before they left the house.

The last few years of Nathan Cohen's life were a blur of illnesses, airplane flights, free-lance radio and TV work, including a revival of Fighting Words for CHCH-TV, Hamilton, and theatre-going. He would often work 36 to 48 hours in a row. Usually, Cohen would arrive at the Star at 9:15 a.m., work until 6 p.m., grab a dinner, see a play, go home, dash off his review by 1:30 a.m., send it in by cab, watch one or two late-night movies, or write and research until 6, and be up again at 8.

It would have taken a toll on a healthy man, which Cohen never was. Robert
Weaver believes that his determination to cover all Canadian theatre killed him.
Clifford Solway, his long-time confidant and producer of Fighting Words, remembers a theatre trip to New York by Cohen in 1969. Cohen, walking along with Solway, would stop every few minutes, lean against a lamp-post and protest, "I have to rest." After a half-minute, when Cohen had caught his breath, they would continue on. His hair was all white and thinning. He was 46.

His mind continued to be almost shockingly photographic. During Canada's centennial year, Cohen and his wife were on a train from Florence to Milan, where they would catch a plane to Yugoslavia. They had not known that there was a cab strike in the flood-racked city, and so had to run to catch their train, leaving all their books back at their hotel. Cohen sat back on the train, his lips moving constantly. His wife asked him what he was doing. "I'm re-reading Great Expectations," replied Cohen. He then began to quote page after page from the novel to his still-capable-of-being-surprised wife, leafing through the pages that had been committed to memory years and years before. "Everything he read would stick to him like glue, and unroll like a flood," recalls his wife.

During his last years, Cohen's diabetes began to affect his eyesight. He would have to sit closer and closer to the stage. A burst blood vessel in his eyes created a veil effect, so he couldn't see colors too well. For the first time in his life, he began to forget names.

But his doctors tended to concentrate more on discussing the celebrities than on his illnesses, according to his wife. They were more interested in asking Cohen about that musical at the Royal Alex, that new drama at the O'Keefe, the promising developments at the Factory Lab.

Depression took its toll, as well. The unceasing personal attacks and the generally poor quality of theatre in the country ate away. His widow has stated: "On many occasions during his last years, Nathan would say, 'Maybe I should drop theatre or go into more useful work.' Or, 'Don't they understand what I'm trying to do?' The longer he stayed in the field, the more discouraged he became, and I honestly think that this was as much a part of his early death as any physical illness."

Three weeks before his 48th birthday, Nathan Cohen died of kidney failure after open heart surgery. He used to tell his wife how his mother had died at 47, and that he would die at the same age. "I'll burn myself out at 47," he used to tell her. And he did.

A few months after her husband's death, Gloria Cohen discovered that Nathan's mother had, in fact, been 53 when she died.

It was one of the few times that Nathan Cohen had been wrong.