Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“A BETTER CLASS OF PERSON” (first published 1981) and “ALMOST A GENTLEMAN” (first published 1991). Two books of autobiography by John Osborne 

 

 

            It’s amazing how a writer’s reputation can change over decades. The best part of 70 years ago, in 1956, John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger appeared and was hailed by some reviewers as the rebirth of British theatre. For some years it maintained that reputation. Look Back in Anger was said to have introduced hard realism and honest colloquial language to the English stage and banished forever the more genteel dramatic schools of Terence Rattigan, Christopher Fry, Noel Coward et al. Goodbye upper-class “anyone for tennis”. Hello working-class and lower-middle-class “kitchen sink”.

The angry orations of Jimmy Porter were heard as the authentic discontents and frustrated hopes of young men in drab post-war Britain. A PR man invented the phrase “angry young man” to publicise the first production of the play, and “angry young men” stuck as short-hand for a new breed of gritty British working-and-lower-middle-class realist novelists and playwrights. In his lengthy verbal abuse of his upper-crust wife Alison, Jimmy Porter rails against the Establishment and the class-system. Because of this, it was assumed that the 26-year-old John Osborne (1929-1994) was a left-wing radical.

            Thus it seemed through the plays Osborne was writing up to the mid-1960s, especially The Entertainer (his best play in my opinion) which could be read as a condemnation of Britain’s foolish Suez expedition; and Luther, where Martin Luther rails and rants very much in the style of Jimmy Porter.

            Then, as it always does, opinions began to change. It was noticed that Osborne’s later – and less successful - plays were becoming more condemnatory of things other than the Establishment. His letters to the press were increasingly conservative, even crustily reactionary. Slowly it dawned on critics and audiences that the anger of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger and the desperation of Archie Rice in The Entertainer were not the creations of a radical. The discontents of these characters were really a lament for the lost power and eminence of Britain in a world which it no longer dominated. They embedded much nostalgia. The Entertainer is as much about the long-lost glamour of Edwardian music-hall as it is about a topical war. Jimmy Porter is not angry at the Establishment because he wants a socialist revolution. He’s angry because he can’t be part of the Establishment. Be it noted that Osborne’s royalties made him a very rich man, allowing him to buy a country house and play the part of a tweedy squire. As one obituary noted, he re-embraced the Anglican Church he had left in childhood and offered a large sum of money to the local church’s roof-restoration fund, only on the condition that the vicar reverted to using the 16^th century Book of Common Prayer rather than more modern liturgical texts.

            And then there was the impact of feminism, now damning Osborne for his misogyny. Jimmy Porter’s wife Alison, always ironing clothes, was really a symbol of women’s subjugation which Jimmy Porter (and by implication John Osborne) fully endorsed. Here I quote shamelessly, from the internet, the introduction to an article by a woman student who “takes to task the established critical view of Look Back in Anger as an essentially radical play about our class-ridden society… It is not class but sex that is really the main focus of Osborne's abusive attention in the play… The play is, in fact, a blatant and particularly vicious attack on women. It seems to me that Osborne uses the insubstantial class element in the play not to attack the 1950s world of privilege and snobbery but to disguise in pseudo-social terms his fear and loathing of women.”

            Very well. There have been other revolutions in taste since this first revulsion from Osborne’s work. His earlier plays have been revived with some success in the 1990s and 2000s (just as Terence Rattigan’s and Noel Coward’s have been) and Jimmy Porter is seen as a product of his time, his angst real even if his anger is misdirected. Even so, nobody now would see Osborne’s plays as essential works.

            In case you were wondering (if you haven’t yet snoozed off), all this is by way of talking about the two volumes of John Osborne’s autobiography that I have read. In A Better Class of Person, first published in 1981, Osborne deals with his life from childhood to the first production of Look Back in Anger in 1956. This is, in effect, a book about the making of the playwright. In Almost a Gentleman, first published in 1991 (three years before his death) Osborne covers the years from 1955 to 1966, when his play A Patriot for Me was first produced. It is interesting to note the class-conscious title of each book. Years later, the two books were published in a single volume under the title Looking Back – Never Explain, Never Apologise.

            A confession on my part. I read A Better Class of Person, when it was new, and before I adopted the habit of writing copious notes on every book I read. I therefore recall moments of it from memory. Little John Osborne was very much of the lower-middle-classes. His father was a commercial artist and his Cockney mother was a barmaid. What I remember clearly from A Better Class of Person is the boy’s attachment to his quiet and reflective father, who died of tuberculosis when Osborne was ten. Less genteel was Osborne’s mother. The most vivid moments in the book record Osborne’s deep loathing of her. Young Osborne and his mother attend a film premiere and join the line to greet Paul Robeson. Young Osborne cringes as his mother shakes Robeson’s hand and says “I always liked you darkies”. At every turn, his mother is presented as uncouth, loud-mouthed, crude, vulgar and domineering. He hates her.

Other parts of the book record Osborne’s truncated schooldays. He tells a tale of warding off a pederast in his holidays. He was expelled from one school for striking a teacher who had first struck him in punishment for some small misdemeanour. Unlike Jimmy Porter, Osborne received no higher education after schooldays and first tried his hand in journalism before attending a drama school and drifting into repertory theatre. On the whole, this is presented as negatively as he presents his mother – seedy provincial theatres, dismal digs for actors, meagre wages and some desperate measures to attract audiences. This includes an account of putting on a Christmas panto, Aladdin, so bad that the mother of the child-“star” marches into the theatre and drags her daughter away from the humiliation of it. Still, Osborne learned the craft of the theatre by being an actor, and developed an ear for dialogue. He also married an actress whom he later divorced. She was clearly the model for the much-abused Alison in Look Back in Anger.

This first volume of autobiography ends with the triumph of Look Back in Anger but you can see where many of Osborne’s obsessions came from – loss of father at the young age (nostalgia for the good old days); detestation of mother (a strain of misogyny); frustration and class-envy (on every page).

 

 

So I come to the second volume of his autobiography Almost a Gentleman, which I read recently. It goes through the ten years up to 1966 when, despite one or two theatrical flops, John Osborne was still being hailed as a major and dynamic figure in British theatre.

If A Better Class of Person shows his hatred and loathing of his mother, Almost a Gentleman ramps up the misogyny to hysteria as Osborne eviscerates each of his many wives. Wife Number Two was the actress Mary Ure (who first played the role of Alison in Look Back in Anger). She left him for the actor Robert Shaw. Osborne gleefully tells us that ten years and four children after she left him, she died in her own vomit. Wife Number Three was the film-critic and occasonal novelist Penelope Gilliat, who bore him a daughter (whom he later disowned). Apparently her main crime was that she worked too hard as a critic and so didn’t act as Osborne’s servant, the way he expected a good wife to act. (For the record, Gilliat died of chronic alcoholism a couple of years after Osborne wrote this book). Fourth and last wife was the acerbic actress Jill Bennett. Osborne presents her as a tight-fisted, avaricious bitch who, when she died, left half-a-million pounds to a home for dogs, not because she liked dogs but because she simply wanted to annoy people. He also quotes with delight the comments of other people as to her complete lack of talent as an actress.

Writers often damn their ex-spouses, but as all this bile is being poured out, one can’t help wondering what attracted Osborne to any of these women in the first place. Perhaps more to the point, what attracted these women to Osborne when all he does is spit out his contempt for each of them? We also get accounts of some of his affairs, including the charming tale of a Swiss mistress who ended up running a brothel in Mexico.

The same sort of contempt is poured upon the liberal-leftish political affiliations he was once assumed to have. In his sixties at time of writing, Osborne speaks of CND Aldermarston marchers in the 1950s and 1960s as pathetic dupes who didn’t understand how the world works. Occasionally he hits the nail on the head when he notes that the Establishment he attacked in his younger years has simply been replaced by a new sort of Establishment. He consciously cultivates the image of a Tory squire, declaring his liking for John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Max Miller and other such solid English stuff. There is plenty of ammunition here for the view that the “angry young man” was angry only because he lacked the social status he so desired. Little wonder that the cover photograph of the original edition of Almost a Gentleman (taken by celebrity nitwit Lord Snowden no less) shows Osborne in tweedy country gentleman attire.

All books relating to show-business – which includes “serious” drama –become at some point a welter of names and dates as colleagues, actors and directors are listed. There is much such in-talk in Almost a Gentleman. 

 

 

Two points are of interest.

Osborne was a randy, and apparently quite brutal, heterosexual. (At one stage he quotes from his diary, thanking God that he is both English and not queer.) Yet being in the world of theatre, he inevitably spent much time in the company of homosexuals. His expressed attitude towards them is one of tolerant amusement, sometimes breaking down into his habitual contempt. Oddly enough, however – given his deep disgust for his four ex-wives -  his greatest words of affection go to other men, particularly to George Devine, the producer at the Royal Court Theatre who “discovered” him and championed his first plays, and (more guardedly) to the director Tony Richardson. Mind you, Osborne detested Richardson’s sometime wife Vanessa Redgrave, whom he contemptuously dubs “Big Van”.

Second point – reading this bilious memoir, it is odd to find the conjunction of gritty Brit kitchen sink drama with Osborne’s accounts of travels to the USA in the late 1950s, luxuriating in hotels and enjoying a life quite unlike the constricted, depressed people his early plays dramatised.

One final thought: Both of Osborne’s autobiographies, but especially Almost a Gentleman, are so vitriolic, violent in their abuse, egotistical and negative about current pieties, that I can’t help thinking they were written in the spirit of provocation. Osborne wants to outrage and annoy readers, the better to get their attention. And getting attention is what showbiz is all about, isn’t it?