We are told too that Faith, Osborne’s sister who died
in infancy, was christened at St Martin’s in the Fields by ‘the Reverend Dick Sheppard, the England star cricketer’. In fact, David Sheppard, the great batsman, later Bishop of Liverpool, was in the womb at the time, so not doing much batting or baptising yet. Dick Sheppard was famous too but as a preacher and founder of the Peace Pledge Union — a fact not entirely irrelevant, since Osborne grew up to support CND and join the Committee of 100.
Which brings us to Heilpern’s supposed great Rosebud discovery: that Faith died of TB not when Osborne was two, as he always believed, but when he was only three months old. According to Heilpern, his recurrent despair can be explained because he was born into a household that was shadowed by intolerable grief. A moment’s thought is enough to see that the discovery adds very little to what we already know. If anything, John would have been more, not less conscious of the agony of the bereavement if it had happened when he was two. But whatever the date, the pain of Faith’s death would never have left his parents, as Osborne makes clear at the end of the chapter about their marriage in his autobiography.
Heilpern’s little errors might be less annoying if the surrounding prose were not so indigestible — like finding withered raisins in a stodgy pudding. He seldom reaches for a metaphor without mixing it. Osborne’s treatment of Mary Ure ‘unhinged her core of fragility’. Pleasure in silly things is ‘the safety-valve of the buttoned-up British’. Adjectives get disastrously transferred from subject to predicate. So Mary Ure ‘took the slavish advice of a New York gynaecologist’ and ‘took solace in her infatuated love affair with Robert Shaw’. Some sentences are so stomach-curdling that you have to stop and take a deep breath before carrying on. Of Osborne’s local town in Kent, Heilpern says, ‘Ye Olde High Street in Edenbridge still looks as if Miss Marple might suddenly appear bustling along it solving crimes.’ As a discriminating stylist, or ‘mature wordsmith’ as Heilpern puts it, what Osborne would have done with this book does not bear thinking of.
At least Heilpern does give proper room to the epoch-making first night of Look Back in Anger, ‘the only play in the history of theatre to have a birthday’ (the French might argue about the first night of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, but that just shows the league we are in). When Binkie Beaumont walked out in disgust at the interval, it was a defining moment. But it did not seem like that at the time. Every established theatre manager and agent had rejected the play. The first-night critics mostly found it a putrid and boring production, with the glowing exception of Derek Granger in the FT who saw that it was ‘arresting, painful and sometimes astonishing’. Only when Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson weighed in the following Sunday did the play’s reputation really take off. Even then, there had to be an 18minute extract on BBC TV before young people began flocking to the Royal Court.
The term ‘Angry Young Man’ is attributed here to George Fearon, the English Stage Company’s press officer, who told Osborne, ‘I suppose you’re really an Angry Young Man.’ But Heilpern does not give the whole story. The phrase was already in the air after a recent novel of that title by Leslie Paul. And what Fearon went on to say later was, ‘We decided then and there that henceforth he was to be known as that.’ In other words, it was a marketing ploy, and though Osborne later complained that it had become a millstone round his neck, that did not stop him buying the AYM1 number plate for his first sports car.
Posterity likes to unpeel labels. We are now told how diverse all the supposed Angry Young Men were in reality. Amis for one, Heilpern tells us, ‘refused to be buttonholed in their company’ (I think he means pigeonholed. Oh God what a book this is). Yet looking back, I can’t help thinking that the unleashing of some pentup rage does seem to be common to that generation. This is how they startle, Osborne and Amis and Larkin and Pinter too: the sudden explosion of anger in polite society, the obscenity in the iambic, the lava spouting out of the dining-room table. The rage is always lurking, rage against the deceitfully bland, the manipulative evasion, against all feeling-suppressants, the rage occasionally overblowing into sheer flatulence, like that great expulsion of wind, ‘Damn You England’, composed beside Tony Richardson’s pool in the South of France.
This does not mean that they congregated and drew up manifestoes. Each had his own private kingdom of anger. They no more formed lasting alliances than do extreme nationalist movements in different countries. In that Olympus of Grumpy Old Men, the 1400 Club (reserved for those members of the Garrick Club who cannot abide sitting down to lunch before 2 p.m.), Amis and Osborne refused to address each other directly, and would speak only through third parties.
There is something else they have in common too and Osborne has in abundance, which is an ear for ordinary speech, for its loops and repetitions and jumps and hesitations, its sudden flaring up and dying down again into banal set phrases. In his best four or five plays, The Entertainer and Inadmissible Evidence especially, there is an almost magical flow to the monologues as well as to the conversations which manages to be both wholly original and utterly down-to-earth. That is the real break with the theatre of Coward and Fry and even Rattigan. And when Osborne revivals come across as dated, as people now and then complain, it is usually because the actors have forgotten how people talk.
The sad thing is that the gift doesn’t last. ‘We theatre scribblers average about a dozen years or so,’ Osborne said gloomily. ‘Nobody ever wrote a great play after the age of 40.’ The ear dulls, the successful playwright floats away from his original material on a tide of champagne and ties up at the port of Thespia, where they speak a different language.
The conventional line is also to chart a falling away from Jimmy Porter in his radical rage inveighing against the church bells to Squire Osborne on his knees in the parish church with a ‘Save the Book of Common Prayer’ sticker in his back window. Can this be the same person who vehemently refused to be confirmed and was sacked from school for knocking down Mr Heffer the headmaster? Well, yes, it can. Perceptive critics like Harold Hobson (who looks better and better in hindsight) spotted from the start the elegiac note in all Osborne’s plays. Even in his early thirties he was singing old music-hall songs with John Betjeman, and, though it is hard to imagine in that sea of booze, when he was married to Penelope Gilliatt prayers were sometimes said after dinner in Chester Square.
In fact the only time I clapped eyes on Osborne was in church, at a confirmation service in a dimly lit side chapel in Westminster Abbey, or rather I think it was a combined baptism and confirmation for those who had somehow missed out on the first leg, including John Osborne’s much loved godson, Ben Walden, later a good actor and one of the few people he never quarrelled with. Just before it started, in stalked this tall, reddish-grizzled man in a huge green overcoat with complicated flaps. He looked like an old-style actor-manager who had been transported from some other time, the time of Sir Henry Irving perhaps or even the Crummleses, and had been left stranded by the time machine. He was absurdly stagey, exuded melancholy from every flap, no flincher from the glass or from anything else. He looked magnificent, terrible but magnificent.
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