John Osborne
Two books in the year by two of the country's most gifted men. If only my own profession could produce anything as wise and funny as Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils (Hutchinson) and Jeffrey Bernard's collection, Low Life (Duckworth). How reassuring to see such hard-drinking mas- ters on top of their form, dazzling but unstrained. If literature's debt to the perception of the informed Heavy Drinker needed reclaiming, these volumes proclaim it effortlessly.
Books about the Edwardian crimson twilight may raise an easy yawn from those who feel sated by an ever-rolling stream of Elgar and Elegy. I am myself the softest touch for almost any expression of the English sense of loss and abiding grief evoked from the national memory of those historical summers before 1914, so sudden- ly darkened and then blotted before 1916. What you've never had, you don't miss: but you surely must or else fly in the face of all proper human recall. However it may be exposed to scorn and parody, the manner of Edwardian England and its going is unavoidable as the catastrophic divide of our century, the Black Death of the common spirit. Only those ruthlessly instructed in a concerted hatred of the receding past could fail to be moved by Jeanne Harding's The Children of the Souls (Chatto & Windus). Sub-titled 'a tragedy of the first world war', that's exactly what it is, the story of a, yes, 'doomed' elite, brilliant, over-privileged and bravely inno- cent.
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