Looking back in judgment
Ferdinand Mount
JOHN OSBORNE: A PATRIOT FOR US by John Heilpern Chatto, £25, pp. 528, ISBN 0701167807 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The heart starts to sink on the very first page, p. xiii to be precise, because this is still the Preface: ‘When I began work on Osborne’s biography, hoping for the best, I asked his wife Helen, “What does no one know about your husband?” ’Already you can see the gleam in the biographer’s eye, the headline on the review front: Angry Playwright’s Other Life, Secret Shame of John Osborne. By p. xiv we have sunk lower: ‘What caused his depressions would send me in time on an obsessive search for the one explanation of Osborne’s torment and fury that might account for everything — “the Rosebud Theory” .’ So the Fleet Street sleuth is also a Hollywood shrink Geoffrey Levy meets Orson Welles and the analyst comes too.
Helen Osborne was the Katharine Parr in The Five Wives of John Osborne divorced, died, died, died, survived. The middle three — Mary Ure, Penelope Gilliatt and Jill Bennett — were also divorced, and all three more or less killed themselves by drink and drugs. Helen was the only one to take his name. She endured his tantrums and his glooms, coped with his drink and diabetes, matched him joke for joke and glass for glass. In this scene of carnage as full of corpses as the end of Hamlet, she alone, the chain-smoking, wisecracking Widow of Oz, as she styled herself, was left to tell the tale. Except that she didn’t and John Heilpern did. Which is a pity.
No human being in recorded history stands in less need of further revealing than John Osborne. To say he wore his heart on his sleeve is a genteel understatement. He flayed himself alive in public at regular intervals. Even before the first word is spoken in Look Back in Anger, the stage directions describe Jimmy Porter in precise terms which fit his creator as near as dammit:
He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike. Blistering honesty, or apparent honesty, like his, makes few friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth. To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.
Osborne himself was the understudy for Jimmy Porter in the first, never to be forgotten production at the Royal Court in 1956. And he went on rehearsing the part for the rest of his life, enchanting, tortur ing and eventually freezing out any man, woman or child within range. His obsession with loyalty (to be shown to him, not by him of course), the difficulty of knowing when he was being serious and when he wasn’t (he didn’t know himself half the time), his mourning for his sweet, hopeless father who died when he was ten — all these things are in the play which he wrote when he was 26.
His grand tirades too commuted easily between the life and the stage. Unfortunately for his nearest and dearest he could only practise with live ammunition. Jimmy’s needling of Alison in Look Back in Anger as ‘the Lady Pusillanimous’ is a mild echo of his invective against his first wife Pamela Lane whom he was just splitting up from: ‘That bitch, that pusillanimous, sycophantic, snivelling, phlegmish yokel, that cow — fortunately I’ve ceased to care what happens to her’ — which didn’t stop him sleeping with her now and then after he had remarried, nor from supporting her financially for years afterwards.
Even in mid-rant there was a part of him which knew perfectly well how ghastly he was being and which could not help advertising his knowledge with a wicked glee. He left his lover Jocelyn Rickards for Penelope Gilliatt by simply stepping out of the taxi as it stopped at the Chesham Place lights and saying, ‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m going to behave rather badly again.’ The most chilling example is the letter he wrote to his only child, his daughter Nolan (by Penelope Gilliatt) then aged 16, casting her out of his home and his life. He never saw her again, cut her out of his Who’s Who entry, and refused to acknowledge her children. Her only offence, as far as one can tell, was to watch Top of the Pops and to have a boyfriend. For this he denounced her as ‘almost uniquely coldhearted’, ‘criminally commonplace’ etc. Yet in the middle of this evacuation of senseless bile he cannot resist telling her to look up the first Act of King Lear: ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ He knows perfectly well that he is Lear and she is Cordelia and he wants to tell everyone and take a copy for the record to be deposited with the rest of his papers in the Harry Ransom Center at Austin, Texas.
So Osborne does not exactly keep things to himself. The real Osborne is about as hard to track down as the real M25. In any case, he also published two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman. These two caustic and evocative memoirs have recently been reissued by Faber in one volume, under the title Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise, and given away at £14.99. When a biographer’s subject has already written his own life, an uneasy relationship arises. Naturally the biographer must ceaselessly raid the material, but he has to be wary too, because the horse’s mouth represents dangerous competition. So Heilpern, like other biographers in this bind, refers as little as possible to the Osborne self-lives and mentions only fleetingly the stir they made when they came out, provoked mostly by the author’s merciless portrait of his mother Nellie Beatrice as a feckless, ignorant harridan.
Nor is it as if people who knew him well were puzzled by him. Sir Simon Bland, the retired courtier who lived next door to Osborne in Kent, could see just as well as Harold Pinter that, in Pinter’s words, ‘the great thing about John Osborne was that he was a piss-taker. He just liked to take the piss out of everybody, including himself.’ But Heilpern insists on constructing a dark psychological narrative, according to which Osborne’s early struggles and deprivations created this tempestuous mixture of aggression and depression, of guilt and vainglory. This is only half-convincing. Alec Guinness, for example, had a similar early life: a drunken, raging, ill-educated mother whom he loathed but supported for the rest of her long life, an absent father, education at dim, fee-paying schools paid for by mysterious distant funds, painful early failures as an actor. Yet the adult persona he constructed could not have been more different: bland, exquisitely courteous, totally self-concealing. The only things Guinness had in common with Osborne were his dedication to his art and his generosity with the torrents of cash that came his way.
Readers should be warned too that it is uphill work trekking with Heilpern. He carries out his obsessive quest largely, and in my view fatally, through a series of interviews of the sort he used to do for the Observer. So when we come to Osborne’s early days on two trade periodicals, Gas World and The Miller, Heilpern makes us trudge all the way to Toronto to meet Osborne’s old editor, Arnold Running,
still a fine-looking man with his full head of hair and grey beard hinting at the bohemian. He looked alert and welcoming, peering at me with his glasses perched on the end of his nose. His wife Pamela, formerly one of the leading breeders of wire-haired fox terriers in Canada, came bustling into the sitting room with coffee and cakes.
After a page or two more of this sort of thing, what we learn is that John was a nice young man who had left-wing views and copied words out of dictionaries. Heilpern tells us too that Osborne’s early collaborator and landlord Anthony Creighton is ‘now 74, tanned from the sun, and dressed informally in a checked shirt, neat corduroys and sturdy walking shoes’. Do we really care how sturdy his walking shoes are or where he gets his tan from? All we wish to know, or all that Heilpern wants us to wish to know, is whether when he and Osborne shared a houseboat their passionate friendship led to sex. Yes, Creighton told the Evening Standard. Er no, he now tells Heilpern. My guess would be somewhere in between, but since we already know that Osborne has sex with anything that isn’t nailed down, I’m not greatly excited either way. Still, it’s more interesting than the wire-haired fox terriers.
But I do wish Heilpern would take a little more trouble. Did Osborne and his first wife rent a room from Creighton at 35 Caithness Road (p. 124), or 53 Caithness Road (p. 146), or even 14 Caithness Road (A Better Class of Person, p. 247)? He constantly expresses wonder that Osborne should spend so much time reading ‘fat dictionaries’ (dictionaries are always ‘fat’ or ‘solid’ in this book, just as Belgravia is ‘exclusive’ and respectability is always ‘bourgeois’, subjects are ‘thorny’, and any university you have ever heard of is ‘prestigious’). But a little recourse to the dictionary might have helped Heilpern to spell some of the longer words like ‘dilettante’ and ‘philoprogenitive’ (the ones that spellcheck doesn’t help you with). I suspect that one of Osborne’s ancestors was a billiard-marker, not a ‘billiard-maker’. The great Education Act was passed in 1944, not 1945. Edwin Landseer (died 1873) is not best described as ‘beloved Edwardian portrait artist of stags and pedigree dogs’. Heilpern repeatedly uses ‘disinterested’ when he means ‘uninterested’. Penelope Gilliatt, we are told, ‘sends her staff in search of out-of-season quail and spatchcock’, as though spatchcock were an esoteric breed of grouse instead of merely a method of cooking the fowl.
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