DIARY JOHN OSBORNE
Ausual the early part of the year has been Good News Bible-black, a poisonous pall of foreboding. Now, in this 13th week of encircling gloom it is all but scattered. The antics of demonic doctors, dentists, actors and tax inspectors had settled like an ever-threatening cloud of my unknowing over these blue but blurred remembered hills. I said elsewhere that January seems to have a gratuitous trick of springing cruelty and death upon cherished companions, including my father and George Devine, in that chill early morning of the year. Like the great Ken Dodd, I have woken daily with Miss Givings and maybe a joke as halt and lame. Like the people of Jerusalem, chafing under the Roman general Pompey, `over them only was spread an heavy weight, an image of darkness, which should afterward receive them; but yet they were unto themselves more grievous than the darkness'. Or, as from the Church of the Yookay plc guidelines handbook: 'The darkness was the burden each man has to himself.'
Since we came here eight years ago, three of our dogs have died. My wife, with her uncanny premonition of such things, has forewarned me days, even weeks, before those last hours on the kitchen floor, a heavy head, still and grateful in her lap. There was Max, the chocolate labrador, who bullied, adored and comfort- ed his mistress for 16 years, and Minnie, his sister, gentle, most female counterfeit. A month ago, my boxer bitch, Lulu, slightly dotty, full of ferocious curiosity, joined them in the little graveyard in the garden above the house. They all had a free and glorious life, and your own is sweetened by the certainty you have brought only uncon- fined delight to a creature whose existence wags and spins upon your love and approval. There are crabbed spirits who find such dumb devotion mawkish. To me, the improvident urge to trust is nothing less than noble. A circumspect dog is a rarity except for those that have been viciously betrayed. Even so, their magnanimity may be most unhuman. Many people would find the description of Jolyon's dog, Balthasar, in The Forsyte Saga as risible as old Oscar found the death of Little Nell: `1 suppose,' said Jolly, 'that it's the second God, you mean that old Balthasar had a sense of?"Yes, or he would never have burst his poor old heart out because of something outside himself.' But wasn't that just selfish emotion, really?' Jolyon shook his head. 'No, dogs are not pure Forsytes, they love some- thing outside themselves.'.. . They laid the old dog's body, heavy, cold and unresponsive, in the grave, and Jolly spread more leaves over it, while Jolyon, deeply afraid to show emotion before his son, began quickly shovel-
ling the earth on to that still shape. There went the past! If only there were a joyful future to look forward to! It was like stamp- ing down earth on one's own life.
For a child to take a dog into its life is a perfect form of moral and emotional instruction. It will initiate him into contain- ing the power of the pack, the necessities of those who demand you to lead as well as love them, and instil more practical wisdom about selflessness, procreation and death than schools or even parents. The first few bars of the 'Enigma Variations' were inspired not by organs or cathedrals but by Elgar's great bulldog, Dan, falling down a steep bank of the River Wye, his paddling upstream to find a landing place (bars two and three) and his rejoicing bark on reach- ing dry land (second half of bar five). The organist at Hereford Cathedral suggested, `Set that to music.' I did,' wrote Elgar. `Here it is.' In the autograph sketch of `Variations', he inscribed the one word `Dan'. In his wonderful book The Literary Companion to Dogs, Christopher Hawtree draws attention to the death of Alexander the Great's warrior dog. Plutarch writes: `When he lost a dog, named Peritas, which 'It seems we are not endangered any longer.' had been reared by him and was loved by him, he founded a city and gave it the dog's name, according to Potamon the Lesbian.' An attractive cat may appear like a queen but a good dog is a gent.
Aiyway, March was blowing well into April and not a sign of dayspring from on high. Then — come last week — my book appeared. I hadn't even glanced at the proofs, not from indolence or arrogance, but simple doubt about the interest of things written idly or merely for fun and money over a period of almost 40 years. A hotch-potch piece I wrote for the Express paid me ten times the salary I was receiving as a touring actor. The Royal Court hierar- chy, like the hacks themselves, subscribed to the notional divide between journalism and literature, which I never accepted. Fielding, Swift, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Dick- ens, Kipling, Conrad, Henry James even, Arnold Bennett, Wells, Shaw — none ever regarded writing for the masses as dishon- ourable. It is those who have brought jour- nalism to its present self-degradation who make this absurd distinction. Both Devine and Richardson believed I was abusing my talent. Like my grandmother, they pretend- ed my appearances in public print had not taken place. In the event, the book has attracted neither the contumely nor feigned indifference I anticipated. It has all been reassuringly enjoyable. I have had tele- phone calls from old friends and whoopee letters from strangers.
But it is the Betjeman collection of let- ters which has truly pumped up the dead batteries of the past year or two into a push downhill start, and I think I may yet be chugging along back on the highway. To top up the tank, it seems I may finally have eluded the grasp of the Wimpole Street Dental Gestapo, and I received a hefty cheque from the Germans. They have scores of heavily endowed playhouses and few plays of their own to put in them, so I have long ago forgiven them for making me shiver nightly in the Anderson shelter just up the road from the present Prime Minis- ter's old home (and their relentless preci- sion in autograph-collecting: 'Will you please write out a poem in your hand of at least 12 lines'). Even the booking clerk at Wolverhampton was most solicitous about my not having a Senior Railcard, pointing out, almost in agony, that I could have saved £30 on my ticket to London. The affront to my vanity that he should assume I was eligible muted my gratitude, but I am puzzled — why is everyone being so kind? Surely they know something that is being hidden from me.
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