DAMN YOU, ENGLAND: COLLECTED PROSE
By John Osborne
Faber, #14.99 (pp 264)
THERE is one odd thing about John Osborne that stands out from the
many odd things about John Osborne. He is funny when he imagines he is
being serious, gut-wrenchingly tedious when he aspires to wit. ''All
genius is cheek,'' he says approvingly of Max Miller. But all cheek is
not genius, least of all when it is a grumbling insult passed off as
audacity.
The arc described by this squib is well known. Launched in a shower of
sparks somewhere on the soft left, it guttered out years ago on the
eccentric right in a bog of acrimony, autobiography, failed revivals,
self-pity, and Spectator diaries.
It has been a career with a certain symmetry, from the long whine of
Look Back in Anger to the mother-loathing, wife-hating screech of A
Better Class of Person and Almost a Gentleman. Hindsight suggests that
the English stage was revived by a hero whose claim on our attentions
was that he didn't like his mum.
On the evidence here, there is not much to show for 30 years of
dyspepsia and stage-managed outrage. Much of it is horribly quaint, not
least the title piece, first published in Tribune after Osborne had
noticed the threat of nuclear war: ''I write this from another country,
with murder in my brain and a knife carried in my heart for every one of
you.'' That's telling them. But then, Osborne has never tired of telling
them, whoever they happen to be. This is a writer who needs to get
things off his chest for fear they might invade his brain.
England, or what the author has taken England to be over the decades,
is the locus. Britain does not impinge (blessings may now be counted)
and even England itself is not instantly familiar. Osborne's country is
a small place imperfectly mapped, though the chapter headings for this
collection of reviews, profiles, and letters to the editor -- ''prose''
for the price of a stamp -- lay out its indistinct boundaries.
There is a lot about theatre, naturally, followed by altogether too
much about foul critics and the ignorant press. Then there is The Blue
Pencil, Queen and Country, The Philistines, and, for light relief, Wine,
Women and Long-Windedness. Much of it reads like the vapourings of
Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells, and makes it all too easy to forget that
Osborne did actually write The Entertainer, Inadmissible Evidence, and
Luther.
Thus:
''. . . it is clearer to me than ever that Shaw is the most
fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid
critic or fool a dull public . . . He writes like a Pakistani who has
learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a
chartered accountant.''
Or thus:
''What distinguishes a woman is her lack of imaginative vitality. She
will hardly ever do anything for its own sake. Her roots are so deep in
sexuality that she is the natural enemy of the visionary, the
idealist.''
Osborne emerges, shambling and rambling, as one of nostalgia's
victims. He loves an older England, an England of music halls and a
''proper'' Anglican liturgy, a caricature drawn in his own image. His
profiles invariably become autobiographical, his concerns are of that
myopic, insular variety regarded as patriotic in parts of the Home
Counties.
Europe? John can't buy Turkish tobacco any more, he tells the Times,
because of the European heirs of dictators. Politics? ''If I lived in
Ebbw Vale I should vote for Michael Foot, and if I lived in County Down
I should vote for Enoch Powell.'' Art? One sentence sticks: ''Slovenly
writing invites slovenly performance.''
True. But slovenly thinking enfeebles both. It is the curse of the
slovenly thinker never to be able to grasp that what he takes to be
crown and sceptre are cap and bells. Still, England being what it now
is, that makes Osborne (pause for laughter) a prime candidate for yet
another revival.
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