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.