Man of many parts

Published 29 May 2006

John Osborne: a patriot for us John Heilpern Chatto & Windus, 528pp, £25 ISBN 0701167807 Despite his reputation as a rebel, John Osborne spent his life playing stock British characters: the angry young man, the teddy boy, the country squire. George Walden on a writer who, for all his immense linguistic gifts, could never simply be himself

A passage in this book describes how Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, both members of the Garrick, avoided each other at the club. Amis was one of the few people Osborne hadn't quarrelled with, so why the wide berth? I am prepared to guess. Women who turn up wearing the same dress tend to steer clear of each other, and writers don't en-joy meeting doubles of themselves. Though Osborne was a far greater talent than Amis, they were playing a similar game, and they knew it.

The game at that stage of Osborne's life was to cultivate a beefy British persona, and serve it bloody: being ostentatiously rude and reactionary, wearing dated clothes (Edwardian preferred), affecting a taste for Vaughan Williams (or, worse still, liking him), drinking hard, behaving shabbily towards women, doing religion and jeering at the French (for Osborne, anything French was "frog wankery").

In Britain, pretty much everything comes down to character-acting, and Osborne's blimpish affec-tations, with their echoes of Evelyn Waugh and others, were appropriate to his age. Another stock character is the angry young man, a type Osborne was to refine in Look Back in Anger. Then you have your champagne socialist, typified by many of his acquaintances, such as Kenneth Tynan. (That use of "your", suggesting a conventionalised type in a conventionalised society, is very English; to my knowledge, other languages don't have it.) In all, I suppose no more than about a dozen off-the-peg characters are available and, if only out of familiarity, the British do them well. In Britain, it is not whether or not to be, but who, that is the question.

Who was John Osborne? Several people. His mother was a barmaid, wonderfully common, a character herself, and his father an advertising copyist and commercial artist who took his son to the theatre and music hall. By some wartime fluke Osborne was sent to a private school. Here he got his characters mixed, turning up in the kind of loud-checked suit favoured by Max Wall, his hero at the time, instead of uniform. He was later expelled for hitting the headmaster, did not go to university, and became an actor. So, a hybrid sort of background. As a result of these experiences and his immense linguistic gifts, both on and off the stage Osborne could "do the voices".

He pulled off the angry young man character in the first part of his life brilliantly. Jimmy Porter/Osborne is not just some youthful lefty, all anti-Suez and social resentment: he is a man of no fixed qualities, ill at ease in his skin and not knowing what skin he should be in. For all his modernity he is a bit of a sucker for honey-for-tea England and regrets its passing, even knowing it was phoney. The prototype for your alienated young man of today, in other words, was a more complex character than he has become: someone who lamented a past he never had and which never existed.

Osborne led an unorthodox life, though not in the usual cant sense of giving the finger to society while sucking greedily at its teat. He had his posturings and his insincerities (he sat around on a Ban the Bomb protest, bored and sheepish, waiting to be arrested, because your famous young playwright has to), but he had scruples enough not to play the champagne socialist. With his social origins and (till he squandered it) his enormous wealth, he could easily have done so, and it certainly wasn't for lack of an appetite for champagne, such a routine part of his life that he called it "some", as in "shall we have some?"

It is sad to see a man of his gifts doing the country squire, but in England you can't be self-invented: the play's the thing, the cast is fixed, and you cannot apply for parts that don't exist. Though Osborne made a good fist of this role, too. He bought country houses and gave 300-strong parties for celebrities and humble locals, did your quirky and original thing (outrageous practical jokes) and your naughty nickname thing (Fu Manchu was Sir Peter Hall). But at least he did it well. Except when he was being cruel ("clearly you have no inner life whatever," he wrote to his 16-year-old daughter before throwing her out, "just a commonplace hole in the air, composed of idiotic quarrels, feuds and top of the fucking pops"), his invective could be inspired.

Being trapped in "character" roles can be constricting for a playwright, even if you are a medley of them yourself. Goethe warned that a writer soon talks out his own little self, and it wasn’t all that long before Osborne began to exhaust his varying personas: from Look Back in Anger through The Entertainer and Inadmissible Evidence was a mere decade. Déjàvu, his last play, updating Jimmy Porter into Osborne in his sixties, was a failure. Except, perhaps, for A Patriot for Me, few if any of his attempts to transcend himself on the stage were successful. He felt he had dried up early, and he had.

The reason John Heilpern prompts these ruminations in me, and will inspire others in others, is that his biography is a superbly rich and psychologically acute account of a man of parts in every sense. It has a first-hand feel because Heilpern is acquainted with many of the characters who teem through Osborne’s life, though there is no sense here of the mere spilling of bitchy theatrical beans. The author, originally from Manchester, now lives as a highly successful writer and critic in New York, so his closeness to the scene of Osborne’s life has been modulated by a healthy distance. The result is a work that manages to be fresh and engaged, but is always judicious when making judgements.

Heilpern is exceptional on Osborne’s relations with the mother who just wouldn’t die, despite all

her son’s prayers that she should (she eventually went at 83). He wanted something in him to die

with her, because the reason he hated her – for having no confidence in him – was a part of him, too. Yet he took her around with him after he became successful in a way no young playwright would today ("Introducing her to others was like inviting them into my sick room, to watch my agony") and, while he reviled her in public, he was generous to her almost to the end. (Financially, he was generous to a lot of people.)

Osborne’s wives form the material of many of his plays, and it was raw. After the first couple you get the pattern, and follow his marriages like a hunt where you know in advance that the fox will escape and the huntsman will fall off his horse, clamber back on and repeat the exercise. Among them were the clingy Mary Ure, the highbrow critic and ball-breaker Penelope Gilliatt and the achingly actressy Jill Bennett (absolutely dotty darling), whose one concession to reality was to commit suicide.

It was part of the social armour of the early, déclassé Osborne to affect a camp style, but Heilpern demonstrates conclusively that a story which surfaced a few years back about a supposedly gay relationship with an actor friend was completely untrue. The reason it was given credence was Osborne’s stagy homophobia. (In life, he appears to have been perfectly relaxed in the company of gays – in his job he would have had a difficult time had he not been.) Confronted by Heilpern, who was allowed to interview him for £300, the actor withdrew the allegation.

Peter Nichols, the author of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, once said of Osborne: "He came into English society as The Intruder and he put a bomb under the whole bloody thing." This is good, British bullshit, an attempt to cast Osborne as your troublemaker-from-the-ranks character (number seven, is it, or number nine?). The conventionality of the judgement should not lull us into accepting it. I know of no good overtly political plays, and Osborne didn’t write any. It was the white-tie theatricals of Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan and William Douglas-Home he put a bomb under. He lived in English society most contentedly for the most part, certainly most luxuriously, and except for the censorship-busting drag ball in A Patriot for Me, Osborne never sought or succeeded in undermining anything much. Rather the contrary.

George Walden’s God Won’t Save America is published by Gibson Square Books in July

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